The Long Kill

by Reginald Hill

  ‘It’s crazy!’ said Jaysmith. ‘What’s worse is that it’s personal. For Christ’s sake, Davey, what are you getting yourself into? You heard Jacob. You know this has nothing to do with his job, with your job. It’s unofficial! It’s private! You’ll be crazy to get involved!’

  The words suddenly felt prophetic as he realized there was something indisputably unbalanced about the way the man was looking at him. Nor was the overtight control of his voice as he replied reassuring.

  He said slowly, ‘You’re right, Mr Jaysmith. It is private. It is personal. You remember Adam?’

  Jaysmith knew what was coming now.

  ‘Yes,’ he said sadly. ‘I remember Adam.’

  ‘He was my friend,’ said Davey. ‘He was my very good friend. You mother-fucking bastard! We were married! Do you understand that? Married!’

  His voice had cracked into a harsh high scream and the gun was rammed deep into Jaysmith’s throat and he could see that the man needed only the flimsiest of excuses to pull the trigger.

  He kept perfectly still and perfectly quiet, refusing to meet the glaring, accusing eyes, hardly breathing even. Gradually Davey relaxed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jaysmith. ‘I didn’t … realize.’

  The gun jabbed at him but, thank God, more in emphasis now than threat.

  ‘You didn’t realize? What does that mean? That you knew we were screwing together, but didn’t realize that a pair of perverted puffs could actually love each other, and feel pain and loss and grief? Is that what you mean? And tell me this, Jaysmith, if you had realized, what fucking difference would it have made?’

  ‘No difference,’ said Jaysmith quietly. ‘I told him all I wanted was to come in with him and make contact with Jacob. But he had to try for me. It was his choice. You knew him, you were close to him. You must be able to tell if that’d be the way he’d have played it.’

  ‘Oh yes. That’d be the way,’ said Davey. ‘That was Adam. But don’t start thinking that makes a difference, Mr fucking Jaysmith. No difference! No difference whatso-fucking-ever! I loved him and you killed him and I don’t give a shit what’s in this for Jacob. I’d get down on my knees and I’d stick my head up his arse for the chance to kill you, you know that, Mr Jaysmith? Up to my bottom lip!’

  There were tears in the man’s eyes. It might have been touching if Jaysmith had been in the mood to be touched; it should have been frightening if Jaysmith had not moved far beyond the significance of fear.

  ‘So what happens now?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m going to lock you in the boot of this car,’ said Davey in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘That’s how Adam ended up, wasn’t it? Packed in the boot of his car. Not a nice big comfortable boot like yours, but folded and twisted and crushed, like a sack of garbage!’

  The matter-of-factness was going. Hastily Jaysmith said, ‘And then, what then?’

  ‘Don’t you listen, man? Like I said, drive you somewhere nice and high and lonely, and I put you back in the front seat, and I see you over the edge. Then I’ll scramble down and make sure you’re dead.’

  ‘Just like Adam should’ve done with Bryant,’ said Jaysmith.

  ‘No! He made it up as he went along. That was his trouble, Adam. He was always acting on impulse, playing it off the top of his skull. In bed, that was fine, Christ yes, that was bloody marvellous. But out on a job, you follow instructions to the letter. He never really grasped that, poor love. And it killed him.’

  ‘But you follow instructions? And I presume Jacob wants me alive when the car goes over?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Davey. ‘But don’t get any ideas, sunshine. He’s given me carte blanche to deal with you any which way I like, as long as the marks gell with a car smash. And if they don’t, like I say, I can always burn them off, can’t I? So out you get and walk slowly round to the boot.’

  Davey got out of the car and kept the automatic trained unwaveringly on Jaysmith as he followed suit.

  ‘You’ll need the keys,’ said Jaysmith, taking them from the ignition. ‘Catch.’

  He threw them a yard to the right of Davey. They skittered past him down the slope. The man’s eyes did not even flicker towards them as he retreated, perfectly balanced despite the steep and uneven track, to a point a couple of yards behind the car.

  ‘You pathetic old man,’ he said. ‘Come forward slowly and pick ‘em up.’

  Jaysmith obeyed, his own footwork much more unsure as he felt the full effect of the blows.

  ‘Now open the boot.’

  As Jaysmith inserted the key in the lock, he knew that his last chance was approaching fast. Davey would not want him in the boot, alive and literally kicking as they drove to the chosen accident site. And to knock him unconscious he would have to come close.

  But the bearded man was taking no chances.

  ‘Now climb in,’ he ordered from his safe shooting distance. ‘And lie down.’

  Jaysmith looked at the boot floor. Beneath that false panel was his rucksack, especially constructed to carry the stripped-down M21. Even if he remained conscious, was there any chance that he could get it out and assemble it and have it ready to fire when Davey reopened the lid?

  He doubted it. The boot was roomy, but it would need someone as double-jointed as Houdini to unfasten and raise the panel while lying on it.

  ‘Get in!’ yelled Davey angrily. ‘Or I swear I’ll finish this here and now!’

  ‘I’m getting! I’m getting!’

  He climbed in, moving awkwardly as an old, tired man might be expected to. It was a piece of play-acting that came easy.

  ‘Now crouch down, on all fours. Hold it there!’

  He rested still. He would have to lie flat before the lid could be closed, but now he guessed Davey’s intention.

  To render him quiescent for the next half-hour or so, he was just going to come close enough to bring the boot lid crashing down on his head.

  Davey was out of his line of vision. He strained his ears through the gusting wind to hear the sound of his approach. There would be a moment when he would raise both arms to bring the lid down with maximum force. Just a moment. A second too soon and the SIC-Sauer would still be aimed; a second too late and his head would be cracked open by the solid metal.

  A stone rattled close behind. He counted two seconds, daren’t wait another.

  He swung his right hand up over his left shoulder. In it he held the small antiseptic aerosol which he had palmed as he pretended to replace it in the first-aid box. Now the sleight of hand which had so delighted Jimmy was all that stood between him and the warping of the boy’s life forever. He only had a fractional moment’s touch to tell him he had the nozzle pointed the right way and there was no chance for a sighting aim.

  He squeezed the nozzle and held it down for a long long burst before twisting round to see what had happened.

  He had been lucky. The squirt of antiseptic spray had taken Davey full in the left eye. The bearded man screamed in shock and pain, but he was still able to see Jaysmith scrambling awkwardly towards him and to bring the gun in his upraised hand crashing down on his head.

  Now it was Jaysmith’s turn to ignore pain and attack. The steepness of the slope and the height of the boot meant that gravity compensated in part for the rubberiness of his limbs. He fell upon Davey in the literal sense, taking another blow to the skull which robbed him of almost all his power to grapple with the man. The best he could do was press close and involve him in a tangle of limbs which would at least inhibit use of the gun. Meanwhile his fingers scrabbled in the earth, muddied by the recent deluge, seeking for a stick, a stone, anything which could be used as a weapon.

  All he got was a handful of splintered shale which crumbled in his grasp. At the same time, the younger man’s strength was taking control. Jaysmith felt himself thrown off his opponent’s body like a dozing cat flicked off a favourite chair. He fell on his back and tried to scrabble his way back up the slope to take refuge beneath the car. Not that it would have
been any refuge if Davey had decided to use the gun. But now, either out of care for Jacob’s command or his own vengeful lust to inflict maximum pain, he chose not to fire. Instead, scrambling to his feet, he offered to help Jaysmith’s progress uphill by swinging his fell boot into the recumbent man’s crotch.

  Jaysmith twisted away from the blow, managing to absorb some of its force on his inner thigh instead of his genitals, but the pain still seared his body like a red-hot file being twisted in his guts from his groin to his heart. His pain and terror almost took him to the doubtful sanctuary of the boot, but now Davey was standing right over him, using the gun as a club once more, smashing down at his skull and face. He felt his nose go and suspected that the blow which loosened several of his teeth must also have cracked his jaw. Dully he thought that there was no way that these injuries were going to look as if they’d been received in a car crash, but the thought brought no consolation. Davey must know he’d passed that point also. Now he had put Jacob’s plan quite out of his mind and was striking for the sheer pleasure of it.

  The gun barrel caught him on the right temple, splitting it open and sending a blinding gash of blood into his eye. He cried out, a bubbling, whimpering cry of despair trailing off into a complete silence as his body went slack. His head twisted to one side and was still, and no breath seeped out with the blood and mucous oozing from his gaping mouth.

  Davey hesitated, the gun poised for another blow.

  ‘You bastard!’ he cried. ‘Don’t die yet. You bastard!’

  The feeble flick of Jaysmith’s right wrist, the ponderous kick of his left leg, should have been as meaningless as the last spasms of any dying man. But the flick sent the handful of shale into Davey’s eyes, and the kick caught him where the ulnar nerve stretches tautly over the elbow, sending an electric shock of pain running up his forearm till it passed out of the irresistibly splayed fingers of his hand.

  The gun fell, hit a stone and, instead of sliding away down the slope, bounced up and under the boot. Davey could have finished his opponent merely by dropping to his knees on his belly. Instead he dived sideways to retrieve the gun.

  It was at best a brief respite. Somehow Jaysmith was upright and staggering up the slope, his feet slithering wildly in the crumbly shale. His idea was simply to keep the car between Davey and himself. But it was like running knee-deep in water and he had only got as far as the driver’s door when the bearded man got the gun, rolled a couple of feet downhill to give himself a clear shot, and fired.

  Jaysmith felt the bullet hit him in the back. Oddly its immediate effect was almost anaesthetic, but he could run no more. He fell sideways through the open door of the car across the driver’s seat. His outstretched right hand rested on the handbrake. With an instant reaction that had nothing to do with thought and a strength that had nothing to do with muscles he pressed the release button.

  Instantly the twenty-five hundredweight of metal began to move backwards down the steep track, dragging him with it. He concentrated so much on trailing his legs safely out of the reach of the front wheels that he scarcely registered the long high-pitched shriek which coincided with a momentary interruption of the steady acceleration. Then almost instantly there was a grinding of metal on stone, a slight change of angle and suddenly acceleration had stopped altogether.

  Slowly he slid off the seat till he was lying on the ground. He looked around for Davey and found him, with a shock of terror, less than twelve inches away, his open eyes staring with uncomprehending dismay into Jaysmith’s face.

  ‘Oh you bastard,’ he said. ‘Oh you tricky murdering bastard.’

  His body from the waist down was beneath the car. The offside rear wheel had passed completely over his body, mounting at the hip, and cracking his lower vertebrae en route. The offside front wheel had followed much the same route except that the car had come to a halt at the apex of its climb and the bearded man’s body was now pinned firmly beneath it.

  The pistol had fallen from his nerveless hand and lay just out of reach. Jaysmith rose, using the car door as a support. He looked down at the pistol and then kicked it down the track. The success of this movement gave him confidence to try a few staggering paces, still leaning against the car, towards the boot. What he was after were the car keys, still in the boot-lock. But when he reached the back of the car, he realized that his effort was vain. The grinding metal noise he’d heard had been the bottom of the car scraping along a broad flat stone. The onside wheel had then left the track and settled in a marshy ditch bringing the vehicle’s whole weight to settle on the stone. With full strength and some assistance he might have contrived to get it free, but in his present state, there was no hope.

  He let his mind consider his present state for a moment and then redirected it into more profitable fields. Once he let himself be fully aware of his injuries, he guessed his body would just pack up. He concentrated instead on Naddle Foot.

  He had no choice. One alternative was to go back to the road and hope that a car would stop and pick him up and take him along to the house. But cars might be few and far between on a day like this, and English drivers had become as wary as their American and European counterparts of picking up unsavoury-looking hitch-hikers. Alternatively, he could try to walk to Naddle Foot. It was less than a mile as the bullet flies, but nearer a mile and a half on the winding road, ten minutes jog for a fit man, twenty minutes walk for a strong rambler, but three quarters of an hour of agony for a man with a bullet in his back.

  The agony he could bear, but the time was too long. And losing blood at the rate he must be doing, he doubted if in any case he could keep going for that time.

  It came as little surprise to discover that during these moments of mental debate, his will had already decided, and his fingers were unscrewing the nuts which held the false boot bottom.

  The panel slipped out easily. Lifting up the rucksack was more of a problem, but he managed it and it wasn’t till he hefted it on to his shoulders and screamed aloud with the pain that he remembered he’d been shot in the back.

  There was another echoing scream close to. It was composed of pain and pleading and anger and it came from Davey.

  ‘Help me,’ he pleaded. ‘You murdering mother-fucking bastard, help me!’

  Jaysmith stopped and looked down at the trapped man. He was pinned facing downhill and there was no way he could twist round to look up the track. Satisfied of this, Jaysmith retrieved the automatic and put it within reach of Davey’s hand.

  He didn’t speak but stepped over the body and set off uphill. After he’d covered a slow dozen yards he heard a shot but he didn’t look back.

  There was pain in his back, or rather a complex scattering of pains across the whole of his body. He couldn’t ignore them so he concentrated on drawing them all together till he had a network of pain so tight that no telltale pain-free area remained to occupy his mind with useless energy-sapping longing. He was climbing alongside the steep line of fencing which protected the grazing sheep from the yawning quarry. Last time he had climbed up here, a million years ago it seemed, it had taken him at most five minutes. Now he felt that hours had passed and still he seemed no nearer that jut of rock which would bring Naddle Foot distantly into view, always providing of course that the rain did not return, or the mist descend, or the blindness which seemed to be affecting his right eye pass over to his left.

  No physical reason for his eye trouble, wasn’t that what Jacob had said? When had he said it? Years ago, surely? But no, scarcely more than twenty minutes! It seemed impossible. No physical reason. What then? Something deep inside, some repressed distaste, self-disgust, something which slowly turned away from his vile trade, his dreadful mystery? He did not understand these things and it was too late to start wrestling with them now. A man was what he did, not what he wished he had done.

  Much more significant had been Jacob’s amazement, genuine amazement cutting through all his own unbalanced obsessive hatred, at the thought that Jaysmith coul
d even contemplate a straightforward relationship with Anya. He’d been right, of course. It was a dream, a fantasy, an obsession even more lunatic than Jacob’s own. And yet her father had killed; and would knowledge of that make her love him the less?

  He didn’t know, but he knew how much pain the knowledge would cause her. He thought of all the pain her mad father-in-law was planning to pour down on her, perhaps had already started pouring. The pain of knowledge that her father had murdered her husband; the pain of discovering that the man she thought she was falling in love with had been a hired killer sent to murder her father; and then the agony of her father’s death before her eyes. That was what Jacob in his craziness planned.

  And finally with the moment of her own death fast approaching, the greatest agony of all perhaps, the realization that what Jacob planned was to claim Jimmy for his own and to set about moulding him in the image of his dead father!

  These thoughts had carried him high up the fellside and almost to the craggy vantage point from which he would be able to look up the valley towards Naddle Foot. He must have lost a lot of blood, his body felt drained of strength almost to the point where the pain no longer existed. That was a bonus, he must take that as a bonus. Just a few yards more. Dragging in huge breaths of cold air that rasped the exposed nerves of his broken teeth, he gained the ledge.

  He could have wept with disappointment. Somehow, despite his previous visit to this spot, despite his awareness of distance and angle, his mind had been deluding itself that the house would be almost at his feet, visible in every detail. His gaze strayed directly down, dragged there by the dreadful attraction of the dismal amphitheatre of barren rock. Looking backwards a little, he could see the BMW with the dead man’s torso sprouting from its side.