The Black Art of Killing

by Matthew Hall

  Black kept an open mind. A career in MI5 presented an intellectual challenge and for a man living in the shadow of successful if not wealthy parents, it had the advantage of placing him beyond the inevitable comparisons: a spy’s life was secret, even from his loved ones. Of the two suspects he suspected Clayton the least. But all this remained speculation. Before he could begin to form a judgement, there was the small matter of apprehending him.

  Black turned left off the Uxbridge Road on the border between Acton and Ealing, drove a short distance along Hillcrest Road and turned right into Whitehall Gardens. A little over 100 yards long, it was lined on both sides by well-kept Edwardian terraced houses. The German estate cars and SUVs parked outside them were those of well-heeled professional families. He passed a middle-aged woman clipping the hedge in her front garden and a window cleaner at work on the opposite side of the road. As he had anticipated, anonymity was not an option. Further along, two labourers were loading furniture into a small removal van which filled the width of the carriageway. When making his getaway, he would have to reverse out.

  Sited almost directly halfway along the road, Clayton’s house had no distinguishing features aside from a bunch of pink helium balloons emblazoned with Happy Birthday tied to the cast-iron gate. A woman in her thirties emerged from the front door carrying a baby in a sling. She walked along the pavement in his direction, smiling and stroking the baby’s cheek. Black stared at the balloons and thought of the innocent children inside. For a moment he was tempted to back up and drive away. Then he reminded himself that unlike Finn, Elliot Clayton would be returned to his family. It was not a question of morality. There was a job to be done.

  He had given himself two options and decided on the second. Clayton’s car, a black Toyota Prius, was parked three spaces along from the house. Black slowed as he came alongside it and steered in tight. The front nearside corner of the van connected with the Toyota’s mirror and tore it from its moorings. He came to a stop, turned the wheel a little further to the left and nosed the van’s front corner gently into the Toyota’s off-side wheel arch, denting it. He checked his mirror. The gardener was still clipping her hedge and the window cleaner scrubbing an upstairs window with a telescopic pole. Black reversed a touch, then pulled forward so that the side door of his van was positioned alongside the small gap between the Toyota and the Audi parked in front of it. He reached into the glovebox and brought out a preloaded syringe, ran through his mental calculation once more and decided to lose five mils. It was a fine line between knocking a man out and killing him. Better to err on the side of caution.

  The front door was opened by an attractive but unhealthily thin woman wearing a red bandana to cover what Black assumed would be a hairless skull. According to Towers’ briefing notes, Helen Clayton was a clinical psychologist who for three years had been suffering with leukaemia. Shortly before her diagnosis, she had left her hospital job to set up in private practice. It had proved a costly move. Due to her ill health she was able to work only part-time and without her regular salary the family had fallen into debt. The unexplained recent deposits in Clayton’s personal account were, it seemed, all that stood between them and losing their heavily mortgaged home.

  Black greeted her with a smile. ‘Sorry to trouble you, ma’am. A neighbour said that black Toyota is yours. I’m afraid I’ve given it a bit of a scrape with my van. A kid ran out into the road.’

  The squeals of excited six-year-old girls travelled along the hall from the kitchen at the back of the house.

  ‘Oh –’ Helen Clayton brought a slender hand to the stark line of her jaw. Wide brown eyes glanced anxiously towards her car.

  ‘It’s not too bad. I’m sure my insurance will cover it. We ought to exchange details. I do apologize – I’m spoiling your party.’

  His contrite tone disarmed her. She gave a sigh and shrugged. ‘These things happen. Hold on, I’ll get my husband.’

  She pushed the door almost closed and disappeared along the tiled hallway.

  Black returned to the van, slid the side door open a little and reached a pocket-sized notebook and pen from the holdall. He glanced right to check on Quinn, who was lying on his back near the rear doors. All was well: he could hear him breathing. He pulled the door back across and tore a sheet from the notebook on which late the previous evening he had written details of a fictitious insurance policy.

  He turned to see Elliot Clayton approaching. A tall, square-shouldered figure with receding temples and the hint of a paunch beneath a New York Jets T-shirt. A once fit young man turning the corner into middle-age. He gave Black a reproachful look, playful but semi-serious as he surveyed the damage.

  ‘So sorry about this,’ Black said. ‘A lad ran straight out in front of me. Lucky I was going slowly. Your name and address is all they’ll need. I’ll get on to it straight away.’ He handed Clayton the piece of paper and the notebook and pen.

  Clayton gave a philosophical shrug, evidently in no mood for recriminations. ‘It’s my wife’s car, actually.’ He pocketed Black’s details and wrote down his own on a blank page.

  ‘Daddy, hurry up! We’re waiting for you.’

  Black glanced over his shoulder to see a young girl standing by the gate, her face painted to resemble a panda’s.

  ‘Won’t be a moment, sweetie. Go on inside.’

  ‘Now, Daddy! We need you for our game.’

  The girl stamped her foot, refusing to move. Clayton dashed off the last line of his address. Black looked from one to the other. Time slowed as he weighed his options. But there was only one. Clayton handed back the notebook and at the same moment Black reached into his waistcoat pocket with his right hand.

  ‘Sorry, again. Enjoy the party.’

  Clayton turned. Black brought out the syringe and thrust the three-inch needle through the fabric of Clayton’s jeans into the top of his buttock, forcing the plunger down hard with his thumb. Sodium thiopental would take seconds to work. Seconds in which Clayton could have put a lot of distance between himself and the van. Black was ready. As the big man wheeled round, eyes wide in alarm, Black slammed his right elbow into his solar plexus and snapped the back of his fist into Clayton’s jaw, at the same time driving his knee upwards between his legs.

  Clayton gasped and doubled over, blood spilling from a split lip.

  Black glanced over and saw the girl’s frightened, bewildered expression. She turned and ran back into the house, calling for her mother. Clayton’s knees collapsed beneath him. Black threw open the van door, hooked his hands under his shoulders and hauled him inside. He was a dead, unwieldy weight. It took all of Black’s strength to drag him over the sill and roll him on to the floor. There was no time to tie him up. Black turned him over, laying him face down and jumped out on to the tarmac as Helen Clayton emerged from her front door.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  Black ran around the front of the vehicle to the driver’s door.

  ‘Where is he?’ Her voice rose to a pitch of hysteria. ‘What have you done with my husband?’

  Black jumped behind the wheel, hit the locks, fired the ignition and jammed the stick into reverse. Helen Clayton’s tormented face appeared at the passenger window. She pounded the glass with her fist.

  ‘What have you done with him?’

  Black stamped on the throttle, using his mirrors to reverse. Helen Clayton clung on to the outside handle of the door, yelling at him to stop.

  Stupid woman. Let go.

  She held on as if her life depended on it. He sped up, jerking the wheel sharply left and right. There was a thud and a scream as the sudden movement threw her clear and hurled her emaciated body across the bonnet of a parked car. He continued on to the junction at the end of the street, braked hard and eased backwards around the corner. As he stopped and shifted into first, he looked left to see the woman who had been trimming her hedge running towards the crumpled figure lying at the edge of the road.

  More collateral damage.

&n
bsp; He hoped that was the end of it.

  Black drove for half a mile at a steady pace, then pulled over and fetched a pair of number plates from the passenger footwell. With steady fingers he peeled the protective film from the adhesive pads he had earlier attached to each corner. Less than thirty seconds later they were fixed in place and he was on his way. He headed west towards the junction with the North Circular Road. Shortly before the turn, a police car with lights flashing and siren blaring careered towards him between the opposing lanes of traffic. Black tightened his grip on the wheel, expecting trouble. It whipped past and continued on. He watched it disappear from view in his side mirror and tried to wipe the image of Helen Clayton’s terrified face from his mind. But it remained stubbornly imprinted. Like a reflection on glass.

  25

  The abandoned cement works were on the site of an exhausted quarry a thirty-minute drive north of Oxford. Towers had suggested it as a suitable venue for the interrogation and had assured Black that he wouldn’t be disturbed. Black had taken him at his word.

  The entrance to the narrow access road was unsigned and almost invisible between encroaching verges. Black left the A road and turned on to it. He continued for a third of a mile over crumbling tarmac as far as a set of locked plate-metal gates at the entrance to the redundant site. Here he turned right along a rough service track that ran along the outside of a perimeter fence. He had recced on foot two evenings before and been pleased at how overgrown the track had become. The hedge separating it from the neighbouring fields hadn’t been cut in several years and in places springy overhanging boughs extended from one side to the other. He nursed the van along, branches scraping noisily along its side and knee-high weeds dragging at the undercarriage.

  After a further quarter of a mile he arrived outside a smaller set of wire-mesh gates smothered with bindweed and bramble where he pulled up. He climbed out to fetch a pair of bolt cutters and check on his passengers. The sound of the door sliding open caused them both to flinch. It was a good sign: they were alert. He studied them for a short while, like animals in a cage. Their breathing accelerated as they sensed danger. They also stank. Fear did that to people – it had a rank quality all of its own. He hoped he could make quick work of it.

  Black drew the door closed again, stamped down the brambles and placed the blades of the bolt cutters around a link in the short length of hardened steel chain holding the gates together. Bracing one of the thirty-inch handles against his body, he pulled the other towards him. The blades bit but the power of his arms alone wasn’t sufficient. It was always the most trivial problems that threatened to foul things up. Cursing the delay, he retrieved the remainder of the tow rope from the holdall.

  He tied one end of the rope to the upright of the gate six feet from the ground and employing a series of simple climbing knots and loops created a crude pulley system that allowed him to double his bodyweight in order to force the arms of the cutters together.

  The stubborn link snapped with a satisfying clink.

  He moved the blades to the other side of the link and repeated the process. The broken chain fell away.

  He was in.

  Black parked the van behind a crumbling brick wall and climbed out to take in the strange surroundings. The scene resembled those in photographs he had seen of the post-Chernobyl ghost town of Pripyat. It was hard to imagine that he was within minutes of commuter villages and the prosperous market town of Kidlington. The crude concrete mixing tower in which imported minerals had been combined with crushed limestone from the nearby abandoned quarry was sprouting grass and weeds from its many cracks and fissures. The several surrounding acres that had once been the factory yard had been broken up by successive winters and was slowly reverting to scrub. Rectangular ponds that had played some part in the industrial process were filled with thick, matted algae and cast in semi-shadow by dense clouds of circling midges. The impression of desolation was completed by the decaying hulk of a tipper lorry sitting on flat, perished tyres.

  Black stepped through the empty doorway to the deserted building and entered an area roughly fifty feet long and thirty wide. The floor was strewn with rubble and broken glass. Where once there had been a steel staircase leading to several upper floors, rusting stubs of ground-off metal protruded from the walls. In the centre of the room were the remains of the three-storey-high mixing mechanism which had been fed at each level with different materials brought in from the outside by conveyor belts. He approached the circular guard rail surrounding it and peered down through the foot-wide gap between the edge of the floor and the mixer’s cylindrical body. A glint of natural light partially illuminated an even lower level at which the finished cement must have emerged. Curious, he went to investigate further.

  The ground sloped downwards from the front to the rear of the tower, where Black found an open doorway at the entrance to a passageway some ten feet wide. Running along the length of its left-hand side was an open-topped horizontal chute made of galvanized steel that sat on a raised concrete plinth. In the centre of the chute was a rusting auger whose corkscrew motion would have pushed the finished cement from the base of the mixing mechanism outside to waiting delivery lorries.

  He stepped inside. The air was damp and musty, the walls spotted with mildew. It was exactly what he needed.

  Liberals and humanitarians (the HRBs, or Human Rights Brigade, as Freddy Towers had always referred to them) had long claimed that physical torture was no more effective at extracting information from a prisoner than polite questioning across a desk. To a certain extent it was true, but only up to a point. To be successful hands-off interrogation required time in which to build rapport and resources with which to offer incentives: friendship and reward were a persuasive combination. But the hard fact was that when searching for a ticking bomb or a sleeper cell about to spring into action, bonhomie and offers of used banknotes were of little use. Quick results called for brutal methods.

  It was nearly three o’clock in the afternoon when he brought first Quinn, then Clayton, into the tunnel beneath the mixing tower at gunpoint. Keeping their hoods on, he spread their hands and feet wide apart and tied them by lengths of rope to the rusty auger. He lifted their hoods above their mouths but not their eyes, removed the duct tape and allowed them each a sip of water. Clayton drank calmly and silently. Quinn gasped and spluttered, then groaned in protest as Black replaced the tape and pulled the hoods back down.

  Then he left them, closing the door behind him so that they were confined in total darkness. Standing bent over and spread-eagled with legs, backs and shoulders aching, even the most hardened terrorists would invariably crack within four hours. Only those intent on becoming martyrs tended to last longer. Such cases provided a different order of challenge: they would have to taste death, then life, then death, then life again before they decided which they preferred. Black had no fear of either Quinn or Clayton wishing to be a martyr.

  He waited in the cab of the van listening to the radio and watching swallows swoop through the clouds of flies above the stagnant ponds. A pair of rabbits emerged and grazed on clumps of scrub growing out of the decaying yard. Life was determined to continue its normal course. Life had no guilt or conscience. These were strictly human afflictions.

  Shortly after five p.m. Black re-entered the tunnel, bringing a pair of industrial ear defenders – the last unused item in his holdall. He placed them over Clayton’s hooded head. At first glance the big man appeared to be holding up well. His hands were braced firmly against the auger, shoulders solid. Then Black noticed the tremor in his legs. The screaming muscles would be near the end of their resources and beginning to cramp. Before long, they would give way beneath him, but even so, without the ability to stretch them out, neither the pain nor the cramps would stop. He left Clayton to cook and turned his attention to Quinn.

  The younger man’s legs had already collapsed. He was slumped forward with his head resting uncomfortably on the auger and most of his bodyweight sup
ported by his chest where it crossed the lip of the chute. His breathing was fitful, his body trembling and his clothes soaked with urine. Suppressing his disgust at the sight, Black lifted the hood as far as his nose, removed the duct tape from his mouth and pulled the hood down again. Quinn gulped in air with such force that the cotton laundry bag clung to the contours of his face.

  ‘I don’t want you to suffer a moment’s more discomfort than you have to, Mr Quinn,’ Black said evenly. ‘You should already have gathered that this is most definitely not a training exercise. You are being interrogated over your involvement in the recent disappearance of four British scientists. You will have become familiar with their research during the course of your work. You should also be under no illusions about the lengths to which I am prepared to go to ascertain the truth. Do you understand?’

  Quinn gave a jerky nod.

  ‘Are you familiar with the work of Dr Sarah Bellman?’

  No reaction.

  ‘Mr Quinn?’

  The prisoner’s head twitched. An attempt at another nod, perhaps. His breathing was wheezy and laboured.

  ‘I will release you unharmed, Mr Quinn, and, indeed, if you prove sufficiently helpful, you may even escape prosecution, but in order for that to happen I need you to tell me who you have been passing information to and for what purpose. Do I make myself clear?’

  Quinn’s body convulsed like a landed fish. Then, suddenly, he stood upright, his shoulders thrusting backwards as if in a desperate effort to drag air into his lungs.

  Responding on instinct, Black unfastened the hood and ripped it from Quinn’s head. The sight that met him was horrible. The young man’s eyes bulged from their sockets and his lips were blue. Black had seen this several times before among prisoners in Iraq – an attack of nervous asthma brought on by the stress of prolonged confinement. Quinn’s efforts to draw oxygen through his restricted airways were proving futile. Black quickly untied his hands. Quinn’s body slumped, forcing Black to catch him. He lowered him to the ground, untied one ankle and laid him out on the dusty floor.