The Button Man: A Hugo Marston Novel (31 page)

Hugo slid the nozzle back into its slot, collected his receipt from the pump, and moved to the driver’s door. He looked over at the blue Ford, wondering where Walton had stolen it from, furious that he’d not noticed being followed. Walton walked to the front of the police car, a hard eye on Hugo, who got behind the wheel and put the key in the ignition. The journalist then walked to the rear door and slid in behind the passenger seat. He had a lightweight travel bag slung over his shoulder.

“You were watching us at the pub?” Hugo asked.

“Well, I couldn’t very well go home, could I? You forget that watching is what I do for a living, and you people are operating on my turf,” Walton said. “You better believe I was.”

“And the Ford?”

Walton smiled thinly. “I borrow cars too, you know. If we do happen to pick up a tail, a quick squawk on the radio will redirect them here to it. A nice distraction for us all.”

“Nicely done,” Hugo said. “Where to now?”

“Just get back to the motorway, and leave your seatbelt off.”

To stop me intentionally crashing
, Hugo thought.
Again, smart move
. Hugo drove slowly out of the gas station and headed back onto the A1, merging carefully with the passing traffic, letting Walton know he was going to cooperate and not wanting to risk a bullet in the back, which would likely take out more than just him at these speeds.

The traffic thickened as they made their way south, trucks and vans clogging the slow lanes as the faster cars dodged by, tapping their brakes when they realized the Vauxhall was a police car. Twice they passed patrol units perched on the side of the road, but neither moved to intercept them. Hugo didn’t expect them to, not really. Chief Constable Blazey would put out an APB if she knew Hugo was driving one of her cars, but Agarwal and Upton would do all they could to keep her from finding out—for their own sake as much as his.

“It’s something of an irony, isn’t it?” Walton said from behind Hugo’s left ear.

“What is?”

“All these people slowing down around us, afraid we’ll pounce. Yet it’s you, in the seat of power as far as they are concerned, sitting there begging for a policeman to light us up.”

“Begging?” Hugo said, raising an eyebrow. “Hardly.”

“No?” Walton’s voice was soft, but turned hard. “Then that’s your mistake.”

“I’m curious about one thing,” Hugo said. He wanted to keep Walton talking, not with any specific goal in mind, but because he’d learn nothing sitting in silence. And silence also gave Walton more time to plan, to think. “What’s Pendrith’s role in all this?”

“In all what? You think you know what’s going on?”

“I think you’re living in the past, Harry. You really think there’s a chance in hell that the death penalty will be reinstated?”

“That was Pendrith’s thing, not mine.”

“Bull. I’ve read some of your articles, or should I call them rants? You want to drag Britain back to the sixties, back to the good old days when guilty men and women were strung up for their crimes.”

“Shut up, Marston. You don’t know a damn thing.”

“Then enlighten me, Harry. Fill me in.” He risked a look over his shoulder, but Walton hadn’t budged, sitting forward with his left shoulder against the passenger seat, his eyes drifting between Hugo’s hands, the GPS device, and the road ahead. A thought occurred to Hugo, one he decided to try on Walton. “So did Pendrith double-cross you? Did he start believing in his new cause? Is that why you killed him?”

“Me, kill Pendrith?” In the mirror, Walton wore a smirk. “He committed suicide.”

“Right, with a passport in his pocket and an hour after telling me he was fleeing the country. No one’s going to buy that story, Harry.”

“Like I said before, you don’t know the first thing about Pendrith. He was a duplicitous bastard and cared about one thing: Lord Stopford-Pendrith. You know why he fought against reinstating the death penalty when he first ran for Parliament? Because he knew damn well it was the popular thing to do. No way he was going to win if he kept supporting it, and he’d be a flip-flopper if he just changed sides, so he had to publicly see the light, become a champion against hanging.” Walton snorted. “Imagine that, a lying politician.”

“Less original than a murderous journalist, I grant you,” Hugo said.

“Murderous? Coming from an American that’s pretty rich. The place with the highest murder rate in the world, where everyone gets to carry a gun and you dumb bastards wonder why you have more homicides per capita than fucking anywhere else. And you, you, coming from the state that happily executes . . . how many people a year? More than fucking China, that’s how many. No, no, you don’t get to call anyone else murderous.” Walton leaned closer, spittle flying from his lips like venom from an angry cobra. “And it’s not murder when you kill killers. It’s justice.”

“So Harper, Ferro, and Pendrith. They all deserved the death penalty?”

“Damn right.” Walton sat back again, eyes on the road. “If I hadn’t stepped in, you would have smuggled those spoiled, pampered Hollywood brats back to America where they would have been given a hero’s reception, as if they were dissidents who’d made it home from the gulag instead of common criminals getting away with murder.”

“I would have smuggled them? So what does that make me?”

“Now you are understanding your situation.” Walton’s voice was calm, matter of fact. “An accomplice to murder, of course.”

“What about Drinker? You killed a grieving father, a man who’d done nothing except lose his only son. What does that make you, Harry?”

There was a pause, and when he spoke Walton’s voice quavered. “That was unavoidable. And yet somehow . . . a perfect irony.”

“An irony? That was a man’s life you ended, not a goddamn irony.”

“Shut up,” Walton snapped. “You should be a little more afraid of me, Hugo Marston.”

Hugo kept his tone flat. “You think this is the first time I’ve sat near a serial killer? I did that for a decade, Harry, and the one thing I learned was that in the daylight, when they’re done sneaking around in the night, they’re no different from other people. Crazy, sure, but flesh and blood.”

“You think I’m a serial killer?” Walton laughed, a dry, cracking noise.

“You’ve killed a series of people, Harry. Wake up, you’re not some vigilante imposing justice. You’re a mentally ill man with a gun and a vendetta.”

“Now I’m mentally ill? You know what I really am, Marston?”

“I just told you, Harry, though I can think of other words to use if you like.”

“I’m a fucking executioner, that’s what I am. It’s what my dad was until those wet, cowardly do-gooders decided that murderers had the right to take other people’s lives but hang onto their own. What fucking sense does that make? Huh?”

“Harry—”

“No, you shut up and listen, Marston. Because soon they might do it in your country too, stack a bunch of vicious, evil men in a cage and let them out, one by one, in the dead of night or the early morning. Cage them together so they can share their evil ways and be better prepared when they get out to kill again, and this time to do it without getting caught. That’s where things are headed, my American friend, make no mistake. Headed to the place we were at in 1965, when they gave life back to cold-blooded killers and in the process took it away from my dad. Might as well have poured the drink down his throat themselves, and not so much as a pension. Took a career away from me, too. Luckily my dad had given interviews to someone at the
Hitchin Gazette
, so he got me a job there instead. Writing about murder instead of putting a stop to it.” The derision in his voice was unmistakable, as if reporting on crime was tantamount to committing it.

“You? You were going to be an executioner?”

“I was. Like the Pierrepoints, keep it in the family. My father taught me everything I’d need to know, where to put the noose, the kind of rope, and the most important thing of all, the calculations for the drop.”

“Which is why Ginny Ferro died immediately. You went to all that trouble, following her, getting the right-length rope, even the mask over her face.” Hugo looked up to see Walton’s grin in the mirror.

“I liked that touch. Most people think it’s was black cloth they used over the face, but it wasn’t. Now, it’s true the judge put a piece of black cloth on his own head when he passed sentence, but for the executions it was a white, silk bag. Were you there for the autopsy? She died immediately, right?”

Hugo felt a knot of sickness in his stomach, the same one he’d felt every time a serial killer expressed pride in his handiwork. Yes, Ferro had died straight away, just like she was supposed to, but he wasn’t about to give Walton the pleasure of knowing that.

“So Stanton is next?” Hugo said.

Walton patted his bag. “She is. And no doubt you think you can stop me, but remember how close to a death sentence you are. Any time I pull the trigger, it’s justified.”

“In your crazy world, Harry. But what do you think will happen afterward? They know it’s you, so sooner rather than later you’re going to end up in a prison cell.”

“Watching TV and getting food, clothing, and medical care.” Walton laughed. “And thanks to Pendrith, they’ll let me out in a few years.”

“Not you, Harry. I have a feeling you’ll be inside until they carry you out in a wooden box.”

“Which is how it should be!” Walton shouted. He banged his fist against the front seat and then flopped back. “You idiots have no fucking idea. By the time I’m done, people will see how it should be. You just see if they don’t.”

“You’re doing society a favor, is that it?”

“You better believe it. Just like my dad, only I don’t expect anyone to be grateful. We do the dirty work and get nothing for it, except in my case maybe a prison cell.”

“Society’s button man, is that it?”

“Oh yes, society’s button man.” Walton grinned mirthlessly. “I like that. And you just wait and see, wait and see what happens.”

“Wait, you said ‘maybe a prison cell.’” Something clicked in Hugo’s mind but at first he couldn’t find the words, the realization of Walton’s insane scheme finally dawning. “It’s your death, isn’t it? You want to bring back hanging, and you want them to start with you.” Behind him, Walton kept quiet. “That’s it, isn’t it? You really think that people are going to be so outraged by you killing Harper and Ferro that they’ll call for hanging to be brought back? That’s really what you think is going to happen.”

Looking out the side window, Harry Walton just smiled.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

J
une Stanton’s home was small and painted white, a two-story detached house with no grass in the front, just a concrete square for parking cars—a space that was empty when Harry Walton steered the police car into it. Walton didn’t like this part of London, the part that had no sights worth seeing and no countryside to temper the endless lines of houses, the wide roads lined with them, going on for miles. These drab boulevards used to be the suburbs of London, but now the houses were lived in by students, two to a room, or large families of Pakistanis, or other blue-collar workers who couldn’t afford to live close to the city center and couldn’t afford the prices in the new suburbs, where the houses were larger and the spaces between them greener.

The only saving grace for this particular stretch of anonymity was a patch of ragged grass taken up by a pond, right across the road from Stanton’s house. A circle of gray water surrounded by as many trash cans as trees, a pond that Walton would put to good use in just a few minutes.

Parked in front of the house, Harry Walton sat quietly in the car for a moment before climbing slowly out and casting an eye over the neighbors’ houses. Once satisfied, he went to Stanton’s front door and knocked, then knocked again when he got no answer. He waited a full minute before walking along the front of the house to peer through the front windows, but the white net curtains obscured his view and made it impossible to see much of anything. But the lights were off, he could see that.

With no one home, his plan was to wait, so he went back to the police car and started it up, executing a quick one-eighty so the car faced the road and its rear bumper hung over the flower bed by the front window. He wanted enough room for a second car to park in the space and a good view of whoever came. He switched the engine off and relaxed, a peace and a calm settling about him as he watched the road.

It took just ten minutes. A white Renault nosed into the driveway, pausing when its driver saw the police car, then easing forward again to get its tail out of the main road. It stopped ten feet from the police car, Walton watching it all the way, pleased the driver was alone.

A woman stepped out and Walton recognized her at once, the face that was once beautiful, worn with age and hard living, eyes suspicious of the police car. Her hair was different—she’d dyed it black already—and a long, olive overcoat hung across her shoulders. She stopped short of the police car and Walton knew what she must be thinking, that somehow her release was a mistake, that her brief taste of freedom was over.
Damn right
.

When she got within six feet of the police car, Walton slid out to meet her.

“Who are you?” she asked. “Police?”

Walton smirked. “Not quite. Think of this as real justice.”

“What do you want?”

“I just told you,” said Walton. He pulled his hand out of his pocket and pointed the gun at her stomach. “Get inside the house, now.”

Stanton put a hand to her mouth, her eyes wide. “Oh God, no, you don’t understand, please, I’m—”

“Quiet!” It was the first time Walton had needed to raise his voice and it irked him. People should follow instructions when a gun is pointed at them. The American had known to do that at least. Funny thing, it seemed like the more people knew about guns, the more familiar they were with them, the more scared they were. Or maybe it was the other way around. Stanton was a killer, but she was too stupid to be afraid of a gun. What sense did that make?

As soon as they were indoors, Walton felt a warm rush of relief. Imposing justice on the unwilling was never easy, and in several instances he’d gotten lucky with the circumstances, a thick enough tree branch, a nice stone wall. And again here, the staircase overlooking the hall with iron balusters half an inch thick.