Hide and Seek

by Denver Murphy

  ‘Have you got him?’ She ignored his enquiry.

  ‘Erm… well…’

  ‘Fucking hell,’ she wailed, resisting the temptation to throw the handset across the room. Her outburst was enough to cause the officer, who had remained on the inside of the door, to wince, and the nurse, who had been pretending to organise some items on the bedside table, to recoil.

  ‘No, Stella, listen to me!’ The power in his command silenced Johnson. ‘We know who he is…’

  ‘…he’s the man from the CCTV.’

  ‘Yes, yes we know that. We were able to get a clearer image of him, having traced the car back to the station.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just listen,’ he repeated. ‘We’ve been able to positively ID him.’

  ‘Who is he?’ She couldn’t help herself interrupting once more.

  ‘He’s one of our own, Stella.’ Potter’s voice dropped. ‘I… I recognised him. I’m so sorry, I should have seen it before, but the image was so grainy, and he was wearing a hat and…’

  ‘Have you got him?’ Her tone was cold, deadly.

  ‘A team’s just been dispatched now,’ he said, brighter. ‘ETA is…’ A slight pause. ‘Three minutes. Look, I’m overseeing this and need to…’

  ‘You call me as soon as you’ve got him.’ She slammed down the phone without waiting for a reply and turned to the nurse. ‘How do I get this fucking thing out of my hand?’ Johnson was already pulling at the cannula.

  Chapter Eight

  ‘Why can’t we just pull into the services?’

  ‘Don’t be so fucking stupid!’ Brandt had grown increasingly irritable during the long journey down to Folkestone. Tiredness had caught up with him and the paracetamol he had picked up from home was doing little to dull the throbbing in his head. Discovering that the Eurotunnel didn’t run 24 hours a day and that it would be 6am until the first train had initially worried him. The getaway had been relatively clean, but he wouldn’t be satisfied until they had made it across to the continent. He knew that if that nosey twat Pulford or someone else became sufficiently suspicious of Franklin’s behaviour and decided to track his car’s movements, they would know exactly where he was going. But he wasn’t going to make it easy for them by spending the next few hours sitting under a load of CCTV cameras that would lead them directly to him. ‘Pull off at the next junction.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Stop asking me that and just do as I tell you!’ Once the initial shock of events that evening had worn off, Franklin had become increasingly talkative. It seemed that whatever sleep he had managed after knocking off work early had done him good and he didn’t seem to be succumbing to the same fatigue as Brandt. He had let him chat away, if for no other reason than it seemed to be doing a better job of preventing him inadvertently nodding off than the car’s stereo.

  Not that Franklin’s chatter was a whole lot more interesting. Having established very early on that attempts to discover their ultimate destination and what would happen when they got there were unwelcome, he started talking about his wife and kids. Brandt knew exactly what he was up to; trying to personalise things was an obvious tactic for any abductee in the hope it would make it harder for the abductor to do them harm. Not only was it not working, but the more Brandt heard about how wonderful his wife was, notwithstanding their recent issues, and how bright and promising his children were, the more he detested Franklin. Even if only part of what he had been saying was true, it enraged him to think that someone as pathetic as him could end up with a better life than he had. Furthermore, he reasoned that freeing these people from such a dead weight might be doing them a favour.

  ‘Take that single-track road on the right and I’ll find us somewhere we can stop.’

  ‘You’re not… you’re not going to…’

  ‘Oh man up, Brian, I just need us to find somewhere quiet, so we can get forty winks before catching the train.’ Even with just the dull illumination from the instrument panel Brandt could see that Franklin remained far from convinced that he wasn’t going to shoot him and leave him in a ditch. ‘Besides I had to make the booking using this car’s registration, so it would be a bit odd if the owner didn’t check-in at the terminal.’ The logic to that statement elicited a small nod of acceptance.

  ‘Look over there, you can stop in that entrance to the field.’

  Franklin slowed the vehicle and pulled in, the car bouncing over the mud ruts left by the farmer’s tractor.

  ‘Ah, peace at last.’ Brandt sighed, reaching for the rope he’d got out of his shed before they left. ‘Right, I’m going to have to tie your hands or something, but feel free to recline your seat a bit if you want to first.’

  Franklin stayed in the position he was and didn’t move as Brandt clambered through to the front and secured him by looping the rope through the spokes of the steering wheel. He had just settled in the back again and was arranging his bag to act as a pillow when Franklin finally piped up again. ‘Why did you do it?’

  Brandt sighed. ‘Why do you think? You don’t think I know that the moment I drop off, you would be out that door and…’

  ‘No,’ he interrupted firmly. ‘I mean, why did you kill all those people?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Brandt replied dismissively, closing his eyes.

  The unexpected laughter that followed resulted in them immediately reopening. ‘For fuck’s sake, Jeff, you think I haven’t met dozens of people like you in my whole career? Murderers!’ There was much distaste in this last word, like it was an insect that had crawled into his mouth and needed to be ejected as quickly as possible.

  Brandt sat up in a fit of rage and jabbed the Glock into his ribs. ‘Don’t you fucking dare compare me with those sick cunts.’

  Silence.

  He flicked off the safety and jammed the gun further into Franklin’s side, awaiting the pathetic, begging apology that he was sure would follow.

  It didn’t.

  ‘So how are you different?’ Franklin asked calmly.

  ‘Alright, I’ll tell you!’ Brandt hissed. ‘The one thing they all have in common, which I don’t have, is a need to kill. It might be for different reasons, but the need is the same. It might be because something in their childhood turned them into a sick fucking bastard or to give themselves a sense of power and worth that was missing in their pathetic little lives. Or they might simply do it because they can, and they get off on it! But I’m different, I’m not doing it for me.’

  ‘Who are you doing it for?’ Franklin had made no attempt to hide his incredulity, twisting round to stare directly into Brandt’s eyes.

  ‘For the same reason why all your tragic attempts to brown-nose and piggyback your way to the top hasn’t worked. No one cares anymore. No one gives a shit about what we do. No one gives a flying fuck about a few fatal stabbings here and there as long as they have somewhere to go to get their next skinny latte and their broadband speed is reliable. People bang on about global terrorism and Brexit and all that shit but only because they think it might affect them. As long as the murderers keep killing their own wives and children, people get shot in a drug deal that went wrong, and women get raped whilst stumbling home from some seedy nightclub at 4am in the morning, they don’t care. They don’t care because it won’t happen to them. It won’t happen to them because their husband is an accountant at a respected multinational company, they don’t do drugs or if they do, they don’t have to go on the streets to get them, and if they do go out at night rather than get Deliveroo to bring them their favourite restaurant food, they book their Uber to arrive before they have even got up from the table.’

  ‘What about those people who don’t have a middle-class job or can’t afford taxis to take them door to door?’

  ‘They’re too fucking thick to notice. If it isn’t in the shitty rag of a newspaper they read, then they don’t know it’s even happening. And because the people that matter don’t care, the newspapers don’t bother to w
rite about it.’ Brandt was shouting by now, spittle flying from his mouth. ‘And when someone lets these ignorant cunts have a say in what happens, we end up with Brexit, we end up with Trump, and the world becomes an even shittier place than it was before.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ Franklin said, the need to calm Brandt down was urgent, but the tirade had failed to answer one simple question. ‘Tell me how you have made a difference then.’

  ‘I don’t really have to tell you, I could see it on your face when you went into that press conference.’

  ‘What the…?’

  ‘Come on, Brian, let’s not dick around. You were going into the press conference to share with the public that one of their citizens, your citizens, had just been murdered in cold blood. You could barely keep the smile off your face.’

  ‘How fucking dare you, Jeff! Don’t tar me with your own brush.’

  ‘Hold on, hold on, I’m not judging you, you’re just a product of the society in which we live. You were delighted to be there. The media circus had finally come to town. Look, I don’t blame you and, more than that, I understand. You’ve worked your whole life in law enforcement and how many times have you seen yourself on the news? I’m not talking about the shitty local stuff, I mean the proper news, the one people actually watch? All those crimes, all those criminals caught and barely a ripple made.’

  ‘So, what, you did it for fame? Infamy?’

  ‘No, no,’ Brandt laughed. ‘It’s not about me. What I have done is stop people being complacent. By doing what I did anywhere and to anyone means that the wife of the accountant in her nice detached house, much like yours by the way, can no longer pass things off as affecting other people. She no longer feels safe when she nips to the shops.’

  ‘But, Jeff, isn’t the whole point of our job to make people feel safe?’

  ‘No, it’s not, and that’s the problem. We’re meant to make people be safe. Big fucking difference, Brian! The safety she used to feel was an illusion; a fallacy. And we can’t make people be safe until they accept the danger that is all around them. Tell me, Brian, how many people have you charged, certain that they were guilty to only find them acquitted in the courts?’

  ‘A few,’ Franklin conceded meekly.

  ‘More than a few I bet. Doesn’t it bother you? And I tell you why it happens: because society lets it happen. It’s so oblivious to what’s really going on out there that it doesn’t care whether murderers get off scot free.’

  ‘Ah now come on, Jeff…’

  ‘No, it’s true. If people really wanted to clean up society, they would give up all this innocent-until-proven-guilty bullshit and they would put their trust back in us that we know what we’re doing.’

  ‘What are you going on about, Jeff? Are you actually being serious here? When people find out that it’s a copper that’s done all this, and not just any old copper but a fucking Detective Superintendent, what do you think that’s going to do for trust in the police? I’ll tell you what’ll happen, it’ll make what the Catholic Church suffered as a result of the child molesting priests look like a fucking picnic.’

  Brandt shrugged. ‘Can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs and all that. Don’t tell me that you don’t know lots of coppers whom the force would be better off without. Take that Johnson bitch for example…’

  ‘Why her?’

  ‘Come on, I saw the look you gave her when she answered that question after you’d made it perfectly clear that you wouldn’t be taking any. What’s more, I bet you told her before you went in that she was to keep her pretty mouth shut. Didn’t want her treading on your toes.’

  ‘I don’t see how her breaking protocol makes her a rotten apple.’

  ‘She knew exactly what she was doing.’ Brandt sneered. ‘She wanted the press to run a story suggesting I was… I was… confused.’

  ‘Is that why you picked girls then? Well, apart from that Asian guy on my patch. Was that to prove something to yourself?’

  ‘What the fuck? Do you realise who you’re talking to?’ Brandt waved the gun in Franklin’s face, outraged. He had entertained this prick’s impertinent questions and had explained quite clearly that none of this was about him. Of all people, given that he must have gone through the same shit Brandt had in his career, he should have understood.

  ‘Oh, I know exactly who I’m talking to. You say you’re different to all the other murderers but you’re the same as them, Jeff; exactly the fucking same. Your wife left you and you’re too proud to wank off to the internet like the rest of us, so you get your sick kicks in another way. What’s more…’

  The sound of the back-door opening stopped Franklin. Moments later Brandt was next to him, trying to yank him out and into the dirt, forgetting that his hands were still attached to the steering wheel. As Brandt let go of his feet Franklin slumped awkwardly on the door sill, his arms held aloft. ‘Please don’t,’ he cried, closing his eyes and turning his face in anticipation of the flurry of punches that would surely follow.

  It was with surprise that he could feel himself being untied.

  ‘Get up,’ Brandt ordered.

  Franklin did as he was told, all the while staring through the darkness at the gun in front of him. He wondered whether his brain would process his eyes viewing the muzzle flash before he felt the impact of the bullet.

  He wasn’t yet ready to accept his fate, not until he knew that Brandt wouldn’t go after his family next.

  ‘But you need me to… in order to get to France. You said so…’

  Brandt paused, debating whether to shoot this prick there and then. As he applied pressure to the trigger, he knew that it would require an alteration to his plans but not in the way Franklin anticipated. Did he think he was fucking stupid? Did he think they were just going to rock up to the terminal; the two of them, all smiles, whilst they both handed over their passports to the border guard? But after a day of unwanted improvisation Brandt wasn’t going to be responsible for yet another deviation from a cast iron plan. He nodded to himself.

  ‘Get in the boot,’ he said coldly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Now!’ Brandt roared, grabbing Franklin by the collar and dragging him round to the back of the car. He released him, so he could open the tailgate whilst keeping the gun trained on him.

  ‘But… but you need me… you bought two tickets…’

  ‘Who said I bought two tickets?’ Brandt laughed, bundling him into the boot and stuffing a handkerchief in his mouth. ‘Spit it out and I’ll rip out your tongue.’ He then turned Franklin over, tying his hands behind him before flipping him back again. All that remained was to secure the gag with a smaller bit of rope from his shed.

  ‘There,’ he said, patting his hands theatrically. ‘All done. And before you say it – well, if you could say it – don’t even think about making a load of noise when we get to Folkestone.’ To emphasise the point, he pulled out of his pocket the scrunched-up bit of paper with Franklin’s family’s address. He took one final look at his wild, panicked eyed and slammed the tailgate shut.

  Climbing into the back again and resting his head on the makeshift pillow, Brandt felt a lot calmer. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of doing this as soon as they pulled up. At least this way he could get a couple of hours’ sleep without worrying whether Franklin would find some means of escape.

  But sleep didn’t come. Despite his exhaustion, the anxiety of the border crossing weighed heavily on his mind and he sat there thinking as the light of dawn gradually arrived. At least his concerns of what was to come provided some distraction from thoughts of earlier. Some of Franklin’s stinging words had rung true. It had never been Brandt’s intention for people to find out it was an ex-policeman who was doing these things. Moreover, he had hoped to build on his successes and take advantage of the momentum his exploits had gained. Undoubtedly his visit to Johnson’s house would be headline news, but he had wanted the spotlight to continue to fall on his victims, whilst his identity would rema
in a mystery. He took some comfort from the knowledge that they had been closer to catching him than he’d thought. In actual fact, his impetuousness in targeting Johnson rather than another random person may well have saved him. He would be sat at home now, congratulating himself on another job well done, unaware that the police had plucked his face from the hundreds of others around the various crime scenes. Maybe Franklin would still have foolishly come to see him, but he doubted that, had he not enticed him to the football the day before to ply him with enough drink so that he gave away a crucial detail about Johnson, things would have turned out that way.

  But he wasn’t safe yet. With that knowledge firmly rooted in his mind Brandt started up the car at exactly 5am. It would give him an hour to make the short final drive to the Eurotunnel and board his train.

  * * *

  The clock on the X5’s dashboard told him it was 5:13am as he took the exit from the motorway; the terminal visible a little further up the slip road. He hadn’t heard a peep from his companion, even though starting the engine must have given Franklin a fright.

  It was Franklin’s much more expensive overnight bag that he’d selected to be sat next to him as he made his approach. Not only did he want his cheap item out of sight, but he also would be using Franklin’s passport, not least in case the police had managed to identify him in the meantime. Brandt knew this was the weakest part of his plan but his study of the photograph back at the house had confirmed, especially considering it had been taken a few years ago, that they had more than a passing resemblance. It didn’t stop him feeling nervous, but he hoped that whoever he met would be sufficiently demotivated at this time of day not to notice the subtle differences.

  Brandt’s relief that the first barrier was automated didn’t last when he found he could no longer recall the entirety of the car’s registration number. He started hunting round for Franklin’s phone which he had reactivated to make the reservation online, but a quick glance at the machine showed him that the plate had been recognised and matched with his booking.