Authors: Michael Kerr
“I don’t play golf, the sun doesn’t agree with me, I’m gay, and I drink French cognac,” Lester said without a trace of humour...
Tom sighed. Fished in his pocket for change. Jesus, how right Little had been. He was now in a mortuary drawer with three bullet holes in his head. A far cry from a new life. If he could speak, he’d say: ‘I told you, Bartlett. But you just wouldn’t fuckin’ listen up’.
Back in the waiting room, Linda was now sitting, head hung down between her shoulders, unmoving. She was withdrawn, consumed by her own thoughts and fears.
“I got you a Coke,” Tom said, holding out the can.
She took it. Pressed the ice-cold metal to her forehead. Rolled it back and forth. “Thanks. Anything?” she asked.
“Only that they’re nearly finished operating, and he’s made it this far. No details.”
It was another ninety minutes before a guy in surgical greens entered. Linda could read nothing in his expression.
“Mrs. Barnes?” he asked.
“No. I’m Linda Reece. I’m Matt’s...partner,” she said, as if needing to explain.
“I’m Dr. Lawson. One of the team that have been patching, er, Matt up.”
A badger, Linda thought, standing up to face the portly surgeon. He was in his fifties, and he sported a bushy black beard that was going to white in the middle, over his chin.
“He’s in post-op, now,” Sam Lawson said.
Thank God! He was alive. “Is he going to...?”
“I believe he’s going to pull through, Ms. Reece. But his condition is still serious. We had to remove his left kidney, though that in itself is not a major concern.”
“What is?” Linda asked.
“He lost a great deal of blood and went into severe shock. If there was a lengthy decrease in the flow of blood to his brain, then tissues will have been deoxygenated.”
“Are you saying he might be brain damaged?”
“I’m saying, we’ll know better when he regains consciousness. His EEG looks fine. I don’t bet, but if I was a gambling man, I’d put money on him making it. Having said that, there are no guarantees.”
“There never are in life,” Linda whispered, and then ran out of the room to look for the toilets. She was going to throw up, and the doctor could have safely bet a month’s salary on that.
FIRST
thing he did when he got in was make coffee, before going into the lounge to feed a live cricket to Simon, his pet spider. After being away, taking care of business, he knew that the little guy would now be peckish.
The thrill of the kill had subsided. After the event, he always experienced a period of anticlimax. Even now, so soon, he wanted to feel the high again. Everyone dies. Take your pick; natural causes, accident, suicide or murder. But the anticipation of personally making it happen was what turned
his
wheels. When he wasn’t taking life, he was thinking about it, or planning it.
He drank the coffee and then ran a bath. Got in and lay with his knees up and his head resting on a padded, plastic-covered pillow fitted with suction cups to hold it to the smooth surface of a bath that was also made of plastic. Was everything made of fucking plastic these days? The shower curtain, toilet lid and seat were. And the mirror was framed in the stuff, as was the frosted double glazed window. The more he looked about him, the more of the invasive manmade synthetic resinous shit he saw. The world was being overrun by unnatural polymeric substances.
Calm down. Think good thoughts.
The water was now only lukewarm. He had been soaking in it for over an hour. His fingers and toes were ‘wrinkled like prunes’, as his mother used to say. Sitting up, he reached forward and plucked a Stanley knife from the plastic rack, pleased that at least the knife was made from metal. Substantial. Thumbing the sharp blade out, he ran it smoothly across the inside of his left wrist. Not too deep. Just enough to allow plenty of blood to escape and flow down his fingers to drip into the scented water. Both wrists and inner forearms were striped with white scar tissue, caused by years of self mutilation. God! He wanted to cut deeper; do it properly. He imagined inserting the blade into his forearm at the crook of the elbow, and drawing it down under pressure in a zigzag line to his wrist and severing the artery in several places. There would be no real pain, just pulsing crimson jets spattering the white-tiled walls and Artexed ceiling. The room would be turned into a Pollock drip painting.
‘
Do it, do it, do it!’
one of the voices in his head insisted.
“No,” he replied aloud, clearly and with conviction, and the tension dissolved to leave him calm and no longer in the mood to self-destruct. Maybe another day. If he had taken his medication, then the episode would not have occurred. But he’d had a job to do. Needed a clear head. The clozapine tended to make him feel a little lethargic and dulled his senses. He couldn’t drive or work efficiently with his brain numbed-up as though it was full of anaesthetic. Retracting the blade, he tossed the knife back on top of the flannel in the rack, got up, turned on the shower and grunted at the pleasant discomfort of the sudden impact, as needle jets of chilled water drilled the soap and blood from his body.
After towelling himself dry and bandaging his wrist, he went through to the bedroom and dressed in casual clothes. He skipped down the stairs, whistling some inane ditty that had been plugged unmercifully on the radio for a week or two.
He
could have been a pop star, if socialising was not such a problem. Ha! Maybe in his next life.
He made a call on a pay-as-you-go phone that couldn’t be traced.
“I got the pest control guy askin’ for you, boss,” Luther ‘Tiny’ Tyrell said. “You wanna word?”
Frank Santini nodded, and Tiny handed him the cell phone.
“Yeah, speak to me,” Frank said.
“I eliminated that rodent problem.”
“Music to my ears. I’ll have the balance of your fee delivered as arranged, and be in touch if we have any further infestations.”
“Always a pleasure to do business with you. Bye for now, Mr S.”
Frank tossed the phone back to Tiny, who picked it out of the air with reactions that belied his appearance. He was six-eight, wide as a bus, and had the look of someone who had gone several bouts too many in a boxing ring.
“Give our friend at the Yard a bell, Tiny. I want details,” Frank said, his mood now lighter than it had been for weeks. With Lester out of the way, he could relax. The plods had nothing without the little rat. Disloyalty was something he could not and would not abide. He looked after his people, and demanded total allegiance in return. If anyone stepped out of line, then an example had to be made. It was the only way to stay on top of the food chain and command respect.
Frank was a lean, sinewy Italian, who looked all of his sixty-five years. His face was swarthy, cruel looking, with high cheekbones, a patrician nose, and dark, heavily lidded eyes. He wore a toupee that was incongruously black against the silver of his remaining underlying hair; sitting atop his head like a limp animal pelt. Frank thought it undetectable, and no one around him had the balls to enlighten him as to how bizarre it looked. He was dressed in a dark-blue mohair suit, cream silk shirt and maroon tie. His loafers were handmade in Milan. He had all the accoutrements, but still looked like a spiv who you wouldn’t buy a second-hand car, or even a watch from.
Francis Mario Santini had been born in the back streets of Naples in 1947, to migrate to London with his mamma the same year. His father, Rocco, had not survived the war.
Frank was to carve out an empire from the underbelly of society in the East End after the Kray twins, who he had been on good terms with, were safely behind bars. He kept a low profile, took a percentage of almost everything that went down north of the river, and protected his interests with a small army of enforcers who, like Tiny, knew better than to ever cross him or his son, Dominic, who if anything was even more dangerous and unpredictable than Frank.
Tiny closed the phone and pocketed it. A gold-capped grin broke the ebony edifice of his broad face. “He wasted Lester and five pigs, boss,” he said. “The guy’s like the fuckin’ Terminator.”
Frank smiled. “Get us both a drink, Tiny. I think we can afford to celebrate. Their case just fell apart. I might just send DCI Bartlett a sympathy card. He’s had a hard-on for months, dreamin’ of seein’ me in prison grey. I’d like to see the cocksucker’s face now.”
Tiny went across to the corner bar, built Frank a large Jack Daniel’s over ice. Uncapped a bottle of Club soda for himself.
“Life is good, Tiny,” Frank said, sipping the chilled sour mash as he walked over to the floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked the Thames from his penthouse apartment. “Put an extra five grand in our friend’s payoff. He deserves a bonus.”
“Have you met him, boss?” Tiny asked.
“No, and I don’t ever want to. Just drop the cash off and leave the scene. You gotta know that some people are screwballs, Tiny. This guy came highly recommended. But he has a death wish, which makes him as lethal as a fox in a chicken shed.”
Gary watched from the bushes as the Merc stopped on the inner circle of Regent’s Park. The giant, shaven-headed black exited and walked along the pavement towards the nominated bench seat. After waiting until Santini’s goon had placed the briefcase behind the seat, returned to the car and driven off, he collected the balance of his fee. Less than forty minutes later he was back at his flat in Putney. He placed the briefcase on the bed and opened it. There was an extra wedge of five thousand, with a note that read: ‘For doing the filth’. It was nice to be appreciated. Santini recognised class when he saw it; though he had not taken the cops out for any other reason than that they were an armed threat in between him and his intended mark.
Paid hits were very profitable. They gave him the independence, means, and the time to commit more emotionally rewarding personal atrocities. He was a chameleon, able to project a meek and affable personality to the morons that monitored his mental health, and especially to Marion Peterson, the buxom community psychiatric nurse who he had to suffer regular contact with. At first he had hated the CPN, considering her a spy; an enemy within who exacerbated his paranoia. However, with time, he came to acknowledge that she and the rest of the support team – as they tagged themselves – were an invaluable aid. Due to his perceived co-operation and self-awareness of his condition, he was able to present them with a model patient who, in their opinion, was no danger to himself or society at large, and responded well to all the required therapy. The art was in cloaking the aggression and the need to express himself by hurting others. As long as he was believed to be popping the antipsychotics as prescribed and following his care plan to the letter, he was protected by the system. Should he demonstrate an unwillingness to comply, then the consultant psychiatrist, CPN, social worker and his GP would consider him a risk and section him under the Mental Health Act, condemning him to an indeterminate future in a nuthatch. The thought of staggering about, full to the gills with drugs that would eventually turn his brain to chicken soup, was his biggest fear in life. To be surrounded by head cases, listening to ‘lift music’ all day and being locked in a room at night, was not an option. It would never happen. He wasn’t ill, just different. True, he heard voices that sometimes insisted he do things. But he possessed the willpower to ignore them – most of the time – should he choose to. And he didn’t display inappropriate behaviour in public these days. As a teenager, masturbating on the top decks of buses had seemed a harmless activity; though he had discontinued the practise after the first arrest. For some reason it had offended other passengers. Overall, he considered himself ‘in control’. He was able to concentrate, plan, and make decisions. Sometimes his thoughts
did
jump erratically between completely unrelated topics, which he accepted was disordered thinking. But he was basically as bright as a new penny, even aware of other people’s feelings, though they did not concern him. It was the imagined events that could be a little disconcerting. The compulsion to act them out was sometimes irresistible. Thankfully, he had the ability to fool all of the people most of the time. So many underestimated him, which in the majority of cases proved to be a fatal mistake on their part.
Putting the wads of banded fifty pound notes in a plastic sack, he wound gaffer tape around the top of it, went downstairs into the laundry room – that served the eight flat complex – and wedged the door from the inside, so as not to be disturbed.
Grunting and straining with the effort, he manoeuvred one of the large dryers away from the wall, removed a breeze block that he had loosened a long time ago, and placed the bag of money in the hidey-hole behind it, along with the handgun and silencer. There was no logical reason why his flat should ever be searched, but he chose to embrace his own version of the chaos theory, therein which unpredictability ruled. He would not have been able to relax for a second with incriminating evidence under the floorboards, or stashed where professional searchers would undoubtedly find it.
“Floorboards!” he said aloud, halfway back up the stairs. He liked floorboards, and yet had none. The floor under his carpeting was made from chipboard, or maybe MDF, which was all the rage these days. He had read somewhere that it had carcinogenic properties. Would it end up causing the same disastrous results as asbestos had done? And it was common knowledge that overuse of mobile phones was giving people brain tumours. Modern technology was lethal. The world was being poisoned. And some people thought that
he
was mad. If he could somehow work out how to explain his hidden wealth, then he would move out to a village in Essex, buy a cottage with ceiling beams and
real
floorboards, and put up a bird table in the back garden. It was a dream he determined to make come true. The prospect of enjoying rustic charm appealed to him.
The next morning, he showered, took his medication, and dressed in tight denim shorts and a plain white T-shirt that highlighted his tanned face and arms. It didn’t take a lot of sun to turn his skin a tawny brown. And the fair hair on his forearms looked like 9 carat gold threads against it. He was slim but muscular, and when ‘Maid Marion’ arrived in just over an hour, he wanted to look his best; beauty to her beast. She was short and dumpy, with a body that resembled a lumpy mattress, and her breath reeked of garlic, which also leaked from the pores of her skin as she perspired and stunk up his flat. After she had gone, he would have to spray the place with magnolia and vanilla air freshener, and open the windows wide to let out the residual aroma of her presence.
He closed his eyes, to fantasise. He chose to see the CPN naked in his bath, her hands tied tightly behind her back and her ankles bound together. She would be gagged, and he would show her the knife before slowly starting the procedure. She would buck and writhe, and whine through her nose. He would initially open her up with an orthodox ‘Y’ cut from shoulder to shoulder, and then cut down between the quivering pink blancmanges of her sagging breasts from sternum to pubic mound. It would not be an autopsy as such. After all she was alive, not dead. This would be more of a pre mortem inspection. She wanted to see inside his mind and examine it. He would see inside her body, sink his hands into her hot, slimy guts and pelvic organs, before dissecting her. He would negate her arrogant, condescending attitude. The bitch would be flopping around the bath like a dying cod on a trawler’s deck. He wondered at what point she would manage to escape into unconsciousness, before the spark of whatever life was, fizzled out.
As he imagined dismembering the raw meat, bagging it up and packing the resulting parcels into the boot of his car for dispersal at several sites, the buzzer snapped his attention back to reality. Jesus! He could still smell the illusory warm, coppery stench of her blood. He could even taste it; a little salty, and of course flavoured by the garlic that the fat cow undoubtedly chewed whole cloves of.