Assassin (2 page)

Within a week, the church, and all it contained, was rubble.

Tuesday, 3 September

It looked like a battlefield.

Thick clouds of dust and smoke rolled like banks of noxious fog across a landscape of devastation. The thunderous roar of collapsing buildings was punctuated occasionally by the sound of explosions and the ever present rattling of caterpillar tracks.

But this was no war. It was organised destruction. Not the hectic random obliteration which comes with conflict but a carefully contrived scheme, plotted and planned by experts and now executed not by an army of uniformed men but of civilians.

There had been three tower blocks on the East End development originally known as Langley Towers. Three blocks designed to house up to a thousand people - they had intruded onto London's skyline like so many before them, jabbing towards the heavens like accusatory fingers. Around them shops had been built, even a youth club, but the residents of the blocks had been more concerned with the structural faults in the buildings than with how to occupy their leisure time. Countless complaints of cracks appearing in walls had flooded into the local council offices, some within less than a month of the blocks being occupied but, as is their way, the civil servants had seen fit to ignore the complaints.

When the stairwell in the second of the blocks had finally collapsed, five people had died.

No one knew how it happened. The builders didn't know. The architects were baffled. The complaints which had been filed were relocated to avoid embarrassment.

The decision had been made there and then to re-house the residents and demolish the blocks. Besides, those who owned the land had seen the sense of selling off the acreage for development.

Hence the arrival of the demolition men.

JCB's and other vehicles battled over and through the tons of fallen concrete and steel, like vast metal dinosaurs over some surreal new world. Men in yellow overalls swarmed over the ruins like termites - only their business was destruction not construction. Others watched from a distance as the tower blocks were brought down, men in white overalls untouched by the dirt and grime of this devastation they had engineered.

The ball of the crane swung into the side of one of the buildings smashing through the stone as if it had been balsa wood. As the metal ball swung back it carried fragments of the tower's interior, pieces of girder which hung from it like metallic intestines.

There was a loud explosion as one of the men clad in a white overall pressed a button on the console he held. Bricks were sent flying by the force of the blast and the third of the blocks fell like a house of cards, several hundred tons of concrete and steel crashing to the ground, adding to the piles of debris which already rose into the air like eroded cliffs.

The smaller buildings such as the youth dub, the supermarket and one or two of the other shops which had once served the residents of these vertical housing estates were still intact as yet. Their windows were smashed, their insides gutted, but their exteriors remained untouched by the ferocious attentions of the men and machines whose only function was to eradicate these final testaments to the. stupidity of modern architecture. It had cost more than fifty million pounds to erect the trio of blocks two years earlier. More than one man on the site thought that it would have made as much sense to merely shovel the money into a furnace. The blocks had been built too quickly, too many comers had been cut but it had taken the loss of five lives to demonstrate such niceties as architectural inadequacies. Still, five lives were small change in the world of property speculation.

And how grand were the replacement buildings to be? Fine new houses, fit for anyone to live in. Provided they had an income in excess of half a million a year. The East End was being cut up, split down the middle between the poor and the rich, the `haves' and the `haven't got a hopes'. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer.

And more resentful.

A bulldozer moved effortlessly across the uneven terrain, pushing a huge mound of debris ahead of it, its tracks scraping the very foundations of the first block.

The foundations had been laid deep but even they had been laid bare by the strategically placed explosives planted by the men in white.

Smoke and dust mingled with the clouds of bluish fumes which belched from the exhaust of the bulldozer as it tumbled past.

Half a dozen mechanical diggers drove their buckets into the shattered remains of the buildings, lifting tons of brick into the backs of waiting lorries.

The massive iron ball on the crane continued to swing back and forth.

The destruction continued.

No one saw the hand.

It protruded from the cracked concrete foundations of the first block, mottled green in places, caked in dust and dirt.

And as the ground shook the concrete cracked open even more widely.

The arm attached to the hand appeared. Slowly at first.

No one noticed.

Just as no one noticed when the fingers on that hand flexed once then balled into a fist.

PART ONE

`Where Lie your greatest dangers? - In pity.'

                                                               Nietzsche

`All hell's breaking loose,

In the streets there's a brand new way ...'

                                                           Kiss

The gavel banged down hard, the sound reverberating around the panelled walls of the Old Bailey's Number One court.

There was only a brief pause in the frantic babblings – so Lord Justice Valentine gripped the wooden mallet more tightly and brought it crashing down repeatedly, continuing even after the murmurings had finally died away.

The judge glared reproachfully around him, his eyes flicking from the witness box to the public gallery then to the barristers and clerks who were gathered before him like bewigged undertakers.

During his thirty-three years as a High Court judge, Valentine had presided over many trials but none that he could remember had generated public and media interest to match that over which he now presided. Members of the public had been warned beforehand by the media that the facts of the case were particularly repellant. That simple statement alone had been enough to ensure that the public gallery was full every day and, so far, the trial had reached its third day. Valentine flicked at his plaited wig and exhaled deeply, anticipating another outburst shortly. The evidence which had sparked the last bout of indignant chattering was to be repeated.

`If there are any more disturbances I will have no choice but to clear the court,' said the judge before looking towards the tall, thin-faced QC before him and nodding. 'You may continue Mr Briggs.'

Thomas Briggs nodded curtly and stepped towards the witness box, his robes flowing behind him like the black wings of a huge carrion crow.

The occupant of the box regarded him impassively through eyes which resembled chips of sapphire, unblinking and quite relentless in their appraisal of him.

The counsel for the prosecution glanced down at his notes then looked directly at the defendant.

'Did you know that Mrs Donaldson was still alive when you cut off her breasts?'

The words came out flatly with no inflection, and were all the more chilling because of that.

Again a babble of conversation began to grow but the judge silenced it with three sharp blows of the gavel.

'Did you know?' Briggs repeated, leaning on the edge of the witness box.

'I knew,' said Jonathan Crawford, indifferently. 'She started screaming when I cut her.'

'And yet you continued until you had severed both breasts?' said Briggs, now turning away from Crawford for a moment.

'Yes.'

Again the beginnings of a murmur.

Again the sharp report of the gavel.

Silence descended once more like a heavy blanket, with only the voices of the prosecutor and the defendant cutting through the oppressive stillness.

'Why did you choose this particular form of mutilation? Mrs Donaldson had already been stabbed,' he hesitated, consulting his notes again. 'She'd already been stabbed sixteen times to be exact. Wasn't that enough?'

'She had children,' Crawford began. 'Rich brats to suck at rich tits.' He chuckled.

'But you had already killed the children too,' rasped Briggs, his face darkening. He was finding it increasingly difficult to apply his usual detached professionalism to this case. Crawford was almost intolerably arrogant and that attitude was beginning to unsettle even the QC.

'We killed the kids first to shut them up,' Crawford told him. 'You know how noisy kids can be.'

There was a note of condescension in his voice which the prosecutor wasn't slow to pick up.

'You entered the bedroom of the Donaldson children,'

Briggs began, raising his voice, walking towards the jury.

'Where Melissa and Felicity, aged four and two respectively, were sleeping.' The QC pulled a number of black and white photos from a manila file and handed them to the foreman of the jury. 'What did you do then?'

'We killed them.'

'You killed them,' Briggs repeated, the knot of muscles at the side of his jaw pulsing. 'But fast you cut out Melissa's tongue and removed Felicity's eyes with a kitchen knife, correct?'

'Oh Jesus,' the groan came from somewhere at the back of the court.

'Correct?' snarled Briggs, rounding on the defendant.

'See no evil, speak no evil,' said Crawford, smiling.

'Answer the question,' Justice Valentine said, scribbling something in his notes.

'Yes, we killed them; said Crawford, brushing his long hair from his collar. 'Just like we killed the other fucking parasites.'

'By parasites I gather you refer to the other people who you stand accused of murdering?'

'The rich bastards, yes. How many do you think have died to make them
their
millions?'

'The Donaldson family were scarcely millionaires. Mr Donaldson owned a small factory complex in Woolwich.'

'From little acorns,' said Crawford, softly.

'So, that was sufficient reason to butcher Mrs Donaldson and her two children? I suppose we should be thankful that Mr Donaldson escaped this bloodbath.' The QC turned to the judge. 'The prosecution will not be calling Mr Donaldson as a witness M'Lord. He is under sedation at the moment.'

Valentine nodded.

'Why did you pick out the Donaldson family?' Briggs continued, turning his attention back to Crawford.

'They had money,' the younger man replied. 'We had to start somewhere.' Again that smile hovered on his lips.

'By "We" I gather you refer to the others who helped you in these murders?'

'There are others apart from me, yes.'

'But you chose to appoint yourself leader to fight this ..."class war" as you call it?' Again the QC raised his voice. 'You declared war on the rich, on, as you call them, "the enemies of the state". Is that correct?'

'We are fighting a class war, yes, but I didn't appoint myself as leader. I was chosen.'

Because of your natural charisma and organisational abilities presumably?' hissed Briggs, unable to control the sarcasm in his voice.

'Very possibly,' Crawford said, smiling.

'And this ... war against the rich, it was to consist of a series of brutal murders of men, women
and
children whose only crime, in your eyes, was that they were fortunate enough to have enough money to live comfortably. Perhaps how you would secretly like to five yourself, Mr Crawford?'

'They were killed because they were parasites. They made their money by exploiting ordinary people. People who had no way of striking back at them.'

'Oh I see,' Briggs exclaimed, tapping his forehead. 'You undertook the role of avenging angel, you and your followers decided to act as executioners on behalf of all those not as fortunate as Mrs Donaldson. Mrs Donaldson who had begged for the lives of her children. Who had begged that her own life be spared but who ended up like this.' Briggs roared the last sentence and slammed a black and white photo of the dead woman down on the witness box in front of Crawford.

The younger man took the photo and glanced at it, raising his eyebrows.

'It's not a very good likeness of her,' he said, pushing the photo back towards the QC. It fell from the side of the witness box and lay on the floor.

The silence was broken by that insistent burbling of voices which was again stilled by the gavel.

At the back of the room Detective Inspector Peter Thorpe nudged his companion and nodded in the direction of the door which led out of the court.

Detective Sergeant Vic Riley got to his feet and the two men slipped out of the court.

In the corridor outside, Thorpe pulled a packet of Rothmans from his jacket pocket and offered one to Riley who accepted, fumbling for his matches when Thorpe's lighter refused to work.

The two men sucked hard on their cigarettes, Riley leaning against the wall. At thirty-seven, the DS was three years younger than his superior although it was he who had smudges of grey in his hair.

'Class war my arse,' said Thorpe. 'The bloke's a fucking headcase.'

'Yeah, him and his followers. Whoever the hell they are, murmured Riley.

'Probably more like the two we've already got locked up,' said Thorpe, taking another hard drag on the cigarette.

'Christ, this bastard Crawford is going to take some cracking.'

'There's no doubt that he'll be sent down, guv,' Riley said.