“But they wouldn’t let you out.”
“There is no out. Not on my game. Stakes are too high.”
“Where did Andy King come in?”
“He was a mistake. Knew it the first time I met him. Chancer. Big mouth, but hell could he plan. The documentation was superb. Travel itineraries, evasive techniques, bureaucratic quagmires ploughed through to buy weapons. But he started to brag.”
“So he had to be wiped out.”
“Disappeared. Dillsburgh gave me the order. Our operations were so big, so global, that we were starting to be less discriminating about who we employed. Big mistake.”
“Where did Jimmy Mullins and Rod Whiteley fit in?”
“Mullins was the initial contact. He’d been approached and had vouched for King as a good risk taker. He didn’t really know what we were about. Whiteley also vouched for King. He got a commission for everyone he recommended, so he wasn’t fussy. We were really starting to drag the bottom of the pond for people.”
“So directly or indirectly, recruitment was targeted at known felons?”
“That’s right. The thing about using criminals is that most of them knew to keep their mouths shut and some we could blackmail if they got too out of line. Trouble is, nobody quite knew where the lines were any more.”
“So then when King started to become a liability you were told to kill anyone associated with him. Just in case they knew something. In case they talked.”
Symon took a deep breath. Suddenly he looked a tired and ageing man. The ebullience, the boyish sangfroid, evaporated.
“Paul, I didn’t kill them. I shot King. Dillsburgh I assumed was a heart attack or a stroke at the wheel. Who knows? Jimmy Mullins, Rod Whiteley, Anna. Not guilty M’Lud.”
“Then who killed them?” asked Cass.
Symon shrugged.
“The text messages. The philosophical puzzles, the mind games, knowing where I was,” I said.
“Not me. Whoever he is, he’s scarily good.”
Symon said that once Dillsburgh was dead he thought the operation was in jeopardy. No one quite knew who was now ‘officially’ in charge. He’d had Mary King’s phone tapped when he was preparing to kill Andy and as insurance to see if she might be trouble. That’s how he knew she’d contacted me. He couldn’t believe it at first when my name came up. Then she changed her number. He came to my place to find out her intentions – the fear was that if she knew anything about what King had been up to she might go to the media, but then the killing started and he thought someone either in the military or in government had ordered a clampdown. Every now and then there was a spring cleaning of personnel in companies such as his, if anything started to get messy. It was a ruthless global business. There seemed to be a cull of anyone associated with King, and that might include Symon himself, given that he’d voiced dissent, so he needed to find the killer. What better place to be than with the investigator who was also trying to find him?
“Believe it or not, I also thought I might be able to protect you. That’s why I tried to throw you off the Ocean Investment scent. If you thought it was a dead end you might throw the case and then you’d be safe. I brought Cass here to protect her.”
I looked at Symon.
“I know it wasn’t you who killed them all,” I said.
He looked shocked. “Then why all the questions?”
“I still thought Cass might be in danger. And I wasn’t absolutely sure.”
His phone trilled. He looked at it, then showed me a text: You next. No number. I could tell from Cass’s expression that she didn’t believe him and thought this might be a set up. I did believe him. I knew now. I should have put together all the pieces before.
Chapter XIX
‘All grandeur, all power, and all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.’
Joseph De Maistre
“So what now, James Bond?” I asked.
Symon looked at me.
“I wish I knew. It’s a mistake to go back to your place. If this cull is a big operation involving the military, and behind that government, trying to cover its tracks, then our only outside chance is to disappear. I know how to do that. It’ll cost, but I have a lot of money.”
Cass looked at me, alarmed.
“Dad. We can’t.”
“We won’t,” I said.
Symon turned on me.
“You don’t know what you’re dealing with, Paul. Please listen to me! Just trying to go on as normal will leave you both dead.”
But already my mind was working in another direction. A speculation was now a certainty. If I was right then it changed everything. I said that Cass and I were going back to the flat. Symon shook his head.
“I can’t help you then,” he said.
“You’re the one who needs to be careful. Where will you go?”
“I can’t tell you that. It might endanger you to know.”
“There was a man in Prague who’d been following me. American Mid-West. Cropped grey hair. Natty dresser. Is he with you?”
“No. And that’s why you should disappear, Paul. You could be OK but they might see you as loose ends, and none of these people like loose ends. This is a billion dollar business.”
We walked out into a night milky with stars bright as dreams. A new moon offered its face in the inky infinity. A dread was in the chill air and I could almost see it coming before it happens. Cass was ahead, me just to her left and Symon behind, walking towards our cars and goodbyes. The world is an angular kaleidoscope of shadows, then a cat movement of something else, the stealth of an assassin. There was the soft whoosh of a gun with a silencer. I turn and Symon walks another few steps then it is as if each layer of him gives way in turn. First the feet refuse, then the knees, and the rest of his body strangely goes forward as he collapses. His eyes were still vivid in the night. I think he is dead before he hits the ground. Even so his lips part and it is as if his whole concentration is arched to pronounce a word, perhaps a syllable, and I strain to hear as I move towards him, but it is only a last breath, more a sigh, as if wearily wondering if it has all been worth the effort, just to reach this end in a cold bleak place. The night is like a trauma built of darkness.
Cass reacts as if in slow motion. It takes a full ten seconds for her to register what is happening. I wait for her to scream but she doesn’t. Something collapses in her and she steps back, almost falling against my car. Now I see the black BMW parked in shadows a hundred metres away. Symon is gone into the night. I feel the silence in his neck with two of my fingers. I look up at the figure some ten metres away holding the gun. Black jogging bottoms, blue padded bomber jacket, balaclava, black gloves. They turn to walk away to the car but stops with a jerk when I call the name.
“Mary.”
The figure turns. A decision is made. She takes off the balaclava and shakes loose her hair. She half smiles. I’ve surprised her.
“Who’s a clever boy then?” she says. “When did you know?”
“Alfred started it. He saw you and said Jimmy’s last words. He’d seen you before. You said I’d told you where I taught and I knew I hadn’t. And it made no sense that you were still alive, unless you were the killer. I just wish I’d tied it all together sooner. What now?”
“It’s over. My work’s done,” she said.
“So you just walk away. Carnage but no regrets?”
“Something like that. I always liked you, Paul, despite your scruffy exterior. You were wearing that jacket ten years ago.”
What did she mean? She registered my surprise.
“The Royal Institute of Philosophy. A series of public lectures: The Idea of Crime in Secular Society. Dr Paul Rook. Sitting at the back, a mousy little thing – before I dyed my hair – eagerly taking
notes and definitely having a ridiculous schoolgirl crush you. Full of feeling and aspirations.”
“Jesus. That’s where the philosophy interest came from. The cryptic texts.”
“Yes, I was enchanted with you and all these years later I suppose I wanted to enchant you. I thought you’d understand what I was doing. I also chose you because I heard you were good. You could help find the people I had to get and who wouldn’t see me. It was just a coincidence that one of them,” she looked at what had been Symon, “…was your friend. Anyway, it’s done now. I had to get the whole nest of vipers. Anyone connected with Andy’s death. Jimmy got him into it. Whiteley vouched for him. None of them deserved to live. Natural Law.”
Suddenly I understood.
“You’re dressing it up as retribution, but it’s guilt.”
Her eyes sharpened. Malice waiting to be triggered.
“Don’t be too clever, Paul. Let it go.”
“Dad, let’s leave,” said Cass.
“It was you. Andy wasn’t clever enough but you were. You did the arms deals, the distribution, the contacts. Andy really was just the mule. But everyone thought it was him and you were just good little wifey at home. And he got killed for it all. So now you want to try and assuage your guilt in a heap of dead bodies.”
“Dad!” shouted Cass.
“It’s all right, Cass. Like most nutters, she has a weird logic. We weren’t in any way responsible for Andy’s death, so to kill us would be against her perverted code. But why Anna? She had nothing to do with it.”
“A mistake. You were her lover. People say a lot in bed. I had to know if you’d said anything that might be useful to me.”
This didn’t quite make sense. She could see I knew that.
“Plus, I was jealous. I wanted to know what sort of woman you went for. She was haughty, dismissive, a stuck up bitch and she tried to throw me out. Things got out of hand and I suddenly got so angry. I’m sorry.”
“Mary, do you have any idea just how loony tunes you are?”
Something shifted behind her eyes, some prehensile loathing, some creature of the night flitting through, leaving its bloody footprints.
“This is your last chance. Leave with your daughter now.”
“One last question: how did you keep track of me? I found the device in the car.”
“I put another one in you.”
What the hell did she mean?
“Miniature GPS tracking device. Only available thought the military. Stays in the human system a few days. Don’t worry. It won’t harm you. And I won’t be doing it again.”
I quickly flipped through all our meetings. How had she done it?
“Coffee. Every time I saw you we had coffee. That’s how you did it.”
She nodded. Suddenly her face darkened again.
“Go,” she said.
I had a hundred other questions. I had another dead friend. I also had a daughter who needed me. I’d put her at such risk. I looked down at Symon. Mary did too. Then she looked at me.
“Make an anonymous call to the police. You’re an old hand at that. And he doesn’t care if you stay or go. Great thing about the dead – they don’t make a fuss. If you get involved it will get very messy for you. They’ll question you soon enough if they discover you were connected.”
I opened my car door. Cass was already in the passenger seat. I turned and Mary gave a small ironic wave. She assumed we wouldn’t meet again, but I was already making other plans. I took out my phone and cancelled the timed email to Lizzie.
Chapter XX
‘Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.’
Albert Einstein
Cass was in shock. I made her a mug of tea and put a triple brandy in it.
“He was your friend. He lived with us. I cared about him and he died trying to help us and we just left him like a piece of rubbish,” she said.
Cass was expecting me to justify it with some abstruse argument. I didn’t. There was no point.
“Yes. We did. And now it’s done and we have to live with it. Cass, it’s too dangerous for you to be involved with Rook Investigations. It has to stop.”
She looked at me tearfully.
“I knew you’d say that. But I know about it. I can’t un-know.”
We stirred the argument up a little but she didn’t have the heart to sustain it. “I want you to go to your Mum’s for a while. Just until this is over.”
She turned on me. “But it is over.”
“Not yet. There’s a big full stop missing.”
*
The next morning I dropped a reluctant Cass at Lizzie’s. I promised we’d do something for Symon. A private little ceremony all of our own. She seemed to find comfort in this. I didn’t go in, though I did register Lizzie looking daggers at me from the door. Then I went to the university, made a large pot of coffee and locked the door. Alfred preened his feathers and sensed the need for thought.
“I think therefore I am,” he said.
“Quite right, old buddy,” I said.
“They that had fought so well
Came thro’ the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,”
I finished the verse.
“All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.”
I got down to serious profiling. I don’t do conventional profiling, more a collage of traits and behaviours. People aren’t robots, though many behave as if they are. The few interesting ones are contradictory, so I paint word pictures of them. Character doodles. This was the one I did for Mary.
MARY KING
Working class. Intellectually aspirational.
Something happened to stifle her dreams – Marriage? Pregnancy? Some sort of failure, perhaps in exams? Trauma – parent or loved one dying? From this moment: quiet rage; determination to make life pay.
Bored with husband. He represents second best. She the do-er, him the braggart. She leads. He follows. The romance of money beckons and the dream of Fiji.
Obsession with acquiring skills, perhaps in the hope of money: accounting, digital technology. She learns quickly – the speed and determination of the self-taught.
How did she learn to shoot so well? Local rifle club? Weekend territorial stint? Garroting – how did she become so strong? I should have registered the gym bag – her need to be fit.
She learns the kinds of things she wanted her husband to know when he got offered the Ocean Investment job: weapons, technology, phone hacking, so she is re-inventing him, he’s almost an alter ego for her and she is both partners in the marriage. When he is killed she becomes the man warrior, the hunter, the killer, the vengeful God. The murders are the fulfilment of a mission and assuagement of guilt. Beneath this she keeps the conventional woman part of her character intact – blonde, red dress, flirtation. She is becoming increasingly Jekyll and Hyde, a series of characters rather than a personality.
NATURAL LAW – this concept gives her intellectual and moral justification for her killing sprees.
GLADIATOR – she adopts Symon’s codename in the hope that I will find him.
Conflates a return to order with personal revenge. This is the behaviour of a true psychotic.
The more I added the more interesting and deadly she became. I knew she would have left her home but I all I had to do was keep my phone online and wait. I finished, gave Alfred a cuttlefish and some raisins and left. Getting out of the university was like trying to escape from a Stalag. Audrey Pritchard was stalking the corridors wearing what looked like a bacofoil wrapping. I wondered if it was some strange metaphor about the abuse of poultry.
“Before you say anything, Audrey – next Tuesday, my room at 4 pm. You can make your complaint in detail and I will challenge you in kind.”
She looked at me smugly. She clearly had a small bomb to drop.
“Ronald Coombes is in hospital. He made a suicide attempt. He k
eeps saying he only wants to talk to you. Sometimes I think you are not just incompetent and workshy but also dangerous to know, Dr. Rook,” she said.
*
The hospital looked like a large block of flats. We all hate them, because they remind us of our own mortality. Soiled bandages, the organs creak, swell, go-slow working, channels narrow, pipes clog, things distend or diminish, routines become unruly, ordinary functions are painful and humiliating, dreams come thick and fast until a storm of fading bleaches them, the last cough, the dissolution of thought and the fading of being, words like weaken, fail, deterioration are the vocabulary of ordinary death.
In contrast to this gloomy rendering of my thoughts, Ron sat up in bed, a drip attached, eating a Mars Bar with an unpleasant relish. He looked ashen, his eyes like over-chlorinated marbles. He smiled at me.
“I went to Roxanne. She seemed nice. But...”
“You couldn’t get it up,” I said.
“No. She tried a variety of quite imaginative stimulations. But not even a whimper, let alone a bang. It was the final straw really. So I went home, had a half bottle of Australian chardonnay and a few codeine for my headache. Then I thought: sod it, and I took the lot.
“Ron. It’s all my fault. I’m so sorry.”
“No, no, I want to thank you. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
I was surprised. He looked blissfully ill.
“I’m off work for three months on full pay. I’m going to have intensive one to one therapy with a psychiatrist, gratis, and they’re putting me in a self-help group as soon as my liver’s recovered. One of the Nurses said there are five women to every man in the group. So...life couldn’t be better really.”
I took his hand and shook it.
“I’m very happy for you, Ron.”
Chapter XXI
‘It is the dim haze of mystery that adds enchantment to pursuit.’
The Natural Law Page 10