LEWIS HAD AN old red Mk 2 Jaguar, much like the one used by the fictional police detective, Inspector Morse, and he had parked it in the hospital car-park, close to the exit. With characteristic old-fashioned courtesy, he opened the front passenger door and stood to one side, holding on to Kate’s arm, as she carefully climbed into the seat.
The man in the Land Rover saw them leaving as he turned into the car-park and he swung in quickly alongside the first double row of parked cars, out of sight, until the Jaguar had gone through the exit barrier towards the main road. Twister realized his mistake when he got to the barrier himself, staring with barely suppressed fury at the red and white arm, which came down blocking his way. He had been to the hospital before and should have remembered you had to pay for the car-park and validate the ticket in the hospital foyer before you could exit.
Lost them, sod it.
Reversing into a nearby car-parking space, he sprinted across the service road through the automatic doors and into the building itself, inserting his ticket into the machine just inside the entrance. It seemed to take ages to respond, then the illuminated display told him there was nothing to pay; the first twenty minutes were apparently free. Snarling his frustration, he snatched the ticket back when it grudgingly reappeared and brushed roughly against an elderly man with a stick as he swung for the doors.
Even as he sprinted back to his car, however, he knew he was wasting his time – the Jag was long gone – and, finally driving out through the hospital exit, he cursed his luck and the fact that this time there was no tracking device fitted to the target vehicle to enable him to keep tabs on his quarry. Then his stomach practically slammed up into his ribcage, suddenly reminding him of something else.
Bloody hell, the tracking device on the MX5.
If it hadn’t fallen off into the rhyne with the force of the collision, it had to be still attached to the underside of the vehicle – almost certainly busted as it was not registering on his monitor – and just waiting for some plod traffic accident investigator to spot it. And that was the last thing he could afford to happen.
Reaching the roundabout and the junction with the A370, he deliberately cut up another car on the roundabout itself, furious with himself for his stupidity and determined to take it out on anyone in the vicinity. How could he have forgotten about the blasted tracker? He was supposed to be a professional. This business was doing his head in. One thing was clear, however: he had to get to the car before anyone had a chance of examining it too closely. According to the picture in the paper it had been collected by a breakdown truck from Jury’s of Bridgwater and he just hoped that was where it had been taken. A prayer might have helped had he been vaguely Christian, but in addition to being a non-believer, he knew that, with his record, he could hardly expect to find a listening ear above, even if there was someone in residence to pray to.
In fact, as he took the third exit off the busy roundabout, a disjointed assortment of pictures flashed through his brain; gruesome images he knew he would never forget – would never want to forget. He had been an assassin most of his adult life and though he liked to blame the SAS for that, his penchant for murder had actually started long before he’d reached adulthood and joined the army.
A quiet retiring boy with few friends, there had never been anything in his behaviour to suggest he was other than a normal teenager who simply preferred his own company. He was always polite, never got into trouble with the more rebellious crowd at school and consistently achieved good examination results. Though an only child, he also enjoyed an apparently happy stable family life, with all the love and support that went with it, even after the death of his mother when he was ten. On the surface then, he had everything going for him.
But beneath the inoffensive wholesome persona that Larry projected lurked the seriously deranged mind of the psychopath; a cold, calculating mentality driven by absolute self-interest, a complete lack of empathy towards anyone or anything and an inbuilt ambivalence towards basic moral norms – including the sanctity of human life. Unlike Terry Duval’s motivation for arson, for Larry killing was not an overtly sexual or vengeful thing. True, it imbued him with a sense of power and fulfilment, and he took great pride in doing the job properly, but he did not get a hard-on from the act – any more than he felt the slightest remorse for carrying it out. He killed because it fitted in with what he wanted to do at the time and if a psychiatrist were to have asked him why he had taken the life of another human being, he would probably have shrugged and answered simply: ‘Why not?’
During his early childhood, he had actually managed to resist the strengthening voice in his head urging him to kill someone, contenting himself instead with shooting birds, cats and small rodents with his airgun or incinerating them with a blowtorch after they had been trapped. But by the time he reached his last year in school, this no longer satisfied him and the voice had become so painfully insistent that he knew it could no longer be ignored.
As a result, he befriended a lower year fat boy, named Jerome Cassidy, and, luring him to the municipal park near the school on the pretext of showing him some dirty pictures, he plunged a chisel he had stolen from the woodwork class into the boy’s throat. Then he sat quietly on a tree stump and, with dispassionate clinical interest, watched him die in a bubbling choking haemorrhage, feeling no connection between himself and his victim, other than through the experiment he had set up.
He killed twice more after that in separate parts of the county, first a young woman out jogging in a lonely country lane and then a middle-aged hospital nurse on her way to work. Both victims were selected at random and strangled. Both were pretty too, but neither the nurse or the scantily clad jogger stirred his juices and he made no attempt to interfere with either of them sexually. It was the act of killing that interested him, plus the satisfaction he gained from watching the light go out in the eyes of his victims as they choked their last; rape was nowhere on his agenda.
More murders would undoubtedly have followed too, had he not spotted a railway hoarding bearing an advertisement for the army with its apparent limitless opportunities for legalized murder. His application was in within four days.
Soldiering – and more particularly the SAS – taught him how to kill silently and efficiently: to slice through someone’s windpipe from behind with a length of wire, to crush a target’s Adam’s apple with the edge of the hand, or – his chosen method – to snap a spinal cord with a sharp powerful twist of the neck.
But while he proved to be a ruthless and dependable assassin, supremely fit and very quickly combat hardened, it soon became apparent to his lords and masters that he was a loose cannon; someone for whom the kill was more important than the purpose of the operation and whose reckless disregard for rules and adherence to orders put others in jeopardy. Inevitably, he messed up in a big way during a key training exercise, which resulted in the death of another soldier, and, following a court martial, he was dishonourably discharged from the service.
For several years after that he simply drifted, claiming social security benefits, while working – first for a Manchester villain as an enforcer and then as a so-called security officer for a dodgy night club in Liverpool. Despite all the efforts of the then regional crime squad to nail him, he was never tied in to any of the crimes he had committed, but ironically, like Al Capone, he was finally indicted for fraud – in his case for evading income tax and dishonestly claiming benefits while employed by the night club – and he received eighteen months inside as a result.
But prison had no effect on him and following his release, he returned home, ostensibly to support his father who was developing Parkinson’s disease. Instead, within three months he had smothered the old man in bed to enable him to take over the family business. The death had gone down as natural causes, of course, despite police reservations, and he had initially congratulated himself on a pretty smart move. But that was before he had run the business into the ground and put himself in the position he was in now – no money, a precarious future and a termination contract that had gone badly wrong – something he had to rectify PDQ if he was to maintain his own self-respect as the ultimate killing machine.
His father’s face and the faces of the rest of his many victims now floated before him like gossamer on a breeze, or foam on a slow-moving sea current. Not that he was distressed by them – psychopaths like him were not troubled by conscience. Instead, he saw those past hits as ‘friends’ who accompanied him on his journeys, a spectral entourage he was confident Kate Hamblin would soon be joining, just as soon as he had worked out the detail on the deadly new plan that was forming in his twisted brain.
Jury’s was not actually in Bridgwater itself; it was some way outside the town, within a short distance of the curiously named Dumball Wharf. The former petrol station had become a graveyard for crashed motor vehicles and its two to three acres of flattened scrub held several hundred broken shells waiting to be consigned to the huge crusher Ray Jury had installed at the far end of the property.
Dusk was creeping in across the misty fields that enclosed the place as Lewis carefully eased his Jaguar through the half-closed iron gates and pulled up before the caravan that served as an office.
Ray Jury was a fat little man, almost as wide as he was tall. He was dressed in a woollen hat, an old donkey jacket, corduroys and what looked like oversize wellington boots. His florid face wore a perpetual frown and his unlit cigarette stub seemed to be stuck permanently to his bottom lip, even when he was speaking in his thick Somerset accent.
He took in Lewis’s old Jaguar with a look of hunger and seemed disappointed when Hayden’s opening shot revealed that they had not come to dump his car, but to look at Kate’s MX5.
The sports car was parked with half-a-dozen others on a concrete apron, away from the car graveyard. ‘We close at five,’ Jury warned, after leading them to the vehicle. Then, seeing there was no new business to be had, he waddled away, shaking his head.
‘Bit of a mess, eh?’ Lewis commented unnecessarily, looking critically at the crushed bonnet and front wings. ‘You were lucky to get out of this in one piece.’
But Kate was not interested in his assessment and immediately turned her attention to the gaping hole where the passenger door had once been. The fire service had done a thorough job as usual. Not only had the door been removed, but part of the nearside rear panel as well and most of the hard-top roof had also been cut away. She found her leather coat almost at once, badly ripped, as Hayden had said, and dumped in the passenger foot-well, and her heart was pumping madly as she checked the pockets. She recovered her mobile immediately, apparently intact and still switched on, but when she slipped her hand into the same pocket, she found nothing save a small tear in the lining. She was on the point of withdrawing her hand and checking the other pocket when her probing fingers touched crumpled paper.
Her heart pounding even harder, she carefully extracted the piece of paper, then, making sure Hayden was still fully occupied, peeled it open and glanced at the contents. At once she breathed a sigh of relief. Thank heavens. It was what she had come for. Panic over.
‘What have you got there then?’
Lewis was standing directly behind her and she quickly slipped the note into her pocket with the mobile. ‘Oh, nothing. Just my mobile and a bill I left in my coat,’ she lied.
As she straightened up, she saw him frown. ‘Don’t you want your coat then? You came all this way for it.’
She shook her head. ‘No point. Pity, but it’s ruined. And there’s nothing else here that I want.’
He threw her a quizzical look, plainly not satisfied with her answer, but he did not pursue it, instead holding out his gloved hand with theatrical aplomb. ‘I wouldn’t say that, Kate,’ he contradicted politely. ‘I found this attached to one of the frame members.’
Peering into his palm, she found herself staring at a badly split black oblong box, maybe 5x2x1¨ in size, with part of a silvery disc that looked very much like a battery visible through the split. ‘Whatever is that?’
He grunted. ‘Well, I’m no technical whizz kid, but I have seen something similar to it before and I would say it’s a bug.’
‘A what?’
‘Most likely a magnetic GPS tracking device,’ he added, staring about him uneasily.
‘You can’t be serious?’
‘Oh I’m serious enough.’ He studied her fixedly. ‘It seems that someone has been keeping very close tabs on your movements, old girl, and I think you owe me an explanation, don’t you?’
Twister pulled up in front of the padlocked gates and stared sourly at the sign, ‘Jury’s Auto Recoveries’, which seemed to be mocking him in the headlights trained on the seven-foot-high chain-link fence. He was too late; the bastards had gone home. Still, that wasn’t too much of a problem – padlocked gates had never been a barrier to him in the past and they were not going to be now – but he needed to check for any possible opposition first, even though the arrival of the Land Rover, with its headlights blazing, should have been enough to advertise his presence already.
Leaving the engine running, he climbed from the vehicle and walked right up to the gates, shaking them as noisily as he could several times. Nothing. No sudden blaze of a flashlight, challenging shout from a security officer or growls from a roaming guard dog and the caravan just inside the compound was fast fading into the deepening gloom of early evening, suggesting that the place was as deserted as it looked. Maybe Jury just wasn’t used to receiving nocturnal visitors, so didn’t worry about security.
Returning to the Land Rover, he opened the back door and rummaged among the selection of tools he kept in the old army ammunition box hidden beneath a couple of tarpaulins. The bolt cutters were old, but still serviceable and it took him just a few minutes to find a weak spot in the padlock chain and snap it in two.
The gates shuddered as he pushed them open and seconds later he drove through and parked out of sight behind the caravan, switching off the engine and lights and opening the driver’s door to listen again. Still nothing, save the distant drone of an aircraft. For a few moments he watched the flash of the plane’s red navigation light as it dropped towards Bristol Airport on its final approach, then climbed out of the vehicle with his torch and began his search.
He found the MX5 almost immediately, parked as it was on a concrete hard-standing away from the alleyways of wrecks that stretched right to the back of the site, and it took him even less time to discover that the tracking device was no longer attached to the sports car or lying underneath it. Shit! Either the thing was in the rhyne or had dropped off somewhere en route – was maybe even lying on the floor of the breakdown truck itself. He scowled and lit a cigarette, considering his next move, but he only managed a single pull on the filter-tip before the voice rapped at him from behind. ‘OK, mister, you stay right there!’
He turned slowly into the flickering beam of a torch – maybe someone should have told his challenger to change his batteries – and glimpsed a short, fat figure behind the light.
‘I been watching you,’ Ray Jury said triumphantly. ‘You come back here screwing once too often. I’ve already rung the police.’
‘Have you indeed?’
‘Yeah, an’ you better stay put. I got a shotgun here.’
The torch was lowered briefly to reveal the barrel of the weapon and Twister took another pull on his cigarette and smiled. ‘So are you going to shoot me?’ he queried and flicked the still glowing ember into the gloom.
For a second the torch wavered as Jury was briefly distracted by the red spot trailing away into the darkness and that was enough.
Twister was on him before he realized it, knocking the length of pipe, which had served as his ‘shotgun’, out of his hands and bowling him over on to the concrete hard-standing.
‘Now, my friend,’ his antagonist breathed, sitting astride him with one steely hand gripping his throat, ‘you’re going to tell me all you know about that MX5. And as you say the police are on their way, you’ve got exactly two minutes to talk before I kill you.’