A Fitting Revenge

by CA Sole

  I told Juliet that there were going to be fireworks when Mandy found out about the money going missing. She would tell Sandra, and Sandra still had influence over us, because we could not predict her next move.

  ‘When I get hold of Sandra, she’s going to regret being born.’ I had never heard such a harsh tone from her before. It was surprising and foreign to the character I knew her to be, but Juliet had never made a false promise in her life.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  On Wednesday morning, Juliet slept until ten. It was most unlike her, but it wasn’t surprising. I took advantage of the silence and privacy to research for my plan. I made a fresh pot of coffee and a few moments later there was a call from the little bedroom, ‘I smell coffee!’ Was it my imagination, or was there some cheeriness in her voice?

  She came downstairs, her hair tousled and her face still bruised, but the colour was less intense and the swelling had reduced a little. Her left eye was clear, though the right was still bloodshot. She looked a mess, but a loveable one to me. I gave way to an internal sigh.

  She left as soon as she was ready. I carried her bag out to the car and stood there while she arranged all the female stuff in the front for her long drive. ‘I’ll come back to help if there’s anything I can do, and I’ll come back when Giles improves. And I promise I’ll keep in touch.’

  I said nothing, but my sadness must have been obvious. Before she closed the door, she put a hand on my arm briefly. ‘I’ll keep in touch, I promise.’

  I went into Reading after she’d gone. I parked the car in a side street near the hospital then walked casually down to the A4 and headed east. It was a depressed area with many shops closed with boarded fronts and vacant terraced houses, some with rubbish and discarded furniture out the front. Yet, from previous experience of driving along that road, I knew that a black Range Rover or large Mercedes or BMW with tinted windows might emerge from the streets to the north. It didn’t take much to imagine why such expensive vehicles would be in a run down area like that, and it gave me a reason to be there.

  I walked slowly, looking down every side street for ... for what? I didn’t know really, but something that indicated drug use had to appear at some stage: addicts with vacant eyes stumbling about or lying in the alley, possibly? This was new territory for me, and I just hoped something would appear magically to give me what I wanted. After about twenty minutes of strolling, including down some likely alleys, I heard a lot of hysterical laughter. Four teenagers were sitting on the lower steps of a house, giggling stupidly. The faded red door above them should have been repainted five years earlier, and the torn lace curtains in the adjacent window were yellowed with age. A crushed beer can lay below the kerb along with sweet papers and a plastic punnet. Someone had dropped an ice cream on the pavement, its now-dry stain had run down to the road. I watched the youths for a moment, their laughter so infectious I almost felt like joining in.

  It was obvious what they were doing. Empty by then, little shiny canisters of nitrous oxide had rolled onto the pavement and several deflated yellow balloons lent a rather sad touch of colour to the steps. One boy, his jeans torn at the knee and with a grey hoodie pulled up over his head, was trying to put a full balloon to his mouth, but he kept missing, which had the others in stitches. Every time he missed there was a farting sound as he let gas out, and each short fart had the whole lot of them rolling about in fits of giggles.

  ‘Hey guys,’ I called, ‘that’s happy fun.’

  Hoodie looked up at me, pointed with a limp finger and burst out laughing again. This was going to take some patience. One of the others, who had a red beanie on his head seemed a bit more compos mentis, ‘Wha?’

  ‘I want some of that stuff, where did you get it?’

  He waved vaguely in the direction of the main road, but he was facing away and his arm had to go back over his shoulder to do it, so he fell over. Hoodie thought that was so funny he let go of his balloon which shot up into the air with another long deep fart, and they all went completely helpless. Red Beanie was the first to recover, ‘Wha’ yer doin’ ‘ere?’

  ‘I want to buy your stuff off you. Ten quid.’ I didn’t fancy going into a shop, they might remember me. Buying off these kids would be an easy way out; less traceable, but expensive.

  ‘Twenny.’ Red Beanie would go far in life, there were no flies on him.

  I picked up their satchel and saw at least ten gas bombs and some balloons. There were also two crackers for controlling the gas outflow from the canister and into the balloon. One of them was the cheap common screw type, but the other was a harmless whipped cream dispenser. This had a trigger control for gas flow, which was ideal for my purpose. ‘I’ll take all of this.’

  ‘Firty, then. We left with nuffin’ if you take that.’

  ‘Thirty it is.’ I wanted to get out of there and stuffed six bombs and some balloons into my jacket pockets. ‘You keep the satchel, a cracker, four bombs and four balloons. All right?’

  ‘Bargin’. The others had put on serious faces as they realised what was going on. Hoodie said, ‘He’s taking our stuff!’

  ‘Shuddup! We got a good deal,’ Red Beanie told him.

  I left them arguing and giggling on the steps and headed back to my car, pleased with my very costly deal; I had ventured into unknown and rather scary territory and emerged better informed and unscathed. However, I still needed to buy another cream dispenser, which I found in a kitchen shop before heading home.

  As predicted, the police found nothing in Sandra’s flat nor in Giles' house. It was now up to me, and I felt quite nervous over what I planned to do, which was to trick Sandra into telling me where the money was hidden. Was ‘trick’ the right word? Persuade, even force might be a better description.

  It was well after midnight. The rain was swept around by a turbulent wind. Streaking drops flickered brightly in the orange street lights, sweeping first in one direction then another. The tarmac glistened and shed the deluge to the kerb. I parked a few hundred yards away from Sandra’s flat and walked to the back of the building, coming out in the side alley from where the bathroom windows were visible. Several of them were open, Sandra’s included. The waste pipes were that heavy cast iron type, screwed into the wall with solid cast brackets.

  I was praying that no one would come around the corner, but then, hopefully, anyone that did was going to be drunk. They would not recognise me, of course, dressed in black leather gloves and a plain black wet suit with a hood. My mouth and nose were covered with a dark strip of material tucked into the hood on either side. I padded along silently in the rubber boots but, even drunk, they would surely remember such an odd outfit. A dark brown climber’s haul bag that held the kit I would need was tied to a length of line which was fastened to my belt. The outfit was completely out of place and as foolish as a gorilla suit at a funeral. I was desperate not to be recognised and not to leave any DNA in Sandra’s flat; no hair, no fingerprints, nothing. To encase my body in neoprene seemed a good way to achieve that.

  Sandra kept her Porsche in the basement parking. I made sure it was there then peered cautiously round the front of the building. A security camera covered the main entrance whose light shone out as far as the road. I kept out of its field of view and had just turned away to go back into the alley when I heard the front door open and squeak as it closed.

  Rain swirling in a sparkling eddy around him, Detective Sergeant Vale pulled up his collar against the wind, turned right and walked away down the street. Well, well, well! That was a surprise. Vale conducting an interview with a beautiful and sexually supercharged woman at one in the morning? So this was how Sandra knew Juliet’s whereabouts, this was how Wiggins had known that I was not at home but at the police station when he abducted her. This was how Sandra had known about my contact with the police after the kidnap, about other things such as when the police were going search her flat that kept her a step ahead of the investigation all the time. He must have been infatuated, and
she had probably offered him a great deal of money in addition to the sex marathons. He had seriously jeopardised his superior’s investigation and endangered Juliet’s life. This one man with his greed, corruptness and partiality was complicit in everything that had happened to the woman I loved. Although furious, I had to smile, because an idea for influencing both their futures suddenly came to me.

  A familiar hollow roar from a powerful engine echoed in the basement parking. The sound made me turn back to see the Cayman growl out of the building, pause at the road for a second then accelerate away to the left. Where was Sandra going at this time of night? Did she sleep at Giles' house sometimes? Was she going to retrieve the money from somewhere as the police had not found it in the flat? Now was the time to do that, after the search had proved fruitless.

  There was no point in speculating. My plan to have Sandra tell me where the money was had now fallen through, and I would have to try again the following night. I thought of going in anyway to have a look around, maybe find something the police had missed, but the risk was too high and the reward probably nothing. I was a little wiser though, because I now knew that Vale was involved.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The next day I took stock, which is to say I moped around the house doing very little of consequence. It was Thursday and I could not try to get into Sandra’s flat again until late that night. I had no clue as to where the money was, so there was no point in searching somewhere just for the sake of it. I could only deal with Sandra after dark when I was less likely to be seen and she was well under the weather. Given how much she drank, that would happen most nights. Additionally, I had to make sure that Vale was not around.

  Once again, late that night, I dressed in my wet suit, checked the kit in my haul bag and threw the leather gloves into it for the moment. In the mirror, all I could see were my eyes. I put on a coat to cover the neoprene suit and found a hat that perched on top of the hood. I intended parking my car well away from the flat and would have to walk several blocks in public view, so I had to disguise my fish-out-of-water appearance.

  For a moment I wondered how, if I ever had the chance, I would explain to Juliet what the real reasons were for doing this. She would never agree to it, even though she had been at the receiving end of Sandra’s vicious nature. ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right,’ she would quote, but I still held to what I’d told Felipe weeks ago in Chile - an eye for an eye, no more, no less. However, the way things had gone between us up to that point it wasn’t likely that I ever would have to tell her.

  Felipe; my young pilot friend who was far away in Santiago or maybe down south in the camp. The way he had ridden the world of a paedophile and salvaged some honour for his sister and his family had impressed me. It had been clever and almost undetectable as long as nothing had gone wrong during the event; and it hadn’t.

  We had sat together that night slowly downing a beer after a day’s training. The other pilots had gone to bed in preparation for an early start the following morning, but we were off the next day and could afford to stay up late. The Porta-Kamp hut which was used as a crew room was insulated and virtually soundproof, and we were not likely to be disturbed. Even so, Felipe spoke softly and kept looking at the door.

  He was finding it difficult to talk about it. The details came slowly, in bits, but it was clear how he had done what he felt he was honour bound to do. He called the paedophile Carlos, but told me it wasn’t his real name. Carlos’ death had to look like suicide, so Felipe ran through many ways to achieve that before settling on the easiest means, the one that suited him. Carlos could be thrown off a bridge, but there was always a possibility of Felipe being seen. Carlos lived in a single storey house, so throwing him off his own roof top might not kill him. He considered an overdose of sleeping pills combined with an excess of alcohol, or for Carlos to hang himself. Both of these could be done out of the public view, in the man’s home, but would involve some element of violence or a struggle, which had to be avoided. Then he thought the easiest way to do it was to gas Carlos; have him sit in his car with a hosepipe from the exhaust stuffed through the window and he would die of carbon monoxide poisoning. The difficulty of how to get Carlos to sit in the car without a struggle which would leave tell tale signs of bruising remained, however. He would have to be unconscious before he was put in the car, and it was the way that Felipe had planned and carried this out that sowed the seeds for my idea.

  First Felipe had to draft a letter from Carlos that showed remorse for what he’d done and that he could no longer live with the guilt. No names of the victims should be written down, Felipe decided, the note must remain vague enough to avoid identification. He completed this draft on a sheet of paper before he even went to the house, because it was carefully worded and he wanted to make sure he didn’t make a mistake when he retyped it in the heat of the event. Because Carlos was supposedly a family friend, Felipe would be able to use the man’s computer and printer to type the suicide note while he was there.

  Felipe bought a new car every year because he enjoyed sampling different models and he had the money to do so. A new car was no good for his purpose, but he had a friend called Enrique who had WW2 Jeep which he used as a girl trap. It was considered really sexy, and Enrique could be seen on summer weekends cruising the corniche in Valparaiso with two or three girls, showing off and waving at the crowds.

  Claiming he needed to impress a new find and managing to sidestep Enrique’s probing questions, Felipe borrowed the Jeep. Over the course of a week, he assembled all the tools and equipment he needed: an empty gas bottle, an electric tyre pump, a length of garden hose, duct tape, some rags and a face mask with suitable tubing. He modified the tyre pump so that the air intake would accept the garden hose and he changed the outlet tube so that it fitted the head of the gas bottle. With the hose wedged into the Jeep’s exhaust he opened the valve of the gas cylinder and switched on the pump. Slowly the needle on the pressure gauge began to rise until the pump slowed down and could not force any more of the noxious gas into the bottle. The pressure gauge read 18bar, close to the pump’s maximum output. Felipe closed the cylinder valve, exchanged the hosepipe for the face mask and, nervously, put it on. ‘I was very scared, Alastair. What if I became unconscious when I tried it out?’

  The gas gave a low, rather hollow, hiss as it entered the mask. Felipe lost courage and ripped the deadly contraption off his face. Instead, he waited to see how long the cylinder would last, because the little tyre pump could not pressurise the bottle to anything approaching its normal level. It took about five minutes at the low rate of flow until the gas stopped. He summoned the courage and repeated the exercise, but this time held the mask over his mouth and nose and opened the valve. Apart from the familiar smell which made him want to choke, he felt nothing. Then he became unaware of how much time was passing and started to feel drowsy. Immediately, before he lost control, he dropped the mask and gulped in clean air. The gas was still hissing gently. Good, it meant that there was enough in the weakly pressurised cylinder to render Carlos unconscious.

  On the night, Felipe put all his equipment into a holdall, grabbed a bottle of Central Valley merlot and went round to Carlos’ home. He was a rich man, Carlos, and owned a rambling single storey house with an attached garage, a door from which led into the kitchen. Fitting the climate, there was a veranda that stretched the length of the house from the kitchen, past the living room, the bar and on past three bedrooms to the end. Every room had access to the outside through its own door, and guests could wander out onto the veranda and join others at the barbecue on the adjoining patio, or go further down the path across the extensive lawn to the swimming pool, where there was another bar and shade. Carlos lived alone but entertained frequently, and often did not know whom he had invited. There was always a surplus of young women, Felipe told me. This night, however, he had asked to see Carlos alone.

  Felipe took a long time to get around to telling me about the actual event. It was a
s if he could not bear to remind himself of what he’d done, let alone confess to it. He paced up and down the cabin in silence, picked up the bar book with its pencil on a string, opened it, closed it without reading anything and put it back. Then he opened the door and had a quick look around outside before continuing his story.

  Carlos and Felipe had a good dinner and drank a lot of vodka and a lot of wine, although Felipe managed to keep his intake down without Carlos noticing. When the man started slurring and kept nodding off, Felipe said he was going to the bathroom, but instead took his kit out of the holdall, put on some gloves and went behind Carlos’ chair. Carefully, he turned the tap and listened for the hiss of gas. He applied the mask very gently to Carlos’ face, holding it just off his cheeks to avoid him fighting it. Carlos coughed at the smell but was too drunk to object to the exhaust fumes and didn’t push the mask away. Felipe was sweating and trembling, he admitted, but he continued to hold the mask with an increasingly firmer grip as if his effort would accelerate the death. Eventually, after a what seemed an eternity but was probably just a minute or two, Carlos slumped to his left and Felipe had to lean right over the back of the chair to keep his hold. He pulled the mask away and heard the flow getting weaker, so he closed the valve, leaving some gas in reserve.

  He opened Carlos’ computer, took the suicide note he had drafted from his pocket and typed it out. He saved it to the desktop so that it would be easy to see, then switched on the printer. There was a whole page of confessions of abuse of unidentified young girls. In them, ‘Carlos’ admitted his carnal desires had ruined the lives of these vulnerable creatures. He understood their pain and their fears and loss of ability to have normal relationships. He expressed unlimited remorse and felt the only way to atone for his deviations was to take his own life. Felipe had written the letter in the long winded way that Carlos would talk, had gone over it time and again, convincing himself that it looked genuine.