by Michael Kerr
“And spend the rest of my life in a cell? Could you do that?”
Lucy looked into his eyes. He seemed to be on the verge of tears; just a man that was lost in a hellish nightmare of his own creation. He knew that all that he had done was wrong, but did not want to pay the price for the fear and misery and death that he had been responsible for. People that should still be alive had been ripped from life, and his sins could not be forgiven. All she could do now was say whatever was necessary to stop him from murdering her. Hopefully she would get another chance to make a bid for freedom.
“I want to live,” she said. “How can we work it so that you can get away and I can go back to my family?”
On impulse Lucy reached out her hand, and to her total surprise he took it and squeezed it. “I don’t want to hurt anyone else,” he said. “But I will if I have to. Help me escape and I promise I won’t harm you.”
She didn’t believe him, but would play the deadly game and hope that she could survive the ordeal. He was – from what she knew from the briefing that they had been given before calling at properties – an educated man who’d had a career in IT and no record of breaking the law. Whatever had affected the change in him was an unknown component of the equation. For all she knew he had a brain tumour that had caused an altered state, or had suffered a blow to his head that had brought about a change in his personality. Bottom line was, he was a homicidal maniac in her view, and however rational he acted she would believe that he was as dangerous as a starving great white shark.
“C’mon, Lucy,” John said. “Get up and start walking.”
“Which way?” she said as she climbed to her feet and looked around her.
John smiled. They had been heading north, and he had noted the approximate position of the sun in the sky. “That way,” he said and pointed the shotgun in the direction they had been heading.
It was half an hour later when they heard a large vehicle pass by just a little way ahead of them. They were almost at a road.
“We need to hunker down and wait till a car comes along when there’s no other vehicles in sight,” John said as they stopped in the shadow of trees by the side of what neither of them knew was the A104.
Fate or luck may be real, but Matt didn’t give much credence to either. He had used logic to lead him to where he thought Gibson would head: put himself in the killer’s mind in the way that Beth would, and played his hunch.
Charlie Norris was a forty-six year old senior sales rep for Sentinel Stationery Services. The company’s head offices were in Harlow, and he had worked for them for twenty-two years. He was cruising along at just above the speed limit in his late model cherry-red Toyota Corolla, looking forward to getting home and spending a family evening with his wife, Jan, and the boys. Life was sweet. He had a good income, a detached house in Highams Park, and loved Jan as much as he had done on the day they had married. Both of his teenage sons were sensible, intelligent and doing well at school. Charlie Junior aspired to pursue a career in medicine, and Glen wanted to be a naturalist and intended to work towards obtaining a BSc in zoology, and hopefully go on to get his PhD. He saw himself as a Chris Packham-type, the naturalist who in turn had been influenced in part by David Attenborough.
Damn. A copper was standing at the side of the road just a couple of hundred yards in front of him. It was a female in uniform, and she was waving him down. He must have gone through a bloody speed trap without seeing a sneaky cop, who had to have been hiding in the trees with his radar gun. He slowed and pulled over to the verge as he approached the WPC, coming to a stop a few yards away from her. Funny, he thought, she was not wearing a hat and her uniform looked dishevelled. As she walked towards the car he could see an expression of apparent distress on her face. This was no speed trap; the officer was obviously in need of help for some reason.
Lucy thought quickly as she drew near. The car’s engine was still running and the man behind the wheel had lowered his window. She needed to make an immediate decision. The killer had told her to tell the driver to switch off the engine. Instead she said in a low voice, “We are both in immediate danger, sir. When I get in the car I want you drive off as if your life depended on it, because believe me it does.”
Charlie said nothing but decided, based on her tone of voice and manner, that she was telling him the truth. “Get in,” he said.
Lucy opened the rear door, threw herself onto the back seat and felt the car surge forward before she had chance to shut the door.
John was completely invisible from the road, hunkered down in the bracken and pointing the sawn-off at Lucy’s back as she waved the car down. Just another sixty seconds and he should be in the car, travelling away from the search area. He smiled as the car stopped in front of Lucy. He intended to instruct the driver to pull into the next lane or track that they came to, and would then dispose of him silently with the sickle and dump the body in thick undergrowth after relieving it of any cash. Lucy could then take off her black and white police issue cravat and the epaulettes on her blouse, to look like a civilian. With her driving at gunpoint they would soon be on the M25 heading west, and he would be home free. All he would need to do then was decide on an out of the way destination to kill her, regroup and decide what to do next.
He was taken totally by surprise as the bitch pulled open the rear door and vanished from view. Even as he got to his feet and rushed out from hiding, the car was speeding away. He didn’t think, just aimed the shotgun at the rear of the vehicle and pulled the trigger, once, twice. Both loads struck. The first clump of shot took out the rear window, and the second peppered the boot. The Toyota swerved to the left and he believed that he had hit the driver, and that the car would come to a stop or run off the road and into the forest.
Lucy had kept low on the back seat, and felt the rush of hot lead pass over her, followed by a shower of glass cubes from the now shattered rear window. The subsequent noise was of more lead shot ripping into the metal of the boot lid. She felt no sudden flash of pain, so knew that if the driver could keep the car on the road they would be safe. Gibson had shot his load, so to speak, and they were now surely out of range, or would be by the time he could eject the spent cartridges and reload.
Charlie somehow straightened the car and accelerated away from the scene, but he was in pain. Some of the pellets from the first shot had hit him in the back of his left shoulder. He could feel the warm blood running down his arm. “What the fuck is going on?” he shouted without taking his eyes off the road.
Lucy pushed herself up into a sitting position and looked back through where the rear window had been, to sigh with relief at the sight of Gibson becoming smaller with every second. She then turned round to answer the driver.
“Are you okay?” she said to him at the sight of the blood.
“I’ve been better,” Charlie said. “Who was the maniac with the shotgun?”
And then it dawned on him. He’d seen the report on the news, but not taken a lot of interest, or thought in his wildest dreams that he would become caught up in something like this. “It was the fugitive serial killer, wasn’t it?” he said.
“Yes, sir,” Lucy said. “You just saved my life. Thank you. Can I please have your mobile phone?”
John just stood there in the middle of the road with tears of frustration forming in his eyes as he watched the car speed away. He was back to square one and knew it. He walked to the other side of the road, reloaded the shotgun and stopped again on the grass verge, to push the barrels up under his chin and close his eyes as he contemplated ending it all. The bitch cop would now be reporting where he was, and he knew that on foot he would not be able to escape. His finger tightened on the trigger. This would be the best way out of it. He wouldn’t feel a thing, and he would be spared the humiliation of a trial and then the rest of his life behind bars.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Travis stayed still and waited. He could feel the cold steel against his throat, and warm blood on his chest that
had soaked through the cotton T-shirt from where it had flowed from the old man’s mouth. He was in a real bind. Foster wasn’t bluffing. Killing seemed to come easy to him: the scrawny corpse now holding him in a tight embrace was proof of that. If it hadn’t been for the encumbrance he would have rolled away cat-quick from the blade and turned the situation around. Maybe he could still make a move; pull his head to the side and push the cadaver into Foster.
Billy could almost read the other man’s mind, and could see the massive biceps’ bulge in Lawson’s arms as the muscles tensed in readiness.
“Do it,” Billy said with a smile on his lean face as he put more pressure on the blade. “Give me an excuse to cut your throat, you dumb fuck.”
“Okay, relax,” Travis said. “We can work this out, Billy.”
“Of course we can. Where’s the money you took?”
“It’s in the linen basket in my bedroom, under some clothes.”
“And the gun and silencer?”
“Your uncle, Mr. Lister, has them.”
Billy believed him, but couldn’t work out how his uncle had put it together, or gave a flying fuck over what his nephew was doing. “Why did he want the gun with my prints on it?” he asked.
“He said he was in no doubt that it was you that stole the gun from his car, way back. I followed you to the house in Ealing, where you topped the housekeeper. The stolen dog was a nice touch.”
“Yeah, it was,” Billy said. “You need to be able to improvise, Travis. I take it that you were also responsible for trashing my house and throwing my late mother’s underclothes about. Am I right?”
“It wasn’t personal, Billy,” Travis said. He could feel the sweat beading on his forehead and his top lip. “I just did what I was told to do.”
“And did my uncle tell you to break my fingers, or was that your idea of improvisation?”
“I―”
Billy had heard enough. He moved the point of the knife up to Travis’s right eye and rammed the long serrated steel blade into it, for it to puncture and slide through brain tissue and come to a stop against the back of Travis’s skull.
Travis sat bolt upright, and the body of George Blane was detached from him and flopped back onto the carpet. Billy giggled as the big man began to quiver with involuntary tremors, as if he were suffering from some kind of palsy.
Travis was still alive and conscious, but suddenly had no idea where he was, who he was, or why his eye hurt so much. He could still see out of his left eye, but did not recognise his surroundings. He was totally mystified. He turned his head in the direction from which he could here a sound that was familiar; someone laughing, and stared into the face of a young man who seemed to find something hilarious. And then the room began to spin around him, at first slowly, then faster and faster until all he could see was a coloured blur. It was as if he was in the centre of a Technicolor tornado, until everything stopped moving and became black.
“Awesome” Billy said as the big man’s body fell back and was still, now devoid of the essence of Travis Lawson; just so much flesh and bone and offal.
Gripping the handle of the knife, Billy twisted and wrenched it free and could feel a rasping sensation as the small steel teeth on the lower edge of the blade ground over the bone that surrounded the eye socket.
After wiping the blade carefully on the corpse’s T-shirt, Billy got up and went through to the bedroom, where he not only found the money in the linen basket, but also discovered a Glock 17 pistol in the drawer of a bedside cabinet. It was fully loaded, and would undoubtedly be a real attention-getter when he made a surprise visit to his uncle’s house.
“You’ve got blood on your face, Billy,” Sean said as his friend climbed in the passenger seat and buckled up. “What happened?”
“I got the information I wanted,” Billy said. “And the guy wasn’t as hard as he looked. I managed to catch him with a lucky punch and busted his nose. It’ll be a while before he gets his shit together.”
Sean saw something sly in Billy’s eyes. He was lying. He doubted that Billy could have bested the tall, muscular guy, even if he hadn’t had one arm in a sling.
“Did you top him?” Sean asked.
“What you don’t know doesn’t harm you,” Billy said. “Just drive.”
“Where to?”
“Guildford”
“What’s there?”
“My uncle’s daughter. He has something of mine that I want back, and I’m sure that my cousin can persuade him to hand it over.”
“This is getting fuckin’ heavy, man,” Sean said. “You’re beginnin’ to frighten me.”
“If you want out, say so and drop me off at the nearest tube station,” Billy said.
“S’okay,” Sean said. “But I think we could both wind up dead meat. Lister has a reputation for makin’ people vanish.”
“He’s just a lowlife gangster, getting old and soft. He doesn’t do his own dirty work, he pays no-brainers like the one I just…sorted to do it for him, and they’re Muppets.”
“What has he got of yours that’s so important?”
“Money,” Billy lied. “I did a job and put my hands on a few grand that belonged to a loan shark. I didn’t know that the bastard was running the business for Lister. Instead of just explaining what I’d done and giving me a chance to give up the cash, he had me hurt. So now I plan on getting it back.”
“Even if you get it back, that won’t be an end to it,” Sean said. “Next time it’ll be your neck that gets broken, not just your fuckin’ fingers.”
“It’ll be fine,” Billy said. “Trust me. And there’s five grand in it for you.”
Sean set off in the direction of Guildford. “Can we stop for a burger?” he said. “I haven’t eaten all day.”
It was nine p.m. when Stuart Palmer opened the front door to be faced by a man with one arm in a sling and holding a gun in his other hand, which was pointing at Stuart’s chest.
“Walk backwards very slowly,” Billy said. “If you do anything else I’ll shoot you.”
Stuart backed up, one leaden step at a time until he was level with the open lounge door.
Billy knew that the young guy would do whatever he was told to. He was blinking rapidly and swallowing repeatedly, obviously petrified.
“Who was it Stu?” Lorraine said from where she was sitting on a sofa watching the beginning of some drama on the box.
“It’s your cousin, Billy,” Billy said as he motioned for Stuart to go and join her.
Lorraine just stared at him open-mouthed, but said nothing. She had known of Billy’s existence, but had not seen him since they had been toddlers.
“I don’t understand,” Stuart said. “What do you want?”
“Nothing but silence from you,” Billy said to him, focusing his attention on the slender young woman. “I want you to give your dad a bell, Lorraine. Put it on speaker and tell him that I’m holding a gun to your head.”
Lorraine picked up her smart phone, scrolled through her contacts and phoned her father.
“Yes, Sweetheart,” Ricky said, answering after checking the caller ID. “You okay?”
“No, Dad. I’ve got company. He wants to speak to you. And he’s pointing a gun at me.”
“Who is it?” Ricky said.
“It’s me,” Billy said. “Your favourite nephew. The one that you had that ape Travis work over and rob.”
Ricky felt a cold worm of dread twist and squirm in his gut. “You’re crossing a very hard line, Billy. Think about it. If you touch my daughter, you’re dead, and you should know that I don’t make idle threats.”
“And you know what I’ve done, you dickhead. To bring you up to date, I topped Travis earlier this evening and got my money back. But I want the gun and silencer that he delivered to you, plus fifty grand as compensation for the pain and mental anguish I suffered. Within five minutes I’ll be on the road, and your daughter will be with me. I’ll let you mull it over and call you back later. Are you at home?�
��
“Yeah.”
“Stay there, I’ll be contacting you by landline.”
“I promise that―”
“I doubt that you’ve ever kept a promise in your life, Uncle Ricky. But I promise you that if you try anything, then I’ll do Lorraine slow and hard, and you’ll get to hear it go down on the phone.”
“Okay,” Ricky said. “Stay cool and you’ll get what you want.”
“You’ll try and have me taken out,” Billy said. “That’s your style; a given. But it won’t be me that meets you to do the deal. Hang on to the thought that if you fuck up, you’ll have the rest of your life to regret it.”
“I’m your mother’s brother, for fuck’s sake,” Ricky said. “I got rid of your no good father for both of you, and paid off the mortgage on the house you live in. You owe me.”
“My mum’s dead,” Billy said. “And you didn’t even show up at the funeral.”
“I was there, Billy, in the car park, right up until they played Peace in the Valley. I did what I could for Gwen, but she always resented me.”
“Well it’s rubbed off,” Billy said. “Because I resent you, too.”
Billy told Lorraine to switch off the phone. He then stepped forward and clubbed Stuart several times across the head with the butt of the Glock, until he was sure that he was unconscious.
“You bastard!” Lorraine screamed and ran at him with her arms flailing.
He just sideswiped her across the stomach with the gun and she crumpled to the carpet, winded and with the fight knocked out of her.
“Get up,” Billy said. “I want you to get your boyfriend’s phone, hand it to me, and then go out the front door. If you make a break for it I won’t shoot you in the street, I’ll come back in here and kill Stu.”
They left the house and walked to where Sean was standing next to the Honda, nervous, smoking, and now wishing that he hadn’t got involved.
“Open the boot and put her in it,” Billy said, looking around to make sure that nobody was in sight.