Her Beautiful Monster

by Adi Tantimedh

  Ken and Clive had to take Boyd down the pub for some stiff drinks afterwards, because Roger didn’t want him burning through the expensive booze in his office.

  Bagalamukhi was sashaying by our desks, smiling, stroking everyone’s shoulder affectionately as she passed us, offering her blessing at this epic deception we were concocting. Lord Shiva, destroyer of worlds, was sitting in Roger’s chair, laughing as he texted the other gods on his phone. I should have felt a lot more uneasy, but I thought I was in control of the situation. That was my hubris.

  Kali was wagging her tongue and rubbing her hands, anticipating the delicious chaos I was about to unleash.

  EIGHTEEN

  Sure enough, the Harkingdales took our bait. Boyd phoned and told Cheryl that they’d accepted the Web address and paid him the finder’s fee, and with that, he was out.

  Since Olivia had set up the site on our server, we could see when they logged on and could track their IP address. If Boyd had done his job and only the Harkingdales knew about the site, they would be the only ones to log on to it. We could see when they created a username and password to register membership and gain access. We could even watch them browse the site in real time, looking over the different types of contract killings and rates on offer. They browsed the forum with the fake posts by clients discussing jobs for hire and how satisfied they were and how secure they felt in using the site, all written by Mark and Benjamin under sockpuppet usernames. They looked up the site’s payment methods several times, and procedures for communicating with the “contractors,” including which ones would meet with a prospective client face-to-face. Meeting in person would demand a further payment and certain steps to guarantee that the would-be client was not an undercover police officer or being followed.

  Mark, Benjamin, and Marcie had certainly thought of everything when they wrote the site up in just one night. If you were to read the site, it would be like an interactive, nonlinear digital novel that took you on a tour of a dark, nihilistic world of death-for-hire as a cold, clinical business. It needed Olivia’s coding expertise and precision, of course, but it took Benjamin’s mischief to make it pop. (No, I will not name the site, lest you look for it. And anyway, we’ve since taken it offline. It was only created for this particular case.)

  “It’s almost Ballardian in its literary tone,” Julia said, fascinated.

  “Shame we can’t submit it for the Man Booker Prize.” Mark smiled wistfully.

  “I am constantly reminded that our lovely, cheerful colleagues are bloody scary people,” I said.

  The Harkingdales decided to pick “death made to look like random street violence” for Sacha and “death made to look like a burglary gone wrong” for Irina.

  And it didn’t even chill me that I’d predicted those were the likely options they would pick.

  “You’d think they’d be more cautious than this,” I said. “They’re laying themselves wide open to exposure.”

  “The arrogance of the privileged,” Cheryl said. “Roger and I saw this all the time when we were starting out in this job. You should ask Ken and Clive about their cases when they came on board.”

  “Look at this,” I said. “They have the option not to meet the contractor in question, but they’re actually requesting a meeting.”

  “How very old school,” Mark said.

  “Ken, Clive,” I said. “Looks like you’ll get to see some of the Harkingdales up close and personal after all.”

  I did not like the smiles that crossed Ken and Clive’s faces. They were the smile of cats relishing the opportunity to slowly torture some mice to death.

  “Please don’t lay a finger on them,” I said.

  “Of course not,” Clive said, without much conviction.

  We messaged the Harkingdales back to inform them that to meet with a contractor would involve a payment just for the meeting. It was not an audition. It was a commitment to engage the contractor’s services. Payment would be made in advance into an account that would be sent to them in a private message via this website (again so we could control and keep records of their communications). It could be in the form of bitcoins, bonds, gold bars, or cash.

  We gave the Harkingdales every opportunity to back out of this. Legally, this could still be entrapment, but we weren’t the police. We were gathering evidence for our client.

  And at every step, the Harkingdales said yes.

  NINETEEN

  Up until this point, the Harkingdales, for all their awfulness, had been something of an abstract presence for us. More often than not, that was how the subjects of cases were to us. We didn’t often need to have any direct contact with them, as we could investigate and research them from afar. Sometimes we didn’t even have to leave the office, when we could just find out all about them from an Internet search. Murderers didn’t often come up in our caseload, despite what you read in novels, and this was a chance for us to have a proper gander at some of them.

  We picked the meeting place. As the contractors, who were more at risk than the client, Ken and Clive reserved the right to pick the venue where they felt safest.

  Benjamin fitted them with pin-sized webcams on their jackets, disguised to look like buttons. This was like gingerly trying to fit a bell on a lion. They met Charles Harkingdale, oldest son of Tobias and brother of Cecily, in the basement of a pub in Holloway. Charles had his father’s jowls but not the exploded blood vessels that made Tobias’s nose look like a red, blossoming cauliflower, which were signs of the excessive alcohol abuse he clearly indulged in. That didn’t mean we could underestimate the patriarch Harkingdale, though. He was the one who directed the children and probably decreed when they might poison a spouse. We were reasonably sure it was Cecily who had poisoned Lev Mayakovsky, since no one else in the family could have gotten close enough to tamper with his booze. Perhaps Cecily led Lev to believe she was the one he could trust, warning him that her family was plotting against him and that she was on his side. She was, after all, still his wife and lulled him into complacency. This would have made it easier for her to put something in his drink before his bath that led him to lose consciousness and then drown.

  It was obvious that Charles Harkingdale was there as the family’s mouthpiece. His mission was to lay eyes on the contractors they were hiring and report back to Daddy. The hire was already rubber-stamped when they agreed to send the payment to us.

  The pub was one that Ken and Clive liked to use on their own cases. It was one that various informers and villains frequented. Ken and Clive used to meet their grasses there when they were still coppers, and never told the Met about the place. It was their place of power. One they could control. Everyone there knew them and was absolutely terrified of them, even more so after they had been thrown out of the force and were now untethered by any rules.

  Charles Harkingdale, with his expensive Savile Row suit and tie, looked well out of place in that gaff. Ken and Clive wanted it to be as uncomfortable for him as possible. He might not have realized that the patrons at the pub would remember him, that in agreeing to meet with Ken and Clive he was already implicating himself and his family.

  They sat in the darkest corner at the back of the pub. We laid eyes on Harkingdale from Ken and Clive’s button cams. They frisked him, lifted his shirt in full view of everyone in the pub to make sure he wasn’t wearing a wire, and confirmed he didn’t bring his phone since it could be used to listen in.

  “A Russian lady and her kid,” Ken said when Charles showed the photos of Irina and Sacha. “Punching below our weight here.”

  “I shan’t tell you our reasons,” Charles said, trying to sound in control, his posh accent perhaps overly pronounced, betraying his uneasiness at having to sit in a pub full of dangerous oiks. “But we do need them taken care of.”

  “Job’s a job.” Clive shrugged.

  “Of course, we would expect proof,” Charles said.

  “Photos,” Ken said.

  “Unless you have a better idea,” Ch
arles said. “I’m under the impression you’re professionals. It’s rather outrageous, I must say, that we had to pay just to meet you.”

  “Listen here.” Clive leaned forward. “You’re not auditioning us. We’re auditioning you. You insisted on a meet, which places us at risk already. That’s why you pay for the privilege of meeting. It’s danger money for us. You think this business is fucking easy?”

  “I don’t think it’s easy,” Charles said. “Otherwise we’d take care of it ourselves, keep it in the family, as it were.”

  My God, the murderous intent was radiating from Ken and Clive. Even watching them on the video feed, I could feel the sheer hatred coming off them, filling the room. The other people in the pub must have felt it, too, as they were giving Ken and Clive the widest berth possible. It must have been like having two angry, hungry sabertooths sitting in the room.

  “We offer a premium service,” Ken said. “Satisfaction guaranteed.”

  “The fact that we’re here now and not in prison is proof of our expertise,” Clive said.

  “Er, yes,” Harkingdale stammered. “Quite.”

  Who would have thought that Ken and Clive being slightly well spoken would be even more menacing than when they were their usual sweary, informal selves, which was already more than menacing enough?

  I couldn’t stop repeating this mantra in my head:

  Please don’t murder him . . . Please don’t murder him . . . Please don’t murder him . . . Please don’t murder him . . . Please don’t murder him . . .

  Rationally, I knew Ken and Clive wouldn’t kill Charles Harkingdale there and then. They were in a public place with too many witnesses, they knew this trap had to be baited for his whole family, but I was still irrationally anxious that they might snap and do it anyway.

  “So will you take the job?” Harkingdale asked. “It is imperative that you do. Or we’ll have to find someone else. But you came most highly recommended. You had the highest scores and the most reasonable rates.”

  “On the website,” Clive said.

  “On the website, yes.”

  “Most reasonable rates,” Ken said, voice dripping with contempt.

  Ken and Clive just sat and stared at him a good long while. They let the deep silence linger on, causing him to shift in his seat. They wanted the bastard to sweat, and they were going to enjoy this.

  “Now we’ve met, face-to-face,” Ken said. “Means we’re committed to the job just as you’re committed to us.”

  “Our mutual obligations align,” Clive said. “Occam’s razor.”

  “Yes, yes, quite,” Charles Harkingdale said, relieved, eager to end the meeting as soon as possible.

  “Do you want it quiet or public?” Ken asked.

  “Sorry?” Charles blinked.

  “There are two types of jobs,” Ken said. “The type where they disappear forever. No one hears from them again and no one’s the wiser what happened to them.”

  “Then there’s the public display of the aftermath,” Clive said. “Made to look like random street crimes, robberies gone wrong, muggings, accidents. They’re found. They make the news. Become public.”

  “Public,” Charles said without hesitation. “We need them to be public. For it to be on record.”

  “Then it’s agreed,” Ken said. “Once you leave here, you will arrange the first half of our fee. That’s the down payment. Once we see it in our account, we set to work.”

  “Here’s how we play it,” Ken said. “In a day, you will receive in the post a clean smartphone. Wait for our call. Don’t use it for anything else.”

  “We won’t talk,” Clive added.

  “We will send you pictures once it’s done. That’s your proof.”

  “After today, you won’t see us again,” Clive declared.

  By the time Ken and Clive left the meeting, I realized I had kept my mantra running in my head even as I concentrated on everything else.

  “Did you get all that?” Clive said.

  “Yup,” Benjamin said.

  “They want us to bump off Dickie Boyd while we’re at it,” Ken said. “No witnesses, no loose ends.”

  Ken and Clive were laughing.

  I doubted Boyd would find this quite so amusing.

  TWENTY

  Staging a scene, building a drone, planting a bug or a camera—these were the activities Benjamin felt most at home with. He had always been a tech head. A Chinese kid who grew up in Peckham, so he always knew how to take care of himself, as he built cheap computers from spare parts to sell to friends and neighbors. Olivia, who was unfathomably sleeping with him, said she wasn’t even sure if he spoke any Chinese. His parents might not have taught him. Benjamin spoke in a broad “Sarf Laaaandan” accent, and if you only heard his voice, you wouldn’t know he was Chinese. He and Olivia probably had similar IQ scores, but he was all about hardware, gadgets, mics, and cameras, anything tactile. Olivia’s expertise was in computers, Internet security, and hacking. She could probably build her own computers and had probably done so, but she didn’t know how to build or fix the engine block of a car, improvise a remote listening device with a cheap Bluetooth earpiece, or assemble a working drone from 3-D-printed parts. The latter were more in Benjamin’s wheelhouse.

  Benjamin’s biggest problem was boredom, so Golden Sentinels suited him because of the different types of cases that called upon his skills. One day, he would leave Golden Sentinels if he got the right idea for an invention that excited him, and form his own tech start-up company. For now, he was more than happy to cause all kinds of mischief for Roger. To him, money was just a means to buy the parts and gear to build devices for causing mayhem, and a tech company didn’t exactly offer those opportunities.

  Thus, it fell to Benjamin to take the faux murder photos as proof of deed for the Harkingdales. He was both director and cameraman here, creating tableaus that would do the Grand Guignol proud. Did I mention he took very good surveillance photos? He was an expert at composition, a deft hand at picking just the right angle and lighting. So staging a murder scene was not only a piece of piss but also an absolute joy for Benjamin. He’d seen more than his fair share of Eighties Italian slasher films and previously banned gorefests, and on top of messing with gadgets had spent his teens extensively researching the forensic realities of bloodletting and grotesque wounds.

  He worked with Ken and Clive here. You could say they were the writers of the scenarios. First was Sacha’s, and he went along without a fuss, since I’d explained to him what our plan was.

  And Bagalamukhi followed us through all three photo shoots, watching us approvingly and taking photos of her own on her phone. This got awfully meta. In the last few months, she had taken a shine to Benjamin, standing over his shoulder as he took photos, waving her cudgel over his head as if anointing him with her approval. I think she may have decided to be his patron god. Truth and deception were spells he cast, after all.

  “This ought to be simple enough,” Ken said. “It could be claimed he was set on by a pack of racists who heard his accent, followed him to this little corner of the street out of the sight of surveillance cameras, and kicked him to death.”

  Sacha lay on the ground against the wall, his face covered with lumps of mortician’s wax molded to look like horrendous swelling over his left eye and cheek, from vicious blows to his face. Olivia applied blue and purple makeup to make the lumps look purple and blue like hematomas and heavy bruising should.

  Sacha closed his eyes and lay limp while Benjamin snapped about a dozen pictures on a burner smartphone. Then they cleaned his face up and headed back to the safe house.

  Next was his mother.

  “Make it look like a burglary,” Clive said. “Found her in the bedroom. She must have woken up and they panicked and stabbed her to death.”

  They waited for Irina to go to sleep that evening and Benjamin simply snapped some photos of her in bed, completely oblivious. Best not to disturb her or tell her what they were up to.

&
nbsp; The nurse wondered why we wanted photos of Irina sleeping. Sacha told her he wanted some photos of her at peace.

  “I’m going to photoshop the stab wounds and smears of blood in later,” Benjamin whispered. “Best to leave her be.”

  Last but not least, there was Dickie Boyd’s demise to stage. No surprise that he would be the one who had to kick up a fuss.

  “You’re not gonna kill me for real, are ya?” he pleaded.

  “Don’t tempt us.” Clive glowered.

  “Just lie down under that car,” Benjamin said.

  “Oh God, don’t drive over me!”

  “It’s a fucking parked car, arsehole!” Ken growled. “It’s not even ours and the door’s locked!”

  “Now get down and act dead before we go hands-on with you!” Clive added.

  Boyd complied. We’d picked the car completely at random on that quiet street not far from Boyd’s office near Bethnal Green. He positioned himself as Benjamin directed and lay under the front fender of the Vauxhall hatchback, wedging his chest by the wheels so it looked like he was crushed under the car. Benjamin made sure to have his head and face in the shot, and framed it close enough so it didn’t show that the car was parked.

  “Could you half-open your eyes, mate?” he asked.

  “What for?” Boyd sputtered.

  “So it looks more horrific.”

  Boyd shuddered and did as requested.

  They bought him a whiskey down the pub afterwards as a reward.

  They texted the photos of Sacha and Irina from the burner smartphone to the phone Ken and Clive had given the Harkingdales. Then they waited a day and texted the photo of Boyd under the car.

  The family authorized the rest of Ken and Clive’s fees within minutes after they received the photos.

  Bagalamukhi glowed even more golden as this went on. She was one of the ten forms of the goddesses of wisdom, after all. She cooed over Benjamin as her newest child even as he worked away at his desk on his 3-D printer.