The Third Rule (Eddie Collins Book 1)

by Andrew Barrett

  “I’ve told you about the elderly gentleman I saw only yesterday in my constituency; well, I’ll tell you another story of what happened while I visited Leeds only last week. I went to the railway station to see how they had progressed since that awful explosion there a few years ago, to see how they had come to terms with things. I laid a wreath at the plaque,” he quietened. And then he looked up, hate in his eyes, “Those bombers are the very antithesis of what our country needs!” He strode, and then waved lazily with a floppy right arm, as though exhausted by fighting the good fight, “I digress,” he smiled. “Forgive me. I was there to see how the station was coping with the drug problem it has, with the graffiti and with the anti-social behaviour it experiences, behaviour which people find distressing, depressing, frightening.” His voice cracked on the final word.

  To those in the rows closest to Deacon’s feet, it seemed as though he were crying, his eyes looked damp as he recalled his tale, and as though he felt the utter despair that some people had to live with. It was this image, the ‘weeping politician’, which would sweep the front pages tomorrow. “People want safety on our streets and in their homes, and by God they have a right to expect it!” Hastily, he wiped a hand across his face. The cameras clicked, hundreds of them.

  He walked around the stage and then he stopped, looked at the audience and began to laugh. “I apologise to you again. I told you I felt strongly about this, didn’t I?” Deacon smiled at the photographers. “Where was I? Oh, yes. While I was there, I saw a group of seven or eight youths, mid-teens, hanging around, hands in pockets, and smoking,” he raised an eyebrow, “up to no good. Nearby a group of pensioners were obviously afraid of these kids. One of the kids, a girl, began kicking at a phone booth, really kicking at it hard. And I wondered why she was doing it, she couldn’t get money from it, it was a card-only phone. She smashed the handset against the card slot and continued kicking it. I was flabbergasted. The elderly people circled around her, keeping their distance and hurried away. I didn’t blame them; she was making me feel nervous.

  “But she was doing it because she wanted to, because she had no regard for property. She was doing it because she knew there would be no consequence. Who would stop her? What would happen to her for causing criminal damage to a phone box? Nothing. That’s what would happen.” His eyes scanned the silent audience, who listened with nods of recognition. “No one dare do anything; clip her round the ear and you’d end up in court, and if she clipped you around the ear, you’d end up in hospital.” He opened his arms to the audience and asked, “Why should we put up with it any longer? Why should those pensioners be scared? People want to feel safe in their homes and on their streets and they don’t!” He paused. “But they soon will. Soon you’ll be able to sleep soundly in the knowledge that people don’t commit petty damage anymore, people don’t burgle any more.

  “When you wake up in the morning, your car will still be there, undamaged. Your shed won’t have been broken into and all your tools stolen. They won’t dare do it,” he smiled. “We’ll see to it. Give it a year or two,” he shouted, “and I’ll be surprised if there’s any crime left worth talking about. Of course, let’s be realistic; there will still be crime about, you’ll never stop it completely; but the kind of premeditated serious crime will be almost non-existent, the kind of spontaneous petty crime will have all but stopped too. The only crime left that affects the people in the street will be spontaneous serious crime. I hate to admit it, but that’s the kind of crime we may never stop. The Rules are there as a deterrent to the petty criminal and to the serious criminal who gives thought to his actions. And particularly against gun crime, something that puts the very fear of God into every mother’s heart up and down the country.

  “And when these criminals are caught, they’ll learn not to do it again; society will not allow them to. If you want to kill serious crime, you have to kill serious criminals!”

  Flashguns blazed as Deacon raised his arm and smiled in a parting gesture. The crowd stood, their applause deafening, whoops and cheers and whistles. Even party-poppers erupted, something that caused Sirius, who waited in the wings, to grow nervous. He peeked around the curtain and watched his boss take the adulation before accepting Sterling’s hearty handshake and gliding gracefully off the stage, waving to his fans as he went.

  “How did it go?” he asked Justine Patterson, his aide and member of the PR team, after he was safely away from the microphones.

  “Looked great to me. It looked spontaneous, especially the part where you said ‘where was I, oh yes’. That was wonderful. I congratulate you, George, on remembering it; it was word perfect.”

  — Two —

  Outside the conference hall, the police had cordoned off a section of the main road and the square. Large truck-mounted screens pumped Deacon’s speech out to the masses while other smaller screens, the Vidiscreens, had crowds gathered around them. For the most part, the demonstrations were timid, mild-mannered affairs, where people expressed their opinion with a grunt or a nod. But there were two distinct factions to the crowd: one for The Rules and one against. And even in the ‘for’ camp, there were divisions. “Why do it with a bullet?” someone shouted. “Yeah, let’s hang the bastards”, someone replied.

  There were hundreds of people gathered in the square, some listening to the speech, most jeering and chanting loudly, drowning out Deacon with bullhorns. Banners swung in the breeze: hooray for sanity; death to murderers; forgiveness is divine; help, not death. There were posters showing the faces of children used and then slaughtered by paedophiles and other assorted twisted elements in society, and counteracting these were graphic depictions of dead men handcuffed to scarred wooden posts; more of freeze-frame shots showing a bullet passing through a human head; the tip of one breaking through the rear of the skull.

  Each faction had its point of view and each tried to outdo the other in words and volume and pictures and arguments, and in the middle, in the grey areas where the two elements joined, were the scuffles amongst PAC representatives and Freedom for Life campaigners.

  A female PAC member went down as a blade pierced her heart.

  — Three —

  Inside Jilly’s darkened lounge the tears still fell from eyes that were incessantly tired. They were immersed in loose dark folds of skin that filled the hollows of her skull like some Halloween mask. By God, you’d have thought the tears would have ended by now, maybe returning only intermittently, but no, here they were rolling down the same cheeks they had dampened for the last three weeks. It was a pain she couldn’t describe, even if she’d felt inclined to.

  She had rejected the offer of counselling; choosing instead the drugs and the deep trough of grief she felt obliged to remain within. Sammy was dead. And her heart was in two. The TV blared somewhere in the background as Jilly brought the cold coffee cup up to her lips; she looked surprised to see it empty. Blankly she stared at the TV; a distraction that no longer distracted, just noise to fill an otherwise silent existence. Some politician, Deacon, spouted about the rights and wrongs of a society that was in jeopardy of not caring a hoot anymore. She shrugged her shoulders.

  “The only way to kill serious crime is to kill serious criminals!”

  Her eyebrows rose at that statement. “Oh how wonderful. I’d like to pull the trigger,” she said without enthusiasm. “What a wonderful law.” She wondered where her son’s killer was now, what he was doing. Was he enjoying a pizza, flushing it down with a beer, laughing with his chums about how fucking clever he was? Or was he at home, sitting in a darkened room like she was, wondering about the point of it all? She suspected the former.

  She put the cup down, finding a place for it on the carpet among the other half dozen or so. Jilly stood and shuffled into the kitchen. The house smelled, the sink was full of dishes with dried-on food, flies mulching away happily, undisturbed and likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future.

  Her slippers scuffed the floor on the way to the drawer wh
ere she kept her medication. Aspirin and Hedex, indigestion tablets, and Calpol for when Sammy got a fever. Her Protromil nestled among it all and she greedily swallowed two capsules, feeling sick as the cold water splashed her stomach. In the cupboard beneath the drugs was the booze. Fresh booze. When Eddie lived here she’d cleared it out when it became apparent he was in trouble with whisky and brandy. Now she had restocked it. Just in case. She looked in there, sighed and closed the cupboard again. Not yet.

  And then it happened. A knock at the door. Jilly froze, her eyes startled wide like the look on a young kid’s face just before the car hits him.

  She remembered that this was how it all began – the nightmare, with a knock at the door. The knock that was going to scoop her insides out and leave her barely able to stand, merely a shell with nothing good inside anymore.

  She’d headed for the front door on legs that somehow worked all by themselves. She wasn’t here; she was in some kind of echo chamber where a weird actor played her part and she, Jilly, watched from behind a mirrored glass screen shouting at her not to go to the door, not to answer it. The actor stared with blank eyes as she ambled through the lounge, heart hammering inside her empty chest, jaw hanging loose, unblinking eyes half closed.

  She reached the end of the lounge when the knock came again, a little more impatient this time, yet still a hearty rat-a-tat-tat that had bounce.

  Only an hour before that knock, everything had been fine. Sammy, Sam, had wandered off out the front door. “I’ll see you this afternoon, Mum,” he’d said as he dejectedly walked down the drive, hands in pockets, NY baseball cap shading his eyes from the sun.

  “Go careful,” she’d shouted after him. He waved absently over his shoulder, didn’t look back.

  She never saw him again.

  She often thought about ‘last times’. When was the last time your parents made love? At the end of it, did they say, ‘Hey, that’s enough for me, honey, that’s my lovemaking career at an end’, or did they just never get around to it again? But in the years that followed, did they spend their quiet individual moments, a memory perhaps sparked off by a love scene in a movie, wondering when their own last lovemaking session was?

  Well, yes, it was a strange analogy, but it occurred to her as she had crawled on leaden feet towards that hearty rat-a-tat-tat. And when she had opened the door, Jilly’s legs had finally given out and she fell to the floor. Over her, helping her to stand had been a police officer, firearm dangling close by in her holster, caring words of one form or another permeating the air around Jilly’s stunned head. They never made it inside her head, just filled the void and acted as background noise as she remembered Sammy waving over his shoulder. It all went black.

  Call it a mother’s instinct, call it what the hell you like, but she already knew her boy was dead.

  And now, another knock brought it all back in a flood of tightly ordered memory, despite the sagging state of her twisted mind, and Jilly almost fell over in the kitchen there and then. But she clung onto the worktop until the fogginess evaporated, and only when the knock came again, did she feel the urge to move towards it, like some inbred command: need to pee, go to toilet. Knock at front door, answer door.

  Eventually she made it there, swallowed hard before reaching for the catch. Her mum smiled sympathetically up at her from the doorstep, a small bunch of roses clutched to her chest and a warm, endearing smile bathed in the day’s sunlight. “Aw, Jilly…”

  Can you remember the last time you and Dad made love?

  The Yorkshire Echo. 19th June

  Deacon’s Passionate

  Introduction for The Rules:

  ‘The Criminal Will Pay’

  “If you want to kill serious crime, you have to kill serious criminals.”

  Social networks around the world are buzzing with Sir George Deacon’s words, which will send a shiver up the spines of those who would commit crime on the United Kingdom mainland.

  Earlier today, Justice Minister Sir George Deacon disregarded a prepared speech for the introduction of the Criminal Justice Act.

  At London’s Earl Court, Deacon mesmerised the audience as he tore into an ad lib monologue setting out his reasons why The Rules were a just - and justified - piece of legislation for the UK, despite continued pressure from home and abroad to abandon the changes.

  Deacon made a strong reference to the murders of his predecessor, Roger King, outside his Kensington home two years ago, and that of PAC founder Josephine Tower, who died alongside eighteen children and two other adults in an arson attack on a school in Sussex at the beginning of June. He said major incidents such as these, and like that on the London Underground, which highlight easy firearms acquisition, were the catalysts for this legislation.

  For a more in-depth appraisal of Deacon, turn to page 14, where we compare his style to former great orators including Blair, Obama, Churchill, and Thatcher.

  By Michael Lyndon

  Saturday 20th June

  Chapter Ten

  — One —

  The room was dark. It was quiet; only the sound of light traffic on the nearby motorway half a mile north came in timidly through the broken window. The smells in here, mainly linseed oil from the cellar and the lingering odour of gas from the camping stove meal an hour ago, mixed with dampness; even in this hot June, dampness still lingered, reluctant to yield its grip on the old house. Two candles burned in the corner nearest the scabby mattress, throwing twists of smoke into the air, their radiance a flickering symbol of hope in a dreary and dangerous world. Spiders’ webs glistened in their light and swayed slightly in the tiny updrafts of warm air.

  Christian smiled at his lot. He wasn’t rich by any means; fuck, in the eyes of the State he didn’t even exist. He had no Social Security number, no police record, no bank account; didn’t know where his birth certificate was, if he’d ever had one; never owned an ID card, fingerprint, retina or otherwise; and never had his DNA or fingerprints taken. He was Mr Nobody, as transient as the candle smoke, and as vague as its flame. It was just as he wanted it, yes, Mr Nobody. He looked at the bare brick walls – the dampness pushed most of the plaster off about three years ago, the naked ceiling too, a network of laths with only hints of the horsehair plaster that once resided between them. He looked at the rotten window frame, half the glass missing, covered by a piece of swollen chipboard. A grey net curtain, torn and snagged, fluttered against the remaining glass. A breeze squeezed through to sway the candles’ flames. No, he wasn’t rich, but he was lucky. Or so he chose to think.

  He crouched by her side, listened as the floorboards creaked, and looked into her face, watching as the candlelight caressed her skin. Beneath the crimson tangle of fine veins running through the yellow tarnish of her eyeballs, there was still the old Alice. And somewhere beneath the black chaos of hair falling across her spotty face, dancing around her shoulders like an unruly kid, Alice lived still. The drugs had toyed with her for the best part of four years, the best part of their time together. But she was still in there somewhere, and sometimes, on the days when she felt better, when the drugs slackened their grip on her just enough for her to sneak out into the world they used to share, he could see her and remember her the way she was back then: laughing always, sometimes at nothing, and dancing like a gypsy round a campfire in the old flat they once shared. That was Alice. And she would come back to him one day. He hoped.

  When they first met, she had been on coke, and that was okay; it was tolerable. But the dealers and the other junkies got to her; crack-heads looking for someone weak to share their torture. And Alice was nothing if not a sharer of grief. She was a good kid. And now she was a junkie too.

  In the darkness of the old house, Christian listened to the stillness. Beneath the candles’ light, his smile fell away and he knew it was time to provide for her. There was the tiny stash hidden in the cellar for emergencies, but so far the need for it hadn’t materialised. And if tonight went okay, he would delay that need for another we
ek or two. He pulled the old quilt up over Alice’s shoulders. The net curtain billowed into the room and he could see moonlight, white and pale, through the gaps in the boarded over window. It made him think of his latest project. He had time just to peek, didn’t he?

  Christian stood and crossed the dusty floor, the bare floor where the smell of linseed blew up through the cracks in the wood from the cellar below. He opened the door to the kitchen and quietly pulled it closed after him, his footfalls echoed around the bare walls, grit underfoot sounded like sandpaper on an empty pan. He turned towards the cellar head door, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the lack of light. No moonlight in here, and he couldn’t even switch on his torch; he dare not, for if the dealers found them, death would be the least of their problems.

  “Maybe later,” he said, and collected his tools and trainers as he headed for the corrugated iron sheet covering the back door. A sliver of moonlight crept through the gap between it and the wall, and further spots of moonlight beamed in through rusting old nail holes, and lit up the floorboards like a private interstellar show.

  He pulled the corrugated sheet closed and studied the cobbled lane and the black wasteland beyond it, scanning for movement in the night. He saw none and headed out quickly.

  If all went according to plan, one day they wouldn’t need to live in places that were fit only for pulling down. He glanced over his shoulder at the terrace of Victorian houses, the ghosts of a previous prosperity; and he knew that the time was near when he could unlock a proper back door, when he could watch as Alice stirred in a dream of finery. It was not beyond his grasp, and the way ahead, the way to achieving his goal was not by using the tools in his pocket, but by using the tools in his heart and in his mind. It was near, that one day.