Catalyst (5 page)

Together they rushed forward. In what seemed like a single, blurred movement, the man pulled aside his jacket with his left hand to reveal an automatic pistol in the belt of his jeans; then the gun was in his right hand, arm extended, aimed, fired. The shot signalled the end of Kevin Brady who, with his twin brother, had covered no more than half the short distance between them. He crashed to the ground and lay twisted in death on the street, the rain washing around him, a hole in his forehead.

Karl stopped, frozen in his charge. The man dropped his arm to his side and spoke.

“Well, Karl. You haven't said a single word all evening. Wouldn't you like to say something now? What about, ‘Please don't kill me'?”

Karl dropped to his knees on the cobbles. He stared across at Kevin and started shaking with fear. He seemed incapable of speech. The man shouted impatiently, “Well, come on! Are you going to fucking say something or not? I'll count to three – one, two… ”

“P-P-Please,” stammered Karl, in a barely audible whisper, “don't k-k-kill me. I d-didn't… ”

The man furrowed his brow and pursed his lips in an exaggerated expression of concentration. Then his face relaxed.

“No, sorry,” he said. His arm came up to the firing position again. His second bullet dispatched Karl with the same precise head shot. Jimmy had not moved since the first shot. His eyes were open wider than seemed possible as he looked from his two dead siblings to the stranger.

“Well, what do you think of
that
, Jimmy?” said the man, nodding towards the two bodies on the cobbles. “That'll be you in a couple of minutes. Tell you what, though,” he went on, replacing the gun in his belt. “I know you're packing a shooter, so we'll do this cowboy style. And as you're the baddie, it's a sort of tradition that you get to draw first. I guess you must know, though, that you don't have a fucking snowball in hell's chance. Right?”

They looked at each other in silence for a full minute, Jimmy's lower lip trembling like a child's. Then, suddenly, his expression changed; his eyes flashed and he reached quickly inside his jacket. His gun had hardly cleared the pocket when the stranger fired. The shot shattered Jimmy's right knee-cap, tearing ligaments and sending splinters of bone up into his thigh. The impact of the bullet lifted his leg up behind him and sent him crashing onto his face on the cobbles, his body sending up a spray of water. The gun flew out of his hand and bounced across the street coming to rest against the kerb. He rolled onto his back into the gutter, jerking his head from side to side and screaming in his agony. The blood pouring from the wound was carried away with the rainwater.

The stranger stood motionless for a long time watching his suffering before walking across to him.

“Does that hurt a bit, Jimmy? Don't worry, it won't be for long. I just wanted to make sure that you had a minute or two to think about what's going to happen to you. It doesn't do to rush these things.” His tone had hardened and the real obsessive hatred came through in his voice. He put his gun back into his belt then took a pair of surgical gloves from a pocket in his jacket and pulled them on.

“I guess you won't be needing the money for Kev's shirt and the drinks after all. I'll take it back now, if you don't mind; I've got no stomach for robbing a corpse.”

He crouched down beside Jimmy, who had raised himself up on one elbow and was clutching his injured leg with his other hand and crying uncontrollably. Reaching inside Jimmy's jacket he pulled out a wad of bank notes from the inside pocket. Silently, he counted out ten twenty-pound notes and pushed the rest back into the same pocket. Then, taking his time, he counted them again, out loud this time as if to show that he had only taken back the amount he was entitled to.

Finally he stood up, taking out the gun again. Leaning forward, he placed the muzzle against Jimmy's forehead.

“Time's up, Jimmy. This is for your neighbours hiding behind their curtains, for the guys you injured tonight and other nights, and for the misery and pain you've inflicted on hundreds of nice people. Oh yes, and for the lady I told you about. I don't think I mentioned it before, but the third time she tried to take her own life, she succeeded.

“Go straight to hell, you evil bastard!”

He pulled the trigger.

CHAPTER 3

At the end of the eighth fruitless day since the killings, Detective Chief Inspector David Gerrard finished reading the final offering, closed the file on his PC and leant back in his chair. His Detective Sergeant, who had supervised the latest information search over the past two days, had been sitting across the desk from him for around two hours as he read through them. DS Joannita Cottrell was thirty-one years old, just under five-and-a-half feet tall and ‘three-quarters West Indian', as she described herself – her maternal grandfather was white. Her long black curls with their auburn highlights were pulled back in a ponytail. She was slim without being slender, with an attractive rounded figure and large dark eyes set in a disarmingly pretty face, which for most of the time displayed a friendly smile. However, this was not her preferred way of spending a Sunday evening and the smile had long since been replaced by a mask of boredom.

“That's – what – seventeen in all out of how many checked?” said David, at last.

“Five hundred and thirty-five,” she said, grateful for an end to the silence.

“Covering a period of… ?”

“Twenty-six weeks.”

“And that's every complaint and call-out we've had on the estate during that time?”

“That's right, sir. Three a day on average. Oh, and none at all since the killings. When we do find this guy, perhaps we should give him a list of our most wanted and let him get on with it.”

David snorted a laugh. “Hold that thought, Jo. Well, nothing hits the spot from that lot. There are a couple we could follow up, just so we can tell the press and the boss we have ‘new lines of investigation'. But, gut-feel, I don't think so.”

“There were others involving the Bradys which we discounted,” she said. “Would you like to see them?”

“Why aren't they with these?”

“Because we didn't think – I didn't think – they would lead us anywhere.”

“Then I don't need to see them,” he said. “I'm sure you're right.”

“What now then, sir?”

“Well, we'll get Mutt'n'Geoff to follow these two up,” he said, reaching over to the printer where he had run off a dozen or so sheets of information. He shuffled through the papers, separating them into two piles and putting each into a plastic wallet folder. “Give them one each,” he said, passing them to the Detective Sergeant. “It doesn't matter who gets which. And make sure they don't spend too much time on them.”

“And then?”

“I think tomorrow after the meeting you and I will have another stroll round the estate, just to take the air and join in the carnival.”

In his office in the Norman Shaw Building at 8.30 am on Monday morning, the Leader of the Opposition was leaning back in the leather tilt-and-swivel behind his vast walnut desk. The office was large and expensively appointed with a rich long-pile carpet and matching walnut cabinets and console tables. The two seats facing his desk across from him were ornate wing chairs, luxuriously upholstered.

Andrew Donald himself was a large man, over six feet tall, and although he was somewhat overweight, he carried the surplus evenly about his body, with no unseemly bulges, front or back. He had a round, rather chubby face and dark hair with a side parting, giving him an old-fashioned schoolboy look. Even so, his appearance was always effortlessly fashionable without surrendering any of the dignity of office. Overall, he looked what he was; an Old Etonian pitching for the job of Prime Minister. Today he was wearing a charcoal grey two-piece suit which the man occupying one of the chairs opposite estimated would have cost him around £2,000.

“Right, let's get straight to it, shall we?” said Andrew, in open irritation. He waved his hand over a collection of Sunday newspapers and national dailies in an untidy pile on the desk. “Would you mind explaining to me why you told the press that you think it's a really good thing that three young men were executed in your constituency?”

Tom Brown was an inch shorter than Andrew and a completely different build: broad-shouldered and muscular with a narrow waist and hips, he had a natural spring to his step and an athletic fluency to his movements. His ruggedly handsome face was accentuated by a pair of pale blue eyes that could burn or twinkle to order, and had the effect of making him – according to popular female opinion – irresistibly attractive. Right now, they were focused and angry.

“That is not what I told the press,” he said, “otherwise that's what they would have printed, wouldn't they?”

“Okay, I'm paraphrasing, but… ”

“No, you're not,” interrupted Tom. “Paraphrasing is when you state the
same
message in a another, usually more succinct, way. Not when you invent something completely different that isn't true.”

“For God's sake, Tom! You're not in the bloody House now! You don't have to dissect my sentences to discredit what I'm saying. You know very well what I'm getting at. You have been our most forthright champion of law and order up to now, and we have put you up there as our key spokesman on the issue. That's why we've given you a research team and an office manager and skimmed off so much of our short-money for you. I can't believe you've betrayed that investment and positional trust to get a few brownie points with that rabble.”

“That is completely out of order!” Tom shouted, slamming the flat of his hand on the desk and half rising to his feet. “Don't you dare talk to me about betrayal! And they are not rabble, they are people!
My
people!”

Andrew took the outburst unflinchingly and with mild amusement.

“
My
people,” he echoed, with a smirk. “It's a shame you don't like them enough to want to live with them, instead of in your walled palace thirty miles away.”

Tom could feel his face reddening with anger.

“Now come on, Andrew, I thought we'd drawn a line under that. I spend at least three nights each week at the apartment there, and it couldn't be more central to the constituency. And I'm there most of every Saturday… ”

“Yes, but nobody sees you just around and about, do they. They don't regard you as one of their community; just a do-gooder who pops in occasionally.”

“What is this about?” Tom shouted. “Why all this again? I suppose you and Isobel can be spotted most weekends queuing at the local butchers! ”

Andrew laughed and held up his hands.

“Okay, Tom, I guess I shouldn't take your ‘good guy' image lightly. God knows it's been a great weapon for the Party. And ‘betrayal' – wrong word. But let's calm down, shall we.”

“Would you like to know what really happened?” said Tom, easing himself back onto the chair. Andrew waved an arm inviting him to continue. “I went to the estate on Friday along with Grace and some of the local Party guys, the objective being to reassure the residents – you know – that this sort of thing couldn't be allowed to go on, etcetera, etcetera. And it was like a street party; the only thing that was missing was the bunting. It sort of caught us off-guard… ”

“Don't you read the papers? The press have been all over the estate since the killings; the dailies have been full of the festival spirit for a week now. That's another thing; I'm not sure why it took you so long to get round to visiting
your
people.”

“Okay, point taken,” said Tom, “in retrospect, perhaps an earlier visit would have been appropriate, and yes, I have read the media accounts of the collective mood in the aftermath. But it was the
intensity
of the feeling that took us by surprise, and the openness of their apparent joy at the death of these three brothers. They didn't see the killings as part of the problem; they saw it as part of the
solution
. There was no way I could simply condemn the act without alienating just about the whole estate.”

“So what are the lessons you draw from that? Put a sniper on every high-rise in every rough estate? I expect you're still in touch with some of your soldier friends. It's only been, what, six years since you were out there killing people yourself.”

“Look, Andrew,” said Tom, getting angry again. “We are on the same fucking side and want the same fucking thing. And I'll tell you something – there are a hell of a lot of people out there who'd vote for your sniper scenario. But I prefer to think of that as Plan B. Perhaps when you're feeling more objective and less cynical, we can discuss Plan A.”

“Okay, Tom,” said Andrew. “
Your
point taken.” He checked his watch and stood up to signal that the meeting was over. “I'm just very concerned that whatever you said and whatever the papers printed, the message, as I read it, is that the man who did this was right in taking the law into his own hands and that, in doing so, he did the estate a big favour. Now whether you actually believe that… ”