A Last Act of Charity (Killing Sisters Book 1) (33 page)

‘Thank you for those kind words.’ Shard moved away from the body, reached into the jacket which lay behind it, discarded on the bed. ‘No phone.’ He returned to the corpse and eased his hand into each of its trouser pockets, with neither noticeable enthusiasm nor success. ‘Nothing.’

‘OK. That tells us something. We’re going now. Soon as you like. Take another look around first. Could he have hung the phone in the bathroom?’

‘Tells us what? Nothing in the bathroom bar the bath. He doesn’t even have a bag. Tells us what, exactly?’

‘The killer took the phone. He probably had two. Why take the phones?’

‘Same reason. Killer wants to see who the vic’s been calling. Maybe these are crimes of jealous passion and are connected only by strings of telephony. Maybe the answers are all in the phone bills.’

‘Do I pay you for your stellar sense of humour? The answer’s as likely to be written in the stars. Can we go yet?’ Stoner’s tone was mild still.

‘You don’t pay me at all. In fact, as you are presumably being paid a fortune for your ace detective skills, maybe we should sort some kind of deal?’

‘Not here, not now, and not with me, I think. We’re leaving through the fire escape.’

‘It will sound the alarm.’

‘Plod is already here, so unless you fancy several hours of tedious questioning, accusations of the most unpleasant kind and then a rescue by someone who I’d imagine will be very pissed off, I’d say that speed was better than subtlety right now.’

A door opened. An alarm sounded. Feet pounded. Stoner and Shard shaded through the darkness back to the Transporter. Where they sat in darkness, observing the arrival of constabulary and medical reinforcements.

‘Mate of yours, was he?’ Shard broke into Stoner’s brooding silence.

‘No. But he was a pleasant enough guy.’

‘For a cop.’

‘For anyone. Hang on.’ Stoner pulled out a phone, keyed a message, closed the phone again. Repeated the exercise identically with a second phone. He speed-dialled the third phone. Waited for pick-up and asked, ‘All quiet?’, then ‘OK.’ And he closed that phone too.

‘You do have a lot of phones. And they don’t light up. How do you do that?’

‘It’s a secret technique. You can find it on the internet, somewhere near the entries about How To Make Big Bombs and Distant Detonations For Beginners. Everything is on the internet. Even tonight’s corpse is on the internet. The internet is a wonderful thing. Even the fact that not of all its free facts are either free or
factual is a wonderful thing.’ He sighed. ‘Dave Reve was OK. He survived an earlier killing moment. He was honey-trapped in a much larger and much more pleasant hotel than this one. The killer – the woman I believe to be the killer – let him live. Sucked his brains out through his dick in a swimming pool, grabbed him in the nightmare killer grip of death and then . . . let him go.’

‘You’re getting poetic, Stoner. Nightmare grip of death? Idiot.’

‘Well, he was happily eating her out at the poolside, like you do, when she clamped her thighs around his ears, jammed his face against her snatch and . . . held his head under the water until he started breathing water. I know, it sounds deranged, but next time you find yourself with a loose woman and a spare moment, and you happen to be in a swimming pool, try it. He couldn’t get away, and blacked out.’

‘But she let him go?’

‘Evidently. Killed someone else in the hotel. Usual provisos; someone else in the hotel got snuffed, same MO as this.’

‘Why? Why did she let him go? And then why did she change her mind and kill him again?’

‘I do have a theory. It works for me so far, but it is just that, a theory.’

‘Do tell.’

‘Nope. Not yet. The problem with theories is when the guy whose theory it is believes it to be true. Then he fiddles the facts to fit the theory and the truth goes out the window. He tells his oppos his theory and they all fiddle the facts. That is the high-road to fuckedness, and I do not wish to take it. If theory firms up to fact . . . then I’ll tell you. Until then . . .’

‘Why are we waiting here? Nice to chat, of course, but while the plods rush around doing the flies around a corpse thing, we’re not going to make any progress.’

‘I’m waiting for the killer to leave.’

‘She left an hour ago in her own car. You let her go. Remember?’

‘If my theory is anything like correct, then she isn’t the killer.’

‘OK. A stunner blonde killer was too bad to be true, anyway.’

‘Not so. Just not that blonde. Not that particular blonde.’

‘Fuck. There’s more than one killer blonde? Be still my beating . . .’

‘Dunno. More than one woman involved here. My theory fits the facts. Snag is that there aren’t enough facts.’

‘Any sign of her leaving? Your mystery killer blonde, that is.’

‘I’d lay odds that she’s not blonde at the moment, and I’d lay more odds that she looks more like a man than you do . . . at the moment. I’m just watching. Going to sit here and do more of it. I’m in no rush. You’ve no need to stay.’

Shard pulled a cell phone from his pocket. Stoner reached out a hand, preventing him from opening it.

‘I don’t need the lights flashing, if that’s OK. Hop into the back; it’s out of sight back there.’

Which Shard did, returning with the announcement that he would be on his way, and after the usual slightly preoccupied pleasantries, he left.

Stoner sat. Waited and watched. It was a long night. Policemen and medical men came and went. Blue lights and red lights and white lights flashed and flickered. Eventually quiet returned. A lone watchman in a police uniform stood by the door of the hotel.

Dawn came. And turned slowly into day.

31

STEPPING OUT

Stoner ran. He left the Transporter after changing into the pretend athletic clothing which provided a cloak of invisibility on any urban street, left behind him all contact with the real world, and ran.

The streets were shifting from night life to daylight, and other runners and joggers, creatures of the transition, were his companions. A few drunks and no-hopers littered the doorways, very sound sleepers lay wrecked on benches. Stoner’s early morning mates varied from the agile and the mobile to the social flotsam which all parks attract and who are either ignored or invisible to the common man. Stoner ran past them all. He answered no greetings from the similarly attired morning athletes and he ran straight into and over and through any drunkard or beggar who blocked his path. They assumed that he’d not seen them, lost in the self-insulated world of the runner, but he saw them all, and he ran at them until they moved . . . or until he collided with them, at which point they were bumped out of his path or fell down with the shock of it all. Either way his path was soon always clear. Jungle law is universal, even when unwritten and unacknowledged.

The park had a series of formal tracks. Stoner ran a pattern in a rough figure of eight. Three laps in, maybe a mile, he was into his stride, his rhythm. The park had settled down to run its own event around his own private race for one. Other runners, joggers and walkers cultivated their airs of privacy by donning headsets of several kinds. Stoner occasionally wondered what – if anything – they listened to. He’d never seen the point in applying a layer of artificial sound over the constantly shifting backdrop provided by the city, by the park and by nature. He’d never understood how the achievements of a musician could best be appreciated by listening to them while concentrating on running, nor how the pleasures of a decent run could be improved by adding distraction. He ran steadily and without fuss; his thought processes attuned themselves to the pace of his running and while his organism handled all the physical side, the navigation, the length of stride and the level of effort, his mind powered away into its own semi-conscious world, where it thought, looked and listened, and then thought some more.

Guitar solos, musical moments, came to him as he ran, as did combinations of facts which, rearranged, presented previously unseen scenarios. What he had taken to be minor details reestablished themselves as pivotal moments, small errors revealed themselves as disasters in the raw; vague insights cleared themselves up into obvious facts while he ran. While he let his thoughts arrange themselves with as little conscious input as he could manage, his running took on a life of its own. The more tired his muscles, the more agile his thinking.

His senses likewise worked at their best when left alone. They often discerned patterns which he may have missed completely if he’d been looking for them. And they found breaks in the patterns around them, interruptions to the steady development of the waking day’s own rhythms. As the dawn light shifted from
glimmer and glow into light and bright, so the sounds of the city and the park within grew into their own maturity.

There was a car parked behind the Transporter. A family four-door saloon of refreshing anonymity. It was out of pattern. Stoner ran on. The Transporter was parked on a no-parking stretch of the road. Stoner was unbothered by parking fines, even by some remote threat of wheel-clamping or a tow-away. He carried enough identification, both legal, genuine and otherwise, to fear no minor minion of the parking police. Laws never applied to him when he was working, and when he was working for the government, as he was now, at least in a tenuous way, then if the government wished to penalise him for parking oddly while working, well, they could reimburse him later.

This was unlikely to be the case with the saloon parked behind the VW. Stoner ran on. He ran another set of three laps. Another mile. He was warmed through and completely comfortable. No one was running with him. No one ran at his pace; when he speeded or slowed, no other runner, jogger or walker shifted their pace to match. And as he completed his ninth lap, his third full mile, the running, jogging and walking population had changed completely; turnover was steady until the 08.30 migration moment, when runners transformed into office-dwellers, and after that came the 10.00 shift, non-workers, workers of unconventional hours. They mostly fit their own predictable patterns, and none of those patterns involved the illegal parking of a family saloon car in a no-parking spot.

After twelve laps, a notional four miles, Stoner looped away from his park centre track and ran the perimeter. The saloon car was empty. The driver sat relaxed and apparently dreaming on a park bench nearby. She sat facing the traffic, not watching Stoner. That amused him. Had he been under observation, he would have sensed it, of that he was certain. He ran to the bench,
approaching it from behind, and sat down, pulling off the tracksuit’s top half as he did so.

‘Apologies for the smell,’ he remarked. ‘It’s going to be warm today.’

Charity maintained her level stare into the motorised middle distance for maybe a half minute. ‘It could get too hot. But only if we allow it.’

‘You’ll get a ticket.’ Stoner the ever-helpful was playing at being helpful.

‘Got one. Get another any minute now.’

‘Do you want to relocate? Breakfast?’

‘This is taking cool to an impressive extreme, Mr Stoner. A friend of yours died last night, and you’re inviting a lady you consider to be involved in that death out for breakfast. Impressive.’

‘Running always gives me thinking room. I like running. Do you run?’ Stoner paralleled her gaze, they watched the flow of traffic together.

Finally: ‘No. I train. In a gym. I don’t run. I swim as often as I can for as far as I can.’

‘In a pool? In a lake? Rivers? The seas?’ Stoner sounded sincere and serious. He and Charity maintained their parallel gazes into and across the endlessly unfolding street scene. Not once did they look at each other. Not yet.

‘Anywhere. Anywhere outside. Do you just run? Running always seems so one-dimensional compared to swimming. Sometimes when I swim I dream I can fly.’

‘That’s a quote. Who said that?’

‘Is it? No idea. It’s true, though. When you run, and I know you run a lot, Mr Stoner, you just pound your feet down. They always carry your weight. You are always planted on the ground. Panting. Sweating. When I swim I am weightless. I can let go. I can drift. I can dream of flight. I can dream of drowning.’

‘Do you? Dream of drowning?’

‘Of course I do. You of all people do not need to ask me of all people that question, Mr Stoner.’

‘You swim to escape, then.’ Not really a question.

‘You run to hide, Mr Stoner.’ Not really an answer.

‘No. I run because I like running and because I like the opportunity it gives me to think. I rarely hide. There is rarely anything to gain in hiding.’

‘Confrontation is your way, Mr Stoner. I know that. I respect that. It’s one reason I am sitting here collecting parking tickets rather than leading you by the nose in a more subtle way. Dealing with your friend Mr Harding is less . . . direct. Also less stressful. Maybe.’

‘Why the formality? A chap could get tired of this “Mr Stoner” nonsense pretty quickly. I think you know me well enough to use my given name. And why in any case are you dealing with me directly? Aren’t I supposed to be hunting you?’

‘You made little effort to hunt me, Jean-Jacques. Very little effort. I was surprised by that. It made me think. Although, truth be told, it’s not actually me you’re hunting. It’s ain’t me you’re looking for.’

‘Babe. That is a quote. I play the damn song sometimes. Dylan. I prefer JJ. And as I said, one reason I enjoy running is that when I run I can think. I find that I think my best when I run. And while I was running I understood that although I consider you to be my opponent in this mucky, filthy business, you don’t see me in the same light. Which is why I’ve sat here like a civilised chap and why you’re sat here like a civilised lady, and neither of us is attempting to kill the other.

‘You have a sister.’ A statement, not a question.

‘I have two sisters. You’ve met one of them, although I don’t think you would recognise her – we’re not much alike – and you’re looking for the other. When you find her I think you’ll kill
her. If you don’t, then I think your Mr Harding will do it. He may not have told you this, of course.’

‘If your sister is the person behind all this utter shit with the chopped-off heads and the insane online movies, then she has no reason to be left alive. But she wants stopping, not killing. My instructions are to find her, not to kill her.’

‘Are you sure about that? My understanding is that your job is to find her and kill her.’

‘No. Just the former. Are you really called Charity?’

‘Yes. My sister is Chastity. She was well named.’

‘Really? She would have been better named Psycho, surely? Maybe Chopper, if you crave the alliteration.’

‘She struggles with herself sometimes. But we all do that, don’t we, JJ?’

‘Why is she killing all these guys? I mean . . . accountants? And why are you talking to me? Don’t you worry that I’ll lock you up and use you as a bargaining tool to collect your sister? That would appear to be a sensible course of action.’

‘I’m not worried about that at all, Mr Stoner. You have nothing to gain from that. Trailing me as bait won’t have any effect on Chastity. Other than more killing. And if she felt that you were attacking me, she’d attack you.’

‘Of course she would. That’s the whole point of a hostage. To provoke a response, an attack. Or something like that.’

‘She’s not stupid, Mr Stoner. She may be increasingly insane, but she has never been stupid. And she is killing because she has . . . we have . . . a contract to fulfil.’

‘It’s a joint effort? Both of you are involved?’

‘All three of us, in fact.’

‘Oh for fuck’s sake.’ Stoner stood. ‘This is a pig of a thing. Can we at least have some breakfast if it’s going to go on for much longer?’

He walked towards her car, collected two parking tickets from its screen, along with a couple of his own.

‘I’ll deal with these.’

Charity smiled sadly at him.

‘No need. The car doesn’t exist. Follow me. Let’s do brunch. Or something.’ She climbed in and fired up the saloon, pulled into the mid-morning traffic. Stoner sprinted to the Transporter, fired up and followed.

‘The contract is simple. It’s open-ended. We have a target list. Exactly like you followed when you were operating yourself.’

‘Operating. A great word.’ Stoner leaned back in the coffee shop’s least comfy chair and reached for his cup. ‘Does the contract specify the butchery? The stupid fucking video? And why are you talking to me anyway?’

‘The original target was an accountant. We didn’t know that; I’ve only learned it by following your investigation.’

Stoner’s cup halted halfway to his lips.

‘You’re following the investigation?’

‘Which should tell you something. Something more than I’d be prepared to confirm, so don’t ask about it. The original contract was simple, and specified that the method should be distinctive. It left finer details up to the operator. She . . . and I’m unsure how and why she decided this . . . made the job so messy and so . . . apparently unprofessional and psychotic that it was bound to attract attention from more specialist agencies than the regular police. That worked, and although the police have been involved all along in parallel to other investigations, your own included, their role has been restricted.’

Stoner attempted to speak.

‘This would be easier if you let me say what I can say, JJ. This needs to be resolved. I can’t take questions and you do need to understand that Chas knows I’m talking to you. She is very good.
Her tradecraft, her streetcraft . . . when she works she’s pretty much unstoppable. But she needs to be stopped.’

‘One hundred per cent agreement on that. Tell me the where and the when and I’ll take her down. Or send others to take her alive. If she’s as good as you say I might be unable to do that myself. Seriously.’

‘There are two more jobs.’

‘Fucking heavens, there’ll be no accountants left! Forgive my levity. This is the twenty-first century; we have a billion spare accountants. Who cares about a few more or a few less?’

‘I don’t think the contract is actually about accountants.’ Charity paused. ‘The longer you do this job, the harder it gets to keep your interest to a minimum. You start to wonder why you’re being contracted to kill people. You shouldn’t. By becoming involved it’s inevitable that you’re going to learn too much about the business of those who you’ve been contracted to kill. And by association you learn the business of those you’ve been employed by. That sort of knowledge is never a good thing to carry around. It is in fact a burden.’

Stoner nodded. Moved the crockery around on their table, no recognisable pattern emerged. No tea-leaves revealed themselves. No enlightenment resulted.

‘It’s why operators like you move into investigation, Mr Stoner. JJ. Otherwise you get too knowledgeable and unless you also understand that knowledge is not power – knowledge is a liability in many circumstances – that knowledge, the stuff you accumulate when you start working out why you’re sanctioning who you’re sanctioning, that knowledge is usually fatal. And in case you’re wondering, I’m telling you this because I want you to help me.’

‘Very kind. Why would I do that?’

‘I think you’ll die if you don’t.’

‘Is that intended as an incentive? A negotiating position? It’s
a little clumsy. Threats usually don’t work. I am a man who is convinced of the merits of direct action whenever I feel threatened. I have been known to become almost violent at times. So they say.’ Stoner stared from the window. The café’s car park contained cars. The number and variety changed. He saw no pattern. He stared from the window at the cars simply because that was something to do with his eyes which was other than staring at his companion.