The FACEBOOK KILLER: Part 2 (6 page)

And so Albert waited, two streets away from number 137, the parcel hidden in his shopping bag. That time bomb. The ticking, ticking time bomb. To anyone passing he looked like any other elderly Muslim man resting his weary bones on a bench, granted he was a little lighter than his peers, but that was down to a vitamin deficiency. He knew that the mail van would stop next to him; after all he had sent twenty letters to the accountant’s office on the other side of the street. All of which had to be signed for. That should keep them occupied for five minutes or more; it was only a matter of time now.

As he waited, Albert kicked the box every now and again. He could see what was going to happen in his mind’s eye. If this went to plan, it was going to be one of our greatest triumphs. The Kill Family Robinson at it’s finest.

He recognised the van, from the day we followed Adela home, as it drove slowly down the road towards where he was sitting. It made one stop before it reached him. He kicked the box. The postman got out of the van. Albert saw
his
yellow envelopes in the man’s hand. He crossed the road with the mail. He went inside the office. Albert tried the back door of the van, it wasn’t locked, he opened it slightly then sat back down.

Our calculations had been wrong. It only took three and a half minutes for the mail to be signed for. It didn’t matter though, that was time enough. The van set off on its journey again. Albert followed it half the length of the street, to the next speed ramp to be exact.

As the driver hit it, the back doors swung open. It was time. Albert discarded the shopping bag and shouted for the van driver to stop, waving the box madly to attract his attention. “You dropped something,” he called out, “your doors are open.” The van braked suddenly, three more boxes fell on to the road, adding credibility to the story. The driver gave Albert a strange look as he took the parcel off him. He picked up the others from the road and drove off without saying a word.

*

Adela shook the box, like an excited child on Christmas morning. This is what she loved about Abdul, his spontaneity, like the time in Paris when he took her to Grand Vefour, a Michelin 3-star restaurant. The bill had come to over 3,000 euros, he had bought a bottle of Romanée Conti, “probably the best red wine in the world,” he had told her, “for the best wife in the world.” That was the night that he had given her the ring.

Her smile lit up those sad eyes, as she tore open the enveloped attached to the parcel. “To my dearest Adela,” it read, “this is something you deserve more than anything else in the world. We will be together soon, I promise. All my love, Abdul.”

Seconds later, Albert heard the screams from outside the house. He knew her parents would be at work; he had made an appointment to meet them at their engineering firm on the premise of discussing plans to build a multi-million pound recycling plant near the city. He knew absolutely nothing about recycling but that didn’t matter, he had no intentions of keeping the appointment anyway. He was listening to some football match on his portable radio, he didn’t have a clue who was playing or what was being said but the volume masked Adela’s cries. He knew that she would have seen the snake before it blinded her, that she would try and get out of the house to escape its fangs and he also knew that she wouldn’t be quick enough.

As Adela’s mother and father waited patiently for their millionaire client, their daughter lay on the floor, those sad eyes now on fire, unseeing. The Red Spitting Cobra slithering towards her, weaving its way between chair legs and beneath the sofa. Coiling its body; preparing for its final angry strike.

Albert turned down the radio. Silence. The street was deserted. The cries of pain were over. But she wasn’t dead, no, we had made sure of that. This snake wouldn’t kill her just paralyse her. A mere reptile wouldn’t be allowed the glory of ending this bitch’s life. That was our privilege and ours alone.

We had agreed that since the stakes were so high in this country, we could leave no trace of foul play. There would come an end to this passage, but not yet and not here.

Bereft of the technologies we had available to us back in England, Albert knew that the only way to get to Adela now was plain old-fashioned burglary. He made his way to the back of the house through a side alley. He didn’t care about climbing over the gate. So what if someone saw him? He had heard screams and was only trying to help.

He couldn’t call the back garden a garden, not anymore. It had been concreted over and block-paved, surrounded by high wooden fences and adorned by garish ornaments and religious-looking statues. It obviously belonged to people who didn’t have time to take care of plants and trees, people who couldn’t take care of their own daughter, people who couldn’t even choose a decent husband for her.

As he approached the large, sliding patio doors, Albert could see her lying on the floor. There was no movement. No sign of her attacker either. He looked for a point of entry. He checked to see if the back door was open, it wasn’t. The patio doors neither.

There was a smell of smoke. Small clouds drifted over the fence. He peered through a small crack. The neighbour was burning off dead branches. He threw on a large armful of leaves. A woman called to him in a strange language, he replied, and then disappeared from the crack. Albert could hear dishes and cutlery clattering. A door closed and then silence again.

Albert’s eyes darted around the concrete garden. The garden shed; surely there would be something useful inside, something to force his way into the house. He took a small concrete urn and, dropping the plastic flowers onto the floor, struck the rusty padlock. It fell apart at the first attempt. Albert had hoped that some of the long-redundant garden tools would still be inside, but he was wrong. It looked like daddy had found a better use for his shed. The small desk had neatly placed piles of porn magazines. The shelf above was stacked with packets of cigarettes, a can of lighter fuel, and an assortment of spirits. “Fuck me, if Allah could only see this,” thought Albert.

He grabbed the lighter fuel and stuck a bottle of vodka in his pocket. The magazines went untouched; we had seen enough of these whores to last a lifetime. Peering through the crack he knew he had only one chance. Putting his sunglasses on, he tossed the can of lighter fuel over the fence like a grenade. It landed perfectly on the smouldering leaves. It was hard to tell how long. He ran with the concrete urn and waited in position by the patio doors. He had one chance. This would have to be a split-second reaction like all of those years ago, in Iraq. Albert’s cheek was throbbing. The urn raised high above his head, arms shaking, sweat starting to run down his back.

The explosions couldn’t have been more than half a second apart. The fence was ablaze now. The dining room filled with shards of glass. Shouts came from the neighbour’s garden and still the bitch didn’t stir.

That’s when it hit Albert, or so he told me afterwards. He tried to describe it but he couldn’t. Was it chemical? Neurological? or something deeper? He didn’t know. All he knew was that the rage had consumed his mind and body entirely.

Personally, I think it was the link. The bond. The similarity, if you like. No, let me correct that. The Irony. Here he was with Abdul Hamid’s wife-to-be.

Albert broke every single bone in that girl’s body. He thinks he used the urn but he’s not one hundred percent sure. What he does remember is her being like a rag doll before he tied her up into ball, so small, that she fitted into a rucksack he found under the stairs. He said she was like one of those balls you make from hundreds of elastic bands, like contortionists who can pass themselves through a tiny hoop.

The violence didn’t anger me. That fucking bitch deserved everything she got. What annoyed me was that he brought her back to the hotel room in the first place. In fact that wasn’t the worst of it either. What really pissed me off was that she was still breathing.

Chapter 12

I’d been thinking long and hard about Matthew Gerradine and what role he could play in all this. I had decided to come clean with him. Tell him about everything. But only if he guaranteed a press blackout until I was ready. If he blew the whistle now, we would have little chance of getting out of Pakistan, never mind back into Britain. If he kept his mouth shut, he would get the biggest exclusive in the history of journalism. But I was paranoid. How did I know that he could be trusted?

I made contact with Serge again. He said it could be arranged but would cost £30,000. And so that is how Matthew Gerradine became my confidant. I didn’t really care what conditions his mother was being kept in, as long as they kept her alive, I was guaranteed absolute discretion.

Gerradine’s home phone number was in the public domain, so Norman called him from a pay phone inside the public library. It seemed like the obvious spot. No background noise to give away where we were. It sounded like he was going to fucking explode when Norman told him that we had his mother. I’m sure everyone in the library heard him too. We told him to email us from a private address, not to tell his police friends and wait for our reply.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Adela was still in the bathtub when we returned to the hotel. Well, she couldn’t very well go anywhere. Her broken legs were wrapped around her neck. Her arms strapped behind her back like a strait jacket. There was dried blood on the sides of the bath, a faint whimper coming from somewhere within that suffocating ball of smashed bones. Fuck it! Albert was the one that had started this and he was bloody well going to finish it. So I went and fetched him from the safe.

Aside from exquisite food in the hotel’s dining room, they used the finest cutlery, especially the steak knives. “It could cut through a tree,” the headwaiter had told us. Well, we were about to find out.

Albert pulled the bundle by its hair onto the edge of the bath. Her left arm flopped against the side as Albert cut the rope, limp, swinging like a pendulum where her elbow had once been. He held her wrist as the remainder slid back down inside. He reached over with his other hand and turned on the hot tap, forcing her wrist under the steaming water, before he made the first incision.

It took him exactly fifteen cuts to remove her hand. In that time the whimpering grew weaker and weaker, like letting the air out of a football. The scarlet whirlpool draining her life away, her future, her marriage, her children, her old age. Gone in a matter of seconds. Her hopes and dreams now mixed with other people’s shit and dirty water. Exactly where they fucking belonged.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We knew Gerradine was pissed off. The email was full of spelling mistakes, obviously written in a rage. Well,
fuck him
; he didn’t know the first thing about rage.

Serge had been considerate enough to have a note left in old Mrs. Gerradine’s home, basically informing her son, in no uncertain terms, that she would be executed if he didn’t obey the rules of the game. Gerradine had found it when he flew around there in a panic.

And so I proceeded to tell Gerradine everything, well not quite everything, I didn’t let him know that we were in Pakistan. I told him that I wanted a posthumous apology to Dermott Madison for any implication in the Facebook killings and I wanted more column inches devoted to the ongoing hunt for Devoy, the real killer. I also demanded that he find out where that bastard Hamid was currently hiding as I had a present for him. He was not to relay any of our communications to the police or his mother would die and he would be framed for it without a shadow of a doubt. I also wanted to know who he was working with.

The reply must have come whilst Albert was getting rid of his ball. We had agreed, no bodies – no death penalty. Adela left the hotel the same way she had entered, in a backpack. We were amazed how much lighter she weighed minus eight pints of blood and a hand. There was nothing ingenious about her disposal. Albert merely dumped his rucksack into one of the many rancid, overflowing garbage containers, most of which already stank of rotting flesh. We found out later that night that the broken patio door and the traces of blood inside had been put down to the blast from the neighbour’s garden. Adela Nissar was simply another missing person in Lahore. Possibly suffering from concussion and memory loss. Her hand in marriage was not lost though. It was in our fridge, awaiting its final ceremony with its betrothed, Abdul Hamid.

Chapter 13

I awoke to a light knocking on the door. It broke my dream about Anna and Laura. We were back home, before it became a pile of ashes, having a barbecue in the back garden. We were laughing and joking about something, I don’t quite remember, I sprayed some more fuel on the coals. Then Laura was screaming; her clothes were alight. I couldn’t move. I was stuck to the spot as if my legs and arms were tied up. Anna tried to put out the flames but they only engulfed her too. The screams were still ringing in my ears. The knock came again. Louder this time. More urgent. I was fully awake, there was nothing I could now to help them. They were in a place I couldn’t reach during my waking hours.

“
Who is it?” I called from the bed. My voice sounded hoarse, my mouth was dry.

“
Security,” came the muffled reply.

I sat bolt upright. Jesus! The empty bottle of vodka that Albert had taken from the garden shed lay beside me on the bed. Empty. I had a headache. The knock came once again.