The Assassin King

‘Oh god. Okay.’ He took a breath then bit his teeth together. ‘So I guess it started about two or three years ago now. Your mate’s boss at the time was a guy called Colin Vaughn. Very highly rated, liked by everyone, and pretty much a shoo-in to run Lincolnshire’s Special Operations Unit when the old Chief Constable retired and everyone moved up a notch. So anyway I was working at the time on a story about this biker gang suspected of running much of Lincolnshire’s drug trade. I got tipped off to a country pub where a lot of deals apparently went down, so we set up there for some undercover filming. With me so far?’

‘It’s hardly War and Peace.’

‘This is still only chapter one, to be fair.’

The tractor turned finally into a field, only to reveal why it had been going quite so slowly, for a pair of novice cyclists were wobbling all over the road ahead, forcing Oliver to slow straight back down again, scowling impatiently.

‘You were telling me about Elias’s boss,’ prompted Anna.

‘Yes. Okay. So there we were, in this pub, and guess who shows up on our second night?’

‘This guy Vaughn, I assume?’

‘Yeah. He was out for dinner with his wife and another couple, so it all looked kosher enough. Only he went to the loos at the same time as one of the bikers. Then it happened again. You can hardly lock him up for that, right? But it made him worth checking out. Especially as there’d been rumours for years of some kind of mole inside Lincolnshire Police. Anyway, the harder we looked, the worse it got. He was forever popping in and out of bookies, for one thing. Not huge bets, but enough to make it clear he had a problem. Plus he’d been at school with a member of this gang. I filmed the two of them conferring together in the park one afternoon. Nothing definitive, but enough to mention it to my boss when he asked me for an update, and for him to pass on to our Chairman, who happened to be golfing buddies with the Chief Constable. Anyway, it’s a week or so later. News suddenly breaks that Vaughn’s house has been searched and ten grand in used notes has been found beneath his floorboards, along with a baggie of cocaine. So it’s handcuffs time for Mr Vaughn.’

‘Quite right too,’ said Anna.

‘He claimed in his trial that he’d been investigating this gang on the quiet precisely because there was a mole. He claimed that they must have realised this and so had set him up. The jury didn’t buy it, not least because of the evidence we were able to give the prosecution. The night of his conviction, we went large on the story. Our part in bringing down the bent cop. Then we all went out to the pub to celebrate. We’d already sunk a few when your mate comes steaming in. Marches up to our table and accuses me flat out of having framed an innocent man. And you know that thing that sometimes happens, when you’re chuffed with yourself over whatever, only to realise you’ve screwed up instead?’

‘God, yes,’ said Anna.

‘It was his anger that got to me. It was too righteous to be fake. So of course I got defensive. I said maybe he was only mad because he’d been on the take too. He invited me outside to discuss it further. I bottled it. Honest to god, the one time in my life. And not because I was scared, exactly. My heart just wasn’t in it. It isn’t, somehow, when you fear you’re in the wrong.’

‘Though I was a bit scared, to be fair. The bastard did box for England.’

Anna glanced at him in surprise. ‘He did?’

‘Come on. You don’t end up looking like a blue-period Picasso from too many frames of snooker. Anyway, word got out about our confrontation. Policemen can’t treat members of the public like that, at least not in front of a table full of journalists. I didn’t press charges, of course, but it still shredded his prospects. He was enough of an embarrassment to Lincolnshire police that they tried to get him to transfer out, but he dug his heels in. Fair enough. This is where his kids are.’

‘And his marriage? You wrecked that too?’

‘Oh god. This makes me look even worse, if possible. So it’s maybe a fortnight later. I’m in the supermarket, doing the weekly.’ They reached at last the turning for the hotel, headed down its gravelled drive to the fork into its car park, pulled up in an empty bay. ‘This woman comes up to me. Happens all the time when you’re on TV. You nod along to the nice things they say, thank them for watching, maybe pose for a selfie. Sometimes they’ll hit on you too. I’m usually pretty careful about that. Lincoln’s a small town, and I’ve already got a bit of a reputation, for some unaccountable reason. But this woman is sexy as hell, and she’s giving me the works. Fluttery big eyelashes, top buttons undone, pressing her chest against my arm. What can I tell you? I’m a bloke. A nice bit of cleavage and my brain turns to mush.’

‘Ah. Don’t tell me. Mrs Elias.’

‘As it turns out, yes. Not that I knew it at the time. She’d taken off her ring and she introduced herself by her maiden name. But obviously she knew who I was, and about my bust-up with her husband. Everyone did. It had been all over the local papers. She was just getting her own back on him.’

Oliver grimaced. ‘I want to be clear about this. I didn’t even know she was married to him at the time, let alone that they had kids.’

Anna nodded. ‘A girl and a boy.’

‘That’s the thing. There used to be two boys. Their eldest fell into the swimming pool while Elias was supposed to be watching him.’

‘Oh hell,’ said Anna.

‘Yeah. And this was soon enough afterwards that everything was still raw. Anyway, I didn’t learn that until much later. That afternoon, we went back to my place. We had fun. Enough that she took to visiting once or twice a week. She’d get her hair done and wear some sexy new outfit. It was pretty obvious in retrospect that she wanted him to find out. He is a detective, after all. Anyway, she got her wish. I walked her down to her car one afternoon only to find him waiting. There was quite the blow-up, as you can imagine. And he blamed me rather than her, accusing me of picking her up in revenge for him coming into my local that night and showing me up in front of my crew.’

‘You didn’t tell him the truth?’

‘Never had the chance, to be honest,’ said Oliver. ‘Anyway, my hands were hardly clean, were they? I knew something was up. There was such sadness in her. I was just enjoying myself too much to find out why. Plus frankly I was worried for her. You should have seen how angry he was. Better all round if he blamed me. Broken marriages are brutal enough already, especially on the kids.’

‘How noble of you.’

‘Yeah, sure. I’m a saint.’

A tall, thin, fifty-something blonde woman in a swirling blue skirt and a battered green Barbour jacket came striding by at that moment, before vanishing into the hotel. ‘Penny Scott,’ murmured Anna. ‘She and her husband own this place.’