Jane Kelman hadn’t always been a killer. Years ago, she’d been a married mother of two who’d never even been in a fight, let alone murdered anyone. But life has a way of changing things, and the truth was, Jane had enjoyed killing the first time she’d done it. The act itself had been exciting. It had given her a sense of power she’d never experienced before and it didn’t take her long to understand why serial killers found murder addictive. The victims too had deserved it. One had been the loan shark she’d been forced to sleep with to help pay off her husband’s debts, a low-level gangster and a slimy piece of dirt called Frank Mellon. Another had been his bodyguard. And the third had been her husband himself, set up to make it look like he’d killed Mellon and the bodyguard in a fit of jealous rage.
Three dead men in one night. What had surprised Jane though was her lack of shock or remorse afterwards. And when you’ve killed once, it becomes easier every time. Some of her victims over the years had deserved their fate, but plenty hadn’t, and, as time passed and the bodies started piling up, she stopped giving any of them a second thought.
In fact, aside from a short period when she became interested in the study of psychopaths in an effort to ascertain if she was one or not (she wasn’t surprised when she scored very highly on the test), she spent very little time contemplating what she did for a career. She carried out the tasks she was paid to do, and moved on. It was one of the reasons why she was so good at it. Another was that she was a woman and therefore men never seemed to suspect her.
But now she’d failed to kill Ray Mason not once but twice. Admittedly he wasn’t supposed to have been there tonight but, even so, it ate at her confidence. She wasn’t going to be truly happy until he was dead.
She also had an added complication. Her partner on this job, Voorhess, a fellow South African killer she’d worked with several times before, and who was also her occasional lover, was hurt.
‘How bad is it?’ she asked as she helped him into the van’s passenger seat.
He’d taken a bullet to the shoulder and was pressing a kitchen towel they’d got from inside the house to the wound. ‘It hurts,’ he said through gritted teeth, ‘but it looks like it’s gone straight through. I know a doctor in London who can patch it up for the flight home.’
‘Let’s get over there now then,’ she said, taking a last look round. All three bodies were in the back of the van now and the house had been cleaned up so that it would be impossible to tell that anyone had been murdered there.
It was raining hard as Jane shut the van’s rear doors and ran round to the driver’s side, climbing inside and starting the engine.
‘What’s your doctor’s address?’
‘I need to check,’ said Voorhess, wincing with pain as he pulled out his phone.
Jane drove slowly forward and the front gates opened automatically. At the same time she brought her pistol up from down by her side and shot Voorhess in the side of the head, the bullet passing out through the open window.
He seemed to rock in his seat and she wondered whether she’d have to shoot him again. But then he toppled sideways against the passenger door, his head lolling out of the window. He was dead.
She yanked him back in and closed the window, contemplating putting him in the back of the van with the others but quickly dismissing the idea. He was too much of a dead weight, and he looked quite peaceful where he was, as if he was asleep, her .22 bullet having not left a lot of blood.
Her next port of call was a farm some forty miles away in rural Suffolk. It was run by a farmer with links to several London crime gangs who offered the occasionally indispensable service of getting rid of inconvenient corpses by feeding them to his pigs. Over the years the pigs had developed a real taste for human flesh and bones, and could be relied upon to leave nothing behind – except teeth, which were gathered up for the incinerator. Jane had got to hear about him through her own underworld contacts (she’d long ago discovered that the black market offered every kind of service imaginable), and had used his services twice before. Because of the risks involved, it wasn’t cheap. The farmer charged £10,000 a corpse and, although the client had covered the costs of the three people they’d been sent to kill, Jane was going to have to stump up ten grand of her own money to offload Voorhess. It was another reason to finish the job on Ray Mason.
Ten minutes later, when she was far enough away from the crime scene, she called the client again.
Alastair Sheridan answered on the third ring.
Jane didn’t usually know the names of her clients. That wasn’t how her business worked. She tended to operate through a middleman who acted as a necessary buffer between her and the person paying the bill, but Sheridan had come to her directly with an offer of a great deal of money. She’d done some work for a close associate of his, Cem Kalaman – he’d commissioned her to get rid of a troublesome witness the previous year – and Sheridan had been impressed enough to want her for this job. It didn’t surprise her that a politician would be involved in murder. It happened all the time, including in the supposedly enlightened democracies.
‘Is the deed done?’ asked Sheridan.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Mason got away.’
‘But you just told me you had him.’
‘He had armed help. We were ambushed, and he managed to escape. I was lucky not to get hurt myself. But what the hell was he doing there? I was contracted to take out three targets, which I did. You never said anything about Mason. My colleague died because of him.’
‘I didn’t expect him to be there either,’ said Sheridan. ‘Look, I’ll increase the pay by a hundred thousand dollars to compensate for this. It’ll be in your account by Monday morning.’
Jane didn’t like complicated jobs, as this one was becoming, but she did like money. ‘That’s suitable compensation,’ she said at last.
‘And I want Mason dead.’
‘That’ll cost you another hundred thousand. It’ll be a risky kill.’
‘I can go with that,’ said Sheridan reluctantly. ‘Did you get a look at the people helping him?’
‘There was only one of them and no, we never saw him. He was firing from behind a gate. Do you know who it could have been?’
There was a long silence down the other end of the line. ‘There’s only one person I can think of who would help him on something like this. Her name’s Tina Boyd. She’s Mason’s former lover, and she knows how to handle a gun.’
This was promising. ‘Do you want me to do anything about her?’
‘Nothing yet. Let me think, but remain on standby.’
He ended the call, and Jane put the phone away. She was suddenly feeling better. Another $200,000 would be a major boost to her retirement fund, and now she had a lead back to Mason.
Whatever happened, she was going to get him this time.