The Killing Club (17 page)

Other intruders, meanwhile, piled past into the dining room.

The once-ornate chamber had been reduced to a heap of smouldering trash. The encircling shelves and sideboards, and their assorted ornaments had all been demolished. The fine wallpaper hung in blackened shreds, daubed with blood as well as claret. The dining table lay burned and blasted, as did the handsomely carved chairs formerly arranged around it, not to mention those who had been seated in them.

Ronald Po was the first of these to be found. He was still alive. He even managed to rise to his knees as the intruders milled in around him. But he was badly bloodied, a spear of bone protruding from his twisted right arm. He was also agog with shock. He tried to speak to them, as if they were here to help him – but only nonsense spilled from his mouth, along with globs of reddish foam.

‘Ronald Po?’ a muffled American voice enquired.

Ronald, dazed enough to think they were speaking to him, nodded dully.

‘That’s him!’ came a Euro-accented response.

‘Welcome to the wages of sin, Doctor Po,’ the American said.

Still unable to comprehend what was happening, Ronald barely flinched as they grabbed him by his besmirched collar and yanked him to his feet. Only now did he seem able to focus on the rest of the smoke- and wreckage-filled room.

Directly alongside him, Tim Willoughby writhed on the floor, his face a blistered pulp, both hands clutched on his jaggedly severed windpipe. By the arcing arterial blood, he was certain to die soon, but a Madsen LAR was emptied into him to speed things along. The same fate befell Ross and Sally Hardcastle, though both looked to be dead already. They sat side-by-side on the floor, against the right-hand wall, which they’d been flung into with back-breaking force. Their shoulders drooped, their heads hung down. A fork had penetrated Ross’s left cheek and jutted at a grotesque angle; a shattered segment of PVC was embedded in his capacious belly. Sally bore less obvious fatal wounds, though she streamed blood from both her eyes and her nose. Repeated discharges from a pump-action shotgun ensured there was no doubt in either case.

‘We need the other!’ the accented voice bellowed.
‘Find Trevelyan!’

But the next survivor they uncovered was Trudy Willoughby, huddled underneath the table. Though incoherent with terror, she was largely unscathed. She’d taken her lead from Doctor Trevelyan, who, on first seeing the grenade, had reacted more quickly than anyone else. Perhaps, maybe – just maybe – he had been expecting something like this? He’d ducked beneath the table, and Trudy had done the same. The table, a tough slab of mahogany, had then taken huge damage, but had still provided enough of a shield for the duo to survive.

‘Hah!’ laughed the intruder who hauled Trudy out by her long, red hair. He was the size and shape of a Russian bear, with an accent to match. He threw his Borz submachine gun over his shoulder, and ungloved a big, dirty paw, with which he mauled the fulsome breasts beneath her smoke-stained evening gown. ‘The last time I see a face so pretty, I drive a steam-roller over it! Happy days in the Balkans, uh!’

‘Sergei … no fucking around!’ the Euro voice commanded.

‘Ach … sorry babe,’ the Russian said, before wrapping his brawny left arm around Trudy’s head, then twisting and jerking it sideways, her neck snapping like a branch.

Only now did Ronald Po scream, which merited him a punch in the stomach and a dizzying blow to the back of his skull.

‘Find Trevelyan!’
the Euro voice roared.

Booted feet stomped all over the handsome house. Cupboard doors were kicked in. Shots were discharged through curtains and pillows, underneath beds, into the backs of closets. But it was the Russian who got lucky. He barged through a door from the dining room into a rear annexe; a beautiful, moonlit conservatory filled with exotic plants and wicker furniture, and immediately sensed movement – only a few feet away, he detected a ragged, white-haired figure cowering behind a wrought-iron stand filled with orchids. Laughing, he hauled Trevelyan out.

The good doctor struck desperately with his fist. His captor retaliated by viciously and repeatedly head-butting him. Other intruders appeared in the conservatory door, the limp, bloodied form of Ronald Po still tight in their grasp. A tall figure in dark khaki and a woollen balaclava shouldered his way through.

‘No more playtime,’ he instructed curtly, and his was the voice with the Euro accent.

The Russian kicked the figure of Trevelyan – now badly cut around the face – away from him. Ronald Po was pushed across the conservatory as well, so that for several seconds the bedraggled twosome stood together.

‘We’ve been looking for you fellas,’ their chief captor said with faux-cheerfulness.

Even in his shell-shocked state, Ronald found himself wondering about the guy’s nationality. German maybe? Swiss? Scandinavian?

‘Maybe you’ve been expecting us,’ the guy said. ‘Maybe you weren’t. I bet when you heard the big boss was loose and a load of cops dead, you started shitting your pants … wondered how it would work out, yeah? Like, would the case get blown wide open again, would the trail lead back to you this time? Well … perhaps it would, perhaps it wouldn’t. You understand … we can’t take that chance.’

‘They’ll get you,’ Trevelyan said, at first querulous but his nerve tautening as the inevitability of his fate grew on him. Angry blood frothed between his shredded lips. ‘You think this will save you? Don’t be too sure. You can’t go around committing crimes like this …’

‘Could be worse,’ the Russian chuckled. ‘We could be rapists.’

‘You fucking moron!’ Trevelyan spat. ‘They’ll catch you. They’ll put you somewhere that’ll make your gulags look like kindergarten …’

‘Sergei,’ the chief captor said, tiring of the conversation.

The Russian unslung the Borz from his shoulder and emptied its entire magazine, catapulting the two doctors back across the conservatory with such velocity they exploded out through a twinned pair of double-glazed windows, and landed side-by-side on the rear patio.

Their task complete, the eight intruders filed back out via the front of the house, where a dark, nondescript van was waiting at the bottom of the drive, blocking in all the other cars, which would now never be driven away again by their rightful owners.

They had reloaded their weapons on the off-chance there’d be someone around; a late-arrival at the party perhaps; a villager enjoying an evening stroll. But the surrounding farmland lay still and quiet. The country lane was empty of traffic, basking in the silver radiance of the new-risen moon.

Chapter 14

Heck was headed through Clerkenwell when he heard the news.

He was en route to a rendezvous with Detective Constables Reynolds and Grimshaw at Stoke Newington police station. Both officers had been busy until late evening, but were still keen to speak to him about the series of face-slashings they were investigating, so he gunned his Citroën along Old Street, speeding through the darkened streets. ‘There’s an appalling news story breaking,’ the DJ said, interrupting his late-night music show in an uncharacteristically solemn tone. ‘Reports are coming in about a mass shooting in a village just outside Oxford. Details seem sketchy at the moment, but witnesses have apparently reported hundreds of rounds fired and a
considerable
number of casualties. It’s not known whether there are any fatalities, but the epicentre of the incident is believed to be a private house on the outskirts of Stanton St John …’

The small hairs on the nape of Heck’s neck stiffened.

Hundreds of rounds fired.

Twice in the same week? Both incidents unrelated? Not bloody likely.

‘That’s all we’ve got at the moment,’ the DJ added. ‘But obviously we’ll keep you updated …’

Heck swerved into the first parking zone he came to. He fished his mobile out and went through his contacts. When he found the one he wanted, he placed a call.

‘Thames Valley Major Crimes Unit,’ came a gruff response. ‘DC Forester.’

‘Mal … it’s Heck. SCU.’

‘Heck … what a surprise.’ But Malcolm Forester didn’t sound surprised.

‘What’s going on, mate?’

‘What isn’t? It’s kicking off here tonight.’

‘I mean in Stanton St John?’

‘Ah … thought you’d be interested in that. We’ve never had anything like it in the past, I’ll tell you that. It’s thrown us.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘Hard to say for sure. The lads on the scene tell me it’s a fucking abattoir.’

‘Come on, Mal. Give me any details you can.’

‘Well, I mean …’ Even Malcolm Forester, a twenty-year veteran of specialist CID operations, and before that a soldier who’d served in the Falklands, briefly struggled to produce a coherent description of events. ‘It’s a place called Woodhatch Gate, halfway along the road to Worminghall. In a nutshell, Heck, we’ve got a home-invasion that’s turned into the nightmare of fucking nightmares. Some bunch of lunatics wiped out an entire dinner party. Just walked in and started shooting with automatic weapons. Sounds like high explosives were used to force entry. First impression is hand grenades … can you believe that?’ The hairs on Heck’s neck no longer stiffened, they bristled. ‘They’ve had the Bomb Squad in first …
hang about
! What do you know, Heck? What’re
you
working?’

Heck hesitated. ‘The prison transit at Brancaster.’

There was a long, low exhalation at the other end, as if only now was this possible link occurring to Forester. ‘They used grenades in that job too, didn’t they? And there were a lot of shots fired.’

‘There’s no guarantee it’s the same firm.’

‘Come on, pal! How many other firms chuck that kind of hardware around?’

‘How many died tonight, Mal?’ Heck asked.

‘Eight that we know of. Multiple shrapnel and gunshot wounds.’

‘Presumably Major Crimes are running things?’

‘Temporarily. But SECU are on their way.’

Heck cursed. The Southeast Counter-Terrorism Unit would be a royal pain in the butt. They’d take charge of everything, nabbing whoever they fancied, no matter which side of the fence he sat on. And they could sweat you for days with no comeback – they didn’t have to follow the complex rules that governed the actions of most British police officers.

‘What’s going on, Heck?’ Forester asked. ‘Grenades on village greens. Machine guns in the shrubbery.’

‘Can’t tell you, Mal.’

‘So I give you everything, and you give us squat!’

‘I can’t tell you anything, mate, because I don’t know anything … not for sure.’ Heck hung up. ‘But I’ve got a damn good idea.’

The trouble was – what did he do next? Everything Gemma had told him made a kind of sense. For all his antipathy to SOCAR, they weren’t amateurs, they were well-resourced and, after the deaths at Gull Rock, they’d be as highly motivated to go after the Nice Guys as he was. But he resented Gemma’s refusal to let him participate more than anything that had happened in his career to date. He didn’t even buy her rationale for it, and that was unusual; normally when they fell out over procedure, he at least understood where she was coming from.

Heck put the car in gear and eased it forward. Some might say he was going out on a limb now, though it could also be argued – somewhat imaginatively – that he was simply responding to a serious incident, which was his duty as a police officer. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter what anyone said. He had to take at look at this. He just
had
to.

He hit the gas hard almost the entire distance, arriving at Stanton St John just before midnight.

The road to the house had been closed off by incident tape a good three hundred yards from the actual scene. Beyond this barricade, which was manned by several burly uniforms, flickering blue light spilled from the plethora of parked emergency vehicles. These weren’t just police cars, but ambulances, fire engines and even khaki trucks bearing military insignia. As Malcolm Forester had said – the Bomb Squad had been sent in first. A yipping and yelping of dogs drew Heck’s attention to handler teams making cautious exploration of the surrounding woods and fields, searching for discarded evidence or secondary crime scenes. Choppers whirred high overhead, spotlights trailing in various directions.

Heck parked near the outer cordon, close to a mobile command post, where a growing clutch of journalists armed with mikes and notebooks were clamouring for the attention of a uniformed inspector, and proceeded along the road on foot, passing several checkpoints by use of his Serial Crimes Unit ID. Despite that, he was increasingly aware that he had no authorisation to be here.

The central cordon, which was lit by arc-lamps, entirely encircled the large Georgian house called Woodhatch Gate, as well as its drive and outbuildings and a significant portion of garden and attached woodland, which was being guarded by armed officers who had disembarked from a nearby ARV. But even here, everything Mal Forester had said about the local lads being caught on the hop looked to be true: a photographer prowling the exterior of the inner cordon, flashbulb flaring repeatedly, didn’t look as if he was part of Thames Valley Photographic – which might mean crime scene images would appear in the local rag before the deceased’s next of kin were even informed. There was also a young woman in a nightie, standing crying at the tape. A female paramedic wearing a hi-viz coat over her green boiler suit was trying to wrap a foil blanket around her.

Inside the central cordon, the interlopers were fewer. Only two uniformed officers were visible, firearms men posted at the end of the drive, on which various high-end vehicles were waiting, now adorned with stickers marking them for forensic examination. As Heck strode up the drive, a detective in the obligatory gloves and protective coveralls emerged from the front doorway to the house, which, owing to its massive smoke and fire damage, had clearly been the main object of attack.

‘DI Bennett,’ he said. ‘Major Crimes. Bloody glad to see you lot.’ He was young, short and lean of stature, with smooth features and fluffy blond hair. He was also pale, his lips grey and taut. Beneath his partly unzipped Tyvek, his tie hung in a loose knot, as though he had been constantly and unconsciously yanking at it. He referred to Heck in the plural, but didn’t seem to notice the newcomer was here alone.