48 Hours - A City of London Thriller (44 page)

Before he could look back at Dee’s face and loose off a shot,
Dee swung around and whipped him across the face with the cable.
Cuts opened up across his cheek. Hickstead fought the pain and
brought the gun around, but Dee blocked his swing with her forearm
and a shot fired into the superstructure. My new wife grabbed his
wrist, and squeezed the pressure points until he dropped the
Browning and it skittered across the deck towards the
stern.

Hickstead knew that he couldn’t beat Dee like this, and so he
decided to use his height advantage. He grabbed her in a bear hug,
lifted her up and squeezed. Two of us were on our feet.

“
Sit down or I’ll break her back!” He carried on squeezing,
and reluctantly we sat down again.

Dee yelled. “Josh! In the lounge…” and then she went
limp.

“
That’s better,” Hickstead said, relaxing his grip.

But he had been deceived again. Realising that she would not
win a battle of brute strength, Dee allowed her body to relax. As
soon as her feet touched the deck she launched a vicious head butt
into the former Peer’s face. His nose disintegrated and blood
sprayed everywhere, but he was fighting for his life and would not
let go. She butted him a second time, smashing his cheekbone as he
turned, trying to avoid her head. His left eye socket was broken
and only skin was holding his eye in place. Still he held on, until
Dee took hold of his left arm and forced it backwards to the point
where she heard ligaments tear. Hickstead’s left arm fell uselessly
to his side, and he moaned.

Unfortunately the double head butt had also disoriented Dee,
and they both collapsed on the deck in a heap. Dee was the first to
recover and she got to her feet. Apart from Hickstead, we were all
on our feet now. It looked as though it was all over. And, still
teetering on unsteady feet, Dee looked for the gun.

Her luck wasn’t holding. Hickstead had landed on his Browning.
Summoning all the strength he had left, he gripped the gun, pointed
it upwards, and without aiming at anything in particular, loosed
off a shot.

Dee screamed, stumbled and fell over the rail into the
Mediterranean Sea.

***

I looked on in stunned disbelief, standing motionless as I
heard the splash of my wife’s body hitting the water. The Captain
pushed me towards the lounge and I half fell inside. The Captain
dived over the side to save Dee.

I didn’t know what I was looking for until I saw it. I picked
it up, set it and stepped onto the deck, aiming at the slowly
rising form of an unrecognisable Hickstead.

He had the gun in his right hand and was trying to raise it to
a firing position. His face was destroyed and looked like something
from a horror movie. The left side of his face had collapsed and
the whole of his eyeball was visible.

“
Don’t raise that gun or I’ll shoot,” I stated firmly. It was
my voice, but it didn’t sound like me.

Hickstead gurgled a laugh from the bloody mouth that hung open
to gasp at the air.

“
I’m the killer, Josh, not you,” he reminded me as he began to
level the gun.

I pulled the trigger on my spear gun and the stainless steel
shaft flew straight and true. In a fraction of a second the barbs
had penetrated Hickstead’s chest and showed through the back of his
jacket.

I thought he would be dead instantly, but he fell to his
knees, holding onto the bulkhead for support. I took the gun from
his hand.

“
Finish it!” he yelled, spraying bright red arterial blood all
over the deck.

I left him leaning on the bulkhead and went to find my wife.
Expecting the worst, I looked over the side to see the Captain
assisting Dee to the ladder. With relief flooding through my body I
lifted her into the boat. She was soaking wet, but I couldn’t see
any blood. She lifted her left arm and there was a new bullet hole
just inches from the other one.

I led her to a recliner and laid her down. The Captain bound
the wound tightly, but it was difficult because the bullet had
entered underneath her armpit and exited behind the
shoulder.

The Captain said he would get the yacht started and we would
be back onshore in five minutes.

“
I thought Dee had damaged the main ignition cable,” I said, a
little naively.

“
No, she didn’t. She pressed the emergency fuel cut off in the
engine room and came onto the deck brandishing the cooker cable. So
I had to get inventive.”

I smiled and held Dee tight. I looked across at Hickstead.
There was still life in him, although it was ebbing fast. He
certainly wouldn’t make it to shore. As he kneeled, breathing his
last, he looked up and saw Dee sitting up, holding her arm. He must
have realised at that point that he had robbed me of nothing,
nothing at all.

Epilogue

I kissed Dee goodbye at the tube station entrance. She made
her way to No. 1 Poultry and I headed off to Ropemaker Street. Dee
still had her left arm in a sling, but I knew for a fact that she
would discard it as soon as I wasn’t looking.

I arrived at the office to find the Times on my desk, open at
the obituary page. I read the most prominent of the
articles.

‘
Arthur Hickstead, formerly Lord Hickstead, has passed away
peacefully whilst on a retreat in Cyprus. Former Trade Union
President and European Commissioner, he was a committed public
servant. Friends say that the reason the Lords withdrew his peerage
was so that he could try his hand at helping Labour back into power
as an MP.

At his request the burial was a small family affair. A
spokesman for the family said that Arthur never liked pomp and
ceremony and so didn’t expect it at his funeral.’

I folded the paper and looked at my messages. DCI Boniface
wanted a statement to confirm that Lord Hickstead had admitted to
the murders of Sir Max Rochester and Andrew Cuthbertson. I would
probably walk over to Wood Street at lunchtime and do what I could
to ensure that Charlotte Cuthbertson benefitted from Andrew’s life
assurance policy.

We loss adjusters have hearts as well.

J Jackson Bentley writes both fiction and non-fiction books
and has been a published author for over sixteen years. He now
works as a Legal Consultant in the UK, the USA, the Middle East and
the Far East. His spare time is spent writing at home in the UK and
in Florida. Married with four grown children he is currently
writing a new thriller set in Dubai which has a horse racing
theme.

Find out more, or, follow J Jackson Bentley at:

www.facebook.com/jjacksonbentley

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You can also contact the author by email at:

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Extract from:

CHAMELEON

A City of London Thriller

By

J Jackson Bentley

Prologue

Vastrick Security, No 1 Poultry, London, Monday
9am.

Dee exited Bank tube station and was assailed by the biting
cold wind. Banked snow still lay on the edges of roads and
pavements but it was now deep frozen and granite hard. The ground
underfoot was slippery where the occasional light rain had speckled
the ground with water droplets that turned to ice on contact. She
could feel the crunch of ice and frost under her boots.

Luckily, Dee didn’t have far to walk. The office block
accommodating Vastrick Security was less a hundred yards away, but
even that distance was a challenge in this, the coldest January
since records began. Almost everyone was wearing scarves across
their faces, and those that weren’t had frost forming on their
cheeks where their expelled breath had frozen onto their skin
before it could evaporate.

The sky was dark grey and heavy laden with black clouds. The
winter solstice had passed just a couple of weeks earlier, and
there seemed very little difference in the level of daylight
between now and the shortest day. At nine in the morning it was
just beginning to grow light, and yet it would be dark again by
four. The grey clouds meant that the light levels would remain
subdued all day, keeping the street lights illuminated almost
constantly. Grey skies, grey weather, grey world.

Dee looked both ways before crossing the street, and whichever
way she looked it was as if Ansel Addams had taken monochrome
photograph of a city in winter. Most of the commuters looked as
though they were wearing dark colours to match their dark mood. The
occasional colourful outfit stood out like a beacon in this
conservative area where neon was rare and the colours used for shop
fronts were subdued.

Dee entered the office building through the swing doors and
felt the immediate heat of the door curtain scorch her head. In the
summer the door curtain would blow a wall of cool air across the
entrance to stop the heat penetrating into the working areas. Today
the wall was a wall of radiant heat which could have cooked a
chicken. She passed through the invisible wall of heat and into the
lobby area, which was several degrees cooler than it was designed
to be. Glass atria may be great to look at, but they don’t keep
much heat in.

Dee took the lift to the Vastrick Security offices. She had
officially become a Vice President of Vastrick on January 1st this
year, mainly, she suspected, because she had managed to get herself
shot three times on her last big case.

When she stepped into the lobby she noticed that Andy was on
reception duty. Andy was an investigator and so he was usually in
the back office, but Dee guessed that the disruption to the roads
and trains meant that some of their people would be working from
home again. She was right; there were four backroom staff in the
office, one investigator and one close protection operative, other
than Dee herself.

Geordie, the other close protection operative, had been stuck
in London since yesterday due to the failure of the trains to run
from Kings Cross up to Newcastle, where he lived, and from which
region he took his nickname. Everyone had called him Geordie for so
long it was rare for anyone to refer to him by his real name, Pete
Lowden, but everyone in the business knew who Geordie was, and he
didn’t mind anyway, and so it really didn’t matter too
much.

Dee removed her coat, scarf, boots and other sundry outerwear.
Replacing her boots with sensible flat shoes, she was dressed in
grey trousers, red roll neck sweater and a black tailored jacket.
If anyone had seen what she was wearing for underwear they would
have found it amusing. She was wearing her new husband’s thermals
and had to admit that they kept her warm. At five feet eight inches
tall, she was approximately the same height as Josh, her husband,
and so the full length leg of the white thermal leggings tucked
nicely underneath her socks.

The attractive young woman both missed and envied her new
husband. He had been sitting by the pool at his five star hotel in
Dubai enjoying Mediterranean style temperatures yesterday, when
they spoke using the video service provided by Skype. He appeared
to be enjoying himself far too much for her liking. But Josh
wouldn’t be back for another three weeks. He was assessing the
value of the loss incurred when a small shopping mall on Sheikh
Zayed Road had been severely damaged by fire. The insurers were
insistent that Dyson Brecht send out a senior loss adjuster, and
Josh’s boss Toby had picked him. Dee would have gone along too if
she hadn’t recently taken three weeks’ leave to go on honeymoon,
and get shot.

Dee was just settling into her desk and booting up the
computer when Geordie came in. He was over six feet tall, muscular
without an ounce of fat on him, with close cropped dark hair. He
was quite striking in his way. He had the rugged good looks that
most women favour. He was dressed in his usual Chinos and Vastrick
Polo top. Yesterday someone had asked him how he managed in the
cold weather with just a polo shirt and a padded jacket. He looked
at them with his piercing blue eyes and joked that he had
encountered worse weather than this in the summer in Newcastle,
which he then assured the London staff was just inside the Arctic
Circle. He had said it with a straight face, and found it amusing
that some of them actually believed it.

“
We have a walk in,” he said with an economy of words that was
typical of him. Despite his appearance he was quite shy around
women, something that made him even more attractive to a lot of the
female clients.

“
It might be a time waster who has no idea of our hourly
rates, but bring them in to Conference room 1 and we’ll give them
fifteen minutes,” Dee said. Geordie headed towards the reception
area whilst she walked across the corridor into the conference room
and switched on the lights.

Dee was still asking housekeeping to send someone up to take
orders for drinks when the ‘walk in’ stepped through the doorway.
The woman was around Dee’s height but her hair was stacked on top
of her head and wrapped in a colourful scarf that contrasted well
with the rest of her outfit. She was accompanied by a handsome
middle aged man dressed in a business suit and tie; her husband,
perhaps. Although she was heavily built - she was probably too big
for a size twenty dress - she carried herself well. Her ebony skin
shone with good health and her dark eyes did nothing to conceal the
intelligence that lay behind them. There was no hint of a smile,
however, and Dee could see the tell-tale signs of worry which had
brought her to their offices.