The Flesh is Weak (P&R3)

by Tim Ellis

  ‘I still have a job to do, Angie.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘We’ll see you later, and stop worrying I’m okay.’

  ‘If you’re sure… Oh, by the way, I went to see Dr Land and he says everything is fine. The scan at the hospital is on Friday at four o’clock.’

  ‘That works out nicely, because I’m there at that time anyway. I’ll be able to meet you in there.’

  ‘Good. I’ll see you later then, and try to stay alive. I love you.’

  ‘I love you as well.’

  ‘It stinks in the men’s toilets, Sir. What plays on your phone when I ring you?’

  ‘You’ll never know will you, Richards? Have you finished doing whatever it is you’re doing down there?’

  ‘I know you’re being disgusting, and I choose to ignore you. You can pull your trousers up now.’

  ‘You should have been a nurse like your mum.’

  ‘Instead, I’m your partner who can double up as a nurse should the need arise.’

  ‘I’m so lucky.’

  ‘And it’s about time you recognised that fact.’ She washed her hands in the sink and dried them on a paper towel.

  ‘You can wait outside for me now, Richards.’

  She looked at him bemused then said, ‘Oh, you want to go, okay Sir.’

  As they walked back along the corridor people stared at them.

  DS Tyrell said, ‘You’ve caused quite a stir, Sir.’

  ‘It wasn’t my idea to take Richards into the men’s toilets, Sergeant.’

  ‘No, I mean surviving being pushed under a train. They’re all taking time out to watch the DVD.’

  ‘Oh that? I’m more interested in whether the woman is working alone, or someone else is giving her orders. Are we going to lunch, I’m starving?’

  ***

  At half-past eleven, and after disabling the fire-door alarm, John Linton went out onto the roof of the Swisotel, carrying the transit case containing the AW long-range sniper’s rifle and propped the door open using the stone he’d left there for the purpose. He assembled the weapon with steady hands and a long time familiarity. The May sun slowly climbed to its zenith, and there was a slight north-westerly breeze. He adjusted the windage control on the Schmidt & Bender telescopic sight to compensate.

  There were people arriving and leaving at the Old Bailey, it was a popular place – especially for criminals. Looking through the scope, he could see the news crew from Sky News setting up the camera and microphone. The reporter in front of the camera today was the good-looking blonde-haired woman wearing a light-grey suit, which revealed her ample cleavage. There were so many obstacles between him and being interested in a woman he didn’t even give her a second thought. The only person he was thinking about this morning was Aaron Carter.

  He found a comfortable position, sat on a steel ventilator cowl, and waited for the guest of honour to arrive. Rather than search the surrounding area for Aaron Carter, he trained the rifle on the reporter and watched her instead. He’d be able to tell from her reaction that the child-killer had arrived, and he didn’t have long to wait. He moved the rifle about until he found the smirking Aaron Carter. Next to him stood a small fat woman with piercings in her ears and lips, and tattoos on her neck and down the length of one arm. He guessed that she was Carter’s mother.

  The reporter stuck a microphone in Carter’s face, and he eyed her appreciatively. Yes, John thought, that was probably why she was there. Carter would be more likely to respond to a beautiful woman with cleavage that resembled the entrance to paradise than a man in a business suit.

  Carter took a long drag of his cigarette and stuck his trademark middle finger up for the world to see.

  It was the shot John had been waiting for. He squeezed the trigger.

  The .338 Lapua Magnum LockBase B408 bullet severed Aaron Carter’s middle finger before entering his left eye, travelling along the optic nerve, and through the temporal and occipital lobes of the brain, before exiting the skull at the rear of Carter’s head. The bullet took a generous portion of grey matter with it before it ricocheted off the stone and hit the left side of the arched entrance and lodged in the wall.

  Blood spurted from Aaron Carter’s severed middle finger, and splattered over the beautiful reporter and Carter’s mother as he crumpled to the ground.

  John would like to have watched the aftermath, but it was time to check out. It wouldn’t take them long to find the bullet, work out what type of rifle had fired it, and the direction and angle of the shot. Armed police would arrive at the hotel looking for the person who could make a shot like that. At first, the police would look for someone connected to the dead girl’s family, but eventually they’d discover that John Linton checked out of the hotel shortly after the shot was made. The breadcrumbs would eventually lead them to 12 Barnard Acres in Lower Nazeing.

  Now, he had to go home, collect a few things, empty his bank account, and cease to exist. No phone calls, but then who would he call? No using his credit card, but then he didn’t have one anyway. Time to put the Army training on how to disappear in a foreign country to use.

  ***

  In the opposite direction from which Tyrell had taken Parish and Richards along Vauxhall Bridge Road was the distinctive red and yellow painted Vauxhall Bridge spanning the Thames. On the opposite bank of the river – at 85 Albert Embankment – stood the Headquarters of the British Secret Intelligent Service (MI6) – usually referred to as Legoland by those who worked there – at Vauxhall Cross.

  Alex Knight stood in a room on a basement level that existed on no official blueprint of the SIS building. She was fed up because of her recent failure, and now she had to stand here like a naughty schoolgirl and explain to her boss what had gone wrong.

  ‘A crustacean could have done it, Knight, why couldn’t you?’ Sir Charles Lathbury didn’t wait for an answer from her, and she didn’t bother offering one because she knew what was coming. ‘I blame the government’s new recruitment strategy, which allows mental defectives such as yourself to enter what used to be a Secret INTELLIGENT Service.’ He stood up, balled his fists on the grey nondescript metal table, as he leaned towards her and shouted the middle word into her face as well as curry-tasting saliva. ‘Detective Inspector Jed Parish is not stupid you know, otherwise he wouldn’t be an Inspector. He’ll know it wasn’t an accident, and now he’ll also know that something’s not quite right.’

  ‘He won’t…’

  ‘Don’t interrupt me Knight. You’ve already proven you know absolutely nothing of any worth. I blame the government, and I blame you, but I also blame myself. I knew you were useless, I should never have entrusted you with such an easy task. You’re clearly not up to the job I see that now. So, any mitigating circumstances before I get the mail boy down here and give him your job?’

  It wasn’t the first time he’d bawled her out like this, but then it wasn’t the first time that a task he’d given her had turned into a sack of shit. ‘It was hardly my fault, Sir.’

  Sir Charles sat back down and steepled his gloved hands in front of his mouth. ‘I see, this is where you attempt plausible deniability. I’m afraid only senior people can get away with that, and you’re so far down the chain of command as to be pre-evolutionary.’ He pushed himself up again and added to her nervousness by pacing back and forth.

  She could smell his cologne and knew it would have come from a bottle with a price tag in excess of her wages.

  ‘I could make you disappear, Knight. There are people outside that door who could make it appear that you never existed. How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-seven, Sir.’

  ‘So young.’

  She stood perfectly still hoping that her statuesque demeanour might persuade him to keep her around. Five years ago she’d been a checkout girl at the local Morrison’s supermarket. That wasn’t, of course, her career choice after graduating from the University of Middle England with a 2:1 in the History of Fashion. She’d wanted to be th
e next Donatella Versace or Stella McCartney, had even put her name forward as a contestant on Sky One’s Project Catwalk with Kelly Osbourne until they’d cancelled the show because it wasn’t female-friendly. Afterwards, on a crazy weekend’s drinking binge, she’d seen an advert in a Fashion Magazine for female agents with the security services and had applied. Six months later, after she’d forgotten all about it, a letter arrived asking her to report to Fort Monckton in Gosport, Hampshire – a single one-way train ticket had been enclosed.

  ‘Do you want a chance to redeem yourself, or is this simply a way of making me fire you?’

  She knew he was being polite. Nobody was fired from SIS they left in a body bag through a tunnel under the Thames. ‘If I may, Sir?’

  Sir Charles appeared in her left field of vision. He wore a cashmere coat over a charcoal grey suit and a blood-red tie. He nodded, and his nod was as immaculate as his clothes. She still noticed what people wore. Parish, for instance, had no dress sense at all, but the girl he’d been with had obviously dressed down so that she didn’t look too female. They were the same, women in a man’s world.

  ‘You asked me to make it look like an accident, Sir, which is what it would appear to have been had Parish not survived. The possibility of him surviving was incalculable.’

  ‘Yet, survive he did.’

  ‘Let me have another chance, Sir. There’ll be no more mistakes.’

  He stood so close to her and whispered, ‘The next mistake will be your last, Knight.’

  She could feel his hot breath on the left side of her face and neck and had the eerie feeling that the heat was a warm breeze from the fires of hell as somebody opened the door a crack.

  He moved away. ‘I don’t really care about you, Knight. What I care about is that Parish doesn’t find out about his parents, so I’m going to put a shadow on you. If you do fail a second time, the shadow will finish the job and tidy up any loose ends.’

  She knew exactly what he meant. If she failed again, she would become a loose end. ‘I understand, Sir.’

  ‘I hope so, Knight, because I’ve become fond of our little chats.’

  She heard a soft thud as the door closed and turned around. Sir Charles Lathbury had left. Tears welled in her eyes and cascaded down her face, and she couldn’t stop herself shaking.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Tyrell took them to the Pimlico Beer Garden ten doors away from CEOPS at No.43. It seemed to take up part of the lower floor of a block of flats, and Parish was glad he didn’t live above the pub.

  ‘It used to be called The Lord High Admiral when it was just a normal pub,’ Tyrell said waving his arms about like a tour guide. ‘But then it became a tapas bar and they changed the name. I expect the old name stemmed from when Britannia ruled the waves, and now that we’re a multicultural society we can’t have something that reflects our murky military past where we killed everybody and took their land, can we?’ He laughed like a horse.

  In the bar, Tyrell said, ‘Shall I order?’

  Parish didn’t even know what a tapas was. He looked at Richards, but he didn’t think she knew what they were either. ‘Please do, you know what food’s the best in here,’ he said trying to sound casual.

  ‘Drinks?’

  Parish asked for a pint of Guinness because he wasn’t driving until later, Tyrell had a Budweiser shandy, and Richards eventually settled for a pineapple juice after Parish told her to stop shilly-shallying around and order something.

  They sat at a small round table that clearly wasn’t large enough for both their drinks and the food, but the place was full and they were lucky to find an empty table at all.

  There was a half-hour wait for the food, but it went quickly enough, and as the plump dark-haired waitress tried to fit everything onto the table a large group of people at the bar began cheering and clapping.

  ‘There must be a birthday party or something,’ Tyrell said.

  ‘It is the news on the television,’ the waitress explained in a heavily accented Spanish. ‘The man Carter who killed that girl has been shot dead at the Bailey.’

  ‘The Old Bailey,’ Tyrell corrected her. ‘That’s what happens when the justice system breaks down, people take the law into their own hands.’

  Parish was busy helping himself to a selection of tapas and piling them onto a plate. ‘I don’t envy the coppers who have to catch his killer,’ Parish said. ‘Most of them will agree with what he’s done. You saw people’s reaction in here, Carter seems to have been universally hated.’

  ‘But that’s the law, Sir, We have to uphold the law.’

  ‘Yes we do, Richards, but sometimes the law is an ass. He killed seven-year-old Zoe Lewis with a car, so it’s a traffic offence. If he’d used a gun, it would have been murder and he’d be sentenced to life in prison. In both cases the little girl is dead. The parents want justice, but in the first case they don’t get it, which sets off a chain of events where other people’s lives are ruined. The government needs to acknowledge when the system doesn’t work and fix it.’

  Tyrell said, ‘If you’d been the father of Zoe Lewis would you have taken the law into your own hands?’

  Parish decided that he liked tapas and stuffed more into his mouth. He took a long swallow of beer before he answered. ‘If no one else was going to get hurt because of my actions, then yes I probably would. Mind you, Aaron Carter was the worst kind of sewer rat, and it would be psychologically easy to have killed him. He’s showed no remorse for killing that little girl. In fact, he wore her death like a badge of honour. In most cases, a father will do anything to protect his family.’ Recalling his early-morning visit to Rick Murcer’s house with Kowalski he glanced at Richards. ‘They’ll even resort to murder, regardless of the consequences.’

  They finished their meal and were back at CEOPS HQ by quarter to two. Tyrell had sent the results of the database query to the printer and it consisted of ten pages. He made two extra copies and passed one each to Parish and Richards.

  Parish had expected a list of names, hoping that one was highlighted in bold indicating the killer, but he knew nothing was ever that simple. ‘There’s no names?’ he queried after skimming through the ten pages.

  ‘CETS doesn’t produce names, it comes up with ideas,’ Tyrell said. ‘Think of it as a very sophisticated mind-mapping tool. It gives you lines of inquiry to follow based on the search terms we entered. Some can be dismissed immediately, but others will be gems that you would never have thought of.’

  ‘Okay,’ Parish said. He went down the list crossing off each entry, which he considered as not relevant. There were no listings for ‘five children in graves’, five by five’, or graves in the shape of a pentagon, but there were a number of entries relevant to the number five. These were the five wounds of Jesus Christ; the alchemy of the five elements; the significance of the pentagram in the Wicca, Satanist, and Taoist religions; the Five Books of Moses; and the five pillars of Islam. There were hundreds of listings related to buried skeletons, but nothing relevant to the case. Apart from listings about boiling bodies becoming a new funeral practice, there was nothing relevant under that search term either. The listings for decapitation between the sixth and seventh cervical vertebrae were mainly related to it being an Anglo-Saxon method of execution. Finally, there was nothing about hanging people upside down to drain their blood. He sat back in the chair and waited for Richards to finish. Tyrell had skimmed through the list, but didn’t really know what he was looking for, so he had put it to one side and got on with his own work.

  Richards finished reading. ‘I can’t see anything that might help us, Sir.’

  ‘On the face of it no, but we could look more closely at the Wicca and Satanist religions. Do you know what they are?’

  ‘Well, Satanists worship Satan, and… Wasn’t there a film about a Wicca man?’

  ‘You and your films, Richards,’ Parish said. ‘The more recent version of The Wicker Man,’ he emphasised the different spellings, ‘starred Ni
cholas Cage and was about human sacrifice to improve the production of honey by bees on an island.’

  ‘Oh, that’s no good, but the deaths could be about human sacrifice?’

  ‘Yes they could, but the film is not relevant to our investigation.’

  A short plump woman in a grey trouser-suit came into the room and handed Tyrell something.

  ‘Ah good.’ He passed an A4 brown envelope to Parish. ‘Your DVD back, and an enlarged photograph of the woman.’

  Parish slipped the photograph out of the envelope. Richards leaned across to look as well. The picture showed a young woman in her late twenties or early thirties with should-length straight black hair, and a thin nondescript face. She wore a flat peaked cap and plain dark clothes. ‘Doesn’t ring any bells with me, what about you, Richards?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know her.’

  ‘Then why are you looking?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘Because you’re nosy?’

  She pulled a face then grimaced at the pain. ‘I might have recognised her.’

  ‘Did you?’

  She reached for the photograph. ‘Let me have a closer look?’

  Parish held the picture away from her. ‘It’s a disguise.’

  Richard’s brow furrowed. ‘Is it? I didn’t see anything.’

  He held the picture up so that they could both see it. ‘What do you notice about the hair?’

  She leaned forward and stared at the photograph. ‘Well… nothing.’

  ‘It’s a wig, its too straight, and she hasn’t got the skin colouring of someone with black hair. Not only that, its being held on the head with the hat.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Not only that, the hat doesn’t go with the rest of her outfit. She’s wearing it to keep the wig on, but also the peak puts the top of her face into shadow for the CCTV cameras.’

  Tyrell put his hand out, and Parish passed the photograph to him. ‘Yeah, you’re right, Sir. Under normal circumstances you wouldn’t give her a second look. The wig and her clothes have been chosen to make her appear invisible in a crowd.’