by Michael Kerr
Beth heard the two blasts and knew that something very bad was taking place. She jumped out of bed and ran towards the door, not to open it, but to reach for the chair next to it, to wedge under the brass knob. And she nearly succeeded. But nearly doesn’t count. Nearly implies almost, just about, virtually, or not quite. The door flew back and she found herself face to face with the young man she was in hiding from. His eyes were stretched open, an almost mouth-splitting smile showed off his white, even teeth. Red spots of blood covered his face, to give him the appearance of someone suffering from a virulent strain of chickenpox or worse.
“Hi, Beth,” he said affably, as if they were old friends. “You’ve got thirty seconds to pull on a pair of jeans and a sweater. If you want to live, then don’t think, just move.”
It took them over half an hour to get any sense out of Shirley. After drinking two mugs of black, sweet coffee, she had bolted out of her chair and up-chucked in the sink. Now she was more with it. Her face was ashen, and between drags from a cigarette, she kept belching and saying, “Pardon me.”
“We need to know why you phoned me, Mrs. Roberts,” Pete said from across the kitchen table. “Was Paul here?”
She nodded, belched again, and after crushing one cigarette out in an already over full and stinking ashtray, immediately lit another with shaking hands.
“The number you gave us was Lenny Mercer’s. Not the garage, his home.”
“I...I didn’t know that,” Shirley said, her voice a little hoarse from being sick. “Paul told me what to say. He said that he was going away tomorrow.”
“And did you believe him?” Matt said.
She shook her head. “Not really. I believe he is the killer you say he is.”
“Do you have the slightest idea where he might be, Shirley? Matt pushed.
“No. If I did, I’d tell you.”
They left her, went out to the car and mulled it over.
“What’s his game, boss?” Pete said. “Why would he want to lead us to Mercer’s place, or to his mother’s?”
Matt thought it through. Tried to put himself in Sutton’s mind. The killer would not have gone to so much trouble just to give them the run-around. He had an ulterior motive.
“He wanted to connect, Pete.”
“Who with?”
“Us.”
“Why?”
Matt could only think of one reason. “To know where I am.”
“With what purpose in mind?”
“To follow me. Which means he thinks I’ll lead him to where Beth is. It’s the only scenario that makes any sense.”
Pete nodded. “He could be watching the car now, waiting for us to leave.”
“Get on the phone. We need someone eye-balling our arses to see if we’re followed. If Sutton does tail us, we’ll set a trap.”
Matt’s mobile rang before Pete could make the call.
“Matt. It’s Tom.”
“I thought you were taking the night off?”
“I was. I just got a call. The safe house got hit.
Matt did not answer. Could not answer. Just waited for Tom to continue.
“He knew the set-up. The bottom line is that Phil Adams is in A&E with a fractured skull. Mike Henton and Dean Harper were shot. They didn’t make it, and Beth is missing.”
Matt passed the phone to Pete. He couldn’t speak. Scrambled thoughts crowded his mind. The bastard had followed one of the other team members from Mercer’s house. The inference was that he had made him talk, took his handgun and gone to Finsbury with all the intel he needed to abduct Beth.
For a few seconds he thought he might go mad, such was the turmoil in his heart and mind. He was transported back to the bungalow in Finchley just six months previously, where he had been OIC of a baby-sit that got hit by a psycho contract killer. He had not only lost the witness they were protecting, but also his DS, Donny Campbell, and DCs Keith Collins, Tony Delgado and Bernie Mellors. He had survived being shot, but survivor’s guilt still ate at him. And now another blasphemy had occurred. He should have stayed with Beth; been there for her when Sutton mounted his attack. Lightning could and did strike twice in the same place. It was hard to incorporate the fact that another sick, homicidal psycho had taken her.
“Boss...Boss!” Pete said after Tom had given him the details and told him to get back to the squad room. “The chief says he’ll meet us at the Yard.”
Matt grunted. Somehow suppressed his desperation and pulled himself together, out of the deep state of introspection he had fallen into. He was cold to the bone, and his mended leg complained, as if it too was recalling the not so long ago events.
After a long pause he shook his head. “No Pete. Sutton will contact me. This is purely personal now. If we don’t find him soon, Beth...”
“We did everything we could boss,” Pete said.
“He fucking played us, and we should have expected it,” Matt said as he drove off and headed back into town to the Kenton Court Hotel.
When they arrived, Pete told Ron Quinn what had happened, and the three of them drank scotch and waited.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
BETH tried to not look down at the two officers that were laying twisted and limp in the hall, their blood staining the cream-coloured carpeting. She walked around them, and in avoiding their bodies let her peripheral vision catch sight of Dean Harper’s upturned face. She could not stop herself from focusing on it. The young man’s eyes lacked the vital spark of life, held no emotion, and were proof that he was beyond any help this world could offer. A single trickle of blood painted a line from the corner of his gaping mouth, down his cheek and onto his neck.
“No time for sightseeing, Doc,” Paul said, pushing her in the small of the back, causing her to stagger out through the door on tiptoe as she fought to keep her balance. “Just keep moving and don’t do anything that might make me nervous.”
They took the lift to the ground floor and left the building, out into the bitter night air. He linked arms with her and walked quickly. They would appear to be a couple in a hurry to get home and out of the wintry weather.
The fucking Nova wouldn’t start. Just a wah-wah-wah-wah as he keyed the ignition. It sounded as though the battery was too low to generate a spark.
Out again, hurrying down a narrow street lined with cars. He decided on a Jeep Cherokee. Took a ‘Slim Jim’ from an inside pocket, slipped the bookmark-thin tool between the glass and rubber seal of the window at the driver’s side and was in the vehicle in less than five seconds. It paid to be equipped for all eventualities. With Barnes’s woman sitting doubled over in the passenger seat with her hands cuffed to the bar underneath it, he quickly hot-wired the 4x4, to leave the area and head north, stopping on a whim after a few minutes to take the cuffs off his prisoner.
“Slide over me, sweetheart,” he said, pressing the end of the gun barrel up under her ear. “You’re driving. Just follow instructions. And be very aware of the fact that if you do anything to attract attention to us, it will be the last thing you ever do.”
Beth eased herself over him. The loathsome maniac had a hard-on. He pushed himself up against her bottom and chuckled as they swapped places. She buckled the seat belt and drove.
Sitting sideways in the seat, unencumbered by a belt, he was able to comfortably watch Beth and glance repeatedly out of the rear window. The now char-broiled cop hadn’t held out on him about the number of cops watching the safe house, he was sure of that. But in case he had been spotted leaving the building, he would assume that he had a tail. He would not be complacent.
After directing Beth to take a circuitous route to the M25 and then head west, he was positive that they did not have company.
“Take this exit,” he said as they approached junction 24.
Beth signalled, pulled into the inside lane and slowed down to negotiate the off ramp.
Once off the motorway, he navigated her through Potters Bar and out onto a back road. She saw road signs for Hatfield and
Bookman’s Park, but was now heading east again in dark and rural surroundings.
“Why me, Paul?” she asked him in as calm a voice as she could muster.
“You know why, Doc. And please don’t try your psychology shit on me. I’m totally immune to it. You won’t bond or find any rapport with me. You should know that, if you’re as good a profiler as the filth believe you to be.”
“What is it you perceive I’ve done to warrant murdering people to abduct me?”
“You’ve voluntarily become a participant in the game, sweetheart. Offering your professional services to Barnes is something I view as an unprovoked act of open hostility. You should have kept your pretty nose out of my life.”
“That isn’t why you’re doing this, is it?”
He smiled. “Clever girl. The real reason is because I know that you’re fucking Barnes. I saw you together at that flea pit hotel on Tottenham Court Road. And I know that lifting you will addle his brain.”
“And what do you hope to achieve by doing this, Paul? Is there some point to it all? I could comprehend why you felt so much anger towards the people who you blamed for your stepfather’s plight, but―”
“What you comprehend or think is of no importance to me, you stupid bitch. You know that I don’t need reasons. I do what heats the oil in my lamp. The objective is to attain pleasure and gratification, with no consideration for anything or anyone else. Everyone has to have a way to titillate their grey cells. What I do floats my boat, turns my wheels, and indulges my deepest needs. And nothing else matters. Get it?”
“And where will it end?” Beth said, somehow functioning, though being in such close proximity to a man who she knew to be capable of such debased acts was literally making her skin crawl.
“It’s the journey that counts,” he said. “Not the destination. We all end up as part of the past, not even missed in a future that is for the living. While we’re here, we just put a finger in the water and make a few circles…end of story. The art to truly getting the most out of life is to grab the fucker by the throat and not be threatened by it. It’s like standing on the parapet of a skyscraper, or on a cliff top. If you don’t look down, then it doesn’t matter how high up you are.”
“Meaning?”
“That trying to lead a safe, cloistered existence doesn’t stop time carrying you inexorably towards the stroke, cancer or heart attack that is lurking, patiently waiting up ahead and all too ready to erase you.”
“Are you going to kill me, Paul?”
“I don’t know. You aren’t a consideration. It’s Barnes that I want to humble and make suffer. Your future is of no consequence.”
There seemed little point in attempting to communicate on any meaningful level with the odious sociopath. He was without any doubt going to kill her. If she let him take her back to his lair, then she would end up the same as the victims she had seen as grotesque corpses in Polaroid photographs. It was time to do something and not let events be choreographed by a headcase with a gun.
“Here,” Paul said, pulling Chris Mallory’s mobile phone from his pocket and offering it to her. “Why don’t you give lover boy a bell. Talk to him and tell him anything you want to, apart from the area we’re in. Do that and I’ll cut your tongue out.”
Taking the phone from him, she tapped in Matt’s number.
“Barnes.”
“It’s Beth, Matt.”
“Jesus, Beth. Where are you?”
“I’m with Paul Sutton.”
“Has he hurt you?”
“No.”
Again. “Where are you?”
“Driving. I can’t say where.”
Paul snatched the phone away, not taking his eyes or the gun off her.
“How’re you doing, Barnes? Not good, I hope.”
“If you harm her, you need to know that I’ll kill you.”
“Said with feeling. But to kill me you’d have to find me first. And that won’t happen. I just thought you would want to say something poignant to the lovely Beth. Who knows, you might never hear her sweet voice again.”
“What do you want from me, Sutton?” Matt said.
“I’ve got what I want from you, cop. She’s sitting not two feet away from me with one of your dead minions’ guns pointing at her face.”
“Let her go. Or I swear to God that when I do find you, and I will, you’ll suffer more than any of your victims did.”
“Get real, you sad prick. I’ve worked you like a fucking puppet. You hadn’t got the brains to know that you were being set up. I watched you and the cavalry turn up at Lenny’s, then followed one of your DCs. He was a very polite young man, though lacked loyalty under pressure. He gave up Beth’s location and all relevant details in the hope of saving his own worthless skin. I’m sure you’ll soon get the call, when they find what’s left of him in his burnt out car.”
“Let me speak to Beth again.”
“What’s the magic word?”
“Please.”
“That’s better. Good manners cost nothing.”
Paul passed the phone back to Beth.
“Answer yes or no,” Matt said. “Are you north of the city in the area we targeted?”
“Yes. I love you, too,” she said.
Paul took the phone from her, switched it off and removed the SIM card. A few minutes later he said, “Take the next right. We’re nearly home.”
“What did he want, boss?” Pete said.
“To turn up the heat. He let me speak to Beth. She confirmed that he is in the area we’re canvassing. We need to saturate it and call at any and every business, not just garages, newsagents or post offices. And I want you to contact each member of the team that attended at Mercer’s house. Sutton said he’d got the safe house’s address from one of us.”
“Do you think you can find him in time?” Ron Quinn said as he poured more scotch, spilling much of it onto the tabletop.
“I’ve got to believe I can,” Matt said. “The alternative isn’t something I could live with.” He took a deep breath, phoned the Yard and asked for Tom.
“Why aren’t you here?” Tom demanded.
“Because I won’t find Sutton there, will I? He just phoned me and put Beth on the line, and also told me he’d killed one of the team. That’s how he got to us in Finsbury.”
“Who―?”
“Pete’s checking. In the meantime we need to put everything we can into the search area. That’s where he’s based.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I told you, he let me speak to Beth. I asked her if she was where we are looking. She said, yes.”
“I’ll throw as much as I can at it. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“We’ll find him.”
“Yeah, but will it be in time to save Beth?”
“He’ll want to make a meal out of torturing you, Matt. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t keep her on ice for a while. You need to believe that it’ll work out.”
“Never say die, eh?”
“That’s right. We’re better than scum like him. He’s at the end of the road, but doesn’t know it, yet.”
Matt ended the call. Looked up to see Pete screwing his eyes tight and shaking his head against whatever he was being told.
“Fuck!” Pete shouted, then threw his phone. It bounced off the corner of a large glass ashtray on the table, pinwheeled through the air and sent up sparks as it thudded into the fire. The three of them watched it begin to smoke and melt.
“It was Chris,” Pete said in a faint voice. “His car was torched on some waste ground five hundred yards from his drum. What they found in the boot was wearing his wristwatch. It was inscribed. They’ll need to do a dental or DNA check to be sure. But it’s him.”
Something shrunk and died inside Matt. Like the mobile phone that was now as misshapen and unrecognisable as DC Chris Mallory, a part if not all of Matt’s soul was a blackened and twisted entity, bereft
of any capacity to show mercy or compassion to the man he had to find. He was consumed by a cold and unforgiving hatred. These parasites within society were beyond any rehabilitation. They were not criminals, they were creatures without pity, who deserved none in return. With unremitting doggedness he would seek out and destroy this individual. Sometimes rules had no place in the dealings he became caught up in. This was one of those times.
Matt said no more to Pete or Ron, just became saturnine, drank more scotch and looked inward, reviewing his life from childhood days, recalling all the great pleasures and equal amount of pain that he had both enjoyed and endured. All he had done and experienced was the sum of who he now was. Come the dawn he would be ready in mind and body to meet and deal with his nemesis. This was a situation he had had the misfortune to be in before. Feeling sorry for himself was a luxury he couldn’t afford to indulge in, and wouldn’t make things right. There was now only one objective in his life, to save Beth. He needed to somehow become detached from the personal implications. It was impossible. This was not now a hunt for a killer of strangers. Sutton had stepped over an invisible line, changed all the rules of combat, and would not be given any quarter.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
SHE was consumed with fear. It was like having a tapeworm writhing inside her alimentary canal, sapping her will, feeding on her dwindling courage as though it was sweet nectar. As she drove, she fought to regain some composure, biting the inside of her bottom lip until she tasted blood; using the pain to stimulate positive thought. She could not believe this was happening. How could he have been able to just appear from nowhere; a ghost in the night. All the precautions they had taken now counted for nothing. She was his captive, alone with him and vividly conscious of the atrocities he had committed and the extent of the sick and depraved acts he was capable of perpetrating on his chosen prey. She knew his sickening modus operandi; had seen the garish photographs, and read the autopsy reports. He would without any doubt rape and mutilate her, before cutting her throat. It would be better to end this now on her own terms, than to be used as a plaything by this monster.