Killing With Confidence

To Amanda,
for always believing in me and

Andrew and
Brooke for making it all worthwhile.

My mum, for
raising my brother Sean and I on her own and

my beloved
colleague Yvonne, for all her assistance.

This book is
in memory of Danny Brown, my first, and best editor, mentor and
friend.

Osiris
 – one of the most important gods of ancient
Egypt. The origin of Osiris is obscure; he was a local god of
Busiris in Lower Egypt and may have been a personification of
chthonic (underworld) fertility, or possibly a deified hero. By
about 2,400
BC
, however, Osiris clearly
played a double role: he was both a god of fertility and the
embodiment of the dead and the resurrected …

Osiris

Growing up
in the post-war shipping port of Hull in England’s North East had
been tough. Being called Osiris made it even tougher. Osiris
Vincent Vance endured ridicule and exclusion from his first day at
school. Even his primary teacher had mocked his unusual name, to
the squeals of delight from the rest of the class.

From that moment on
Osiris was an outsider. In later years he changed his name to
Vinnie, but it made little difference. He would always be Osiris in
Hull.

He was named after an
entry his mum Veronica had found in the
Encyclopaedia
Britannica
, which she had unsuccessfully tried to sell on
almost every doorstep around the historical city.

She’d been heavily
pregnant at the time and lugging those impossibly heavy books had
left her with ugly-looking varicose veins covering her legs. She
was just nineteen years old.

Her first and only
lover had been a merchant seaman, who promised her the earth, then
disappeared as soon as her waist began to thicken. He’d known she
was pregnant long before the naïve teenager did.

Veronica’s parents
ordered an abortion. They knew someone who performed them. Not a
doctor, of course. It was 1947, the year before the National Health
Service had been formed, and they could afford neither his fee nor
the shame it would bring on the family.

The abortion had been
bloody, painful, and as it turned out unsuccessful. Her belly
continued to grow. As Veronica spent weeks recovering from the
botched procedure, she read the encyclopaedias. She didn’t
understand many of the big words or explanations. But one entry
leapt out: 
Osiris 
…
both a god of fertility and
the embodiment of the dead and resurrected
.

‘That’s him alright.’
She knew it was a boy. A boy whose life they had tried to take. But
he had survived, resurrected from the dead. This baby was going to
be born no matter what and he would leave his mark on this world,
of that she was certain.

1

Black & Blue

April
Lavender wiped her mouth clean of the flour dust from her morning
sausage roll, sprinkled with a liberal helping of salt and
smothered in brown sauce. At lunchtime she would return for a
cheese and ham roll washed down with whatever soup the Peccadillo
café had to offer, which she also routinely salted before tasting.
She couldn’t get her head round this new low salt way of thinking.
She knew of some younger colleagues who didn’t even take salt on
their chips. ‘How could anyone eat chips without salt?’ she
muttered a little too loudly to herself, earning a sideways glance
from a taxi driver at a neighbouring table.

No, April was too old
to change her ways at fifty-six. She loved salt on her food and had
the high blood pressure to prove it. Anyway she’d given up trying
to be healthy since modern science seemed determined to take away
everything she enjoyed. Recently it had reported that bacon
shouldn’t be eaten at all and any alcohol shortened your life
dramatically. If that was the case it was a wonder she was still
breathing.

At least April had
managed to quit one vice, smoking, after the birth of her first
grandchild last year – spurred on by the cruel ultimatum from
her daughter that the baby wouldn’t be allowed to stay over unless
Granny stopped her forty-a-day habit.

‘The cheek of her,’
April mumbled, ‘I have to stop smoking so she can get a
babysitter.’

The taxi driver
shifted uncomfortably in his seat before deciding to pay up and
leave in case April tried to strike up a conversation with someone
other than herself.

Unfortunately, since
the fags had gone April had piled on the weight. Nothing fitted any
more. Last week she had to suffer the indignity of her blouse
button pinging off and landing on a colleague’s desk, to much
hilarity around the office. Her humiliation was complete when she
was forced to cover up her decency by stapling her shirt back
together.

It hadn’t always been
this way. Back in her teens she’d been a real looker. Long blonde
hair – not the harsh dye job it was now to cover the
grey – shapely legs and a pert bust that sent the fellas
wild.

She had settled down
with a tall, charming, handsome man, who soon turned into a
pot-bellied pig. They stumbled on for five years, producing two
children, before she finally had enough, left him and moved back in
with her folks. The next few years had been tough. Her ex had
refused to pay a penny for the kids. ‘How do these buggers expect
their children to survive?’ she’d often say to anyone who’d listen.
Conditions were cramped beyond belief in her ageing parents’ tiny
bungalow.

April was also what
was termed an ‘unskilled worker’. But after a secretarial night
class, she got a job on a local paper, the
Weekly Extra
,
based on the Southside of Glasgow. She was the editor’s secretary
and loved it. She could never understand why secretaries all wanted
to be called personal assistants these days. She’d been proud of
her title.

April loved the paper
and in particular loved speaking to readers. Even if they called
with a complaint she could usually soothe them over without having
to bother the boss. People trusted her. They would tell her things
that even merited reports in the paper. April hated handing these
tips over to the surly journalists, who were more interested in
filing their expenses – the most inventive work they produced
all week – than filing copy for the paper. They usually made a
pig’s ear of the stories, anyway, especially if there was a human
interest angle rather than just the formulaic court reporting.

One day April
convinced her editor to allow her to write a story of her own. The
reporters were outraged and complained to the National Union of
Journalists. It was the early 1980s and the whole country was
gripped by the miners’ strike and recession. It seemed as if every
affiliated union was just itching to join in – including the
three reporters at the
Extra
who were determined to keep a
closed shop. They only backed down when the editor promised that
his secretary wouldn’t be paid for her work and it would appear
under the by-line of ‘April Lavender – guest writer’.

That seemed to
placate them for a while. The truth is, April didn’t care about the
journalists’ sensitivities. She knew she had that all-important
foot in the door. Every week her articles would appear, taking up
more and more space and shoving stories by the ‘proper’ journalists
into the margins. They resented her, especially when the postbag
was full of mail addressed to April. But their resentment turned to
outright hatred when five years later she leapfrogged them all to
land the post of editor.

Editor. Pride coursed
through her body every morning when she read that sign on her
office door. The money was okay, but it was the prestige she adored
more. She was a pillar of the local community. Just a year later
she made another leap, into the nationals, tripling her meagre
wage. She had been with the
Daily Herald
now for nearly
twenty years. But the energy and ambition that had once driven her
out of a doomed marriage and perpetual poverty was fading.

April had a new boss
who didn’t like her. The Weasel was always sending her copy back to
be rewritten. That had never happened to her before – in the
local newspaper days she had been the one who sent articles back to
be redone. And today she’d learned of a new humiliation. She was
being shunted sideways, from women’s editor to the newly created
Special Investigations desk.

The problem was that
her newspaper spent little time and resources on proper
investigations now. It was the same throughout the industry. Even
the world famous
Sunday Times
Insight team had been
disbanded. And she would still have to report to the Weasel. Why
didn’t they just say what it really was? One foot out the door.

EU laws made it so
much more difficult for employers to get rid of their workforce
these days. But give someone a new job then three months later tell
them it wasn’t working out and they could still boot you onto the
street.

Yip, three months was
all she reckoned she had left. Then what? She still had a crippling
mortgage, car and all the other bills to pay. She needed that
salary, especially since there was only one income now after her
third marriage collapsed during one almighty row last Christmas.
April felt depressed. She was in desperate need of some comfort
food and asked the waitress to add a bacon roll to her bill as
well.

Half an hour late
April tottered in her high heels towards the office. New day, new
desk, new colleague, new career. ‘Who am I kidding?’ thought April.
‘More like the end of an old one.’

A wave of dread swept
over April as she thought, ‘There’s no place for an old hack like
me any more.’ She stared at the ground and noticed something wasn’t
quite right. ‘Oh, great, odd shoes.’ Sure enough, her footwear was
identical in style, but very different shades. April waddled slowly
to the entrance of her work full of misery. What a state she was
in.

And she had a point,
what with her peroxide blonde hair blowing in the wind, an ample
behind swinging from side to side and her bust straining at her
blouse. But it was her shoes that would have caught the attention
of a more observant passer-by. In the daylight one was black, the
other clearly blue.

2

The Motivator

Osiris used
to be sloppy when it came to his nocturnal activities, as he now
thought of them.

He’d nearly been
captured several times, usually because he was blind drunk when he
did what he liked to do with prostitutes. Once he was caught
literally red-handed – hands dripping in blood from a hooker
he’d just strangled to death. The problem was she’d haemorrhaged
from both her nose and mouth, sending great spurts of the stuff all
over his arms, face and body. Her screams had alerted a neighbour,
who broke down the door, and Osiris had only escaped by leaping
head first through the first-floor window. He still bore a
three-inch scar running along his hairline from the shattered
window-pane.

That had been a long
time ago in Gateshead, but he’d got markedly better at his
nocturnal activities after becoming addicted to self-help tapes.
They were marvellous motivators: how to be better at what you do,
how to feel good about yourself, how to plan your steps then set
about achieving every one of your goals. Most of all they gave him
the confidence he had lacked all his life. They had added a degree
of professionalism to his work, turning him from a violent, drunken
murderer into a cold-blooded killer.

Now he could
appreciate and savour every moment of the kill, instead of waking
up the next day with a sore head and covered in whores’ blood. Yes,
these self-help tapes, and later CDs, had transformed his life,
making him examine himself, his very foundations, to truly
understand what made him tick.