by Haywood, RR
‘Oh Alison, he’s playing with us,’ Elizabeth uses the tactic I was deploying but seconds before, ‘he knows we’re here and we’re going for him right now…’
‘How did he get my number?’ Alison sobs, ‘you’re the only person who knows it.’
‘I don’t know, Alison. But we’re going to find out okay. We’ll fix this,’ Elizabeth says.
‘He’s texting again…’
‘Alison, it’s Mike here. Can you read it out?’
‘It says… ‘the devil is waiting…’
‘Okay, Alison. Stay calm. He’s doing this because we’re closing in on him. This is a reaction of fear and panic,’ I explain quickly with another look round, ‘he’s trying to spook us to buy time so he can get away.’
A bleeping noise comes over the loudspeaker on Elizabeth’s phone at the same time as Verhoeven’s phone vibrates in my hand.
‘Another message…oh my god!’
‘What is it?’ I ask while Elizabeth keys in the code on Verhoeven’s phone.
‘The devil doesn’t panic…’ Alison reads as Elizabeth shows me the message screen on Verhoeven’s mobile.
The devil doesn't panic
The devil doesn't panic
The devil is waiting
The devil doesn't panic
The devil is waiting
I do not panic
I am waiting
Waiting
Waiting
Waiting
The bleeps of Alison’s phone receiving multiple streams of messages are loud and clear as Verhoeven’s phone buzzes in Elizabeth’s hand.
‘Alison.’ I force my voice to remain calm despite the rising sense of panic. ‘Switch your phone off…does she have a landline?’ Elizabeth nods. ‘Alison, it’s me,’ she says, ‘do what Mike says, switch the phone off.’
Alison doesn't say goodbye but ends the call abruptly just leaving the buzzing phone giving noise to the otherwise serene landscape.
Waiting
Waiting
Waiting
See you soon Mike
The messages end just as abruptly as Alison ended her call and we’re plunged into silence.
I take Elizabeth’s hand in mine and pull her closer. ‘One of us is bugged,’ I whisper. She nods without looking at me but I nudge her gently. When she looks over I press a finger to my lips and she nods again, a small movement that only serves to make her look more fearful.
We walk in silence across fields that take us ever further away from the burning corpse of the man we murdered. Into wasteland surrounded by abandoned industrial units decaying from neglect and onto a road and suddenly we’re back in civilisation and just a normal couple on holiday walking hand in hand through the quiet streets of Belgium.
Not clothing. Placing a listening device in clothing is possible but very bloody hard and the technology is also very expensive to make something that small that can transmit any suitable distance. The bag I’m carrying is new and hasn’t left my side since I got it. The only thing left are the phones. We have three of them now. Elizabeth’s own mobile, the one she gave me and Verhoeven’s phone. Verhoeven’s could be bugged or adapted to be used as a listening device but that wouldn’t account for the stuff Williams apparently knew before we got to Lars Verhoeven.
Elizabeth’s and mine then. If Williams had the merest suggestion that he was being tracked he could have deployed counter measures. Elizabeth said that every search they do leaves a footprint. Maybe Williams found those footprints and realised she was closing in on him. He could have paid someone in her organisation to access her phone. All it would take is for her phone to have a hidden background programme running, one she was never aware existed and Williams would not only have access to every bit of data on her phone but could activate it into a listening device. My knowledge of technology lets me down at that point as I consider if he could activate the camera lens of the phone to gain a viewable image.
I stare at Elizabeth until she finally glances at me. I blink once and nod. She nods back.
‘I think,’ I say with a heavy sigh, ‘that we’re out of our depth.’
She stares at me with a puzzled expression, ‘go on,’ she prompts gently.
‘Going for Williams is dangerous, we should just send the footage into the news agencies and leave it. It’ll connect the deaths of De Smet and Verhoeven and the police will think Williams killed them both to prevent them talking.’
‘Right,’ she stays looking confused, ‘so he’ll be a fugitive,’ she thinks for a second, ‘but that takes time, time enough for him to get away.’
‘That’s his problem,’ I sigh again as though tired to the bone, ‘We’ve made a statement…so let’s just leave it.’
She’s a sharp woman and she has the sense to wait before replying, making it look like she’s thinking. ‘I don’t want to,’ she says heavily, ‘but…I see the sense in it.’ She shrugs. ‘Okay, we’ll do that.’
The phone vibrates the second she finishes speaking and I wait while she puts the code in.
Nice try see you tonight Mike and Elizabeth Markt Square we’ll meet for a chat the devil is waiting I am waiting I will see you
‘That,’ I say wearily, ‘is really shit grammar. I mean, not one fucking comma or full stop,’ I tut. ‘Williams,’ I speak clearly into the air, ‘you are a fucked up pathetic little weasel cunt that craves attention like a crappy Bond villain…fuck you…I had you once and…
But you lost me once too
‘He can text fast,’ Elizabeth remarks, ‘I’ll give him that. Faster than a bloody teenager.’
‘De Smet died slowly,’ I say. ‘He cried and begged the same way Verhoeven cried and begged. Why? Because you’re all the same. Addicted to the power of abusing people who can’t fight back and you’re terrified of someone stronger, harder and more dangerous than you. I’m coming for you, Williams and you’ll beg, weep and cry just the same as they did…’
Markt Square 6 café opposite the tower
‘And you can’t use punctuation for shit either,’ I speak into the phone and just in case he’s watching me through the camera I grin and stick my finger up. Then after waiting for the traffic to go past I drop the phone on the ground and slam my boot down again and again. The phone crunches, splinters and breaks into plastic chunks. I keep going to destroy whatever devices or bugs he’s got in there. The bits are scuffed and booted into the road and across the pavement. ‘He might have bugged our phones too,’ I say before she blurts anything out, ‘do you need yours?’
Shaking her head she pulls it from her pocket and hands it over. I take mine and hold the two together as we keep walking back towards old Bruges and the many canals that weave through the historic city. We stop to lean against a low wall and stare down into the murky depths as the Belgian versions of Gondolas glide by. When the view is clear I drop both phones into the water below and smile as they sink out of sight.
‘Clear?’ she whispers.
‘Hope so.’ I glance up at her. ‘At least we’re being pro-active and not clinging to his assumed form of control.’
She sags and breathes out slowly as the immediate tension eases slightly. ‘You okay?’ I ask quietly.
‘Fine,’ she mumbles. ‘Are we going?’
‘Going?’ I ask her.
‘To the café at six?’
‘I am,’ I reply, ‘well, not going straight there but yeah, I’ll be near it.’
‘Me too.’ She nods seriously.
‘Er, yeah listen,’ I step closer, ‘you should go home, it’s probably gonna be a trap with a shit ton of plain clothed police waiting to apprehend the murderer they’ve been tipped off about.’
‘It won’t be.’ She shakes her head and looks exhausted but resolute. ‘He’ll meet you.’
‘What makes you think that?’
She smiles a grim expression of distaste. ‘His ego for a start, and like you said, he wants that element of control and the satisfaction of looking you in the eye…and
me,’ she adds with a faraway look, ‘the thrill he’ll get from that is too much to resist…so yeah, he’ll be there.’
I think quietly for a second and realise that despite being driven by fury to kill him, this woman has spent a lot of time and energy working out how this man ticks and she’s right. His ego is too big, his vanity is too much to allow him to scuttle off. He allowed himself to get caught last time and took a vicious beating knowing he’ll walk away.
‘Nah,’ a sudden thought pops into my head, ‘he knows we’ve got the footage, if anyone sees that he’s fucked.’
She gives me a curious look, ‘I thought you knew him?’
‘Knew him? I only met him once and that didn’t go too well.’
‘No,’ she says with a twitch of a smile, ‘I mean I figured you would have, er…’ she shrugs and thinks for the right words, ‘analysed him or something, you know, worked to understand the offender profile and…’
‘Oh, yeah that was done. But we only had a tentative profile until we…or rather I got his name and then went for him…the clever bastards in the offices would have analysed him after but by that time I was arrested, suspended and then bailed…and then kicked out…and I became an alcoholic…addicted to sleeping pills…’she watches me closely, ‘and other stuff,’ I add with a shrug.
‘It’s about power,’ she says intently, ‘the thrill of having that power over someone else. To control them completely…’ She becomes wistful as though trapped in a faraway memory. ‘He wants that power over you,’ she looks up sharply, ‘over me, that’s the thrill for him. That’s the addiction and his vanity and self-assured belief just serves to drive him to take that risk. For him it’s worth it. You could turn up with a gun and shoot him but he’ll take that risk for the pleasure of seeing you destroy yourself again…and there’s always the chance you’ll miss.’
Heavy words that sink into my mind and I know she’s right. John Williams is everything she just described and more. I look over at the stunning woman who I just witnessed murder someone in the most brutal way possible. What they did to her to drive that rage for so long must have been bad. It got to me enough just dealing with the many victims and their families, but it never actually happened to me, my grief was vicarious but not direct.
A sense of admiration for Elizabeth comes over me. That first, she refused to ever let go of that desire for revenge and second, she was prepared to do the dirty work herself when she could have arranged it with ease having so many ex-military on her company’s books. It even explains the lust she had last night. She was with a very flawed but inherently good man who defeated the bad guy. The man who stood up to them and did the unthinkable in this modern society. The lust wasn’t because I’m a killer but because I was…because I am stronger than they are.
‘Fuck,’ I shake my head, ‘we’ve got a few hours to…’ I stop myself from saying it.
‘Kill?’ She finishes the sentence with a wry smile. ‘Let me guess? You need a coffee.’
‘Read my mind.’ I stand up and exhale slowly.
‘Well, Mr Humber,’ she stands up too, ‘I need a shower and a change of clothes. We do that first and I’ll buy you the best coffee in Bruges…before we go and meet the devil.’
‘That,’ I smile, ‘sounds like a deal.’
Ten
The hotel is the worst I have ever known but water is water and from this shower it comes out hot and fast. I go first on the basis that Elizabeth will probably want a longer soak than me.
I’ve seen death in all its forms. Natural. Murder. Suicide. Accident. People who have jumped in front of express trains and been spread like butter over a quarter of a mile of track. Drowning. Poisoning. Gunshots. Stabbings, lots of stabbings. But I’ve never seen a man anally raped with a tyre iron and then forced to eat his own shit from the end.
You know when something is bad because the mind tries to blot it out and I keep finding myself thinking of mundane things, like if I have a clean t shirt left and if we should get food before we meet Williams. It takes force to mentally make myself think directly about what I did, what I witnessed and everything else that’s happened. I force my mind to process both of the killings, how I did it, how it felt at that time and now. I analyse and examine every emotional reaction and what’s more I allow those emotions to come and go without restriction.
Right and wrong. It was wrong to kill. It is wrong to kill. But it was right for the circumstances. Wrong but right. Their victims may hear about the deaths of those men and feel a sense of relief that they’ll never be touched again.
We had a saying in the police. You can never measure what you prevent. It was always about the worth of a uniform copper on foot patrol. Sometimes he or she would go for a whole shift and do very little, but what did they prevent? Who saw them and decided not to do a bad thing that day?
There are children in this area now who fate had chosen to be the victims of those predators but who now will never be molested by them. They’ll never know. Nobody will ever know. I’ll know.
Shower over and she steps past me while I start brushing my teeth and the strength of human nature shows evident as despite all the fucked up things in my head, I can’t help but let my eyes fall to her naked backside as she steps into the cubicle.
‘Something funny?’ She peers round with a puzzled look at my suppressed chuckle.
‘Nothing.’ I rinse my mouth out and the smile that was forming ends abruptly when I see the haggard fucker staring back at me in the mirror. I look past my reflection to see her staring at me with interest. Her elbows up covering her breasts as she stands with her back to the shower letting the jets soak her hair back.
‘So,’ I stare at her reflection, ‘how does it feel?’
‘Being a killer?’ she asks with a sigh. ‘I don’t know…I’m tired,’ she says flatly, ‘but…’
‘Go on.’
‘I feel good about what we did.’ She looks down at the water drumming on the shower base. ‘But I feel bad too…good, bad…no,’ she shakes her head slowly, ‘that’s not right. I’ve thought about it for so long and built my company up so I would have the resources and means to do it. Now it’s over,’ she says flatly, ‘years of my life…years of seeing Alison suffer…and then it was done in a few minutes flat. He was alive and now he’s dead.’ She stops and stares into the middle distance then with habit of hand she starts washing her arms, armpits, chest and stomach. ‘He suffered,’ she remarks, ‘I mean, it wasn’t him that did those things to me…Verhoeven I mean, it was Williams. But Verhoeven did it to others so…fuck, Mike. I don’t know how I feel. Disgusted, definitely disgusted. Happy? Not yet. Relieved? Yeah, yeah but not because we killed him but because he can’t do it again…I’m gabbling.’ She looks up at me and shrugs.
‘No,’ I blurt too quickly, completely entranced with the whole of the woman. Of her thought processes and the apparent honesty with which she speaks.
‘Mike?’
‘Yeah?’ I turn at the door.
‘What we did yesterday, last night,’ she pauses and a look of intense worry crosses her face, ‘how you made me feel,’ she says slowly, ‘were you thinking about Tessa?’
How the fuck do I answer that? What do I say? Fuck me this all too much for my tiny mind.
‘Will you do it again?’ she asks in a voice barely more than a whisper. ‘We’ve got time,’ she adds quickly as though trying to convince me. ‘Christ.’ She stares at me in horror. ‘I must sound like a monster…we just killed a man…and I’m asking for sex…’
‘It’s okay,’ I say softly and the tears burst from her eyes to join the rivulets of water cascading down her face.
Eleven
Side by side we walk in silence through the heaving crowds moving towards Markt Square. A beautiful summer evening and the air is warm and filled with the white noise of people living their lives.
Elizabeth and I made love with a gentle intensity and hunger that built with a slow burning passion. It was distracting,
absorbing, fulfilling and somewhere in the back of my head there was a connection being made between seeing death and feeling life. I didn’t think about Tessa.
We got ready and worked together to clean the room down, using anti-bacterial wipes on every surface. The bedding was scooped up into a pile and taken out into the corridor to be dumped outside the door of another room. Not a perfect crime scene sanitation but functional at the very least.
Now the time is here and we walk towards a man that shaped the whole of Elizabeth’s life and the last few years of mine. Every action has a reaction and the woman beside me is a direct result of the actions he took. The man that walks with her, the bearded haggard washed up ex-detective, ex-alcoholic, ex-drug addict fucking clichéd walking disaster is a direct result of his actions. Our lives. Separated but connected by invisible strands that wove our futures until this day. This day. We are walking to see the man who has dictated our entire existences and still he dictates. He called so we come running. He taunted us with messages and summoned our presence. Control. The expectation of control. The perception of control. The belief that we had a choice to come here when all along it was his decision.
We feed from the wide boutique store lined road into the vast square and both look towards the landmark of the famous tower. Our eyes sweep in synchronised harmony to the café opposite with the ubiquitous deep green awning.
Control. The control others have over us. The perception of it. The idea of it. We live our lives in subservience to that control, to that expectation. We’re here because he said so. Because his vanity and thirst for power and control, and his intelligence allowed him to make these decisions knowing we’ll trot like sheep and sit like children to bask in fear and awe at his magnificence. Fuck it. We might as well drop to all fours and put collars on our necks and roll on our back to spray subservient piss in the air.
‘You okay?’ Something in my voice snaps her head round, her eyes look wide then narrowed.
‘Mike,’ she says slowly, ‘your face? What’s going on?’