She thought he was about to drool until he pulled back in horror. Her upper inside thighs were covered in angry bruises.
“How?” he asked lamely.
“Bernard’s driver, he came round last night to check on me. That’s the other reason I left this morning."
He reached up gently to touch the mottled flesh, and she took her cue and pulled his head into her waist, feeling his chin against her Brazilian style pubic hair. “Hold me, Jack, hold me.”
She waited for his arms to encircle her upper thighs, and then gently lifted him under the arms. His head moved slowly up her body and she breathed deeply as he ascended past her breasts. She felt her nipples harden as his heavy breathing flowed around them. Finally he was standing in front of her, and she moved her hands across his chest and then ripped his shirt open, the buttons flying in all directions. “I need you, Jack, I need to feel you inside me. Make love to me, Jack. I need to feel loved, not like a piece of meat.”
She nearly laughed out loud at the surprise on his face, but held herself in check and pushed him back onto the bed. She grabbed at the button of his jeans and then tugged them down to his ankles. She heard him whimper her name as his boxer shorts were ripped off and then she was on him. She felt his arousal beneath her and rolled over pulling him with her.
“Get inside me, Jack,” she whispered. “I need you, now… right fucking now!”
She felt him fumble and then he was sliding in. She let out a sigh and dug her nails into his back. He flinched and looked down at her, a scared rabbit in her headlights.
“Fuck me, baby, fuck me.”
She kept her nails out of his skin, waiting for him to build to a climax. She closed her eyes to his pathetic face pulling, wishing him to come quickly. She felt him on the verge, his thrusting manic, and as he ejaculated she again dug deep, raking down his sides and back. She screamed, copying him, and went for one more drag down around his neck.
“Jesus Christ!” she heard him mutter. Stupid bastard, it’s nearly over now. “That was wonderful, babe! I’ve never felt like that before!”
He smiled down meekly and rolled off her. “That was, err… special.”
She smiled up at him, and then rolled over and stood up. “Come on, let me show you the swimming pool!”
“Wait!” she heard him cry behind her, the sound of him hopping and pulling up his jeans, had her smiling.
She took the stairs two at a time and then stood leaning on the frame of the lounge door. She watched as he followed, taking the stairs slowly and looking at her nakedness. This is as easy as taking candy from a baby, she thought. He came to a stop in front of her. “Can you grab my handbag, babe? It’s in there.”
***
Jack was in a state of confusion. Jesus, he thought, I’ve never had a girl squirm like that under me, but my fucking back is raw, and my neck! He was on dangerous ground with this girl, everything had happened too fast and the old defences were popping up. He could feel an enormous passion building inside for her, but she was troubled. Disturbed? She had the face and body of a goddess, but her facial expressions were starting to give him cause for concern. There was something false behind her eyes, and he genuinely felt a small stab of fear. He nodded at her request for the handbag and entered the lounge deep in thought. She had wanted a quick shag, but why? He hadn’t been taken in with the soft words of lust and wanting, something wasn’t right but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Still, there was plenty of time to figure her out and help her, and the fun he would have if she came on like that all the time, sheesh… Could his back take it? Too bloody right it could. Pain was a sensation and in less than three months he would have no more.
Little did he know, it would be less than three minutes.
***
Dennis Compton watched the man walk in. He was behind the door and held a pair of steel handcuffs together in his fist, like a knuckle-duster. He moved like a cat behind the man, who had bent over to pick up a handbag on the coffee table. The punch started in Compton’s waist as he twisted, the power evolved and multiplied across his chest and then unleashed itself through his shoulder and arm and finally his fist. The cuffs slammed into Jack's temple and he crumpled to the floor, smashing the coffee table as he fell.
Behind him, he heard Holly enter. “Come over here, sweetie.”
She shuffled over to him, knowing what was coming next. She had been dreading this bit, but Dennis had insisted, for authenticity.
“You hid the stuff at his place? Everything I gave you?” When she nodded, he winced. “This’ll hurt me more than you, Love!”
She stood still and closed her eyes and he jabbed her twice, hard in the face, the first rocking her backwards and splitting her nose, the second stunning her chin. She fell to the floor in a heap.
Compton helped her up, moved her over, and then put her down, kneeling by Jack. He grabbed Jack’s right hand, formed it into a fist and jabbed it into Holly’s blood smeared face. She let out a moan, as the second blow landed.
“Well done, girl. Now, grab the phone.”
Jack felt his arm moving in the dark fuzzy haze that was smothering him like a blanket. He could hear distant voices talking. They seemed far away but were getting closer. Then he could feel his head pounding, a splitting pain lanced through his brain. He groaned and tried to move his arms. Then something thundered into his stomach and he slipped back into the hazy darkness.
Compton stepped back after kicking Jack in the ribs. “That should keep him quiet for long enough. You remember what to say, girl?”
He watched Holly nod and then dial three numbers. Nine, nine, nine.
The line crackled and then a voice spoke at the other end. “Emergency Services, which service do you require?”
“Police… Quick, there’s someone in the house,” she whispered.
Another voice then spoke. “This is the police, what’s the emergency?”
Holly counted to ten as she had been told, then whispered again, “Help me, there’s someone in the house, he’s downstairs, I can hear him.”
“What’s your name and address please?”
Holly again waited for several seconds. Then, even quieter, whispered the address, and then added, “Shit… he’s seen me, he’s got a gun… he’s coming up the stairs…” Then she screamed and dropped the phone. Compton reached over and cut the call.
“You’re good at this, love. Right, you know what comes next. I’m gonna shove you across this other table and you go lay wherever you land until the police come, OK?”
He watched her nod and then pushed her, hard on the chest. That should bruise nicely, he thought.
His radio crackled into life and he listened and then answered. “This is DS 137, I’m only round the corner, show me as attending the scene.” He turned the radio off again.
He turned back to Jack, and pulled him up into a sitting position. Then he grabbed an old service revolver out of his jacket pocket and placed it into Jack's hand. He lined himself up between Jack and Holly and put the gun to the fleshy part of his forearm. He had his hand over Jack's and leaned over to sight the weapon. It was now aimed, through his arm, towards Holly’s back. She lay still where he had pushed her. “Not long now, sweetie,” he called softly.
He pulled the trigger as her head started to turn. The bullet leaped from the revolver, tearing through the flesh of Compton’s forearm and exploding out the other side in a vapour mist of blood, and continued straight at Holly. It thudded into her back, her right shoulder blade, with a smack. Her body bucked, as though punched, and she rolled over onto her chest, her face now facing Compton and Jack. The bullet didn’t make it through her body but came to a stop just under her front ribs, leaving a hole through her lung.
She looked at Compton, a baffled and pained expression drawn across her face. “Why?” she croaked.
Compton's face was twisted in pain, as he turned the gun in towards Jack. Sirens were blaring in the distance, getting closer. “You’re a liabi
lity, my sweet. I don’t fucking trust you. Plus, I don’t like sharing.”
He thought of how long it had taken to plan this job. He had been waiting to relieve Bernard Cunningham of his wealth for over a year. The man owned betting shops all over London and the south of England. He had vast amounts of cash, always ready to hand, and kept it hidden in the house. He had brought Holly in, a young street girl he had been looking after for a while, who was wise, tough and pretty, after hearing Cunningham was looking for a housekeeper. He had forged references for her, and got her an interview through a source. Cunningham had taken one look at her and given her the job. When Compton discovered the man was going on a short holiday he had formed the plan quickly.
He needed a stooge and who better than a dying man? He had heard about Jack’s plight at the hospital, overhearing a nurse talking of her pity about him being so young. He had followed Jack and watched him for three days. He had needed to make his move, he was running out of time before Cunningham returned. The night before, he had taken all the cash and jewellery from the house. He had a fortune safely stashed in his garage lock-up. He had picked up Holly early that morning and they had waited outside his flat, waiting for Holly to be able to lure him here to the house. First though, she had to get inside the bedsit and plant some jewellery if she could. They couldn’t believe their luck when they had followed him to the cliff.
Don’t let the fucker jump, girl, had been Compton’s last instructions as she had got out of the car. Get him to the bedsit and then back to the house. All she then had to do was get him to touch stuff and then fuck him upstairs, the sex would be called rape, with the bruising he had inflicted that morning on her being put down to Jack, and scratch him a little. Then lead him down here.
Compton still couldn’t believe how well it had worked. He turned the gun down and pulled Jack close to him, as though in a struggle. He felt Jack starting to come round, and aimed the gun down at his chest. They were in an embrace as he pulled Jack's finger on the trigger and the gun barked and jumped. Jack slumped back, his eyes rolling up into his head.
Holly felt her life slipping away as she watched Compton shoot Jack. Bastard. He was alright, really, Jack. Maybe she shouldn’t have brought him here. She could have given him three happy months… Nah, not her style. She would have broken his heart, and left him for someone else. This way, he didn’t suffer.
Not like Crompton, though. She hadn’t trusted the slippery bastard.
Pain racked through her and she felt as though she was drowning, slowly. Must have got me in the lung, she thought in amazement, as red bubbles formed in her mouth and then dripped onto the carpet. The sirens were close now, and she watched Crompton look over at her. She smiled at him, with bloody teeth, and tried to wink. She had left a confession at Jack’s flat, hidden where the police would find it, eventually. She was going to tell Compton if everything had gone to plan, and he could have got to it first, while she made her escape to France. She had always wanted to visit Paris. The sirens were outside the house now, and a blue flashing light lit up the room, highlighting Compton’s face every other second.
“What the fuck have you done, you little bitch?”
Your time’s up too, you bastard, she thought, and smiled at him as she died.
Compton slumped back, his hand going to his forehead and his eyes squeezed shut, as the police came bursting through the door.
The Hoard
By Robin Carter
The two men had been back and forth across the field for hours now. The small earthen mounds they left in their wake made the farmer’s field look as if a legion of moles had invaded and taken over.
“I’m shagged out, mate, how much longer are we going to keep this up?” shouted the bigger of the two, Mark, a tall, dark, veritable mountain of a man.
“Until we find something, you lazy git, you’re twice my size and you don’t see me moaning, do you?” replied Carter who, in total contrast to Mark, was a light — almost wiry — build, with a bookish demeanour. Looking up from behind his nerdy, wire-rimmed glasses, he smiled and stabbed his spade back into the next grid location they had marked on the field.
Mark grinned at his geeky little friend and very soon got a steady rhythm going again — swing, thump, sling the spoil — and was soon lost in his thoughts. It had been a strange journey to get here.
For five long days they had toiled away, all from one initial find of a single gold coin. They knew that this had been Boudicca's land, or at least this local area.
After all the battles, all the killing, and flushed with success, Boudicca had returned home for a while, laden with the treasures of Colchester, London and St Albans — treasures she had, according to rumour and legend, not taken to her final, fateful battle, somewhere near High Cross on Watling Street.
For years they had searched for the now mythical treasure of Boudicca, following clues, researching old manuscripts, reading and re-reading accounts of the battles, any information that could be found. There was precious little of it that was not just rhetoric and conjecture. They had endured years of ridicule from historians, they were, after all ‘just a pair of ignorant treasure hunters’ — the pariahs of the historical community.
The biggest problem with a lot of the information they acquired was that it was written by the likes of Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus and Tacitus. While Suetonius was a credible historian, he was also an insufferable bore and politician and, as such, wrote what he was supposed to; the politics of the time and the perception of the Romans and their legacy ruled the day, so in his eyes Rome won, and, as such, Boudicca was nothing but an outspoken barbarian woman, etc. Tacitus gave more information, but between them nothing of note about the treasure. None of this helped them get closer.
As Mark paused for breath, he remembered how close they had come to quitting the whole search. It had been Carter’s nerdish searching and stubborn persistence that had come up with just enough to keep them going. It had been tenuous at best, but a hint was enough to keep them on the trail.
It had been the only hint of the spoils of war in any of the archives they had visited. The information was taken from an old memoir, by no less than Tiberius Claudius Narcissus, a freedman of Rome and the right hand man of Emperor Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanica — more commonly known to the layman as Emperor Claudius, the man responsible for the invasion and conquest of Britain.
The two ‘Treasure Hunters’, had found the journal by accident on a trip to Rome and the Vatican Archives. It had taken them years of correspondence with the numerous and very tedious layers of Vatican bureaucracy just to get access to even the most generic documents.
Finally they had hit on just enough information to push them into the right, general geographic location. The information in question was a requisition order for one contubernium, the smallest unit of soldiers in the Roman army.
An eight man unit would not normally raise a red flag, but these eight men were requisitioned from the frumentarii, the Roman Secret Service, men who normally worked alone and carried out the darker wishes of the emperor.
These were men who spied on their colleagues, and were often considered the emperor's killers. The document listed marching orders to Britannia, kit requisition and details of local contacts in the Iceni region of the fog-shrouded isle, Britannia.
This, coupled with research already acquired down the years through hard work in half the ancient archives of Britain, meant that they could narrow the search to a specific part of the Iceni territory. Now they were forced to resort to more local means of information: rumour, legend and local gossip. They had staked so much on their success! So much on a scribbled note by an ex-slave who had allegedly sent a select group of frumentarii to capture and take back all of the gold that Boudicca's horde had stolen on her rampage through Roman Britannia. There could be no other reason for the unprecedented group of spies coming to this part of the world during that volatile period of history.
“Pass me the coin aga
in, will you?”
“Carter, for fuck’s sake, why? What good will it do? We have dug this field to death and there is nothing here. This coin was just a fluke.”
Carter held out his dirt-encrusted hand, “I can feel it, it’s here. The coin makes me feel closer to the rest of the treasure, that’s all. If I can just hone in on that feeling again, I know I can find the rest of it.”
“Twat,” Mark muttered as he passed the coin over. “Like you can feel treasure."
The coin in question was a solid gold Iceni coin that could only have come from the royal household; the quality of the coin and its purity were not something normally found anywhere else. It was still in excellent condition, despite all its years in the ground, and there was no reason for it to be in this field unless it was part of a hidden hoard or buried trove.
Of course, it could have just been dropped by a passing noble. You could never discount Sod's law. But they were not far from where the royal household was reputed to have been, so maybe they were on the right trail. They had certainly spent enough time buying drinks and listening to rumour, and gossiping old men, to get this far.
They were close, Carter knew he was; he was almost pissing himself with excitement – he hadn’t been this excited since Oxford United won promotion back to the League a few years ago.
Glancing over, Mark’s face had his thoughts on the subject — “twat” — written all over it. He didn’t know why but that word was being muttered more and more as the hours passed and Carter kept rooting in the earth like a pig after truffles.
“How the hell did I get caught up with this twat for all these years?” Mark muttered to himself as he forced the spade into the soil once more, venting his frustration on the earth. The two of them could not have been more different. Mark, the boy from the estate who had made good by getting into university, mostly, he had to admit, because he was good at every sport he tried his hand at. Good may have been an understatement. He had rowed for Oxford, run at a competitive level, was a marksman in his cadet corps, and had captained the rugby and the football team. He was the ultimate sport Billy. Yet with all that ability he was bored. He wanted to learn. He found it so easy to excel at sport and yet remembering all this history, all those dates, just seemed slightly beyond his grasp. He had been desperate to be seen as more than just an overly muscled dumb-ass. It was that desire to learn that had led him to seek out friends away from his sporting universe.
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