Gabriel's Angel Page 3

  Of course, some might consider the slaying and murder of a drug dealer to be less of an offence against humanity than, say, selling young people drugs. Indeed it might be tempting, for a moment, to get lost in the vigilante chic of righting wrongs and transcending the cumbersome justice system by striking down evil wherever it raised its spotty little head. But Kevin didn’t moralise. He didn’t think to himself, ‘Oh good, a drug dealer; I’ll sleep better tonight.’ He didn’t even think ‘Well at least nobody will mourn this lowlife.’ Apart from anything else, he had watched this particular lowlife for more than a week before killing him, and he knew very well that the man’s aging mother, with whom he lived and who he pretty much looked after single-handedly, would definitely miss him.

  No, Kevin Spine didn’t think one damned thing. Drug dealer, naughty wife, annoying bloke down the pub, mechanic who didn’t do a very good job on his client’s Chrysler—it really made no difference. He wasn’t interested in what people had done, although invariably his clients insisted on telling him, imagining that somehow the sheer outrageousness of a sloppy 30,00-mile service would make Kevin share their desire for justice and ensure he took his job seriously, maybe even agree to kill the bloke for nothing. Kevin turned off during the tales of wrongdoing, switching back on only for the important facts: address, place of work, any information about routine or habits. Then he gave bank details to his clients and told them that the wrongdoer would be dead within 72 hours of the money landing in that account. And they were.

  This was his biggest job yet. In fact, he would go so far as to say this was his first corporate killing—a publishing executive who, for some ridiculous reason, was sabotaging her own company to the point where the share price was beginning to tumble like a space hopper down a really big hill. A reckless alcoholic about to cost her colleagues millions. £50,000 for offing a drunken executive. This was what all those early jobs were for; they were the building blocks. This was the big time.

  It was also, in Kevin’s opinion, indicative of the fact he was now killing a better class of victim that his brief had been simple. There had been no over-elaborate explanations, no sobbing or shouting, no long pathetic quest for vindication. He had been told his victim was ‘bad for business’. It was unclear whether killing her was to prevent her doing whatever it was she was doing or to punish her for having already done it. Not that Kevin minded either way.

  The only instruction was to kill her at home and make it look like a robbery. The problem, and Kevin considered it a minor one, was that he had never actually robbed anyone and thus wasn’t exactly sure what a robbery looked like. He watched ‘A Touch of Frost’ and ‘Cracker’ for research purposes but both dealt with overly elaborate murder. Robbery, he decided, simply wasn’t a prime-time crime any more.

  His target lived in a large flat overlooking the River Thames near Canary Wharf. It was a rich part of town, so Kevin wore his best black Marks and Spencer’s suit and a new grey shirt. He always travelled on public transport. Nobody noticed you on the Tube unless you were mad or busking, even if you were carrying a gun in your otherwise empty briefcase.

  He wasn’t a fretful killer. He would normally be quite happy to sit quietly and read the paper, but this afternoon he had a nagging thought that he had forgotten something. Gun? Check. Name and address of victim? Check. Bullets and silencer? Check. Travel card? Check. He even had a key to his victim’s flat, which had been copied from the target by the people who were paying him. He was very happy to take it, and not only because it made his job easier. He knew that having a key would help him to confuse the police investigation before it had even started, and that was always a good thing. On first appearances the police would find a robbery—and Kevin would perhaps break a back window to help them hold on to that thought for a few moments. But, after due consideration, they would congratulate themselves on discovering that the killer did not come in through the window but wanted them to think he did. They would thus suspect a lover, friend, relative or neighbour. They might even suspect the caretaker, but they would not suspect a professional. Especially as he didn’t plan to kill her with the gun.

  But still there was something he’d forgotten. Kevin took his small black diary from his pocket and looked up the date: February 17th. His daughter’s twenty-first birthday. Bollocks. He might not have seen her more than five times in seventeen years, but he never forgot her birthday. Well, he did, but never an important one: he’d remembered her eighteenth, for example, and had written to her to ask what she wanted for her twenty-first.

  ‘A card would be nice,’ she had emailed back a few days later, and he had decided then to push the boat out a little.

  Satisfied, he sat back and read his horoscope in the free paper. ‘You need to relax more,’ it guessed. ‘Don’t keep over-reaching yourself; it’s bad for you!’

  How easy is it to come up with a few words that fit together loosely enough to suggest they spoke directly to around four million people in the UK? Well, it doesn’t wash with me, thought Kevin, deciding that he and he alone had seen through the charade known as astrology. I never over-reach myself.

  Silver Street was his stop, and he left the station at exactly the same pace as everyone else—the best way to blend in. It was just after 5 p.m., already dark, and it had been raining lightly. He walked steadily toward Cresswell Street; the further he got from the station, the fewer people there were walking with him. His mark’s luxury flat, number 42A, turned out to be half of an imposing detached redbrick mansion.

  The lights were not on. If this were any easier, he thought, he’d have to give them some money back. He began to whistle softly—‘In the Ghetto,’ from Elvis’s sensitive period. It was a song he had never heard until after the King’s death, and when he discovered it, he had found it terribly moving, mostly because he believed that Elvis was singing ‘In the Gateau.’ He imagined the King, approaching middle age with bigger trousers than he might have hoped, serenading forlornly the cake that was to play such a significant part in his downfall. Kevin often thought of this song when he was about to kill someone. Why, he didn’t know.

  He walked up to the door without looking around, without pausing unlocked it and walked straight in. There was, he knew, a small chance that he might bump into someone in the hall and that if he did, he might have to kill them. But it was a very small chance. His victim lived alone, she was— his reconnaissance had told him and the lack of lights in the flat confirmed —likely to be out, and the neighbour had left his house two days earlier with a large suitcase and some skis.

  He walked straight to flat two, put the key in the lock, and entered what was a large, plush hallway painted in a rich golden yellow. To his right was the lounge, a big room with high ceilings dominated by large windows facing the river. In its centre was a long beige sofa with a matching armchair at a right angle. He walked round the edge of the room, taking in entry and exit points, and stopped at the windows. There was nowhere offering a view into the flat, but just to be on the safe side, he drew the curtains and sat in the armchair.

  In front of him was a glass coffee table with a magazine without a picture on the front and some flowers, fresh white freesias. They smelt like summer and life. Beside them was a glass-brick ashtray. He took out a cigarette, a lighter, and his gun, screwed on its silencer quietly and slowly, then set them all on the table in front of him.

  He put his feet up and smoked. Later he’d mess the place up a bit, later he’d find a present for his daughter, but now was a time for stillness, for quiet reflection and a B&H. Kevin never failed to be amazed at how easy killing someone was. Take all the fluffy moral baggage off the carousel of life, and all it took was a moment, a minimum of force, and the will. Drive down the high street and mount a pavement, walk up behind someone on an Underground platform and nudge them under a train, point a gun and squeeze a trigger—it was a doddle, and this was going to be no different.

  What does a man think of when he’s waiting to murder someone f
or money?

  The money mostly, and in Kevin’s case, his shoes. He looked at them on the coffee table. They were worn on the outside: must be the way he walked, it was the same with the other shoe. Maybe he should see an osteopath about that, or at least buy some new shoes. Nice shoes from Bond Street, nothing too extravagant, although looking a bit classy couldn’t possibly be bad for business. Treat himself to something nice and Italian. He could afford it now.

  He was still immersed in his shoe reverie when he heard the front door close. Not a problem, he was nothing if not professional—feet down, gun up and pointing straight at Yvonne Foster as she walked into the living room and turned the lights on.

  She didn’t freeze, she didn’t scream and in fact, to her eternal credit, her first reaction was to reach toward a vase on the sideboard beside the door to use as a weapon. He’s small and older than me, she thought, then quite absurdly, How dare you smoke in my home?

  Kevin admired the fact that her instinct was to fight but he hissed, ‘Be still or I’ll kill you now.’

  And still Yvonne was. She was a well-dressed woman, with immaculate blonde hair pushed back tidily from a handsome tanned face, a face that looked its age: late forties. She looked like a woman who was used to being in charge of her surroundings.

  ‘Come in, that’s it, toward me.’ Kevin’s mouth was dry. ‘Stop. Stand still. Now I’m going to ask you a question. You answer correctly and I’ll be out of here within four minutes. You don’t, I’ll stay, you’ll get hurt, everything gets messy. Right?’

  Yvonne nodded, thinking she could beat him in a fight, but then she stared at the gun.

  ‘Where do you keep your jewellery?’

  She breathed a sigh of relief. (Poor cow, thought Kevin.) ‘Bedroom, in a box, everything. Take everything—I’m insured—take it all, except well …’

  ‘Except what?’

  ‘There’s a ring my son bought me: it’s not worth anything, but I’d be really grateful if you just left that. It’s blue, a glass stone; he got it in a market in India—it’s just that …’

  ‘Shut up, I’ll leave the ring for fuck’s sake. Now turn round and face the door.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just do it!’

  Yvonne turned round. Did he want her to lead him to the bedroom? Not a pleasant thought, but it was unlikely he’d leave her here, she supposed. Why didn’t he tell her to move? And what were those sounds?

  What she heard, albeit briefly, was Kevin picking up the ashtray, which was even heavier than it looked, and walking up behind her. She didn’t hear anything else. Not the shattering of her skull as Kevin brought the ashtray down on her head with all his weight. Only he heard the four other blows, delivered with equal ferocity to her broken head.

  He threw the ashtray onto the sofa, picked up his own cigarette stubs, put them in his pocket, and walked quickly, without looking back, into Yvonne’s bedroom. It was enormous. You’d never guess from the outside how big the rooms are in these places, he thought as he made his way to the oak dressing table. On the side, in front of a picture of what was presumably her grown son smiling boyishly from a boat, was a velvet jewellery box. Kevin opened it and tipped everything out onto the floor. His eye caught a silver bracelet with linked opals; he knew instantly that Christine would love it—or rather he would love it for her, because he didn’t have the faintest idea what she might or might not like.

  He had to take the rest as well, of course, or it wouldn’t look like a robbery. He went back into the living room. My, Yvonne had bled. He stepped over the pool of thick dark blood oozing across the floor toward the sofa, retrieved his briefcase from beside the armchair, returned to the bedroom, and filled the briefcase with the baubles on the floor. He looked around and decided the room looked a bit tidy, so half-heartedly kicked a chair over. He felt somewhat foolish doing that. Strange, really—smashing a skull into bits came easy; pushing a chair over made him feel self-conscious. Still, he was a professional, so he opened up her wardrobe and pulled some dresses out, littering them across the floor.

  Then he went back into the living room and, picking up Yvonne’s handbag, emptied it on to the floor beside her body. Masterstroke, he thought, rummaging through the handbag as well; the police might think it was junkies. He picked up her purse, took out all the cash, put it in his pocket, and threw the purse into the puddle of blood on the floor. He went down the hallway and to the kitchen. This would, if he had been some kind of lowlife druggie thief, have been his only point of access. The back door was wired and would probably trigger an alarm at the local police station if broken, or at least it would if he broke the window from the outside. He picked up a tea towel, held it against the thick glass nearest the door handle, and elbowed it. It didn’t break. Bloody hurt his elbow though. Beside the oven was a fire extinguisher. He grabbed it and smashed the base against the window. The window shattered and a surge of foam came spurting out of the fire extinguisher all over the kitchen floor.

  Oh well, he thought. The place looks a mess; that’s the main thing.

  On his way back through the hallway, he stopped in front of an ornate mirror to make sure he looked OK and that there were no unsightly bits of skull in his hair. He nodded to himself, looked around, and grabbed his briefcase.

  Kevin Spine left the building.

  Outside the cool air tasted good. Grubby and polluted it might be, but it suited him quite nicely, thank you. He walked along the bank of the Thames. It was quiet here, exclusive he guessed, and the moon shone high in the sky. Kevin inhaled the dirty damp air, filling his chest the way men do after a job well done. He took a cigarette from his pocket, lit it, and smoked as he walked. Why hurry, he thought, and so he sat on a bench and looked at the distant lights of Vauxhall Bridge and, further along, the Millennium wheel.

  I love London, he thought, it’s so anonymous.

  He finished his cigarette and walked on until he reached a break in the riverside wall where steps led down to a jetty. There was an old rusty gate stopping anyone from getting down, probably because it was considered unsafe, but if he could get past the gate, the first few steps would take him down behind the embankment wall and out of sight. He looked behind him—there was nobody around—and clambered down without catlike grace, less ninja assassin than middle-aged, 40-a-day, conscience-free killer. He stumbled, breathless, down the first flight of stone steps as far as a barbed wire fence. Behind the wire there were only five steps down to the wooden pier, which hadn’t seen a boat in years. Kevin didn’t need to go further than this: the black water lapped the side of the steps, and he knew the currents would drag whatever he threw in outwards and down. He opened his briefcase, put in his hand and picked out all the jewellery he could, tossing it underarm into the water, quickly repeating the action until the case was empty.

  Only then did he remember the bracelet. He checked his jacket pockets, nothing. His trouser pockets? No.

  ‘Fuck fuck fuck,’ he hissed. He looked over the barbed wire fence. ‘Jesus Christ, it’s meant to be,’ he said aloud, seeing the silver bracelet glistening on the edge of the jetty. The fence came just about up to his chest. He pressed the briefcase on to the wire, took off his coat and laid it across the case, then leant gingerly forward, reaching toward the twinkling bracelet.

  Not far enough. He looked around. There were no handily placed sticks or other jewellery retrievers. Still, Kevin was not averse to improvising: he took off his shoe, leant over again, and this time was only about three inches short. He stood up, shifted the case down his stomach and gave a little jump so that he was higher on the fence. Nearly toppling over, he caught his foot on the wall behind him for balance and reached again—nearly there. He was by now balancing almost fully on the briefcase, seesawing, with his lower abdomen acting as a kind of fulcrum. Reaching forward he felt the wire beneath him sink a little, which actually helped, taking him closer to the ground. He could nearly touch the bracelet with the end of his shoe.

  One more lunge
should do it, he thought.

  It didn’t. He lurched forward, his body slipping across the case and over the fence. If it hadn’t been for his genitals catching around the barbed wire, he might have fallen on the jetty and bumped his head.

  ‘Nrgh!’ was the noise he made. He could swear he could feel a piece of sharp metal embedded in the top of his penis. He couldn’t move, not without cutting open his dick and impaled testicles and pouring their contents into the Thames. He was bent double at the groin over a barbed-wire fence, feet and hands off the ground, pretty much being supported by his bollocks.

  He decided to try to manoeuvre backwards gently, very gently, reaching out his fingers to the ground in the hopes of easing himself back over the fence. Christ that hurt.

  Plan B: he doubled up and tried to move the wire from beneath him. It was a good idea, but the wire wasn’t so much beneath him now as in him. It had to leave the way it went in, which meant Kevin making the exact opposite movement that he had inadvertently made a few moments earlier. He had to go forwards over the wire, pushing the barbs downward and hopefully, dear God, outward as he went. He took some deep breaths: the initial agony was passing. I’ll laugh about this in the morning, he lied to himself. He held the wire tightly in both hands, ignoring the trickle of blood rolling down his fingers. He pushed the wire down—’ouch ouch ouch’—but he could feel it leaving him; when it was out, and his testicles told his brain they were free, he would roll forward.

  Unfortunately, and this is not the first time this has happened to a testicle, it went off a little too early. ‘Clear!’ it shouted at Kevin’s brain, even though it wasn’t. Kevin rolled forward, leaving a bollock attached to the barbed wire.

  The pain started in the groin but charged up through his chest to his throat, no doubt intent on giving the idiot brain a good kicking. It didn’t make it that far, tumbling out of his mouth in a piercing scream. He clutched at his bleeding groin, falling on to the jetty. Stillness might have helped but was quite simply impossible. Nobody sits still after they’ve left a testicle on a fence. He thought he was going to retch but didn’t; shame really, it might have kept him awake. Instead, he rolled on to his side toward the water—any spatial awareness he may have been equipped with must have resided in his absent ball, because he didn’t stop as he rolled toward the edge of the water, and he had no sense of impending sewage-laden doom.