A Last Act of Charity (Killing Sisters Book 1) (21 page)

21

NO TRAINS TO HEAVEN

‘Little Willie in a johnnie?’ The Hard Man was plainly entertained by the whole thing. ‘You caught a dick in the bog? You went fishing in the toilet? Jesus weeping Christ, JJ, what is all this? And how did you know about the stiff before I did? Professional interest only. I’m not suggesting that you killed him.’ That was perhaps an example of his sense of humour. Maybe an attempt at levity. It was difficult to tell.

Stoner shifted in his seat. As was his way, the Hard Man had met him in a restaurant, although eating was a long way down Stoner’s list of priorities. A very long way down a rather short list.

‘The head was sitting on the desk. Just sitting there. Leaking. It had not been easy to remove it. Most of the mess in the room came from the effort involved in hacking the thing off the neck. It sounds as though it should be easy enough, but it’s not. It’s not like chopping the head off a dead chicken. At a guess, I’d think the killer used a proper butcher’s cleaver or something very like that. Something heavy, sharp, and with enough depth of blade to stop it twisting around and going nowhere every time it encountered bone or sinew. It’s too easy to get the blade stuck in gristle. Bugger to pull it out. You get crap flying everywhere.’

‘Not a samurai sword, then?’ It was never easy to know whether the Hard Man was making a joke.

‘Doubt it. The
katana
is supposed to be sharp enough to remove head from neck in a single slice, but you need a lot of skill to do that. And hiding a sword in your back pocket isn’t too easy. A butcher’s axe would fit into a suitcase. Briefcase. Overnight bag. Why the thought, though? Do you have another serial somewhere which involves some tough nutter flailing about with a sword? Some cretin with a fixation for bad Japanese movies who’s watched
Kill Bill
too often?’

The Hard Man shook his head. Said no more. Watched Stoner, silently and steadily. Did not even pretend his usual stoic fascination with the contents of the menu. Not that any waiter seemed over-keen on serving them. Maybe they’d been told to keep away from the debriefing. Which was, Stoner recognised, exactly what the working lunch actually was. Although it was late afternoon, the Hard Man had suggested that they consider their meeting to be lunch. Stoner had no problem with whatever they called it. Time is just time; it ebbs and it flows, labels applied to it generally fall off at inconvenient moments.

‘The head was the proud possessor of a shiny new Apple laptop, and that fine machine was connected to your favourite murder fansite, transmitting – guess what – a video of the head to that very site. Or, to be more accurate, it had sent about an hour’s worth of video, lost the connection and shut itself down. No idea why. Computers should remain a mystery to everyone except those who understand them, that’s the way things should be. No doubt the sad fucks at murder merry mayhem or whatever it’s called are even now creaming their collective unwashed and ill-fitting jeans over what they imagine to be a decently realistic dummy dead head. Bully for them, of course. I’ll check. Unless you’d rather do that?’

The Hard Man shook his head a little. ‘Done that. The site’s
still running about an hour of utterly pointless and not even faintly pleasant footage of some sad fuck’s head. Techs are even as we speak manipulating the early part of the show to see whether they can pull more from it. There’s shadow movement at the beginning, which I’d imagine to be the killer moving around the room until he leaves. But I’m not hopeful. This guy is too smart to leave reflections of himself in things. But looking harder never hurt, so looking harder they are. Tell me more, Sherlock?’

‘Clothes neatly piled on the single chair. These motel rooms are small. Functional. No wardrobe as such. Coat rack with a jacket and an overcoat. Nothing remarkable. Shoes together beneath the chair. Suitcase against a wall, case for the laptop on the desk. Body on the bed. A lot of blood. Lots. The head had been hacked off with the bod lying on the bed, face-up and alive. Spray of hard blood all over the wall and the nicely meaningless picture above the bed.

‘Heart had run for a decent while after the neck arteries had been cut, so you can work out for yourself how much blood was on the bed, the floor as well as the walls. Sodden in places. No, I did not walk through it. It was well set, though, congealed. Room was cold, but the drips had stopped dripping long ago. The plods will give you ToD.

‘Bod spread-eagled, so not conscious for the excitement, the entertainment. No one on the planet would lie still while some maniac chopped their head off in front of them. They’d need to be seriously out of it. You’ll get toxicology, I expect?’

‘Yes. Won’t take long. They don’t get many murders out here in the shires. They go in for death by a thousand glares rather than hacking folk apart with axes. Backstabbing rather than honest-to-goodness full frontal assault. Each to his own. The dick?’

‘Cut off after the ticker had ticked for the last time. Blood oozed rather than pumped. Cut off with a knife or similar. Sharp; a cutting not a chopping blade, so two blades used at least. No
hacking, chopping, no particular mess nor gratuitous disfigurement. Circumcised but a long while ago, and not by the killer. Clean cut, balls left where they should be.

‘Cock in a condom. Your merry forensic men can tell you whether our man enjoyed a last blast before meeting his maker in the jolly hereafter, unless it had been in the pan for too long.’

‘Yes, JJ. I’ll get the usual from forensics. If you want and if it helps, I’ll pass it on to you. You’ve been fishing in dangerous water again.’ The Hard Man was offering encouragement of a sort. ‘And you’ve answered a question?’

‘As you say. The last two bodies you showed me were dickless as well as headless, but we’d assumed that the killer had some bizarre trophy fetish and had kept the dicks for kicks, or something. But I bet they went down the toilet, too. Then there was just that one message, that “sin” thing. In truth, I wondered about that. The scenes were so messed up, deliberately messed up, that I’d felt something was being hidden. Just pointless confusion. Distraction.’

‘The pig blood was a bit of a giveaway there, JJ. Do you have any idea what that particular nastiness was all about?’

‘No. Apart from some serious attempt at obscuring something bloody. How many human blood types were present, that sort of thing. There was nothing at this scene which didn’t come from the bod, so far as I could see. But I did have the feeling that if I’d waited for SOCO and the plods to arrive and do their stumbling about, then someone else might have got to the scene before I did . . . maybe before the regular plods, even. I’m not the only guy on the planet who can listen in to emergency calls or pay folk to do that for me.’

‘As you say. Why did you go rooting around the plumbing, though? Did you really think that the regulars would have missed it?’

Stoner nodded his reply. The Hard Man sighed, leaned back
in his chair and flicked a hand for a waiter, who materialised instantly, accepted the Hard Man’s order for the two of them and vanished again.

He looked up: ‘So this is a sex crime? Whore lures john to motel, pimp does . . . does what? Pimp kills, hacks heads; whore chops off their dicks? I can’t make much sense of this. I mean . . . I can offer endless suggestions, we can all do that, lord love us, but none makes much sense. Got any thoughts you’d care to share? Be as off the wall as you like. This makes little sense to me.’

‘What makes the least sense to me, oh great master, is why your own deities are interested or involved. If you felt an unusual urge to level a little more with me on that score I think I could make more progress, frankly. No offence intended.’

‘None, as they say in the movies, taken. It would be disingenuous of me to tell you that I have no idea why my own employers are sufficiently bothered about some string of whack jobs to employ us, rather than letting the more mundane forces of law and order do their relentless jobs, but I can’t see how my own theorising could fail to obstruct the clarity of your own thinking. No shit, JJ; I’m being straight. If you can convince me that you need to know more, then I’ll think about laying more of this crap on your shoulders, but I don’t see how it will help. But I can repeat – in case you’ve managed to forget – that your pal Harding is apparently fingering you for at least one of these jobs.’

‘That’s exactly what I mean.’ Stoner glared across the table. Food arrived. He ignored it. Both men waved away the over-attentive waiter. ‘He, Shard, Harding, is completely certain that my involvement is purely investigative. We’ve discussed the subject at some considerable length. And in depth. And with near murderous intensity.’ Stoner’s voice had risen. ‘Which we both assume was someone’s intention. Any idea who that someone
might be? Because I truly do hate being set up, being set up to act the idiot.’ He was almost shouting.

The Hard Man chewed slowly, with the air of a man reflecting.

‘I do believe that I called you – after many hours failing to make a connection – to warn you that this was more than just a possibility. That Harding may consider you to be responsible in some way and that I was concerned. Both for your wellbeing and for the possibility that he might be wrong and might act precipitously. Although I should also say that I have no doubt that you would be able to look after yourself should there be a conflict. Unless a long gun was involved. Harding is an excellent shot. First class.’

‘You would know, I’d imagine? You’ve employed him?’ There may have been a little bitterness in Stoner’s question.

‘Not directly. Not recently. But I have respect for his abilities. As I’m sure you do too. If it’s worth anything, I’m pleased you’ve sorted it out. Should I assume that you’re working together?’

‘Assume away. Assume what you want to assume. There’s one big fat fuck of a lot more to this. That you’re not talking to me is a loud shout in itself. You’re not interested in finding a killer. Plods can do that. What’s going on? What are you actually after?’

‘Eat up.’ The Hard Man continued chewing. Stoner looked at his plate, as if noticing it for the first time.

But the Hard Man offered an answer. ‘I don’t know all of it. And I can’t tell you all of what I do know. It’s not riddles. Any operative needs direction. You don’t need me to tell you that. You’ve run enough operators in your time. It can too easily be that too much information gets in the way of finding the truth.

‘And the truth I want you to find is – you were wrong about this – the identity of the madman who is killing these johns. That has to be enough for you. From that point on, others further up the food chain will make decisions. They may or may not involve me, and I may or may not involve you. You should know that
there is a lot of flapping. There’s no panic. There is concern at levels which concern me. Political levels, which is always bad news. I don’t know who, but I do know why. Or rather, I can guess why.

‘It’ll be a loss of control. A wobble in the established order of how things work. I’d lay odds on that. Maybe a shift in loyalties somewhere behind doors so closed that they’re more solid walls than French windows. Even if I did know more than that – and all I have is suspicion – I’d not willingly tell you more because it could hamper your judgement, impair your sense of direction. Things like that. It might also lay you open to easy identification by parties I’d rather remained unaware of your involvement. If that happened, then you might face rival recruitment, which would be bad, or removal from the field, which could be disabling or fatal. Which would also be bad.

‘It feels like the manoeuvring of a private army. I’ve got no problems with that; many of us have our own private armies. It’s usually the easiest way to get things done in these dark days when everyone sits on a committee and everyone sat on that committee reports to another committee, and everyone on those committees reports to another committee. It gets utterly inefficient. Which is what it’s for. It’s all a huge, expensive and insane control and check on everything, accidentally intended to prevent anything actually happening. Like major wars, cleansings both ethnic and otherwise, genocides, mass destructions, nuclear annihilation and the unpalatable understanding by Joseph Q. Public that none of it actually matters and that the whole world is run by big companies anyway, leaving government by media as a palatable and allegedly accountable fairy-tale front. Which is as it should be.

‘Where was I? Is any of this actually any use to you? I doubt it. I tend to believe that information only clouds the thinking. There’s a struggle going on somewhere. There always is. There’s
no need for me to know who’s involved and why and where. There never is. Can you ever believe that I might actually be helping you to help me? Does it ever occur to you that it is in my own interest for you to be successful? Why are you always so fucking paranoid?

‘Guinea fowl’s good, isn’t it? Why is some maniac filming these dead heads and posting them on that sicko site? Why is the same maniac murdering people who I can find no sensible connection between and chopping off their dicks? I could almost have understood keeping them as trophies. I can see the appeal in that. There are a few gentlemen whose detached dicks I would happily keep in the freezer so I could laugh at them from time to time when things were feeling just too fucking serious, but . . . chopping them off and flushing them down the lav? That’s a bit extreme. Why’s he doing it?

‘These questions are much more interesting and involving than the machinations of self-deluding pensioners desperate to retain their grips on power, office or whatever they think they’re doing. Or should we swap jobs? You stand well back, be uninvolved, do nothing but seek patterns in the famous big picture, while I go digging in the dirty detail looking for actual, tangible, provable facts. That would make a refreshing change, as cider drinkers say on telly.’

He resumed chewing with obvious relish and looked across at Stoner, who was prodding at his food with the air of a man who’s just realised that he’s guest of honour at his own last supper.