by Nick Oldham
Tara shook her head. ‘This man has degraded my daughter. He has screwed her and made her suck his dick.’ She stood upright. ‘Before I hand this gun over, I want two things.’
Henry waited. The demands were coming. He only hoped they could be met.
‘I want him degraded and I want him to admit what he’s done.’
‘How?’ Henry did not like the way this was going.
‘You talked about securing evidence? You talked about clothing, my daughter’s clothing, how it needed to be kept?’ Henry nodded. ‘I want him to take his clothing off. I want him to stand there naked and ashamed and then I want him to confess his crime.’
This, Henry thought, is not progressing terribly well. Even though Tara had called him, had made a cry for help, she was still very close to a killing.
He shook his head. ‘No, Tara,’ he said softly. ‘That is not a good idea-’
Before he could finish his rationale, Tara snarled, ‘I don’t give a fuck if it’s a good idea or not. He does those things or he dies.’
She meant it. Henry swivelled to Coulton. ‘It’s your play, Jake.’
‘No way.’
Henry chortled. ‘Strip or die. I know what I’d rather do, because if you ask me, that’s what I’d do in your position. Fact is that your clothes will be taken off you for forensic anyway.’ Henry shrugged, glanced at Tara, then back at Coulton. He was trying to manage a situation that was almost out of his control, ‘She’s more than capable of blowing your head off and if this appeases her. .?’ Henry looked at John Lloyd Wickson, the silent tycoon now, a man who had very little to say in the present circumstances. ‘What do you say, John? Naked or dead?’ Wickson remained schtum.
Coulton stood up slowly.
An expression of extreme satisfaction crossed Tara’s face.
He began to unbutton his shirt. ‘You do know that this will get the case kicked out of court, don’t you, Henry?’
‘I doubt it. And just at this moment in time, I wouldn’t be too concerned about a court case, pal. I’d be more bothered about walking out of here still breathing.’ Actually Henry agreed that this could compromise any legal proceedings, that the defence would use it very much to their advantage, but he wasn’t going to admit this to Coulton or to Tara. All this was about was getting three people out of here alive. The worry about the court case could come after.
Coulton tugged his shirt out of his trousers, unfastened the cuffs and slid the garment off. He held it up between thumb and forefinger before letting it waft to the floor. ‘That enough for you?’ he said to Tara.
Once again she gripped the shotgun tighter and raised it to her shoulder, sighting Coulton down the barrel.
Henry saw him judder with fear.
‘You strip naked, Jake.’
Coulton’s jaw rotated. Henry could see him weighing up the distance between himself and Tara, knew what was going on inside his head: Can I do it? Can I get to her before she pulls the trigger? Is it too far?
He unbuttoned his trousers and unzipped the fly. His decision apparently had been that tackling her was too much of a risk. Live coward or dead bastard?
The trousers dropped. He kicked them to one side and stood there in boxers and socks. He had a very well-maintained body, Henry saw, though he did have some rather large, red and unsightly spots on his shoulders and back, which made Henry feel better.
‘Socks and underpants,’ Henry said.
The night air was cold, very cold. Cloud rolled in with a harsh wind. Rain began to fall, getting progressively heavier. It was turning into a horrible night.
The sniper did not notice the weather in as much as it affected him personally. He had lain in fields before, in far worse conditions than rain. Often lain for days on end when he was younger and did this sort of thing more regularly.
This was easy — and he was certain he would be there for this one night only.
Tonight his victim would die.
It was also a relief for Henry to see that Jake Coulton’s penis was no great shakes. It was certainly not in proportion to the rest of his body, so shrivelled up and insignificant it seemed. Terror, though, Henry conceded, could have had some bearing on that. A display of his privates was not enhanced by the presence of a shotgun-wielding mad woman.
Coulton stood there, shoulders drooping, not covering himself.
‘Now what?’ he asked. The shape of his mouth was a mirror of his anger.
‘Now, Jake, I want you to tell me what you’ve done.’
‘Can he sit down?’ Henry said.
Tara shook her head. ‘No, I want him to stand there. . actually, no I don’t.’ She changed her mind abruptly. ‘What I want him to do is get down on his knees and I want him to admit what he’s done and then I want him to beg for mercy.’
‘Tara!’ John Lloyd Wickson said. ‘This has gone far enough. At least let him sit down, for God’s sake.’
She spun on him and growled, ‘Then it’s your turn.’
‘Tara,’ said Henry. ‘Come on, love, this is getting silly.’
‘No, it’s not,’ she said, looking at Henry, but keeping the shotgun pointed at her husband. Henry knew straight away he had said the wrong thing. ‘If the rape of my daughter is silly, then I’ve called the wrong person, haven’t I, Henry?’
‘You know what I mean,’ he insisted.
The shotgun arced back to Jake Coulton, naked, pale, spotty and withered.
‘All right, you can sit down,’ Tara relented. ‘Then admit what you did.’
He sat.
‘Come on, then.’
Henry closed his eyes in hopelessness, feeling he had lost what little control he’d had; maybe he had never been in control and maybe the cops were right about him. Maybe he was guilty of what he was accused of, maybe he was a man who misjudged things and, worst of all, maybe he didn’t deserve to be a cop.
‘Tara, don’t do this,’ he tried. ‘It will weaken the case against him.’
She gave him a withering look and he knew she did not care now. He could see it in her eyes that she was going to kill him now — whatever he said. Her primal instincts had been broken open and she was reacting in a very extreme way to protect her child.
‘Speak,’ she said to Coulton.
She crossed the kitchen and lifted Coulton’s chin with the muzzle of the shotgun, then pushed the gun into his throat.
‘For fuck’s sake, Tara,’ Henry protested. ‘I’ve come to get you out of this and you’re not listening to me.’
It was as if she hadn’t heard a word he said.
‘Speak,’ she repeated. She raised his chin even higher so he could look at her along the barrel, eye to eye.
He swallowed a big dollop of fear.
‘Did you rape my daughter?’
‘I. . I. .’ he stammered.
‘Not good enough.’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I raped her.’
‘Tell me more. . admit it all, you bastard.’
‘I. . picked her up from the disco like you asked me to do. . and I drove her home.’ In spite of his nakedness, he was sweating. Rivulets poured down the back of his neck, down his face, under his nose. One drop of sweat rolled on to the barrel of the gun.
‘Tara, that’s enough,’ Henry said.
‘No, actually, it’s not, because I want him to tell me everything, every last detail.’
‘There is no victory in this, Tara.’ Henry was desperate. ‘Can’t you see?’
‘It’s not about victory, Henry, it’s about truth and justice. . So, go on, Jake, tell me about how you raped a fourteen-year-old girl.’
‘I did it on the back seat of the Bentley,’ he said shakily. ‘I forced her down and forced myself on to her.’
‘Did she resist?’
He nodded as much as the barrel of the gun would allow.
‘And yet you still did it?’
‘Yeah,’ he gasped.
‘Did she en
joy it?’
‘No.’
‘Did you enjoy it?’
Coulton did not reply.
‘Did you? Did it give you a feeling of great power?’
Coulton closed his eyes. ‘Please, take the gun away.’
Henry watched the scene, feeling powerless to intervene. The well-built, strong figure of Jake Coulton seemed to be shrinking with each second. He had become small, insignificant and pathetic. Whilst part of Henry’s mind liked this, another bigger part hated what he was witnessing. He hoped it would end soon. Without bloodshed.
‘Now you know what it’s like to be degraded, don’t you Jake?’
Tears streamed down his face. ‘Yes.’
‘To be powerless, to have all your dignity stripped away.’
‘Yes,’ he squeaked.
‘Why did you do it? What gave you the right to think you could do this to my daughter?’ commanded Tara.
Coulton’s tear-filled, frightened eyes looked across at his boss, John Lloyd Wickson.
‘Because he said he didn’t care if she got raped because she wasn’t his daughter, not his flesh and blood.’
Silence hit the room with the speed of a lightning strike.
Henry felt a chilly draught from the kitchen door as though someone had come in through the front door and let the night in.
Please cops, get here soon, he prayed.
No one moved. Jake sat there, chin resting on the barrel of the gun, stricken by fear into immobility, having realized he had said the wrong thing, in the wrong situation, as Tara’s head revolved slowly to look directly at her husband.
Henry knew in that instant just how John Lloyd Wickson must have felt. It was that single occasion when something dark is revealed, some inner secret outed, when your stomach churns over and a frozen prickle runs over your body, and every square millimetre of skin contracts tighter than cat-gut strung across a tennis racket.
Wickson shook his head. ‘I didn’t,’ he croaked, wilting under Tara’s eyes. ‘It’s not true,’ he back-pedalled, sensing the imminent danger to himself.
‘You are as much a bastard as him,’ she said. Her chest rose and fell as she struggled to maintain control. Henry recognized the moment: she had lost it.
Everything then slowed down. Every infinitesimal detail of what took place in the following seconds was seen and analysed microscopically in Henry’s head and, he had no doubt, in the heads of the people fortunate enough to stay alive.
He was watching the shotgun and Tara’s fingers on it.
The forefinger that was wrapped around the trigger.
The trigger being pulled back at the same time as the muzzle was pushed harder into the soft skin underneath Coulton’s chin, the shotgun angled upwards.
Henry heard himself roar: ‘Nooooo!’
He flung himself towards the gun, like a goalkeeper diving for the low, hard-struck penalty. Both feet left the ground. His hands were outstretched, but he knew he could not stop it happening.
The trigger went back.
There was a massive blast.
There was recoil.
And Henry would never forget what happened to Jake Coulton’s head.
The blast went in below the chin, diagonally up and through his head.
Henry’s ears pounded with the shock wave.
He was still in mid-air.
The cartridge blasted a hole in Coulton’s chin no bigger than the diameter of the muzzle.
The shot burst through his skin up through the ‘V’ in his jaw, expanding and widening all the time as it travelled, destroying bone, tissue, skin and organs, until it emerged, ten times bigger than it had entered, from the roof of his head, completely removing the top third of Coulton’s skull, taking with it brain, blood and membrane, covering the wall and cupboards. At the same time, Couton’s body was lifted completely from his chair and thrown back against the wall with a thud.
Tara recoiled, controlling the shotgun, racking another shell into the breech like an expert. She twisted away from Coulton, knowing she had done the job she set out to do, with the intention of carrying out another job, one that had just come along: to murder her husband.
Henry knew intuitively what she intended.
Tara turned the weapon on Wickson. He threw his arms up. Some defence!
But Henry was on her now, grappling for the gun, forcing his weight on to her. She attempted to push him away and in so doing discharged the weapon again, the shot this time blasting into the ceiling.
Henry tore it out of her hands. She turned on him with the look of a tigress blazing in her eyes. For safety he threw the shotgun across the kitchen, skimming it across the floor before turning back to Tara. She powered into him, beating his chest with her fists, hitting his recent wound, hurting him. He wrapped his arms tightly round her and held on for dear life as she squirmed, fought, wriggled. All the while he spoke hypnotically to her, did not raise his voice.
‘Tara, Tara, hold it, come on down, it’s over, just hold it,’ he said. She managed to free an arm and punched him on the jaw, cricking his head back with a snap. That hurt too. But he trapped her arm again and held on, never easing his grip, until the fight dissipated out of her and she became a floppy mess in his arms, could no longer stand up. She sank to her knees. Henry let her down and she began to sob dreadfully.
Henry looked over at John Lloyd Wickson. He sat there wide-eyed, stunned and speechless. Henry panted, gathered himself and turned to Jake Coulton.
He was sitting against the wall, having slithered down like a ragdoll, his head lolling forwards on to his chest, exposing the massive, gaping wound on the crown, which was disgusting. A mass of blood smeared the wall. His right foot twitched as though he was keeping time with music.
‘Jesus,’ Henry hissed.
John Lloyd Wickson moaned, turned on his chair and dropped to the floor, retching.
Henry swallowed back his own revulsion. He had seen such death before, seen people shot to death, but had never watched someone have their head blown off with a shotgun. He had always turned up post-event at shotgun deaths. He knew he was deeply shocked by the spectacle and wondered what he had got himself into — not for the first time. Involved with a family cut through with abuse, adultery, mistrust and criminality. It was like many of the families he dealt with on council estates, but of a much greater proportion. Everything with this family seemed to be magnified and he put that down to one thing: money.
Wickson coughed up vomit.
Tara wept at his feet on the floor.
Jake Coulton sat there, horribly murdered.
Upstairs, a young girl shivered after being raped.
Henry blew out his cheeks, his eyes and mind not believing the tableau around him. His hands rested on his hips. He prayed even harder for the arrival of the cops because he just wanted to hand it all over.
The kitchen door creaked and opened slightly.
‘Charlotte, love, don’t come in,’ Henry called. ‘Please stay out there.’
The door continued to open. And it wasn’t Charlotte who was standing in the hallway.
Henry stiffened up; his jaw, though, fell slack.
‘Hope you don’t mind me coming in?’
Not as if there was any choice in the matter. Verner pushed the door open, and stepped into the kitchen, as confident as he could be, a smile of victory on his face and a pistol in his right hand. He placed his foot on the shotgun which Henry had thrown across the floor. ‘Goodness, what a mess. Still,’ he said, looking at Henry with a big smile, ‘saved me a job.’
Thirteen
The mobile-phone gun was one of several toys that Verner liked to have at his disposal. Always useful in case of emergencies, such as being arrested. He would never have used such a weapon for an actual contract killing because they were unreliable and apt to explode in the hand, which would never do when face to face with someone you have been contracted to assassinate. On those occasions a proper weapon would always be used as unreliability w
as not an option. But as a standby, to have a mobile-phone gun or a cigarette-packet gun or even a belt-buckle gun was very reassuring. They came in handy if you didn’t want to be in police custody.
Verner knew that on the continent of Europe, the police were very aware of disguised weapons, but that British cops, being the smug island race they were, still thought they were the stuff of fiction and did not expect to find them pointed in their face in the same way, say, French cops did.
That was how Verner had been able to get underneath the guard of the two armed officers who had been escorting him at the hospital.
By playing on the British sense of fair play, which still existed within the police, he had been able to persuade the officers to let him make a phone call on the understanding they could record the number dialled and then listen in to the conversation. Except their sense of fair play had ended up with them dead. He had then been able to coerce the petrified X-ray nurse to get the handcuff key from one of the dead cops and release him.
It had seemed almost surreal to him to be pointing a mobile phone at someone and threatening them with death.
When free, he had of course been obliged to kill her too. Verner did not like leaving witnesses, even innocent ones. He had actually felt a tinge of remorse for that, for a few minutes, but having to apply his mind to escaping had flushed that idiotic emotion right out of him.
Getting away had been a breeze.
Within an hour he had been in Manchester, dressed in clothing stripped from a poor soul unfortunate enough to be about his size and build. He had left the guy stripped naked and trussed up like a turkey in an empty room. He hadn’t even seen Verner hit him, which is why he was allowed to live. He had stolen a Ford Focus from the staff car park and tootled unchallenged away from the hospital.
He dumped the car on a side street near Manchester city centre and made his way to the Radisson Hotel on Deansgate, booking in for a couple of nights under an assumed name. Using a credit card, also in a false name, which had been taped to his inner thigh, together with?150 in ten pound notes — Verner rarely left anything to chance — he visited Marks and Spencer and was reclothed, fed, re-moneyed through cashback and a cash machine and feeling good within an hour. He also visited Boots the Chemist for some ointment for the dog bites on his arms.
