A Last Act of Charity (Killing Sisters Book 1)

by Frank Westworth

  ‘My . . . client . . .’ she began again.

  ‘Your john. You needn’t tell me who he is. If he’s the guy who owns this place then I’ll soon know who he is anyway. I didn’t know you knew government people. It might be better for us all if I don’t know who he is.’

  Stoner’s grip on his serious expression was hard to maintain. She squeezed and rubbed more; stood a little closer to him. He could smell nothing but her; feel nothing but her; hear nothing but her. His world was centred only on her. Which is a dangerous place to be.

  ‘My john . . . thanks for that . . . I think you’re right . . . asked me to come and stay. It’s not the first time. I’ve known him for a while. He came to me from a recommend . . . or was it an agency?’

  Stoner remarked with some tension that he didn’t need history, he could get history on the History Channel; he simply wanted to know what she was doing here and why he was here too.

  ‘He said he had important news for me. Good news. News I would like to hear. He is a . . . generous man. He pays very well, he is almost always polite and he is almost always clean. He brings me gifts . . .’

  Once again Stoner suggested that brevity would be a bonus. Not least because things were becoming urgently messy in a personal way and he didn’t want her to stop what she was doing but would need to stop her soon if he was to retain any pretence at focus. Losing focus in situations like this is usually the point at which the bad men wearing bad hair and bad suits and with bad intentions were most likely to appear and ruin his already tiring day. She stood closer to him; pressing her bare abdomen against the thumbs which were inflicting the damage. A lesser man might have wept at this point. Stoner struggled with his focus.

  ‘He told me it was a family matter, and I could share his delight. I thought his son had won a Nobel Prize or his daughter had married a horse and produced prize-winning marrows or something. But no. No. He’s thrown his wife out of this house and decided to divorce her. It’s funny, but I’d never thought he had a wife. Seemed too . . . tough for that. I think she’s keeping at least one of his other houses. He has several houses, you know, and . . .’

  Stoner’s strained suggestion was that she stick closer to the matter in hand. She smiled. She could appreciate wit.

  ‘He wants me to live here. Forever. If I live here, then he’ll give me this house for as long as I want it. He’ll pay for it and he’ll maintain it. There is a very large garden. I think I could like gardening. All his houses . . . I think . . . I’ve only seen three of them . . . Have large gardens. Which is a bit strange, because he’s not very interested in . . .’

  Stoner’s demand that she get back to the plot was made through misting eyes and straining senses; she was moving briskly against him.

  ‘He would like me to be his wife. But without the actual marriage thing. I don’t believe he really wants a divorce. I think he just said that to sound good. So I’d take him seriously. I don’t care about that bit. I knew you’d be really pleased. I know you don’t enjoy what I do, but I do need to live. And I thought that I would give it a try for a bit and then surprise you. I could give up on the game and you could stop being angry about it, and we would get lots more time together and I can come with you and we can solve crimes together. That would be brilliant.

  ‘Come on, come on, come on . . . that’s better. You’ll feel easier now. You were too tense. You are always too tense. There is no need to be tense with me.’

  Stoner rocked on his feet. His sight steadied, as did his balance. A lesser woman would have reached for the tissues. The dirty blonde emptied him between them and rubbed herself against him, took her hands from him and ran them around his waist.

  ‘Can you forgive me? Can you kiss me now? Can we go to bed now?’

  ‘Where is he?’ Stoner’s equilibrium was returning. The moment for bad men in bad suits had passed and he felt more like kitchen for coffee than bedroom for a fuck.

  ‘He’s had to return . . .’ she switched voices to a thickened BBC radio announcer’s; ‘. . . m’lord has returned to the House. There is a committee or a conclave – what exactly is a conclave? – and he has to be there to make great big important decisions.’ She smiled at Stoner. ‘He’s been whipped, he says. He always enjoys talking about whips but never uses one. Not with me, anyway. Back the day after tomorrow. Sorry; tomorrow now. He won’t be early. He’s never early. Have you noticed that people who think they’re important expect everyone else to be early but never are themselves? Coffee?’

  Stoner’s cell phone shook in his pocket. He lifted it out, read the message, flicked it shut again and sighed.

  She read him clearly; ‘Wam bam, thank you mam. Off so soon, JJ?’

  He rocked his head. ‘Not yet. Not yet. Did you say something about coffee?’

  She led him deeper into the house, into a world changing from fake ancient charm to modern honesty; a bright shining kitchen flickered fluorescently into view.

  ‘Fresh or jug?’

  Stoner went through phases where he took his coffee seriously. The dirty blonde had never understood why, but respected any oddity. It had often proved to be a professional strength. Stoner merely grunted. ‘Hot. Wet. Black.’ Nothing too complicated.

  ‘You cross with me, JJ?’

  For a moment, the dirty blonde looked serious. She could do this. Stoner wondered whether it was an act; how far from being another john was he, really? How far from the manipulations? Her serious look stabilised, steadied, still appeared sincere.

  ‘Not cross, babe. Not angry. Just . . . concerned. You know how it is. I know how you are. You can control men, but not all men and not all the time.’

  A familiar chorus. Familiarity eases tensions. Which is not always a great idea. He looked up at her. ‘What do you want? You have a house, a home. You can stay there. Live there as you want. Call it your own. Do with it what you want. Decorate. I don’t know. Anything. Isn’t it . . . grand enough for you? Do you really want something . . . like this?’ He spread his arms wide, taking in the whole gleaming brightness. ‘Do you . . . I mean . . . do you even cook?’

  She looked down. Looked at the immaculately expensive floor tiles. ‘The house is nothing, JJ. The place I live is your house. It belongs to you. You can come and you can go. All the others living in the house pay you rent. Proper rent. You visit me in your house and your . . . friends come and go and I am furniture. Fucking furniture. Furniture you fuck. The fucking pays the real rent. I know how it is. I do this, don’t I? I do this for money.’ She was shouting, almost.

  He looked as lost as he felt. And he felt anger rising, dully. ‘You want to pay me more rent? Why?’

  ‘Because then I’d be more than just your whore. I’m everybody’s whore. Take the money out of it, JJ, and what’s left? What is left?’

  Stoner sank onto a stool. This was a familiar conversation. He was weary of it, and knew she was too. ‘He’ll be listening, y’know. Your lordly nightshade. Your would-be master. He’ll have the place wired. Cameras too, most likely. Is he really a lord? A real lord?’

  ‘Not sure. How would I know for sure? If you know who he is, would that be a problem? Problem for us?’ For a moment, the dirty blonde looked almost concerned. Sad, almost. Cautious.

  Stoner pondered. ‘I don’t think so. Depends. I’ve certainly not been here before. I’d have remembered that. But I’ll know the type of guys who do his security, and they’ll all be good guys, efficient guys, and he’ll want to know what goes on in his house and they’ll know how to let him know. That’s the way it is. Men in your lord’s league always work like that. If he lets you alone in his house then he’ll want to know you’re not trashing it, not inviting in strange men, doing parties and stuff. He’ll have watchers. It’s no big deal. I don’t think it’s a big deal. Does he bring his work home? Does he talk work here? If he does, then he’ll most likely record it. He’s a minister, is he? Some serious high-up? The Hard Man might know him.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. That twat? W
hy is he always numero uno in your thoughts, JJ?’ She was suddenly distracted. Off-track. ‘Already you’re talking about him. Again. He is one pig. One pig swilling with the other pigs like him. Dirty snouts fighting for the trough.’ She sounded confused. Oddly worried. Nervous.

  Stoner sighed. ‘Oh, fuck this, babe. I didn’t come here to fight. Why would you living here get us closer? That’s all I want to know. I give you all the room you want.’

  His cell phone called for him again. He ignored it. As soon as his phone ceased its urgency another phone began to blast out bad music; a phone on one of the shining cutting blocks in the gleaming kitchen. They both looked up, both said ‘You get it’ in unison, both smiled. Stoner picked it up and thumbed the green icon. Listened. Sat down again, heavily. Said nothing. Flicked the device silent.

  ‘Hope you enjoy being a film star,’ he said, raising eyebrows high enough to peer through them at her. She smiled back, dropped her robe to the floor, rubbed her breasts and performed a stately twirl for the unseen eyes.

  ‘Oh, I’ve done porn. Everybody films themselves fucking these days. Everybody. They got audio here as well?’ Her gaze drifted to Stoner, who nodded.

  ‘You know him? The security man?’

  Stoner nodded again.

  ‘So m’lord doesn’t have to hear why I’d be doing this with you? I can negotiate with security. If you want me to?’ She simpered in a professional way.

  ‘Not worth the bother. If he’s inviting you to stay here . . . to live here, then he’ll make conditions, I expect. But you’d have to agree to them first. Probably. I don’t know. Not my top subject, this. I just don’t see how it’s an improvement for you over what you’ve got. But you don’t need to explain it. Just make up your mind, do what you want to do. It’s best. You want to pretend to be lady someone, then do it. Just do it. Sort out what you want, tell me and we’ll work it out. But you knew that, yes? And . . .’ he sighed, ‘it would probably be best if I keep away from him.’

  She nodded.

  ‘There’s a price.’ Stoner sounded suddenly serious.

  ‘There always is, JJ, but . . . not with you, not with me. What is it?’

  ‘If you get serious with him, just tell me. I don’t want to know anything else from this point on. You live here and act like his . . . consort or whatever. I can handle that. You start having . . . feelings, tell me and I’ll step outside for a while. Promise?’

  She walked to his side and reached for his hand. Held it. Squeezed it. Pulled him with her through the house.

  And in the lonely midnight . . .

  ‘JJ?’

  ‘Mmmm’

  ‘Can they hear me, us, too?’

  ‘What? Who?’

  ‘M’lord Posh; can he hear us now? In the dark?’

  ‘Dunno. Depends. On what he wants to hear.’

  ‘If you’d done his set-up, would you set it to hear us now?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘JJ?’

  ‘Mmmm?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Stoner sleeps like the dead man he will one day become. Unconcerned. Untroubled. Uncomplicated. Pretty much the only time he sleeps like this is when the dirty blonde sleeps beside him. He tries not to recognise this, to be unaware of it. He just accepts that given the chance he would sleep like this, like the dead man he will one day become, every night.

  His cell phone flashes its summons into the warmth and the dark of the piled clothes, discarded along with them. It silently cries into the night many times, with decreasing frequency. No one hears it, no one sees its urgency.

  In the darkness, her skin is almost invisibly dark, just a dull gleam; a small gloss moment in a dark mass. Her hair is a golden cap reflecting the tiny light. Like a halo. Like a crown of pale thorns in the darkness.

  17

  GREEN LIGHT

  Driving. Driving again. This time into the big city itself. Endless demands from the Hard Man that they meet, that they resume their several interrupted conversations. Stoner could see little purpose to this. Both he and the Hard Man subscribed to the manwatcher’s theory that the full content of any serious conversation was available only when all the parties to that conversation were in direct line of sight, sound and sensation of each other, but there was nothing new nor meaningful to discuss since their last conversation. Telephone conversations, text messages, email and loudhailers all had their limitations, but any one of those simple, two-dimensional media would have been fine for two folk to agree that nothing had happened. Nothing relevant. Nothing important.

  An agreement to say something only when there was something to say was their normally preferred way of working. Less babble, less background, less clutter. More focus, more opportunity to talk about, something worthwhile.

  Today his physical presence was in demand. It could be an irritation, but the invitation would be hard to decline.

  The heavy Transporter ploughed its way through light traffic and shrugged off anything bigger with disdain. It was a comfortable way to travel. Quiet, the big engine insulated behind walls of sound-absorbency and performing its motive function in a typically efficient Teutonic way. A lesser advantage of fitting an engine with around three times the original unit’s performance was that the engine was never working hard at any even faintly legal road speed. It idled along major roads in a high gear, no stress, less effort, little noise and no vibration at all. The drive train and the engine’s mountings were specified to handle that engine at full bellow, and at a gentle canter they transmitted no sign of the engine’s presence into the driver’s domain.

  Peter Green’s distinctively thin Gibson soloing leaked from several speakers into the hush of the cabin. His weary, world-stained voice wondered why; why don’t you give it up, bring it home to me, write it on a piece of paper, baby, so it can be read to me . . . Stoner’s thoughts wandered uselessly between the previous night and the approaching meet, between fleshy pleasure and fleshy pain, wondering and wandering with an atypical absence of focus. He had nothing to say to the Hard Man, and the Hard Man could have nothing to say that he wanted to hear.

  He swung the Transporter from the main road to a suburban cluster, drifting towards his own part of town, watching mirrors as was his habit. No one following. No menace. Nothing to worry about. Stoner was almost puzzled by this. His presence in the parsonage had certainly been recorded as well as observed, by uncertain friends if not by actual foes. His was a small world, manipulated by the media which described and defined it.

  A quiet suburban car park, then. The Transporter was as secure as a vehicle can be. Silently locked, silently alarmed, waiting in silence for its pilot to reappear. If vehicles could boast character, then the Transporter would be stoic, dozing doglike dreams maybe, of oil changes and chases, the sudden sprint and the pounce, the growl and the gripping, hanging on.

  Stoner slid from the passenger door, slipped into a fast stride away from his house, crossed the road. Stopped. Sat on a wall, flipped open his cell phone, made a clown’s exaggerated performance of reading and sending text messages. Sent not one in fact, but several in fantasy, face pointing hard at the small screen while eyes and ears watched around him.

  Nothing. Background noise, the chatter of the living, the mindless random of everyday life. No obviously false patterns and no obvious interruptions to the pointless performance of suburban existence. Folk doing what folk do. As always, Stoner wondered what it was that they did, and why they would choose to do it. But not for long. Life is too short to wonder about the lives of others. Those, the many others, that is. Individuals are more interesting, and stand out from the crowd. There were no obvious individuals nearby. No one of obvious interest.

  He walked fast alongside an old wall, mortar and tired brick. A wall of a long-gone building, now a wall containing nothing, hiding nothing apart from Stoner, who strode with the ease and confidence of the long-distance walker toward his own house, a house he claimed to inhabit, but which was not and never had been his home. The
dirty blonde lived there, although she was currently waiting for someone to claim her in their own home. Mr Tran lived there, along with a volatile and transient array of companions, fellow travellers and those on the run. And the techno prisoners could often be found nearby, hooked in, as they often were, to Mr Tran’s companionable caravanserai. Stoner owned the house. His name was writ loud on papers supporting this view, but it was never home, not for him.

  The habitual paranoia of his trade found him approaching his house more than once and from more than one direction. For no reason he could express, he wished his whereabouts to be less than public knowledge for a while. Privacy felt prudent. The old wall was cut by a doorway. Stoner pushed through it, latched it behind him. Ran down a short descent of steps to a cellar door, pushed through that and latched it behind him. Complex gimmick locks are great for the movies; a deadbolt is dead simple and dead reliable. There is no silent way to defeat a deadbolt, no way to break in without attracting attention. Underrated, deadbolts and latches.

  Mr Tran was waiting for him. Stoner had no clue how this could be. If he wanted to see Mr Tran, to talk with him, then Mr Tran would be waiting for him with oriental patience; if he had no wish to see Mr Tran, then Mr Tran would be nowhere to be found. Another mystery skill, one of many hidden within the quiet Vietnamese features.

  ‘You have been to see Missy.’ It was not a question. ‘She is well.’ Neither was that. Mr Tran was practising making statements in English, which was neither his first nor his second language. ‘You are working a case for that man.’ No questions today. This was a day of statements.

  ‘I am.’ Stoner agreed.

  Mr Tran bowed slightly, recognising the reply as the truth that it was. ‘Tea.’ He led Stoner through into his own rooms, walking in silence as if it were natural, which it might be among Vietnamese, and leaving the door open behind them. Stoner turned to close it; Mr Tran prevented this with a raised hand and a smile. ‘Your telephone.’ He held out his left hand. Stoner dropped the phone into that open hand, which opened the phone, flicked the green key. Nothing. No glimmer of electronic life. Stoner dropped the battery into that open hand. Mr Tran smiled and returned both cell phone and power cell to their owner.