Chosen To Kill (DI Matt Barnes Book 4)

by Michael Kerr

  “It’ll be a big list. There could be scores or hundreds of well-off old farts that he could target.”

  “I’ll run what we get past Beth. See if she can eliminate enough to leave us with a manageable number.”

  “You think he’ll keep going?”

  “Positive,” Matt said. “I get the feeling that this isn’t really about the money. It’s a game to him. He raises his own self-esteem by attacking those that have made something of themselves. I would imagine he feels that taking some of what they’ve earned, and then killing them, is some kind of payback.”

  “For what?”

  “I haven’t got a clue, Pete. If we knew that we’d probably know his identity.”

  “That doesn’t explain why he murders the housekeepers. He has no need to.”

  “Maybe because he deplores them for being what he considers servants to wealthy men. Who knows what makes these crazies tick?”

  Errol and Phil were keeping up to speed with the hunt in Epping Forest. Many properties off the beaten track had been visited, and so far there was no result. As the hours passed by it seemed more and more likely that Gibson had slipped the net.

  Billy was lying face down, unable to move. The yard was littered with rubbish, and weeds sprouted up from cracks in the old and crumbling concrete. He was dazed, could taste blood that had run down into his mouth from his nostrils when his nose had impacted with the brick wall, although he could still smell the sharp, offensive odour of cat piss. He took shallow breaths as the pain in his stomach lessened.

  The sudden pressure on the back of his head made him grunt. He was in no doubt that it was the muzzle of a gun. He waited for a voice; expected a cop to identify himself and caution him, as another pig cuffed him. He couldn’t work out how they could have made him, though, or be waiting for him to return home.

  “Where is it?” Travis Lawson said to Billy.

  Billy was confused. It wasn’t the police, so who the fuck was it? “Where’s what?” he said.

  Travis whipped the barrel of the gun across the side of Billy’s head, gashing his ear, and said, “Play dumb and I’ll break you in two, son. Tell me where the gun is.”

  “Who are you?” Billy said as anger aided him to absorb and almost nullify the pain.

  Travis straightened up, raised his foot off the ground and brought the heel of his shoe down on the fingers of Billy’s left hand.

  Billy made a keening noise as he felt bones snap.

  “Last chance,” Travis said. “Where is it?”

  “The bag,” Billy gasped.

  Travis took a step back and squatted down next to the plastic bag, which Billy had dropped as he was smashed into the wall. He upended it with a hand enclosed in a soft kidskin glove, to empty it, grinning as the gun and silencer dropped out, along with a balaclava, a pair of latex gloves and some banded blocks of bank notes.

  He picked up the gun and ejected the mag after first checking that the chamber was empty. Told Billy to reach out and grasp hold of the gun by the butt and pull the trigger, before taking it back and ordering him to take hold of the silencer and grip it tightly. He then put the gun, mag and silencer in a pocket of his car coat and returned the money to the bag. “You get to keep your mask and gloves,” he said. “And think on this, Billy Boy. We have your prints on the murder weapon. You’ve had a good run, but now it’s time to quit. Find another hobby.”

  Billy waited to be punched or kicked or stomped on again, but nothing happened. He kept still; muscles tensed for a slow count of ten, and then slowly raised his head and looked around. The man had gone.

  He climbed to his feet, nursing his hand as he made his way out of the yard and walked to his own back gate.

  Standing at the kitchen sink he ran his swollen hand under the cold water tap. His fingers were puffed up to the size of small bananas, and he realised that he would need hospital treatment. He would clean himself up and then visit the nearest A&E and tell them that he’d fallen down the steps of his cellar, to explain the facial injuries and broken fingers.

  Fury swept through him. He grasped hold of a ceramic mug standing upside down in the dish rack, spun round and hurled it at the wall. It skewed to the right, to shatter a wood-framed mirror that had hung there for as long as he could remember. A flash of memory: he saw his mother standing in front of the mirror, brushing her hair, humming some ABBA tune as she applied pale pink lipstick. For an instant he could smell her lemony scented hair, and her makeup and cheap perfume.

  “Fuck!” he screamed as what seemed to be a thousand fragments of reflective glass rained down onto the floor to become seven years of bad luck staring him in the face. And he had destroyed a mirror that may have been old and cheap, but was a tangible part of his life.

  After sweeping up the glass and pot shards, he got the Hoover out and vacuumed the floor, before making a pot of tea and sitting at the table to think things through from the second he had been attacked. The features of the tall man’s face were indistinct. He had only caught a brief glimpse of him. But that was enough. He let his mind conjure up the image. Visualised the moment and froze it, like pausing a DVD. He didn’t know the man’s name, but had seen him before. Where? It eventually came to him, and he smiled. He knew exactly who he needed to deal with. There was no hurry. Good things come to those who wait. He would get the gun – that now had his fingerprints on it – back, and settle the score with the moron that had assaulted him and taken it and the money. And with the man who had sent him to do it.

  His killing spree of wealthy old men and their housekeepers was now on hold. He had other more pressing business to attend to. But normal service would be resumed when he was armed again and had dealt with the man who had obviously thought he could be threatened and controlled.

  Before driving off, Travis placed the nine millimetre pistol, the mag and the silencer in a transparent ziplock bag, and then removed his gloves and pulled away from the kerb. He had parked his car in the next street that morning and followed Billy, noting that he had left by the back door. He had been puzzled to see him steal a dog from outside a shop before catching a tube to Ealing. And it was apparent that the young man was following a woman. It had made him smile to see the ploy that Billy had used to gain entrance to the large house. He’d just let the dog go, and it had ran straight to the woman and entered the front door as she opened it. Smooth as silk. It could have been a rehearsed scam by a double act.

  Travis had even heard the soft blat of the silenced gun, and was correct in thinking that the woman had just been eliminated. So it was true, Billy Foster was the ‘Housekeeper Killer’. No need to wait. It was a given that once Billy had finished the job he would return home.

  Travis had been parked near the tube station in Hounslow, saw Billy appear and drove to the end of Wilton Street, to park nearby and walk down the back alley and enter the yard of the untenanted terrace house next door to Billy’s.

  Now, driving away from Hounslow, Travis scrolled down the contact list in his phone and sent a two word text message to his boss: JOB DONE.

  Ricky had contemplated having Billy capped, but decided that being roughed up by Travis and having the murder weapon returned with Billy’s fingerprints on it would suffice. Blood was, after all, a little thicker than water.

  Having the cop, Barnes, on his case over the gun had got his attention. He had thought back to the time when Al and the other two dickheads had robbed the freight office at Heathrow. After their short-lived getaway, Al had sold the gun to Sammy who, when the three had been lifted, gave the Beretta up to Ricky to dispose of.

  The admission of collusion by a clerk at the company where Eltringham had shot a guard, led to their capture. The clerk had said he had been told that if he didn’t furnish them with the information they needed to carry out the robbery, then his wife and daughter would be targeted.

  Ricky remembered that he had put the weapon in the glove box of the Jag he’d owned at the time. Less than thirty-six hours later when he h
ad called in at a small iron foundry – owned by a guy he’d known from his days as a boxer – to have the pistol melted down, it was missing. He’d assumed that one of his own men had taken it, but never discovered which one.

  It had been like a bright light being switched on in his head. Sitting in his study at home nursing a large brandy, Ricky had recalled everything he had done between the time he’d put the gun in the glove box and arriving at the foundry in Bermondsey. He compiled a mental list of all the people that he knew had been in his car. Only one person had been left in it unattended; his no-good nephew, Billy Foster. He had not seen Billy for several years, but had always thought him to be a little weird and untrustworthy. And Ricky’s sister, Gwen, had told him not to call round again, after a friend in the know had told her that it was her brother who’d arranged for two of his thugs to throw Stephen down the steps. The ungrateful bitch had been happy enough for him to pay off the mortgage on the terrace house on Wilton Street, though, and should have been appreciative that he’d had her husband dealt with. He had seen his nephew a few times over the years, attempted to befriend the youngster, but watched him grow into a very strange and introverted young man.

  The day he had stood in the car park at the crem’ and said his goodbye to Gwen, he should have realised that Billy was the so-called Housekeeper Killer who had used the gun that the police were searching for.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Beth had left Northfield at four p.m., to stop at the first shop that she came to and purchase a pack of cigarettes and a cheap throwaway lighter before heading for home. She had been checked over after sustaining quite severe bruising to her neck. She was fine, but the incident validated the tenet she had come to accept, that life was a state of being that could end at any moment. Many people were lucky and managed to reach old age without ever experiencing life or death situations, and could not properly imagine how unsafe existence is. Beth was not one of them.

  Beth recalled that her now long gone grandfather had once told her that as a sixty-year old he had made a melancholy journey back to a suburb of Southampton to the house in which he had been born. He had not visited the avenue for almost forty years, and was on reflection sorry that he had returned. He had found the houses to be fundamentally the same, though the majority had been improved by double-glazing, and many had new roofs. Cars crowded each side of the street that he had roller-skated and played hopscotch on as a kid. And as he had walked along the pavement he could put names to almost all the families that had been neighbours, and it was poignant to realise that they had all gone, and that the homes and gardens that they had once been so proud of were now owned by what he thought of as newcomers with no memory of who had lived, laughed, cried and died there prior to them moving in. The walls did not resonate with the history that had taken place therein, but were simply the sum of the bricks and mortar.

  Beth could empathise with how her granddad had felt. Revisiting anywhere that had a place in your heart begged disappointment. Sometimes memories were best kept intact by not going back and having to assimilate the changes.

  Pulling onto the grass verge at the side of the country road, Beth got out of the car, ripped the cellophane off the pack of Mayfair and plucked a cigarette from it, to light up and inhale deeply, triggering a coughing fit as she drew the hot smoke down her throat and into her lungs.

  Damn! She had truly believed that she had beaten the addiction, but like an old arch enemy, the nicotine had waited patiently for her to suffer a relapse.

  Closing her eyes, Beth felt a little dizzy. She leaned against the side of the Lexus and let the events of that morning replay.

  Peter Mullins had been a patient at Northfield for nine years, and had not displayed any aggressive behaviour in that time. He was a thirty-three year old man with a love of wildlife and the natural world, who played the guitar and was now an extremely proficient watercolourist.

  It had been almost ten years ago that Peter had been arrested for murder, and had subsequently admitted to having killed at least twelve young women.

  There had been no manhunt for a serial killer. Peter had not used the same MO each time, and had not escalated, only selecting a random victim every several months, to attack them in various locations around the city. The crimes had not been linked.

  He had been caught by pure chance. Two brothers had been walking their dogs on a towpath on the banks of the Thames near Chiswick. It was a Sunday morning, just as dawn broke, that Bobby Davis had seen what appeared to be a girl or young woman sitting against the trunk of a tree. Approaching, they called out, and as they did a dishevelled-looking man rose up from where he had been crouching next to her unseen in the lush grass, to scramble to his feet and run off, to vanish through a thick screen of bushes that opened up onto a disused railway cutting.

  The brothers rushed across to where the girl was sat with her legs open and her head lolling forward. What they had assumed to be a bright red blouse was a blood-drenched T-shirt that had been ripped or cut open to bare her breasts.

  “Go, Clyde,” Bobby said to his four-year old German shepherd, as Bobby’s brother, Brian, let his Rottweiler, Champ, off the lead.

  Bobby followed the barking dogs, while Brian knelt down to check out the motionless woman, to immediately realise that she was beyond any help. A pair of tights, presumably hers, had been employed to strangle her. They were around her neck, tied off at the back. And there was a ragged wound between her breasts, and a blood-stained knife lying on the grass next to her, along with what Brian believed to be her heart. He jumped back, away from the gruesome spectacle, swallowing hard as he reached for his phone to call the police.

  Clyde launched himself off the ground and reached forward with his powerful forelimbs, for them to strike Mullins in the back and knock him forward as he attempted to climb up the steep slope that led up to the lane where he had parked his car.

  Mullins was winded from the fall, but was in full survival mode. He grasped a short length of branch from the ground, rolled over and swung it at the dog’s head. Clyde avoided the blow with ease; his darting jaws enveloped Mullins’s wrist to bite down with large, sharp canine teeth and puncture the skin and sink through the flesh and shake the appendage until the branch was released, as an instant later Champ joined the fray, to inflict a deep bite to the would-be escapee’s ankle.

  “Good boys,” Bobby said as he drew near. “Leave.”

  “Your fucking dogs bit me,” Pete Mullins screamed in an almost feminine high-pitched voice that was fuelled by rage and pain. “I’m gonna sue you, you bastard, and see to it that those shit machines get put down.”

  Bobby was usually an easygoing and pleasant young man, who offloaded any mild build-up of aggression on the rugby field. But this wanker took the biscuit. He had without doubt seriously injured if not killed the woman that Brian had stayed with, had attempted to brain Clyde, and was now complaining about a couple of bites. And most unacceptable of all, he was badmouthing and threatening the wellbeing of Clyde and Champ.

  Bobby lashed out with his foot and felt the satisfying give as ribs cracked under the impact of his Dr Martens boot. The guy on the ground rolled up like a fucking hedgehog in the mulch of the previous winter’s leaves and started to moan. Bobby kicked him again for good measure, and Clyde took that as an open invitation and bit the man again; this time on his left biceps, to sink his teeth in and shake the arm like he did at home with an old fabric Cabbage Patch doll that Bobby had found on the foreshore over a year previously.

  It had been, as in the case with many serial killers’ capture, pure luck that the brothers had been walking past with their dogs at such an early hour, and had spotted the girl.

  Peter Mullins had only been at the scene a couple of minutes, having brought the already raped and strangled girl to a spot that he believed would give him the time and privacy he needed to remove her heart.

  Only after being found unfit to plead and committed to spending an indefinite length of t
ime in a high-security psychiatric hospital, did Mullins admit to killing at least a dozen other young women. He did not know who they were, but had kept ‘souvenirs’, and stated that the voice of his late mother had ordered him to rape and murder the women, and to, in some instances, remove parts of their bodies, which where found cured and wrapped in greaseproof paper in a locked trunk that he had stored in a spare room at his aunt’s house in Edgware. Since being detained he had shown absolutely no remorse for his actions, but had been a model prisoner/patient.

  Beth took another deep drag from the cigarette, threw it onto the road and got back in the car; to sit and review the session she had had with Mullins, to better understand what had triggered the uncharacteristic attack...

  …It was exactly two p.m. when Peter Mullins was ushered into the small room that was situated off a secure corridor in the Anderson Centre, which was home to thirty-five male patients considered to be potentially highly dangerous and to be suffering from severe personality disorders.

  “Good afternoon, Peter” Beth said as the now balding and overweight man slumped in a chair to face her across a table.

  “It’s far from good, Dr. Holder,” Peter said as he stared unblinkingly at her with his dark, unreadable eyes. “I want to keep my guitar in my room with me at night, but Dr. Rennie will not allow me to.”

  “You know why, don’t you?” Beth said.

  “No. I’m not suicidal.”

  “It’s policy, Peter.”

  “Fuck policy and procedure. It is manipulation; Rennie’s way of demonstrating that he has power over me.”

  “Not true. It’s part of a system that you’ve been in for a long time now,” Beth said. “You know how it works.”