He knew most people experienced a cathartic sort of reaction to murder, but Chris was well beyond that. This was the fourth life he’d taken, perhaps he could describe himself as an old pro at it now? As Chris closed in on the dead hitman he concluded to himself that he’d only ever meant to kill one of those four, the other three had been in self-defence. They had been a kill or be killed type of situation, just like the dead hitman before him.
Now they had finished brawling, Chris could afford to appraise him better. He rolled the dead body over with one foot and stooped to him. The hitman was laid half in the shadow of the bridge, so only his shoulders and face was faintly illuminated. He was handsome, in that plain sort of way. Had he deliberately shaved his face and scalp? Was it beneficial in his line of work? His eyes, growing glassy, stared out in horror.
Now what to do with the body? It was always the problem he was left with. The act of murder, or in this case deadly self-defence, always left him with the difficult task of disposing of a body. Chris closed his eyes and concentrated. He was too far from the sea, not that the sea seemed to get rid of bodies. They only arrived on a beach somewhere at some point, probably ruining some holiday-goer’s vacation at the same time. Burying it was out of the question, especially in the dead of the night and without a shovel.
Chris stood up. Perhaps just try to conceal it and hope it decayed enough before some bypasser took notice…? Like always.
He made a mental note to ask the next hitman what they did with the bodies.
He glanced around, but the underside of the bridge was just blackness. He could hedge his bets by dragging the corpse under the bridge, but that did mean touching the body. He was always reluctant to touch the bodies, his vague knowledge of forensics always warned him against it. He could create an alibi for circumstantial evidence with a living man, he couldn’t justify having touched a dead one.
The quiet of the night was suddenly interrupted by a thumping of a bass-line, but as quickly as it arrived it faded back into the night. A joy-rider.
He went to grab the corpse by the ankles, but decided against it last second.
Fuck it. Leave it. He concluded there was very little evidence linking them at present, he was going to leave it that way. Perhaps his skin cells would be under the hitman’s nails, but without DNA from Chris they would be impossible to trace. No fingerprints had been left on the body that would be useable.
He stepped away and left the dead hitman, with his throat slit, to the undignified fate of rotting in the creek. The knife was painted with claret Chris noted as he began to climb the embankment up to the road. He needed to conceal the weapon on his person, but he didn’t want to paint the victim’s blood over his clothes while he was at it.
In a spark of ingenuity, he found a little patch of mud amongst the tall wild grass and plunged the knife into the soft mud. It slid in much easier than he’d anticipated, to the hilt even. When he tugged it free it was covered in a little streak of mud, he then patted the slit over with a foot. He climbed the embankment, super cautious of any potential witnesses on the road, but when he arrived at the railing there was not a soul to be seen.
It was the dead of the night and the majority of this sleepy little town would be nestled deep inside their beds. With the knife concealed in his waistband he precariously vaulted the railing. He had returned once more to the outskirts of suburbia. Quiet and sleepy houses, a desolate park and a little cluster of shops - an idyllic place for a murder.
He glanced up and down the road, saw an unfamiliar black van idling off in the distance. Was that the hitman’s? He hesitated for a moment, but it didn’t come to life.
He stepped, but something crunched underfoot. In a flash of a reaction, he removed his foot and saw his dropped iPod. He stooped and collected it, it was still playing music through the headphones. He silenced the music that had once been the soundtrack to his midnight jaunt. He had completely forgotten about it, he was lucky for it could’ve been a vital piece of evidence. He didn’t replace the headphones in his ears, he didn’t fancy his chances. He’d been caught distracted, he wasn’t going to make that mistake again so quickly. Not that he actually felt the desire to listen to anything. His nerves were beginning to feel a little frayed. Paranoia, like it had before, began to nick at him. The shadows that he’d used to best the hitman now worked against him, who was concealed amongst them?
He shut the wandering thoughts off, as best as he could manage. He began to walk towards the parked van in the distance, it had been the way he had come. He now intended to head back home, as quickly as possible. He set off with a hasty walk.
His journey towards the van was unmarked by any interruption, but as he peered into the abandoned vehicle a new joyrider passed him by. Thankfully he was obscured by the van and the occupants of the car were high on whatever narcotic was leaking out the car windows in a grey mist. The insides of the hitman’s van seemed as plain and unremarkable as the hitman he noted, carefully avoiding touching the outside of the van as he peered through the window while balancing up on his tiptoes. The streetlights above him did an awful job of helping him see. A little black block in a cup-holder caught his attention. A mobile phone? He bit his lip as he considered it, it might be an interesting find and a vital piece of evidence. He imagined the phone might’ve contained text messages that could link Chris to the hitman. He had been the “hit” after all. His common sense told him that it was very unlikely the text messages would be unencrypted. But still… He saw a glisten of silver, a keyring. The keys were still in the ignition. Now an amateur might be tempted to borrow the vehicle, but if a body was hard to dispose of then a van was going to be almost impossible. So many potential traces, so much to get rid of discreetly and so very few avenues to potentially hide one. Chris did suspect however that the hitman hadn’t locked the vehicle. He glanced around and spied a tall and impressive tree in the nearby park.
A few seconds later he returned to the vehicle with a giant leaf acting as a glove as he wrested the handle. The door opened and the light came on. He, without touching anything, reached up and stole the mobile phone. He shut the door with a swipe of his knee. He pocketed the phone alongside his iPod in his jeans. He then quickly stole back onto the path and disappeared into the quiet of the night.
----------------------------------------
Chris ran the taps and pooled the water in the sink. He then gently placed the knife down on the nearby cabinet. He stripped out of the muddied jeans, the bloodied t-shirt and black jacket. The T-shirt ironically stated “Kill4Me”, the blood splattered down the front and along the neck was his own. He placed the clothes in a neat pile and returned to the sink. His reflection wasn’t as frightening as he’d anticipated it to be. The gash across his left brow had already dried out, he still washed it. He got rid of the long trail of dried blood down his cheek. He had a little cut on his lip and it was starting to swell a little.
The damage was minimal, at least he hadn’t sustained a black eye. That would’ve been an opening statement for his first day of college in the morning.
He was lithe, skinny and long. He was rather pale too, looking even more washed out in the harsh artificial light of his en-suite bathroom. His hair, long and black, was knotted and messy. It trailed down his back to his shoulder blades. He had once taken great pride in his fantastic mane of black hair but he was beginning to feel the desire to shed it. He splashed another handful of water at his face. His face was thin and long, it had been a gift from his mother. Most of his features had been a gift from her, about the only thing he’d ever received that had been of use. As he wiped away the condensation on the mirror he saw her in his reflection again. Those same high cheekbones, those similar black lashes that made him look like he was wearing perpetual eyeliner and his shapely green eyes.
He was beautiful, he always had been. He had never known anything else. It wasn’t an arrogant sentiment, it just simply was. He scanned his naked torso and saw a collection of bruises appe
aring on his hips and lower back. He peeled off the black pants he’d been wearing and saw the bruises extended down his legs.
With long fingers, ones that would be perfectly suited for the piano should it ever interest him, he appraised the rest of his flesh. He had emerged from the fight with very little injuries. He was proud of himself.
Now what to do with the clothes? Should he steal downstairs and place them in the washing machine? For a moment it seemed plausible, but quickly he failed to fathom a justifiable excuse to be putting a load of washing in the machine at midnight. It was too suspicious, too out of the ordinary. Even if he suspected his sleeping Aunt wouldn’t hear a thing, nor would think twice of it, he still wasn’t prepared to take that chance. Especially with blood on the T-shirt. He pushed the clothes into a pile down the side of the toilet, obscured from immediate view. He then padded naked to his bed, turning the light off behind him.
He was residing in a rather lavish villa, in the sleepy city of Melun. It was his Aunt’s house, but she treated it more as simply some place to eat and sleep. Much like his mother, she too was a workaholic. Only while his mother had been the mastermind of a prostitution empire and swimming in the murky waters of the criminal underworld, his Aunt was a public official. She worked in the mayors office and was by all accounts very much her sister’s opposite. It was election season, so she was very busy.
She was very hands off, and very liberal. In fact, he barely saw her and that suited him fine. He had no need for anyone to try and replace his dead mother. He had moved here after finishing his GCSE’s, and after his business in Callinghurst School was all wrapped up, and had expected to be forced to endure familial torture. Instead, she had earned his respect when she simply installed him in one of her five rooms and handed him the keys to a little cabin on the grounds that she’d renovated as a studio for him.
When she was home, their conversation was minimal but pleasant.
But ultimately Chris had been left to his own devices.
Her husband was an enigma he’d not met in the three months he’d been lodged here. He rarely visited and was always away on business. It would’ve seemed divorce was imminent, yet neither of them were hostile to one another. In fact, it was almost business like.
Whatever they were up to, it wasn’t quite interesting enough for Chris to investigate.
Melun was a rather tedious little town, near the big bustle of Paris but somehow very removed from it too. It was quiet and a little strange. It had become a little more exciting in the last three months with a serial killer on the loose, dubbed the “Fairy Killer”.
But Chris hadn’t followed the case in the news enough to know any more than the killer was preying on young gay men. He had been holed up in his studio for the majority of his stay here, barely leaving the villa unless he needed art supplies or inspiration. When he did leave it was mostly in the dead of the night when the world was asleep.
He simply had no interest in the world of living, but as Chris slipped into his double bed he contemplated that perhaps he had grown bored of hiding in the shadows of the world. His apathy for the world had run out and dare he say it, he was starting to feel lonely.
The attacks on his life had jolted some sort of emotional significance in him.
Chris was pained to realise that he had unwittingly changed beneath his perfect skin, he had lost his utterly methodical and icy composure. Perhaps he wasn’t as detached as he’d once thought he was. Some psycho-analysts might have told him he’d just grown up, or they might say the horrific way his mother had died had caused him to endure a form of emotional breakdown - Chris didn’t have an answer.
He would’ve liked to have admitted his mother’s abrupt and senseless death hadn’t affected him, but he couldn’t deny the haunting nightmares that intruded upon him regularly. The nights he recalled the gunfire splintering into the limousine killing his mother, and almost himself too, always made him wake in a cold sweat. Sometimes his dead father haunted the same dreams, but he couldn’t fathom why.
His relationships with his parents hadn’t been normal, his mother had been distant and icy and his father utterly absent. His father had left them both when Chris was young, setting up life with his piece of totty from the office. Chris had enjoyed the last laugh though, having fucked his father’s son, his half-brother, and mentally destroying him and then telling it to his father’s face moments before his death. Christopher had destroyed his father’s prodigal son in the most delicious of ways, just to spite him.
Chris’ final months at the boarding school had been interesting for sure.
During Chris’ stay in Melun he had often questioned whether he should’ve felt some form of guilt manifest in him, but it never did. Ultimately they had all been expendable and he had no emotional attachment to any of them. Remorse was certainly not crippling him…
Chris rolled over and winced, a sharp pain jolted up his back. He was beginning to feel sore.
While his life had considerably quietened down in this sleepy town, several large questions hung in the corners of his life. Who was sending the hitmen after him? Three separate men had attempted to end his life, all of them failing. But who the fuck was sending them?
This “Broker” wasn’t much of a lead…
Was it the same person who had killed his mother? The same person who had sent the motorcyclists to fill the limo with machinegun fire? Or perhaps it had to do with the death of his father? His father had been in the bad graces of many people when he died, perhaps they were pissed he’d been killed before they got the chance to get to him?
Chris recalled the man clad in black that had arrived at the scene of the crime and almost chased after Chris as he fled his dead father’s house. Was it them?
But why would they follow him all the way to France just to settle a score? Especially chasing a nobody like Chris…
Chris’ thoughts rested on that for a moment. A nobody… was he a nobody? His mother had amassed a large empire that spanned from prostitution to sex trafficking, and despite him knowing absolutely zero about her businesses he was her son.
He considered the money in his current account. It was a colossal sum, more than any sixteen year old should ever have. It was mostly ill-gotten no doubt but laundered perfectly.
It afforded him a high volume of luxuries. This sum of cash was the only link he had to the businesses. Was that enough?
Frustratingly all Chris could do was speculate on these answers, for he was no closer to the answers than he ever had been before.
Sleep started to seep into him. His last moments on the waking plane were spent mentally checking that he had concealed the hitman’s mobile phone in his room, the knife could wait till the morning…
CHAPTER TWO:
Jean Dubois rolled the cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other and sighed. His dark glare made the young officer stammer and trail off. He flushed red, almost as red as his auburn hair. He nodded awkwardly and stepped away.
Jean puffed on the cigarette and carried on down the steps towards the crime-scene. He was one of the three detectives the Melun police force employed. He was the most senior and the one with the most reputation. He suffered no shit and took absolutely no prisoners. He was average height, but a little fat. The lifestyle of coffee, burgers and cigarettes had caught up with him. His little indulgence of cocaine every now and again certainly didn’t help. He was the type of man who looked like he’d just edged out of his prime. His square and manly features had begun to grey, become fuzzy with ill-kept grooming and dampened his image. His watery blue eyes were tired, red and haggard. His beard and short hair was salt and pepper. He was dressed in a long black trench coat, grey trousers and a white shirt. It did little to protect him from the cool morning air. He took a long drag of the cigarette and surveyed the scene before him. He was short-sighted and ought to be wearing his glasses, but he hated wearing them and persevered without them. The edges of his world were a little blurry, but he was fucked if
he was going to wear them. In the distance a traumatised dog-walker was being interviewed by an officer, her little Chihuahuas restlessly circling at her feet. She was a pink and blonde blob to Jean, that was the only reason he didn’t give her his mental score as he did most women he met. A little group of officers were combing up the grassy embankment opposite, looking for evidence as they went.
A photographer was taking pictures of the dead body, from this angle and that. Recording the crime scene for later review. A set of forensic investigators were relaying equipment from the van parked on the bridge overhead. A little crowd had formed on the bridge, morbidly curious spectators to a murder.
As Jean reached the bottom step, he felt his heart hammering a little. That was quite the walk for his almost fifty-years. Fifty, the big 5-0. Not a number he was relishing.
He wasn’t married, he didn’t have kids. He had nobody to share this milestone with and he wasn’t sure that’s why he was apprehensive about it. Jean Dubois had always been married to his career, at the expense of everyone else. Sure there had been women, and even the odd man, in his life but none of them had stuck around. Probably his fault.
He flicked the cigarette to the floor and stubbed it out with one pointed shoe.
The creek was busy with activity. What had the world come to? It was like his sleepy little town of Melun had exploded over the last three months. There had been more murder in this summer than there had been for the entirety of the last year.
“You think it’s the Fairy Killer?” it was his colleague and fellow detective. Arron Lemaire was a handsome and spunky detective, much more energetic and charming than Jean. If Jean was a tired and grumpy grizzly bear then Arron was a Panda, all play and charm.
The Killing Games Page 2