I leave an hour before dawn, dressed all in black, and carrying the rifle over one shoulder. I have only one intention: to find and kill the sick fucking bastard who raped Clare.
Getting into the city would be straightforward under other circumstances, just find the nearest working car with an accessible set of keys (cars parked in driveways are best, as breaking into houses is much easier than trying to locate the previous owner of a car parked in the street) and drive off. This morning, however, I want to be as quiet as possible. Not only do I now want to advertise my approach to anyone within a couple of miles, but I also want for Clare not to notice my absence. Typical of most teenagers she sleeps late, and I hope to be back before she gets up. So, I spend ten minutes searching for a bicycle. I get lucky at the end of the street where a mountain bike of about the right size is secured under a tarpaulin in a front yard. It’s not even locked, I guess in this area of town it was better to have something stolen than vandalised.
The ride into the centre of London is cold and uncomfortable, but passes without remark, and within twenty minutes I’m sailing down the empty streets of Bank and past St Paul’s, and along the Strand to Trafalgar Square. In the absolute silence of the city before dawn even the quiet sound of the chain and bearings echoes off nearby buildings when I pedal, every gear change an unwelcome intrusion into the stillness of the giant, austere mausoleum that this city has become. I feel out of place, an interloper amongst the architecture, as if the true nature of the city has been revealed, and mankind is no longer welcome here. It gives me the shivers, or maybe that’s just the sub-zero temperature of this January morning. For all the acclimatisation I’ve had to a world without central heating, I still forget to wear adequate clothing on days like this.
I push harder on the pedals, getting the heart pumping. No point in freezing to death before I get there.
It starts snowing as I reach Trafalgar Square, a light dusting that my numb hands can hardly feel. In the pre-dawn light it’s difficult to see the flakes as they drift down from the lightening sky, and the world is washed out in a bluish-grey hue that ruins my sense of depth perception. Not the best time of day to be out hunting, I tell myself.
I’m careful to stow the bike around the corner, in the awning of a convenience store that was still open the last time anybody was alive to use it. A clump of tangled remains is all that’s left of a queue of Sunday night clubbers and drunks. As I step around the corner I expect to see a veritable battlefield of remains, crashed buses and taxis, and the assorted debris of a night out in London.
Instead, I have to blink a couple of times to make sure I’m not hallucinating. The entire square is clear, with the exception of four large coaches parked at the base of Nelson’s column. No other vehicles are visible, and even though the light is poor, I can’t make out a single lump of remains anywhere along the road. Somebody has taken the time to sanitise the entire area, moving buses, cars, taxis, and remains elsewhere so that they can enjoy the space without a constant reminder of what was lost. I recall what Clare said about these freaks being “Witnesses of God’s judgement”. Seems to me that they’re not all that comfortable being in the presence of God’s work.
I don’t bother trying to be quiet or stealthy as I check out the area, as there’s no sign of anyone being awake or active in the coaches. Rather, I wander around the perimeter of the square with my hands deep in my pockets, checking out possible escape routes and trying my best to keep my fingers warm and moving. It’s going to be hard to operate the rifle if I’m shivering and my fingers can’t bend. I blow into my cupped hands and my breath feels scalding against my skin, but at least the tingling sensation means they’re warming up a bit.
I turn south and cut down across the square, heading between the two fountains. As I approach them a large square shape looms out of the darkness, and I almost walk straight into a marquee that stands in the middle of the square. It’s a dull colour that might be grey or brown, but in this light is almost invisible against the background. I step around the supporting poles and take a look inside.
The tent has been set up as some kind of prayer room, though I guess it could equally be used for an alcoholics anonymous meeting or some sort of marketing seminar. At the back of the tent is a table with a couple of gas cylinders and a portable stove with an urn for boiling water. A table stacked with assorted bibles is next to it. Forward of that are about ten rows of folding plastic chairs, in two columns of four with a wide aisle between them. The seats look like they’re straight out of a garden centre, not the sort of thing you’d want to spend extended periods of time on.
At the front of the tent, opposite from the entrance that I’m standing at, a large wooden lectern stands. I walk over to it, and look out across the seats as if I were about to give a sermon. There’s a small solid box at the base of the lectern, and I realise that it’s for making the person delivering the sermon appear taller. I try it out, and almost have to duck to avoid the sloping canvas of the marquee’s roof. To stand here comfortably, Richard must be about six or eight inches shorter than me, putting him below five foot six. Useful to know, should make him easy to spot.
I retreat from the tent and finish making my way over to the coaches. They’re big double-decker rock star affairs, the sort of thing that have every kind of luxury you need aboard. From looking at them the upper deck seems to be where the bed cabins are, as those are the windows with condensation forming on them. I have no idea if there are people on the lower decks, there’s no visible sign, but at the same time the windows are too high up for me to see into. I consider my options – simply charging aboard each bus in turn waving a gun and demanding Richard’s presence might be a little melodramatic, and would likely be met with resistance. I’m not planning on hurting anybody else, and really don’t want to have to hold anyone at gun point. Except the bastard in charge. Him, I have no problem scaring.
The presence of so many people has thrown any semblance of a plan that I had right out of the window. From the seating and the number of coaches there could be anywhere from fifty to eighty people here, and I had no idea there could be so many. Clare told me that the last time they were in town. Richard’s little gang of followers numbered around a dozen. I was hoping to just catch him off-guard, coming out of wherever he was staying and put a round into him from a decent range. Now that’s going to be almost impossible unless he’s the first person out of a coach. It might almost be worth hanging around to see if that’s the case, but it’s getting light now and I can hear stirring in two of the coaches.
Deciding on a more cautious approach, I stride back to my bicycle and head back home. I’m frozen and exhausted when I get there, and sleep on the sofa until Clare finally wakes me at mid day to take her looking for a gun.
Somebody in a pub once told me that there were two ways to get a gun in London. You could either join the Met and work your way through the ranks and eventually try to apply for the firearms training and maybe end up as an Authorised Firearms Officer, or you could buy one off him for two hundred quid. I’m all out of dodgy geezers in pubs, and the only entry for a gun shop in the Yellow Pages is for an air rifle dealer. Not the sort of thing that Clare and I are looking for, which only leaves the first option. I find myself thinking of Brian’s police car, and wondering if the Brian that Clare met is the same guy. I wonder how many Brians there are left in the world. Not many, I expect.
Back on track, and Clare is driving our taxi to Westminster at the stately pace of twenty miles per hour. I don’t rush her, she’s only been driving for a day and it’s a large, heavy vehicle, not the sort of thing designed for fourteen year old girls to drive. I decide to ditch it as soon as we get to our destination for the afternoon’s shopping trip.
Breaking in to the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police is a disappointingly easy task, one that I had been imagining for the entire journey as some task of herculean proportion that would occupy us happily for an hour or two. Sadly, all of the doors are open, and we breeze through the building hunting for an armoury, which turns out to be fairly close to the motor pool. Clare’s excitement grows as we hunt for the keys to the locked cages where the weapons are stored, and I have to remind her that this isn’t a game.
The armoury is an impressive sight, with row upon row of pistols, sub-machine guns, and several assault rifles. Clare walks immediately to the sub-machine guns and I watch her carefully when she picks one up.
“It’s so heavy,” she says, “I thought it would be lighter. What is it called?”
“I think that’s a Heckler and Koch MP5. It’s a sub-machine gun, but the police version only fires one bullet at a time, so it’s semi-automatic.”
She mulls this over for a minute, examining the weapon. On the left side of the trigger there’s a switch with two settings, “S” and “E”, which I assume is the safety because it’s set to “S”.
I pick one up myself, judging the weight to be about six or seven pounds. Without a magazine loaded it looks like a large pistol, with a grip under the barrel for holding the gun steady, and a metal stock that retracts on rails and locks into place for bracing against the shoulder. I try lifting the gun up to a firing position, letting my right eye focus along between the sights. I don’t touch the trigger, although the firing selector is set to the “S” position, firing even accidentally in this small a space will probably deafen us both.
I place the large gun back on its rack and turn my attention to the pistols. Clare has already replaced the gun she was examining, and is waiting for me before touching anything else. In part I would like to think that my lessons on gun safety the previous day might have had some effect, but in reality I suspect that like most people she’s been raised to be afraid of guns. It’s hard to live your life in London and not know somebody who has been the victim of some sort of gun crime, and apart from television that’s the only exposure most people get to them. A couple of years shooting in my university rifle club taught me differently. Guns should be respected for the danger they can pose when handled incorrectly, but it’s people that you need to be afraid of. That’s why I’m here.
The pistols are Glock 17s, or at least that’s what I assume from the Glock logo on the handle and the “17” marked on all the barrels. It’s a precisely engineered device, with the main handle made out of a tough plastic, and the square barrel and slide a toughened steel. Clare breathes a little warmth into her hands and takes one from the rack. I pick up another, and find us both holsters, cases, and a collection of cleaning equipment. Finally, I take about a dozen magazines and as many boxes of nine millimetre ammunition as I can find.
Clare stuffs everything into her backpack, pushing aside a stuffed animal that might be either a dog or a bear to make more room for her gun and accoutrements. I strap the holster around my shoulder, place the gun in it with one loaded magazine, and zip a spare inside my jacket.
On second thought I help myself to some of the less lethal equipment in the room – a pair of leather gloves that are a decent fit, and a copy of a technical maintenance manual for our guns. Not exactly my idea of light reading material, but we’re going to have to learn to keep everything in working order from now on.
We exit the building through the car park, picking a set of keys from a board marked “ARV”. These are the police’s Armed Response Vehicles – high performance BMW 5 series cars modified for the police. Brian would be very happy with one of these, and I wonder if he’s already found himself one. The rear gates are wide open, so it’s a distinct possibility.
I take the car out slowly, getting a feel for it as Clare opens every single little drawer, pocket, compartment and tray she can find. They’re all empty, the car is totally devoid of any sense of personality from its last occupants. To me, that’s a blessing, but for Clare it’s boring. I decide it’s best she keeps herself occupied, and suggest she reads through the gun’s manual to learn about it. She pulls the ring-bound photocopied manual from her rucksack, opens it on her lap, and starts reading aloud.
I drive us back to the flat – tired, but happy to have got the first task out of the way. Whilst Clare recites disassembly instructions, I plan what to do next.
The hard part is going to be telling Clare what I’m planning.
We spend that evening at the flat in Bermondsey, and again I sleep for only the briefest of naps, gun loaded and sat on the coffee table next to the sofa. I spend some time to finish reading the Mystery of Edwin Drood, and find myself extrapolating Dicken’s unfinished work. I can’t help but feel that he had a surprise in store for the end of the story, had he not died during its writing. The battery starts to fade in my torch, and I try to sleep for a couple of hours before sunrise.
I awake with a start, a noise in the street outside has me on my feet with the gun in my hands before I even realise that I have woken up. I listen for a good ten minutes, heart pumping so fast that every beat feels like it could burst my chest. Clare hasn’t stirred, and there’s no further noise, so I ascribe it to a combination of dogs and nerves, and settle back on the sofa.
Dawn rolls around, and I wait for Clare to wake up by preparing a large breakfast. Cereal with UHT milk doesn’t taste too bad when covered with sugar, and the gas stove allows for plenty of coffee. The smell of fresh grounds seems to work miracles on the cobwebs from last night’s lack of sleep, and by the time Clare rolls out of bed and stumbles into the kitchen with a yawn, I feel ready to take on the world.
I wait for Clare to finish her cereal and pour her a second mug of coffee before telling her.
“I’m going to go to see Richard today.”
It takes a moment to sink in, and then her expression turns to one of mixed fear and confusion. I keep talking before she has a chance to say anything.
“I’m going to hurt him for what he did to you, and to do that I need to get close to him, talk to him, and make sure he knows why I’m doing it.”
“But…”
“I’ve thought about this a lot Clare, and it’s something that I need to do. For you, and for anyone else that he tries to hurt.”
She looks up at me, our eyes meeting and holding for just a moment longer than is comfortable, and then she looks away, staring out of the window at our car parked outside.
“Can I come with you?” The question doesn’t surprise me. It’s more or less what I expected her to ask.
“I’m sorry, but that would be too dangerous for both of us. As soon as Richard sees you he’s going to be suspicious, and seeing us together will be likely to make him run.” Or do something stupid. No telling if he’s armed, or if his bunch of nut-job followers are brandishing pitchforks and burning torches. I’m already going to be running from them, I don’t want them chasing me before I get to Richard.
“What are you going to do to him? Are you going to kill him?” Her fear has become curiosity, and I realise that this is something she’s been thinking about doing herself. What has she been planning?
“I don’t know yet.” Liar. “I would rather not have to.”
Disappointment flashes across her face for a fraction of a second. Death is one of those things that I never knew anything about when I was her age, but she’s seen everyone she ever knew die, and it hasn’t broken her. In some ways she’s not a child any more, and her physical age puts me off-guard. Does she understand the importance of what I’m going to do? With so few of us left, killing someone is killing a significant proportion of the human race.
It’s bizarre to think in those terms, but the mathematics of survival have changed. In generations past we could abstract human suffering – starvation, disease, poverty – by invoking the dreaded spectre of over-population. A few thousand deaths here or there weren’t enough to merit more than the odd outraged opinion column in the Guardian. Now, taking a single life is practically an act of genocide.
Then again, and I find myself thinking this for the first time, with so many dead, with everyone and everything you ever knew gone in an instant, what difference does one more death make? It’s not like the world is losing a cure for cancer or the potential for world peace.
No, I tell myself, nobody is going to miss Richard, and I’m not going to feel any guilt for killing him. He did something terrible, and deserves to die for it.
Of course Clare can come with me. This is for her, after all. I pour more coffee, and we make a plan.
We drive into the city that afternoon, Clare stopping for a few seconds to let me out on The Strand, before driving slowly on to the square in the automatic Fiat Panda that she selected for herself. The car is small and easy to drive, as well as being extremely quiet. I’m certain that nobody will be able to hear the engine clearly enough to know that she stopped.
I watch the car drive on for a few seconds, then dash along William IV Street and take a left down Adelaide Street onto Dulcannon, rifle bumping against my back and the edge of thigh no matter how I try to hold it still. A large wedge-shaped building is ahead of me, the thin edge facing towards me and the opposite long side overlooking Nelson’s Column. It’s far too close to risk breaking the glass, so I have to pick the lock. I’m not very good at this, so it takes me a couple of minutes, but finally the last pin falls into place and I can twist the lock open. The stairs are right at the end of the hall, and lead straight up to the roof. The door out onto the roof is barred and claims to be alarmed. Sometimes the lack of electricity is a good thing.
I creep along the rooftop, stepping over ventilation ducts and manoeuvring around large boxes that seem stuffed with cooling for the air conditioning. The edge of the roof has a small metal fence running around all three sides, which is little more than a wire mesh with vertical supports. It’s useless for hiding behind, but about half way along the edge of the fence, facing towards the column, there’s another stairwell protruding out six feet into the air, with a forty-five degree slope facing north. It’s almost perfect cover. I walk over and duck down into the shade on the north side, scanning over the square for a sign of Clare.
She’s over towards the tent, being escorted by a large woman with curly red hair who seems to be in her late forties or fifties. I’m about sixty yards away, and details are hard to tell from here, so I pull out a small pair of binoculars from my jacket and take a better look around. The woman has her hand on Clare’s arm, leading her gently, and smiling as they talk. Good, I was worried somewhat about how people would react to her return. It looks like Richard hasn’t told anyone about what happened.
At the tent Clare says something to the woman, who nods, and goes inside alone. Clare looks up in my rough direction, but she can’t see me, so she scans around the square, and I follow her gaze with the binoculars. There are a few people over by the coaches setting up a trestle table and some kind of stove. They look cold, bored, and hungry, and I wonder what these people are doing for food. Apart from these people, I can just make out the legs of a couple more people inside the large marquee, though nothing more. It’s getting late in the day, and the light will be fading in the next hour, and already the tent is lit from within. Singing starts suddenly, and I feel a memory stir in me from a long time past. They’re singing Jerusalem, and out of nowhere I’m back in the pub with friends on a Saturday watching England playing Australia in the rugby. The memory passes in a heartbeat, but it’s the first time I’ve thought about my old life in months. What am I doing?
That question is answered a minute later, when a short, balding man appears from the tent. He wears glasses with an ugly black plastic frame, and has thinning black hair combed over his pale domed head. His clothing is that of a priest – black shirt and trousers with a white dog collar. Richard. He’s accompanied by the woman with red hair, who looks at Clare with a small worried smile before Richard pats her on the shoulder and she ducks back inside the tent.
Richard’s expression changes instantly to one of almost paternal concern, and he stoops to bring himself down the couple of inches to Clare’s eye level, one hand going out to her arm. She flinches back, but pulls herself together enough to let him touch her. I can’t even begin to imagine how tough this is for her, but she’s doing an amazing job. I slide the rifle off my shoulder and load it in a precise, practised movement. The bolt slides closed without a sound, and I line up my sights on Richard.
Clare is leading him away from the tent, walking without obvious direction but leading Richard towards the coaches, closer towards me. From here it’s not a difficult shot, but I worry about Clare being too close, and she’s under strict instructions to get clear of him as soon as he’s in the open. Even if I miss with my first shot, I should have more than enough time to reload before he gets to any kind of cover.
Richard is talking to Clare and keeping her close to him as they walk. I can almost hear his words over the singing, a note of contrition and concern as he tries to convince Clare that what happened was her fault in some way, that he’s just trying to look out for her. Just imagining it makes my blood boil, and it takes an effort of will to keep my finger off the trigger. He looks around, confused about where they’re going, and takes Clare by the hand, looking to steer her more towards one particular coach.
Then everything goes wrong.
Clare pulls away from Richard with a snap, and screams a “NO!” at him. His face turns from concern to rage in the time it takes me to blink, and he steps forward and grabs Clare by the throat. The singing stops, and I can hear him talking clearly at last. Then I realise we’re in deep shit, because he’s calling her a demon, the spawn of Satan, and telling her she needs to pay for what she’s done to the world. I hear a shout from the tent, and a dozen people emerge, stopping for just long enough to see what happens next.
Richard has Clare at arm’s length, lifting her onto tip-toe with surprising strength. She’s grasping at his arm, trying to lever his fingers off her neck and gasping for air. I have my sights centred on his head, and without hesitation I pull the trigger in a smooth, clean motion.
The rifle kicks, but I’m used to it and I’m reloading almost before the recoil pushes the stock into my right shoulder. Richard’s body crumples to the ground, his head leaving a bloody trail across the ground where it falls. Clare steps back from his grip as he falls, her hand going into her backpack. She pulls out her gun, pointing it in the direction of the crowd who are either screaming or running, several of them back into the tent. The red-haired woman rushes towards Clare, and for a second I think she’s going to try to tackle her, but Clare is already backing away towards the building I’m in, and the woman falls to her knees at Richard’s body, sobbing and cradling his ruined head in her lap.
I satisfy myself that nobody is heading our way, then shoulder the rifle and bound across the roof and down the far stairwell. Clare is running towards me, stuffing her gun back into her rucksack, a huge smile on her face. She reaches me, and leaps up to wrap her arms around me in a hug. I return it for a second, then pull my head back to check she’s okay.
“You all right there?”
“I am now. Let’s get out of here.”
The police car is parked half a mile away. When we reach it I can hear singing in the distance.