The Alex King Series

by A P Bateman

  10

  Two weeks earlier

  Social media announcement

  Anarchy to Recreate $ociety

  The people have spoken. No cause, campaign, charity or individual has achieved half as many likes on social media in such a brief time as our group. Your group. The group of the people. Anarchy to Recreate Society has achieved thirty-million likes. We will soon be recognised as a terrorist organisation rather than a social and political awareness group. We don’t expect people to like this post. But the fact you are reading this shows that we have struck a chord in the hearts of the citizens of this world, and that cannot be disputed.

  Today, one of the richest five people in this world will die. They will be killed by soldiers of our cause. The remaining names on the list will not go unpunished for their greed. When the last name on the list is dead, we will create a new list. A new list of the five wealthiest names. And so on. This will be our ongoing manifesto. It is now up to the rich to give up their wealth for their own survival. To avoid making the death list, they simply have to use their money for the good of the population. Or die.

  This group is now closed.

  11

  King watched the coroner as she packed away her case. It was an old leather satchel, the type he imagined doctors used on house calls. In the nineteen-fifties. It was well-worn and stretched. He wondered if it had been a gift from somebody with similar credentials in her family. Her father’s perhaps. Or her uncle’s. It was a manly affair. Or maybe she had soul? Maybe she liked antiquated things that were both different from the norm, marked her out as a character. An individual. Maybe she had hunted down such a bag after qualifying, or landing a promotion. King had done the same with his vintage Rolex. At the time, it had been a matter of money. He hadn’t had enough of it for a new model in a jewellers’ window. But now the older models made the same prices, or perhaps more than the new ones, but in his opinion, carried a little more sophistication and shouted far less. A different, more acceptable message.

  She was a young woman. No more than thirty, but she was running this team and there were both men and women performing duties, who were well into their middle-forties. Which initially told King she was good at what she did. Or lucky. It didn’t matter to King. Luck had been a constant and welcome companion to him. He’d take luck over skill any day.

  She looked up at King, as she snapped the case shut. “You’re not a police officer, are you,” she stated.

  King shook his head. “You guessed.” He smiled. “I was hoping to wing it a bit longer, to be honest.”

  “So, what are you?”

  “I’m with Interpol.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “An investigator?”

  “Yes.”

  “So,” she paused. “What do you want to ask me?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Well, this is where I brief you on my findings. You then order a full autopsy, tell me to leave no stone unturned, give up my weekend… that sort of shit.”

  “Have a nice weekend,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Doing anything nice?”

  “No, I…” She frowned. “What do you want to know?”

  “There may be DNA from one of the killers on the body of the husband. They fought. That much is obvious.”

  “One of the killers?”

  “Yes,” King replied. “There would have to have been two.”

  “Because?”

  “The man has the markings of a rifle’s buttstock on his face, the chequered grip.”

  “So?”

  “So, he was shot. After they had a fight. The buttstock wound came from an accomplice. They fight, the accomplice batters the husband and the person he’s fighting with draws back and shoots him in the head.”

  “You suppose a great deal.”

  “I thought it was obvious.”

  “Really? Well, what about Snell? Care to add your thoughts?” There was a hostility, but she seemed to be keeping composure. She certainly hadn’t like the supposition. “I can always use an expert’s opinion.”

  King watched the two men, both clad in white coverall suits, zip up the body bag of who he now knew to be Mrs Katie Jameson. She had been thirty-four. “Well, a point three-three-eight bullet is going to be pretty difficult to disprove,” he said. “And Liam’s death looks to be pretty straight forward. The bastards knew what they were doing, that’s for sure.”

  She sighed, apparently having softened in mood. “I’ve never seen anything like this. The couple, yes. But a long range, single shot with a sniper rifle? No,” she paused. King noticed her hands were shaking and there was a croak to her voice. She coughed, cleared her throat and wrung her hands. It stopped the shake, at least. It surprised him. He had CSI down as world-weary, dispassionate. “And certainly not the calculated suffocation of a child,” she added. “I’ve seen it done with a pillow, an attempt to pass it off as cot-death, but the way they did that…” she trailed off. Her eyes were moist. The boy’s death had really affected her. She coughed again. “How about you?”

  Learned it, done it, taught it, King thought. But not children. Even he had principles once. Instead, he simply shook his head. He stepped aside as the two men put the body of Mrs Jameson on a gurney, and started to wheel her out. He realised he had forgotten the coroner’s name. She had introduced herself back on the sun terrace. “I’m Alex, by the way,” he said. “Alex King.”

  “Amanda Cunningham,” she smiled thinly.

  “I don’t suppose you see much like this down here,” he said.

  She shrugged. “I doubt they do,” she said. “I’m with the Home Office. I was flown down by helicopter and arrived about an hour before you did.”

  “From London?”

  “Yes, I’m staying in Truro. And you?”

  “Just flew into the airport at Newquay. I’m not in a hotel, I’ve got somewhere to stay,” King said, then asked, “And what do you do now?”

  “I’ll get the autopsy started on Snell in the morning. I want to collate my findings first. It’s important to get this right. He’s the reason I’m here,” she paused. “Some people in some very secretive offices want everything they can get on his death.”

  King nodded, but said nothing in reply. He had one of those secretive offices now.

  She shrugged. “The Jameson family will be left to the pathologist and his team in Truro. They’re a first-class unit, so I gather.”

  King took out a card. It had his mobile number on it, his email too. It was shiny and embossed. There was an emblem with gates and a crown, a portcullis and a lion on the other side. He handed it to her and she looked at it. “My contact details, should you discover anything helpful to the investigation.”

  “MI5?” she asked. He nodded. He couldn’t get used to the name. He had spent his career in different departments, different corners of the intelligence community. Dark and shady corners. A shadow world. He couldn’t see a way out of the world he was occupying now, so had started to embrace it. It was a sight more honest work than he had been used to. “I thought you said you were with Interpol?”

  “I’m on secondment,” he replied.

  “Just with this case?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good luck,” she smiled. “Tough one.”

  “That’s the truth.” King shook his head.

  “So, are you any closer to catching them?”

  “You tell me,” he said. “Tell me something, give me something to go on.”

  “There it is!” she grinned. The two men were back. They wheeled the gurney in and went to Mr Jameson’s body. The bag had been zipped and sealed. A yellow tag on the zipper. “Finally, some cop-talk.”

  “I watched CSI last night, if that counts. That’s how I knew you were the coroner.”

  “Pathologist. I’m a Home Office pathologist. I’m not referred to as CSI either.”

  “Right,” he said, then added, “You’re pretty young for such a s
enior position.” He regretted it when he saw a change in her expression.

  “Innovators usually are,” she said coolly.

  “And you’re an innovator?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Ambitious?”

  “I came out of university and medical college with a lot of debt. An obscene amount of debt,” she paused. “You either live with it forever, or you get to the top of your game pretty damn quickly.”

  “And you’re at the top of your game?”

  “Almost,” she said, her expression softening. “But not out of debt. That’s the price you pay for ambition, eh?”

  “I suppose,” King said, but he didn’t know. He had taken a path different to most. His education had been a work in progress. He liked to think it was on-going.

  “So, what skills are you bringing to this? You’re clearly not a detective.”

  King looked past her, through the now open window and across the valley to the California house. “Not as such.” He looked at the sun terrace, a shade under two-thousand-five-hundred metres away. “But I have a skillset that the people at the top deem advantageous to the investigation.”

  “Is that really it?” She grinned. “It’s not a case that you’ve pissed off enough people to be given the unenviable task of hunting down these killers?”

  “You think I piss people off?”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  “Have I pissed you off?”

  “No, not yet” she replied. “But I don’t think you’re a man to be easily swayed. In those secretive offices, I imagine that wouldn’t bode well for you.”

  King shrugged. She had a point. His eyes were still on the house. He imagined himself with the rifle. Knew deep down that he would have conceded and chosen a less tactical, but more achievable firing point. A range of fifteen-hundred metres or so. Maybe two-thousand if he’d spent a week and a thousand rounds of ammunition on the range beforehand.

  “Why unenviable?” he asked, turning to look at her, study her expression. “Surely bringing these people down would be an achievement to be proud of?”

  She nodded towards Mr Jameson’s body, the men now leaving the room. “For them, yes. For that ten-year-old boy, yes. For others caught up in this along the way, then yes. But you’ve read the social media, their posts. They were up to thirty-million likes and shares when they closed the group. The world is speaking. Billionaires are shedding their money to avoid being in the wealthiest five. Hospitals, schools, homeless centres, charities… they’ve all had vast sums of money donated to them, or now have trusts set up to hold the money side-lined for such projects. Eleven billionaires have lost billionaire status this week. And they weren’t even in the running for the five. They’re pre-empting. The world is finally on track to redress the balance. People are feeling the benefits already. There is food and water getting into some of the poorest regions of the world. Health and medical supplies are running out, such is the demand to distribute them. Pop stars rehash an old song and raise millions and the money sits dormant for years. Billionaires get threatened, shown that the threat is real, and the money is there, the assets bought and the distribution underway. Money talks.”

  King knew this, but he also knew that much of the dumping of money and assets had been down to hastily formed shell companies. The billionaires would get their wealth back once the killers had been captured. They weren’t billionaires for nothing. “You sound like you support them,” he said, a little coldly.

  “How dare you!” she snapped, her eyes blazing. “That little boy, his parents!”

  King held up a hand. “Exactly! That’s what people must remember,” he said. “Each assassination has had its innocent casualties.”

  “Collateral damage.”

  “I hate that term.”

  “Just countering your argument.”

  “This isn’t a debating class,” he said.

  “You can’t dissect an argument without both sides.”

  “You learn that in debating class?”

  “Of course.”

  “Oxford?” he ventured.

  “Yes.”

  “Figures…”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Nothing, sorry.”

  “Why, were you at Cambridge?”

  King scoffed. “No,” he said. “I never went to university.”

  “Figures…”

  King shrugged. “Fair enough,” he conceded. “But people are skimming over these innocent deaths in awe of what is happening. They are voyeurs, eager to see what happens to the people they blame for world poverty. For class separation. Billions of pounds have been given to various charities, causes and trusts in such a brief period. And the trouble with social media is that claims are made daily, on all sort of matters and people believe it all to be true. Most of it is a load of rubbish. The hype of what has been done is far outweighing the true count. Billionaires can easily falsify their donation claims, there isn’t the infrastructure to check. A good publicist on the case and some guy gets put down the list, another poor sod takes his place. Already the system, the ultimate penalty these people have declared, is being circumvented.”

  “Sure,” Amanda agreed. “But they still have their list and they still intend to make good on their threats.”

  “No doubt,” said King.

  “So why you?” Amanda asked. They were alone now, the light fading outside. The curtains were drawn open and someone had turned on a light and it made the late afternoon look darker than it really was. “Your skillset. Why are you deemed necessary for this investigation?”

  King nodded towards the house across the valley. “That was a highly skilled shot. I’ve made a few in my time. For another department.”

  “Special forces?”

  “Of sorts.”

  “But you aren’t a detective,” she stated. “Surely there needs to be a team of investigators on this.”

  “There are,” King replied, looking back at her. “But I’m good at finding people. I just need a trail, that’s all. I’ve found everybody I’ve ever looked for.”

  12

  The cottage was dark. It would be. He hadn’t been back here since Christmas. As usual, the garden was unkempt, and the grass had shot up in the spring sunshine and rain. In the duchy of Cornwall, this seemed to come in equal measures.

  King swung the Ford Mondeo into the gravelled parking bay and switched off the engine. He looked at the cottage with the same feeling of comfortable familiarity and gut-wrenching trepidation as always. He had been happy here. But he had been heartbroken and miserable here too. A misery indescribable to those who hadn’t experienced it themselves. An agonising, open, continuously raw wound which he sometimes thought would never heal. Dark years. And then, like a sudden change of wind, he had recently and unexpectedly been happy once more. As happy as he had ever been, and with that came an underlying feeling of guilt.

  His wife had died in this cottage. She had taken an overdose and left him a note. It was her way to end it quickly. Not for only for her, but for him. Ovarian cancer, but with further complications. She was a driven, young and attractive woman. Too busy and too immortal for regular screening or check-ups. And when it had been caught too late, what was left of her life was going to be hers. Catheters, bleeding, baldness and bouts of incapacity through a cocktail of drugs just to draw out a few extra months was not on her agenda. King had gone to the shops. Jane had ended it after writing a letter for him to move on. He never thought he would be able to, but he had. It had been five years later, and only when he had found the woman he was with now. Caroline Darby was a fellow MI5 agent and they had met on an operation he had been drafted in on. That had been over a year ago. They had come to the cottage a few times since, and each time, they wished they could stay forever. It always felt like it wouldn’t be long before they did, but once back in London and given another assignment, those cottage dreams fizzled and disappeared for a while longer.

  King got out of the hir
e car and took his leather travel bag off the rear seat. He was only planning to be here for one night, so was travelling light. There was a plastic grocery bag as well. There was a good deli in a nearby village and he had caught it just before closing. He hadn’t felt like going out to eat. He approached the cottage, but the motion light didn’t come on. He always left it switched off when he returned to London, as he felt it would only indicate that nobody was home. In truth, you had to want to find this place to see it. Shrouded by trees, a hundred metres from the road and looking out over a distant tidal creek across farmland, it was as secluded as you could get in Cornwall. He liked it that way.

  The door opened with the usual creek and resistance. This was Cornwall, so the weather was damp for almost half of the year and damper for the rest. He didn’t plane the door because for the eight weeks it dried in the summer, the gap would be large enough to post letters through. Or parcels. He hit the lights, flicked on the combi-boiler in the cupboard under the stairs and dropped the overnight bag onto the slate floor in the hallway. The place smelled damp and dormant, but the heating would soon take that away.

  As usual, there was a pang of emptiness as he walked through to the kitchen. Jane had designed and furnished and decorated. It still had her stamp on it. Caroline had respectfully started to leave her mark on the property, with little knickknacks and ornaments, a few scatter cushions and lifestyle magazines on the coffee table. And candles. Always candles. King would often joke that she needed to embrace electricity. But it was all about the various aromas, apparently.