The King of Terrors (a psychological thriller combining mystery, crime and suspense)

by Mitchell, D. M.

  Stafford shook his head. ‘The murder was ritualised, not carried out in a fit of anger. The charge won’t stick, it has too many holes.’

  ‘Watertight. We have a full confession,’ he said, leaning back in his chair. He took the book and dropped it into the waste paper bin. ‘You’re off the case, Stafford. Thankfully it will all be over and done with before you can do any more harm.’

  ‘You can’t be serious?’

  ‘I’m never anything but serious.’ His face twisted into what Stafford presumed was an attempt at compassion, something that didn’t sit too well on his features, as if alien to them and he needed the practice. ‘Look, man, you’re what – two, three months away from retirement? You don’t need this aggro. Let’s call it succession planning for continuity’s sake. Time for a gradual slide into retirement, not thrust into something that’s clearly too much for you at this stage in your career. You’ve had a good innings, Stafford; do you really want to go out with a miserable failure as your last outing? Quit whilst you’re still ahead.’

  ‘Bollocks!’ he said. ‘I’m not taking that crap!’

  ‘You haven’t got a choice.’

  ‘Who says so?’

  ‘I say so! Let’s face it, Stafford, you’re an old warhorse that’s past its prime and ready to be put out to pasture. Let the thing go before you do anything foolish.’ He looked down to his papers. ‘You’re off the case. I’ve put Morley onto it to wrap it up.’

  ‘That wanker? I don’t believe it. You can’t do this.’

  ‘You’re speaking about a fellow officer, I have to remind you! And you’d better believe it, because I just did. Conversation over, Stafford. We’ll sort things out later.’

  ‘I have to protest…’

  ‘I don’t have to hear you.’

  Stafford stormed out of the office. He saw Style standing with a number of other colleagues. They all looked at him like he was a broken piece of glass, the edge flying their way. They knew him well enough to be able to read his temper like a weatherman predicts a hurricane.

  ‘You know about this?’ he fired shotgun-like at the group of officers. One or two looked away. ‘Styles, you in on this too?’

  ‘Sorry, sir, in on what?’

  ‘They’ve pulled in Pawlowski and slapped a murder charge on him. Full confession, apparently.’ He could tell by the vacant expression that he appeared as much in the dark as anyone. ‘OK, so where the fuck is he?’ he blasted. The men remained tight-lipped. He was told Holding Room 3. Stafford let the men wither under one of his trademark glowers then dashed away, swirling through the office like a grey tornado. Styles followed quickly on his heels.

  ‘When?’ he asked, trying to keep up with him.

  ‘This morning. They got a tip-off. Conveniently forgot to tell me. He’s put Morley on the case to wrap it up.’

  ‘He can’t do that.’

  ‘He just did.’

  Stafford bounded down the corridors, pile-driving through doors, muttering under his breath, getting more worked up along the way.

  ‘Let me in the fucking room!’ Stafford badgered the reluctant duty officer, who resisted bravely but eventually unlocked the door and stood aside. A man was sat on a chair, his head down. He lifted it on hearing the door open. His left eye was swollen, a cheek bruised, lip split. ‘A full confession...’ Stafford said.

  ‘He resisted arrest,’ said the officer. ‘Put up a fight. Broke an officer’s nose.’

  ‘Bollocks!’ said Stafford with a contemptible snort down his nose. ‘He resisted making a confession, more like.’

  ‘Jesus!’ said Styles.

  ‘You OK?’ Stafford asked of the man. His reply was to spit on the ground at Stafford’s feet.

  ‘This isn’t the 1970s,’ Styles mouthed incredulously. ‘They can’t do this and get away with it. Not unless they had good cause to believe he is the murderer.’

  ‘And my name’s Andy Pandy!’ he said.

  ‘Andy who, sir? Wait a minute, where are you going?’

  ‘To get pissed’ he retorted.

  Styles found the man sat outside in his car in the car park, his forehead resting on a bridge made up of his fingers, Bon Jovi blasting out of the stereo. He knocked on the glass of the door. Stafford, without looking up, hit the button and the window crawled down.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘You never drink on duty. Never have, never will.’

  ‘Bollocks!’ he said. ‘What do you know?’

  ‘The men back there know you better than they know their own wives. They respect you, cantankerous old sod that you are. Not my words, theirs. They said you’d be in the car park listening to Bon Jovi on full blast.’

  ‘Get in,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you.’

  He drove for a good five minutes before saying anything. ‘Something is going on here, Styles. Something I can’t get my head round. Never seen anything like it all the time I’ve been on the force. So, tell me straight: what’s going on?’

  ‘Beats me.’

  ‘Cut the crap. Let’s start with you.’

  ‘Me?’ said Styles. ‘I don’t get it. What do you mean?’

  ‘Do you think I’m going senile too? I’ve been in this business far too long to have the wool pulled over my eyes. You get transferred to my unit out of the blue from the Met. No real reason given. I say I don’t want you, Maloney tells me I’ve got to have you. Crucial to the case, he says. Still don’t need you, I say. Don’t argue, I’m told.’

  Styles’ fingers drummed on his thigh and he watched the world shoot by in a blur. ‘It’s only forty miles an hour speed limit here, sir,’ he observed.

  ‘So I take you,’ he resumed, pressing his foot harder on the accelerator. ‘And I soon sniff out that this isn’t your usual beat. Little things stand out, irritating little things that get me wondering. I even get one of my men coming up to me to say something similar. So, I says to myself, who is it exactly that I have here? Why is he here? Well I still have contacts in the Met so I did a little digging. Got a few people to pass on what they knew.’

  ‘Which, of course, is strictly illegal’ he said. ‘So what did they know?’

  ‘Surprise, surprise, what do I find? You never really came from the Met, did you? OK, Styles, spill the beans once and for all, who are you, where are you from, and what the fuck is going on here?’

  ‘Maybe you’d best pull over,’ he said. ‘You’re going to kill someone if you don’t cool down.’

  ‘Too fucking right I am!’ he thundered, then sighed, indicated and pulled over to the side of the road. Someone honked belligerently behind him and he threw up a middle finger. ‘Right, start talking, because there’s some weird shit going down here that I’m not party to.’ He killed the engine, sat back and folded his arms.

  Styles closed his eyes briefly, sucked in a calming breath. ‘You’re right; I’m not with the Met. I’m with Special Operations; Counter Terrorism Command.’

  ‘SO15? Bollocks!’ scoffed Stafford.

  ‘Straight up,’ said Styles. He reached into his pocket, whipped out ID which he handed to Stafford, who read it, shaking his head.

  ‘What the fuck has this case got to do with you guys?’ He thought about it. ‘Maloney’s obviously in on this. I see lots of things starting to fall into place. Right, Nobby, tell me the rest.’

  ‘I’d have to kill you if I did,’ he said lightly.

  ‘I’ll kill you if you don’t, you little tosser. The fact nobody tells me any of this really fucks me off!’

  ‘Understandable,’ Styles agreed with a nod. ‘But all done for good reason.’

  ‘And the good reason being?’

  ‘We got wind of a major terrorist threat to mainland UK about a year ago. That threat level has since been raised to substantial.’

  ‘An attack is a strong possibility...’ said Stafford.

  ‘In the jargon, yes.’

  ‘A threat from whom, from where?’

  ‘MI6 have been receiving re
ports of a group, going under the guise of the Church of Everlasting Bliss. Doradus appears to be the name of its spiritual leader.’

  ‘The same Doradus that Carl Wood was fearful of?’

  ‘The very same.’

  ‘So you think they murdered him? Why?’

  ‘What the doctor who pronounced Wood dead from a heart attack didn’t notice was the additional injection puncture wound. Didn’t notice because the man had Type 1 diabetes who injected insulin daily. Wood had quite simply been injected with a dose of a chemical that was most likely digithiamine dianthisyde that stopped his heart. A substance very effective and almost impossible to detect. It’s a favourite of theirs. Yes, most definitely he was murdered.’

  ‘Let me guess, because he obviously knew too much about them and they didn’t want it broadcasting. You reckon they silenced him because they knew he made contact with us, had arranged a meeting?’ Styles nodded emphatically. ‘How’d they know about the meeting?’

  ‘Trust me, they know. Walls have ears and all that. You don’t know who you can trust. I believe it was the same too for the other professor, Baxter. What he’d been about to publish – A Return to Eden – was something that apparently lifted the veil on the hitherto secret existence of the Church and their activities. How he came across the details we’ll never know, but he paid with his life. It wasn’t suicide, I can say that much.’

  ‘So what exactly is this Church?’ Stafford asked. ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘Hardly surprising. But its operations are global and it has some loose affiliation with more prominent, established terrorist factions, operating mainly, as far as we can tell, from roving cells in the Middle East and in Europe. But Intel’s been patchy to say the least. Trying to pin it down has been hampered by the fact that it seems to have all the right friends in all the right places. Trails go stone cold, barriers go up, and just as we think we have got a bite the line goes slack, or snaps altogether. However, in the last six months we uncovered a plan to use more extreme terrorist measures...’

  ‘Planes into buildings extreme?’

  Styles looked at him thoughtfully and shook his head. ‘Similar in that it’s driven by religious extremism, but different approach. The threat’s biological, we think.’

  ‘What type of biological?’

  ‘Let’s say a very nasty kind. In truth we’re still unsure. It could all be a smokescreen to hide something else. Our sources have been flashing red lights for quite a while, but it’s been all but impossible to pin down where or when, and what’s more, why. Even the most extreme of terrorist organisations have a defined goal, a reason, no matter how twisted. But with the Church – or CEB, as we call it in the trade – it’s different. It’s almost as though it’s killing for killing’s sake. Mass killing being the operative words here. What’s driving the killing isn’t clear. But if there really is a genuine biological threat to the UK, then it could be murder on a scale never seen before. Forget world wars; this could produce the same body count in a matter of weeks, not years. Then there’s the organisation’s involvement with the Chinese. The country has been buying up or heavily investing in resource rights the world over – water, oil, gas, copper, iron – particularly in third world and developing countries. In part they say it’s to work with these countries, aid development, but cynics would say it’s to get a foothold in acquiring the resources that at some time in the not too distant future will become precious to every country the world over. They’d have immense control. Now what we want to know is how could CEB benefit from all this? Why are they enmeshed with the Chinese? One theory is that, at its most extreme, the CEB orthodoxy seeks to wipe out every person on the entire planet except for a chosen few, return it to a pre-industrial, pre-Fall, Eden-like state. Think about it; if you have access to most of the planet’s valuable resources – resources that made and mark out the modern world they so despise and want to bring to its knees – you can ensure no one uses it again. Destroy it, pollute it, whatever. There would be no returning to the modern world as we know it.’

  ‘That’s sheer bloody lunacy!’

  ‘In their minds it’s entirely logical. That’s a worse-case scenario, of course.’

  Stafford grunted. ‘Why is it I’m not reassured? OK, so the murdered Polish woman, where does she fit into all this?’

  ‘It’s not necessarily about the woman; it’s the symbol. It’s mediaeval in origin and has been strongly associated with CEB. We were routinely monitoring terrorist activity in Pakistan when video surveillance threw up the same symbol painted onto a wall that also turns up out of the blue in a Manchester flat. So naturally we make a connection. Given that we’re already monitoring embryonic cells based in Manchester it made sense to have someone inside, on the case. For your information Maloney doesn’t know who I am. His actions today, the way the case is being closed down is highly suspicious, don’t you think? Part of the reason I’m here.’

  Stafford gave a gasp. ‘What are you saying? That Superintendent Maloney is in on something, maybe trying to cover something up? Look, I hate the guy’s guts, but do you know what you’re suggesting here?’

  ‘You have to keep this quiet, Stafford. Let him have his head. Go along with things. ‘Lives depend on it. Many, many lives. So as far as today is concerned, we never had this conversation, understand?’

  He pushed fingers through his hair, shaking his head. ‘Jesus!’ he said. ‘Things are never simple. Where do we go from here?’

  ‘The Polish guy back at the station, he’s no guiltier of murdering that woman than you or I. But I’ve seen this before; if they want him guilty they’ll find him guilty. Whatever they want to stick will stick. That man Rayne, the third member of the Lunar Club, he knows more than he’s letting on. I’ve got people looking into him. Soon there won’t be anything he can hide from me.’

  ‘But Maloney – are you saying he’s with this CEB?’

  ‘Many people are with CEB. You just don’t know who, which is why from now on you have to be real careful. So you’ve got to let it go, leave it to me. You understand, Stafford?’

  He eyed him. Hit the play button and Bon Jovi’s rock guitar chords growled aggressively. ‘Cut the Stafford, Styles; it’s sir to you!’

  * * * *

  36

  Unfinished Business

  On closer examination she was older than he thought. She looked mid-thirties maybe. The beginnings of lines spreading out from her eyes. Tired eyes, Gareth thought. Deeply troubled.

  ‘So who are you really working for?’ said Gareth. ‘Who is Caroline Cody?’

  She screwed her nose up slightly. ‘I told you, I work for Pipistrelle.’

  ‘Oh yeah, the bat,’ he sneered. ‘Come on, where’d you learn all this gun stuff?’

  ‘The hard way. I served in Afghanistan.’

  ‘That tells me something but not a lot. You with the military now?’

  ‘No, and that’s all I’m going to tell you on the subject. I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘That’s not good enough.’

  ‘Well tough titty!’ she snapped. Then shook her head, leaning back against the worktop with her arms folded. ‘Sit down, Gareth.’ She waited till he gave in to her stare and sat down. ‘First, you have got to believe me when I tell you to trust me, no matter what happens. You got that?’

  ‘Seems everyone wants me to do that. What choice do I have?’

  ‘Secondly, I know where your sister is.’

  ‘What? Where?’

  ‘You’ll meet her very soon.’

  ‘Well what are we waiting for? Take me to her now. Like you said, Tremain will be here soon and I’m guessing we don’t want to be here when he arrives.’

  ‘It’s not as straightforward as that, Gareth. You’ll get to see her alright, and soon, don’t worry about that. Thing is it’s time you knew where you stand in the grand scheme of things.’

  ‘No shit,’ he said.

  ‘It’s certainly an interesting situation you�
�re in,’ she said. ‘On the one hand you have Lambert-Chide who wants to dissect you in the name of science, and Doradus who wants to do the same in the name of religious fundamentalism. But at least Lambert-Chide wants you alive, for now, which is one reason you’re still breathing now, otherwise Camael would have done the nasty on you and you’d be lying in a pile of mouldering back in Godstone. Either way, it’s not good news for you. Rock and a hard place, and all that.’

  ‘OK, so let’s take this one step at a time. Start with Camael. Why does he want my sister and me dead?’

  She studied a dirty patch of linoleum at her feet. ‘In order to understand what’s going on you’ve got to go back to the origins of the Church of Everlasting Bliss, and that starts in about 1471.’

  ‘Everlasting Bliss? You kidding me?’

  ‘Are you going to shut your trap and listen? I thought you wanted to hear. Fine if you don’t, it’s your funeral!’

  He held up his hands at her unexpected outburst. ‘Ok, sorry, go ahead…’

  ‘1471. Edward IV is on the throne of mediaeval England and the country is being rocked by a widespread outbreak of plague. It’s devastating, entire communities all but wiped out by the disease. Villages decimated with some never to recover. Given the sheer scale of this, and that religion was at the heart of medieval society it’s little wonder the plague was seen as God’s punishment visited upon a sinful world. Now into this mix add a man whose belief system was to extend even beyond the common orthodoxy of the day and whose life was to be transformed by the plague. His name was Benedict Jones.

  ‘On the face of it our Benedict seems nothing special. He’s a merchant who made his name in London. He was a successful man, part of what we call today the merchant aristocracy, having his fingers in many entrepreneurial pies. He owned properties which he rented out, he had part-ownership in ships that exported cloth to the Baltic and Low Countries, wool to Calais and imported goods from the Flemish markets. He had political ambitions, and his connections to the Crown because of his trading placed him in a good position for him to realise his ambitions. Things were looking up for Benedict Jones till the plague struck.