Low Profile (3 page)

He had thought that at some stage in his life he might try and sell this model – this continuum – to some criminal psychologist. Academics would love it, he believed. Perhaps he himself might become a criminologist in the future, imparting his knowledge from first-hand experience. He'd even thought that he could combine the professions. Remain an executioner and, at the same time, teach. An appealing prospect. That said, he'd probably end up killing his students.

Away from those daydreams, the one thing he felt was important in all this was that when this end point was reached, it should be over quickly. There was no point in dragging it out now. He wasn't that cruel.

Hawke glanced across at the kneeling and bound target who was to witness this, gave him a wink, then pulled the trigger.

The bullet entered her temple, did its damage in a microsecond, then exited, the force of the impact driving the light-framed woman sideways. She died as instantly as it was possible to die, and her blood back-sprayed on to Hawke's paper suit, flecking across him like a modernist painting. He stepped back as though shocked, but laughed as he looked down at himself.

Then, even though he knew she was dead, he made absolutely certain – as a professional killer he always did. He stood astride her like a colossus and fired one more bullet into her already pulped brain.

The target reacted to this horrific scenario, toppling sideways from his kneeling position and, although he too was bound with parcel tape at his wrists and ankles, his head also wrapped in a similar way to Lottie's, he began a desperate wriggle towards the door like a huge python. A terrible but muted sound came from his throat.

Then the killer's feet were in front of him, obstructing his way.

All the target could see from his prone position was the pair of paper shoes and the elasticated hem of the paper suit around Hawke's ankles, and the specks of Lottie's blood on them.

Percy Astley-Barnes stopped moving. He heard the rustle of the paper suit and sensed that the killer had squatted down on his haunches over him.

‘You had to see that,' the man's soft voice explained. ‘It was necessary for you to see your loved one die so you know just how seriously your threat and your transgression were taken.'

Percy retched with fear and vomited into his mouth, the sickness trapped there, unable to be ejected and finding its only exit up through his nasal passages, out through his nostrils, and flowing backwards down his throat as he desperately swallowed and gagged and choked. Hawke watched from above, a sneer of contempt on his face. Then he realized that his target might actually die from suffocating on his own vomit unless he acted quickly.

That would not do. There was no pleasure in watching such an undignified death, the kind of death an alcoholic might suffer.

Hawke reached down and tore away the strip of tape from Percy's mouth. Percy convulsed and coughed and managed to spit out the chunky sick on to the carpet on which he lay until he reached the point where he was breathing normally again, if raggedly.

‘Have I made my point?' Hawke asked.

Percy uttered something completely incomprehensible.

‘I'll take that as a yes,' Hawke grinned.

He hauled Percy back on to his knees, steadying and balancing him there. Hawke did not want to shoot Percy whilst his head was on the carpet – at least not the first shot. This was because it was something else Hawke quite liked – the action/reaction of placing a gun against a target's head whilst they were upright, then shooting them. There was, he thought, something almost poetic and balletic in the movement. The tightly squeezed face (why, he thought, did people scrunch up their faces like that? It made not one jot of difference. You could squeeze up, anticipate as much as you wanted, but the result was the same), then the touch of the muzzle to the head, held there for just the tiniest of seconds, then the trigger pull and the discharge, the bullet entering the head, the brains being blown out and the physical reaction of the body.

Pure fucking poetry, he thought.

Over in a jiff, but implanted in his mind for leisurely replay, over and over again.

So, having balanced Percy, Hawke simply did what he was supposed to do – killed him – then stood over the dead body and put another round into him.

Hawke exhaled as he stood in the centre of the living room, pulled off the hood, one dead body either side of him; then he breathed in the reek of blood and cordite in the air as though he was sniffing a flower glade in spring.

He glanced at his handiwork. Job well done, money well earned, he congratulated himself.

Until he suddenly tensed up when he heard the noise.

Henry walked through the open gates and up the fifty metre long driveway, the packed gravel scrunching underneath the soles of his shoes. The house ahead of him, illuminated by discreetly placed ground level lights, was a modernized executive detached property; from the rear Henry knew there were sweeping panoramic views of a wide curve of the River Wyre. He recalled there was even a small jetty where Percy kept a speedboat, though access to the river was dependent on tides.

Three cars were parked on the wide turnaround at the front of the house. He recognized Percy's Aston Martin with the personalized number plates, but not the black Porsche 911 or the brightly coloured Fiat 500. None of the cars seemed to be out of place, just the sort of array Henry would expect to see outside a wealthy person's home in this neck of the woods.

On the face of it, therefore, nothing unusual.

Except for the open gates and the fact that a person who had made a desperate phone call was not now answering his phone.

The instinct acquired over thirty years of being a cop gave Henry a bad feeling about it all. He paused at the back of the Aston Martin, glancing at the registered number, fleetingly thinking about the amount of money the car had cost, plus the number plate. Henry had gone to town with his Audi, but the cost of the Aston dwarfed what Henry had forked out. It took real wealth to run one of these beasts. But these were only passing thoughts, running parallel to everything else going on in his mind.

He walked past the car, placing his hand on the sleek, low bonnet, feeling the heat from the engine, then alongside the Porsche. He flashed his torch beam across its glossy, but slightly ugly and squat, black bodywork. He registered the stick-on sign in the back window indicating the car was actually a rental. He touched the rear bonnet and it was cold, no heat from the rear-engine car.

Then he went past the gaudy Fiat. In a very sexist thought, Henry saw it as a woman's car, and when he saw the pink, dangling, fluffy pair of dice hanging from the rear view mirror, and the eyelashes on the headlights, his stereotype was only reinforced.

He went up the steps to the front door, all frosted glass, which opened into a large vestibule. Henry pushed the door and found it to be open, another little, almost inconsequential factor to add to the growing list of inconsequential factors, which made his nostrils dilate and his senses click up a gear, his tiredness replaced by tension. The front gate open, the front door open, at this time of day.

He swallowed drily, realizing how dehydrated he was from his long day, which had included a lot of coffee but no straight water or juice. And crap food.

He stepped into the intricately tiled vestibule, ten feet to the next, inner door, beyond which was a wide entrance hall, stairs off to the right and access to the reception rooms, dining room and kitchen. He placed his hand on the door knob, turned and pushed it open with a click and a slight creaking sound.

First the noise, then the voice: ‘Mr Barnes? Percy? This is the police. Can I come in, please? Mr Barnes, this is the police … Detective Superintendent Christie.'

Hawke froze, standing between the bodies of the two people he had just executed. He shot a glance at Percy's body, which gave one last quiver from head to foot. A death jerk.

Hawke's quick calculation: he had fired four of the six rounds in the Smith & Wesson, two remaining in the chamber. He had two speed loaders in the pocket of his paper suit, so twelve more there; he knew he could reload in seconds.

‘Mr Barnes,' the cop shouted again. ‘I'm concerned about your welfare and I'm entering your house.'

More calculations: one cop? Or many cops?

Either way, Hawke had to find out.

He stepped over Lottie's body and went to the living room door, moving confidently into the hallway, happy that he was ready for whatever was before him.

He almost burst into laughter.

One man, one cop, a dishevelled, tired looking individual, crumpled jacket, trousers and crumpled face to match. The guy looked old, tired and ragged, his skin a weary grey colour, more like he should be in a retirement home than in the cops.

That said, he thought, I probably look more like I should be advertising tyres rather than someone paid to kill people.

Both men straightened up, dramatically tense.

‘Drop the gun,' Henry said. ‘I'm a police officer.'

Hawke shook his head and gave a short laugh. ‘You shouldn't have seen me, you should've arrived five minutes later. I've nothing against cops,' he added in some sort of explanation.

Henry said, ‘Put the weapon down.' His voice was calm and authoritative, although inside his heart had instantly started to beat rapidly. His eyes were focused on the gun in the man's hand, not on his face or eyes. He had seen and learned enough in the last ten seconds to know that submission was not on this man's agenda, so why look into his eyes? It was the gun that would be the problem, particularly for a knackered old cop unlucky enough to have stumbled into this scenario on his own. A firearms team might have brokered a different result, maybe. Henry had put everything together now. The forensic suit, the blood splashes on it, meaning the deed had already been done and Henry was too late to save anyone, but just in time to get himself killed. Percy was undoubtedly already dead as, probably, was anyone else in the house, and killing a dumb cop probably wouldn't make too much difference to this man who, by the looks of him, was not the sort of person who got caught.

The revolver came up.

Henry threw himself sideways, whilst in the same movement he launched his Maglite torch as hard as he possibly could at the man, not even sure it would connect. He hit the floor hard and a judder of agony shot through him; he felt the whoosh of the bullet just above his head as the silenced round destroyed a sheet of glass in the door panelling behind him. A second bullet slammed into the wall.

What amazed Henry about the shoulder pain as he hit the floor and rolled was that it was indescribable and almost debilitating, and if he'd had the choice he would have remained where he landed and not moved again until the agony had dissipated.

Unfortunately, being shot at by a gunman didn't give him any time to feel sorry for himself. He had to force himself through it.

He drove himself with an iron will and, ducking behind the staircase where it curved and widened, took the opportunity for one glance.

The gunman had disappeared back into the living room.

Henry did not need any more motivation than that. Holding his shoulder, he sprinted for the door, out through the vestibule on to the front steps, knowing that his only option was to escape and come back with reinforcements, a dead cop being neither use nor ornament to anyone.

He stumbled down the steps on to the gravel, where he lost his footing, tripped and rolled, coming up covered in gravel dust in front of the Fiat. He stayed low, using the cover provided by the cars before veering across the driveway to a row of thick, high rhododendron bushes that lined it. They were taller than him, and dense. He ducked between two, tripping again on a large stone but managing to keep upright, veered right, using the bushes as further cover, and scrambled towards the gates. He did not look back, knowing he had to get off the property and into his car and screech like fuck away.

As he ran he heard a whirring, clanking noise ahead of him – and with dread, realized what this was.

The gates were closing, trapping him in the garden.

Henry crouched low, trying to keep his laboured breathing as silent as possible and at the same time to get a view of the front of Percy's house from behind the bushes. It was still lit by the floodlights angled up from the ground.

Then, with an audible crack of electricity, the exterior lights went out and the house and garden were plunged instantly into almost impenetrable darkness. As there were no street lights on the lane beyond the grounds, there was no ambient lighting other than from the occasional appearance of a bright, virtually full moon from behind clouds scudding across the night sky.

Henry knew what ‘lights out' meant.

He had disturbed a killer in the act of murder, a killer who was probably now cursing himself for being so careless as to allow someone else to see his face. And although Henry had only seen it for a very short time, it was imprinted on his mind and he was certain he would be able to ID the man.

Which was bad for Henry.

Because ‘gates closed' plus ‘lights out' could only mean that a disturbed killer had one more job to do before leaving the scene: hunt down and kill the remaining witness.

It took a few moments for Henry's eyes to adjust to the darkness, but even then it was difficult to see through the gloom, a situation not helped by the fact that in his initial panic to escape he had thrown his torch at the gunman, a reflex action. In retrospect, not a particularly rational act, although if it had hit him it could have been the thing that gave Henry just enough time to dive to one side whilst the man was distracted.

Still, Henry admonished himself, right now, a torch would have been very handy.

He swore, squinting to see, but as the moon went behind a heavy chunk of cloud the blackness was almost total. He fished out his mobile phone and hid the illuminated screen with his hand.