The Jackdaw

‘Open your eyes.’

Hudson watched as the woman slowly opened her eyes and then tried to lean as far away as she could from the hooded man.

‘Yeah. Do as you’re told, bitch.’

‘You are Georgina Vaughan, yes?’

‘How … how d’you know my name?’

‘That’s not important. What are important are your crimes against the people.’

‘I haven’t committed any crimes against anyone.’

‘Wrong. You work for Glenhope Investments, correct?’

‘I’m just a project manager.’

‘The same Glenhope Investments that needed a government bail-out to stop it from going out of business, while at the same time continued to pay its employees grotesque bonuses.’

‘I don’t know anything about that.’

‘Liar. You’re a liar and a whore to money and wealth, and soon you will be judged for your crimes.’

‘You’re so dead,’ Hudson said out loud, an ugly smile on his face, eyes frenzied with excitement. ‘You’re dead, bitch.’

Gabriel Westbrook stood leaning over his desk as he watched the hooded man preaching to his audience on the screen – an audience the live viewer count put at over one hundred thousand and growing. He sensed little sympathy from the watching public for the plight of his fellow financial sector worker, imagining them as a mob, stalking through the City looking for more victims to lynch. Already he sensed an uneasiness spreading across the City. Nothing too serious yet, but people were beginning to talk and the talk wasn’t positive. Now, with a second victim taken, fears would increase and spread. Not a wholesale panic, but it didn’t take mass hysteria to cause serious financial problems – just a sustained shift in momentum. With the threat of more victims to come, some people would start to choose to take their holidays early, in the hope that by the time they returned the madman would have been caught. Others would take time off sick and many would no longer be comfortable working late – keen to hurry home in the hours of daylight. The streets of the City would hardly be deserted, but the country’s financial heart was like a giant old tanker relentlessly carving its way across oceans, driven by perpetual forward momentum. Were the balance to be tipped, no matter how slightly, momentum would be lost and it would be a long hard process before the huge financial institutions once again reached full speed ahead, by which time billions would have been lost. In a time when the sector was still recovering from its first self-made crisis, the effects would cause significant damage – maybe even more.

He wanted to turn off his computer, but somehow couldn’t.

‘I didn’t do anything.’

‘You are part of the organization that made our government steal the people’s money so you could survive – money that you were supposed to give back to the people, but didn’t. Instead you invested it in property, African gold mines, Australian mineral mines, the vast profits of which you shared amongst yourselves like pigs at the trough while decent, hard-working people lost their jobs, their houses and their life savings. And yet you say you’ve done nothing wrong.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Westbrook shouted at his screen. ‘Someone needs to stop you – someone needs to shut you up, before you start a bloody civil war.’

‘You should watch this,’ Phil Taylor called out to his wife Cathy. ‘This man’s talking a lot of sense.’

‘I don’t want to listen to that lunatic,’ she called back to her husband who sat in the small office-cum-storage room.

‘Don’t you want to know what those bastards did with the money they stole from us?’

‘Stole from us?’ she questioned, continuing their inter-room conversation from the kitchen. ‘I was under the impression bad debtors put the business under. That and you overstretching.’

‘Yeah, well, if the banks had just lent me a bit more we would have been all right.’

‘Sure about that, are you?’ she doubted him.

‘Whatever,’ he mumbled quietly to himself, eager to get back to the hooded man on the screen.

‘Nothing wrong indeed.’

‘I swear. I haven’t.’

Taylor watched as the man walked behind the woman and rested his hands on her shoulders, making her squirm and twist as she tried to see what he was going to do.

‘I’m going to ask you a question now and I want you to answer it honestly. If you lie I will know and your punishment will be severe. Do you understand?’

‘No. No I don’t understand. I just want to go home.’

‘Answer the question honestly and perhaps you will.’

‘OK. OK, I’ll answer the question as honestly as I can.’

The man took a deep breath, the voice distorter making it sound like a rush of wind.

‘Have you received any bonuses since the banking crisis? A simple question.’

‘OK – yes, yes I have, but it’s not what you think.’

The man straightened and took another deep breath, as if he’d unearthed a great truth.

‘How much? How much each year?’

‘I can’t remember, exactly.’

‘Try. How much?’

‘About ... about forty thousand pounds.’

‘Forty thousand pounds.’

‘But it was in shares. I couldn’t even spend them. They were just ... just paper.’

‘And your salary, how much do you get paid each year?’

‘I told you – I’m not rich. I’m just a project manager.’

‘How much and don’t lie to me.’

She slumped in the chair.

‘About ninety thousand pounds.’

‘Ninety thousand pounds and forty thousand bonus, while others can barely feed their families. Shame on you. Shame on you.’

‘D’you hear that?’ Taylor called out. ‘Hundred and thirty grand a year for being a bloody project manager.’ His wife didn’t answer. ‘Greedy bitch,’ he whispered. ‘Bet you weren’t thinking about people like me when you were celebrating your fat City bonus. No – of course you weren’t. None of you were.’

Father Alex Jones had received the text message he’d been dreading informing him that the Your View Killer was back live on the Internet. He sat at the altar of his empty church in Dulwich and logged onto Your View on his old iPad and soon found the images he feared, but looked for anyway – the hooded man with the deeply unsettling distorted voice standing next to a terrified-looking young woman. He’d prayed as the man had preached, pleading with God to touch the man’s heart with mercy while begging for the woman’s safety, but so far neither prayer seemed to have been answered.