The Black Art of Killing

by Matthew Hall

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a sudden movement at the fringes of her vision. She glanced up towards the locked gates some twenty yards ahead of her with the impression that she had briefly seen a figure. But there was no one there. An overhanging branch perhaps, or the shadow of a passing cloud. Imagining things again. She had been anxious and on edge ever since Joel had walked out without warning, apt to startle at the slightest thing. She took a deep breath, leaned down to fetch her helmet from the pannier and felt the irrational sense of being observed intensify. Another nervous glance around the site confirmed that it was deserted. There was no man at the gateway, just a cock pheasant wandering across the farm track on its far side.

  She fastened her helmet, climbed on to the bike and made her way over to the high gates. Beyond the wire mesh the verges of the access track were overgrown with nettles and cow parsley. After thirty yards or so it turned sharply right, then continued in a straight line for a third of a mile before it met the lane which connected with the main road into Oxford. The drone of bees from the hedgerows either side merged with the sound of the rustling poplar trees and the hum of distant traffic. At eight p.m. in early June it was still broad daylight.

  Karen was all too aware that her anxiety was illogical and that the main cause of her fragile state was the difficult call she had to make to Canada, but that didn’t make it any less real. Since he had left, Joel had taken on a sinister aspect in her mind. He was a brooder, a man whose anger was cold and suppressed but occasionally revealed itself in dark, vindictive glances. Part of her harboured a fear that having stolen her money he wasn’t beyond intimidating her into giving up her claim on it.

  Furious at allowing herself to succumb to such irrational thoughts, she took out her phone and dialled Leo’s landline. Of all her friends he had been the most understanding of her fragile state. While others had been full of well-meaning advice and platitudes he had simply accepted her as she was. He had also been a soldier. A man used to facing down danger. His words of encouragement would count for a lot.

  The phone rang five times, then connected to voicemail. She tried again with the same result. She scrolled hurriedly back through her contacts and found his mobile number. Her call connected immediately to a message informing her that his phone was switched off. Typical. She guessed that he had probably unplugged the landline, too. He was like a hermit sometimes, never happier than holed up in a darkened room, cut off from the world.

  There were other friends she could call, but all those within range were also friends of Joel’s. She didn’t want him to hear that she had become a nervous wreck. She still had some pride.

  Get a hold of yourself!

  Karen thrust the phone back into her rucksack, a burst of anger at her own weakness finally giving her the courage to unlock the heavy padlock on the gates and push her bike on through it. She locked the gates behind her and pedalled off along the track. Picking up speed, she channelled her frustration into exertion, her wheels clattering over the uneven surface. She rounded the corner and caught her first glimpse of the traffic passing to and fro along the road up ahead. She felt suddenly foolish, her cheeks reddening with shame.

  The figure stepped out from an overgrown gateway to her left. He was dressed in black, a balaclava rendering him featureless. A jolt of fear like a powerful electric shock shot through Karen’s body. She swerved, but there was no room to avoid him. He ran straight at her, sending her and the bike flying into the verge. She flipped over the bars, saw a flash of sky, felt brambles tearing her cheeks and then he was on her. A knee drove into her sternum, pinning her to the ground. A gloved fist struck her hard in the face. A flash of stars briefly wiped out her vision. She couldn’t breathe. He punched her again, this time in the jaw. She felt the muscles of her limbs go into spasm. Her brain screamed at them to move but nothing responded.

  He grabbed her roughly between the legs, then tore the small rucksack from her back and vanished as quickly as he had appeared.

  18

  Black spotted her sitting alone in the far corner of the busy accident and emergency department. Her right hand was braced diagonally across her chest in a sling and a thick dressing was taped to her temple. Her head was lolling towards her chest as if she were drifting in and out of sleep. He picked his way towards her, weaving between drunk students, an old man who looked like death and a young woman who smelled of poverty nursing a screaming baby.

  ‘Karen? What happened?’

  She blinked and looked up, then smiled with relief as much as her battered face would let her.

  ‘Leo. Thanks. I got the nurse to call the porters’ lodge. I couldn’t –’

  She seemed overwhelmed and confused. Her speech was slurred from a large dose of codeine. She struggled to stand. He took hold of her arm and helped her to her feet.

  ‘Let’s get you home.’

  He led her between the rows of seats, along the corridor and out to where he had parked his Land Rover. She moved slowly and stiffly and seemed to be injured in several places. There were grass stains on her jeans and scratches along her cheek and neck. The message the college porter had brought to his door shortly after eleven p.m. was simply that Karen had been in an accident and needed collecting from the John Radcliffe Hospital. Black knew that like most people in Oxford she cycled everywhere, and he had assumed that she had had a crash. He waited for her to tell him what happened, but she didn’t say a word. He noticed there were bruises on both sides of her face, as if she had received multiple impacts. He struggled to picture how they could have occurred.

  Only once he had safely installed her in the passenger seat and fastened her seat belt did he venture a joke.

  ‘So, what did the other guy look like?’

  ‘I don’t know. He was wearing a mask.’ Silent tears spilled down her cheeks.

  Some joke.

  ‘He?’

  She spoke falteringly through sobs: ‘A man – outside the site at Woodstock … jumped out at me … pushed me off my bike … fractured my wrist … I thought he was going to kill me, Leo, then …’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  Karen’s breath came in short bursts between sobs.

  ‘Have you told the police?’

  She nodded and wiped her eyes. ‘They sent a woman to take a statement … She asked if it could be domestic. I had to tell them about Joel … I don’t think it was him. This man was … he was like a … he was so quick.’

  Black tried his best to remain calm. ‘Did he say anything?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Was he trying to rob you, or –’

  ‘He took my rucksack … My purse and phone were in there.’ She swallowed. ‘I thought he was going to … He must have followed me. How else would he have known I was there?’ She looked at him through red, swollen eyes. ‘I’m scared, Leo.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll sleep on your sofa.’

  She nodded gratefully.

  Black touched her reassuringly on the shoulder. He turned the ignition and started for home.

  By the time they arrived back at college Karen was out on her feet, the opiates rendering her into a stupor. Black looped his arm around her waist and supported her full weight as he helped her up the stairs to her rooms on the second floor. She crawled into bed still dressed in her clothes and within moments fell deeply asleep. He closed the door and retreated to the small sitting room that doubled as a study into which she had crammed the few possessions she had salvaged from the ruins of her marriage. A large framed photograph on the wall above her desk showed Karen during a recent field trip to British Columbia hugging a vast cedar tree that must have been thirty feet round. He recalled her stories of the expedition: of how the First Nations people had, over the centuries, harvested planks from the outside of the trunks by tapping in wedges which, aided by the action of the wind, slowly caused pieces of timber to split away. The trees repaired their own wounds and lived on for centuries alongside their human companions. The idea of pe
ople living in harmony with their forests had moved her deeply.

  She was a botanist whose work, as far as he knew, was purely altruistic. He could think of no possible reason for anyone to hurt her except for purely opportunistic reasons. Muggings were rare but not unknown. A lone woman on a bicycle in an area beyond the scope of any security cameras was an easy target. Only one detail troubled him. She had said ‘balaclava’. If her memory was correct, that meant her attacker was more than a mere opportunist. He had planned.

  A small paranoid voice sounded in the back of his mind suggesting a connection with the missing scientists. He dismissed it. Karen was a plant biologist. Her work had no defence application that he could conceive of. She had been attacked and robbed in a city that for all its wealth had more than its fair share of poor and desperate vagrants, addicts and street criminals. Such things happened every day.

  He sank into the chair beside her desk and found his thoughts drifting back to Finn.

  He should never have agreed to go to Paris. Ever since seeing Finn’s body he had been stirred by a primitive desire for revenge. He could feel it now. If he knew where to find the man who had attacked Karen, he knew exactly what he would do to him: break his jaw and ensure he never had children. It would be over in seconds. He pictured the limp, groaning body at his feet. He tried to push the image away, to replace the anger with rational thoughts: who was to say what he would be capable of if he were hungry and destitute enough? It didn’t work. Since his trip across the Channel something inside him had shifted. The ghost of his old self was haunting the new.

  What if whoever killed Finn wants to kill you, too? How many people must there be who would gladly see the two of you dead? How many sons, fathers, brothers and cousins have you killed, Leo?

  The more he tried to silence the taunting voice the louder it became until he could think of only one way to silence it. Reluctantly, Black brought out his phone and found, buried at the back of his wallet, a business card. He took them into the bathroom and locked the door behind him.

  In the bedroom of his sixth-floor flat in a nondescript block in Lancaster Gate Freddy Towers stirred from the semi-doze which these days so often passed for sleep and reached for the phone ringing on the bedside table. He squinted at the screen and saw that it was the call he had been hoping for. He sat up excitedly and switched on the reading lamp as he answered.

  ‘Leo? Is that you?’

  ‘Yes, Freddy.’ He sounded flat and morose. ‘A friend of mine has had an accident.’

  ‘A friend? Who?’

  ‘Dr Karen Peters. She’s a botanist. She’s also a close colleague.’

  ‘What sort of accident?’

  ‘She was attacked and robbed by a masked man. It could be purely coincidental –’

  ‘But you think there’s a French connection …? What would be the point of hurting your friend?’

  ‘You tell me, Freddy.’

  Towers paused to think. ‘No, I can’t see any obvious link.’

  ‘It seems premeditated, frankly, the sort of thing I’d do to soften up the genuine target. What I’m getting at, Freddy, is whether there is anything you’re not telling me … The past … My guess is there is.’

  ‘Careful over the phone, Leo. Perhaps we ought to meet? How are you placed tomorrow lunchtime? I can come up if you like. How about the Randolph?’

  Black answered with silence.

  Towers tried again: ‘I can make it tomorrow evening if you’re busy. I’ll call the local police now if you like, tell them to keep an eye on her for a few days. Karen Peters – is that right?’

  ‘I don’t want you coming here. London. I can make lunch tomorrow.’

  ‘Excellent. Army & Navy, then. Shall we say one?’

  Black rang off.

  Towers lay back on the pillow, feeling hopeful for the first time since he had received the news of Dr Bellman’s abduction. If Leo could be prised from his lair, anything was possible.

  19

  Towers’ word with the Oxford police brought a young female detective to Karen’s door shortly before seven the next morning. Karen emerged groggy and disorientated from her bedroom to meet her, still dressed in the clothes she had slept in. While Black made coffee for them both in the kitchenette he overheard the detective explaining that her superintendent had decided to offer her the option of a twenty-four-hour personal protection officer while they attempted to trace her attacker. It was a purely precautionary measure, she assured her, but in light of the fact that two scientists employed by the university had gone missing in recent months it might be a wise one. Karen hesitated then declined, opting instead to take up the offer of a portable panic button.

  Black felt both guilty and duplicitous as she was prompted into discussing the intimate details of her break-up with Joel. The detective noted every word on a laptop and promised they would speak to him. The only salve to Black’s conscience was the thought of Karen’s thieving ex-husband having police officers arrive at his door, preferably when his young girlfriend was at home.

  Thirty minutes later the interview was over and the detective was on her way. She left Karen with her business card, a leaflet advertising the services of Victim Support and a promise that her case would be treated as a priority.

  ‘She seems competent,’ Karen said, as if trying to reassure herself.

  ‘Yes,’ Black said, feeling even more guilty as he watched her tugging anxiously at the cuff of her sweater. ‘Would you like me to stay a while?’

  ‘No, I’ll be fine. Look, I’m so sorry to have imposed on you. I can’t have been thinking straight last night.’

  ‘It was no trouble.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She gave a grateful smile and pushed the hair back from her face.

  Black noticed the scattering of delicate freckles on her cheeks and the fullness of her lips. ‘Call me any time. I’ll try to remember to keep my phone on.’ He smiled.

  She smiled back and briefly met his gaze before quickly glancing away as if embarrassed.

  What was the appropriate gesture – a handshake, a kiss on the cheek? As Black tried to decide the moment for anything that might have felt natural or spontaneous passed, leaving him no option but to make do with an awkward wave as he stepped towards the door. ‘Goodbye, then.’

  ‘Bye, Leo.’

  Making his way down the stairs he couldn’t help but feel that something had changed between them. Until the previous evening they had been professional colleagues on friendly, polite terms, but they had woken up as more than that. As what, though? Were they close friends now? Confidants? The way Karen had looked straight into his eyes had felt like an invitation to cross a boundary but tempted as Black was his instinct was to remain at arm’s length. His relationships with women had been few, unhappy and a long time in the past. He had learned to live without love or sex and it had brought a kind of peace. Romantic feelings, he had long ago decided, were a complication he could live without.

  But try as he might to put her out of his mind, Karen’s presence lingered and refused to leave.

  Black showered, changed, grabbed breakfast and taught an early tutorial before catching one of the many buses that shuttled between Oxford and London day and night. Ninety minutes later he disembarked at Marble Arch and set off across Hyde Park hoping that a walk would give him an appetite for the doubtless heavy lunch that awaited him.

  The warm weather had brought out the crowds and with them all the fantastic contradictions that only London seemed able to contain. Large clusters of black-clad Middle Eastern mothers were enjoying picnics on the grass with their children while nearby several young white women were sunbathing in bikinis. Skateboarders, a party of orthodox Jews, rich Saudis in flowing robes and Roma beggars mingled amidst the drifts of Chinese and American tourists. Differences insurmountable elsewhere seemed to have been overcome in this corner of the capital that had somehow managed to become neutral territory.

  At Hyde Park Corner he crossed beneath the Wellingto
n Arch and headed along Constitution Hill, caught up in the excitement of the sightseers heading towards Buckingham Palace. The pink tarmac, the great Union Jacks draped from pristine white flagpoles and the sentries dressed in their red tunics and bearskin hats combined to create a spectacle of glorious and benevolent permanence at the heart of a turbulent world. He supposed the crowds gathered here in the belief that behind the palace walls lay some magical secret, Her Majesty a benign semi-deity who stood in stunning contrast to all that was base and venal in human nature.

  Leaving the throng behind he continued along the Mall before cutting through Marlborough Road to Pall Mall, the home of London’s most exclusive clubs. Black had never understood the appeal of retreating into a recreation of an Edwardian country house to spend hours in the company of others exactly like oneself, but he was the exception among his former colleagues. Part of military life was being ‘the right sort’, or, in other words, behaving with impeccable manners, while at the same time being prepared – if senior ranks were in sufficiently boisterous mood – to drink to oblivion and humiliate oneself in a bout of broomstick jousting. Black had played his part but often through gritted teeth. He had little time for the childish rituals of British establishment men. The club, the officers’ mess, the draughty boarding school seemed to him all to be extensions of each other.

  The doorman in top hat and tailcoat greeted him warmly. It had been half a decade since Black had crossed the threshold of the Army & Navy (known to its members as ‘The Rag’), but he was received as if it were yesterday. To his astonishment the old retainer at the desk remembered his name and had ticked it off the list of expected visitors even before he had reached the mahogany counter, where he was politely informed that Colonel Towers was waiting for him in the Coffee Room. Black ascended the sweeping staircase hung with oil paintings of imperial generals and recalled the particular brand of deference with which officers of the Special Forces were greeted within these walls. The club’s staff had always prided themselves on knowing who they were and liked to display their knowledge through subtle displays of exaggerated discretion.