Kill Who You Want

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Plot reminder: Giles Hancock, introduced in an earlier chapter, is one of Abigail Gilchrist's pot-smoking friends. Mark Cosgrove is the estranged husband of Catherine Butterfield's lesbian lover, Madeleine, and the man Vince saw fleeing the scene of the shooting. In a previous chapter Vince had established Cosgrove's address, the same residential block where Wye lives. Kubič has been replaced as chief investigating officer by the arrogant DCI Yardley and has once more hit the bottle.

~~~~~

Giles Hancock's absence from school that Monday morning had been more a moral obbligation than an active decision. What with his father away on business, his stepmother choosing that day to take the train down to London for her one of her regular shopping expeditions and Miss Booth's Charles Dickens text analysis test scheduled for second period, it would have been an affront to his clearly defined personal philosophy to have not just stayed in bed. What did he care about Dickens? The only writer he would willingly want to textually analyse was Edgar Allan Poe. Maybe Salinger or Wilde.

Breakfast consisted of a glass of his father's seasoned single malt and some internet porn. After showering, he poured himself another generous splash of whisky and headed back to his bedroom.

It would soon be time, he thought. Any day now. He needed to get himself prepared...

The mirror was a simple, unadorned affair he'd picked up at a hardware shop for a fiver. Sliding it out from its hiding place down the side of the wardrobe, he propped it onto his desk and the wall above, spent a little time adjusting the angle so that, once comfortably seated, his face appeared centrally. It wasn't exactly the same as that antique dresser his mother had brushed her hair at when he'd been little - an ornate French affair with handpainted lilacs which she'd inherited from her grandmother - but it had sufficed so far.

The key to the desk drawer was attached to the leather lace around his neck along with the shark's tooth he'd got in Australia three years earlier. He sometimes told people that he and his father had gone out on a skiff over the Great Barrier Reef and had reeled the thing in themselves. The truth was he'd bought it from some street vendor near the Sydney Opera House. It probably wasn't even real. Neither had it been much of a holiday.  He'd spent most of the time in the hotel with his stepmother waiting for his father to come back from yet another business meeting. The closest they'd got to an open water fishing adventure was a twenty-minute pedalo around Sydney harbour, and even then his dad had spent most of those twenty minutes on the phone.

Untying the lace, he clicked open the drawer. That its contents were so neatly and methodically arranged belied the constant affirmations of both his father and his teachers that his was a disordered and chaotic mind unable to see the simplest of tasks through to the end. It was all a question of will. If he wanted, he could be top of his class. If he wanted, he could set his sights on a good university and a good career. He just simply didn't desire such things. All he wanted was to get out of his face at every possible opportunity. Get up and go to bed whenever the hell he liked. Mooch around, jerk off, heap shit-scoops of scorn on the conventional world.

He'd bought it all when he'd accompanied his stepmother on one of her London shopping expeditions a few months earlier. She'd lent him one of her credit cards, told him not to go too crazy. She'd thought he'd gone shopping for video games in Oxford Street, but instead he'd got the tube over to Covent Garden, taken a look around a theatrical make up shop.

He lifted a brow prosthetic from the drawer, one which would deepen the eyes, make its wearer appear more robust.

He hadn't tried that one yet.

*

At pushing eighty, Gladys Bone's hearing wasn't quite what it had once been. More it was the hissed agitation of Ginger the cat rather than the doorbell itself which alerted her to the caller's presence. Gripping bony fingers to the side of the armchair, she winced herself upright, followed Ginger's feline slink through to the hall.