A Last Act of Charity (Killing Sisters Book 1)

by Frank Westworth

  Stoner smiled, despite himself. ‘Doing good, Shard, doing good. And then?’

  ‘Then you’re off. On foot. Why on the foot, JJ? Your truck’ll be towed by now. Your problem. There’s movement. He’s in sight. Not a big guy; easy to take down. Big coat, watch cap, gloves, silent shoes. A pro tracker and a good one, I’d guess. Maybe military, but didn’t smell like it to me. I kept well back. You took a call, made a call, whatever; waved the bright light of your phone for all to see. Maybe you were surfing the porn, who can tell? You stopped. Your trail stopped. You looked around and, fuck me, he vanished, right in front of me, right before my eyes. Panic rises. Mistake time; I was watching you and not the guy with the soft shoes.

  ‘You move on; he reappears. It’s like a switch. If he’s that good then he’ll know I’m there, so I allow some distance, follow you for a little. But no; he’s still there. You change direction, head off somewhere east. He follows for maybe 400 metres and then stops. Looks like he’s talking; a headset, earpiece, something. Turns around, scans, scans again. Shows no sign of having spotted me, but I don’t know. Walks back to the hotel. I’m in doorways, in bloody front, no shoelaces to tie, no excuses for being there. I ring a doorbell. Avon calling. He passes me on the far side of the street. No glance my way; I can’t see a face, not a hair, no clues. Big hat, high collar, cold night.

  ‘Walks straight past the hotel. Not a pause. Meat wagon’s present and correct, boys in blue and men in white idling the way they do. He stops and he stares. No hurry, just another rubber-necker. Turns the corner we came in by, lights up a car, climbs in and gone. Number’s on the text to yours. I lean on the pedals but there’s no traffic and a bicycle is not too clever when the enemy’s driving. End of. Went home and shouted at myself a little.

  ‘Good idea about the bike, JJ. Shame it’s not got an engine, huh? Bloody shame. What now? Where are you? You were silent all night. Strange time to go to a party.’

  24

  MOTOR VANS, ELECTRIC SOUNDS

  ‘Sometimes I think I’ve wasted the last twenty years.’ The dirty blonde’s lament scraped from the cell phone’s struggling speaker. ‘You there, JJ? You hearing me?’

  Stoner grunted. The heavy Transporter’s cabin was technically and expensively quiet, the darkness all outside. The ride and the roads were smooth, the phone sat snug in its dock, no bad connection crackles interrupted the one-way flow.

  In the same way that the dirty blonde would sometimes achieve an almost magically manic level of excitement over matters which appeared to Stoner – and probably to the rest of the functional world – to be mundane, so at other times her excitement turned into an equally manic form of misery, mixed with doubt and defeat. Most of the peaks and most of the troughs came and went of their own volition. Stoner was always made forcefully aware of them, but he rarely actually understood the stimuli. Sometimes the mania thrilled him, brought new life to old emotions . . . sometimes he simply switched off from it, refused to let it interfere with the constancy of his own uniquely intense feelings for her. It often paid a dividend to be aware of but undamaged by emotional extremes in others, he felt.

  ‘I’ve been doing this since I was twelve. You know that. You know that, JJ, because I’ve told you before.’ Her voice sounded flat, empty. It might have been the low quality of the signal or the weedy speaker. And it might not.

  ‘I always tell you, JJ. I only tell you. Only you. Don’t know why. Why is that? You there, JJ? You still there? You hung up? You never hang up. Not on me.’

  Stoner grunted. Kicked the side of the transmission tunnel. The heavy Transporter was resolutely solid, it made little noise. Its carpet was thick and dense, its steels robust, impervious steels, efficient steels. He kicked it again, harder. With extra conviction. The cell phone shuddered in its dock, the signal crackled in a gratifying way. Stoner felt increasingly calm. He had felt calm enough before this, but greater calmness grew and spread within him.

  ‘You’re driving again. OK. I know you don’t like talking when you’re driving. Just say hi or something.’

  Stoner grunted. Kicked the car again. The phone rattled obligingly. ‘It’s not a good line,’ he shouted, face pointing away from the cell phone’s microphone.

  ‘Not a good time?’ The dirty blonde sounded momentarily concerned.

  ‘It’s always a good time, babe.’ Stoner aimed to reproduce the sound of a man concerned but harassed, interested but interrupted. He had no idea why this might be important. Or to whom.

  ‘You’re always driving. Driving, driving, driving. We don’t get enough time together because you’re always driving.’ Petulance was defeating concern. Her voice sounded exactly as a voice sounds in the morning after a lengthy and chemically fuelled night. ‘We should spend more time together,’ she sounded, almost angry. She was rarely angry.

  Stoner grunted.

  ‘Where are you driving to? You won’t tell me. You’ll tell me that I don’t need to know and I don’t need to worry and you’ll tell me when you see me. Have you found another body?’ The voice sounded suddenly more alert, a glint of optimism lightening the thunderclouds.

  ‘Many more bodies?’

  Stoner grunted.

  ‘I know, I know. You’ll tell me later. You’re not the only one who’s busy, either. His eminence, his lordship . . . whatever, got a whole pile of calls last night. I’m shattered. Hardly any fucking sleep. Every time I managed to drift away some twat called him up. He’s not like you, JJ. He doesn’t turn that bloody phone off. I turned it off when he went for a slash, but do you know what? Some twat called him on another phone. He’s got loads of them. Why would anyone have more than one phone, for fuck’s sake?’

  One of Stoner’s other phones lit up and shook in an enticing manner. Shard. He left it. He was finding the dirty blonde’s monologue almost relaxing; monologue therapy. Excellent stuff. It eased a tension from which he was not yet suffering. A sort of down-payment investment for future tensions. He enjoyed the idea of that. Maybe there’d be a profit in it? The Hard Man would know. But would certainly steal the notion if so. A conundrum.

  ‘He’s rushed off, too. We were supposed to be having some friends around for lunch. His friends of course. Don’t think he’d like my friends. Don’t think I could invite my friends around for lunch. For anything really. The fucking catering people turned up about an hour after breakfast, said they were setting up for lunch. Lunch for twelve. Thought I was the fucking maid. Fucking housekeeper. I told them they could fuck right off and fuck themselves. Didn’t they know who I fucking am? They fucking do now. I told them I was the mistress of the fucking house, their fucking boss, the useless fucks. That fucked them, complete mind fuck. They didn’t know where to look. Never mind where to put themselves. Soft fuckers.

  ‘The head fucker asked where I wanted to eat. I mean . . . where they should set up luncheon for the luncheon function. Fuck’s sake. Luncheon function? Sounds like a dose of the honks. Bad lobster, mixing coke and sardines. I told them that one would luncheon in one’s summer house. Didn’t know this place had a fucking summer fucking house. Fucking does though. Made me feel completely fucking stupid. How come those sad café fuckers knew that my fucking house has a fucking summer house when I didn’t fucking know my fucking self?

  ‘Jesus, JJ. Only sane man I’ve ever known is you. Why do I miss you so much? Why do I feel so crap? I want to see you . . .’

  This might have been the magic moment. This might have been one of those rare moments when it would have been right to speak the truth, to speak all of the truth. She missed him. He missed her. They both shared their beds with other people, the wrong people and for all the wrong reasons. If she would just stop talking for a moment, maybe they could start communicating. Stoner considered speaking. Considered bridging the gulf between them with words. Considered the risk, the exposure.

  A text landed on his other cell; yet another summoning, another obligation, another complication.

  Stoner remained sile
nt.

  The dirty blonde battered on.

  ‘What are you doing now? Where are you? Why don’t you come here? No idea when his eminence will drop by but if he dropped by and found you here he would just have to . . . well . . . I don’t know. He’d just have to fuck off out again so you didn’t murder each other. He did say I could have this place. I could own it. As in, it would be mine. I got a table set for twelve for lunch. There’s no one else here. It’s insane. Catering dickheads are coming back at eleven-thirty. That’s . . . now. They’re not fucking here. I’ll fucking rat them out for being bastards and not turning up. Oh fuck, the door’s ringing. Gotta go, JJ. Kisses, yeah? Give your little guy a big squeeze and a big rub for me. Fucking doorbell. Do those fuckers think I’ve got nothing to do but answer the fucking door? Sorry this was so short. I’ve gotta rush.’

  Stoner drove on, bemused.

  The matt black van sat in the car park where one of the techno prisoners had said it would sit. Inconspicuous it was not. Apart from being matt black, a non-standard shade for any known vehicle apart from mythical helicopters, it boasted a huge and well drawn universal anarchist emblem in fluorescent pink on each side. If anyone believed in the notion of hiding in plain view, of conspicuous invisibility, this would be a great opportunity. Stoner stared as he rolled the Transporter alongside; driver door to driver door, gazing into the doped, dulled gaze of Mallis him/herself.

  ‘You’re not . . . early.’ Said in a not unfriendly way. Mallis appeared too dim at the moment for unkindness. More of an observation, something which may be interesting at some other time. ‘We have a lot of material for you. You a quick reader? Good listener?’

  Stoner nodded.

  ‘Don’t get out. Catch this.’

  A rubber model of a cartoon Tasmanian Devil flew gently through the gap between the windows. Stoner caught it, reflexively. Nodded thanks.

  ‘Read it,’ instructed Mallis, ‘and return it. I’ll wait.’

  Stoner examined the rubber devil. It pulled apart in the middle revealing a USB connector. It was a memory stick. Science is a source of constant advance and wonder. A rubber cartoon animal packed with information. Who could have thought it.

  ‘You can listen to The Archers,’ smiled Stoner, attempting levity.

  ‘Desert Island Discs.’ Mallis didn’t smile much. ‘My favourite. I collect the podcasts and save them up for waiting time like this. Expands the mind. The benign nonsense of it all.’

  The matt black van’s gloss black window rolled silently closed. Stoner flicked open a laptop, booted it and pushed the memory stick into place. It opened with a movie. The dead head. Possibly another dead head. They can appear uncannily alike. A second window opened next to the moving image and a text file scrolled down it at talking speed; a voice unfamiliar to Stoner read the script aloud. A description in cripplingly impenetrable and pointlessly technical garble described the source of the movie. Strings of numbers and terms meaningless to Stoner apparently revealed where the signal had been posted and hosted.

  None of it meant much to anyone unfamiliar with satellite coordinates, but it would be no doubt useful information for a techie as techie as Mallis. Stoner opened a screen window to copy the information to his laptop’s drive. Nothing happened.

  Mallis popped the black van’s horn and wound down his window. ‘Don’t do that.’ The window wound back. Information technology is miraculous. Omniscient.

  The rubber cartoon devil resumed its monologue. Seventeen killings could be connected, apparently, to the messy heads-off murders; all but four in the UK. All of them could be linked politically or organisationally, all could be considered to be professional hits, all of them disguised, either as too-obvious accidents, improbable suicides or as unlikely natural causes. Parts of the MO were similar, mainly in the deliberate misdirection of the inevitable investigation. And when Stoner’s mind boggled gently at the thought of such a high number of deaths, he reminded himself that if a decent researcher shoved out the parameters of their search far enough . . . they could connect anything to anything. The skill always lay in the analysis.

  The range of victims was also interesting enough. All men. No pattern of age, particularly, although none was old and none was young. The analysts’ view was that there were further cases as yet unlinked, and that there would be more in the future. All of the UK hits had ended the careers of men connected to the security industry in some way, although only the police official had been so involved officially and openly. The other links were less obvious.

  Menus offered themselves. The gloriously misnamed techno prisoners had opened up an entire world into the lives and identities of the victims. Stoner was as amazed as he always was whenever he enlisted their services. And as frustrated as he always was that until payment had been made – and made in full – he would be unable to keep or to copy the information. This was one of the oddities of dealing with them; they knew his word was as good as his money and that he would never betray either them or himself. However, they also believed, as he did not, that he was likely to depart the land of the living suddenly and unexpectedly.

  The twins themselves, Menace and Mallis, had of course never actually explained this to him. They pretended sublime disinterest in mundane matters like money, preferring instead to concentrate their self-proclaimed genius in the rarefied world of information, its acquisition, verification and transmission. A colleague of theirs, a seriously muscled man who rejoiced under the nickname of Hazardous and who shared the twins’ taste for gothic theatrical excess, had once outlined their only way of working. Stoner had been amused . . . mostly amused, by this display of quaint paranoia, and had pointed out gently to Hazardous that if he seriously wanted to extract data from the prisoners then he could do so, being who he was, how he was and being connected as he was. Hazardous had smiled and remarked that no matter how low Stoner may be able to stoop, they could stoop lower still, and, really, it only boiled down to whether he wanted the information the techno prisoners were so expert at supplying. They really had no rivals in their world, not in this country and quite possibly not in the entire Anglophone world.

  Stoner had wondered how this might be. Hazardous had smiled again in an almost engaging way, but had also declined to comment further.

  Their relationship had worked perfectly ever since. Only once had information supplied by Mallis turned out to be substantially incorrect, and to Stoner’s surprise the fee had been refunded. Although the opportunity to emphasise their technical expertise had been taken even then, the money transfer had been from an apparently non-existent account into Stoner’s most private and most personal hidden account. The unspoken suggestion was that in the same way that they could place funds into a hidden account, the prisoners could also remove it. Stoner had no idea whether this was in fact possible, but he preferred the quiet life.

  He drifted past fields of information. Far more than he was ever likely to read, let alone need, but when the inevitable reckoning, the reporting, arrived, it was always helpful to be able to supply acres of data for the Hard Man to present to his own bean-counting masters. At the bottom of the last page were details of the fee and the numbers of the account into which it could be paid. He paid it. Started the Transporter’s engine and wondered why the driver’s window of the other van wound down at that point.

  Mallis aimed his inevitable dark lenses in Stoner’s direction and leaned forward, almost far enough to be outside the protection of his vehicle’s steel walls. He called out: ‘Be careful with this, Mr Stoner. The information you have is incomplete. There will be more, and you should wait for it before moving far. You’ve paid the whole fee. We’ll be in touch.’

  A speech. And a worry. Stoner assumed complete stillness and stared hard at the shiny black lenses. Then he nodded. Both windows elevated themselves. Both vehicles departed, stage left and stage right.

  25

  THE COLOURS OF THE RAINBOW

  The shot came from nowhere. He was so surprised that
he almost failed to recognise what he’d seen and heard. A gunshot? A quiver in the drift of dust in the lights? In broad daylight and while he was occupied with tasks both innocent and mundane? He laid down the oil can he’d been emptying into the black Harley-Davidson on its bench in the centre of the room, turned to face the door and sat down.

  Slowly.

  Silently.

  Shifted the breathing from nose to mouth to reduce the interference with the hearing. The tools he’d been using were well trained, they lay in a clean line on a cloth bed; easy to find and silent. Habit is a life-preserver.

  No unusual sounds. An unusual lack of sounds, in fact, which told a silent story of its own. He waited. Background noise levels steadily returned to normal; the customary animal ambience, human and otherwise, birdsong and trees. A shot interrupts birdsong, but the apparent silence of the trees was all in his imagination. He rose, silently. Switched on the spotlights which lit the bike on the workbench with a brilliant, hard clarity, a clarity which eased the strain on the eyes when wrenching on something small. Walked silently to the room’s main lighting switches and doused them all. The only light was the light illuminating the Harley. The motorcycle shone, gleamed dully, flat black paint contrasting intensely with the higher gloss on the black exhausts. It added to the atmosphere of watchfulness. The tense quiet. It cast unpredictable and unusual reflections. He reflected. This place was his place of safety. His private place. Not a place where guests were invited, and all uninvited guests were unwelcome until proved otherwise. The burden of proof was theirs. His concern was privacy. Quiet.

  Stoner slipped into shadow. Observed through wide-open eyes and listened with stretched care. No shadows moved to interrupt the windows’ illumination, and no abnormal sounds disturbed the watch-keeping birds. Until the second report. Closer than before. No doubt this time, a shot, and a heavy shot too. Big calibre, low velocity. Pistol. No rifle’s high-speed bullet whipcrack but no silenced sibilance either. Big-bore handgun, fired close by. No sounds of impact. No splitting brickwork, no breaking glass. Someone else’s problem, then. It is not easy to miss a building at close range in daylight. Scallies bagging rabbits, perhaps. But scallies rarely use handguns for rabbits. That would require skill, scallies blast away with small-bore shotguns when hunting the scary rabbit. Usually. Scallies save pistols for use on each other.