A Last Act of Charity (Killing Sisters Book 1)

by Frank Westworth

  ‘You sound like a schoolteacher, Charity. Is that actually your name?’

  ‘It is. Next? You may be up for staying here chatting for the rest of the night, what’s left of it, but I’m not, and your friend will be wondering where you’ve gone. He’s armed, I’m sure, and unpleasantness would be inevitable.’

  ‘Dave Reve, the guy you met at the club, the guy who was convinced that he already knew you. He’s here, isn’t he?’

  Charity’s eyes fell from Stoner’s face.

  ‘What can I say? He was here, I believe. I doubt that he is any longer. You should go check. That would be the correct thing to do.’

  ‘We can check together.’

  ‘No. No we can’t. Dave Reve checked in . . . I think he may also have checked out.’ She looked at something on the car’s instrument display, and started the engine. ‘Third floor. Room 310. Sorry about the mess. Don’t try to stop me and don’t bother trying to trace the car. Or stop it.’

  The window powered its way closed, and the car rolled lightlessly and unhurriedly forward. Stoner ran in front of it. The car accelerated steadily towards him. He stepped back, trailed tough fingernails along its passing roof. He followed the car as it left the garage, and ran to the hotel entrance. Charity’s lights lit and the hazard warning lights flashed once as she passed the heavy Transporter, accelerating at a rate which would defeat the most powerful of bicyclists.

  Stoner pounded on the door of the hotel’s reception. Leaned his weight against the night bell. After a short while, Shard joined him.

  ‘There should be a law against this.’

  Shard and Stoner stood in the doorway of the hotel room, a room anonymous and exactly like so many others apart from the carnage it contained.

  ‘You knew him, then?’ Shard may have been talking to calm his nerves. Then again, he may have wanted answers. In that he would not have been alone. Stoner stood back into the silent early morning hallway.

  ‘Yes. Not well and not for long. Long enough to know that he was called Dave and that he was an accountant. A police accountant. Not the greatest vocation in the world, but hardly deserving of this.’

  They spoke quietly. The rest of the hotel, with the unconscious surrealism of similar situations, slept on unawares. Real policemen and their attendant disturbance would follow soon enough. The half-closed eyes of a severed head regarded them accusingly, perhaps, as they stood framed by the door.

  ‘You think the blonde tart did it?’ Shard was direct. Stoner shook his head slowly.

  ‘Can’t see it. She’d have been blooded from head to foot. Just look at this mess.’

  The room was as filthy, as gory, as it was possible to imagine it.

  ‘Can’t understand the quiet of it, though. You can’t do this to a decently fit guy without him making one fuck of a fuss about it.’ Shard’s level gaze swept the room for understanding. ‘Chopping his head off didn’t kill him, then? And if he’d not known the killer, then he knew enough to refuse entry. So . . . no sign of a break-in. He knew the killer? Even if it wasn’t the blonde tart, like you say.’

  Stoner shrugged. ‘Electronic keys. Easy to copy if you know how and if you come equipped. Easy to lift one from behind the reception desk. Easy to make a new one if you know how to drive the machine behind the desk. I don’t know these things personally, but I do know those who do.’

  ‘You’d just shoot the door off its hinges, like in the movies.’

  ‘I would.’

  ‘It would make a big bang.’

  ‘Big bangs have their place. Big bangs scare the shit out of the innocent.’

  ‘You say the vic’s a cop, though, so not too innocent?’

  ‘He was an accountant. Didn’t strike me as the sort to be scared witless by a big bang, but you never can tell. Let’s go. There’s no more here. No more answers.’

  ‘You don’t want to search the place? Do the heroic and always illuminating CSI deal? Always works on the TV.’

  ‘My sides, they are splitting with the wit of it all. No. If you care to keep your manly feet away from the blood, and reckon you can search the place without leaving a Here I Am postcard for the plods, then be quick and see whether you can find his phone. I want to see who he called. There’s nothing else for me here.’

  ‘You don’t want to look for the phone yourself?’ Shard looked at Stoner with curiosity. ‘You want to leave no trace at all?’

  ‘In one. I would rather not have been here at all, so far as anyone other than us is aware.’

  ‘And the blonde tart in the car. The one with the great big gun?’

  ‘The blonde tart you watched get out of the car, go into the hotel, and who you think offed our hero here? I don’t care if you paddle through this shit, but I want to be unconnectable with the scene. Not sure why. Let’s call it a hunch. Let’s pretend that I know what I’m doing. I don’t think it matters much if you leave trace. It’s not you who’s being chatted up by beautiful if unhappily deadly blondes. Who should not know that I have any connection to this mess. Which in fact I don’t. This is very confusing.’

  ‘You like being confused.’

  ‘I don’t mind it.’

  ‘Confusion’s a great excuse when you need to hurt someone a lot.’

  ‘You think I want to hurt someone?’

  ‘I think you always want to hurt someone. Do you really want the phone?’

  ‘It would help. Might help. And why do you say that? I never want to hurt anyone.’

  ‘That just isn’t true.’ Shard trod a fine line to the headless corpse. Looked at it for a time.

  ‘None of the bodies has been booby-trapped,’ Stoner suggested, helpfully. ‘I’m just being helpful. Supportive. Encouraging. Hurry up. We broke in, remember? Some day the plods will come.’

  ‘Thank you for those kind words.’ Shard moved away from the body, reached into the jacket which lay behind it, discarded on the bed. ‘No phone.’ He returned to the corpse and eased his hand into each of its trouser pockets, with neither noticeable enthusiasm nor success. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘OK. That tells us something. We’re going now. Soon as you like. Take another look around first. Could he have hung the phone in the bathroom?’

  ‘Tells us what? Nothing in the bathroom bar the bath. He doesn’t even have a bag. Tells us what, exactly?’

  ‘The killer took the phone. He probably had two. Why take the phones?’

  ‘Same reason. Killer wants to see who the vic’s been calling. Maybe these are crimes of jealous passion and are connected only by strings of telephony. Maybe the answers are all in the phone bills.’

  ‘Do I pay you for your stellar sense of humour? The answer’s as likely to be written in the stars. Can we go yet?’ Stoner’s tone was mild still.

  ‘You don’t pay me at all. In fact, as you are presumably being paid a fortune for your ace detective skills, maybe we should sort some kind of deal?’

  ‘Not here, not now, and not with me, I think. We’re leaving through the fire escape.’

  ‘It will sound the alarm.’

  ‘Plod is already here, so unless you fancy several hours of tedious questioning, accusations of the most unpleasant kind and then a rescue by someone who I’d imagine will be very pissed off, I’d say that speed was better than subtlety right now.’

  A door opened. An alarm sounded. Feet pounded. Stoner and Shard shaded through the darkness back to the Transporter. Where they sat in darkness, observing the arrival of constabulary and medical reinforcements.

  ‘Mate of yours, was he?’ Shard broke into Stoner’s brooding silence.

  ‘No. But he was a pleasant enough guy.’

  ‘For a cop.’

  ‘For anyone. Hang on.’ Stoner pulled out a phone, keyed a message, closed the phone again. Repeated the exercise identically with a second phone. He speed-dialled the third phone. Waited for pick-up and asked, ‘All quiet?’, then ‘OK.’ And he closed that phone too.

  ‘You do have a lot of phones. And t
hey don’t light up. How do you do that?’

  ‘It’s a secret technique. You can find it on the internet, somewhere near the entries about How To Make Big Bombs and Distant Detonations For Beginners. Everything is on the internet. Even tonight’s corpse is on the internet. The internet is a wonderful thing. Even the fact that not of all its free facts are either free or factual is a wonderful thing.’ He sighed. ‘Dave Reve was OK. He survived an earlier killing moment. He was honey-trapped in a much larger and much more pleasant hotel than this one. The killer – the woman I believe to be the killer – let him live. Sucked his brains out through his dick in a swimming pool, grabbed him in the nightmare killer grip of death and then . . . let him go.’

  ‘You’re getting poetic, Stoner. Nightmare grip of death? Idiot.’

  ‘Well, he was happily eating her out at the poolside, like you do, when she clamped her thighs around his ears, jammed his face against her snatch and . . . held his head under the water until he started breathing water. I know, it sounds deranged, but next time you find yourself with a loose woman and a spare moment, and you happen to be in a swimming pool, try it. He couldn’t get away, and blacked out.’

  ‘But she let him go?’

  ‘Evidently. Killed someone else in the hotel. Usual provisos; someone else in the hotel got snuffed, same MO as this.’

  ‘Why? Why did she let him go? And then why did she change her mind and kill him again?’

  ‘I do have a theory. It works for me so far, but it is just that, a theory.’

  ‘Do tell.’

  ‘Nope. Not yet. The problem with theories is when the guy whose theory it is believes it to be true. Then he fiddles the facts to fit the theory and the truth goes out the window. He tells his oppos his theory and they all fiddle the facts. That is the high-road to fuckedness, and I do not wish to take it. If theory firms up to fact . . . then I’ll tell you. Until then . . .’

  ‘Why are we waiting here? Nice to chat, of course, but while the plods rush around doing the flies around a corpse thing, we’re not going to make any progress.’

  ‘I’m waiting for the killer to leave.’

  ‘She left an hour ago in her own car. You let her go. Remember?’

  ‘If my theory is anything like correct, then she isn’t the killer.’

  ‘OK. A stunner blonde killer was too bad to be true, anyway.’

  ‘Not so. Just not that blonde. Not that particular blonde.’

  ‘Fuck. There’s more than one killer blonde? Be still my beating . . .’

  ‘Dunno. More than one woman involved here. My theory fits the facts. Snag is that there aren’t enough facts.’

  ‘Any sign of her leaving? Your mystery killer blonde, that is.’

  ‘I’d lay odds that she’s not blonde at the moment, and I’d lay more odds that she looks more like a man than you do . . . at the moment. I’m just watching. Going to sit here and do more of it. I’m in no rush. You’ve no need to stay.’

  Shard pulled a cell phone from his pocket. Stoner reached out a hand, preventing him from opening it.

  ‘I don’t need the lights flashing, if that’s OK. Hop into the back; it’s out of sight back there.’

  Which Shard did, returning with the announcement that he would be on his way, and after the usual slightly preoccupied pleasantries, he left.

  Stoner sat. Waited and watched. It was a long night. Policemen and medical men came and went. Blue lights and red lights and white lights flashed and flickered. Eventually quiet returned. A lone watchman in a police uniform stood by the door of the hotel.

  Dawn came. And turned slowly into day.

  31

  STEPPING OUT

  Stoner ran. He left the Transporter after changing into the pretend athletic clothing which provided a cloak of invisibility on any urban street, left behind him all contact with the real world, and ran.

  The streets were shifting from night life to daylight, and other runners and joggers, creatures of the transition, were his companions. A few drunks and no-hopers littered the doorways, very sound sleepers lay wrecked on benches. Stoner’s early morning mates varied from the agile and the mobile to the social flotsam which all parks attract and who are either ignored or invisible to the common man. Stoner ran past them all. He answered no greetings from the similarly attired morning athletes and he ran straight into and over and through any drunkard or beggar who blocked his path. They assumed that he’d not seen them, lost in the self-insulated world of the runner, but he saw them all, and he ran at them until they moved . . . or until he collided with them, at which point they were bumped out of his path or fell down with the shock of it all. Either way his path was soon always clear. Jungle law is universal, even when unwritten and unacknowledged.

  The park had a series of formal tracks. Stoner ran a pattern in a rough figure of eight. Three laps in, maybe a mile, he was into his stride, his rhythm. The park had settled down to run its own event around his own private race for one. Other runners, joggers and walkers cultivated their airs of privacy by donning headsets of several kinds. Stoner occasionally wondered what – if anything – they listened to. He’d never seen the point in applying a layer of artificial sound over the constantly shifting backdrop provided by the city, by the park and by nature. He’d never understood how the achievements of a musician could best be appreciated by listening to them while concentrating on running, nor how the pleasures of a decent run could be improved by adding distraction. He ran steadily and without fuss; his thought processes attuned themselves to the pace of his running and while his organism handled all the physical side, the navigation, the length of stride and the level of effort, his mind powered away into its own semi-conscious world, where it thought, looked and listened, and then thought some more.

  Guitar solos, musical moments, came to him as he ran, as did combinations of facts which, rearranged, presented previously unseen scenarios. What he had taken to be minor details reestablished themselves as pivotal moments, small errors revealed themselves as disasters in the raw; vague insights cleared themselves up into obvious facts while he ran. While he let his thoughts arrange themselves with as little conscious input as he could manage, his running took on a life of its own. The more tired his muscles, the more agile his thinking.

  His senses likewise worked at their best when left alone. They often discerned patterns which he may have missed completely if he’d been looking for them. And they found breaks in the patterns around them, interruptions to the steady development of the waking day’s own rhythms. As the dawn light shifted from glimmer and glow into light and bright, so the sounds of the city and the park within grew into their own maturity.

  There was a car parked behind the Transporter. A family four-door saloon of refreshing anonymity. It was out of pattern. Stoner ran on. The Transporter was parked on a no-parking stretch of the road. Stoner was unbothered by parking fines, even by some remote threat of wheel-clamping or a tow-away. He carried enough identification, both legal, genuine and otherwise, to fear no minor minion of the parking police. Laws never applied to him when he was working, and when he was working for the government, as he was now, at least in a tenuous way, then if the government wished to penalise him for parking oddly while working, well, they could reimburse him later.

  This was unlikely to be the case with the saloon parked behind the VW. Stoner ran on. He ran another set of three laps. Another mile. He was warmed through and completely comfortable. No one was running with him. No one ran at his pace; when he speeded or slowed, no other runner, jogger or walker shifted their pace to match. And as he completed his ninth lap, his third full mile, the running, jogging and walking population had changed completely; turnover was steady until the 08.30 migration moment, when runners transformed into office-dwellers, and after that came the 10.00 shift, non-workers, workers of unconventional hours. They mostly fit their own predictable patterns, and none of those patterns involved the illegal parking of a family saloon car in a no-parking spot.

/>   After twelve laps, a notional four miles, Stoner looped away from his park centre track and ran the perimeter. The saloon car was empty. The driver sat relaxed and apparently dreaming on a park bench nearby. She sat facing the traffic, not watching Stoner. That amused him. Had he been under observation, he would have sensed it, of that he was certain. He ran to the bench, approaching it from behind, and sat down, pulling off the tracksuit’s top half as he did so.

  ‘Apologies for the smell,’ he remarked. ‘It’s going to be warm today.’

  Charity maintained her level stare into the motorised middle distance for maybe a half minute. ‘It could get too hot. But only if we allow it.’

  ‘You’ll get a ticket.’ Stoner the ever-helpful was playing at being helpful.

  ‘Got one. Get another any minute now.’

  ‘Do you want to relocate? Breakfast?’

  ‘This is taking cool to an impressive extreme, Mr Stoner. A friend of yours died last night, and you’re inviting a lady you consider to be involved in that death out for breakfast. Impressive.’

  ‘Running always gives me thinking room. I like running. Do you run?’ Stoner paralleled her gaze, they watched the flow of traffic together.

  Finally: ‘No. I train. In a gym. I don’t run. I swim as often as I can for as far as I can.’

  ‘In a pool? In a lake? Rivers? The seas?’ Stoner sounded sincere and serious. He and Charity maintained their parallel gazes into and across the endlessly unfolding street scene. Not once did they look at each other. Not yet.

  ‘Anywhere. Anywhere outside. Do you just run? Running always seems so one-dimensional compared to swimming. Sometimes when I swim I dream I can fly.’

  ‘That’s a quote. Who said that?’

  ‘Is it? No idea. It’s true, though. When you run, and I know you run a lot, Mr Stoner, you just pound your feet down. They always carry your weight. You are always planted on the ground. Panting. Sweating. When I swim I am weightless. I can let go. I can drift. I can dream of flight. I can dream of drowning.’