Paul Finch - The Killing Club

‘Keep walking,’ Cooper instructed.

Farthing whimpered as the dark entrance loomed in front of them. Heck glanced sideways; tears had appeared on the chubby cop’s milk-pale cheeks.

‘You still need a way out of this, Mr Cooper,’ Heck said. ‘Shoot us now, and what happens next?’

‘That hardly matters to you .’

‘But what about you? Won’t be much chance of getting the rest of Crabtree’s gang if you’re sitting in jail. It might be the other way around. Crabtree’s lot will have friends on the inside …’ Bricks and other rubble clattered under their feet as they stumbled into the mildew-scented interior.

‘If I feared retaliation, I’d never have embarked on this course,’ Cooper said.

‘And what course was that?’ Heck wondered. ‘Bumping off some Nazis? Carrying on your father’s good work?’

‘Father was the finest of the fine. During this nation’s darkest hour, fighting men like him shone.’

‘Pity he didn’t restrict himself to the fighting, eh? Pity he became a war criminal.’

‘It’s no crime to execute those responsible for heinous deeds.’ Cooper’s voice had imperceptibly tautened. ‘Father was always an honest man. He believed in justice and a firm response to wickedness. Along there … all the way to the end.’

They now faced the meshwork corridor with its hanging cables and rags of lagging. The open spaces beyond it were hidden in funereal gloom.

Farthing all but sobbed aloud.

‘And what wickedness were Nathan Crabtree and his cronies committing?’ Heck asked, starting forward, eyes darting right and left.

‘The mere fact you have to ask that condemns you … but their main fault is simply being who they are.’

‘You don’t share their views? I’m surprised.’

‘Which again shows how little you know, sergeant. Animals like that … they call themselves British. And yet they terrorise the weak, punish the innocent. They call themselves patriots … even though they defame our flag, besmirch our name …’

‘So how’d you do it?’ Heck asked. ‘Lure them to their doom. I’m guessing they didn’t know they had a runner on their hands?’

‘ What are you doing?’ Farthing blurted, suddenly jerking out of his tearful reverie. ‘We don’t want to know , okay Mr Cooper? We don’t want to know anything.’

Cooper appeared not to have heard the outburst. ‘I propositioned the two henchmen. Made sexual remarks to them. One while he was using a public lavatory. The other while he was crossing a public park.’

‘As easy as that, eh?’ Heck said.

‘Dumb animals follow their instincts. As for Crabtree, I presented him with certain photographs I’d discovered on the internet. Offered them for sale to him in a pub . I knew he would pursue me for as long as was necessary.’

‘And in each case, when you got to the pre-prepared spot, you just turned around and pulled your Luger?’

‘The brutes are so easy. They were even easier to render unconscious. If your forensics people were ever to examine my khukuri, they’d find as many blood flecks lodged in its lion head hilt as they would in the grooves or bevels of its blade.’

‘They aren’t going to find it, Mr Cooper,’ Farthing said in an attempted manlier tone. ‘You have my word on that. Look … we couldn’t stand Crabtree and his Nazi pals either! We’re glad they’re dead. We weren’t investigating this case very hard …’

‘I’d like to believe you, PC Farthing,’ Cooper said, ‘I really would. But in modern Britain, the establishment – an amoral, drug-addled band born of the 1960s and 1970s, of whom you are the willing servants – have proved numerous times how uninterested they are in finding justice for the oppressed, and in fact have expended much more energy defending the rights of the vile. So no, I don’t believe you.’

Heck said nothing. They were now approaching the end of the meshwork passage, though just before that a sheet of grimy polythene part-hung down overhead.

‘Okay … you don’t like us.’ Farthing’s voice turned whiney again. ‘But what good is killing two bobbies? Look … I’ve got a wife and three daughters! What’s it going to do to them if they never see me again? How will they cope?’

‘Widows and fatherless children were left equally bereft in the years following the war,’ Cooper replied. ‘They managed.’

‘Oh, cut the crap!’ the PC snapped in a strangled tone. He swung sharply round, the eyes bulging like wet marbles in his pallid, frightened face. ‘If you’re going to do it, do it! Don’t bore us with your good old stiff-upper-lip “who-d’you-think-you’re-kidding-Mr-Hitler” bullshit!’

Heck spun around too, taking advantage of the distraction to grab the edge of the hanging polythene and yank the entire thing down; a crumpled mass of water-laden sheeting, which covered their startled captor head to foot.

Cooper didn’t fall beneath the weight of it, but it hampered him and blinded him. He never even saw the rocketing punch that Heck threw at his face, but grunted on impact. There was a splat of scarlet on the other side of the sheeting, and yet he remained upright. Already he was fighting the encumbrance off, levelling his Luger.

‘Leg it!’ Heck shouted, snatching Farthing by the sleeve.

‘What … where to?’

‘Anywhere! Just bloody leg it!’

They ran together, but in no particular direction. The wilderness of the shop floor lay all around them, littered with rubble – but it was wide open. There was nowhere to duck or hide. Heck glanced back. Cooper was stumbling out from the mesh corridor.

‘Down here!’ Farthing squawked. To the left, a steel stairway dropped through an aperture into dimness.

They descended without thinking. Some ten feet down, it deposited them in a concrete corridor with numerous doors leading off it, though at its farthest end, maybe eighty yards away, there was a smudge of light. They ran towards this, but only seconds later heard the heavy clunking of feet on the stair behind.

‘Oh Christ!’ Farthing gasped.

Passing door after door, they saw nothing but mould-streaked walls, rotted pipe-work. Heck glanced back again. The tall, rangy form of Cooper was pursuing them along the passage, silhouetted on the light seeping down the stair. He was walking rather than running, but with long, loping strides. Heck was confused as to why, in this narrow field of vision, he hadn’t already opened fire. Possibly, just maybe, it was his eyes. Cooper was nearly sixty, and perhaps didn’t have his glasses with him. It was certainly the case that he’d had to get close to his other victims. This gave them a chance, of sorts.

Heck bundled Farthing around the corner onto another shop floor. This one was dimmer than the first, and strewn with further rubble, but still there was nowhere to hide.

‘Oh … shit!’ Farthing stammered.

Heck pushed him towards a double-sized doorway, and beyond this into a tall timber passage that was broad enough for forklift trucks to drive down it. Their footfalls echoed as they hammered along, emerging fifty yards later in what had once been an internal loading bay, a series of concrete platforms abutting into a hangar-like space where HGVs were once accommodated. It was filled with litter and old leaves, and stank of oil.

There was no further access from here. Panting, Heck could only gaze at the huge folding steel doors that separated them from the outside. Again, they heard feet reverberating along the service passage behind.

‘Fuck!’ Farthing hissed.

They scrambled through a smaller-sized doorway on the right, entering a confused sprawl of interconnecting offices and corridors. Again, all were cluttered with rubbish and cross-cut by shafts of light penetrating from various external windows, though most of these had been closed off with corrugated metal. They turned several corners, before blundering into a final room, and finding there was nowhere else to run.