Vicious Circle (26 page)

‘No!’ she whispered and shook her head vehemently.

‘Don’t lie to me, you cow!’ He pricked her cheek with the point of the knife and she squealed with shock and pain.

‘Please don’t hurt me any more. I don’t like these games any more. I don’t want to play any more. Put that knife away please, Aleutian.’

‘This isn’t a game. You told Hector Cross about me, bitch.’

‘No, I did not.’ But despite the denial he saw the guilty realization dawn in her eyes. Her face contorted with terror.

‘Yes, you did. You told him where to find me,’ he laughed at her.

‘Please. You don’t understand.’ He ignored her protests, and his voice dropped to a kindly and reassuring tone.

‘Don’t worry; just do as I tell you and everything will be all right. Take your left ear and pull it out to one side as far as it will go.’ She stared at him in dumb incomprehension.

‘Do it, Victoria. Do it, if you really love me,’ he urged her, and still staring at him she lifted her hand and took the lobe of her ear between her two fingers and stretched it out.

‘That’s perfect,’ he said, and with a single quick stroke of the silver blade he sliced the ear off cleanly at the level of her scalp.

She shrieked once and then stared with fixed horror at the severed ear that she held between her fingers.

‘Now eat it. Put it in your mouth and swallow it,’ he told her softly.

The blood from her wound dripped onto her chest and ran down between her breasts. She ignored it and kept staring at her severed ear. He pricked her neck and she started and looked up at him.

‘Open your mouth,’ he told her and pricked her again. She opened her mouth.

‘Now put it in your mouth and swallow it.’

‘No!’ she said. ‘I am sorry. I didn’t mean to do it. Let me explain…’

He touched her eyebrow with the point of the knife. ‘Eat it or I will cut out your eyeballs, one at a time.’

She put her own ear into her mouth.

‘There you see. That’s not so bad. It probably tastes pretty good, doesn’t it?’ Her shoulders heaved again. ‘No. Don’t do that. Swallow it.’

She made a determined effort to obey. Her face and her throat contorted. At last she gulped it down. She was panting but she blurted out hoarsely, ‘It’s gone. I swallowed it.’

‘That’s really cool. I am proud of you.’

‘Please, please stop now. Please don’t hurt me any more.’ She was weeping bitterly and still rolling her head from side to side.

‘Stop?’ he asked with mock surprise. ‘But we have only just gotten started. There is still something you want to tell me about, isn’t there, Vicky? You want to tell me who you have been talking to about me, don’t you?’

‘I never told anybody about you, I swear it on my mother’s grave.’ Tears were streaming down her face, and she was breathing in great shuddering gasps.

‘You are lying, Vicky. I have to make you eat your other ear.’ He forced her to her knees and he seized her remaining ear and stretched it out like a piece of rubber. He laid the blade against it, and Vicky screamed.

Nastiya heard that scream.

*

Nastiya picked up the cab at the front door of the Portals of Paradise. It was dropping off four giggling and squealing Polish girls.

She pushed one of the girls aside, jumped into the back seat and told the driver, ‘Forty-seven Gardens Lane and the postcode is TW9 5LA. It’s on the corner with Kew Gardens Road. It’s about three hundred yards down the road from the Kew Gardens tube station.’

‘I know where it is, love,’ the cabby said.

‘An extra fifty pounds if you can get me there in under a quarter of an hour, cabby.’

‘Buckle your seat belt, and have your fifty-pound note ready, lady,’ he told her. ‘Here we go.’

The streets were almost deserted and he drove very fast. He pulled into Gardens Lane with minutes to spare. Nastiya pushed two fifty-pound notes through the pay window and told him, ‘Keep the change, you earned it.’ She jumped from the taxi and ran across the road to No. 47. As she went through the gate into the tiny garden she heard Victoria scream. She kicked off her stiletto heels and dropped her sequin-covered bag. She pulled her pencil skirt up around her waist and ran at the door, building up momentum. She remembered from her last visit that the lock was old and flimsy. However, she also remembered the two substantial security chains, so she launched herself with both feet together and at the last moment kicked out like a mule.

To her astonishment the lock gave way readily and the door crashed back against the inner wall. Nastiya flew through it, feet first, into the passageway beyond. She rolled back onto her feet and was running again with barely any check in her charge.

She remembered the exact layout of the shabby little apartment. The living room and the kitchen were to the right. But she could see the light under the door of the single bedroom. She kicked it open and then dodged aside and flattened her body against the side wall. She glanced around the door jamb into the bedroom.

It was a charnel house. Blood splattered the pink linen of the single bed. It had been dashed across the walls and was pooling on the fluffy white rugs in the centre of the floor.

Vicky was on her feet facing her, but Nastiya could hardly recognize the girl. She was naked. Her ears had been hacked away. Blood cascaded from the fresh raw wounds. It ran down into her mouth and dyed her teeth crimson. Blood poured off her chin and ran down her body in sheets. The room stank of blood and vomit.

Nastiya recognized Aleutian at once from the video. He was standing behind Vicky. He had her in a headlock, pinning her helplessly. In his other fist he held the bloody knife with which he had committed the carnage. He was reaching around Vicky’s body and holding the point of the long blood-caked blade against her belly button. Using Vicky’s body as a shield, he was glaring at Nastiya over her shoulder.

‘Listen to me, Aleutian. Let Vicky go and you can walk away from this,’ Nastiya told him in a calm and reasonable tone of voice.

‘I don’t know who the hell you are, blondie, but I like what I see of you. I think I have got a better plan than yours. First I am going to finish what I started with this cow I have here. Then I am going to come after you, and when I catch you I’m going to give you the best fuck you have ever had in your life. Then I am going to kill you also, but very slowly. Now I am only going to do this once, so watch closely please.’

He drew the knife swiftly from side to side across Victoria’s naked belly, cutting down deeply through her skin and muscle and her stomach wall. Her intestines bulged from the wound. The knife had sliced through them and the contents spilled from them. Then he changed the angle of the blade and stabbed it up through her sternum.

Vicky’s eyes flew wide open, staring into eternity, as the blade pierced her heart. The breath rushed from her open mouth and then she sagged in Aleutian’s grip as she died. Even Nastiya was for an instant frozen by the brutality of it.

However, her dominating concern had switched from saving Vicky’s life to the knife in Aleutian’s hand. The knife gave Aleutian control.

She’d seen from the way he handled the weapon that he was a skilled knife fighter, probably the most dangerous she had ever faced. He knew how good he was, and he was supremely confident. He was enjoying himself. Obviously he thrived on the smell of blood and the stink of ripped bowels that filled the room. She knew she underestimated him at her peril.

She, on the other hand, was unarmed, barefooted and dressed in restricted clothing. The tiny bedroom was made even smaller by the bed in the centre. For her particular fighting style she needed space in which to manoeuvre, to retreat and feint. Most of all, she must have space in which to keep clear of that blade.

Clearly, Aleutian had reached the same conclusions, and he moved swiftly to restrict her movements even further. Still holding Vicky’s corpse in front of him as a shield, he tried to crowd Nastiya into a corner of the room. But she broke away, slipping around his left side, away from the knife.

Before he could swing his human shield around to block her, she had regained her position in the doorway. The door jambs on each side of her covered her flanks. She faced him again and fell into a fighting crouch with her hands held high and stiff as axe blades, crossed at the wrists.

‘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.