Friends to Die For

by Hilary Bonner

  ‘Well, that’s something, boss.’

  ‘Not enough. Just go put some fear into the bastard, Vogel. He’s too damned cool for my liking.’

  ‘Yes, guv,’ said Vogel.

  He was getting up to leave when Clarke’s desk phone rang. She listened for a few seconds, then gestured for Vogel to wait.

  ‘We’ve had a call from a woman who works in the Covent Garden Veterinary Surgery,’ she said. ‘Apparently she’s only just seen a newspaper report mentioning that Michelle had been mugged and her face disfigured not long before she was murdered. Says she put two and two together and reckons it was Michelle, wearing heavy make-up, dark glasses, and with a baseball cap pulled down over her face, who visited the surgery on the morning of her murder. She was asking about the medical history of George Kristos’s dog.’

  Vogel looked at Clarke enquiringly.

  ‘The dog was terminally ill, Vogel. And Kristos knew it. He’d been taking the creature to the vet regularly. It had cancer of the liver.’

  ‘Christ, so Kristos was about to lose his dog anyway. This is getting better, boss.’

  ‘Yep. But still not enough for a conviction. Let’s just see if we can’t break Kristos. Clinch it.’

  Vogel left the room, taking Joe Carlisle with him.

  He told Carlisle to get a doctor to the station to examine Kristos as soon as possible, to contact Bob and Alfonso, and to pass on DCI Clarke’s message to Ari, Billy, and Tiny in their cells.

  Hoping that Parlow and Wagstaff would call in soon with news of Greg Walker, Vogel was just about to head off to the cells to begin the process of trying to break Kristos when Carlisle halted the phone call he was making and called after his DCI.

  ‘Guv, they reckon it’s going to be a couple of hours before they can get a doctor here,’ said the DC. ‘Apparently there’s been some sort of emergency . . .’

  Vogel set off for the cells, cursing under his breath. On the bright side, a two-hour delay would give him time to talk to the Sunday Clubbers. And it would mean Kristos would have plenty of time to stew.

  When the detective entered his cell, George Kristos was sitting bolt upright on the stone bench that served as a bed. His eyes instantly fixed on Vogel’s. It was as if he had been staring at the door, waiting.

  The cold gaze unnerved Vogel. He had to remind himself that he was the one who was supposed to be doing the unnerving. It wasn’t going to be easy, but Vogel had an idea of something that might intimidate Kristos far more than the prospect of being tried for murder.

  ‘We have arranged for you to be seen by a doctor,’ he said. ‘Information has come to our attention that makes it necessary for you to undergo a full medical examination before we formally interview you again.’

  He knew that his language was stilted and awkward. It was deliberate. Vogel studied Kristos carefully. Was there just a flicker of something indecipherable in his eyes? Was the man blinking a little more quickly?

  ‘Unfortunately it could be as long as two hours before an appropriate doctor can attend. Until that time you will be detained in this cell. Food and drink will be brought to you at the requisite intervals. Is that clear?’

  Kristos inclined his head slightly. Were his hands trembling? Vogel wasn’t sure of that either. Perhaps he had begun to imagine things.

  ‘I shall see you later then, Mr Kristos,’ said Vogel as he left the cell.

  This time there was no reaction at all.

  I will never allow myself to be violated again. The surgeons were as bad, in some ways, as the woman who had destroyed me. I still found it hard to believe that they could not have saved some part of my manhood.

  I read, many years later, of transplants and reconstructions, but after what I had been through I would never again put myself at the mercy of the medical profession. They had left me like this. Not even half a man. And as I had grown into what would have been puberty, in a young offenders’ centre, with vandals and rapists and idiots, neither they nor anyone else knew of my inner agony. They did not realize that I too had sexual feelings. That the torture of adolescence was also mine. Testosterone raged inside me, just as it did in the bodies of my fellow inmates who passed for normal.

  The last time I saw a doctor was when I was seventeen, the year before I left the young offenders’ centre. The ignorant bitch sat there in her white coat and stethoscope and told me that as I had lost my testicles as well as my penis, I would not suffer from any sexual desires I may be unable to satisfy.

  Was she not aware that it is not only the testes which produce male hormones? The adrenal glands also do so. Not enough to deliver any sort of sexual satisfaction – especially in one who lacks the required equipment – but enough to drive me mad with sexual frustration. Particularly in my teens.

  I have not been near a doctor since. My knowledge of my condition, and the drugs I have used to manage it, have all come from the Internet.

  When they let me out of that dreadful institution, a place where everyone knew what had happened to me, where the staff and the inmates all knew that I was a freak, I vowed that I would reinvent myself. I would learn how to pass for normal. I thought if I could become an actor I could teach myself to perform off stage as well as on.

  And, indeed, my whole life since I was eighteen has been a performance.

  But first I had to acquire a new identity. As long as I remained Rory Burns I would always be the freak with no balls and no prick. I would never be able to get beyond that.

  The whole time I was in the Edinburgh halfway house, I was just awaiting the right opportunity, obeying my licence to the letter, reporting like a good boy to my probation officer, behaving myself perfectly – apart from the small matter of my two visits to King’s Cross.

  Although I had no money, I was clean and tidy and well-mannered, so it was easy enough for me to hitch-hike to London. I’d read about King’s Cross and how the prostitutes lurked there, wanton and lustful, worthless in the eyes of the Lord. Unable to find the one who had been responsible for my destruction – the evil bitch Marlena having yet to be revealed unto me – I needed to release the anger within. I needed to vent my wrath, to worship at the altar of retribution. With my sacrificial blade I violated their secret places and ripped out their womanhood. And then I returned to the halfway house.

  It was only after I sacrificed my second victim that I found out she was not a prostitute. She was a student nurse from Sweden who had strayed into that place of depravity by accident. I watched the girl’s parents on television, weeping as they told of how she’d wanted only to devote her life to God. She had been pure – a virgin as I was and would always remain.

  God showed me His wrath then. I began to have violent headaches. I would wake up in the night in a terrible sweat and quaking with fear. Sometimes pains would course through my whole body. I knew that God was punishing me for causing the death of one of His chosen children. I listened to His voice. I vowed I would never again give in to my base urges. There must be no more wanton killing. Instead I would dedicate my life to becoming someone else.

  One day in the local paper I read about a Greek Cypriot couple who ran a kebab shop in Muirhouse. Their seventeen-year-old son, Georgios Kristos, had died suddenly of meningitis. Broken-hearted, they were selling up and returning to Cyprus. It was perfect. The boy was just a year younger than me. I would turn myself into Georgios Kristos. And I knew exactly how I would set about doing so.

  I’d read the book, The Day of the Jackal. It had all seemed too simple to be true. Surely it was only in a novel that this method of building an identity could work? But work it did. In 1998 anyway.

  The authorities had found me a job in the packing department of a chicken factory. Not exactly appropriate for someone who had committed a violent crime, but nobody seemed to notice. It paid little, but I saved all I earned. Then I realized that I could earn far better money by actually killing the creatures. I applied for overtime whenever possible. It caused me no concern to watch these poor ha
irless battery hens die. After all, their lives were as full of pain and despair as mine had so far been. And I too had sometimes thought that I would be better off out of my misery.

  But suddenly I had a real purpose. I saw my chance to become a new person, somebody who could at least seem to be normal – and I grasped it.

  The newspaper report most obligingly supplied the date of Georgios Kristos’s death. I was able to obtain his death certificate. That supplied me with his date of birth, and I was then able to obtain a birth certificate. The report also told me which school Georgios had attended. It seemed he had been a precocious student, and at seventeen had already passed four A-levels, including English and, most fortuitously for me, Drama.

  I waited until Georgios would have been an adult. On his eighteenth birthday I left my halfway house one morning and never returned. Neither did I ever see my probation officer again. I was no longer Rory Burns. I was Georgios Kristos. I dyed my reddish blond typically Gaelic hair a Mediterranean black, acquired dark-tinted contact lenses, and took to using sunbeds and fake tan.

  I have learned well how to pretend to be something that I am not. Indeed, anything at all that I am not. I was not drawn to acting by a desire to become a star of stage or screen. Though I have found, curiously perhaps, that I enjoy performing before an audience. I chose acting because it seemed the ideal craft for a man who was to live entirely by subterfuge.

  The principals of the Willesden Academy for Performing Arts were impressed by my false academic qualifications. And it turned out that I was a natural. While I was there, I learned to drive and acquired a driving licence, I acquired a passport in the name of Georgios Kristos, I opened a bank account, and I was able to join Equity.

  I had succeeded in creating a new life for myself. And I wanted to live it. For my God. In order to keep my vow that there would be no more killings, I researched medications and therapies, and overseas suppliers who did not concern themselves with prescriptions and legalities, eventually settling on a cocktail of anti-psychotic drugs that allowed me to keep my anger in check.

  Sometimes I almost forgot that I was acting on and off stage. Playing a role. I travelled to London, found myself work, acquired somewhere to live in the heart of the city and nurtured my new life. I kept it up for thirteen years. Thirteen unbelievable years. There was one little lapse. But only one in all that time. And I doubted anyone would ever find out about it, even now, for it took place in another country. Not realizing that it would react with my medication, I decided to sample marijuana. My hard-won control evaporated and I was again overwhelmed by the urge to take revenge. But I did at least make sure that my victim was a prostitute. An evil woman without morality. And God did not seem to mind. The terrible pains in my head and my body did not return. And I never smoked marijuana again.

  God rewarded my efforts. I achieved happiness of a sort. Enough acting engagements came my way to fund my modest needs, supplemented by the various odd jobs I undertook. There were bit parts on TV, pantomime, a couple of commercials, fringe theatre and occasional provincial tours. I worked out in the gym as a diversion for any sexual energy, and to build up muscle and improve the appearance of my body. With the help of enhancing jockstraps I became an expert at creating a satisfactory crotch bulge.

  I was George Kristos, handsome young man-about-town. I could have any girl I wanted. Or so everyone thought.

  For the first time in my life, I made friends. Each week, I would look forward to Sunday Club. I kidded myself I was fond of the others and they of me. Then I learned that I had been sharing a table with the woman who had brought about my destruction.

  My pink lady was Marlena. Or rather, Marleen McTavish.

  And it was then I rediscovered my own true identity: Rory Burns.

  Now the whole world will know. I have been found out. But that is no matter. I have fulfilled my destiny.

  And there shall be no retribution levelled against me except that of my Lord God Almighty.

  Parlow and Wagstaff approached Vogel just as he arrived back at his desk.

  ‘’Fraid we can’t find Greg Walker, guv,’ said Parlow.

  ‘What!’ snapped Vogel. He glanced at his watch. ‘It’s taken you long enough to not bloody find him, hasn’t it? What the fuck have you been doing?’

  ‘We went to his flat, then to his mother-in-law’s place in case he’d gone there to see his kids. That’s up towards Camden, sir. She hadn’t seen him all day, so we drove to Waterloo to check out his lock-up. He wasn’t there either, but there was a bloke in the lock-up opposite who said Walker had been there all afternoon and had only just left.’

  Vogel grunted, bored already with what was beginning to sound like a succession of excuses for failure.

  ‘I don’t suppose this bloke had any idea where Walker was going?’

  ‘Not really, guv. He said Walker got in a taxi and he thought he heard him ask for an address in Soho, but he couldn’t catch exactly what he—’

  Vogel barely hesitated. He turned and ran for the door, yelling for Parlow and Wagstaff to follow.

  ‘Have you still got that CID car outside?’ he asked breathlessly.

  ‘Yes, guv,’ said Wagstaff.

  ‘Thank God,’ said Vogel, still running. ‘We need to get to the Zodiac on Lisle Street. Parlow – on your radio! Call for backup. And get an Armed Response Unit to meet us there. I reckon we’re gonna need ’em.’

  Wagstaff, proud holder of a police advanced driving certificate, jumped behind the wheel, and with Parlow in the back seat and Vogel next to him shouting instructions, took off with a screech of rubber.

  Greg Walker was at that moment climbing out of a black cab outside the Zodiac. The Browning was tucked into one pocket of his leather bomber jacket. It wasn’t yet cocked. Nonetheless the gun’s close proximity to his abdomen caused Greg to break into a sweat. He kept one hand in his jacket pocket, holding the pistol in place, almost as if he feared it might leap out of its own volition and shoot him in the foot.

  It was early evening. The Zodiac opened at lunchtime seven days a week and stayed open until three or four the following morning, but it was seldom busy at this hour. There was only one security doorman on duty, whom Greg recognized from his previous visit. Greg approached him without hesitating. He was beyond fear.

  ‘I’m sorry to come unannounced,’ Greg said. ‘I have some information for Mr Kwan. I wonder if he could possibly find time to see me?’

  The doorman turned slightly away from Greg, bending his head towards his radio mike, clipped, as usual, to the lapel of his black jacket. As he reached with one hand to switch it on, Greg stepped forward, removed the pistol from his pocket, cocked it by pulling back the top-slide thus springing a cartridge from the magazine, and thrust the barrel into the man’s midriff.

  ‘Take me in,’ he muttered, ‘or you’re a fuckin’ gonner.’

  To Greg’s surprise, the bouncer made no attempt to knock the gun out of his hand the way Greg had so often seen it done in movies and on the telly. Instead he led the way through the main gaming room, where only a few dedicated punters were playing the tables. Greg walked close to the doorman and kept the gun tucked into the man’s side, hoping nobody would notice it. No one did. The gamblers were intent only on their own activities.

  Perhaps because of the time of day and the relatively small number of punters on the premises, there was no second security operative at the rear door which led to Kwan’s offices. Greg gestured to the doorman to open the door, which he did at once, tapping in a security code. Greg pushed him through.

  As soon as they were on the other side, the doorman made his move. Greg was pulling the door shut, which put him slightly off balance. The man kicked out, catching Greg with a mighty blow at the top of one thigh, then wrapped his leg around both of Greg’s, behind the knees, causing him to topple backwards, crashing heavily to the ground. It was expertly done. Unfortunately, as Greg fell he inadvertently squeezed the trigger of the Browning in his right hand. />
  The bullet hit the doorman straight between the eyes. The tac vest he was undoubtedly wearing was therefore of no use. He died instantly.

  Greg scrambled uncertainly to his feet, stunned but determined to finish what he had begun. He ran up the stairs to the third floor. The door to Kwan’s offices was shut. Greg fired three rapid shots at the lock, then gave the door a shove.

  Tony Kwan was sitting at his glass desk, just as he had been when Greg had made his previous visit. But this time he did not rise to greet Greg. He did not move. He just sat there, unblinking.

  Greg aimed his pistol at Tony Kwan’s head. He had no idea whether or not Kwan wore a bulletproof tac jacket, but he was taking no chances. He wanted to shoot the murdering bastard right between the eyes. As he had the doorman. Only this time it would be deliberate. He began to squeeze the trigger.

  The subsequent bang was therefore not a surprise. Then he became aware of a terrible pain in his lower arm. He looked down and saw that his right wrist and hand were a bloody mess of shattered bone and sinew. His pistol lay at his feet. He had been given no opportunity to fire it at Kwan. He’d been shot. Worse, he’d failed. He’d let his Karen down.

  But what had he expected? Greg wondered, as the world started to go hazy and he slumped to the ground.

  One of Kwan’s goons, holding a still-smoking revolver, stepped forward and kicked Greg a couple of times in the ribs.

  Greg howled in agony. There was little doubt that at least one rib had been broken. But then, that too was only to be expected.

  With lights flashing and siren blaring, Wagstaff got Vogel to Lisle Street in four minutes. As they approached the Zodiac all three policemen heard gunshots. Vogel threw himself out of the car before Wagstaff had brought it fully to a halt. They did not know then, but the first four shots had been fired by Greg Walker at the security doorman and then the lock on the door to Kwan’s office, and the fifth was the shot fired at Greg by Kwan’s henchmen.