Dead on Demand (A DCI Morton Crime Novel)

by Campbell, Sean

  He started with a cat-o'-nine-tails, turning the woman to make her watch as he ripped the flesh on her date's back, lacerating it thoroughly. The thongs had been triple knotted to increase the number of points of impact. Not only would it increase the pain caused, but it would make the weapon harder to track. Lead weights on the end of the thongs made light work of the man's skin. In only a handful of lashes welts were beginning to appear, and the man was openly weeping. It was hard to imagine that this was once a legal punishment used in Britain as recently as the Forties in Wandsworth prison. The cat even found modern-day use in Trinidad and Tobago despite international criticism.

  Of course, those used judicially hadn't been modified as Ant's had. His arm began to tire, and he lowered the whip. A saline solution was thrown over the man's back, seeping into his open wounds. He yelped, a small sound escaping the rags with which he had been gagged.

  The gag was unnecessary. It was to prevent them pleading rather than to prevent anyone hearing. The road was a long way away, and the building's walls were thick and insulated.

  He yanked the rag from the man's mouth.

  'Stop being a little bitch or I'll make it worse.' Ant's eyes flared and then focussed as if he was staring at something floating in the air. Ant was no longer seeing the businessman In his mind's eye, he was exacting revenge for the treatment he had endured in prison.

  'Fuck you,' the man cursed, and spat at Ant. It was a big mistake, and he knew it the moment he spoke. Ant stuffed the gag back in his mouth and grabbed an electric branding iron that was starting to glow with heat.

  Once Ant was satisfied it was hot enough he advanced on the man, touching the iron first to his legs, then his arms. Rage coursed through him, but his movements were controlled. He knew what would cause pain. He had suffered worse in prison. The woman watched wide-eyed as Ant methodically scarred the man. His touches were light. Too deep and he would burn out the nerves and the pain would stop.

  Alcohol was poured into the trenches he had gouged in the man's flesh. He screamed, or would have if the gag had not been in place.

  'Never tell me to fuck off.'

  He removed the man's gag, daring him to speak.

  'Please, I'll tell you where I put the money.' It was the first thing Ant knew of any money. He didn't want to appear too keen, and ignored him. A pressure washer was applied to the man's flesh. It would sting like crazy but the cold water would take the heat out. Too much and the man would pass out.

  'Please!' The man began to beg as Ant moved towards the woman. She tried to shy away, almost toppling the chair over backwards. She had to watch. The order had been explicit.

  Her eyes clapped shut, scrunched tightly to avoid watching. It just wouldn't do. Ant didn't want to hurt the woman. She was no threat, and really only a by-product of the deal he had struck, but it was necessary. If she wouldn't open them he would simply remove her eyelids.

  He told her as much. Picking up a razor-sharp scalpel he walked towards her.

  'We can do this the easy way or the hard way. Open them. Now.'

  Her eyes shot open, and Anthony returned his attention to his primary victim.

  The next torture Ant had endured in prison had been having his fingernails pulled. It was an easy task requiring only a pair of pliers. Hatred flowing through him, Ant bent the man's index finger back for easy access, keeping it away from the rope bindings.

  He pulled one. The man yelled, a guttural sound that resonated around the warehouse. In between anguished moans he tried again.

  'I'll give you the goddamn money, just stop!'

  'How much is left?' Ant only wanted to ask how much, but added the rest as an afterthought. That way he didn't betray the fact this was new information.

  'Just over a million.' The man's head hung lower. It was obvious that there had been much more in the first place.

  'Where is it?' Ant demanded.

  'Self-storage unit in Kennington. A bank would have been too risky.'

  'How do you get in?

  'Key code at the gate, key at the locker. Number is 1332 for the door, and the key is in my wallet.'

  'You know if you're lying you'll die,' Ant warned him, deciding that the money would buy the man some relief.

  The man nodded. Ant decided he'd had enough. The man would die anyway, but he would make it quicker than he had planned. He took a knife, and ran it across the man's neck from behind. Blood spattered out, covering the floor, and the man fell silent.

  The woman was next. To keep her from screaming he thrust the knife up through the ribcage, piercing the lung. She would die in a matter of minutes.

  He poured kerosene all over the warehouse except for the bodies, set the timer provided that would provide a spark in an hour, and left. The fire would take care of all the evidence he had ever been there.

  CHAPTER 37: GUNS

  'Thanks, John. We'll be fine, don't worry.' Rosenburg hung up. As much as he protested he wasn't worried, he was. That call was from one of his wife's cousins. Internal affairs were investigating the guns that he'd diverted the previous year, and his disappearing act only compounded the appearance of guilt. His wife's cousin was a junior clerk in their department and he wouldn't be able to affect the investigation, but the heads-up was invaluable.

  He hadn't planned to steal the guns originally. His wife Jane ran ARM Disposal UK Ltd. It had been how they had met. It was her father's firm then, and Rosenburg tried to keep work and pleasure strictly separate, but Jane had inherited the firm on the old man's death a few years after they had married. She wasn't great with the paperwork, but she worked hard and kept the business turning over a decent profit.

  A lawyer for one of the gang leaders arrested had approached him in the station. They couldn't afford to lose their entire stock, and could he help? The lawyer had traced Jane's maiden name of Friedrich and realised her husband was a detective. He'd taken a gamble approaching him, although simply asking wasn't necessarily criminal without further action.

  Rosenburg had fobbed him off initially. He hadn't said no as such, but he certainly hadn't said yes.

  He slipped it into conversation with his wife that evening, almost as if it was an inconsequential anecdote. He had waited with bated breath for her response. If she had been shocked and appalled he would have simply agreed with her and dropped it, never to be thought of again.

  She hadn't been shocked though. She realised that she was sitting on a gold mine. She couldn't steal every gun. The batch destruction had to be witnessed by law, and her husband wasn't routinely given that duty. She came up with a compromise. In each batch she would remove a few of the weapons, and supply them to the lawyer, who would in turn sell them to his clients.

  It was a fairly simple scheme, and it wouldn't make them millionaires by any stretch of the imagination, but it did allow them to live a little beyond their means. With perfect foresight they should have realised that eventually one of the guns would be found by the police and the scheme traced.

  The next step would be to ditch the remaining stock quickly, even if it meant actually shredding the weapons. Then they'd choose an office boy to become a patsy, and point the finger at him should the Internal Investigations Unit come knocking. With their mole monitoring the progress reports they'd be informed well in advance if they were going to make a move.

  ***

  The blaze was enormous. The building caught quickly, with all of the excess junk stored inside helping the fire spread in minutes. Without an alarm or a sprinkler system the fire had a head start before anyone noticed it had started. It was when the fire reached the roof that Joe Public could see there was a problem. A passer-by called 999, and the fire service was on hand less than ten minutes later. It wasn't an unreasonable response time, but the fire had already consumed most of the warehouse and was spreading towards the adjoining buildings. Their efforts were concentrated on preventing damage to those buildings rather than saving the warehouse, as there was little left to save.

 
By the time the fire had been extinguished it was clear there were lines of extreme heat radiating out from the centre of the blaze. An investigation was started immediately into the cause of the fire, and it was evident that the cause was arson.

  The lead investigator, Russell Watts, walked gingerly among the remains.

  'Petrol,' he announced, sniffing the charred remains. Chemical analysis would confirm it later, but he was certain.

  'What have we here?' he asked no one in particular. A glint of metal had caught his attention. It was sheet metal, and was piled in the centre. It wasn't damaged, although some carbon charring could be seen around the area.

  He motioned for his team to come look. With great care they shifted the sheets, only to reveal two bodies underneath. They were cooked thoroughly by the heat, but the injuries Ant had inflicted were still clearly visible.

  'Holy Mary, Mother of God!' Russell exclaimed.

  'Get away, lads! This is a crime scene.' They retreated from the bodies, and phoned through to the police for back-up.

  ***

  'Something wrong with your food?' Sarah had spent hours preparing his roast dinner. It wasn't easy to find time to prepare something so arduous on a Friday.

  'No, dear,' David said glumly.

  Sarah looked at him suspiciously. He had spent nearly twenty minutes pushing it around his plate.

  He had been listless for a few days, and Sarah suspected that being on desk duty was beginning to wear on him.

  'How was work?'

  'Good, good.' It was his standard non-response, a hint that he didn't want to talk about it. Sarah wasn't going to let him get away with it that easily.

  'Any interesting casework today?' she tried again.

  'Not really.'

  'For God's sake, David, we've been married for twenty-five years. I know when something is bothering you!' Sarah rarely took the Lord's name in vain, but her patience was frayed.

  'I'm not cut out for desk duty,' he said simply. He wasn't good with computers, and typing up incident reports offered no intellectual stimulation. He was being paid an inspector's wage and doing the job of a temp.

  'So, take their offer.' It was the first time she had broached the subject of the letter since it had arrived.

  'And do what? Sit around and watch the television? Garden?'

  'Is that any worse than what you're doing now?' She knew how to manipulate her husband.

  'Well, no.'

  'Then take the deal.'

  'I can't. I'm not ready to be old.' He was in barely into his fifties, but had already started to feel it.

  'David, growing old is normal. You've got years ahead of you, but you simply can't be running after criminals all day much longer. Stay home, with me.'

  David had begun thinking of a caustic reply as she started that lecture, ready to rant for hours, but his expression softened as he realised that retirement would mean more time for them to spend together. He could fish, cook, read and do all the other things he'd been meaning to do but never found the time for.

  'I'll think about it.'

  Sarah grinned inwardly. She knew she had him on the ropes, and he'd sign the acceptance note included in the letter in a few days. She could afford to wait a week or two; she'd been waiting for almost three decades of marriage.

  CHAPTER 38: KEYS TO THE CASTLE

  A subtle carved sign hung above the entrance to the Internal Investigations Unit: 'Quis custodiet ipsos custodes'. The unit was the last line of defence in the Met, watching over the guardians that safeguard society to ensure that their work was carried out with due diligence. The Internal Investigations Unit never took chances, preferring caution at every turn. No single person held all the keys to the castle, and so no one could abuse their position within the unit for personal gain.

  Every access request on their encrypted computer system was logged, tagged and assigned to an investigation. At one glance an investigator could see who was looking at a jacket, how often, and whether they were involved with the case in any discernible way. The unit had a rigidly enforced policy of Chinese walls. No investigator should ever look at an investigation he was not actively involved in. The system used a flag warning system. If a file was included in a list it shouldn't have been, a small flag was raised. A one-off glance at the index of a jacket would also raise a small flag. Looking at one repeatedly would drop so many flags that the system would raise an alert.

  Those alerts then went to the Internal Investigations Unit security officer responsible for enforcing the Chinese wall. When John Friedrich accessed the jacket for Charles Rosenburg the system had flagged it in no time. He was a mere data-entry worker, and had no reason to access active files unless specifically instructed. He wasn't involved in the Rosenburg case, so it came to the attention of the security officer seconds after his first access.

  Seeing that he took a break immediately after viewing the illicit data, the security officer had followed him outside, pretending to smoke a cigarette.

  He heard the conversation on the phone, and surreptitiously swiped the phone from John's desk when he went back to work. He didn't know who was being called, but he would find out. The boss would threaten John with obstruction of justice, as well as being an accessory to the crimes. There was no way John wouldn't crumble. He was a simple bloke, and wouldn't survive in jail.

  ***

  'No smoke inhalation,' the coroner announced as he walked in.

  Charles Rosenburg had never investigated an arson homicide before, and must have looked quizzical because the coroner explained without his even needing to ask.

  'It means they were dead before the fire started. The lungs are clean, so they weren't breathing when smoke was in the air.' He spoke slowly, as if explaining something to a child.

  'So how did they die?' Rosenburg snapped. He was never patient when he was being patronised.

  'Acute blood loss, though the man wasn't in great shape before that. He suffered a pretty thorough beating.' The doc's tone was more conciliatory.

  'What happened?'

  'Looks like he was whipped, beaten, hung, electrocuted and eventually his throat slit.'

  'Fuck. Who'd he piss off?'

  'That'd be your job to find out, Inspector.' The coroner grinned. He much preferred the simplicity of the morgue.

  'Any hint as to ID?'

  'DNA samples have been sent up, but you'll have to get the results yourself.'

  'How did she die?'

  'Again, blood loss. She took one blow, a knife shoved up through the lungs. It would have collapsed the lungs. A classic stealth takedown. It wasn't needed though; she was wearing a gag, so only the killer could have heard her anyway.'

  'So he didn't want to hear her? What about the man?'

  'No gag there. Seemed his squeamishness was limited only to the woman.'

  'Maybe he knew her, or has woman issues. Time to talk to the head doctor upstairs.'

  'My full autopsy report will be on your desk tomorrow morning.'

  'Thanks, Doc.'

  ***

  'Dr Jensen?' Rosenburg popped his head around the door to find the doctor dozing in a wing-backed leather chair, a pile of papers scattered across his desk. It looked like Rosenburg wasn't the only one with an excessive caseload.

  'What? I was just resting my eyes.' He started to shuffle papers in attempt to feign being organised.

  'Relax. Got time for a quick question?'

  'Shoot.' Jensen chuckled at his own double entendre.

  'Got a double homicide. Killer let the man scream, but prevented the woman from doing so. That strike you as normal?'

  'Could be a number of things: difficulty dealing with women, the perception of women as property in need of protection, guilt, rage at the male victim and the need for him to suffer more.'

  'What could cause it?'

  'Old-fashioned upbringing, elevated hormone levels, post traumatic stress, childhood abuse... Your guess is probably as good as mine without a psych evaluation.' />
  'So there's a chance he wouldn't be fit to stand trial?' His eyebrows narrowed. The lawyers would jump on it.

  'Maybe. Let me have a look at him when you bring him in.'

  'Gotta catch the bastard first.'

  'Good luck with that.'

  ***

  The room was cold. John had been asked to join his supervisor in interview suite number one. It was used to conduct interviews for active investigations, and a number of efforts were made to make the subject uncomfortable. Keeping the thermostat down was one of them, and it was working on John. They hadn't told him what they wanted to talk to him about, and he was beginning to stress out.

  Despite the frigidity of the room, beads of sweat were beginning to form at his temple. Outside, the security officer was running through what he had witnessed again.

  'He dialled from a mobile, but it wasn't a work-issued phone so no tracking that way.'

  'Don't worry, it was probably a disposable SIM. You reckon we've let him stew long enough?' The supervisor, Theresa West, jerked a thumb at the one-way mirror between them and John.

  'Give him five more minutes. Then he's all yours. I'll be outside if you need me, boss.'

  ***

  'Who'd you call, John?'

  'Sorry, what are you talking about?' John feigned ignorance.

  'We know you accessed the ARM Disposal jacket.'

  'Did I? Must have clicked on the wrong link.' John gulped slightly, the movement of his Adam's apple betraying his nerves.

  'Don't think so, John, you spent several minutes on that page. Then you called someone. Who?'

  'I must have just left the window open.' This time, it was more of a plea than a defence. He knew they had him.

  'John, you're not fooling anyone. Talk now, and all you'll lose is your job. Otherwise I'm arresting you for perverting the course of justice at the least.' The threat was obvious. The charge would be tried on indictment, so John would face anything up to life imprisonment with twelve strangers deciding his fate. The odds were stacked against him.