‘I’m not feeling sorry for myself, you condescending prick. I’m looking out for myself. Staying. Alive!’
‘You keep sucking vodka for breakfast, lunch and dinner and you won’t be alive for much longer.’
‘Yeah, well, at least I’d have died by my own hand and not by some fucked-up jarhead’s.’
‘Right, and I’m sure Chloe and Ray would understand.’
‘Don’t you dare to presume to know what my family is thinking.’
‘I’m not presuming. I know what they think of you, and that aint much.’
‘Yeah, well fuck you, Scott! If I can’t catch the bastard, what the hell makes you think you can?’
‘For a start, I’m sober.’
‘You’ve also outstayed your welcome. Now fuck off!’
That had been the last she’d heard from any of her team.
Chapter Eighty-six
Sunday, December 10th
Today Alistair was on room service duty. In his early twenties, Alistair had a soft, friendly voice and kind smile, neatly combed brown hair and wide, attentive eyes. He appeared comfortable in the hotel’s uniform of white shirt, burgundy bow tie and waistcoat, and black trousers, wearing them as if they were his own clothes. She figured he saw himself running the hotel in the future, and she liked that about him. Such ambition showed responsibility and trust. And she needed all the responsible, trustworthy people she could find.
Alistair entered the adjoining room and placed the tray with the orange juice, bottled water, and two fresh glasses on it down on the table. There was no water in the bottle, only vodka. After all, who ordered vodka at ten in the morning other than a paranoid cop too afraid to leave her room?
Via the tiny concealed camera hidden beneath the pillow, she watched on her laptop as Alistair began to leave the room. The next thing she knew, she was through the integral door and calling to the young waiter. ‘Alistair, right?’
Alistair stopped at the door, seemingly frozen by the voice he had only ever heard over the phone.
‘Just thought it would be nice to say hi in person,’ she said with the warmest smile she could muster. ‘So…hi.’
Alistair returned the smile, but it lacked any sincerity. ‘Hello.’
She pulled the integral door shut behind her, aware of the mess and the stench of stale cigarette smoke beyond. ‘Listen…what you and the hotel are doing for me, well, I really appreciate it.’
‘Not at all.’
‘You know why I’m here, right?’
Alistair looked at his feet, reluctant, she thought, to look her in the eye. ‘I’m aware of your circumstances, madam, yes.’
‘Please, call me Catherine.’
Alistair acknowledged the courtesy with a polite nod.
She noted his awkward posture, finding it endearing. She moved to the table and retrieved the tray with the disguised vodka. ‘For later. You’re on until seven tonight, right?’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Meeting your girlfriend after your shift I suspect.’
‘I − ’
‘Sorry, none of my business.’ She walked slowly back round the bed towards the integral door. ‘You like vodka, Alistair?’
Alistair shrugged narrow shoulders. ‘I’m more of a lager man to be honest.’
‘Lager, huh? Good for you. Tell you what… I’m partial to a couple of cold ones myself, especially around seven in the evening.’ She gave Alistair a wink and swore she saw him blush before he looked back at his feet. ‘Just so as you know.’
Watching Alistair leave, she shuffled back through to her room, where she was greeted with her reflection in the full length mirror.
Dressed in black knickers and nothing else, she didn’t think she looked too bad for her age.
Did Alistair agree?
Maybe around seven o’clock she’d be able to ask him.
Maybe.
Chapter Eighty-seven
Wednesday, December 13th
She gnawed on the biro top and scanned the word search puzzle for that elusive final word.
‘You’re always here,’ she hissed at the page. ‘I’m just not looking hard enough.’
The elusive word in the 90’s action films puzzle she now hunted was PREDATOR. She blinked at the blurred grid of jumbled letters on the page.
The word was not there. Simple. The publishers of the puzzle book had made a mistake − again! This was not the first time they’d neglected to include a word in the grid of jumbled letters. Every one of the hundreds of puzzles she’d begun in the dozens of books strewn across the room’s floor had been missing that final word.
She knew it was not her who could not find it, because she had never failed to complete a puzzle...Ever.
She swapped the biro for a cigarette, lit up, and scrutinised the grid one last time: top to bottom, left to right, corner to corner.
‘Nope. Definitely not there.’
The books were defect. Every damn one of them.
She flipped the page and began another puzzle. The subject was insects, and instantly she found FLY. By the time she’d finished the cigarette, she’d found all the insects except for one: SPIDER.
She hadn’t found it because it wasn’t there. So why waste anymore time looking for something that could not be found?
This was the question she had posed to The Undertaker when he had called her yesterday.
‘Because it’s my job,’ had come the dry reply. ‘Just as it is yours.’
‘Chambers cannot be found,’ she’d said. ‘That’s the point. Has he killed again?’
‘No.’
‘That’s because I’m next on the list and he can’t get to me.’
It was then her boss had broken the news she’d been dreading. ‘Commissioner doesn’t think so. Chambers last struck over a month ago, Catherine. The threat level toward you and your family is being dropped.’
‘Yeah, and according to Daniels, a sniper’s greatest asset is patience.’
‘And if you include Gavin Miller and Terence Randal, that totals ten victims.’
‘They don’t count,’ she’d protested. ‘They were a means to an ends.’
‘Maybe, but this is not my call. Funding has been cut on your security detail.’
‘How long?’
‘End of the week.’
‘Then I’ll pay for myself.’
‘That’s your choice. But I’ll have to consider your position on my team.’
‘Just as I’ve been considering why Andy Dodd called you direct the day I visited his brother. Sir. Tell me, why did he call you? Why didn’t he call the complaints commission? Why you, the only person who knew about my connection with his brother and Malcolm Hoyt? Bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?’
The answer she’d received was that of a flat dial tone.
With its electronic guts spilled out, her mobile still lay in the corner of the room where she’d thrown it.
The defective puzzle book she was working on now joined it.
Chapter Eighty-eight
Friday, December 15th
Every half an hour she would perform the search, crawling on all fours, as had become her way. She would begin in the bathroom, checking behind the shower curtain, then move onto to the wardrobe and finally beneath the bed. She would then repeat the ritual in the adjoining room, Webleyfirmly in hand − never not so. Once satisfied she was alone, she would crawl to the window and take up her seated position facing the door. From there it was impossible for anyone to enter the room without her seeing them first; even a decorated sniper.
‘Just fucking try it,’ she snarled into the vodka bottle poised at her lips. ‘Pleeeeeeeease, just fucking try it.’ She sucked on the bottle and swapped it for the shaving mirror she’d taken from the bathroom. Slowly she poked the mirror up between the curtains and the window and angled it to reflect the grey sky outside.
The two storey building across the road finished three stories below her floor. No chance of Chambers taking a shot
at her from there. However, look further, across the building, over the Magistrates Court, passed the small park with the bandstand, and in the distance about a kilometre away, standing twenty floors high, loomed a newly erected green-tinted glass office block with space to let.
It was this building to which she angled the shaving mirror. Watched and waited. Waited and watched. Alert for that tiny glint of light reflecting from the magnified lens he was no doubt watching her room through. It would come, she was sure of it. But for now the image had not changed since the last time she’d performed this part of the ritual. No movement behind the tinted windows.
Her room was eleven feet long, sometimes ten. Using this info, and coupling it with her extensive knowledge of the city, yesterday she’d guesstimated the distance between her hotel and the office block at exactly 1,136 metres. Chambers had shot a man at a range of 1,800 metres. For a man with such deadly accuracy, he could plant a bullet up her crack blindfolded from the green office block, and she probably wouldn’t even notice until she took a piss.
Yet now his MO had changed. Now he favoured getting up close and personal. However, he still had to scope out his target and learn their routine.
‘Observation, too. Your boy’s highly adept at memorising places and objects from a distance in a short space of time. Handy if you’re scoping out a potential victim’s house.’
Or a target’s hotel room.
And the only place he could do that was from the building reflected in the little mirror. Sure she’d kept her curtains closed, but what with thermal imaging technology he would know exactly what she was doing.
But not anymore. Not since she’d had the idea to crawl around the room instead of walking. Such a simple solution she’d almost kicked herself for not thinking of it earlier.
She scrutinised the reflection, moving the mirror back and forth along the width of the building. She thought about Chloe and Ray and Vicky, and wondered if they were taking such precautions.
They may hate her after learning she hadn’t left the room, and that her contribution to the investigation consisted solely of drinking and smoking and alienating her colleagues, but at least they were all alive.
And that, she considered, was a job well done.
With her left hand, she swapped the mirror for the vodka, the vodka for a cigarette, all the while with the Webley firmly in her right hand. The gun felt right there, as if it belonged. She couldn’t recall a time when it was not there, and couldn’t imagine a future with it not being there.
Chapter Eighty-nine
Sunday, December 17th
Only when she was jarred awake by a noise from the next room did she realise she’d fallen asleep. On the laptop screen on the floor beside her she watched Alistair entering the room with more vodka disguised in the water bottle.
Had she placed an order?
She didn’t remember doing so.
And the hotel knew better than to send anyone to the room without her specific consent. Yet here was Alistair, tray in hand, just a thin wall away from where she sat alongside a near full bottle of vodka.
Why?
Only then did she notice the date in the bottom corner of the screen, and remembered The Undertaker’s warning of her security detail being dropped yesterday.
‘Shit.’
She pushed herself up to her bare feet. Wobbled as her weakened legs struggled to take the strain. Heart thumping, she edged along the wall to the integral door. Wrapped both hands tightly around the gun’s butt, and took a deep breath.
Don’t think, just act.
She shouldered the door open and aimed the gun directly between Corporal Philip Chambers’ wide eyes.
‘Hands on your head! Do it now!’
Dressed in the hotel’s uniform of burgundy waistcoat and bowtie, white shirt and black trousers, Chambers froze in the centre of the room.
‘I said hands on your head! And get down on your goddamn knees.’
Chambers complied, his scarred face calm and unreadable.
Adrenaline pumping, she stepped into the room, her senses heightened, acutely aware of her prisoner’s skills. ‘Yeah, that’s right. I gotcha. Jeez, and I thought you boys were meant to be patient. What, couldn’t wait, huh? The minute my security detail left you just had to make your move, that it?’
Her prisoner did not respond, just knelt in silence with his hands clasped tight behind his head.
‘What’s up? No chilling little speech for me? No lessons about pain and understanding? About not being able to live without death − all that shit?’ She closed in on her prisoner, but not within reaching distance. She thought about what Mason had said about her being too drunk to catch Chambers, and looked forward to hearing his apology when she showed him the recording of her apprehension.
‘So what’s the plan, Phil? Were you gonna hide out in here like you were trained to do? Beats the hell out of some shit-hole in Afghanistan, don’t it?’ She circled her prisoner. You think you could have hid here without me finding you? Christ, you couldn’t even enter the room without me seeing you! Yeah, that’s right. I’m the real thing. I aint no mute cripple or teenage girl or eight-year-old kid. I’m a goddamn Detective Chief Inspector. Did you ever consider that? Huh?’
She stopped behind her prisoner, aiming the gun at the back of his head, at his brown wig, her moist finger poised on the trigger.
‘So, how were you gonna off me? The gut, like Darren Spencer? Wrists, like Tanya? Stabbed through the heart like Angela? Or maybe slice my femoral arteries like you did Samantha?’ Her aim was steady, the gun’s muzzle just inches from Chambers’ scalp. ‘You’re pathetic. What, just because you had a bad time fighting in that bullshit war you think you’ve got the right to play God back over here with innocent peoples’ lives? You’re worse than the fucking Taliban. At least they have a legitimate belief. All you have is self pity. Boo-fucking-hoo. So your friend died in your arms. I got news for you, soldier: It’s a fucking war! You don’t go over there to play football and get pissed with your mates. You go to shoot and be shot at. You go over there to protect the very people you came back here and slaughtered.’
The gun met resistance against the back of her prisoner’s head. ‘Don’t you see the irony? Because I do. I see it clear as day, because you’re here to kill me. Thing is, though, there’s no one here to watch. What, did you figure the family was here, too? You disappoint me, soldier. I really did think you were smarter than that. Pity really. Sort of takes away the satisfaction of blowing your head off knowing you’re just as dumb as the rest of them.’
She took a step back and steadied her arm. ‘Nevertheless, I’m still gonna enjoy this. Shame you haven’t got anyone who gives a shit about you here to watch. Then again, Hannah and little Beth would probably take it in turns pulling the trigger themselves, right?’
She squeezed the trigger, once, twice, three times, four times. The noise was deafening, the gun’s recoil wracking her arm and shoulder and jarring her teeth. She closed her eyes and squeezed out bullet after bullet, unloading on every sick psycho she had ever put away, each of whom appearing to morph into a blurry mix of Malcolm Hoyte, Vincent Dodd, and Philip Chambers.
The satisfaction was all consuming and tingled every nerve in her body like the biggest, most intense orgasm. Her knees liquefied, and no sooner was the gun empty then she was on the floor next to the body of her prisoner, who was curled into a tight ball with his arms clasped to his head and sobbing into his elbows.
She reached across. But it was not Chamber’s hitching shoulder she touched. It was Alistair’s.
And then she laughed. But to those who could hear and see her, she was crying.
Chapter Ninety
Friday, December 22nd
The room was small and white with no windows to the outside, just a metal grate screwed across the small window in the only door in and out of the room. In the centre of the room was a metal table with two chairs either side. All were screwed to the floor. Immovable, ev
en by the room’s most psychotic visitors.
The light was strong and piercing, reflecting off the clinical white surfaces and hurting her aching eyes. She’d been in this room before, of course. Many times. It was located in the city hospital’s psychiatric wing, and was where many of the city’s more unstable criminals would come for an initial psychological assessment.
Yes, she’d been in this room, and had sat next to the two men sitting opposite her at one time or another.
Next to, but never across from them.
Wearing a black overcoat over his black suit, The Undertaker asked, ‘How’re you feeling?’
‘Weak.’ The word scratched her parched throat. She reached for the plastic cup of water and noticed the purple bruising on her forearms.
‘They’ve been feeding you intravenously,’ Mason said, noting her confused expression. ‘It was the only way. You’ve been non-responsive since we brought you in.’
She nodded. Her head felt as if it were packed with wet sand and glass. ‘How long?’
‘Five days.’
Jessop closed her eyes. Saw Alistair Waters’ petrified face on the carpet next to her.
‘Alistair Waters is not pressing charges,’ The Undertaker said. ‘You’re very lucky, Catherine.’
Mason said, ‘The kid was shaken up pretty badly, as I’m sure you can understand.’ Mason crossed his arms, a defensive gesture she’d rarely seen against her. ‘Turns out he had a bit of a soft spot for you. Felt sorry for you.’
She winced inwardly.
‘The hotel’s keeping this under wraps,’ The Undertaker said. ‘As far as any of the residents or press are concerned, there were a bunch of teenagers in the room partying and letting off fireworks.’
Jessop stared at the tiny puncture marks in her arm. Her hands trembled on the table top. Both her colleagues saw this but chose not to comment. She wondered if she would ever be able to look them in the eyes again.
The Undertaker slid a thin paper folder across the table to within touching distance of her fingertips. Printed on the cover was the word CLASSIFIED. ‘Full debrief of what happened that day. I suggest you read it…Carefully.’
Hurt (The Hurt Series) Page 25