Assassin

Catalyst

The priest was mad.

The men who forced him into the back of the ambulance had seen the face of insanity before and they recognised it now in those haggard features.

He screamed, he cursed, he threatened.

All to no avail.

He warned them that they were committing heresy. A word none of them had heard spoken before. A word better suited to distant years. To superstition.

And, as he fought to escape their grasp and return to his derelict church they found that superstition was a word which circulated with greater intensity inside their minds.

He told them they were making a mistake, told them they were desecrating Holy Ground, destroying something of untold value but they didn't listen. The old priest was insane. Who else but a madman would have lived in a derelict church in London's East End for the past eight months with only damp, mildew and rats for company? The windows had been broken, the holes boarded over in places but the priest had not left. He could not leave he had told them as they hauled him from his haven and into the waiting vehicle. They must not enter the church, must not disturb its contents.

When they told him that the remains of the church were to be demolished, that a block of flats was to be erected on the site he had grown even more uncontrollable, flying into a paroxysm of rage which the uniformed men found difficult to cope with. He had run back towards the church screaming words which made no sense to them.

Someone had suggested sedating him but one of the men had feared the effect which a calming drug might have on a man of such advanced years and such precarious health. So, they had let him scream.

Scream that he had something valuable in his possession.

Scream that he guarded a secret.

That he and he alone knew that secret.

That he, in that stinking, vermin-infested shell which had once been a place of worship, had kept the thigh bone of a Saint hidden.

One of the ambulancemen had chuckled quietly to himself as he'd listened to the aimless rantings.

To the priest's exhortations that the bone could bring life to the dead. That these men, these builders who were coming to destroy his home, were also eradicating a power which came from God himself.

The power to raise the dead.

He must have the bone.

He had to have it. Had to retain the power. The secret.

They strapped him to the stretcher inside the ambulance to prevent him damaging himself, then they drove off, one of them seated in the back of the vehicle still listening to the madman's insane ramblings.

The church must not be destroyed.

Must not be ...

Must not ...

Must ...

He had lapsed into unconsciousness within a few minutes, his eyes bulging wide for a split second then his chest falling as if all the air had been drawn from him by a powerful suction pump.

Despite the efforts of the man in the rear of the ambulance, the priest had died before reaching hospital.

A day later the builders moved in.

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

Tuesday, 3 September

Prologue

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.

JCBs 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 club, 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

One

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 babbling – 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 first 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 live 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.

'Yeah, maybe. But if we get him out of the way we still have to find his followers.' He dropped the cigarette and crushed it beneath his shoe. 'Before anyone else ends up like Mrs Donaldson and her kids.'

Two

'You sure it's safe in here?'

Danny Weller pulled the blanket around his neck and glanced up at the roof of the building. Through one of the holes he could see the night sky, dotted with stars as if someone had hurled sequins at black velvet.

'What do you mean, safe?' Sean Robson wanted to know. 'If you're worried about the coppers finding us ...'

'No, not the coppers. I mean, the bloody place isn't going to fall down around our ears is it?'

Robson shook his head and wiped his nose with the back of his hand, studying the mucoid smear for a moment before scraping it off on his trousers.

'They're knocking down the tower blocks,' he reassured his companion. 'They ain't interested in this place. It'll do for one night anyway. At least it's better than sleeping in the street.'

He peered through the gloom at the interior of the supermarket. The floor was covered by a thick layer of dust and dirt, parts of the roof were missing and most of the windows had been smashed but at least they wouldn't be disturbed.

Robson regarded the empty shelves and felt his stomach rumble. He imagined the shelves full of food as they once had been but the gnawing pains in his belly convinced him that that was one fantasy best left alone. He concentrated on the bottle of Haig which he held in his hand. Robson took a long swallow then offered it to his companion, who drank deeply. Rather too deeply. Robson shot out a hand to take the bottle from him.

`Take it easy,' he snapped. 'That's got to last.'

Weller regarded the older man warily for a moment then licked his lips and nodded. At twenty-nine he was three years younger than Robson. Both had been jobless for more than five years, alcoholic for a little longer. Homeless for perhaps three years. They had eked out their living by, at various times, begging, stealing and, very occasionally, working in menial jobs where the promise of a meal had seemed more attractive than the prospect of wages. But what money they did come by was hastily spent on drink.

Robson in particular would do anything for the taste of whisky. He knew it was destroying him, eroding his brain cells, eating away at his liver, but he didn't care. It was only a matter of time for him now. Lung cancer had been killing him slowly over the past eight months; it was merely a question of which killed him first. The booze or the disease. It didn't matter either way to him.

He'd met Weller in Wormwood Scrubs two years earlier. He himself had been given seven days for disturbing the peace while the younger man was serving a two-month sentence for aggravated assault. He'd used a Stanley knife on the owner of an off licence who had refused to serve him.

The relationship between the two men was a curious one. There was nothing sexual about it, although, in the beginning, Robson had wondered if his companion was a little dodgy. There was no other word to describe him. He looked dodgy. His face was very smooth, to the point where Robson doubted it had ever felt, or needed to feel, a razor. And his features were soft, almost feminine. But Weller had never made any attempt to get close to his older companion and for that Robson was grateful. Mind you, let him try it. Just once. He gripped the bottle more tightly and took another swig.

Weller knew little about the older man except that he had once been married, the marriage had floundered and Robson had been evicted from the house after repeatedly beating his wife. Weller had always been aware of Robson's capacity for violence and, on more than one occasion, had seen it put to use. He feared rather than respected his companion but was willing to put up with the older man's volatile nature. Weller had suffered enough loneliness to last him a lifetime and even the company of someone like Robson was preferable to the solitude which he had known before they met. He knew that Robson was dying but he did not dare to imagine life alone once the older man was gone. Only now, as Robson coughed and spat blood, did Weller consider him with something approaching pity. When the bottle was offered to him again he wiped the blood flecked sputum from the rim before drinking, the sound of his companion's choking coughs ringing in his ears.

Robson held his chest, gritting his teeth until the pain subsided slightly. He drew breath but even that simple act sent fresh waves of pain through him and he held out his hand for the bottle which Weller reluctantly passed back.

`Fuck,' muttered Robson, rubbing his chest.

He hawked again but this time the thick mucus merely dribbled over his chin, hanging like obscene streamers from his beard.

'You all right?' Weller wanted to know.

'No, of course I'm not,' snapped Robson. 'But there's not much I can do about it is there?' He wiped the crimson saliva away.

Weller could only shrug.

The scream made them both look round.

'What the fuck was that?' murmured Robson, his pain momentarily forgotten.

The sound had barely died away when another split the night. Like the first. A scream yet something more. A howl. A roar of pain. Or rage?

Silence descended for a few seconds and then the sound came again. Louder this time, it seemed to fill the men's heads and Weller felt the hairs at the back of his neck stiffen and rise. An uncomfortable silence descended and both men remained still, as if fearing that their own movements might trigger a repetition of the sound.

For interminable seconds they sat as if frozen. Then Weller got slowly to his feet and moved towards one of the windows on his right. It had been boarded up but there were gaps between the planks which enabled him to see into the darkness beyond. A watery moon illuminated the rubble of the site and cast thick shadows.

Weller cupped his hands around his eyes and peered out into the darkness, eyes flicking back and forth for the source of the sound.

Something moved.

A swift almost imperceptible deviation in the mounds of rubble drew his attention.

Before he could focus properly on it, the shape had gone, swallowed by the shadows.

'Probably kids pissing about,' said Robson, appearing at his companion's side.

'It didn't sound like kids,' the younger man noted, still scanning the gloom.

When the sound came again it seemed to reverberate inside the shell of the supermarket itself, so strident and loud did it seem.

But, this time the roar did not die away swiftly, it seemed to build slowly, from a low rumble to a deafening bellow which caused the men to shudder.

It finished with startling suddenness.

'Kids my arse,' hissed Robson. 'What the fuck is that?'

His breath was coming in short gasps and, even in the gloom, Weller could see how pale his face was, as if all the colour had drained from it.

It was then that the doors at the far end of the building began to shake.

Both men spun round, squinting through the darkness towards what had once been the main entrance to the supermarket. The doors were padlocked and boarded up, but the pressure from outside was such that they continued to rattle. It sounded as if heavy blows were being rained upon them.

'Come on,' snapped Robson, tugging on the younger man's sleeve.

Weller needed no second prompting. He turned and followed him towards the back of the building where they had first gained entry. Through what had been a storeroom, on into an area which still held fridges the size of cars, once used to