Kill Who You Want

Chapter Thirty-Six

Taking advantage of the lawyer's temporary speechlessness, he turned his attention back to the boy. Those sneering, scornful eyes had dropped down to his lap once more.

"Where were you aiming for eh Giles? Plum between the shoulder blades? Or maybe the stomach, like Catherine Butterfield?"

Still not a flicker.

The lad was a bloody statue, Kubic couldn't help thinking. Just a chunk of cold hard stone.

"Lily," he continued. Just that - the name dropped there between them like a feather left to float in the breeze.

Then again: "Lily." Now a sigh. "Always so pretty, girls' names which come from flowers. Rose, Iris, Daisy." He leant foward, compressed his voice to a whispered hiss. "That's what they were going to call her. The baby inside Catherine's stomach. Almost ready to come out by then. Almost ready to take her first breath, step aboard this great rattling rollercoaster ride we call life. Who knows what little Lily's trip might have had in store." He sat back again, sighed wearily once more. "Maybe she'd have followed in her mother's footsteps. Become a doctor, devoted her best years to helping people. Just the same as poor Sophie Markham had planned doing."

It was then that he noticed it. The little hiccuping judder of the boy's shoulders. The hand pressed over eyes, the moisture which had dribbled out onto his fingers.

No, not stone. Just a kid, that was all. Just some poor messed up little kid who missed his mother like hell.

"I tried so, so hard," he whispered, more softly this time. "That day, at the top of St Frideswade's." The boy looked up, his hate softened and refracted through the tears. "Promised her that we'd find her help. A psychologist, someone she could talk to. Someone who would listen."

In his mind, he could still glimpse the scene. The broil of bruised grey clouds so close above, the November wind bustling and jostling at his back. Her slippered feet on the moist parapet, silk nightgown buffeted this way and that.

Then, absurdly, gone...

"Depression's a disease Giles, that's the way you should think of it. That your mother had a cancer. There was nothing she or anyone else could do."

The boy was looking up at him, the tears thick now, droopy translucent trails down each cheek.

"G," Kubič hissed urgently. "We need to know who the hell G is."

*

Available only to law enforcement authorities, the software was often referred to as 'brute force' due to the high velocity numerical assault it could effect upon the security shields of electrical devices. Within forty minutes of being handed to the constabulary's chief technician, the access code of Giles Hancock's phone had been identified.

Renault still in station car park.

It was this the most recent text message which immediately grabbed investigative attention. Sent by a contact logged simply as G, it had been timed at 8.17, approximately half an hour therefore after Kubic's feigned knife attack on Clive Bone.

As if this weren't incriminating enough, another message from the self same contact was quickly retrieved from the phone's hard drive. Timed less than an hour before the murder of Sophie Markham, it read simply and darkly thus:

Nathan has failed

To which Hancock had later the same evening given the following single word response:

Done

It seemed clear, therefore, that the boy's accomplice and probable supplier of the sniper rifle was said G. A contact who - perhaps now perturbed by a lack of a similar conclusive message - would a little before eleven o'clock that evening hazard a call as the phone's owner sat wordlessly sobbing in the interrogation room...

There was a hiss of background noise, the urgent twice-repeated calling of Giles' name. The line was then cut - urgently it seemed, as if aware of the state-of-the-art call tracer the receiving phone was hooked up to.

"West Road," whispered the technician, locating the signal on the GPS screen. "About halfway down."

"But that..." Larkinson began to stammer increduously as he squinted at the display. "That's the Echo."

*

Given the heightened uniformed presence on Ravensby's streets, it was only a matter of two or three minutes before the ground floor entrance door had been shouldered and kicked into submission, a thunder of successive service boots made the ascent up to the news room.

Too late though...

George Shreeves sat slumped in the editor's swivel chair, his head twisted unnaturally sideways against the desk, lifeless eyes seeming to stare up at the office clock as if wary of some looming, impending deadline.

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