by Michael Kerr
CHOSEN TO KILL
A DI Matt Barnes Thriller
-4-
By
Michael Kerr
Copyright © 2014 Michael Kerr
Discover other Titles by Michael Kerr at MichaelKerr.org
Kindle Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this Author.
Disclaimer
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Also By Michael Kerr
DI Matt Barnes Series
1 - A Reason To Kill - Link
2 - Lethal Intent - Link
3 - A Need To Kill - Link
The Joe Logan Series
1 - Aftermath - Link
2 - Atonement - Link
3 – Absolution - Link
Other Crime Thrillers
Deadly Reprisal - Link
Deadly Requital - Link
Black Rock Bay - Link
A Hunger Within - Link
The Snake Pit - Link
A Deadly State of Mind - Link
Taken By Force - Link (Read a free sample at the end of this book)
Science Fiction / Horror
Waiting - Link
Close Encounters of the Strange Kind - Link
Children’s Fiction
Adventures in Otherworld – Part One – The Chalice of Hope - Link
Adventures in Otherworld – Part Two – The Fairy Crown - Link
“I always believed that I was a decent person, but have to admit that I let circumstances affect me to the extent that I started doing very bad things. Killing someone is like breaking an egg: once you’ve done it you can never put it back together again.”
~ John Gibson
“The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is the duty of the living to do so for them.”
~ Lois McMaster Bujold
CHAPTER ONE
He knew a lot about life and death and pleasure and pain. It was pretty simple really, like a graph with peaks and troughs indicating what had been good or bad days as time rolled by. He had experienced more foul than fair times, since leaving a miserable childhood behind him to join the adult rat race and get by in a dog-eat-dog world. Well, he did more than get by now; he took what he wanted, because he had no intention of holding down a poorly-paid fulltime job and being caught up in a system that was corrupt, self-serving to maybe ten percent of the population, and run by ex-public schoolboy pillocks, whom he adjudged to be parasites on working-class folk, taxing them unmercifully and squandering the money like compulsive gamblers suffering a permanent bad streak.
He showered, dressed in drab clothing that would not draw attention and left the house at exactly seven-thirty a.m., to stroll along the street at a speed that was neither too fast nor too slow. He knew how to blend and not be noticed by others. The art was to appear anonymous, like some dowdy old person who somehow became invisible: just another grey or white-haired geriatric that limped along under the radar. But he wasn’t old or limping. He was extremely fit, in peak condition for a young man in his mid-twenties. And he was blessed with physical hallmarks that made him look average; being slim, five-foot-nine, and with no facial features that were striking. He wore his mid-brown hair medium-length, and just merged with his surroundings like a chameleon.
Shit! He had inadvertently stepped on a crack between two flagstones. That was a no-no. Doing it was totally out of character for him. It had been at least four years since the last time this had happened. Was it a portent? Should he call his mission off? No, he could make it right. He stopped, counted to ten, backed-up three paces and pretended to look at something in a shop window before continuing on his way, this time avoiding the crack. He knew that he had a mild form of OCD, and although annoying, he could accommodate the obsessive compulsive disorder. But standing on cracks, walking under ladders and a host of other things were not a part of it. He was just superstitious. He remembered a saying from way back when he was probably no more than six years old: ‘Step on a crack and break your mother’s back’, his now dead grandmother used to say. He hadn’t understood what it had meant then, and still didn’t. It had just stuck in his mind like some line from a kids’ nursery rhyme.
Taking a tube from Hounslow Central to Barons Court, he then walked to Palliser road, which was located very close to Queens tennis club. Entering a stall in a public toilet, he locked the door, withdrew a nine-millimetre Beretta from a deep pocket of the dark-grey parka he wore and checked the magazine, even though he had done so three times before leaving the house. He then reached into another pocket for the cylindrical silencer and screwed it onto the end of the pistol’s barrel. With the extended weapon tucked in the waistband of his cargo pants, he flushed the loo, exited the stall and washed his hands thoroughly at a stainless steel sink that was lined with scum, before using a pleasantly scented hygiene lotion to sanitize them; the lotion being an item that he never left home without. The world was a germ and virus-ridden place that he considered to be as lethal as he was to the people he had chosen to kill.
The large house of his intended victim was an imposing edifice of Georgian construction, pristine white brickwork fronted by a wrought iron palisade that, as the front door and window frames, was painted in black gloss as shiny as patent leather dancing shoes, or the front door of number ten Downing Street.
He made his way along the road, counting the properties, to turn left onto a side street at the end, and then left again to enter a wide alley and once more count each individual house until he was at the rear of the targeted private residence, slowing to look both ways, to be certain that there was no one in sight before using one of the several keys, that were attached to a circular brass fob by a split ring, to open the solid hardwood door that was set into a seven-foot high brick wall topped with razor wire that fully enclosed the large back garden. Locking the door behind him, he strolled along a redbrick path that was laid in a herringbone pattern and bordered by mature trees and rhododendron bushes.
The back door to the house was fitted with a cat flap, and not alarmed, and as if on cue a large tabby wriggled its bulk through the aperture and jinked around him as he approached.
Selecting a Yale key on the bunch, he silently slipped it into the lock, turned it and pushed the door open, pausing to put the keys in a pocket of his parka and pull on a pair of latex gloves before entering a long hallway.
Jeremy Beaumont was just twenty-five minutes away from meeting the last person he would ever see.
Passing a storeroom and a large walk-in larder, he came to an enormous kitchen that he supposed would have had the staff to cater for a large and wealthy family in days gone by. This spacious residence was now home to one rich old man, and he found that objectionable, when so many decent, hardworking people couldn’t even get their feet on the first rung of the housing ladder.
Locating and switching on a kettle, he made a pot of tea, then checked his wristwatch. The housekeeper always took Beaumont tea at exactly nine a.m.
He entered the bedroom on the second floor of the house and placed the silver tea tray on a bedside table, and then drew the thick velvet curtains back to al
low sunlight to flood the room.
Jeremy woke up slowly, his eyes almost gummed shut and his hands and knees pained by the now constant fire of arthritis that the prescription painkillers failed to nullify. Being eighty was a very poor substitute for the youth and even middle age that he had enjoyed every minute of. Now, with a pacemaker lodged in his chest and failing general health, he found each day a mounting trial to face.
“Good morning, Janet,” Jeremy said, turning over and rubbing at his eyes with swollen knuckles.
There was no reply. He blinked and reached over to the table for his spectacles, put them on and was faced by a young man sitting in an easy chair in front of the window, almost silhouetted by the backdrop of sunlight.
Jeremy felt confused and scared, and didn’t know what to say or do.
The silence that followed was untenable. “Who are you?” Jeremy eventually asked the stranger. “Where is Janet?”
He smiled at the old man. “You can call me Daniel,” he said. “And Janet is at home. She gave me her set of keys to your house.”
“Did you kill her? Are you going to kill me?”
“Old age is killing you, Jeremy. I’ll only put you out of your misery if you give me good reason to.”
Jeremy pushed himself up into a sitting position with his back against the padded headboard. “What do you want?” he said.
“Just a little of your ill-gotten wealth. You’re a very rich man. As a member of parliament you also sat on many companies’ boards as a director, and you still have your stained fingers in the tobacco industry.”
“But―”
“That’s a bad word, Jeremy, please don’t use it again,” he said, drawing the pistol from his waistband and pointing it at the now trembling man’s chest. “You have money and credit cards in the house. I want the cash, the cards and your PIN numbers. And if you hold out on me or try to be clever and give me false or reversed numbers, then you’ll die.”
Jeremy didn’t want to die. Even at his advanced age and with all his infirmities, he realised that he still had a potent lust for life. Most of his wealth was in stocks and shares, and so the few thousand pounds he kept in his safe was paltry. And the major credit cards in his wallet would only allow a relatively small amount to be withdrawn off each.
“How much do you have in the house?” ‘Daniel’ said.
“Approximately ten thousand pounds. And my cards are in my wallet in the top drawer of the dressing table behind you.” Jeremy said.
“Get up and take me to your safe,” Daniel said as he opened the drawer, took out the wallet and removed the cards.
Jeremy could not rush. He climbed out of bed slowly and limped over to the door in his baggy pyjamas, to be followed down the stairs and into a study on the ground floor, where he moved a small occasional table that was positioned in a corner of the room. Kneeling down with difficulty, Jeremy pulled back a corner of the carpet to reveal a hinged lid that was set flush to the floorboards. Lifting the small trapdoor up and laying it back against the wall, he punched a four digit number into the panel on the upturned safe door and opened it.
“Okay, move away from it,” Daniel said.
Jeremy didn’t get up off his knees, just crawled like a baby to several feet from the robber and sat with his back up against the wall, to concentrate on drawing air into his phlegm-filled and decaying lungs.
There was twelve thousand pounds neatly banded in a dozen blocks. Daniel found nothing else worth taking. He was not greedy, and made do with cash and cards from his selected prey. Jewellery and other valuable articles had to be fenced, and were therefore risky to take and convert to money.
“Back upstairs,” he said to Jeremy. “Your tea will be going cold.”
It took Jeremy a while to shuffle up to his bedroom, where he climbed back onto the bed and watched and waited as Daniel took a small notebook from a pocket and wrote down the names of the banks corresponding to the credit cards.
“Write your PIN numbers where appropriate,” he said, handing Jeremy the book and a ballpoint pen. “And bear in mind that I’m going to leave you tied up and gagged. If the numbers are false, I’ll come back, and you really wouldn’t want to see me pissed off.”
Jeremy wrote the correct numbers next to the names of the banks in a scrawl that was only just decipherable. Daniel then turned to a blank page and told him to write them down again, just in case he had made them up. They matched.
Pouring tea from the pot into a china cup and adding milk, he said, “Do you take sugar?”
Jeremy shook his head and reached out to take the tea with both hands. Took a sip of it to ease his dry throat, and looked into the young man’s eyes. All he saw was a twinkle of humour, overlaying a coldness that he imagined a worker in a slaughterhouse with a bolt gun possessed as he dispatched beasts without a shred of empathy for them.
Daniel allowed the old man time to drink the tea; took the cup from him, placed it back on the tray, and then shot him once between the eyes.
Leaving the house, he stopped halfway along the path, to sit on a wooden bench that was painted dark green. He felt relaxed and in some way pleased with himself for carrying out what he thought of as a mercy killing. The old man’s health and quality of life was rapidly deteriorating, and so he had curtailed it, and by so doing had freed him from further suffering. He felt like a boy scout: Job Done!
An hour later he was back on a tube heading home, having made several withdrawals from ATMs, wearing a black woollen beanie hat, shades, and with a Band-Aid tightly placed across his nose to alter its shape as he kept his head down to extract the money. No sneaky camera would see him for who he really was, for the killer by the name of Daniel was no more than a fabrication; a character he assumed to be totally separate from his everyday personality.
CHAPTER TWO
He slipped out of bed at six a.m., headed for the bathroom to take a leak, and then went downstairs to the kitchen, dressed only in the jockey shorts that he’d slept in. He switched on the coffeemaker before unlocking the back door and stepping out onto the decking, to watch the sun as it broke cover in the east to rise up and begin its daily journey.
Stretching, he walked barefoot down the steps and across to the small grove of mature apple trees that he supposed had been the inspiration for the house name: Orchard Cottage.
“You’ll stand in fox or badger poop, you lummox,” Beth called from the open kitchen door. “And I’ve poured the coffee.”
Matt didn’t turn around, just hooked his fingers in the waistband of his shorts and gave her a quick flash of his pale bottom.
“I can’t believe you just mooned me out in the open,” Beth said after giggling at his spontaneous act.
“I’m full of surprises,” Matt said, strolling back to the deck, to stop and check the soles of his feet before climbing the steps.
Beth embraced him and kissed him on the lips. He could feel the softness of her breasts through the thin cotton of the T-shirt she wore.
“Good morning, sweetheart,” Matt said.
“Yes, it is,” Beth said. “This place has given me a whole new outlook on life.”
“In what way?”
“The peace and quiet. It’s like finding a small park in the city and going into it to escape the hectic way of life that is all around it. I used to think that I liked the hustle and bustle, but I was just acclimatised to it, and didn’t know what I was missing.”
Matt nodded. He believed that they had made the right move. They could work in busy, crowded environs and then retreat to the tranquillity of what they regarded as a little piece of heaven that went by the name of Woodford Wells; a small village north of the city with no downside that they had yet come across.
They showered together, drank a second cup of coffee and got ready to leave for work.
“Have you got anything really heavy on at the moment?” Beth said to Matt as they locked up and walked over to the cars that were parked side by side on the wide gravel drive out front.
“Nothing that you need to know about,” Matt said. “You’ve been the damsel in distress too many times for comfort. Remember, we agreed that your days of consulting for the police are over.”
Beth smiled. “Just interested,” she said. “There’s no reason I can’t give you pointers if you need any. And don’t forget that we also agreed that you don’t go head to head with any more homicidal sociopaths and put both of us in danger.”
“You got it,” Matt said, and they kissed before getting into their vehicles and driving away from the cottage.
DCI Tom Bartlett was already in Matt’s office drinking coffee when his DI entered and paused to fill a mug with the fresh brew.
“You have all the paperwork to make the arrest?” Tom said.
“Good morning, Tom,” Matt replied. “Yeah. We have eyes on him. He hasn’t left his flat for twenty-four hours. There were only two other residents living in the house. One is abroad, and the other has been moved out until it’s resolved.”
“Any problems?”
“Not that we’re aware of. As far as we know he doesn’t own a firearm. The women he attacked all suffered knife wounds. He has form for using a blade, in and out of prison.”
“You think he’ll give it up without doing something stupid?”
“I don’t know. At least seven of the women he robbed were slashed when they fought back or tried to keep hold of their bags. The last one nearly bled out.”
Johnny Harrison was basically a petty criminal who had escalated from shoplifting and stealing lead off church roofs to mugging women in the street. His MO was to just walk up behind them, snatch their hand or shoulder bags and run off. It wasn’t rocket science. What had brought the crimes to the attention of the Serious Crimes Unit was the level of violence that he was prepared to use, and the fact that his last victim had been lucky to survive the attack on her.