His warrant card took him without query through the security check points, enabling him to by-pass the metal detectors that would have noisily revealed the presence of a weapon. There was no sign of her in the departure lounge. He prayed he was not too late. If she had already boarded the aircraft, his cause was lost.
He was only just in time, finding her almost at the front of the queue trickling through the boarding gate. A young, dark-haired woman, in airline uniform, stood collecting the boarding cards.
“Julie!”
The loud, bellowing cry of her name grabbed the attention of everyone in the queue. Julie's face froze with horror as she turned to look into the barrel of the revolver. Proffitt stood no more than ten yards away from her, legs slightly astride, the gun held out in front of him at eye level in both hands. There was a sudden burst of activity in the immediate vicinity as the queue scattered, people ducking and scurrying out of the line of fire, but Julie stood rooted by fear to the spot. Her long, piercing scream “Noooo!” was finally drowned out by the gunfire. The hands raised instinctively in front of her face were an impossible defence against the bullets that flew from the gun. Seeing the terror in her eyes, Proffitt's only feeling was that he had, at last, wrung an emotion from her.
Someone began to weep, someone quietly uttered what seemed to be a prayer, but most watched in stunned silence the tall man with the gun and the beautiful woman, the look of fear frozen rigidly on her face, lying on the floor, strangely in something resembling the foetal position, as her life's blood seeped out of the wounds in her throat and chest. First to move was the young woman in uniform, who had been standing closest to her. Initially screaming at the sound of the gunfire and the splattering of blood across her uniform and the side of her face as the bullets found their target, she quickly gathered her senses, summoning up the courage to kneel beside Julie, searching for signs of a pulse. Proffitt knew it was a hopeless gesture. A trained marksman, who practised every week without fail, his accuracy at that range was infallible.
He had no need to turn to know the meaning of the sound of running footsteps coming up behind him. Many times as a young, uniformed constable he had been assigned to airport duty at Heathrow. They were days of hope, high ideals and burning ambition, standing on the threshold of a career that now, nearly twenty years on, lay in ruins.
Prison life would be hard. It always was for an ex-policeman. He still had the gun in his hand. Put that in his mouth, a squeeze of the trigger, and it would all be over. He looked at the crumpled body on the floor. Even bloodied and in death she still looked so beautiful. How was that possible? To take his life would mean, in the final reckoning, she had won. That couldn't be allowed. He would take responsibility for his actions. In prison he would enjoy a degree of isolation from the public humiliation about to descend on his family. He had no doubt the threat to distribute the tapes would be carried out. His son and daughter were grown up, old enough and hopefully mature enough to cope with what they saw, however difficult it may be to understand why. The effect on his wife would be devastating, made worse by the prolonged and sensational media coverage it was certain to attract. He hoped she and his children would stand by him. God knows, he needed them now. Yet he had to admit it looked a forlorn hope and who could blame them?
“Armed police – put down your weapon.”
Proffitt bent down slowly to place the weapon on the floor and kick it away from him.
“I'm a police officer. I know the drill.”
He knelt down on the floor and then forward to lying face down, drawing his hands behind his back. Handcuffs were clamped tightly around his wrists, before he was hauled roughly to his feet.
“Please contact Commander Hawkes at Scotland Yard,” instructed Proffitt firmly, staring into the barrels of the Heckler and Koch weaponry pointing menacingly at his head. “I wish to make a statement.”
About the Author
I was born and raised in Birmingham, England, where I was educated at King Edward's Grammar School, Aston. I am married, with two grown-up daughters. A keen photographer, having had photographs published, I enjoy also cinema and theatre. A great follower of football or soccer as some call it, I am a long-time supporter of Birmingham-based professional club, Aston Villa, still regularly attending matches at their Villa Park home ground. Railways and especially the old steam locomotives are also a great interest, fortunately living in a country where this is a popular interest, so boasting a large number of heritage railways, one of the main ones not too far from where I live.
Although having spent most of my working life in financial environments, words, not figures, have always been my first love. I did spend some years as a freelance journalist, when I was local correspondent for a number of national trade magazines and worked some newspaper assignments. I have also worked in Press and Public Relations with a Birmingham-based advertising and public relations agency. My Penguin Books prize winning short story 'The Prisoner' was a prize winner in a competition organised jointly by Penguin Books and a local commercial radio station. I was interviewed on air and the story was broadcast, read by a leading actor from a popular daily national radio serial. Set in the early period of World War Two, the story revolved around a member of the Hitler Youth charged with returning an escaped prisoner from the occupied Channel Islands to the European mainland. It was also subsequently accepted for publication in 1992 in a short story book compilation 'Shorts from the Midlands.' More recently I made this story available free to read on the ‘Authors Den’ website, attracting more than 1,700 reads and favourable comments. Also, on this site is ‘The Reluctant Father Christmas,’ a Christmas short story I placed free to read two years ago, which has now clocked up more than 7,000 reads. Other short stories have won prizes in minor competitions over the years and I have a number of short stories yet unpublished.
My crime thriller novel 'The Hit-and-Run Man,' published in 1991, may have been instrumental in stopping the U.K. cinema release of a Johnny Depp movie. The book hit the U.K. headlines in 1996, when, after reading Press previews of 'Nick of Time,' I raised concerns about notable similarities between the plotlines of the movie and the book. Although not published in America, I was able to place the book as having been presented there, including a link with an agency claiming Hollywood connections. Not surprisingly, United International Pictures denied any knowledge of the book, but, despite favourable preview reviews, the movie was pulled from its U.K. cinema release and sent straight to video. In 2008 'The Hit-and-Run Man,' was a featured novel in the Four Counties Noir Festival - "A Festival of Crime Fiction from the Dark Heart of England" - at the Light House Media Centre, Wolverhampton, England and was selected for a reading.
The introduction of an IRA element into the novel is probably not a surprise as most of my life has been lived under a terrorist threat of some description and on two occasions has struck close to home. Although living a few miles outside Birmingham city centre I heard in the distance the explosions when in November 1974 IRA bombs exploded in two city centre public houses, killing 21 and injuring 182.
The second occasion was a more direct impact as I could have lost a close family member. In an incredible and almost fatal case of wrong time, wrong place, my brother, some three hundred miles from his home, was driving through Lockerbie when the bomb-shattered plane hit the ground. In the dark, he was aware of nothing until a huge explosion erupted ahead of him. His first instinct was that a petrol tanker had exploded and, indeed, it was probably escaping fuel that sent a fireball racing down the road towards the van he was driving. Rescue workers who found him wandering around dazed and in a severe state of shock were unsure who he was and even wondered at first if he was a plane survivor. Fortunately he must have reacted fast enough to avoid serious physical injury, though sustaining some burns to his face and scalp.
As an indie author I published a revised edition of the 'Hit-and-Run Man,' with additional material, as an e-book from Amazon Kindle in 2013.
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