The Black Art of Killing

by Matthew Hall

  Before he rang off, Black asked the question Johnson seemed to have been avoiding during their exchange: ‘Are you able to tell me how Mr Finn – if that is who he is – came by his death?’

  ‘It appears he was stabbed. Repeatedly. I’m afraid that’s all I know.’

  ‘I see … Thank you.’

  Black put down the phone and walked over to the window. He stared out over the quad, feeling his sinews tighten and cold anger pulse through his veins.

  Finn of all people. A man who had once fought his way out of a crazed Iraqi mob with his bare hands.

  Death.

  Black had wondered when it would next come to tap him on the shoulder.

  6

  Holst regained consciousness face down on a cool, hard surface. His limbs were numb. He was blindfolded, bound hand and foot, and a cloth gag pulled so hard against the corners of his mouth that his cheeks felt as if they might tear apart. Despite this excruciating pain he felt heavy and drugged and too lacking in energy to do anything other than draw each breath through his congested nostrils. At first the only sound he could hear was that of the blood coursing through his ears to the jumpy rhythm of his heart. Then he became aware of a vibration, the low hum of engines and the stifled, pathetic sobs of a woman somewhere close by.

  There was no prospect of moving or of making an intelligible sound. He was helpless. Trapped. It occurred to him that he might indeed be dead. Images that had not visited his mind since Sunday-school classes began to revolve as if on a carousel behind his eyes. Angels, demons, a shadowy figure of Christ and a serpent’s head as large as a man’s with black-green eyes. He fought the urge to vomit, fearing that he would choke. Then a sudden sensation like the ground giving way beneath him distracted his attention. The motion repeated itself and he realized that he was on board an aircraft and that pressure was building against his eardrums. They were descending towards the ground.

  He was alive.

  Time passed – how much, he wasn’t sure – and the sobbing continued. He wanted to kick out and stop it. Then came the whir of electric motors and the familiar sound of landing gear lowering and locking into position. He summoned an image of his wife, Laura, and their son and daughter aged ten and eight. For precious moments they seemed to smile at him before fading and distorting and joining the procession of grotesques thrown up from the most fearful depths of his mind. He heard himself groan like a man on his death bed and felt overcome with self-pity. What had he done to deserve this? Why him? All he had done was work like a slave to push back the frontiers of knowledge.

  The aircraft touched down, bounced once, then came quickly to a halt. Even in his trussed-up condition Holst was aware that it was a small plane, a light jet of some sort. A door opened. Two sets of heavy footsteps approached and stopped close to his head. Thick hands grabbed him under the shoulders and hoisted him to his feet. The restraints were removed from his ankles. Behind him, he heard the woman whimper in alarm.

  ‘Allons-y.’ Let’s go.

  Holst’s legs felt like planks of wood attached to his body. His captor half carried, half dragged him several feet, then hauled him down a flight of steps into hot, humid, cloying air that pulsed with the sound of cicadas.

  Several voices shouted at each other in French. The words sounded like orders. Military instructions. Holst felt trickles of sweat run down his back and forehead. The heat was intense, like nothing he had experienced before. They walked across a stretch of tarmac towards the sound of another engine, loud and crude compared with the plane he had just left.

  ‘Escalier. Quatre.’ Four stairs.

  They went up, Holst going first, gingerly seeking each tread with the toe of his shoe before committing his weight. They entered a confined space that smelled of fuel oil and hot vinyl. He was placed in a seat. Seconds later he heard the woman being brought in after him. Now she was weeping and moaning and he heard Drecker’s voice shouting at her in English to shut up. She didn’t. There was a sharp slap, a wounded cry of pain, then finally her whimpering stopped. Several more people followed them in, a door slammed, there was a roar of engines and the accelerating thud-thud-thud overhead told him that they were in a helicopter. He felt the machine lift from the ground, rock from side to side, tilt slightly, then move forward with a jerk.

  The flight was hot, noisy and to the best of Holst’s estimation took less than half an hour. He guessed they were in the tropics. Somewhere in Africa perhaps? Probably one of the former French colonies: Ivory Coast or Senegal. But why here? Susan Drecker was an American who worked, at least as far as he knew, for a wealthy entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley. A man whose identity she had kept secret and who wanted to acquire the results of his precious research for commercial purposes. Coupled with the right nanotechnologies, Holst’s discoveries about the reward centres of the brain had the power to manipulate human behaviour in ways that hitherto had been inconceivable.

  Could it be that Drecker had been lying all along? That she was nothing to do with business but a government agent who had become aware of the horrendous danger his work posed if its fruits were to fall into the wrong hands? The feeling of nausea returned. His life’s work for nothing. He was going to be interrogated, asked to spill every last detail and terrorized into spending what remained of his career in undoing what he had done. He had heard dark and crazy rumours of such things happening before, of scientists who had created technologies so radical and threatening to the established order that they were strangled at birth.

  His fear and anguish gave way to raging anger. Fuck these people. Fuck them to hell.

  The engines changed pitch. The helicopter tilted, tipping him forward against his seat belt, then came in to land.

  7

  Black’s remained one of the few unsmiling faces in the second-class Eurostar carriage as the featureless plains of northern France gave way to the outskirts of Paris. All around him weekending couples strained for their first glimpse of the Eiffel Tower above the city’s skyline, but his gaze remained focused inwards. The image that replayed repeatedly in his mind was of a victorious Finn crazily firing his carbine into the night sky from the deck of a British cargo ship they had recaptured from al-Shabaab fanatics. It had been one of their more audacious ops. Their team of six arrived by Apache, fast-roped down to the vessel and spent the next three hours eliminating twenty-three battle-hardened fighters for whom surrender was not an option. Finn had accounted for nearly a dozen of them. He had been fearless that night, as if imbued with some supernatural power. He had pursued the last of them into the bowels of the engine room, fighting hand to hand against hot clanking metal. Finn took no joy in killing – for him, like Black, it was simply a job that he happened to do well – and relished being alive like no one else.

  Five hundred rounds offered to the stars, whooping with delight.

  A scene from another life.

  Kathleen’s call had been more than a shock. It had been a convulsion that unleashed a torrent of memories, some good, some ugly, that had hit him with the force of a tidal wave. Black had made his excuses to Karen and the Provost and spent the evening walking on Boars Hill in the countryside to the west of Oxford. Mile after mile alone with his thoughts and never seeming to tire. Then a few sleepless hours staring at the cracked distemper on his bedroom ceiling before rising before dawn to catch the London train. The procession of images hadn’t stopped.

  His reaction puzzled and troubled him. He and Finn had accepted the possibility of death without question. Over the course of their long careers they had lost friends and colleagues too numerous to mention. A day hadn’t passed without the thought that the next mission could be the last. Far from being a horror, it had given life a thrilling edge: a soldier exists on a plane elevated above those who take the arrival of the next week, the next month, for granted.

  It was all the more odd, then, that Black should find himself feeling as if he had been hollowed out. Disturbed on some level he couldn’t yet reach or comprehend
. It was as if all the silt that had settled over the previous five years had been violently agitated, leaving him swimming in dark and ominous waters.

  He glanced out of the window to see the last traces of greenery vanish and the city close in around them. The train sped through the netherworld of graffiti-daubed cuttings, somehow invisible from the streets above, that several minutes later terminated in the strange magnificence of the Gare du Nord. Black stepped out on to the platform to be greeted by the unmistakable smell of Paris. He had noticed over the years that ancient cities each carry their own distinctive odour, while those of modern glass and concrete smell of little more than traffic fumes. Paris and London both smelled of their earth and brick, and of centuries of habitation. There was a sharply bitter note in central London air that evoked something of its imperial indifference and isolation. In Paris, even amidst its perfumeries and patisseries, there was, to the English nose at least, always the vaguest hint of effluent. A city whose atmosphere, like one great human exhalation, expressed the common condition in all its baseness and splendour.

  With a little over an hour to kill before his noon appointment Black wandered through the nearby streets and found a small café in which he drank a large espresso while standing at a zinc-topped bar, attempting to decode a discarded copy of Le Parisien. Paris wasn’t a happy city, he gleaned. There had been another violent disturbance in one of the poorer suburbs and a police officer had been shot. Racial tensions were running high and politicians of all stripes were using the situation to make hay. No one quite knew what to do with the country’s millions of poor immigrants who stood little chance of becoming French in the way that many French understood the meaning of the word. According to some of the more hysterical voices quoted, the city was like a citadel under siege. Black reflected that not much had changed. Paris’s troubled history had been regularly punctuated by periods of threat, occupation or revolution, and after each disaster something dogged and determinedly truthful in its character had invariably re-emerged to restore it.

  He left the waitress a generous tip – she had kind eyes above her melancholy smile – and made his way to the Métro station.

  His journey took him south under the Seine to Chevaleret in the 13th arrondissement. His destination was the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, which turned out to be a large complex of buildings covering several blocks. When, finally, he found his way to its central point, he discovered that in common with most hospitals he had had cause to visit in similar circumstances, there were signs to every department except the mortuary. He wandered fruitlessly for a while before stopping a pale young woman he assumed to be a junior doctor and attempting to ask directions in fractured French. She listened patiently before sending him in the right direction in perfect English.

  The mortuary was located in an anonymous wing set apart from the main building and surrounded by an area of well-tended grass. Black arrived at its entrance with eight minutes to spare to find Simon Johnson already waiting. As Black had surmised from their brief phone call, he was a new recruit, twenty-four or -five at the most. Despite his youth, he had already been firmly pressed into the Foreign Office mould: his thin fair hair neatly parted, regulation dark suit and tie, black brogues polished to a parade-ground shine.

  ‘Major Black?’

  ‘Yes. You must be Simon. Pleased to meet you.’

  Black offered his hand, sensing Johnson’s relief at his friendly, business-like tone.

  ‘I’m only sorry it’s in such unfortunate circumstances.’ He shifted awkwardly from one foot to another. ‘Commandant Valcroix is waiting for us inside. There’s an investigation under way, of course, but I should warn you he won’t be very forthcoming. The case has already been assigned to a juge d’instruction who’s directing the inquiry.’

  ‘A judge? Already?’

  ‘It’s the way they do things here. It feels rather alien to us, but it seems to work.’ He glanced towards the door. ‘Shall we?’

  Black nodded, readying himself for what he hoped would be a brief ordeal.

  The mortuary was on the basement level. Black followed Johnson down two flights of steps to a subterranean corridor whose gloss-painted walls were scuffed along their length at waist height from the constant passage of trolleys bearing bodies from the hospital’s wards and operating theatres. They arrived at a secure door. Johnson pressed the video intercom. After a short exchange with an officious attendant the door buzzed open. They entered another corridor identical to the one they had just passed through, except that parked against the left-hand wall were more than half a dozen gurneys bearing corpses draped with pale blue hospital sheets.

  A bow-backed, sallow-faced man somewhere in his fifties appeared from a small waiting room to their left. An olive-green jacket hung off his angular shoulders and flapped around his insubstantial body.

  ‘Mr Johnson?’ He mistakenly directed the question at Black.

  ‘Non,’ Johnson corrected him. ‘C’est Major Black.’

  ‘Ah. My apologies. Commandant Henri Valcroix, Police Nationale.’ He looked them both up and down with intense, unblinking eyes, which lent him a presence that more than compensated for his lack of bulk. ‘You have a passport, yes?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Black produced the document and, for good measure, his driving licence. While Valcroix scrutinized both, Johnson felt obliged to rehearse the fact that Black had been Finn’s close colleague and commanding officer for the larger part of two decades.

  ‘And you were in the Special Forces, Major?’ Valcroix asked.

  ‘I was an infantryman,’ Black replied.

  ‘Of the famous SAS?’

  Johnson cast Black an anxious glance. ‘Obviously there’s no secret that Sergeant Finn was a special serviceman. But even though he is no longer serving, Major Black is still bound by strict obligations of confidentiality.’

  Valcroix grunted and handed back Black’s papers. ‘You know why Mr Finn was in Paris?’

  ‘Only the little his wife could tell me. We haven’t spoken for some time.’

  ‘He was working as a bodyguard. To a young British scientist. Female. Attending a conference. Do you undertake such work, Major?’

  ‘No. I’m an academic. Or trying to be.’

  Valcroix raised an eyebrow. ‘You teach? Where? In a university?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘May I ask which one?’

  ‘Oxford.’

  Valcroix nodded, seemingly startled by this fact. ‘The young woman, too.’

  ‘It’s a big institution. May I ask who she is?’

  Valcroix avoided the question. ‘Let us see if it is indeed Mr Finn. Please.’ He gestured them to follow.

  A pair of swing doors at the far end of the corridor led into a tiled area. Three of the four walls were lined with refrigerated body-storage units. An overpowering smell of disinfectant barely masked the underlying stench of chilled, decomposed flesh. An attendant, who gave every impression of having far more pressing matters to attend to, was standing by impatiently. Valcroix glanced to Black, who nodded his readiness.

  Black was no stranger to dead bodies, but he nevertheless felt a fist-sized knot form beneath his diaphragm as the technician slid open a drawer on the lowest tier.

  The corpse was wrapped in an envelope of gleaming white polythene. The technician pulled back the flap revealing the head, shoulders and torso of a large, well-built man. The face was white as if moulded from candle wax. Black’s impression was of a cruel and unflattering facsimile of Finn, but his gaze lingered on the facial features only briefly. His eyes were quickly drawn to the dozen or so very obvious stab wounds to the chest and the deep lacerations criss-crossing the arms and shoulders. Any traces of blood had been washed away after the autopsy, but the livid bruises surrounding each wound spoke of the force with which the knives had been driven through skin, muscle and bone. Finn’s furious attempts to defend himself were evident from multiple gashes to his arms both above and beneath his elbows.


  Black’s eyes flicked to Valcroix, who gestured the technician to pull the plastic back further. He opened both flaps out fully, revealing more stab wounds to the abdomen and sides and a pattern of vicious overlapping bruises that suggested he had been kicked repeatedly. There was worse: the fingers and thumbs of the newly revealed hands had been sliced off. Every one. What remained of them had been gathered in a clear polythene bag that rested between Finn’s thighs.

  ‘Are you able to confirm Mr Finn’s identity?’ Commandant Valcroix asked.

  Black nodded, lifting his eyes to the detective’s impassive face. He noticed that Johnson had turned away, unable to look any longer.

  ‘It was clearly a vicious attack,’ Valcroix said, gesturing the technician to slide the drawer back in.

  ‘It would have taken at least three men,’ Black said.

  ‘The fingers –’ Valcroix let the words hang like a question.

  ‘A lot of mutilation takes place in combat. More than you might imagine. Especially among irregulars.’

  ‘Combat? Why would that be relevant?’

  ‘No common thugs could have done this to Finn. This had to be the work of professionals.’

  Valcroix nodded, as if his suspicions had been confirmed.

  ‘What happened to the young woman?’ Black asked.

  ‘She is missing. We presume she was abducted.’

  ‘May I ask from where?’

  ‘The Hotel George V. But I’m afraid that is all I can tell you at present, Major. Procedure. You understand.’