by Michael Kerr
Even if Eltringham had lied about who ended up with the pistol, it was a given that someone who worked for Lister knew where it was, or at least who had taken possession of it. And if the killer was one of Lister’s men, then all they would need was a DNA sample to match against the one that Lloyd had failed to identify.
“Coffee, boss?” Tam said from where he was on the computer, looking at a detailed Google map of Epping forest, as if by just studying it a red cross would appear at the location where the rapist/killer was in hiding, with a popup box and the words ‘John Gibson is here’.
“I’ll get it,” Matt said. “And while we’re drinking it you can start digging out the names of all the lowlifes that have worked for Lister, going back to the time of the robbery at Heathrow five years ago.”
“That could take awhile,” Tam said. “He runs legitimate businesses and employs regular people that won’t even know that they’re working for a gangster.”
“Start with the ones that are close to him, that we know run his protection, drugs, bent massage parlours and prostitutes. Your connections at the SC&O should be able to furnish a list. A little interdepartmental cooperation is called for.”
Matt poured them both black coffee, and then left Tam to it and took his mug upstairs to Tom’s office, to bring him up to speed.
“I think we’re making good progress on both cases,” Tom said. “If Gibson has seen the news he’ll be well and truly spooked. He’ll feel pinned down, if he actually is still in Epping Forest.”
“That’s good for whoever he’s holding,” Matt said. “If he stays put, he’ll keep them alive. Corpses aren’t much use to try and bargain with.”
“You don’t do deals with his kind.”
“I know that, and you know that, but he doesn’t. When we find him it’ll be his choice as to whether he walks out or leaves in a body bag. Keeping any hostages alive will be the priority, though.”
“What about the other case?” Tom said.
“The shooter used the gun that we’re looking for, and left blood at the Brodie household. There’s no match in the DNA database, but if someone connected to Ricky Lister has the gun and is the killer, then we may be able to get a sample.”
“It’s a long shot, Matt.”
“It’s all we’ve got. And I’ll need warrants to collect the samples, because the guys that work for Lister will no doubt refuse to be swabbed.”
“That could prove difficult. We don’t have a lot to go on.”
“You can swing it with Adams. If he thinks that this could close the case, he’ll go for it. He knows that the gun from the old Heathrow job is the link, and that the three robbers worked for Lister. The blood is the case breaker.”
“When do you need the warrants?”
“As soon as we have a list of everyone that has worked for Lister over the last five or six years. I’ll have it on your desk two minutes after I have the names.”
“That could take forever.”
“Not with Tam on the job. He still has friends in SC&O, and they’ve been trying to shut Lister down for years. Their records will give us all the names we need.”
The team was busy. As expected, they were getting phone calls from people that were sure they had seen Gibson. He had supposedly been recognised in places as far away as the Isle of Skye, Newcastle, and at a Burger King in Manchester. Every sighting had to be checked by local constabularies.
Matt left the building at seven p.m. to go home and be with Beth. She had taught him how to mentally back away from an ongoing case; to think about something personal and recharge his batteries. He found that – to a degree – he could do it for short periods. For the first time since becoming a cop he had the ability to put other peoples’ misfortune in a separate room in his mind and concentrate on his own life. Beth had been the catalyst. The love that they shared had become more important to him than anything else. He had too much to lose now. That he had unwittingly put Beth’s life in jeopardy on more than one occasion still caused him to have nightmares, from which he would wake up from suddenly in a cold sweat. The psychopaths that he had goaded and brought into their lives were dead, and yet in some way would always be alive in his mind, haunting him from the grave. Better late than never he had learned that he wasn’t responsible for all the bad shit that went down, and that he did not want to die for strangers. Life was too short to knowingly put it on the line. He had lost the gung-ho attitude. Maybe he was becoming more mature. Certain events had a way of concentrating your mind on what was really important.
Beth met him at the door and crushed him to her. “I’m glad you’re home” she said after they had enjoyed a tender kiss. “We don’t seem to see each other enough.”
“You’re right,” Matt said. “It’s like a timeshare thing. You’re at the nuthatch, and I’m trying to solve murder cases. Maybe we should work out the earliest date we can retire and be together all the time, with enough money so that we can visit exotic places and do more than just pay bills and keep warm in winter.”
“Bullshit, Barnes,” Beth said with a smile on her face. “You need to do what you do. Half an hour laid on a beach and you’d be restless; an hour and you’d be going out of your skull.”
Matt didn’t return her smile. “Not if I was with you,” he said. “Believe it or not I’ve modified my priorities a lot. I still put a hundred percent effort into closing down killers, but the need to do it is far less important than what we have.”
“That’s good to know,” Beth said. “I think that we should plan to be as free as a couple of bluebirds by the time we hit fifty.”
Matt liked the idea. They had no mortgage, a reasonable amount of money in the bank, which they could add to, and would both receive a good package, even with what they would forfeit by not staying on till they were old and grey and in their sixties. “That sounds like a plan,” he said. “Too many people have to work till they drop.”
They had a lazy evening, watched The Bourne Identity, which they had both seen before, and ate sandwiches and opened and demolished a bottle of Gallo cabernet sauvignon. When the news came on, the second item was the piece on John Gibson.
“Are you any nearer catching him?” Beth asked.
“If he’s in the area we think he is, yes. But who knows, he could have got nervous and decided that he’d feel safer if he was a long way from London.”
“I still think he’ll be in the forest,” Beth said. “How do you propose to save any hostages he’s holding?”
“He’s an amateur with no military background; basically soft and out of his depth in a situation he has no previous experience of. When we locate him, we’ll have a green light to use extreme prejudice. He’ll be given one chance to surrender, and if he doesn’t, snipers will take the first clear shot that presents itself. If he happens to be alone, then we can afford to hold off and wait for him to see the light and admit defeat.”
Beth said nothing. She believed that Gibson had forfeited any rights after raping and killing his first victim. That he had become a repeater and continued to kill put him completely outside acceptable parameters of behaviour. Had he not been seen attempting to strangle Janice Cross, after bludgeoning her boyfriend to death, then he would still be on the rampage.
“What about the so-called Housekeeper Killer?” Beth said.
“We have his DNA, but no match to identify him,” Matt said. “We know that a con still serving time used the gun over five years ago, and probably passed it to one of the other thugs that worked for his boss, Lister. That means we need to swab everyone that was employed by Lister back then.”
“Is that possible?”
“Yeah. We once caught a guy who’d abducted a ten-year-old girl in Slough, but had been careless and left a cigarette end at the scene. We took swabs of all men between nineteen and fifty in the area we believed he lived in. Very few refused to furnish a sample for elimination purposes. One that did refuse was a self-employed plumber. He lived a few streets away from wher
e the girl had been taken. When we searched his house we found her.”
“Alive?”
“No. He’d put the body in a large dry-cleaning bag and stashed it in his loft. Maybe he was planning to dump it somewhere. Who knows?”
Beth sighed. The world seemed to be full of crazy and bad people. No one was really safe, as she knew only too well from personal experience. “I need another drink,” she said. “And we can talk about something more pleasant before we go to bed.”
Matt went through to the kitchen and opened another bottle of wine. He was feeling the effects of what he’d already had, and thought that he would have a hangover in the morning. So what was new? Before he’d met Beth, he used to regularly be worse for wear. Nowadays he only overdid it on special occasions, or like tonight, when both he and Beth needed to chill and not dwell on all that was wrong in the world at large.
It was seven-twenty a.m. when Maria Harper came out of the tube station and began the six minute walk to the four-storey Victorian house on a quiet tree-lined street in Ealing.
Maria had watched the early news, and was naturally worried to hear that some maniac that they were calling the Housekeeper Killer was on the loose. He had apparently murdered three housekeepers to date, and also two out of three of the men that they had worked for.
Maria thought that she would be safe. She was married, unlike the other women. But better safe than sorry, so she told her husband, Graham, to have a new, stronger lock fitted to the door of the flat. The windows were all double glazed, and were securely locked every evening.
Opening the gate to Ballantyne House, Maria took her key ring from her shoulder bag and unlocked the front door, only to gasp with shock as a small mongrel dog rushed past her, brushing her leg as it entered the house.
“Come here, Jake,” a voice called, and Maria turned to see a pleasant-looking young man standing at the gate with a lead in his hand and an apologetic smile on his face.
“Sorry about that,” he said, walking up the path towards her. “He slipped his lead.”
Maria returned his smile. “No harm done,” she said. “Can you call him out, though? My employer isn’t a dog lover.”
Maria stepped into the hallway, and he followed her and closed the door behind them.
Maria suddenly became fearful. The news bulletin popped into her mind, and too late she began to believe that she was in danger.
It had been nothing short of a masterstroke. He had seen a woman tether her dog to a drainpipe outside a shop, and then go in. It took less than five seconds to untie the lead and walk away, to enter the underground and follow the housekeeper down to the platform, having picked the small dog up to carry on the escalator. He looked at the brass disc fastened to its collar, to see that its name was Jake.
“Hi Jake,” he said. “I’m your new pal. My name’s Billy.”
Walking from the tube in Ealing to where he knew the woman was headed, he felt totally relaxed. There was nothing more ordinary than a guy walking a dog, and Jake was trotting along to heel and seemed quite happy to be with him. Maybe he would keep it.
He smiled now as Maria’s eyes widened and she drew in a deep breath as he pulled open his Parka and withdrew a gun from his belt with what appeared to be a very long barrel.
Taking a step back, he levelled the gun at her forehead and pulled the trigger, to savour the sight of the women’s head jerk backward as a small hole appeared above the bridge of her nose. She seemed to stand there forever, before her eyes slid up to show the whites and her legs gave way, for her to collapse into a sitting position with her head drooped forward to display the large exit wound in the back of her skull.
Billy had intended to walk her through to the rear of the house, to find a suitable small room to push her into before he shot her. Having a corpse sitting in the hall with its blood and brains on the wall was a little messy. Had he not been there to deal with the house owner, he would have been tempted to clean up. Ignoring disorder irritated him. Turning back to the front door, he took a wad of tissues from his pocket and wiped the brass doorknob that he had touched when he had closed it, and then pulled on a pair of latex gloves and donned his balaclava. It took him less than thirty seconds to drag the corpse along the hallway by the hair, open a door that was set into the oak-panelled side of the stair case, and bundle the body inside.
A voice from upstairs called, “Maria.”
Billy retraced his steps, walked up the stairs and on to the first floor landing.
“Maria,” the voice called again from within a room that he was almost level with.
Pushing open the door, Billy was faced by a tall man walking towards him.
Neville Marsden looked fit and well, dressed in a cream cotton short-sleeved sports shirt, black trousers, and wearing tan-coloured moccasin-style shoes. He was sixty-seven years of age, but could still pass for a man a decade younger. He had recently sold his small publishing company to Harper Collins as an imprint. Amberglow was well known for its list of good nonfiction, including biography, history and works on contemporary affairs. It was a distinguished company with a claim to permanent importance, not work of ephemeral popular interest. The reason Neville had sold was because he was dying. He had terminal brain cancer, and the tumour was inoperable. The Harley street consultant had told him that he had a year, maybe eighteen months with the drugs he had been prescribed. Neville was pragmatic about the situation; decided to put his house in order, as the saying goes, and enjoy the time he had left as much as possible. The prospect of death was now something almost tangible. His mortality was no longer in question, and although he would have much preferred to die in his sleep at least twenty years hence, that was not going to happen.
Neville saw the gun in the masked intruder’s gloved hand and smiled as he stopped, stood still and waited.
Billy was astonished by the man’s apparent lack of fear. “Go over to the bed and sit on it,” he said.
“I don’t think so,” Neville said. “I watch the news. You’re obviously the maniac they’ve dubbed the Housekeeper Killer. Is Maria dead?”
Billy nodded.
“And you evidently intend to murder me before you leave,” Neville said. “So do it now, before I take my chance and go out fighting.”
This was absurd, Billy thought. Why would a wealthy man act so inexplicably?
Neville took another two paces towards Billy. He was still smiling.
“Stop, now, or I’ll shoot you in the fucking groin,” Billy shouted.
But Neville kept coming. He had absolutely nothing to lose, and was not going to just do what this murdering animal said and meekly surrender his life.
Billy held the gun two-handed and shot Neville in the left thigh.
Reeling sideways as his leg gave out on him, Neville felt pain blossom in his leg as he toppled to the floor. He hoped that the bullet had severed his femoral artery, knowing that if it had he would bleed out within a couple of minutes and be beyond any further suffering.
Billy went over to the bed and sat on it. He was uncertain what to do next. He had the gut feeling that the man he had just wounded would not give up so much as a penny to him.
Neville dragged himself over to the nearest wall and grunted against the pain as he sat up with his back against it to face his soon to be executioner.
“I know all about you,” Billy said. “You’re a fat cat publisher, divorced with two grownup children. You have everything to live for, so why are you pushing me?”
Neville winced, but then smiled again. “What you obviously don’t know about me is the fact that I’m dying,” he said. “I’ve got brain cancer. I sold my company, and am just sorting my affairs and counting off the days.”
“Do you really want to die sooner than you need to, in this room, at my hand?” Billy said.
“I don’t think I have a choice. You’re the one holding the gun.”
“Tell me where the safe is, give me the combination, and all I’ll take from you is your money.
”
“Why should I believe you?”
“What have you got to lose?”
Neville had the sudden realisation that he didn’t want to die: not before his time. And yet he truly believed that he was about to. “Behind the mask and the gun, are you a person that can give your word and keep it?” he asked.
Billy lowered the gun and stood up. “Yes,” he said. “You haven’t seen my face, and so I can choose to let you live.”
Neville told him that the safe was in the bathroom behind a mirrored wall cabinet that was hinged at one side and could be easily pulled back to reveal it. He then gave him the four-digit number that would open it.
“I want you to lay face down with your hands behind your back,” Billy said. “I’ll tie you up, take whatever money I find and leave.”
Neville did as he was told, as Billy unplugged a bedside lamp and wrenched the long, plastic-coated flex cable from its base, to then use one end of it to tie Neville’s wrists together and the other end to secure his ankles.
There was nine thousand pounds in the safe. He took it and placed it in a plastic shopping bag that he had brought with him, and then returned to the bedroom.
“Remember,” he said to Neville. “Even a killer like me can give his word and keep it.”
Jake was sitting in the kitchen. Billy took a bowl from a wall unit and filled it with cold water and set it down on the floor. “There you go, boy,” he said, and watched as the dog lapped up half the water.
Opening the back door, he removed the balaclava, stepped out and closed the door behind him before taking the gloves off and putting them, the mask and the gun in the bag with the money.
After catching a tube back to Hounslow, Billy made a call from a phone box and alerted the emergency services to the fact that there was a seriously wounded man at an address in Ealing, which he gave the operator before hanging up. Everyone except Maria was a winner, Billy thought as he walked home. Jake would be reunited with his owner, Neville Marsden would live to die another day from his brain tumour, and he was now a few thousand pounds better off, and the escapade had to some extent calmed him down over the ransacking of his house. The thing that bothered him the most was that nothing had been taken. And no one knew that he had the gun or the money, so just what the fuck could they have been looking for?