The Choice: An absolutely gripping crime thriller you won’t be able to put down

by Jake Cross

  She had incriminated herself with this talk, and who knows what she faced now. She was just a regular woman, not part of the criminal underworld, not bound by their code of ethics, the them and us attitude to law enforcement. Nikos Avramidis, though, was a criminal who should have known better, but when journalists started offering cash for scoops, he oozed out from under a rock with his mouth far from nailed shut. The reporters had quickly offered him up to his hunters, but not before they got something juicy and damning:

  Król just says to me, there’s this woman he’s gotta find. Says it’s for that cop, the one he’s always moaning about. Never really knew the score with him and that cop. Never said the guy’s name, by the way. I know now it’s that weirdo McDevitt. But one day he’s saying the guy’s fucked in the head and has evidence on him. Next minute he’s saying the cop’s in his pocket. I never knew what to think. But anyways, this cop wanted a woman found, and he had the address of someone who’d know, so our job was to go in at night and beat it out of him.

  And now the story was everywhere. Not much ink for Brad because he was a former underworld enforcer, and guys like that did things like this all the time, so nothing new there. But the newspapers had gone to town on Michael McDevitt, Scotland Yard DCI, believed to be responsible for numerous deaths, and assumed to have fled the country. His life and crimes were offered to the world beneath eye-catching headlines, from ‘DEFECTIVE DETECTIVE’, to ‘ROGUE COP ON KILLING SPREE’ and ‘OFFICER OF DEATH LOOSE ON STREETS’. Every little threat he’d ever made to another officer or a criminal painted him as evil incarnate. Ramirez, now back on the streets, had been quoted heavily. All of his previous investigations were going under the microscope in a search for injustice.

  Thinking about Gondal made his lip tremble. He wished he’d let the man live. Gondal had been a good man, a man dedicated to crime fighting, just like he’d been. He should have respected that common bond. However, it wasn’t the fact that Gondal was dead that irked him. He could have tied him up to get him out of the way for a couple of hours – that he hadn’t thought of doing such, that he’d acted rashly… it was his own fuzzy thinking that upset him. He was supposed to be better than that.

  Strangely, there was no mention of the two goons that he’d sent Brad off with, which meant they were either dead and buried, or alive and keeping silent. He was betting they were gone for ever.

  He’d expected people in his orbit to tell the journalists all sorts of daftness, of course. What he hadn’t counted on was how many people from his past would jump on the bandwagon. Someone from his school had called a paper to talk about ‘Killer Cop’s Evil Streak’, without, of course, mentioning that all he’d ever done was flushed his head down a toilet for ruining Mick’s pencil case. ‘Killer Cop’s ex-girlfriend suffered years of Rape and Abuse’, apparently, which must have happened while he was sleepwalking and she’d chosen never to bring it up. Most infuriating of all, though, some midwife now seventy years old had claimed that she knew ‘Killer Cop Was Evil Baby’ just from the look in his eyes in his mother’s arms.

  That shallow bullshit was worthy of headlines but where was his highlight reel? Where were the supercop stories? They had him for ‘Respected Solicitor Murdered’, but there was no ink allocated to the post office robbery he’d single-handedly thwarted while off-duty as a uniformed constable. ‘Evil Detective Slaughters Disabled Man in Cold Blood’ was more headline-worthy than his record of twenty-six killers and eighty-five armed robbers behind bars. Instead of ‘philanthropist’ because he’d organised a ‘cops vs criminals’ charity football match last year, they called him ‘racist’ because the fellow cop he’d killed had been of Pakistani origin!

  Worse than all of that, though, Alize had found out. She hadn’t replied to any of his messages in which he’d said he’d be with her soon. He’d agreed to meet her near Berlin where he’d told her he was meeting a guy from the German State Criminal Police Office to discuss a joint venture. Then, three days ago, long after his name had spread across the world, she’d messaged back, right out of the blue.

  Missing you, where are you, Sweetcake?

  That question had speared his heart.

  Eight months of texting since he’d met her online, a hundred phone calls, swapped presents, and then this! They would have had a great holiday, and then he would have told her he was staying on in Berlin, and before long he would have moved in with her, and together they would have enjoyed the sweet life, but instead she fucking did this! The bitch hadn’t even tried to get his version of the story; she had swallowed every word in the papers and run to the police. They were clearly controlling her social media accounts and using her to lead him into a trap.

  The only consolation, if it even qualified as one, was that his be with you soon claim had his hunters looking overseas. Let them waste manpower hiding in bushes around her home, and let her have sleepless nights as she worried that every noise was the infamous DCI Mick McDevitt, PSYCHO SLEUTH, coming down the fucking chimney.

  He was angry, but there was also cause for relief. One vital aspect was missing from every newspaper. The crucial component: the spark that had ignited everything. The event that had instigated his becoming a ‘Murderous Top Detective’ was in there among a plethora of assumptions, but the newshounds and amateur psychologists had missed their chance to solve the case. He was surprised, and a little proud, that Brad hadn’t spilled the beans, especially given the prime opportunity he’d had before the video camera.

  In other news: in Slade Green, a package had been posted to the parents of a sixteen-year-old girl who had been raped eighteen months ago. Her CitizenCard had been taken by the rapist as a trophy. When it fell through their letterbox, the parents thought the rapist was taunting them, and they handed the card to the police. Scientists quickly found DNA matching a known sexual offender, and yesterday he had been apprehended while sleeping rough with his brother. When Brad’s street gossipers had first provided the culprit’s name, Seamus Hunt, Mick had been loath to use the man, but over the months the offender had provided the location of three meets at which eight paedophiles had been arrested. Mick had destroyed every other piece of evidence in the Loyalty Box, but he had been unable to allow a child molester to walk free.

  Seamus Hunt had so far chosen not to mention ‘SLAYbian of the Yard’s’ name, so the world didn’t know about his involvement in those embarrassing cases. Good.

  Finally, he turned his attention to what really mattered.

  He typed Karl’s name, but got nothing. Liz’s name brought up the triple murder and some offshoot stories. Nothing about their involvement in the past few days’ activities. Clearly this meant they had not been charged and that their names had been kept out of the papers. Certainly they would have had their lives scrutinised by detectives because they were integral performers in this production: statements checked, pasts unearthed, every coincidence put under the microscope. But, in the end, they had walked through this thing unscathed. Mick burned with anger at that notion: Karl and Liz out there, right now, probably fucking each other and laughing and living their lives as normal, and not giving Detective Chief Inspector Michael McDevitt a second thought.

  But gossip wasn’t his reason for scouring the newspapers for Liz Grafton. He was after a specific piece of information, and when he found it, it made him sit back in the battered, puke-smelling armchair in shock.

  He remembered taking the piss out of Brad for believing that he and his gay lover were destined to be together, but since then a number of occurrences had eaten away at his cynicism. That story in the newspaper finally pushed him from sceptic to believer.

  Now he knew why the bitch had escaped his wrath every single time he had her within his grasp. Fate. It was meant to be.

  Ninety-Four

  Karl

  Barely twelve miles away, Karl was indeed trying to get on with his life, but he was not sleeping with Liz Grafton. He hadn’t seen her since that night. He had asked about her, of course, and
knew she was up north somewhere, staying with an old school friend that not even the police had a name for. Still fearing for her life, maybe, or just eager for new surroundings to ease the pain. Karl, though, had stopped worrying about his old enemies. The police had watched his house for the first two days, but since then he’d been a sitting duck. And there had been no attack. Two days ago he’d finally stopped watching the street through a gap in the curtains. McDevitt was gone. He was hiding somewhere in Germany. He was no longer a threat.

  New surroundings were something that Katie wanted. They had talked about a long holiday, but didn’t have the money just yet. So, they watched TV – never the news – and chatted – never about THAT – and shopped, and cleaned, and tried to return their lives to normal, to reinject the boring, repetitive aspects of life, in order to move on. They were aware that each minute that passed would make acceptance easier. There would be problems, though. Karl couldn’t face reopening the shop because a man had died there, and there was tension between he and his business partner because of it. As if it had been Karl’s fault. Katie’s dad’s house was going on the market because Katie couldn’t bear to return to it after her ordeal, and Peter was doing a bad job of hiding the fact that he also held Karl at fault. Then there were the headaches. Like a muscle overtrained that aches the next day, his mind had been so seriously assaulted that his head now throbbed constantly. But he got through it by thinking of the muscle analogy: it would heal bigger and stronger.

  Katie was in the bath and Karl was in the living room when the phone rang.

  ‘You never did tell me your baby’s name.’

  It was Liz. He hadn’t expected to hear from her again.

  ‘We’re going for Alex. We don’t know if it’s a boy or girl. But that fits both. Alexandra or Alexander.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ she said.

  For a short time they chatted about things inconsequential. Her husband wasn’t mentioned, but she did tell him that she was selling ‘the businesses’ and going back to college to study veterinary medicine, which she had pursued many years ago but given up in order to run two of Grafton’s ‘enterprises’. Mick McDevitt wasn’t mentioned, but she did fleetingly say she was going to be donating serious amounts to charity because ‘auditors are sticking their noses in’. She hinted that Britain wouldn’t be home for long because there were ‘people wanting to muscle in’. He felt bad for her, but couldn’t find enough solace to want to continue the conversation. It brought back too many bad memories. And there were niggling doubts that she’d been as innocent as he’d assumed – certainly some newspapers didn’t believe Elizabeth Grafton had been nothing but a doting wife love-blind to her husband’s crimes. So, there were silences on his end.

  She tapered off mid-sentence and said: ‘Ronald’s funeral is on Saturday. I’d like you to come.’

  He paused long enough for her to understand.

  ‘I don’t know what good it would do, either,’ Liz said. ‘But having you there is what my brain’s saying is the right thing. Or at least offering you the chance to attend. Up to you.’

  He was pretty certain it would turn out to be a bad idea. Maybe the press would be there and would wonder who he was. They might enquire, then poke, then unravel, and before he knew it they’d have the truth, so brilliantly hidden by the police so far. But his brain was telling him he couldn’t say no. Liz wanted him to go, so he would go. He couldn’t explain why, but he felt he owed her that. It would be a tricky situation because funerals were a time of grief and he felt nothing but abhorrence for Ronald Grafton. But that wasn’t what worried him as he ended the call.

  The trickiest part of all would be breaking the news to Katie.

  Ninety-Five

  Brad

  Since the target car-shared to and from work and wasn’t a social animal, getting to him alone would prove a problem. Luckily, the target had a doctor’s appointment at noon the next day.

  He saw the car turn into the car park at 11.40 a.m. and find a space near the back where a low wall separated the grounds from those of a Co-op. It backed in, and stopped. He hopped over the wall, yanked open the passenger door and slipped neatly inside, grabbing the back of the driver’s head.

  Ian broke the kiss after just a second.

  ‘Where the hell have you been, Brad?’

  Brad sank low in the seat, watching the road. He’d seen the police watching the house and figured they might have followed Ian. But there was no sign.

  ‘Don’t believe what the papers have been saying. Not all of it is true.’

  ‘I know what journalists are like, Brad. And I thought I knew you. Just tell me, is someone dead because of something you did?’

  Brad didn’t answer and didn’t look away from the road. But this time it was because of shame. And his silence gave Ian all the answers he needed.

  ‘I cannot be with a man in prison.’

  ‘They won’t catch me.’

  ‘Then I cannot be with a man running from the police.’

  ‘It would be like the early days. Secret meetings.’

  ‘Now is not a time for jokes.’

  ‘You don’t know the full story.’

  ‘Maybe you can beat this. But I can’t be with a man who lied to me.’

  They both watched the road for a few seconds. ‘So what happens now?’

  Ian said nothing. Brad looked across and saw a mobile in Ian’s hands. Using it would end things for ever, he understood.

  ‘Where will you go?’ Ian asked.

  ‘You mean where after I leave here?’

  Ian didn’t answer that. ‘I’m supposed to call the police if I hear from you.’

  ‘And is that what you’re going to do?’

  No answer. But the phone was still in his hands. Brad opened his door and got out. He shut it, but stood there, waiting. After five seconds, nothing happened, so he turned to leave.

  The window came down. He stopped, and bent, and they looked at each other.

  ‘You understand my decision, don’t you, Brad? There were promises. Jobless and destitute, I don’t care. I said that, didn’t I? I wanted a good man. I said if you ever went back to that way of life, it was over. Remember?’ Ian rolled up his left sleeve to expose a tattoo along the inner forearm.

  ‘I remember. I know I can’t win you back. I accept that. But it’s not too late for this to still mean something.’

  Brad exposed his own inner left forearm, and the same Latin phrase, Proverb 22:1. His return promise.

  ‘Melius est nomen bonum quam divitae multae.’

  A good name is more desirable than great riches.

  Ninety-Six

  Karl

  Karl had seen gangster funerals in films and read about real-life ones in the papers, and this one was nothing like he had expected. Six sleek black limousines followed the hearse which had so many floral tributes hanging off it that it looked like a rolling garden, but the turnout was mediocre. No throngs lined the streets bearing placards with the dead man’s face, no shops were shut in tribute, no planes flew overhead with banners. It looked like any other funeral. He put it down to the fact that Ronald Grafton had never achieved high infamy. Many knew his name, but there were many criminals out there and few carved a place in history the way the Kray twins had. He saw no police, either, unless they were undercover.

  He had asked Katie if she’d wanted to attend, and she had: for two whole days, right up to the point where they pulled up outside the church.

  ‘I don’t want to do this,’ she said, which he’d been expecting. He was ready to turn the car around and leave, but she pointed at a greasy spoon across the road and said she would wait there. He said they could forget the funeral. She said he should do this for Liz. He said okay. He kissed her cheek, and stroked her belly, and off she scuttled. He turned his focus to the church.

  * * *

  He was on time, but people were already oozing out of the door. Liz must have decided that the service itself was private. Karl stood
by his car and scrutinised the mourners. Some of the men who came out of the church were big, mean-looking brutes in suits who shook dozens of hands and were given space wherever they stood or stepped or turned. He assumed these people were other ganglords, maybe rivals who had turned up to pay their respects. They might have been employees, hired muscle mourning the loss of their beloved boss, or just their beloved jobs. Many of the other attendees were ladies attached to those men and a host were children and teenagers. This scene fitted more with the gangland community picture that he’d had in mind, but overall there seemed nothing untoward. It was just a funeral. He wondered how many of the sixty or so present actually wanted to be here. He certainly didn’t.