‘Cool! You’ve been watching the Jackie Chan Kung Fu movies, blondie,’ he mocked her, and he lifted Vicky with her legs dangling and ran straight at Nastiya. He was attempting to force her into the passageway where he could get at her more readily.
Nastiya saw the opening; his feet were visible below Vicky’s dangling legs. Instead of retreating she ran to meet him. Just before they collided she launched herself feet first under Vicky’s legs and shot out her favourite mule kick. Both her feet landed solidly on Aleutian’s left ankle, exactly where she had aimed.
Clearly, she heard the bone and cartilage in his leg give with a snap. She felt a surge of triumph, she knew for certain he would go down and she would get her chance to take the knife from him.
Aleutian grunted with pain, but to her dismay he stayed upright. She back-flipped onto her feet and faced him again. However, before she could fully recover her balance he used Vicky like a battering ram and slammed her limp body into Nastiya with such force that she was hurled backwards through the doorway. She came up hard against the far wall of the passage.
Aleutian came after her. He was limping on his injured ankle, but nevertheless moved surprisingly fast. He was still holding Vicky’s mutilated body in front of him. He drove Nastiya back against the passage wall, and he stabbed at her face over Vicky’s shoulder. Nastiya grabbed his wrist, but it was slippery with blood and he twisted free, still holding the knife. She was against the wall and he was shoving Vicky into her, keeping her hedged in and off balance. Vicky’s head rolled about loosely on her shoulders. Her eyes were glazed and unseeing.
Aleutian stabbed at her face again and she ducked under the blade, losing sight of him for an instant. He let Vicky’s corpse drop, and Nastiya’s lower body was no longer shielded by it. With the speed of an adder he struck at her belly. Nastiya twisted violently aside to avoid the thrust, but the corpse was lying across her feet, inhibiting her movements. She felt the sting of the steel as it opened a long shallow cut across her hip. She tried to jump over the corpse and get into the open before he could strike again, but the rope of Vicky’s intestines wrapped around her ankle and she tripped. She went down on one knee and threw up her hand to counter the knife thrust that she knew must surely come, but instead Aleutian grabbed her wrist and dragged her face down on the floorboards. He put one knee in the small of her back to pin her while he swiftly readjusted his grip. Then he forced her to her knees and knelt behind her, holding her in a single-handed head lock. He put enough pressure on her larynx to prevent her calling out.
‘You are quite good, blondie,’ he commended her. ‘You know how to use yourself in a fight.’ He was breathing heavily and chuckling. ‘Now you get your chance to show me how good you are at the famous old doggy style.’
At that moment the front door of the apartment crashed back on its hinges, and Hector and Paddy burst through it into the passageway together. They paused for a moment to take in the scene.
Aleutian rose to his feet without losing his choke-hold on Nastiya. Using her body as a shield, he faced them.
‘Stay where you are,’ he warned them. ‘Come any closer and this slut gets it.’
He held the knife to Nastiya’s neck with the blade pressed up under her ear. He saw the pistol. Hector was holding it in a double-handed Weaver grip. He had taken up the classical gunfighter’s crouch; balanced on the balls of his feet with the pistol pointed at Aleutian’s forehead.
Aleutian ducked his head and tucked himself in closely behind Nastiya, offering a minimal target. He began to sway his head from side to side like a standing cobra to frustrate Hector’s aim.
‘Welcome, Mr Cross. It’s such a pleasure to see you again. Please accept my condolences on the recent loss of your lovely wife,’ he said.
It was as though a shutter flickered across Hector’s eyes and his vision seemed to glow red with the heat of his fury. He just managed to control it.
Once again his mind was working like a computer, calculating range and aiming point. The pistol sights were set to shoot one and a half inches high at twenty-five yards. This range was eight, maybe nine yards to target. He would have to compensate for the rising bullet. Aleutian was moving all the time, giving him only intermittent glimpses of his head.
‘You can take him, Heck,’ Paddy breathed as he crouched behind Hector’s shoulder. His words were only just audible.
Hector’s lips tightened into a hard straight line; he knew that the chances of pulling off the shot without touching Nastiya were about even money.
‘We can do a deal, Mr Cross,’ Aleutian said. ‘I know you have a car outside. You could not have gotten here so quickly without one. You give me the keys and I give you this piece of blonde pussy. Fair exchange?’
The weapon in Hector’s hand was unwavering. ‘Who gave you the contract on my wife?’ he asked.
‘That’s not the deal, Mr Cross.’
‘That’s the only deal, Aleutian.’
‘Look what I did to your friend Victoria. No ears and no guts. Please don’t annoy me.’
Hector’s eyes never even flickered towards Vicky’s mutilated corpse.
‘I want the name,’ he insisted.
‘And I want to go on living. No names.’
‘I can wait,’ Hector said.
‘I don’t think you can,’ Aleutian said. ‘Watch this.’ He brought his knife down behind Nastiya’s back and placed the point on her naked tricep, and then slowly he pushed the long blade cleanly through her arm. Nastiya’s face contorted with the pain as the point emerged from the front of her biceps.
‘It’s okay, Hector,’ she said but her voice was hoarse and her eyes were filled with agony.
‘Tough cookie!’ Aleutian acknowledged her stoicism, and jerked the blade out of her flesh. ‘Next one goes through her leg.’ He stabbed the blade through her thigh. When he pulled it out dark blood spilled from the wound and pattered onto the floor.
‘Take him, Heck,’ Paddy demanded.
‘Hazel!’ With a single word, Hector explained his reluctance to fire.
‘You can’t save Hazel, but you can save Nazzy. Take him, please.’ Now Paddy was pleading, and Hector had never heard him plead before. But never before had Paddy been forced to watch helplessly as the woman he adored was cut to ribbons.
Hector knew he had to take the shot. He also knew that it would be the most crucial shot he ever fired, and the consequences should he miss.
However, the pistol in his hands was a very special weapon. Dave Imbiss had persuaded a military master-armourer to work on it for him. First the armourer had obliterated the serial numbers, so there could be no paper trail linking the pistol to Hector. He had hand-polished the chamber to accept the rounds so cleanly that there was no possibility of a jam. He had put the barrel through a classified machine in the US Defense Sniper Division that rendered the rifling and lands mirror perfect. The cartridges were also part of a specially prepared batch. The ballistics were perfect; every bullet would rotate through the barrel and fly to the target on an identical trajectory, with no wobble or roll and almost zero deflection. Finally, the crude iron sights had been replaced with state-of-the-art optics. The end result was that its accuracy was fined down to thousandths of an inch. Hector had spent so many hours on the practice range with it that the pistol was now almost an extension of his own body.
Moreover, Aleutian was a wild animal at bay and he was on the cusp of panic. He was no longer thinking like the cold-blooded killer he really was. He was making a little mistake. He was beginning to sway his head to a rhythm, moving it from side to side with the regularity of a metronome. Aleutian was showing Hector one eye and an inch and a half of the right-hand side of his head at intervals of two seconds. Hector would have to let his bullet pass a millimetre clear of Nastiya’s cheek.
He drew a long slow breath and then let it out just as slowly. He lined up on the space into which he anticipated he would fire. His pressure on the trigger was a mere feather off the point of rele
ase. His concentration was so intense that for him everything seemed to slow down and go very still and quiet. The pistol went off of its own accord. It seemed to Hector that a force beyond his own volition had made the shot.
He saw a lock of Nastiya’s golden hair snipped off cleanly by the bullet, and her ear flicked as the turbulence of the passing shot caught it, and then he saw Aleutian’s right eye explode in a burst of pale jelly as the bullet passed through. The back of his skull blew out. The pale matter of his brains splashed across the wall of the passage, and he went down hard and lay on his back. His heels drummed spasmodically on the wooden floor.
‘We must get tourniquets on those wounds right away, but don’t touch anything in the room which will leave fingerprints!’ Hector shouted at Paddy as he rushed forward. Nastiya took a pace towards him and then fell forward as her damaged leg collapsed under her weight. Paddy caught her and lowered her gently to the floor.
Hector moved swiftly to the spot were Aleutian had been standing. He did not have to concern himself too much with fingerprints on the expended cartridge cases. The only fingerprints of his were on the external parts of the weapon. He pulled a cotton bandanna from his pocket and wiped the pistol meticulously, then used the cloth as a glove. He went to where Aleutian’s corpse lay on its back. Hector had noted his grip on the handle of the knife so he knew that he had been right-handed. He knelt beside his corpse, picked up his limp right hand and folded his fingers around the hand grip and pressed them onto the blued steel. Then he did the same with Aleutian’s left hand on the slide. He paused for a few seconds to examine the Maalik tattoo on the dead man’s wrist, and grimaced with anger. Kneeling behind Aleutian with an arm under his armpits he stood up slowly, lifting the corpse into a standing position.
‘Keep your head down, Paddy,’ he warned. ‘I’m going to let another one off.’ He forced Aleutian’s dead finger onto the trigger. The pistol fired and the bullet smacked into the passage wall beside the front door.
Then he released his grip on Aleutian’s dead body and let it fall to the floor under its own weight.
He stood for a few seconds reviewing the scene. The angles were right. Aleutian’s right hand was now covered with burnt gun-powder. When the police forensic team applied the paraffin test they would get a positive. His body had fallen in a natural attitude, with the knife that he had used on Vicky under him. It was all convincing.
He turned away from the body and squatted beside Paddy as he worked on Nastiya’s leg. Paddy had taken down a length of sash cord from the window in the end wall of the passage. He tied the cord high up around Nastiya’s thigh above the wound. Now he was twisting it tight. The cord gradually cut into her flesh and the bleeding from the wound was pinching off. Hector knelt beside him and used his bandanna as a tourniquet on her arm.
‘You saved her life. I don’t know how to thank you, Heck.’ Paddy spoke without looking up.
‘Then don’t!’ Hector said.
‘I can do better than my stupid husband,’ Nastiya told Hector. ‘Soon as I can stand up I am going to give you a big fat kiss.’ She was very pale, her voice hoarse, but she smiled.
‘I’ll hold you to that,’ he warned her.
‘How come you made Aleutian fire a second shot even after he was dead?’ Paddy asked.
‘To put burnt powder on his hands and his fingerprints on the pistol,’ Hector told him.
‘What are the police going to think when they find this big mess that we have made?’ Nastiya asked.
‘We hope they are going to think that Aleutian killed Vicky with the knife after a lover’s tiff, then in remorse and fear of the consequences he shot himself.’
‘It took him two shots?’ Paddy asked incredulously. ‘His aim must have been a bit wild!’
‘Suicides often fire a clearing shot first, to check the gun and bolster their courage before they make the killing shot,’ Hector explained. ‘I think we have cleared our tracks. We have left nothing here that the boys in blue can trace back to us. Let’s get the hell out of here.’
Nastiya made no sound as Paddy picked her up and carried her out through the front door. Hector stood up and walked back to where Vicky Vusamazulu lay. Even to one accustomed to death in all its most hideous aspects, this mutilation was sickening. He gave her a few seconds of silent respect.
‘Silly little thing. But she didn’t deserve to go out like this.’
Then he went to Aleutian and stood over him. With his hands thrust into his pockets, he stared down at the ruined head. The single remaining eye stared back at him. Anger and dismay washed over him in alternating waves. Anger for what this man had done to Hazel; dismay for the fact that his death had wiped out the trail that might have led Hector to the lair of the ultimate Beast.
Now he knew he was staring at the veritable mother of all dead ends. He turned away and followed Paddy out to where the Q-car was parked. The street was deserted.
Hector opened the driver’s door and slipped behind the wheel of the Q-car. Paddy was in the back seat holding Nastiya. She was silent and pale. Hector drove away without revving the engine. As they passed the gates to the Botanical Gardens, Hector spoke again.
‘Well, it looks like another lucky one. We’ve got away clean except for Nazzy. How are you bearing up, tsarina?’
‘I’ve been worse, but I have also been a lot better,’ she said. ‘Where are we going?’
‘We are going to see a man that Paddy and I both know rather well,’ Hector told her, as he passed his iPhone back over his shoulder. ‘Grab my phone, Paddy. You will find Doc Hogan in my contacts list. Tell him we are on our way. We will be with him in about an hour and a half.’
Doc Hogan had been the Royal Medical Corps doctor attached to the SAS regiment in which Hector had served. When he retired he had settled down on the family farm in Hampshire. However, behind the country gentry façade he was still in the practice of medicine, albeit unofficially and on the quiet. His speciality was trauma management. His small and select list of patients were all ex-army friends and comrades who had suffered minor misadventures such as impregnating a lady who was not their wife, or getting themselves stabbed, or carelessly standing in the way of a flying bullet.
Paddy and Nastiya stayed with Doc Hogan as his guests for ten days, before he allowed her to fly down to Abu Zara in the Bannock Oil jet to complete her recuperation.
The demise of Aleutian and Vicky Vusamazulu hardly raised a ripple of interest. It was reported as a domestic violence on the back pages of a local news-sheet, but it never made it to the TV news channels or the national radio broadcasts.
*
Agatha had accepted Hector’s offer of permanent employment and was now his chief personal assistant, but it had tested his powers of persuasion to talk her into accepting an increase in her salary.
‘I don’t know what I would do with all that money, Mr Cross.’
‘You are a clever girl, Agatha. You’ll think of something,’ he assured her. ‘However, I’m going to need you in Abu Zara, where you will be close at hand to help me, with business and Catherine Cayla. We may return to London once the Trust has sold Number Eleven and we can set up alternative lodgings.’
Apart from the fact that she was such a dedicated and experienced secretary, she was the world’s living expert on that period of Hazel’s life prior to Hector’s appearance on her horizon. Every day Hector was involving her more intimately in the research that he was carrying out on her accumulated records to try to identify the hidden enemy in Hazel’s past. In this, Agatha’s experienced advice was invaluable.
During one of their long and probing discussions of the killer’s identity, it was Agatha who reminded him of the existence of Henry Bannock’s stepson, the son of the wife who had preceded Hazel in the role. His name was Carl and at first Henry had welcomed him into his family with open arms. He had provided him with the finest education and when he left college had given him a highly paid job at Bannock Oil. However, their relationship had
exploded in a terrible family scandal which had affected Henry Bannock deeply.
‘What was it all about, Agatha?’ Hector asked her. ‘I heard the rumours when I came to work for Bannock Oil. But I never learned any of the details.’
‘Very few people did. It was long before my time. But I only know that Mr Bannock was deeply ashamed of the whole business. He never allowed anybody ever to talk about it in the Bannock household. There was no reference to it in any of his personal records; he must have expunged them all. It was as though it had never happened. I heard that Carl Bannock was released from prison after serving a long sentence. But then he simply disappeared, until after Mr Bannock died and Hazel took over his job as CEO. Then Carl popped up again out of nowhere, and started hounding Hazel. I don’t know what he was on about, but I think he was trying to blackmail her. I think he forced her to pay him out a large sum of money, because he suddenly disappeared again and I haven’t heard anything of him since then. Did Hazel ever speak of him to you?’
‘Never. I didn’t ask and she didn’t tell. I knew there was a deep and dark family secret and I didn’t want to rake up old and hurtful things connected to Henry Bannock, who she revered,’ Hector admitted. ‘It was as if this Carl fellow never existed.’
‘In any event I cannot see how Carl could be implicated in Hazel’s murder. What would he stand to gain by killing her, or by having her killed? He had already gotten all the money out of her that he could.’
‘I can’t see any motive either, apart from sheer vindictiveness. But if Hazel had paid him off, as you suggest, why would he come back all these years later to murder her? I agree it doesn’t make sense. I think we must look for her killer elsewhere. But we will bear Master Carl Bannock in mind, although I think he is pretty far down the line of possible suspects.’
*
As soon as they were settled back in Seascape Mansions, Hector and Agatha started drawing up a list of possible villains, but there had been so many hostile people in Hazel’s life that the list expanded until it threatened to stretch out to unwieldy proportions. It was impossible for Hector to travel back and forth across the globe to follow up every lead and run down every possible culprit. So Agatha had to find a reputable private detective in each country where Hazel’s erstwhile enemies were now scattered. Hector employed them to carry out the local search. Only when the report from the hired detective was hot and promising would Hector fly out to follow up the blood spoor in person.