The Killing Club

Farthing, white-faced and sweating, climbed slowly from the driver’s side, while someone else climbed from the passenger side. The newcomer was slim but tall, about six-foot-three. He was in his late fifties, with lean, angular features and pale blue eyes. He had grey hair cut so short that it was really no more than a circular patch on top of his head, and a clipped grey moustache. He wore a fawn tracksuit, and a khaki belt, into the left-hand side of which the khukuri knife was tucked. This was a truly admirable object – its blade shone wickedly and there was a carved steel lion’s head at its pommel. But he also wielded a firearm: a Luger nine-millimetre, that most iconic weapon of the Third Reich, which he now trained squarely on Farthing’s head.

They’d been fooled, Heck realised. He’d gone straight through that gate in the fence without considering that their quarry might be somewhere closer to home – hiding under the police car perhaps, or squatting around the back of it.

‘Please tell me you managed to get a call out first?’ Heck said to Farthing.

But Farthing was too busy jabbering to his captor. ‘Mr Cooper … this is ridiculous. You’re not going to shoot us. I mean, come on, you can’t …’

‘Shut up,’ Cooper said, quietly but curtly.

‘Look, we were only here to ask you a couple of questions …’

‘I said shut up!’

‘Jesus, man … you can’t just fucking shoot us!’

‘Don’t do anything rash, Mr Cooper,’ Heck advised.

‘Rash implies unnecessary, pointless, futile.’ Cooper’s accent was noticeably Sunderland, but more refined than most. He waggled with his pistol, indicating that Farthing should walk over and stand alongside Heck, which he duly did. ‘I assure you, Sergeant Heckenburg … the action I take here today will be none of those things. Now empty your pockets, please. Every weapon you’re carrying, every communication device. I want them placed on the ground. When you’ve done that, put your hands up.’

Heck stooped, laying down his radio, mobile phone and handcuffs. Cooper watched him intently and yet unemotionally. His pale blue eyes were like teddy bear buttons; it was quite the most unnatural colour Heck had ever seen.

‘That looks like an original 1940s Luger to me, Mr Cooper,’ Heck said. ‘Another spoil of war?’

‘Inside!’ Cooper indicated the yawning doorway behind them.

Heck held his ground, fingers flexing. He glanced around. There wasn’t a building overlooking them. The only high points in sight were the towering hulks of disused cranes. Directly overhead, the sun had gone in, tumbleweeds of cloud scudding through a colourless sky.

Cooper pointed the Luger directly at Heck’s face. ‘I said move.’

Heck turned, hands raised. Farthing did the same, half-stumbling, the eyes bulging in his sweaty, froglike face.

‘I’m guessing you haven’t tried to fire that before?’ Heck said over his shoulder.

‘It’s fully loaded, I assure you,’ Cooper replied.

‘Yeah, but what do you think’ll happen if you fire it now … for the first time in seventy years?’

‘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.