by Glenn Cooper
“Hurry!” Henry commanded, beginning to pace in anticipation. “You know, John, even after a century I still find this Morse code unfathomable. When I first heard of it I thought it was a Moors Code and I asked what possible use would King Selim have for such an instrument.”
Finally, Cromwell announced that he had it and read out a message that the Spanish fleet had been spotted approaching the Isle of Wight.
Henry boomed, “Then we must make ready. Our spies have told us that they plan to anchor off Southend and send their troops to London on barges. How many more cannon can you have for me tomorrow, forger William?”
William’s smile wiped clean away.
“Perhaps one more, Your Majesty.”
“At dawn tomorrow, I want three of these singing cannon on barges with plenty of shot. John, you will place two on the shore and one on my flagship and you will help me defeat the Iberians once and for all.”
“And then you’ll give me a ship?”
“Then you will have whatever you desire!”
12
Woodbourne had never really thought about why it took him less time to strangle a man than a woman.
It was night. Earlier he had tied the Frasers to their beds, putting Adele in the master bedroom and Des in the guest room, each with a tea towel stuffed into the mouth. He went downstairs to the lounge where he fell asleep with the TV on. When he awoke in the middle of the night he drank the last beer in the house, went to the master bedroom with two of his kitchen knives and turned on the light.
Des was awake, straining against his ropes. Woodbourne sat on the bed and watched the man, the way a twisted boy might watch a bug he had spiked with a nail. Des seemed to sense what was coming because he began bucking and trying hard to expel the gag. Woodbourne waited until he had tired himself out then slowly reached for his neck. He started gently, almost languidly, as if he wasn’t wholly committed to the enterprise and Des looked puzzled at first about his intention, but as his grip intensified and the airflow became compromised, Des’s eyes became wild and he started bucking again. Woodbourne, as if irritated by the thrashing, squeezed much harder and his hands began to shake from the exertion. Finally, Des stopped struggling and Woodbourne paused to uncramp his hands before clamping down again for another half minute for good measure. Then he slit his throat, picked up the knives and moved to the guest room.
The light from the hall showed Adele’s terrified face well enough that he left the lights off.
“It’s your turn.”
She seemed resigned to her fate and lay there quietly, only shaking. As he pressed down on her larynx ever so gently with his thumbs, it dawned on him why women lasted longer. He didn’t squeeze as hard because he savored it more. So he played with her the way a cat plays with a mouse before the final snap of its jaws, tightening and relaxing, tightening and relaxing. And when he had milked the experience for all it was worth, he let go, allowing her face to return from purple to pink, then plunged the larger knife into her heart and the paring knife into her throat.
Downstairs, he washed the blood off the knives, changed into a clean set of Des’s clothes and shoes, and checked the dark street through parted curtains. It was time to move. He didn’t know where he was going but someone would find him if he stayed in this house much longer. Outside, he climbed into Des’s car and drove off into the still night.
Quint was kept waiting in Secretary Smithwick’s ante-room at Whitehall like a naughty boy summoned to the headmaster’s office. Finally, two men, the minister of state for energy and the department’s permanent secretary, left her room and eyed Quint the way one might treat a bloated fish washed up on shore. Smithwick appeared at the door, invited him in, and dispensed with pleasantries.
“Give me a status report,” she said curtly, settling in behind her desk. “I need to brief the PM in an hour.”
Quint had wondered why he’d been asked to come to London in person and concluded that it was merely a show of dominance. A phone call would have sufficed.
“We are two days away from our first MAAC restart since sending Camp across,” he said. “Operationally, the collider is functioning properly so I don’t anticipate any mechanical problems. Of course, we have no idea whatsoever whether Camp is alive and well or whether he’s had any success in locating Dr. Loughty.”
“Yes, well, but what of the matters under our control? What of the search for Woodbourne? What does your Mr. Jones say?”
“There’s been no progress. The trail seems to have gone cold.”
“And if, in two days time, you haven’t found him, what then?”
“We’ll put the young man, Duck, on the mark and see what happens.”
“That doesn’t sound comforting or even vaguely scientific, Dr. Quint: you’ll see what happens.”
“I don’t know what else to say. We’re in uncharted territory. Our assessment, based on what we know is that there are several possible scenarios. If Camp and Loughty are both on their corresponding marks, then without Woodbourne, perhaps only one of them is exchanged for Duck. If neither of them is there, then maybe Duck goes back or maybe he stays here. If some other resident of the parallel space happens to be on the mark, maybe he switches with Duck. There are too many unknowns.”
While he spoke he was aware that she kept tilting her head up and down as if she was deliberately trying to blur his image through her bifocals.
“You know,” she said, “my predecessor was dead against having you in this position and I agreed with him. We should have had a British head on British soil.”
“Eighty-five percent of the funding has come from Washington.”
“Nevertheless. My reservations have come home to roost. Your actions have been deplorable and injurious. You behaved like a cowboy. A British chief would never have taken the decision to exceed the energy specifications on his own. I want your resignation.”
“I think that would be unwise, Madam Secretary, particularly at this critical time.”
“I have little interest in your opinion. What I want from you today is your undated letter of resignation. I will place it in my desk and use it at a time of my choosing, perhaps as early as two days from now, when the experiment has been repeated.”
Quint’s face flushed with anger.
“Whether or not you’re interested in my opinion I’m going to give it to you. What happened was completely unanticipated and if it hadn’t happened now, it would have in two years when Hercules II ran. And guess what? There’s powerful preliminary data to suggest we’ve found the graviton, which was the first major program goal of MAAC. So I’d say I saved the project a hundred million dollars getting to an answer faster.”
Her voice rising, she replied, “That’s simply not the way I see it, not the way Leroy Bitterman sees it and most importantly, not the way the prime minister sees it!”
Quint folded a hand pensively under his chin. “The last thing you need is a loose cannon rolling around your decks. So far there’s been a tight lid on what happened in Dartford. What do you think the public’s reaction would be if it got out that your supercollider, which has been the source of so much Sturm und Drang in the tabloids, for creating anomalies like mini-black holes that will suck up the Earth? What would happen if people found out that we’d opened up a channel straight to a hellish other world? How do you think the prime minister would enjoy that press conference?”
“Are you threatening me?” she asked angrily.
He parried her fury with a wry smile. “I’m only telling you that it might make an abundance of sense to keep me on the payroll. And I’m also telling you, with all due respect, that you ought to be scrapping plans for the merger with the Swiss. With the discovery of the graviton, I think we’ve demonstrated that scientifically, MAAC can stand on its own and that I can remain at its helm.”
Duck was having a good day.
After a full cooked breakfast of fried eggs, fried bread, grilled tomatoes and mushrooms, and three rashers of baco
n he had brief interviews with a psychologist, a linguist, and an historian. Then, when he was returned to his room he was treated to a DVD of Toy Story that he watched with rapt attention, hardly moving a muscle for ninety minutes. When he was done he asked his MI5 minder whether the characters in the video were real. Delia was a middle-aged analyst the psychologist had recommended for the assignment, the idea being to set him at ease with a maternal presence.
“Maternal, am I?” she had asked after asserting she hadn’t a maternal bone in her body. But with her hair pulled back in a sensible bun, her cardigan sweaters, her flat-soled shoes, and her ample hips, she was indeed something of an archetypal mother figure.
Delia patiently explained that the characters were animations but Duck refused to believe it. She let the matter lie. Lunch was a large pepperoni pizza that he consumed with a liter of Pepsi. Smiling, he flopped on his duvet for a post-prandial nap but was interrupted by Trevor’s arrival.
“How’re you doing, mate?”
“What’s that belly timber called again?” Duck asked, pointing to the greasy box.
“Pizza. Like it, did you?”
“I like pizza. Can I ’ave it for me next victuals too?”
“I don’t see why not. No shortage of pizza round here.” He had Duck’s expanding interview file and leafed through it in front of the yawning lad. “So, listen, I can see you’re sleepy and all but I want to ask you a few more questions about Brandon Woodbourne.”
“I told you, didn’t I? ’E’s a right captain-’ackun.”
“Don’t know that term.”
“You know, a stall-whimper.”
“You mean a bully? A bastard? A killer?”
“Yeah, all that, excepting of course a killer, ’cause you can’t kill no one in ’ell, can you?”
“But you can hurt people, right?” Trevor asked.
Duck nodded. “Believe you me.”
“Have you seen him hurt people?”
“No, but I ’eard tell. ’E likes ’is knives, I’ ear. And ’es a strangling sort. When ’e’s put you away, ’e’s apt to filch what you’ve got.”
“And you’ve never seen him do these things because he doesn’t live in your village?”
“Right you are. ’E’s got no fixed place. ’E wanders about, like I said. But not with others. ’Es a lone wolf, ’e is.”
“From what you’ve heard, does he like to attack men or women?”
“Not many women in Down.”
“Did you ever have a conversation with him?”
Duck fluffed his pillow as he thought in preparation for his nap. “Yeah, maybe one time, if I do recall.”
“What was it about?”
“’E was passing by our cottage one day while me brother and me was killing a chicken in the road. ’E said ’e wanted some cause ’e was ‘ungry. Well, I rushed inside and told ’im through the shutters to sod off and leave us be but Dirk ’acked it in two and tossed ’alf to ’im, ’cause to be ’onest, ’e was scared ’e’d come after us. So ’e swears at me and tells me ’e’ll get me one day, but says to Dirk that the last time someone was good to ’im was when ’e was alive and a woman with yellow hair was so kind to ’im ’e didn’t kill ’er. Imagine that? ’E would ’ave crashed ’er without two thoughts if she was a scab.”
Delia knocked then entered and Duck cheerfully let Trevor know that she was a kind woman too.
She took the compliment with a thin smile and whispered to Trevor, “I just took a call for you from the Kent Police. They want you at an address in Crayford.”
“What’s there?”
“Bodies. They think Woodbourne was there.”
When Des and Adele’s son returned from his business trip he stopped by his parents’ house because he hadn’t heard from them since their return from Australia. He used his key and fainted dead away at the carnage. When he recovered he rang the police who sealed the place off and contacted Trevor.
Ben Wellington arrived soon after Trevor, accompanied by an MI5 forensics team who dusted for prints and did a laptop field identification. The murdered journalist’s car was tucked away in the garage. It came as little surprise that multiple prints matched Woodbourne. Trevor and Ben donned booties and went to the bedrooms for a look. Both husband and wife had signs of manual strangulation and deep knife wounds.
“Chokes them first, then finishes them,” Trevor said. “Seems to like it both ways.”
Ben looked a bit wobbly. His line of work was managerial, bloodless. “Just like the journalist.”
“He’s predictable,” Trevor said.
Ben turned away from Adele’s bound and bloody body and made for the door. “According to their son, the family car’s gone missing. We’ve got the details and the police are putting them out.”
Trevor said, “He’s going to keep to this pattern. He’ll find an empty place, break in and hole up. If these people hadn’t come back from their hols then he’d probably have only stayed till the food ran out.”
They headed down the stairs.
“He could be anywhere,” Ben said.
“I think we ought to put the car description and his picture out there to enlist the help of the public.”
“I and my superiors are hesitant to go public with his photo.”
“We’re always going to be a step behind him if we don’t.”
“I don’t have to tell you how sensitive this is.”
“Christ, Ben, we don’t have to tell people he’s dead, do we? And we don’t have to release his name. No one’s going to be able to figure out the particulars.”
Ben peeled off his booties and went outside, gulping at the fresh air. “All right, let me run it up the flag pole again.”
Woodbourne had arrived in London near four a.m. when the city was as still and quiet as it ever got. Driving in the darkness from the east on lonely roads he could only catch glimpses at how much the it had changed from his time, and he never made it far enough west to see the skyscrapers of the City or new landmarks like the London Eye. In truth, Hackney was one of the boroughs that hadn’t gentrified quite as much as others and driving around Shoreditch had a distinct air of familiarity. He was born and had died in Kent and had spent most of his life in and around Dartford, but his happiest time was a one-year stretch in his late thirties spent in a bed-sit in Shoreditch.
He’d already killed seven women and three men in Kent by the time he answered an ad for the Shoreditch rental, and there would be five more victims before he was caught, tried, and hanged. Moving to London was his way of laying low for a spell, a good distance from the scenes of his crimes but close enough to his elderly mother in Crayford if she fell ill. The cold-water flat he had rented was on an alley of a street called Glebe Road and there, one door down, he had met Sarah.
He drove down Kingsland Road past shuttered stores and cafes and the scraggly trees like exclamation points, punctuating the concrete sidewalks. He was confused at the lack of recognizable landmarks but turning onto the narrowness of Glebe Road seemed as natural as breathing. The street was twisty and claustrophobic with low, grotty apartments and commercial studios on one side and an ugly brick railway wall on the other. He had always liked that squeezed-in feeling then and he liked it now; it always seemed a good place to hide away. The building that had been his was three stories of dirty tan bricks with chicken wire and bars on the street-level windows.
He drove around looking for a place to ditch the car and found an industrial site on Clarissa Street where he left the keys in the ignition, hoping it would be stolen. Then he took his tote bag with some of Des’s clothes and his knives and walked the mile and a half back to Glebe Road where he lurked in the shadows waiting for an opportunity to knock. He didn’t have a long time to make a move, maybe two more hours until dawn broke. He needed a new place to hide. He wanted a woman. He’d kill for a smoke. The latter two desires hadn’t been accommodated since arriving. He could have had Adele, he supposed, but in his day he’d only taken young,
attractive women and he couldn’t bring himself to shag a fat old lady. He knew plenty of blokes who were indiscriminate, especially blokes in Hell who’d have a hag if they couldn’t find a younger woman and would take a weaker man if they couldn’t find a hag. But he wasn’t one of them. Better to wank off. The woman he carjacked was plenty nice but he didn’t have the time for her. And none of the people he’d encountered had cigarettes. It wasn’t as if he still had nicotine cravings after all these years, but his fond remembrance of the toasty smell and taste was driving him mad.
He waited an hour. It began to rain. He was just about to try to pry open the door of his old building with one of his knives when he heard footsteps. He saw a woman with an umbrella walking toward him and he pressed himself into a dark doorway. She passed by, seemingly unaware of him and reached into her handbag for her keys.
The woman put a key in the lock of the entrance to his old building and he quickly came up behind her.
“Don’t say anything, don’t scream or nothing. I’ve got a gun.”
The umbrella slipped from her hand and it was then he saw she was young and blonde.
“Please, don’t hurt me mister.” It was a pleading tone, an Eastern European accent.
“I’m coming in, right behind you. I won’t hurt you if you behave.”
“Please.”
She was crying softly but compliant. He stooped for the umbrella, closed it and followed her in.
“Which one’s yours?”
“Top floor.”
“All right, let’s go.”
“What do you want?”
“Quiet.”
The stairway looked the same, like it hadn’t been painted since the war. In life, he’d never seen the second-floor flat but he’d heard enough footsteps on his ceiling. She trembled as she unlocked her door and kept shaking when she stood in the middle of her tiny sitting room/kitchen. He closed the door behind him, latched it and tossed his bag and her brolly on a chair. Then he shoved the gun in his pants pocket.