by Michael Kerr
“Tell me about the man you keep house for, James Brodie,” he said. “Everything.”
It was almost thirty minutes later when he was sure that Catherine had no more to say that he needed to hear.
He took the key to the front door of Brodie’s house from where she told him it was, in her handbag on the carpet next to the bed. It was on a leather fob that had a maple leaf stamped on it.
“Why the maple leaf?” he asked.
“I have a married daughter living in Toronto,” Catherine sobbed. “And two grandchildren.”
“Nice,” he said. “Now kneel on the bed facing away from me”
Catherine did as she was told. She could suffer being raped. And because she had not seen his face, she believed that she would survive the experience.
God, her arse was nicer to look at than Suzy’s. He would always remember this woman as she was now, knelt on the bed with her legs slightly apart displaying herself to him.
He stood behind her, pushed the end of the silencer up against the back of her skull and felt her body stiffen as she realised that he was going to shoot her, not fuck her.
Catherine was consumed by the terror that she had always imagined anyone that knew they were about to die must feel. Her bladder voided as the bullet tore through her skull and exited her left eye, to pass through the bed and lodge in the floorboards beneath it.
He retrieved the brass shell from the carpet and sat down in the wicker chair for awhile and just studied the motionless body. It gave him an immense sense of accomplishment to view the now deceased woman. She would have no more problems in life, and so he had liberated her from further disenchantment. And yet in some small way it saddened him that everyone was judged by their frailties, not their strengths: of how they looked, their age or colour, or position in life’s complex and inequitable game. He sighed and stood up, removed the silencer from the gun and replaced both components in his pockets. Taking one final, long look at the inert form that had been fully functional up until just a few minutes ago, he was fascinated by the spreading stain of blood that appeared be a living entity, slithering out from beneath the head, to soak into the now crimson and white sheet beneath it.
With the key and four crisp tenners from Catherine’s purse, he left the flat and stealthily retraced his steps back down to the window that he had entered by. Outside the property, in near darkness, he removed the mask and gloves and made his way off into the night. It was four-thirty, and the underground was due to reopen at five a.m. Perfect timing. He would be at the house in Chelsea before six, to get on with the main event.
James woke at six-thirty and slipped on a silk, paisley-patterned dressing gown over his pyjamas. He walked barefoot downstairs to the kitchen and switched on the coffeemaker, and then the flat screen TV on the counter, to watch the breaking news.
James Brodie was fit for his age. He was seventy-two, but exercised every day and played golf twice a week. They say, once a Marine, always a Marine, and he fully embraced that credo. He had served in ‘Nam in the early seventies, had been awarded a Purple Heart, and also had the fragments of a bullet still lodged in his back as reminders of what he chose to still think of as the Glory Days. He was of medium height, stocky, with steel-grey hair still worn Flat top, high and tight.
After making his fortune in oil, James had retired at the age of sixty-eight, the year after his wife had died of cervical cancer. He had moved to London and settled in Chelsea, which was home to the single largest community of Americans living outside of the United States.
James was looking forward to hearing the front door open. He had originally used an agency for the services of a housekeeper, but after Catherine had been sent, he had decided that she was a woman that he wanted to work for him fulltime. Catherine had a warm personality, was extremely efficient, and James supposed that his liking of her was growing in depth, and that he could foresee them being much more than employer and employee.
He heard the key in the lock as he poured coffee into a large, white porcelain cup that was almost the size of a cereal bowl.
The internal door to the kitchen opened, and the beginnings of a smile died on James’s face as a guy wearing something akin to a ski mask and holding a gun entered the room.
James did not hesitate. He snapped his right wrist forward and saw a cataract of steaming black coffee fly from the cup he held, to cross the space between them and splash on the masked face.
Billy made a howling noise as the red-hot liquid hit his right eye and soaked through the wool of the Balaclava to burn his cheek. He pulled the trigger and heard the cough of the bullet passing through the baffles of the silencer.
James followed up, leaping forward and dropping low to roll broadside into the intruder, to knock him down like a ninepin in a bowling alley. He was unaware that the discharged slug from the Beretta had zipped past his head, missing him by less than three millimetres.
Billy was young, fit and armed. He could hardly believe that an old man had got the better of him. He got to his knees and lifted the pistol up, only to feel a sudden flare of pain as a blow to his mouth knocked him back down. Tasting blood, he closed his temporarily blinded right eye, to focus his left on the man who had now got to his feet and was drawing his right leg back to presumably kick him in the head.
Billy fired, and was relieved to see Brodie jerk backwards, spin to the left and collapse to the floor in a heap.
James grimaced as the bullet entered low down on his side, glanced off his hipbone, chipping it, and exited to plough into the solid oak door of a kitchen unit. He attempted to push himself up, rightly thinking that this was a life or death battle that the odds were now stacked against his winning.
Billy got to his feet and aimed the gun at Brodie. It took all his willpower to stay his finger on the trigger. The old bastard had hurt him. He regained his breath and took pleasure in watching blood leak out from the dressing gown to flow onto the tiles, before experiencing a certain level of dismay to see that he was standing on the grouted gullies between them. But these were not flagstones and were too small to avoid stepping on the spaces between them. He decided that it didn’t count.
“Crawl across to the corner of the room and lay face down,” Billy said.
“Like hell I will,” James replied.
Billy was dumbfounded at the man’s belligerent attitude. “Do you want to die?” he said.
“No, but everyone does, so I’m not going to jump through hoops just because you’ve got a gun. Without it you’d now be in a sorry state.”
Billy could feel his face redden. Brodie was right. He would have no doubt been even more badly hurt if he hadn’t shot the old man.
He shot him again, this time in the foot. And as Brodie curled up in agony, he stepped forward and clubbed him across the temple with enough force to stun him.
James came to lying on the hearth rug in front of the Adam fireplace in the sitting room. The pain in his side, foot and head was considerable, but he could assimilate it. He had suffered many injuries during his life, and was able to use his mental fortitude to not overcome, but partially nullify them. He attempted to move, but realised that his hands were tied behind his back. His ankles were also tightly bound together.
“You’re a tough old sod,” Billy said from where he had been sitting in an easy chair ten feet away from James, holding a tea towel soaked in cold water to his eye and hoping that the hot coffee had not caused any permanent damage.
“And you’re a worthless piece of shit,” James said, looking up at the seated figure with steely eyes. “Just a pathetic two-bit nonentity.”
“And you’re pushing your luck,” Billy said. “All I came here for was money, but you raised the stakes when you threw that coffee in my face.”
“So finish it,” James said. “Because I’m not about to give you a dime.”
Billy shook his head in disbelief. He couldn’t understand why an extremely wealthy man would put his life on the line for whatever spare c
ash he had in the house. “Have you wondered where I got your front door key from?” he said.
James said nothing.
“I called round to your housekeeper’s flat a few hours’ ago. She told me all about you and gave me the key. We had some fun before I left.”
“What did you do to Catherine?” James asked.
“Just trussed her up and gagged her. But if I leave here empty-handed, I’ll go back and cut her eyes out.”
James was beaten and knew it. He felt guilty over Catherine being harmed to obtain information about him. “There’s a safe―”
“Behind the oil painting of Lincoln on the far wall,” Billy said. “I know.”
With the combination from James, Billy opened the safe and smiled – despite his sore mouth – at the large block of money facing him. He went back into the kitchen; found a sturdy cloth shopping bag folded up with others in a deep drawer. Returned to the large reception room and transferred the money to the bag.
“Where’s your wallet?” he said to James.
“Upstairs in the back pocket of my pants.”
He went up and found it. And also a pencil and some notepaper. Sitting back down in front of James, he asked him for the PIN numbers for the cards he’d filched from the wallet, wrote them down, and then got him to repeat them.
“That’s about it,” he said, standing, picking up the bag and looking down at James. “And before I shoot you, I want you to know that I lied. Catherine is dead.”
James Brodie had lost comrades in war and loved ones in peace. He had the ability to accept that life was ephemeral, and that death was eternal. He smiled at the hooded killer. “Your time will come, and when it does you’ll have nothing to look back on and be proud of. You’re just a cowardly waste of space, son.”
Billy was shaking with fury as he shot the American in the head, but took little pleasure in the act. The man’s words had struck home. He knew that what he did was wrong, but had a hot wire of anger in his brain that drove him to do what he did.
Dismantling the silencer from the gun, he then placed the weapon, the Balaclava and the gloves in the bag with the money and headed for the back door.
Leaving the area, he decided that what other people thought was of no concern to him. He had chosen a path that gave him pleasure to travel along, and saw no valid reason to not continue robbing and killing at will. Letting the Yank’s comments rattle him had been irrational. They were the insults of a distraught man who knew he was about to die. Actions always spoke louder than words.
CHAPTER TEN
The computer-generated image that had been created by Kenny Ruskin in CCS gave a sharper three-dimensional depth to the sketch made by Dick Curtis. And Kenny had enjoyed the aside to the usually more mundane work he did in the Computer Crime Section.
Matt arrived home just before ten p.m., switched on the TV and told Beth that the image of the wanted man would be featured on the news.
“If the likeness is as good as we think it is, we should get a call within minutes,” Matt said.
“Unless he’s homeless and lives under some city bridge in a cardboard box,” Beth said. “He could be a dosser with no job, family or friends.”
“Thanks for being so encouraging, sweetheart,” Matt said as Huw Edwards solemnly introduced the late evening’s bill of gloom and doom to – in the main – depress, anger and leave the general public wondering why the hell the world seemed to be in worse shape with each passing day.
The face that Matt now knew every feature of appeared to fill the screen, and Huw’s voice informed viewers of the killer’s crimes, warned them that he should not be approached by the public, and gave a contact number for the incident room dealing with the case.
“Not someone I’d like to meet in a dark alley,” Beth said when the picture disappeared and an update of more violence in the Middle East was announced.
“Not funny,” Matt said.
Beth realised what she had said and felt terrible. “Sorry. I didn’t engage my brain before I opened my mouth. Those poor girls and that young man were murdered in alleys.”
John Gibson sat alone in the lounge and stared at the image of himself on the forty-inch wall-mounted Samsung TV. In a split second his secret life was now an open book. He pressed back against the soft cushions of the settee, physically withdrawing from the almost perfect facsimile of himself. His brain seemed to freeze and he could not think of anything to do. People would have recognised him and were no doubt calling the police as he sat there stupefied, as still as a man on the scaffold with a rope around his neck, waiting for the drop.
It was all Anna’s fault. She had gone off sex after giving birth to their daughter Naomi over two years ago. He had been drawn to porn on the Internet as an alternative means of release, and then decided to go with prostitutes, but soon came to be disgusted by their pretence to enjoy sex, when all they were interested in was the payment for supplying it.
The first young woman’s death at his hands had been an accident. He had not meant to strangle her, just control her while he took her by force. When she had died he found that it added to the thrill of rape. Murdering the women assuaged the growing hatred he felt for his wife. His newfound pastime allowed him to maintain his pretence of being a happily married man, a doting father and a respected member of the community.
He used the remote to switch off the TV, got up and walked woodenly out into the hall and put on his car coat.
“Where are you off to?” Anna said, coming out of the kitchen, where she had been talking to her mother on the phone.
“I need some fresh air,” John said. “I won’t be long.”
“But―”
He said nothing, just stared her into silence and left the house, to drive his Nissan north with no immediate destination in mind, passing through Chigwell and then Theydon bois, before deciding to head west and take refuge in Epping Forest, to give himself the time and space to think over what options he had.
Parking off-road at the side of a deserted bridleway, he got out of the car and walked along what he determined to be a deer trail, to push through a split in a galvanised wire fence, and then walk down a weed-covered embankment to sit on the thick grass and face the large expanse of water which was the King George Reservoir.
Lighting a cigarette, John looked out at the shimmering manmade lake. The moonlight was reflected off the dark water, to fragment and sparkle on the choppy surface. He took deep drags, and wondered how the hell he could get away with what he had done. It struck him that he had not been responsible for the rapes and murders; had obviously suffered some mental aberration that had compelled him to do things that in his right mind he would not have done. He wished that he could turn back time and undo his actions; to have his life back as it had been before Naomi had been born.
Phil Adams phoned Matt at ten-twenty. “We’ve had over a dozen calls identifying the rapist, boss,” he said. “All but one giving us the name of a guy living in Ilford.”
Matt clenched his fist and thought he might crush the Nokia. “What else do we know about him, Phil?”
“That his name is John Gibson. He’s a thirty-two year old civil engineer, married with a young daughter. He drives a late model blue Nissan, and not one of the callers that named him could believe he could be responsible. Each and every one of them thought that he must have a double.”
“I want the team at the end of the street he lives on ASAP. Give me the address and get the ball rolling, Phil. If he’s seen the news he’ll probably panic and do a runner, so get his car registration and have it put out as an APW.”
Phil arranged for the all points warning to be put into immediate effect, and for the team to head for the address in Ilford. They did not use the services of an armed response unit. Each SCU officer was highly trained in the use of, and authorised to carry firearms. It was rare for any of the team to even have to draw them, let alone have to resort to discharging a weapon, but the cases they worked on were of the except
ional type, and so it had been deemed that they should have adequate protection. A baton or Taser was of less use than a water pistol against armed gangland types or known killers. It all came down to having to fight force with at least equal force.
Anna was about to climb the stairs with her arms full of freshly ironed bed sheets and clothing when someone pounded on the front door and shouted, “Police. Open the door,” just a second before it flew open and smashed back into the wall, and shards of wood from the shattered frame littered the carpet.
Anna spun round, dropping the load she had been carrying, to stare in disbelief at the man who appeared in front of her holding a gun that was pointing at her chest.
Matt, Pete and Errol had gone in the front, after Errol had used the short steel Enforcer battering ram – informally called ‘the big key’ – to gain swift entry to the premises. Marci and Phil were at the rear, ready to thwart any attempt to escape.
Pete checked the lounge and nodded to Matt before heading into the kitchen to open the door for Marci and Phil.
As the team searched the house, Matt ordered Anna to go into the lounge and to sit on the settee.
“I don’t know what you want, but I’m going to my daughter,” Anna said, walking around him with the intention of climbing the stairs.
Matt heard the strident wail of a child from above, gripped Anna by her upper arm to stop her, and waited until he heard Pete shout “Clear”, before walking Anna up the stairs and into the small bedroom where a young girl was crouched at the back of a single bed, crying, trembling and hugging a teddy bear in what, had it been alive, was a death grip.