Without Conscience

by Michael Kerr

  Barney had decided that to attempt negotiating with the killer was a luxury he could not afford to do. He believed that given warning of a police presence, Cain would execute his hostages without hesitation. The operation was now fully under the command of the ARU leader, who was trained to contain a situation by eliminating its root cause.

  ...Three, Amy thought, throwing the door back one-handed, before adopting a shooter’s stance; her right hand holding the pistol cupped in her left, and the left side of her body slightly forward of the right. She entered the cabin and moved to her left, so as not to be silhouetted against the ambient light of the evening sky.

  Bobby reacted fast, somehow staying the descent of the knife, he pulled Caroline up on to her knees in front of him as a shield, hunkering down behind her and holding the edge of the blade firmly pressed against her neck, just below her left ear.

  Amy found her target a split second too late. She could not risk taking the shot. Cain was too obscured by Caroline, and there was no guarantee of being able to hit him in the gloomy surroundings.

  “Welcome aboard, Amy,” Bobby said, his voice like gravel, due to the tissue of his throat doubly inflamed by the blow to it, and the chemicals he had breathed in. “As you can see, we started without you. But better late than never. Toss the gun over to me by the butt, or I’ll cut sweet Caroline’s throat from ear to ear.”

  Behind Cain, Amy could see Mark slumped on the floor, facing her. She saw everything in slow motion, almost like individual photos being shown as a slideshow on a computer screen. Mark’s fleece had ridden up almost to his chest, and the light-coloured sweatshirt beneath it was covered in a dark bloodstain. She couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead. She wanted to run to him, check for a pulse, and summon an ambulance.

  “Get fucking real, Cain,” she said, her voice loaded with venom that only the strongest cocktail of fear, anger and hatred could produce. “I don’t have the time to listen to your threats. Use the knife and I’ll have no reason not to empty this gun into you.”

  “You’re bluffing, bitch,” he said. But he could see the truth of her words in both the stony expression on her face and the intensity in her eyes.

  “Unless you’re totally brain dead, you must know that blowing your head off would make my fucking day,” she said.

  “Shoot him!” Caroline cried out, twisting sideways, away from the knife.

  As Amy’s finger tightened on the trigger, and an instant before the SIG spat a bullet at Cain, the interior of the houseboat exploded in brilliant, all-encompassing light, which seared her retinas with brightness she imagined to be ten times more powerful than that of a camera’s flash gun.

  Bobby leapt forward as Caroline moved. The slug punched a channel through the air next to his head, and as he slammed into Amy, blinded by the explosion of light that robbed him of sight, he gripped her in a bear hug and his momentum carried them both out through the open door, across the narrow deck and over the low guard-rail, into the dark, icy waters.

  “Go...go...go!” the team leader whispered into a lip-mike, and the shadowy figures boarded the craft, their helmet visors down as the leading officer lobbed the flash-bang through the partly open door. A second following the effusion of light that floodlit the cabin, and also the low bark of a silenced gunshot, two figures teetered out on to the deck as though in a lovers’ embrace, to topple over the rounded prow of the houseboat’s hull.

  Amy kicked out and clawed at Cain’s face as they hit the water. They struggled beneath the surface, weighted down by their now sodden clothing.

  She was drowning, and knew it. Her lungs cramped with the amount of water that she had sucked in, and her will to survive was diminished. She ceased to fight, and through a fog, over Cain’s right shoulder, the small figure of a child appeared. It was Darren, her dead son, smiling and beckoning to her from the radiant glow that he was suspended in.

  The pressure in her chest increased, and she was tantalisingly close to opening her mouth and inhaling for what would be the last time. On the brink of having to gulp for air that was not there, Cain released her, and with a supreme last-ditch effort she propelled herself towards the golden apparition of her late son, upwards, with limbs that felt too heavy to obey her muddled brain’s instructions. Like a runner stretching forward to cross the finish line, she thrust her face up into air, but was jerked back down; an unseen hand around her ankle. She kicked out instinctively, felt something solid give beneath her foot, and was at once free again.

  Amy came to her senses laying face down, head turned to the side. She was coughing water out on to the grass. A helmeted officer knelt at her side, pumping her back with his hands.

  “Mark?” she spluttered.

  “Dr Ross is being stabilised,” the officer said.

  Barney was squatting down in her line of sight, lighting a cigarette, his face ashen and etched with concern.

  “What happened, Barney?” Amy gasped, twisting over and pushing herself up into a sitting position, to wrap her arms around her aching chest.

  “Mark got himself stabbed, but he’ll be okay. It looks worse than it is,” Barney said, hoping that he was right. “Caroline is in a state of shock and has a nasty cut on her arm, but will be fine. Cain is missing.”

  “Missing?”

  “You both went overboard, and only you came up. We’re searching for him now.”

  “I took a shot at him,” Amy said. “But I don’t know whether I hit him or not. Somebody turned floodlights on and blinded me.”

  “It was a flash grenade,” the officer by her side said.

  “Dead or alive, we’ll find him,” Barney said, taking a long drag from his cigarette, before dropping it on the grass and crushing it underfoot. “We’ve got divers and a helicopter on the way. I’m hoping the bastard did us all a favour and drowned.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Bobby lost his grip on Amy. He made a grab for her as she rose to the surface, grasped her by the ankle, but was kicked off. His desperate need to breathe forced him to let her get away from him. He swam powerfully under the water, ignoring the compulsion to surface and relieve his pounding lungs, which were starved of oxygen. He eventually surfaced, drew in a single deep draught of sweet, cool air, got his bearings and then ducked back underwater and headed out into the swift flowing river.

  Each time he surfaced, torch beams were searching for him, sweeping the black waters. But he was not seen. His luck held, and going with the strong current and keeping close to the far bank, he was soon a long way from the houseboat and the police that were hunting for him.

  Finding his feet on the muddy bottom, Bobby waded ashore, gripping the pilings of a small jetty to keep his balance as the soft mud clung to his legs. In front of him was a beer garden at the rear of a country pub. Shivering and suffering from the numerous injuries and the effects of the blast from the fire extinguisher, he fell to his knees, crawled up on to the bank and lay on the damp grass for a few minutes to recover his breath and muster the strength to go on. All he wanted to do was curl up and escape into sleep.

  Blink.

  He came out of the trance, seizure or whatever the fuck it was with new resolve. In some way the mental break had worked like a battery charger. He felt infused with new strength and determination.

  Rising in a crouch, he made his way over to a high brick wall that bordered a long lawn. Keeping close to the wall, he scurried like a half-drowned rat scampering through a sewer. The Thames was reputedly cleaner than it had been in decades, with a burgeoning fish population; even wayward dolphins and whales had been sighted on several occasions in recent years. But the stink of his sodden clothes from the muddy water contradicted that finding.

  The sound of laughter and music drifted from the open rear door of the pub, so he veered away from the building to a gate that led from the garden into an ill-lit car park at its side. He staggered from vehicle to vehicle, eventually found an unlocked Audi, and paused to give his predicament some thought. He
felt vulnerable. He now had to improvise and dig himself out of a mess, without having the luxury of being able to plan in advance. If he was to have any chance of evading capture, then he would have to think clearly and foresee the actions of his enemies. His first impulse was to hot-wire the car and drive away. But no, he could not risk the chance of being stopped at a police roadblock. They may believe that he had drowned, but would seal off the area on the off chance that he had survived. He would only make good his getaway if he outthought them and kept calm. If the game was to continue, which it must, then he had to outmanoeuvre the slow-moving, witless plods who were hell-bent on ending it.

  Exiting the car, he closed the driver’s door and went to the rear. He was freezing, and hurting from head to foot, but ignored the discomfort and put it out of his mind. There would be time enough to worry about his physical condition when he had found a suitable place to lie low and recuperate. His sight was the main cause of concern. The compound from the fire-extinguisher had fucked up his vision. Everything appeared to be on the other side of a thin sheet of dirty ice, distorted and blurred. Hopefully, the river water – polluted or not– may have diluted the chemicals in time to save his eyes from any permanent damage.

  He opened the boot, climbed in, pulled the lid down until he heard the lock mechanism click into place, and then curled into a foetal position and waited in the pitch-black metal womb of the car.

  The slamming doors woke him from a dream in which he was chasing a naked female runner around Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. He was also naked, wielding a sharpened branch, and was gaining on his prey. Her mouth was open and she was screaming, but could not be heard above the noise of traffic and the chatter of tourists. He and his quarry were in a world a fraction out of sync with their surroundings. He could pass through people, and they were unaware of his presence. Only the concrete under his feet was solid. Increasing his pace, he reached out, grasped the prey by its flowing red hair, and pulled. The woman lost her footing. Her feet shot forward, and she left the ground in the same way that someone slipping on a banana skin would go down. Her back hit the unyielding grey paving stones with a loud smack. He knelt in front of her, and made ready to impale her, only to find that his short ash wood spear had become a bouquet of red roses. The young redhead began to laugh at him, as her features rearranged into those of his late mother.

  The absurdity of dreams was their attraction. It did not occur to him that in reality it would be ludicrous to be in this position. He could smell the roses, hear the masses of pigeons cooing, despite all efforts to banish them from the square, and could see the corpses of his prior victims shuffling towards him, to encircle him and reach out to claw at him with green-skinned fingers.

  “Now you’ll be sorry, Bobby, you’re a naughty, naughty boy” the apparition of his mother said.

  He awoke, back to suffer and shiver in the darkness. But not for long. The engine started and the Audi began to move.

  A magical mystery tour, he thought. Someone was unwittingly aiding his escape, taking him to their home, where he would be able to find warmth, dry clothes, food, and most importantly, sanctuary. With any luck the police would be convinced that he had drowned. The dumb bastards might spend days searching the Thames for his body. The relief of having escaped diminished the anger that he felt towards Caroline, Amy, and Dr Mark. He would hopefully have another chance to kill all three of them. The thought of the expressions on their faces when he ‘returned from the grave’ to take care of business made him snigger, like when he had been a schoolboy, up on the flat roof of the gymnasium block, looking down through a skylight into the girls’ shower room. He and Charlie Dodson had got away with it at least a dozen times. They would never have been caught, he believed, if Charlie hadn’t taken some Polaroids of the naked thirteen-year-olds and started showing them to classmates. Old ‘Dinger’ Bell, the music teacher, had caught him with them, and Charlie had not only admitted to having taken them, but grassed him up as being his accomplice. That was a valuable lesson, and was an incident that, with others, resulted in him trusting no one. He had been quite pleased when Charlie crashed a stolen car two years later, to be burned to death, trapped in the resulting wreckage. The bitch who had fried in the car with him was Pamela Briggs; one of the girls that he had photographed in the showers.

  Geoffrey and Felicity Collins were both retired school teachers, financially secure and living out their ‘golden years’ in a secluded cottage that backed on to the golf course at Esher. It had been the occasion of the sixty-fifth birthday of their dear friend, John Goodwin, another retired teacher, which had resulted in them driving over to the pub near Chertsey for a celebratory meal with John and his wife, Eileen.

  Geoffrey limited himself to a couple of small glasses of red wine with the meal, not prepared to risk losing his driving licence by being over the limit. The evening went well, and the four of them discussed the possibility of taking a cruise together the following year.

  “You didn’t lock it, again,” Felicity said, opening the passenger door of the Audi, climbing in and slamming it shut behind her.

  “It must be an inherent trust in my fellow man,” Geoffrey said, buckling up, starting the engine and turning the lights on before driving across the car park to the road.

  “I think it’s more likely to be one of those senior moments; an early sign of dementia,” Felicity said, slapping him on the leg, and then leaving her hand on his thigh. She felt horny. Funny how the older she got, the more she enjoyed sex. Maybe without the pressure of work, or their son living at home, her libido was responding to the lack of other stimuli. She wanted to sit on Geoffrey and work off the need that was demanding release, and hoped that he would be in the mood, and could get it up. He wasn’t impotent, but neither was he the ever-ready stud he had once been. She let her hand move up and over, and was rewarded by the feel of a healthy erection straining against cavalry twill.

  Blink.

  He was alone in a cocoon of darkness, and knew that he had suffered yet another of his fugues. They were becoming far too frequent, and his fear of one kicking in at an inopportune moment made him ill at ease. Had one taken place while he had been in the river, then he would almost certainly have drowned, unless his trusty auto pilot had stepped in to save the day. There was no way of knowing how long he had been ‘away’. The tink of hot metal cooling, and the stillness, told him that his unwary chauffeur had completed the journey. He counted to a thousand, twice, then kicked out the back of the rear seat, hoping – but not unduly worried – that the noise would not be heard and cause alarm.

  The car was garaged. He exited it and then took the time to strip off his still dripping clothing and dry himself with a tartan throw that had been on the rear seat of the Audi.

  Opening the garage’s side door, he investigated his surroundings. The detached cottage was in large, secluded gardens. A light shone from an upstairs window. He returned to the garage, wrapped the damp blanket around himself and climbed back in the front passenger seat of the car. He decided to wait for a while, to give them time to go to sleep, before breaking in.

  He dozed. It had been a hectic day, and he had much to contemplate. Not least the fact that Amy Egan had nearly been the end of him, not once, but twice in the space of a few hours. He fell asleep with the image of her pointing the gun at him. The dazzling flash had undoubtedly been his salvation, by spoiling her aim.

  When he woke again, he left the garage, having no idea what time it was. At the rear of the cottage he held the blanket over a small window of the kitchen door and punched it out. The sound was negligible, and the falling glass fell on to a thick coir doormat, which dampened the noise. He reached in, turned the key, which had been left in the lock, twisted the door handle and pushed. There was hardly any give. He stretched his arm up to the elbow inside the door, found the bolt, slid the bar back from the staple to release it, and entered the house.

  There was no knife rack to be seen on any of the tiled counters,
but a cutlery draw offered a wide selection of weapons. The house was quiet, save for the tick tock of a grandfather clock that stood sentry-like in the hall, as if guarding the stairs. He was suddenly hungry and thirsty, but that would have to wait. First things first. He would secure the area, as Mr FBI would probably say in cop speak. He climbed the stairs, and the act of stalking human prey dulled his pain and aroused him. All the negativity was dispelled. He was yet again fired-up and totally focused. What really turned him on, was that he had no idea where this was going, or what he might do next. He could outguess most people, but not himself. He felt charged, and the air seemed to spark around him. A manic excitement swelled in his mind. All his senses were heightened.

  Felicity had gone to sleep thoroughly sated. Geoffrey had risen admirably to the occasion, and with hardly any foreplay she had positioned herself over his turgid member, lowered herself on to it, and began to move, slowly at first, then faster and faster, crying out with unrestrained pleasure as the burning need within her was satisfied.

  She came awake to the nightmare, moonlit vision of a naked man standing at the side of the bed, holding a gleaming knife in his hand. As she watched, frozen and incapable of movement, he lowered himself next to her and put a finger to his lips, implying that she should not make a noise. She tried to scream; to break free from the bonds of fear that pinned her to the mattress, but might have been struck dumb; a state that no doubt saved her life.

  “What’s your hubby’s name, sweetheart?” Bobby said, touching the cold blade to her throat.

  The harsh voice released Felicity from her fright induced torpidity. “Geoffrey,” she whispered.