The Jackdaw

by Luke Delaney

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sally disagreed. ‘I checked the reports myself. All are recorded as being fully searched.’

  ‘Mistakes happen,’ he reminded her. ‘This is what I need you to do. Get hold of at least two ARVs. Take one with you to Surrey and search those buildings again. Get the other one over to the golf course in Hampstead ASAP and tell them find and secure a guy called Francis Waldegrave as a matter of urgency. I’ll meet them there as soon as I can.’

  ‘Francis Waldegrave?’ Sally asked. ‘Who the hell is Francis Waldegrave?’

  ‘The Jackdaw’s next victim,’ he told her.

  ‘What?’ She tried to understand. ‘How could you possibly know who his next victim is going to be?’

  ‘I found something,’ he assured her, ‘but I don’t have time to explain right now. You’re just going to have to trust me, Sally.’

  A few seconds passed before Sally answered. ‘They won’t like it,’ she warned him. ‘You know what ARV crews are like: they’re going to want a bit more information than we’re giving them.’

  ‘I can’t help that. Just get them to meet me there and make sure they know to keep Waldegrave out of the way.’

  ‘OK,’ she hesitantly agreed, ‘but wouldn’t you rather check out the buildings in Surrey and leave the golf course to us? You could be in Surrey quicker than us from where you are.’

  ‘No,’ he insisted. ‘Leave the golf course to me.’

  ‘Why are you so keen to get to the golf course?’ Sally asked.

  ‘I need to speak to Waldegrave,’ Sean half lied.

  ‘Bollocks,’ Sally accused him. ‘You think The Jackdaw’s going to be there, don’t you? Somehow you know – you know he’s going to try and abduct Waldegrave from the golf course.’

  ‘I don’t know anything,’ Sean tried to convince her. ‘Not for sure.’

  ‘You want to confront him, don’t you?’

  ‘No,’ he answered, not even sure within himself if he was telling the truth or not. ‘I just need to check something out.’

  ‘Then let me get local uniform units to swamp the area and scare him off,’ Sally suggested.

  ‘No,’ Sean answered too quickly. ‘This could be our best chance to catch him. He’s made a trap for himself. Let’s let him walk into it.’

  ‘I don’t know, Sean,’ she appealed to him. ‘Don’t stick your neck out again. Your children, Sean. They’re so young.’

  He sighed into his phone. He knew she was right, but he also knew he wouldn’t be able to stop himself. He never could. ‘I have no intention of confronting him,’ he told her what he knew she wanted to hear, ‘but if we end up crossing paths, Dave will be with me and he’ll be armed.’

  ‘Dave’s armed?’ she asked disbelievingly.

  ‘As a precaution,’ he tried to calm her. ‘If we’re the ones who have to arrest him then it’ll be Dave making the approach, not me.’

  ‘No it won’t,’ she told him. ‘Just be careful. I’ll call you once we’ve checked out the buildings in Surrey.’

  Sean listened to the phone go dead.

  15

  Mark Hudson sat in his squalid bedroom staring at the blank square on his computer screen, waiting for The Jackdaw to return. He felt like he’d been watching the screen for days, but he didn’t dare take a break and run the risk of missing his idol – not even to use the toilet or to eat or drink. Nothing could pull him away from the old computer he’d stolen during a burglary a few months before. The thrill of being an intruder in somebody else’s home had been one of the greatest feelings he’d had in his short life, but it would have been oh so much more satisfying if the occupants had been in while he rifled through the house. Next time he’d make sure they were. He’d do it at night. Wait outside hidden in trees as he watched them go to bed one by one, the house turning to darkness, and then he’d slip from the trees and find a way in. Before he left with his stolen haul he’d be sure to defecate somewhere prominent inside the house – a final act of defiling the house and family who lived inside. He had no way of knowing that such acts would soon fail to satisfy his needs. Soon he would need more.

  ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ he shouted at the blank screen. ‘What are you waiting for?’ He flopped backwards on his bed, but kept his eyes on the screen. He needed this. He lived for this. The Jackdaw had shown him the way forward. Shown him what he could achieve with his life. And now he was going to slay another rich pig live on the Internet – for his entertainment. And after that, he’d as good as promised to end his own life.

  Hudson leaned forward, suddenly interested in his own thoughts. How did The Jackdaw plan to kill his next and seemingly final victim? Would he hang him like he did his first, or would he use the shotgun? He hoped it would be the shotgun. He’d already seen people hanged – hundreds of them on the Internet – victims of the Holocaust, victims of other conflicts, but prisoners too and even Saddam Hussein’s execution by hanging had made it onto the Net. He’d even seen his fair share of decapitations – nearly all the victims of jihadists and terrorists — but he’d never seen anyone shot, not live and close up with a shotgun. He hoped he shot him in the chest or better still the abdomen, so the victim could be seen to be suffering. Somehow that would make it all the more real.

  And how would The Jackdaw end his own life? With courage and strength? No fear. He’d show the world how strong he was. The Jackdaw was just like him – he lived his life hard and fast and wouldn’t let anyone fuck with him. If they did he made them pay, just as Hudson did. They were kindred spirits. The Jackdaw had shown him the true way forward. From now on he’d never look back. He knew what he had to do with his life.

  But right now he just wanted the small black square with the words ‘Your View’ in its centre to blink into life and for The Jackdaw to once again take centre stage.

  Over a hundred miles away from Hudson’s squalid bedroom, Gabriel Westbrook sat at the breakfast bar in the kitchen of his house in Hoxton. Once a tough and depressed area of the East End of London housing dockers and their families, famous for lunatic asylums and workhouses, in the 1980s it had been taken over by young artists and then inevitably the rich had moved in, taking advantage of its proximity to the City to make it their own.

  He looked up from his laptop’s screen for a few seconds to see his beautiful young wife playing with his beautiful children in their modest-sized garden. She waved through the glass kitchen extension and encouraged the children to do the same. He faked an eager smile and waved back, pointing at his screen to let her know he still had work to do. Only it wasn’t work on his computer – it was the same black Your View picture that, unbeknown to him, a young psychopath in Birmingham was waiting to come alive.

  Westbrook had planned on meeting some work colleagues for a game of golf, but had decided against it when he saw The Jackdaw’s earlier broadcast. He’d bent a few rules and regulations back in the bad old days, when the banking crisis was the only thing in the news, and in his heart he’d always known that his actions had probably made somebody, somewhere, suffer because of his own greed and impatience to climb the corporate and financial ladder. He always managed to console himself with the thought that if he hadn’t, then someone else would have, and since then he’d been as white as white. However, the thought of The Jackdaw still roaming the streets a free man was enough to put him off leaving the house. How could he know? How could he be sure he hadn’t already been selected to be his next victim? But The Jackdaw had all but promised to take his own life once he’d taken his final victim. All Westbrook had to do was see out these last few hours and he’d be in the clear. No more looking over his shoulder whenever he was out and about. No more feeling paranoid on the Underground – every stranger’s glance making him on edge. No more nightmares about being taped to that old wooden chair as the monster burnt out his eyes and hacked off his fingers before hoisting him in the air to hang to death. He just had to get through the next few hours.

  With The Jackdaw out of the way ev
erything could get back to normal. The City could relax and breathe again – stocks and shares would quickly recover and the money and bonuses could once again begin to roll in. He, like his colleagues, knew the get rich quick and stay rich formula. It was simple enough: get your bonus, take the cash out of the increasingly regulated banking sector and use it to buy property across London. Who cared if the middle and working classes got pushed out of London altogether? There was fast money to be made. At least, that was what he used to think. The Jackdaw was nothing other than a vengeful lunatic, as far as he was concerned, but the amount of people watching and voting had deeply troubled him, especially the amount who had voted the defendants guilty and thus encouraged The Jackdaw to maim and kill. Locked in his bubble of work and wealth, he’d had no idea how much the majority of people hated his kind. But it was those who voted not guilty who had affected him most – tens of thousands of ordinary people, no doubt many who had suffered as a result of the banking crisis, but who showed mercy and compassion – they were the ones who had truly changed him. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life making money for people who already had money. He wanted to do more with his life now, something that mattered. Something that made a difference – if he could just see out this day. Come Monday he would hand in his resignation then take some time out to think about what he really wanted from life. A slight smile spread across his lips at the irony. The Jackdaw represented nothing but hate and revenge – a man who wanted to turn the country on itself. But somehow he couldn’t help but believe that The Jackdaw, in trying to destroy him, had saved him.

  Phil Taylor sat in his small, cluttered office in his small terraced house in Hull, his chin propped in the palm of one hand while the other circled the arrow icon round and round on his computer screen as he waited for what was promised to be the final broadcast ever from the man the media had been calling The Jackdaw. He wasn’t even sure why he was watching any more – any sympathy or admiration he’d ever had for the self-proclaimed messiah had long since faded.

  At first he’d hung on The Jackdaw’s every word, agreeing with everything he had to say and the need to say it in the first place – even to the point where he felt no sympathy for the man he’d murdered. But since the torture of the young woman and the blinding of the young man, he’d seen The Jackdaw in a new light and now his latest ranting, preaching diatribe had confirmed in his mind that he was nothing more than a madman – just another murdering psychopath looking to become infamous.

  The Jackdaw blamed others for his plight, just like he himself had been doing since his small business went under. But Taylor didn’t want to be like The Jackdaw – didn’t want anything in common with him. The time for bitter recriminations and self-pity was over. It was time to build again.

  ‘I don’t need this any more,’ he told the room. He moved the cursor over the quit icon and clicked. The Jackdaw was gone forever. He clicked the cursor on the Internet search space and typed ‘Loans for small businesses’ into the box and pressed search just as his wife came into the room.

  ‘You all right, love?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure,’ he told her. ‘I’ve wasted enough life. It’s time to start over.’

  Father Jones sipped his tea and tried to concentrate on preparing his sermon for the following morning, but the black computer screen with the words ‘Your View’ emblazoned across it continued to distract him. He felt he had no choice but to watch what he expected to be the last of the troubled soul’s broadcasts, no matter how abhorrent they were to him. Rarely had he felt so close to such evil as he did when he watched and listened to the man who hid behind a bird’s name, but he had to be there in spirit and mind when the dreadful broadcast began – to pray for both victim and persecutor.

  He looked down at the blank pages of the book he recorded all his sermons in – giving them marks out of ten according to how well his listeners had responded to them, most of the marks being five or less.

  ‘Tut, tut,’ he reprimanded himself. ‘Not many ten out of tens in here. Perhaps I’m in the wrong job?’ His thoughts turned to the policeman, the detective who came to see him very irregularly and always at times when it was all but certain no one else would be about. He wondered what he would be doing right now. Not sitting down trying to write some half-baked sermon, that was for sure. How would he be feeling knowing the ‘troubled soul’ was planning on taking another victim and then, if he was to be believed, his own life? How desperate and sick the detective must be feeling right now – the life of another human being in his hands. The weight of his responsibility must be crushing. No wonder he felt the occasional need to unburden his soul – even if it was just to an under-qualified priest hidden away in the depths of southeast London. But Father Jones sensed a strength in the man he’d rarely detected, and a darkness too that ran like a vein of evil through his core – an evil he somehow managed to control – unlike the ‘troubled soul’ who’d thrown his lot in with the devil the moment he’d taken a life. The policeman had secrets – troubling secrets he needed to unburden himself of before they consumed him and dragged him to a place where not even God could help him.

  He looked at the blank screen and then the blank page in his book. ‘Jesus,’ he blasphemed, ‘what am I supposed to say? I’ve got young kids stabbing each other because they walked down the wrong street. I’ve got young mothers using their family allowance to buy crack instead of baby food and a man who can draw an audience of hundreds of thousands because he tortures and kills people, while I’ll be lucky if forty people turn up to listen to me on a Sunday morning. Dear Lord, give me strength. Give me a sign of why I should carry on.’

  He breathed in deeply through his nose and began to write his sermon. The other day, he began. A man came to see me in the middle of the night – long after everyone else had left. A policeman. A policeman who carried a terrible burden.

  ‘Do you really have to play golf today?’ Jennifer Waldegrave asked her husband as they inched along in the heavy traffic along Hampstead High Street.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ Francis Waldegrave answered. ‘It’s all for a good cause.’

  ‘But I was really looking forward to doing something together,’ she complained. ‘You work so hard I hardly ever get to see you. You’re either at work or going to some charity do or another. You practically missed seeing Evie grow up and now she’s away at university and it’ll only be another couple of years before Harry’s off too. You’ve sacrificed so much.’

  He ran a thin hand through his neat, greying black hair and checked his reflection in the rearview mirror. Although at a glance he appeared handsome and tanned, he also looked tired. Not the sort of tired you can look after a late night, but a deep-set tiredness born of years of relentless hard work and dedication to his profession. What little spare time he had he split between his family and the charity work he’d come to take increasingly seriously. But it was all beginning to take its toll.

  ‘It won’t be for much longer,’ he assured her in a kindly tone. ‘I’m fifty-six now. In another couple of years I’ll be able to retire and spend more time with you and the kids.’

  ‘But the children won’t be children any more,’ she warned him. ‘In so many ways they’re already young adults.’

  ‘And fine young adults they are too,’ he told her with a smile. ‘Thanks to you.’

  ‘And the best education money can buy,’ she reminded him.

  ‘It all helps,’ he agreed, ‘but at least they’re not arseholes. They understand they’re privileged. They know how lucky they’ve been. They don’t look down their noses at anyone. They don’t think they’re special just because their parents can afford things most people can’t.’

  ‘You certainly made sure of that,’ she said approvingly.

  ‘It’s important,’ he insisted, stealing a look at his still beautiful wife as he eased the Jaguar through the traffic. ‘They need to know the value of money. I’ll give them the best start I can then it’s down to them: they h
ave to make it themselves. Nobody helped me when I first started. I paid my own way through university before getting a job in the City. I started at the bottom and worked my way to the top. It wasn’t easy. I didn’t have an old school tie to wave around.’

  ‘I know,’ she assured him, ‘and that’s what sets you aside – that’s what makes you better than the others.’

  ‘There’s more like me than you think,’ he tried to convince her.

  ‘Really?’ she argued. ‘I bet there’s not many giving up their day off to run a charity golf day. You know you hate golf.’

  ‘I may hate golf,’ he agreed, ‘but it can sometimes be a better place to do business than the boardroom. At least I get some fresh air and exercise.’

  ‘But on your day off,’ his wife complained. ‘Can’t you skip it – just this once – and take your poor neglected wife out for a long, lazy lunch?’

  ‘I can’t,’ he sighed. ‘Most of the people are only coming because I persuaded them to. We need their money. Twenty-first-century London and people are still living on the streets. Hard to believe.’

  ‘And a lot of people blaming you and your kind for it,’ she reminded him.

  ‘There were plenty of homeless people before the banking crisis,’ he explained. ‘Although I won’t deny it didn’t help. Some of us got greedy, became lost in the search for easy, fast wealth. Once I knew who they were I got rid of them quickly enough. I didn’t try to protect them – no matter how much people wanted me to. We all have to take responsibility for our actions.’

  ‘I remember your actions cost us quite a few friendships,’ she recalled. ‘No one could ever accuse you of trying to win a popularity contest.’

  ‘Integrity is not negotiable,’ he explained. ‘They had to go.’ For a second his mind wandered back through the years to the time when he was the CEO of King and Melbourn Capital Associates, the mismanagement of funds he’d helped uncover and the subsequent letting-go of a number of its employees – some senior officials amongst them. Those who had done wrong must pay for their mistakes and greed – in part at least. ‘If I had to do the same tomorrow I would,’ he eventually continued. ‘I wouldn’t hesitate for a second.’