The Deep Secret

by David Robinson

  Julius, too, took his fill of her a few times. When we were done with her, he took out a stiletto knife.

  “What the bloody hell are you going to do, Julius?” I asked.

  “Kill her,” he replied. “It is the safe way, as my master taught me. It is not something I enjoy, but it must be.”

  “No, no, no,” I told him. “Jesus Christ, remember what happened to that German lad in Rheims? You don’t have to murder her. Bloody hell, this is England, mate. We’d both swing for it. Come on. I’ll show you a better way.”

  We took a taxi from that fleapit, down to Penarth Railway Station, where my car was parked. Buying platform tickets, once through the barrier, we ordered her to visit the ladies, and while she was gone, we returned to the car and began the drive back to Bristol, twenty pounds richer, and our balls relieved of some of their excess.

  That was my first criminal episode of The Deep Secret. Julius later confessed he was glad I had stopped him from murdering the woman.

  “I was never comfortable when my master took their lives,” he admitted, “but I knew no other way.”

  But he was quite happy to take their money and their favours, and over the coming, lean years, he and I would supplement our income and our libidos using the hypnotic cocktail or The Deep Secret.

  30

  Keeping his speed between fifty and sixty, Billy checked ahead and slightly to his right where the towers of the old river crossing scraped the sky. He recalled his childhood when Graham Burke and Julius had taken him and young Gerry to Aust to watch them building the Severn Bridge. He also remembered the sense of awe as those twin towers struck high into the air.

  Bristol had so many other memories for him, too. His first kiss, his first fuck, his first murder. He grinned. They happened in exactly that order, and all within a few days, and all with the same girl, and all with Gerry prompting him. He was sixteen years old, Gerry was seventeen, and they had travelled down to Clevedon to be with her after they met a few days earlier in a café near the Bristol Hippodrome.

  Meaty little thing she was. Chunky thighs and calves. Happy to drop her knickers for both of them in the rough sand under Clevedon pier. Happy to let them ride her bareback, too. Gerry later claimed that he hypnotised her into it, but Billy didn’t believe him. Oh, Gerry knew something about hypnotism at that age, but not to the level of getting a girl to drop her drawers.

  With a savage grin, he recalled the storming hard-on when she struggled against Gerry as he wrapped one of her stockings round her throat and strangled her. Billy wasn’t entirely happy with the killing, but he was so overcome with excitement, and exhilaration at having taking the final step to amoral hedonism, that he shot his bolt a second time before she finally lay still.

  They half buried her in seaweed and crept cautiously out from under the pier, relieved that no one had seen them, then they disappeared into the growing autumn darkness, and got the train back to Bristol. Police found her two days later, near a holiday park in Walton Bay, where the tides had swept her body. Fortunately, any trace of him and Gerry would also have been washed out of her. Sure, the police turned up and questioned them, along with lots of other kids who had been hanging about at that café, but they simply brazened their way through it.

  “Yeah, I seen her,” he told the law, “and I fixed up a date with her, but she didn’t show up. Left me looking a right berk, she did.”

  The police went away and never bothered with either of them again. One day, when he got old, he would maybe claim the murder in his autobiography. It was so long ago, however, that he couldn’t recall the girl’s name. He could recall much else about her; the colour of her skirt and knickers (both pink), the exciting contrast between the dark pubes and the creamy white of her skin, but he couldn’t remember her name.

  Passing the Portishead turn off, with the busy docks and the new Severn Bridge filling the skyline to his right, he eased the stolen Nissan into the nearside lane, and followed the exit for Gordano services. This was an easier way into the city. Ten to one every cop in Bristol would be on the A38 and M32 looking for him, even if they didn’t know he had swapped cars again, but they wouldn’t expect him coming from the east. Passing through the picturesque little village, he felt it strange to think that this was Easton-in-Gordano and he came from Easton, Bristol. He hoped it was an omen.

  The news this last day or two had been full of his antics, and he wondered if the filth would realise the true significance of that murdered fireworks bod and his missus in Worcester. Probably not, he decided. At least not until it was too late.

  He smiled again at the thought of Croft getting his comeuppance. Not that he had a personal grudge against Croft. Gerry was the one with the axe to grind. It had been eating away at him for years.

  As far as Billy was concerned, Croft was just a smartarse; a public school educated toff who liked to show off his skills and demonstrate how courageous he could be, and Billy would enjoy taking him out. Killing was fun, killing gave him a great fillip, but it would be an extra pleasure to bump off Croft.

  Course, Croft didn’t yet know where he had to be. He was probably still up in Scarbeck, shagging that black cop. Not to worry. He would know. Come tomorrow morning, he would know it all. Come the day after, he would know all about eternity, too. All Billy needed to complete his task was a young bit of totty and where he was going, they would be in plentiful supply.

  He had been surprised by how easy it all was in Northwich and Nantwich; so surprised that by the time he found the theatrical supplier in Wolverhampton, he was almost blasé about it.

  It was a tiny, poky little place in streets of high-density, terraced housing, to the north of the town centre. He’d struck at nine in the morning and found, to his delight, that it was run by a man and his forty-something daughter. He’d clubbed the man first, with the butt of the automatic, then held the woman at gunpoint while she locked up.

  Not pretty. Bit on the tubby side, if anyone wanted his opinion, but she resisted when he fumbled under her skirt and pulled at her knickers. To demonstrate how serious he was, he pressed the pistol to her father’s head, and pulled the trigger. She didn’t hassle after that. She just lay there and let him do what he wanted.

  And while he was fucking her, he silently congratulated his dead pal.

  Gerry was the planner. Gerry had fine-tuned the details. Every cop in Europe would be looking for him, and he would need to change his appearance. Fortunately, his father knew about theatrical makeup and… what did Gerry call them? Prosthetics? Sounded like a false cock to Billy. Anyway, Gerry knew about them, and he knew they would have to hit a theatrical warehouse like this. With Gerry dead, Billy had been going to skip it, when a thought struck him.

  If he carried out the hit, as Gerry had planned, it would lead the cops to assume he was changing his appearance. Another spanner in their works.

  Ejaculating into the condom, he climbed up and stared down at the terrified woman’s open and stained vulva.

  “Car keys,” he ordered and she pointed to her work desk in the corner by the door.

  He pressed the gun to her head. Her eyes spread wide in absolute horror a second before he pulled the trigger.

  With the two dead, he spent a further ten minutes collecting her car keys, taking money from her purse, her father’s wallet and the cash drawer, a few items from the supplies around him (wigs, false beards, eyelashes, and so on) and then, after checking the quiet street, let himself out into the rear yard.

  Ripping the number plates from Ted Sinclair’s Range Rover, he tried the keys in the compact Peugeot parked nearby and was delighted to find they fitted. He attached the false plates to the car, front and rear, climbed in and drove away, congratulating himself on anther simple and undisturbed brace of killings.

  Driving sedately along the back roads, he had decided upon Worcester as the next target. It would give Croft and the law something to think about. Warrington, Wolverhampton, Worcester. Was he targeting towns beginning with
the letter W? He chuckled at the thought of it leading the police to Weston-super-Mare.

  Driving through Kidderminster, climbing a steep hill on the outskirts of the town, he had stopped for a bite to eat and studied the Yellow Pages for the area. It was all very well choosing Worcester because it began with the letter W, but were there any professional firework supplies to be had in the city?

  Yes, there were. A few places as it happened. Billy selected one with an address on an industrial estate at Blackpole, to the north and east of the city. What he had to do would take time, and a place like that would be preferable to small shops on busy roads.

  The industrial estate was easy to find. It was just off the Kidderminster road. Finding Sparklers was a different matter. There were hundreds of units, large and small, on the estate, and almost thirty minutes passed wandering streets and roads, running into cul-de-sacs and doubling back before he finally found the place… only to learn that it was closed for the day.

  Furious at the delay, he drove into the city and spent the night at a guest house near the river, where he passed himself off as an engineer working on the motorway. He had considered driving out into more rural areas and repeating his fun and games at Nantwich, but he needed to stay in the Worcester area. After Nantwich, it was probably too risky. Every farmer in the country would be sleeping with a shotgun at his bedside.

  Instead, he cleaned himself up, shaved and changed his clothes, took the opportunity to dispose of the used condom from Wolverhampton, and spent the remainder of the afternoon and evening in his room, coming down only for dinner.

  Throughout the evening, he reviewed Gerry’s handwritten plan.

  “Croft is very resourceful,” Gerry had warned him on one of his visits to Hattersley. “Never underestimate him. I did and look what happened to me.” Gerry had gestured at the prison walls. “He’s a pain in the backside, but he’s tough and not afraid. That goes doubly since we’ll have his girlfriend with us. He will come after us, he will face us, and we have to arrange it so that he cannot escape, and to do that, we need the fireworks. More than anything else, they are vital to our success.”

  Reading the rest of the plan, Billy could see the logic. Much had changed. Sinclair was dead, so, too, was Gerry, but the spate of killings, bolstered by the text messages, should ensure that Croft showed up for the final face-off, and the fireworks, so necessary to Gerry’s original plan, were just as critical to Billy’s adjusted template. To leave the Worcester area without them would mean tracking down another supplier, and time, while not exactly short, was getting on.

  After his sexual exertions and two days on the road, Billy slept well that night, and was up early the following morning. After breakfast, he settled up with the landlady, then drove out of the city, through choking rush hour traffic, back to the industrial estate where he waited until Sparklers opened at 10.00am.

  Two men, one woman, he noticed when they arrived. As he climbed out of the car, one of the men came out again, gave him a curt nod of greeting, and climbed into a small van to drive away. Billy might have assumed he was a customer, but the van had Sparklers emblazoned on its sides.

  With the Webley in his pocket, he entered the warehouse and found himself confronted with a small counter. He rang the bell, and the remaining man emerged from the back area.

  “Morning, squire. Trade, are you?”

  “What? Oh, er no. Sorry. I just need some fireworks and advice on how to set them off.”

  The counter hand shook his head. “Sorry, chief, we only do trade.”

  Fortunately for Billy, Gerry had planned for this contingency. He went into the speech he had rehearsed the previous afternoon and evening.

  “Look, let me be honest. I’m a traveller. Salesman. You know. I’m on my way home. Devon. My daughter gets married Saturday. I ain’t got nothing arranged but I suddenly figured it would be nice to have fireworks for her. You know.”

  “Well, we can do you a display, mate. Depends where it is in Devon.”

  “There isn’t time, is there?” Billy pleaded. “Can you not just sell me the fireworks and the triggers?”

  The man still appeared doubtful. “These are not toys, matey. These are serious fireworks. Get it wrong and they’ll blow your bloody house down.”

  “Surely you can show me?” Billy persisted. He opened his wallet. “I’ll pay you. Cash.”

  The sight of the money, stolen from the Sinclair home, Northwich, Nantwich and Wolverhampton, did the trick.

  “Get me hung, you will.” He disappeared into the warehouse, and returned a few moments later with a large box of pre-packed fireworks. Opening it up and unpacking it, he said, “This pack comes complete with a four cue firing system. That means you can wire four different delays into it. There’s a pack of quick-burn, four-second delay fuses and an assortment of fireworks from simple barrages to rockets, roman candles and showers. You name it, this baby has it. All up, it’s one fifty, and if you shove me fifty on top, I’ll give you a quick rundown on wiring up the timer.”

  Handing over the money, tucking his wallet back into his pocket, Billy grinned. “Show me.”

  It was not complicated. A fuse had to be attached to each firework, the electrical leads clipped on the fuse and run back to a battery-operated control board, where the bare wires were slotted in and clamped. There was a remote control trigger, too. Within a few minutes Billy felt he had been working with them all his life.

  The assistant repacked the fireworks and pushed them across the counter to Billy. “There you go, boss.”

  Billy dug into his pockets again and brought out the Webley. “Thanks, pal.”

  The assistant had time to appear horrified, when the gun cracked, a hole appeared in his forehead, and he crashed back to the wall, his blood spreading across the bare plaster, and slid to the floor.

  The noise of the pistol brought the female assistant from the rear room. Billy waved the revolver in her face and she froze. “Back in there,” he ordered, leaping over the counter.

  He followed her into the warehouse, where fireworks were stacked on pallets in a mezzanine labyrinth of shelves.

  “Car,” he ordered.

  She brought out her keys. “Silver grey Nissan Micra. It’s out front.”

  Billy recalled her arriving in it. He took the keys and with the gun still trained on her, risked a glance around. A drum of narrow cable caught his attention. Watching her, he kicked and nudged it with his feet in her direction. “Turn your back, hands up, lean on the supports.”

  She did as she was told, raising her arms and leaning forwards so that she was resting against the pallets on the first level racking.

  With nothing to cut the cable, Billy fed out a long length, passed it through the pallet, wrapped it several times round one hand, ran it across and repeated the process with her left hand.

  “Legs apart,” he barked, and she obeyed.

  To her surprise and horror, Billy did not tie her legs, but instead, ripped down her trousers and panties.

  “You’re gonna enjoy this,” he said, “and if you don’t, I will.”

  “Please. No.”

  He pressed himself close to her and the gun barrel to her neck. “Shut it. One more sound, and I’ll be fucking cold meat instead.”

  To his annoyance, he had run out of condoms and had not bought any more. As he entered her from behind, an idea occurred to him and he grinned. By the time he was through, leaving his cream in her wouldn’t matter. With a warehouse full of fireworks, there wouldn’t be enough left to identify her, never mind him.

  Ignoring her muted pleas and crying, he reached an exciting climax, the thrills augmented by the idea which had just occurred to him.

  “Gonna see whether your mate told me it right,” he said, taking down a couple of boxes of the same fireworks he had been sold.

  “Oh, God, please let me go.”

  “I’m going to,” he replied, unpacking the boxes. “I’m going to let you go to your god.”

&n
bsp; She whimpered again, begging him to show her some mercy. Billy ignored her and began to wire up the fireworks. He guessed they would start a small fire and that would be enough to trigger the remaining fireworks in the place.

  “Should be quite a display,” he told her, setting a barrage between her outspread feet, “and you’ll be right at the sharp end.” He laughed. “Or your end will be at the sharp end.”

  He began to work on setting the fuses and cables to the fireworks, carefully running the cable back to his control board. It was a good deal more intricate than the counter assistant had led him to believe. Getting good contact between fuse and electrical clip was vital and he kept losing them, having to go back and replace them.

  A sound reached him. The bell on the front door. Someone had come in. The girl heard it too. “In here, Alistair. Help me.”

  Billy raised the pistol and shot her in the back and she cried out.

  Swinging his aim around, when Alistair, the man who had driven off in the van earlier, appeared at the warehouse door, Billy fired. The bullet missed, embedding itself in the door jamb. Alistair ran for it. Billy hurried after him, but by the time he reached the counter, Alistair was outside, climbing into his van.

  Snatching up the parcel of fireworks he needed, Billy ran out. The van tore way, Billy fired after it.

  “Bollocks.”

  Gripped by fury, he glanced back at the warehouse. The tart was in there dying, her channel full of his cream. Did he have time to finish what he had started with the fireworks? He decided he did not. Moving quickly, he transferred his belongings to the Nissan Micra, tore his number plates from the Peugeot, climbed in and drove off. The place would be swarming with cops in the next ten minutes.

  A quarter of an hour later, he pulled into a secluded lay-by on a wooded lane close to the motorway, where he changed the number plates again before dropping onto the motorway and driving south. Ten miles on, he cut onto the M50, and lay low for the night, hiding the car in woods near Tewkesbury, and sleeping in the back seats.