Make Them Pay (2 page)

The man parked his car outside a fashionable house in a street in Pimlico and mounted the steps to the front door. He looked around furtively before pressing a button on the intercom.

‘Yes, who is it?’ asked a woman’s distorted voice.

‘It’s me,’ said the man, hoping that the girl would recognize her caller. She did.

‘Well, well, the wanderer returns, but if it’s more money you want, darling, you’re out of luck. The well’s dried up.’

‘Let me in, Lavinia, it’s important,’ said the man crouching over the intercom.

‘It’d better be,’ said Lavinia, and buzzed him in.

With a last surreptitious look around, the man entered the house and ran up the stairs.

‘This had better be good, buster.’ Lavinia stood in the doorway of her apartment. She was attired in a black jersey dress that stopped well above her knees and clung to her figure like it was glued on to every alluring curve.

‘I’m in trouble,’ said the man, following her into the seating area and flopping into a chair.

‘So, what’s new? D’you want coffee?’

‘Please.’

‘So, what’s this big problem of yours?’

‘I was doing a bit of target practice at a tree in Richmond Park and a guy saw me.’

‘You were doing
what
?’ Lavinia held the cafetière in the air in an act of suspended animation, and her eyes opened wide in a combination of surprise and disbelief. ‘D’you mean you had a gun?’

‘Of course I had a gun. What d’you think I was using, a bow and arrow?’

‘What were you doing with a gun? And what the hell were you shooting at trees for? Have you got it in for trees all of a sudden?’ Lavinia skirted the kitchenette counter and joined the man in the seating area, handing him a mug of coffee. ‘Are you out of your mind?’

‘Why I was doing it doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t concern you.’

‘So, what the hell d’you want me to do about it, then?’ Lavinia leaned back on the sofa, spreading her arms along the top and crossing her long legs.

‘I could use some money,’ said the man. ‘How about a couple of hundred, Lavinia darling?’

‘Oh the hell with you!’ exclaimed Lavinia, but nevertheless took four fifty-pound notes from her handbag. ‘There you are. And that’s it. No more. Daddy doesn’t approve of you and he doesn’t approve of me keeping you.’

The man ignored that comment; he’d heard it all before. ‘D’you think I could stay here just for a few days and lie low, darling?’ he asked, swiftly pocketing the cash without a word of thanks.

‘No, you bloody well can’t,
darling
. You ran off once and you’re not coming back. Anyway, I’ve got a new guy in my life now. And he’s got his own money. And he drives a Ferrari.’

‘Just for a day or two.’ The man adopted a wheedling tone.

‘No way.’ Lavinia swept a hand through her long blonde hair. ‘But you can screw me if you like, just for old time’s sake.’

The man knocked at the door of 17 Clancy Street in a fashionable part of London’s Paddington.

‘Yes?’ The Nigerian who answered the door peered into the gloom outside.

‘Hello, Samson.’

‘Oh, it’s you.’ Samson Adekunle looked at his caller and smiled. ‘Have you come to take up my offer? We could certainly use you.’

‘In a manner of speaking, Samson. We have certain matters to discuss.’ The man produced a pistol and pointed it straight at Adekunle. ‘I know how to use this, so step back inside and keep your hands where I can see them.’

‘What on earth are you doing?’ asked the panic-stricken Adekunle. Although adept at using the telephone to extract money from defenceless elderly people, he was not a physically brave man. His eyes widened in terror and he began slowly to walk backwards, his hands raised in the air. He would have been even more terrified if he’d known that he had less than an hour to live. And that that hour would be filled with unspeakable agony. But the man with the gun had a score to settle.

‘We’ll start with your computer, Samson,’ said the man. ‘There are a couple of our mutual friends I want to get in touch with: Hans Eberhardt and Trudi Schmidt.’

‘I don’t know where they are,’ said Adekunle. ‘I think they’ve moved house.’ He glanced at the man’s menacing pistol and knew instinctively that his lame denial was pointless. He was in little doubt that his assailant was pursuing a personal vendetta. When they had first met, Adekunle had convinced himself that this man was possessed of an uncontrollable streak of viciousness. He remembered what had happened when he’d lost his temper with a naked Trudi Schmidt, just because she’d teased him. And that brutality had terrified him then, and now terrified him even more because he suddenly realized why the man was here.

Forcing Adekunle into the kitchen, the man ordered him to bring one of the chairs back to the living room. Once there he instructed Adekunle to strip naked, before securing him to the chair with several lengths of rope that he took from a shoulder bag.

‘And now, Samson, you’re going to tell me all I need to know.’

‘Like hell!’ exclaimed Adekunle, but it was destined to be his last act of bravado.

Three days later, the man parked his car a yard or two away from the camper van. It was exactly where he had instructed the driver to park, on the grass verge and facing north, opposite 21 Bendview Road. That he had selected that address was merely coincidental; the man had no idea who lived there and cared even less. It just so happened that that was the house opposite a suitable grass verge.

Taking a jerrycan full of petrol from his car, he placed it on the grass close to the van. Creeping stealthily along the left-hand side of the vehicle he slid open the door to the rear of the driver’s seat. Taking out his pistol, and moving rapidly he got in and sat down immediately behind the driver.

Hearing the noise, the driver turned in alarm. ‘
Wer sind sie?
’ The sudden intrusion caused him to pose the question in his native language.

‘Who
are
you?’ translated the man mockingly. ‘I’ll tell you, my friend. Right now, I’m your worst enemy.’

The woman turned in her seat. ‘My God, it’s you,’ she said in faultless but heavily accented English. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’ve come to settle a debt,’ said the man, fitting a suppressor to his pistol. ‘In a manner of speaking.’ He fired a round into the back of the man’s head.

The woman cried out in horror as the gun turned towards her. ‘
Nein, liebchen, bitte
.’ But her plea was to no avail. Roughly seizing the woman’s hair, the man turned her so that she was forced to look out of the windscreen. Then he fired a round into her head too. ‘And that’s for you, you whore,’ he said. He had actually enjoyed killing Adekunle and these two.

Removing the suppressor from his pistol, he pocketed both. Gathering up the shell cases that had been ejected, he alighted from the camper van. Unscrewing the cap of the jerrycan, he spread its contents liberally over the interior of the vehicle and the two dead bodies. Finally he threw the jerrycan into the van, struck a match and ignited the fuel before returning to his car and driving away.

T
he sign on my office door informs any interested party that the occupant is DETECTIVE CHIEF INSPECTOR HARRY BROCK HSCC(W).

I’m attached to a unit called Homicide and Serious Crime Command West that has its headquarters at Curtis Green, a turning off Whitehall in central London and which was once a part of New Scotland Yard. But that was before our beloved parliamentarians claimed the building for themselves and shifted the police to a concrete pile in Broadway that has all the aesthetic charm of a grain silo. Not many people know the whereabouts of Curtis Green, including a large number of police officers, and we’re responsible for investigating weighty crimes from Westminster to far-flung Hillingdon and all the dens of iniquity that lie in between.

So much for my professional side. As for my social life, what little there is of it, I’m in a wonderful relationship with a gorgeous blonde resting actress called Gail Sutton and we’ve been together for a few years now. I’d met her while investigating a murder at the theatre where she was working. The victim had been Gail’s friend and fellow dancer.

As Gail and I had both been married before, we’d decided against risking matrimony again. We even lived apart; I had a flat in Surbiton and Gail lived in a townhouse, a mile or two away in Kingston, although I seemed to spend more time at her place than at my own.

Gail had been married to a theatre director called Gerald Andrews. I’d never met the guy, but from what Gail told me, he sounded a thoroughly dislikable character. However, the union had ended in divorce when, feeling unwell, she’d returned home early from Richmond Theatre one afternoon – she’d been appearing in a revival of Noël Coward’s
Private Lives
– and surprised her husband in bed with an attractive young woman. The girl, an exotic dancer, usually performed in the nude and this occasion was no different. I’d often thought, since hearing the story, that Andrews must’ve been crazy to let a girl like Gail escape. Just to emphasize the separation, Gail had reverted to using her maiden name.

But with typical male chauvinism, Andrews had resented Gail’s justifiable objection to his philandering – something that she’d long suspected – and had done his best ever since to thwart her attempts to get decent acting parts. Consequently, she’d been hoofing, as she called it, in the chorus line of a second rate revue
called
Scatterbrain
when I
met her.

My own tale of marital woe was a result of my marriage to Helga Büchner, a nymphomaniac German physiotherapist who’d massaged my shoulder back into working order after a physical confrontation with a gang of youths in Whitehall when I was a uniformed constable. Contrary to the predictions of my colleagues at the nick, the marriage – but not the nymphomania – lasted sixteen years. However, well before that a tragedy occurred that marked the beginning of the end.

Against my wishes, Helga had continued to work at the hospital after the birth of our son Robert. She had left him with a neighbour while she went to work, but the boy had fallen into the garden pond and drowned. He was four years of age.

The day that the superintendent had called me into his office to break the news is forever etched in my memory. The police are very good when it comes to personal tragedy.

‘I’ve got some bad news for you, Harry,’ said the superintendent. ‘I’m afraid your son has died.’ Without any frills, he went on to tell me exactly what had occurred, just as though he were giving evidence. But that’s the way we coppers prefer it. ‘Take as much time off as you need,’ the superintendent had said. ‘I’ll square it with the guv’nor. Give me a bell if there’s anything you want.’

The death of our son, together with the ensuing adultery on both sides, finally succeeded in cancelling out the promise of ‘until death do us part’. It was inevitable really; Helga had been carrying on an affair with a doctor at the hospital for quite a few months before I found out. It was no comfort that a colleague told me that the husband is always the last one to find out.

The last murder in the HSCC West area of responsibility had fallen to a colleague of mine and I knew that I was next on the list. Consequently, I’d decided to take the weekend off secure in the knowledge that it would probably be the last free time I’d have for a while. I’d hoped to spend some of that time with Gail, but she’d gone to Nottingham to visit her parents George and Sally. George was a property developer whose only overt vice was an obsession with Formula One motor racing and the land speed record, both of which he talked about incessantly. Until his wife Sally, herself a former dancer, told him to shut up.

As a result I was condemned to spending my temporary freedom mooning about the flat, and doing some essential shopping in Kingston.

Strangely, and to a certain extent unnervingly, things continued to be very quiet for me. Murder and mayhem in that part of the capital for which HSCC West was responsible seemed to have died. To coin a phrase.

I took advantage of that lull to call Gail and suggest a quiet dinner somewhere.

We took a taxi from her place to a restaurant a few miles away that served good meals and had a decent wine list. We both knew it well and had been there on several occasions in the past.

‘Ah, Mr Brock, how good to see you again,’ said the unctuous proprietor, almost bowing. ‘And you too, Miss Sutton. A table for two?’

The owner knew I was a police officer hence, I suspect, the excessive servility. He also claimed to have seen several of the shows in which Gail had appeared and was convinced he’d seen her on television, but she’d never appeared on TV. I’d come to the early conclusion that he was a consummate liar with an eye to the main chance: money and staying on the right side of the law. But he employed a first-rate chef and that was all that mattered.

‘You seem to have had a lot of time on your hands recently, darling,’ said Gail, once we were settled at a discreet table. A candle illuminated the space between us.

‘Don’t tempt providence,’ I said, little knowing that she’d just tempted it once too often. We ordered an aperitif and mulled over the menu.

We enjoyed our meal, despite frequent solicitous enquiries from the proprietor wishing to know if we were satisfied. My only regret was that I could no longer complete my enjoyment with a cigarette. But Gail was unsympathetic; she was always encouraging me to give up the habit, even though she occasionally smoked herself.

‘A nightcap at my place?’ asked Gail.

I knew what that meant and readily agreed. Somehow, I finished up staying the night. Again.

On Thursday the seventeenth of July, a red and white California T5 Volkswagen camper van parked on a patch of grassland just off Bendview Road in Richmond, Surrey. The tourists, if that’s what they were, had probably stopped there because the location afforded a magnificent panoramic view of the curve in the river Thames, from Richmond Bridge in the north to Marble Hill Park in the south.

The presence of the vehicle had first been noted by the crew of a patrolling police car at a quarter past eleven the previous night. The crew had paid it scant attention other than to note that lights were on behind the curtained windows. The driver’s colleague saw that the van was rocking slightly and made a coarse comment.