A Last Act of Charity (Killing Sisters Book 1)

by Frank Westworth

  ‘Bit bloody obvious, though. “Here I am! Come look at me, Harley-Davidson Man,” surely. For one who likes to skulk about they’re a bit brazen.’

  ‘That’s the whole point. Part of it, anyway. Folk see the Harley, assume the rider’s some urban wannabee badass and ignore you. Even other bike riders ignore you. Perfect invisible machine. Like the Transporter, only cooler. You can sit on any city street on that and so many folk see you that you are completely hidden. You can wear body armour, Kevlar kit, hide your face and carry all manner of offensive weaponry and no one, absolutely no one takes a blind bit. Perfect, as someone once sang.’

  ‘Three? Each one more . . . ah . . . menacing than the last?’ Shard was mocking, but not much.

  ‘No. The others are dull ex-army camo trail bikes. I keep one in town and one in the van. Perfect. Same reason as the big hog, but one hundred per cent disposable. Used them all the time before I . . . retired. Great for following, shadowing, surveillance, dodging traffic, riding footpaths through parks, one-ways, ratruns, the lot. Nice NATO specification, too; big carriers, even a box for a light rifle and an invisibility switch which kills the electrics apart from the sparks. Made for me. Love them. Dog-cheap, too. Fuck me.’

  ‘Not while there’s a dog on the street, JJ, what’s up?’

  ‘There’s a message from Mallis. Contact number. Time for a drive. Need to be away from here, then. Time for tea somewhere, plainly. Want to come? Any preferred destination? How’d you get here anyway? Helicopter? Ninja midget submarine? Something even more James Bond?’ Stoner shut down the PC, pulled leads from ports and plugs from sockets as he did so, shrugged into shoes and a jacket. Shard was ahead of him, standing by the motorcycle.

  ‘Is there room in that wagon of yours for my bicycle?’

  Stoner stared. ‘Bloody hell. Fit bastard.’

  20

  AND I PRACTISE WHAT I PREACH

  Stoner closed his cell phone. Sat, silent for a moment, looking at it. Looked up at Shard, who gazed back impassively.

  ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Well? That all sounded most amicable,’ Shard raised a mug of supposed coffee halfway to his lips, changed his mind and set it down again. ‘But you are so good at the paranoid security thing that I have no idea at all what you were both talking about.’

  ‘All. All talking. Both prisoners were talking with lucky old me. The marvels of modern science, so forth.’ Stoner looked around. They were alone, pretty much, the grim roadside eatery proving unpopular even with hurried men on the move. ‘Big, big coincidences. And they’re always trouble.’

  ‘How so, my man? Share with Shard, your local confessor.’

  Even Stoner looked alarmed at that.

  ‘Identities of the heads are confirmed; details even now wafting to an email address I’d forgotten I had, so it should be decently secure. If I can remember its passwords. If not . . . Mallis no doubt knows them. Little of interest there. The interest’s in the coincidences. But I need to think a little. Do you know anywhere which serves actual coffee? Even an entirely addicted caffeine cowboy could not survive on this piss.

  ‘OK. The deadheads are no-marks. Nobodies. Oh the jokes just keep pouring out. It’s a laugh a minute here. There is no reason for us to be involved. None. Apart from the fact that our employers wish it. They’re messy deaths, but the plods will probably catch their man eventually, and if they don’t it’s hardly a matter of concern to our masters and lords. What is a concern is that on each day of the dead there’s another death. Always close geographically, and always an alleged accident. Or an alleged natural cause. Of someone of interest. Someone too young and too useful to be dead. The latest is a plod, in fact, quite a senior one, offed in some spa hotel. Drowned in their posh pool while taking an early morning swim before power breakfasting, or whatever top cops do in spa hotels.

  ‘What’s interesting to the terrible technical prisoners is that so far there isn’t a messy death to match up with mister dead policeman. No dead head. If their theory is something like correct, there will be. My theory is that the other guy, the head donor, won’t be found until some clueless innocent cleaner goes to clean his hotel room, innocently.’

  ‘Then there’ll be shrieking, and running and shouting, and panic and plods all over. Just, exactly what we – that’s thee’n’me, JJ – do not want. Can your master hold the scene for you before SOCO whip in and stomp all over the place in their size fifteens?’ Shard sipped, with caution.

  Stoner was almost amused that Shard was plainly intent upon them working as a team, a partnership. That would be the first time for a very long time, and although he preferred to work alone he was well aware that Shard’s skill set was perfectly complementary, and so long as Shard would accept that any partnership between them was not going to be a democracy, then it could work well.

  ‘It’s more likely that Mallis will catch breaking news on police channels about the death before my boss does.’

  ‘Have you asked them to keep an ear out?’

  ‘No need. Not with Mallis. He’ll call as soon as. If theory is good theory, then the next death will be close by the last death. Drive time. Do you and your bicycle need a lift?’

  Shard smiled, nodded. They drove. But not far.

  ‘Here it comes.’ Stoner swung the Transporter to the side of the road, flicked on the hazard lights. Answered the shaking cell phone: ‘Yes?’ Then a long silence while he listened. Followed by a couple of affirmative grunts, and he handed the phone to his companion.

  ‘There’ll be a text any moment now with an address. Get that, memorise it, then climb into the back and dig out anything that looks a little like current police ID. There should be something in one of the racks, drawers, y’know. There’ll be a blue flashing light, too, somewhere. I always prefer the subtle, silent stealth approach.’

  ‘Messy again?’ Shard was all business.

  ‘Hard to say from the panic, but we’ll need to press on a little if we’re to get there before the blue boys. Pass the phone.’

  Blue lights flashing from the windscreen, phone in hand, Stoner dialled the Hard Man, waited less than a single complete ring for the reply.

  ‘OK. So we have a body. We have two bodies. The first is the plod you know about, the second is a civvy stiff you don’t. Yet. But you will. As soon as you get notified about the second, the messy one, will you keep the law away from the scene? Thanks. I’ll be there in fifteen, need another fifteen in peace and quiet. No, I’ll be on my own. Why? There a problem?

  ‘OK. Can you do the delaying thing? It would help. No, I don’t know who he is. Do you have firm ID on the dead plod yet? OK. I’ll be arriving in the van with lights flashing. I’ll pretend to be legal and lawful and things like that. Really could do without the real plods appearing while I’m there. No, I won’t touch anything, I just want to feel the scene before SOCO turn it into their own private playground. Thank you. I’ll leave the cell on.’

  He closed the call, pocketed the phone. Grinned. ‘Here we go.’

  ‘Going alone, JJ? There are two of us. Hello?’ Shard looked expectant.

  ‘You’re the lone bicyclist, matey. The last scene I saw, I was watched. Know it.’

  Shard nodded. Paranoia was a trade technique all its own.

  ‘I need you to watch the watcher. Find the fucker and follow him. No contact, no fighting, no being seen. You do that?’ Shard nodded again. ‘I’ll drop you a couple of blocks away. Use this number. All good, ’cos we’re here.’

  ‘Yep. I’ll call.’

  The Transporter scraped the kerb and stopped to release its passenger. Shard piled around to the back, removed his mountain bike, vanished down an alley with a hiss of tyres and was gone.

  Blue lights strobed from the Transporter’s screen, and Stoner parked it outside the unremarkable motel.

  Flashing lights, an air of hurry and authority. A waved ID and a shouted demand. They all work together to open doors and gain directions to a hotel room. Milling. A tight knot of frighte
ned folk. Stoner pulled them around him, told them to sit down, calm down and drink a few cups of anything they might find soothing. Instructions: stay away from the doors. Wait for the boys in blue. Keep their valued statements fresh by trying not to talk about what they might know, think or have imagined. Talk instead about the weather, the football, the government. Meanwhile, Stoner assured them, they were perfectly safe; the criminal was long gone. Even as he spoke the words, Stoner wondered whether they were true.

  He ran up endless flights of endless stairs, found the offended room, slid the keycard and eased the door open with his toe; both hands free, senses switched on. Stripped off jacket and shoes and pulled on the familiar white paper suit and the white paper shoe covers and the white paper hat with the elastic and the light blue surgical gloves. He intended to touch nothing, nothing at all, but he also intended to leave no trace of his presence. No point in causing extra work for the real workers, after all.

  Death. A reclining corpse. A man in repose. And in pieces.

  21

  NO TRAINS TO HEAVEN

  ‘Little Willie in a johnnie?’ The Hard Man was plainly entertained by the whole thing. ‘You caught a dick in the bog? You went fishing in the toilet? Jesus weeping Christ, JJ, what is all this? And how did you know about the stiff before I did? Professional interest only. I’m not suggesting that you killed him.’ That was perhaps an example of his sense of humour. Maybe an attempt at levity. It was difficult to tell.

  Stoner shifted in his seat. As was his way, the Hard Man had met him in a restaurant, although eating was a long way down Stoner’s list of priorities. A very long way down a rather short list.

  ‘The head was sitting on the desk. Just sitting there. Leaking. It had not been easy to remove it. Most of the mess in the room came from the effort involved in hacking the thing off the neck. It sounds as though it should be easy enough, but it’s not. It’s not like chopping the head off a dead chicken. At a guess, I’d think the killer used a proper butcher’s cleaver or something very like that. Something heavy, sharp, and with enough depth of blade to stop it twisting around and going nowhere every time it encountered bone or sinew. It’s too easy to get the blade stuck in gristle. Bugger to pull it out. You get crap flying everywhere.’

  ‘Not a samurai sword, then?’ It was never easy to know whether the Hard Man was making a joke.

  ‘Doubt it. The katana is supposed to be sharp enough to remove head from neck in a single slice, but you need a lot of skill to do that. And hiding a sword in your back pocket isn’t too easy. A butcher’s axe would fit into a suitcase. Briefcase. Overnight bag. Why the thought, though? Do you have another serial somewhere which involves some tough nutter flailing about with a sword? Some cretin with a fixation for bad Japanese movies who’s watched Kill Bill too often?’

  The Hard Man shook his head. Said no more. Watched Stoner, silently and steadily. Did not even pretend his usual stoic fascination with the contents of the menu. Not that any waiter seemed over-keen on serving them. Maybe they’d been told to keep away from the debriefing. Which was, Stoner recognised, exactly what the working lunch actually was. Although it was late afternoon, the Hard Man had suggested that they consider their meeting to be lunch. Stoner had no problem with whatever they called it. Time is just time; it ebbs and it flows, labels applied to it generally fall off at inconvenient moments.

  ‘The head was the proud possessor of a shiny new Apple laptop, and that fine machine was connected to your favourite murder fansite, transmitting – guess what – a video of the head to that very site. Or, to be more accurate, it had sent about an hour’s worth of video, lost the connection and shut itself down. No idea why. Computers should remain a mystery to everyone except those who understand them, that’s the way things should be. No doubt the sad fucks at murder merry mayhem or whatever it’s called are even now creaming their collective unwashed and ill-fitting jeans over what they imagine to be a decently realistic dummy dead head. Bully for them, of course. I’ll check. Unless you’d rather do that?’

  The Hard Man shook his head a little. ‘Done that. The site’s still running about an hour of utterly pointless and not even faintly pleasant footage of some sad fuck’s head. Techs are even as we speak manipulating the early part of the show to see whether they can pull more from it. There’s shadow movement at the beginning, which I’d imagine to be the killer moving around the room until he leaves. But I’m not hopeful. This guy is too smart to leave reflections of himself in things. But looking harder never hurt, so looking harder they are. Tell me more, Sherlock?’

  ‘Clothes neatly piled on the single chair. These motel rooms are small. Functional. No wardrobe as such. Coat rack with a jacket and an overcoat. Nothing remarkable. Shoes together beneath the chair. Suitcase against a wall, case for the laptop on the desk. Body on the bed. A lot of blood. Lots. The head had been hacked off with the bod lying on the bed, face-up and alive. Spray of hard blood all over the wall and the nicely meaningless picture above the bed.

  ‘Heart had run for a decent while after the neck arteries had been cut, so you can work out for yourself how much blood was on the bed, the floor as well as the walls. Sodden in places. No, I did not walk through it. It was well set, though, congealed. Room was cold, but the drips had stopped dripping long ago. The plods will give you ToD.

  ‘Bod spread-eagled, so not conscious for the excitement, the entertainment. No one on the planet would lie still while some maniac chopped their head off in front of them. They’d need to be seriously out of it. You’ll get toxicology, I expect?’

  ‘Yes. Won’t take long. They don’t get many murders out here in the shires. They go in for death by a thousand glares rather than hacking folk apart with axes. Backstabbing rather than honest-to-goodness full frontal assault. Each to his own. The dick?’

  ‘Cut off after the ticker had ticked for the last time. Blood oozed rather than pumped. Cut off with a knife or similar. Sharp; a cutting not a chopping blade, so two blades used at least. No hacking, chopping, no particular mess nor gratuitous disfigurement. Circumcised but a long while ago, and not by the killer. Clean cut, balls left where they should be.

  ‘Cock in a condom. Your merry forensic men can tell you whether our man enjoyed a last blast before meeting his maker in the jolly hereafter, unless it had been in the pan for too long.’

  ‘Yes, JJ. I’ll get the usual from forensics. If you want and if it helps, I’ll pass it on to you. You’ve been fishing in dangerous water again.’ The Hard Man was offering encouragement of a sort. ‘And you’ve answered a question?’

  ‘As you say. The last two bodies you showed me were dickless as well as headless, but we’d assumed that the killer had some bizarre trophy fetish and had kept the dicks for kicks, or something. But I bet they went down the toilet, too. Then there was just that one message, that “sin” thing. In truth, I wondered about that. The scenes were so messed up, deliberately messed up, that I’d felt something was being hidden. Just pointless confusion. Distraction.’

  ‘The pig blood was a bit of a giveaway there, JJ. Do you have any idea what that particular nastiness was all about?’

  ‘No. Apart from some serious attempt at obscuring something bloody. How many human blood types were present, that sort of thing. There was nothing at this scene which didn’t come from the bod, so far as I could see. But I did have the feeling that if I’d waited for SOCO and the plods to arrive and do their stumbling about, then someone else might have got to the scene before I did . . . maybe before the regular plods, even. I’m not the only guy on the planet who can listen in to emergency calls or pay folk to do that for me.’

  ‘As you say. Why did you go rooting around the plumbing, though? Did you really think that the regulars would have missed it?’

  Stoner nodded his reply. The Hard Man sighed, leaned back in his chair and flicked a hand for a waiter, who materialised instantly, accepted the Hard Man’s order for the two of them and vanished again.

  He looked up: ‘
So this is a sex crime? Whore lures john to motel, pimp does . . . does what? Pimp kills, hacks heads; whore chops off their dicks? I can’t make much sense of this. I mean . . . I can offer endless suggestions, we can all do that, lord love us, but none makes much sense. Got any thoughts you’d care to share? Be as off the wall as you like. This makes little sense to me.’

  ‘What makes the least sense to me, oh great master, is why your own deities are interested or involved. If you felt an unusual urge to level a little more with me on that score I think I could make more progress, frankly. No offence intended.’

  ‘None, as they say in the movies, taken. It would be disingenuous of me to tell you that I have no idea why my own employers are sufficiently bothered about some string of whack jobs to employ us, rather than letting the more mundane forces of law and order do their relentless jobs, but I can’t see how my own theorising could fail to obstruct the clarity of your own thinking. No shit, JJ; I’m being straight. If you can convince me that you need to know more, then I’ll think about laying more of this crap on your shoulders, but I don’t see how it will help. But I can repeat – in case you’ve managed to forget – that your pal Harding is apparently fingering you for at least one of these jobs.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I mean.’ Stoner glared across the table. Food arrived. He ignored it. Both men waved away the over-attentive waiter. ‘He, Shard, Harding, is completely certain that my involvement is purely investigative. We’ve discussed the subject at some considerable length. And in depth. And with near murderous intensity.’ Stoner’s voice had risen. ‘Which we both assume was someone’s intention. Any idea who that someone might be? Because I truly do hate being set up, being set up to act the idiot.’ He was almost shouting.

  The Hard Man chewed slowly, with the air of a man reflecting.