Quintin Jardine: Head Shot

Size matters…

'I didn't appreciate how big it was, not until the very moment when he brought it out.'

She looked up into his twisted, anguished face. 'I mean I've seen that calibre of gun before,' she added, 'but I've never actually held one.'

'It's quite a cannon,' he admitted. 'I'l give you that.'

'Yes, but I'm not just talking about its weight, or its smoothness, or any physical thing, I'm talking about a sheer sense of potency; I just seemed to feel it flowing into me. It scared me, yet thrilled me, at the same time.' Her voice was matter-of-fact; he realised the depth of her hysteria and that scared him more than anything.

He threw his head back and exhaled, a great breath hissing through his teeth. He could feel the tension gripping him, bunching the muscles behind his neck, puckering the scars of battle that he had picked up over the years. That roar of anger and frustration swelled up inside him again, and again he held it back.

He gazed at the weapon as it lay at her feet; a huge old-fashioned nickel-plated automatic, which he recognised as a 45 calibre Colt, with a long black silencer fitted to the end of the barrel. 'So…' He ground out the word. 'Gripped by this sudden surge of omnipotence, you…' Again he cut himself off short. 'Is that what you're saying?'

The emotion within him seemed to bring her to her senses, or to somewhere close by; yet still, she looked at him as if he was a stranger.

'No,' she said evasively, her whisper barely audible even in that still, silent room. 'That's not how it happened. I was frightened; he was mocking me.'

'If he'd laid down the fucking gun, and you had picked it up, why were you frightened?'

There was a long pause; he felt his heart-rate rise, and a strange, cold feeling ran through him. 'Come on,' he snapped, at last, forcing her to answer.

'It was the look in his eyes; he was sneering at me. He thought he was so dominant; he was just so damn confident. He was playing with me as if I was his slave. He had me there, at his mercy, about to be kil ed and there was nothing I could do about it.'

'Did he speak?'

'Oh yes,' she said, her voice strengthening. 'He spoke, all right. He explained to me in great detail what it would do to me… after he was finished with me, that is… how the bul ets were soft-nosed with a mercury core to flatten them on impact. He didn't have to, though. I've seen how they work.'

'Too bloody right you have,' he grunted, absently.

She gave no sign of having heard him. 'Then he told me he was going to shoot me in the back of the head. It would blow my face away, he said, make a mess that would be a message as well. He said that he wished he could be there when they found me.'

She took a deep breath. 'He laughed at the thought of it. That's how sure he was of himself; he laughed as he got down on me, and then he put it on the floor as he undid himself, he laid it right beside my face. He invited me to look at the means of my own destruction, to understand it, to feel its power. I remember thinking he was crazy, and looking at him, too scared really to understand what he was saying. He was smiling, all the time smiling. "Don't worry," he said, when he was almost ready.

"The best is yet to come."

'But he had got it wrong. He thought I couldn't move, but when both his hands were busy, when he was…' She paused for breath. 'I made a grab for it. I almost dropped it: that's how badly I was shaking, that's how frightened I was. But I managed to keep hold of it, and to put it up against his head, and to tell him to get off me.'

He looked down at her, waiting for her to finish. She was still perched on the edge of her seat, her naked body shining silver in a shaft of moonlight that flowed through a narrow gap in the curtains.

'And then… okay, I suppose you could be right… then, I felt it: I felt the power that it gave me, power over him for a change. My hands had stopped shaking, completely. I could hold the gun steady. I saw the safety catch on the side, and I saw that it was off.

'He stopped laughing then. I pointed it at him and it was his turn to be terrified. And yes, you're right, I wasn't frightened at al; not by then. I just felt so angry, so tremendously, overpoweringly angry, at what he'd done to me, and been going to do. I couldn't stop myself; I didn't want to stop myself, and so…'

He finished for her. '… You blew his fucking head off. You had him under control, but you fucking well shot him.'

Suddenly he bent and picked up the great gun from the floor; releasing the magazine, checking it, then slipping it back into its housing in the butt.

He knelt down beside the body, feeling the queasiness which always overtook him when he confronted death, close up. He was glad that he had switched off the light as he looked at the leavings of the man, lying face up on the floor, in a dark puddle that had soaked into the rug on which he had fal en. 'He wasn't kidding about the ammo,' he said. 'You don't use this stuff to inflict flesh wounds. Shoot someone in the arm with one of these shells and you'll blow it right off.' He glanced over his shoulder, back towards her.

'You made a good job of it,' he said. 'You shot him right in the face; took out his right eye and the bridge of his nose. No, this bastard wil not be bothering you again.'

He saw a shiver run through her shoulders; he knew that soon, she would need sedation.

'This leaves us with only one smal problem,' he continued.

'What's that?' she whispered.

'What the hell are we going to do with him?'

The skul 's empty eye-sockets seemed to be looking up at him from the white card, which the cabin attendant had given him. 'Welcome to Malaysia,' he murmured.

A significant part of Bob Skinner's police career had been spent pursuing the drug dealers who had threatened the social fabric of Edinburgh, the city that lay at the heart of his force's territory. The bigger they were, the more he hated them, with his strongest venom being reserved for those who peddled the most addictive substances in the most vulnerable areas, the places where the poverty trap was at its tightest, and where the perceived respite offered by spoon, flame and needle was, for some, an irresistible lure.

The heavier the sentences the Scottish High Court had handed down to those convicted, the wider had been his smile. But even he thought that the Pacific countries were going too far in imposing the ultimate penalty on the peddlers. At the same time, he recognised that much of the global supply of hard drugs originated in the area, and that at least the regional governments were showing the rest of the world that they took the problem seriously.

His difficulty with their policy was that, invariably, the people who fell through the trapdoor were the couriers, the mules, the foot soldiers, but never the generals. In any war, the great majority of the casualties come from the Other Ranks; in the global battle against narcotics the story was just the same.

The Deputy Chief Constable planned to say as much in his speech to the plenary session of the international conference at which he was representing the police service in Scotland. He knew that his view would not be popular with his Malaysian hosts, but that would not deter him from putting it forward.

'They spell it out, sir, don't they,' said Detective Chief Inspector Mary Chambers. 'A red skul and crossbones and "Death penalty for drug trafficking", stamped on your landing card. That's a bit unnecessary, heading in this direction, do you not think? There can't be a hell of a lot of smack smuggled from Heathrow to the Far East.'

Skinner glanced sideways at her, taking in the plain, square face, the forehead defined by close-cut dark hair which offered not a hint of personal vanity. 'She looks more like a copper than any bloke I've ever seen,' Andy Martin had said after her interview, and, the DCC had conceded, he had been right.