The Ultimate Selection:
Be Careful Who You Talk To
S. J. Wardell
Acorn Independent Press
Copyright ©S. J. Wardell 2012
First published by Acorn Independent Press in 2012
The right of S. J. Wardell to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is sold subject to the condition it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise circulated in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise without the publisher’s prior consent.
A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-908318-54-1
www.acornindependentpress.com
About the Author
With a BA in Prose Fiction Writing and Journalism, S. J. Wardell openly admits to his love and respect for the written word. His passion for writing had been hidden away, until his literary calling became too strong for him to ignore any longer, bringing to surface the publication of the highly acclaimed novel, The Ultimate.
Using a wide range of research techniques, S. J. Wardell always delivers accuracy within his fiction, with an added raw, gritty reading experience.
Follow S J on Twitter: @sj_wardell
Acknowledgements
To my wife; I thank you immensely for the copious amount of support you have given me; the patience you have afforded me, and for our two beautiful children you have gifted me.
To my publishers; Ali and Leila at Acorn Independent Press, thank you for all your combined hard work; for making sense of the original manuscript, and most importantly, for believing in me and my work.
To Louise; thank you for all your hard work in designing such a fantastic book jacket.
And finally; to you the reader, a very, very big thank you for buying my book – I hope you enjoy it.
Chapter One
The whole idea had popped into Greg’s head when he was about nineteen. This was the time that his mother and father had moved back to Ireland with his sister. He was very well settled in his flat and completely independent. This was the first time he had felt alone, but also the first time he had felt truly free.
Greg read an article in a daily tabloid newspaper. A Frenchman had gone on a killing spree and had left the French police in turmoil. The French authorities were hopelessly lost – they had no leads and were totally clueless as to how they were going to catch this murderer-turned-serial-killer.
Greg collected all the online newspaper reports of the incident, in English, and stored them on his laptop in an encrypted file. The file had been password protected with a self-destruct Trojan Worm. From time to time, Greg would reacquaint himself with the details of the case.
The Frenchman had started his reign of terror in his early fifties, when he had come home early from a business trip and caught his wife in bed with another man. The police had been called but he cleverly told them that he had been away on business, which his employer verified, and that he had simply returned home to find the two dead bodies. Somehow the brutal murders awoke a monster inside him. At his trial, he described his hunger for murder as the most addictive, powerful drug he had ever known.
Greg liked the idea of playing a game with the police, a treasure hunt, the kind of game where you could lead them in whatever direction you chose, frustrate them and make them look incompetent.
The Frenchman had only been caught by DNA that he foolishly left at the scene of one of his later crimes. He had slaughtered eight young women, all in their early twenties before being locked up. Greg thought this was either a clumsy mistake, or that he wanted to get caught and put a halt to his newfound addiction. Maybe eight victims had been enough for him, or their faces haunted him in his sleep.
Greg knew that if you take a person’s life away from them in a violent manner, the images of that could stay with you forever. You would either have to be very sick or resilient to erase those kinds of images from you memory. Though, if the images that he saw were only images, they could remain locked away in the dark depths of his mind, he could detach and archive them. That would be different. He could handle that, or he believed he could.
Two months earlier, he had decided to test his theory. North London was full of stray dogs abandoned by people who only ever wanted a puppy. He combed the streets until he found a moderately tame dog. After giving it food and making a fuss of it, Greg befriended the animal. Within a short time, the dog started to follow him.
Then he proceeded to lead the dog to a large park known as Barn Hill. It was a massive place, with miles of woodland and fishing pools dotted around. Greg knew the area very well. As a child, he and his friends would spend a lot of lost youthful time there, playing childhood games in the woods or fishing at one of the many pools. One of his memories of the place was the cross-country run endured twice a year as part of the curriculum.
Greg could not harm the animal, as the animal had not done anything wrong. If the dog had attacked him or shown any unprovoked aggression then there might have been a just cause. The innocent are the innocent – the guilty would provide Greg with reason to act.
Greg was totally sane, or was he? He seemed to think he was! Well, the way that he had meticulously planned out his first crime would indicate that he was in control. His plan was not to commit any of the murders. This would be left to others. It should be their choice, he would never force them. He would just make it possible although there would seem to be no alternative for his victims.
His plan was to choose carefully and kidnap the intended victim. He wanted his first victim to be someone with whom he had no links at all, so that there was absolutely no way to trace it back to him. He was undecided whether it would be a male or female, though it had to be someone he could overpower and control with the least amount of physical effort, cleanly and very slick. He wanted to give the people who were being shat on in life a chance to get even and exact their revenge on their tormentors. It would be the ultimate revenge. A revenge that could result in slow long-term suffering or simply, bang your dead! Over in minutes, rather than hours or even days – simple, but only by his choice.
Greg knew that whilst he was out and about, either at work, at the gym or even out socialising, both friends and strangers alike would tell him about their personal relationships. It happens every day in such a crowded dirty city.
Most of his friends were either cheating on their partners and spouses or it was the other way round, they felt they were being cheated on. He also knew people that were being treated like shit by their respective other halves… abusive kind of shit. He knew a number of guys who after a bad day, would drown their sorrows at the local pub and then go home and take it out on their so-called loved ones.
Greg believed that it would have only been a matter of time before that happened to him and Karen. He found himself getting bored… stale, it was not for him; anyway, he liked the idea of no strings and all that. He was far too young and busy and, after all, that was never in his plan.
The beauty of the whole thing was that it gave him the freedom he thought he needed to be as sexually promiscuous as he wished. Sometimes he wanted to dabble a little into his sexual fantasies and other times he just wanted roll on, roll off sex. It did not matter if he was good or not; he did not plan on impressing them. It was selfish sex and that is what one-night-stands were all about. It was getting your pleasure and if they got some pleasure too, well that was a bonus… for them.
That was why many people in long-term relationships had affairs. Though this does not excuse the f
act that what they were doing was wrong. And those who mistreated their other halves, well, in Greg’s mind, they were the scum of the earth! A taste of their own medicine was what they needed.
Greg felt it would not seem right for him to administer the punishment to the condemned. He believed that it should be the party that had been the recipient of the wrongdoing, the person who the shit had landed on, the person who had been cheated on or beaten, the innocent party. Greg had been meditating on this for weeks, mentally preparing, now all he needed was victim number one. He sat in a pub, beer in hand, thinking about what it would feel like when he overheard a guy shouting his mouth off; boasting about how badly he treated his girlfriend. He was a chubby guy, he could even be considered fat. He was the kind of person that had only ever experienced a workout in a cake shop, not in a gym. He disgusted Greg.
He remembered overhearing the chubby guy saying that his girlfriend had given birth to their baby nearly two years ago and she wanted to get married. This guy was saying that he did not want to marry her.
‘It’s only a fucking piece of paper!’ he told his companion. ‘It would be a waste of fucking money,’ he continued in an alcohol-slurred fashion. ‘Fuck me, she’s fucking let herself go… if you know what I mean.’ A drunken laugh followed.
Greg heard him say how his money was his own. The child, his child, was of no importance and he referred to the baby as a ‘pain in the arse,’ and a ‘fucking mistake.’ The guy he was having a drink with felt a little uncomfortable at the way his drinking buddy was talking loudly and sometimes even shouting. Other people in the pub could hear their conversation. The way Greg saw the situation, that guy had made his bed so he should shut up and lie in it! Nobody made him sleep with that woman. Nobody else was at fault. He was the one that got her pregnant. It takes two to tango. After all, they did not have to keep the child.
The chubby guy went on by saying that he had given her a smack in the mouth to shut her up, and that he had taken the last of the child benefit money so he could go out and get drunk.
‘When I get home…’ the chubby guy said, ‘I’ll give her a good seeing to,’ he laughed. ‘She knows that I can’t handle the baby fucking screaming all the time.’
That was what made Greg think about that particular guy, what he said, all of it made Greg want to go over to him and give him a smack in the mouth to see how he liked it! A bit of reflection and a sharp shock is was what he needed.
‘But what day was it that I’d seen that fat fucker in that Pub in Baker Street? – Friday, maybe Saturday? And who was the guy he was drinking with? Who else lived in the house with the chubby guy, his girlfriend and the baby?’ Greg had a lot of answers to find!
Chapter Two
It was the morning after…
As Greg opened his eyes, it all came flooding back and his recollection of the previous night’s events began unfolding in his head. A massive adrenaline rush passed through him.
All the planning, all the times he had held his own private dress rehearsals, the secret way he had picked his victims, through their own self-selection. All the time the motive in his mind was the same; it never changed or lost focus. It was murder!
Greg was a very popular guy. His full name was Gregory Jason O’Hara. He was twenty-three and lived in a small flat in Raglan Court, Wembley Park, North London. The flat was not his, he leased it. Greg thought highly of his landlord; the rent was reasonable, any repairs were carried out with the minimum amount of fuss and Greg was shown respect and privacy. The truth was that Greg had only met his landlord once.
Greg was just about six foot tall, weighed about twelve stone and was in very good shape. He was very proud of the fact that he had passed his driving test on his first attempt. He owned a van due to his need to transport large loads. It was a white Ford Escort. It looked like a standard van; Greg had not made any very noticeable modifications.
He was not a bad-looking guy, though the small scar under his right eye sometimes made him feel a bit paranoid. He got the scar in a fight when he was younger. A guy had pushed into Greg in a burger bar, late after the pubs had kicked everyone out. Greg was trying to get a snack whilst on his way home with some friends, when a guy behind them in the queue kept nudging Greg in his back. There was an exchange of words and the guy punched Greg, cutting him just below his right eye. The guy was wearing a chunky ring. A lucky punch! Although Greg did not retaliate at the time, he got his revenge a few weeks later when he saw the same guy on his own. The guy was drunk; Greg was sober. It was easy for Greg to even the score. Greg believed that you should never get mad, you should get even.
Greg’s mother and father had moved back to Ireland and his younger sister went with them. That was nearly four years ago, though Greg still missed them all greatly.
Ireland was the country of Greg’s birth. He was born in a city called Cork. Cork is the Irish Republic’s second largest city, situated on an island between the two channels of the Lee River. The family home, a modest two up-two down terrace was all they could afford at the time, as Greg’s father was the only breadwinner in the household. The mortgage repayments stretched their already elasticised budget. The property was ideal for a new family starting up but was never meant for the long-term. The small yard at the rear would never have been large enough for Greg to spend his playtimes and the house soon became overcrowded once his sister arrived. It was then that Greg’s parents decided to sell up and make a new life in England. The small amount of money they had made from the sale was just enough to get the O’Hara family of four on the ferry, with a little left over to enable them to set up home on the mainland.
Greg only had patchy memories of his birthplace. The tall statue of Father Matthew, the founder of The Irish Temperance Movement, St. Anne’s Church where he had been christened, the English Market which his mother would push him around in his pram where it seemed that everyone knew everyone. A large city of over twelve million souls, Cork was a friendly place; people always seemed to find the time to ask after the well-being of others and were always willing to lend a sympathetic ear. Greg’s mother often took him to Bishop Lucey Park. The vast greenery offered him the freedom to run free as far and as fast as his little legs would take him ‘Slow down, Greg!’ his mother would call out. Greg had inbuilt selective-hearing at a young age, and would be unable to hear his mother, his pounding heart muffling all outside noise.
Greg’s parents had come to England not long after his fourth birthday. His sister, Elise, was three years his junior. They had first settled in Kilburn, North West London. Kilburn was known to most Londoners as ‘Little Ireland,’ this was because most of the people living in the area were either Irish settlers looking for work, or direct descendants of those who had previously migrated from the Emerald Isle.
They moved in to a terraced house on Dyne Road, just off the Kilburn High Road, using some of the capital from the sale of the home in Ireland to pay for the rental deposit. Greg’s father saw this as a step down as they did not own the property but renting privately was the only option open to them at the time. It was not long before Greg’s father had a full time job, and enough money saved to place a small deposit on a three-bedroom house in Wembley Park. They moved three years later. Oakington Crescent was a very quiet residential area and the large rear garden was perfect. The O’Hara stamp soon made the place feel like home.
As the years flew by, the time arrived for Greg to leave school and he got himself a job working for Brent Borough Council as a refuse collector. The money was OK. Greg was fairly bright but, more important than that, he was very streetwise. The work kept him active – easy Monday to Friday stuff. The money was always in the bank on time. Greg had worked for the council for five years, though not always in the same role. It was only the first two years that he worked on the bins as a refuse collector. It was OK, but you had to work as a part of a team and you had to work at the pace of everyone else in the team. When a job as street cleaner became available, Greg filled out h
is internal application in record time. His two years of service, along with his unblemished record, put Greg head and shoulders above the other applicants. The money was about the same but it meant that all the older guys could no longer bully him. Though that was during work, if they tried that outside work it would have been a different story.
In the evening, depending on how he felt, Greg would sometimes go to the gym and work out. He was a great believer in self-discipline. He did not smoke and only drank alcohol at weekends. Even if he went for a drink with a few friends during the week he would not drink alcohol. Greg thought of himself as a bit of a boxer, he had a speedball in his room and had gained a large collection of archive boxing videos. He worshiped Mike Tyson. Iron Mike had pure punching power!
Greg left home a few months after his eighteenth birthday. He found a one bedroom flat in the same area he had grew up in. The flat was in Raglan Court, on the Empire Road, still in Wembley Park and a few minutes’ walk away from the family home. Everything about it was perfect.
‘If you like it, you should take it,’ Greg’s mother told him.
‘What do you think, Dad?’ Greg asked his father.
‘It’s clean, and the location is great. But, son, I’m not the one who’s going to have to live there, am I? I agree with your mother, if you like it, you should take it!’ his father said, smiling.
His mother and father had helped him in all that they could. They gave him bedding, pots and pans and even a kettle along with other things he needed to set up his new home. Greg enjoyed the privacy as well as his newfound independence.
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