Hurt (The Hurt Series) (29 page)

‘Not at all. You’ve been very helpful.’ Jessop slid her card across the table. ‘In case you think of anything else.’

Edwards took the card and twisted it between his fingers. ‘There is one thing I think you should know.’

‘Go on.’

Edwards pocketed the card, necked his beer, and stood. ‘Chambers is a bit of a legend.’

‘How so?’

‘Son of a bitch chalked up the nine longest range kills in British Military history. Was going for the big ten when he got hit.’

Jessop’s skin prickled. Next to her Mason had gone very still.

‘Google it if you don’t believe me.’ Edwards picked up his gym bag and flung it over his wide shoulder. ‘Trust me, the guy’s top fucking notch. Never misses. Used to boast he’d hunted the best and killed the best, and was deadlier than God himself.’

The ex-soldier graced Jessop with a tight smile. She returned the gesture, noting Edward’s inability to look her in the eye as he turned to leave.

Chapter
Seventy-seven

According to the newspaper article, Corporal Phillip Chamber’s longest kill had been an unprecedented 18000 metre shot, direct to the chest of a “key” Taliban official named Mohammad Hakim Zahid. Chambers and his spotter had spent five days under heavy fire hidden above a shop waiting for the perfect conditions to execute the shot.

With no military intelligence on the elusive Zahid, Chambers had been asked how he’d known who to target. He’d said he’d been taught to compartmentalise, improvise, adapt, and overcome. Or “CIAO”, as he liked to call it. He told of how he’d seen Zahid being saluted on a number of occasions, and in his two tours of the country, he’d picked up a lot of the language. This helped because his mother had been deaf, and from a young age he had considered her ability to lip read cool. And so with his mother’s help he had learned the art, and had gotten into a lot of mischief at school because of it. Little did he know how the skill would benefit him several years later 3500 miles away above an Afghan shop.

Of all the theories Jessop had considered about how Chambers had heard Angela talking to her on the bench that day from forty yards away, good old fashioned lip reading had not crossed her mind. It was all too easy in these days of high-tech spyware gadgetry to ignore the most obvious solutions.

The article went on to echo what Edwards had said about how Chamber’s career had been arrested on October 28
^th
2010 when an RPG had taken out the truck he and his spotter were riding in.

October 28
^th
, she mused, glancing at the calendar on her desk. Last Saturday was October 28
^th
, the date Chambers had begun his killing spree with Spartan the dog.

Scrawling down the page, she stopped on the picture at the bottom of the article. In the picture Chambers wore beige combat fatigues. Hair shaven as it was now he had a wide smile on his unblemished face and an arm around the shoulders of a lad roughly the same age wearing the same clothes. He also had a smile on his face. A smile she had last seen five days ago in another picture.

In that picture, the lad had also had his arm around someone’s shoulder: his brother’s. Earlier that day, she’d seen him with his father, but that time he wasn’t smiling. Captured on tape as Terence Randal had raped him, Oliver “Olly” Randal was crying.

She shook the image away.

‘
Tight as brothers,
’ Edwards had described Chambers and Olly’s friendship.

Tight enough to share secrets about their childhood? Dark secrets you could only share with the person in who you trusted your life?

No one knew about Terence Randal raping his son. No one except Chambers. And he wanted the truth to be heard, and the sick bastard to pay.

That’s why he’d led them to Randal.

She shut her eyes, took a deep breath. Listened to the sound of her phone ringing. ‘Yes?’ she answered.

‘You were right,’ Curtis said. ‘Gavin Miller, the Big Issue seller, is at the squat on Falkirk Street.’

She pictured the squalid house, trying to imagine Chambers and his young family living happily there. ‘Cause of death?’

‘Looks to me like an overdose.’

A
knock on her office door. She looked up to see Mason alongside a man of similar stature and intensity.

‘Gavin had no loved ones to whom Chambers could teach his lesson,’ she told Curtis. ‘He’s collateral damage.’

She cut the call short and beckoned the two men in. Mason opened the door and in stepped Bryan Daniels, the head of CO19 - The Specialist Firearms Unit.

Chapter
Seventy-eight

In his early fifties with short blonde and steady green eyes, Daniels had the quiet confidence of a man comfortable with his life and what he had done in his previous life. Such confidence, coupled with broad shoulders upon a sinewy physique, commanded respect in any room he walked into, and attracted the eye of any women fortunate to be in that room. Jessop had called him because he had served in both The Falkland War and Gulf War.

His role, sniper.

Wearing a black polo shirt and dark denim jeans, Daniels lowered himself into a chair, crossed his long legs, instantly at ease in the room and the company. ‘I’ve read about Chambers. Talented boy.’

‘He’s also a very sick boy,’ Jessop said.

Daniels nodded.

She couldn’t swear to it, but within that nod she detected some empathy for Daniels’ fellow ex-soldier

Mason asked, ‘So just who are we up against?’

‘As well as an exceptional marksman, Chambers will be highly proficient in concealment and stalking techniques within rural and urban surroundings.’

‘No shit,’ Mason mumbled.

Daniels ignored the remark. ‘To illustrate, one of the final tests of the sniper cadre is to move undetected over a distance of one and a half kilometres, both rural and urban. If you make it undetected, you are then to locate the concealed two man observation team, move to a position one hundred and fifty metres away, and fire off two rounds.’ Daniels looked to Jessop. ‘Then extract without being seen and without leaving a clue of ever having being there. Sound familiar?’

It did, she thought. Too familiar.

‘Observation, too,’ he continued. ‘Your boy’s highly adept at memorising places and objects from a distance in a short space of time. Handy if you’re scoping out a potential victim’s house.’

‘And remembering people’s addresses from a quick glance at a driving license,’ Mason added.

And her goddamn mobile number, Jessop thought.

‘Right. However, all these skills are useless without the snipers most valuable asset, patience.’ Daniels sipped from the bottle of water he’d brought with him. ‘I knew a guy who spent a week lying in a make-shift desert sewer waiting for the wind to drop so as to execute his shot.’

Mason said, ‘So a few hours hidden in someone’s car boot or loo wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for Chambers?’

‘Hardly.’ Daniels smiled, yet Jessop noted he was no longer at ease. Beneath the collar of his black polo shirt his neck muscles and shoulders were tense. She guessed because he more than anyone in the room knew who they were up against.

After a quiet moment, Daniels said, ‘PTSD doesn’t discriminate. Every soldier who steps into combat is fair game, and not even the most skilled doctors can predict how long the trauma will last. For some it could be months, others, years. Some endure the horrors for the rest of their lives, forever stuck on the front line.

Jessop glanced down at the picture of Chambers with his arm round Oliver. He would
forever
be trapped in the truck’s charred wreckage, holding his dying friend as the life pumped from his exposed heart. Maybe the Olly’s of the world were the lucky ones, for they didn’t have to endure a lifetime of perpetual torment from the ghosts of their fallen comrades.

Daniels shifted in his chair, crossed his muscular arms. ‘I’m no shrink, detectives, but from what I’ve learned about Chambers from your files and his service record, he truly believes in what he’s doing. And isn’t going to stop until he’s completed his mission.’

Mason said, ‘So what’re you saying? We don’t stand a chance at catching him?’

Jessop caught movement out of the corner of her eye. Saw Davies standing at the door and beckoned him in.

Daniels noted her attention slip, glanced to Davies stepping into the office. To Mason he said, ‘Not at all, Detective. I’m saying patience is his greatest weapon. Now that you’re onto him, be prepared for him to use it.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning you might have to exercise some patience of your own.’

Jessop looked to Mason, his brooding eyes locked firm with Daniels’ steady green eyes. Neither blinked. Daniels’ reputation preceded him, and anyone who knew the ex-soldier showed him the respect he had earned. Yet he had just questioned her team’s ability, and against such an adversary as Chambers, she felt he was within his rights. She also appreciated his honest evaluation, which Mason, it appeared, did not. He had taken it as a personal slur, and was not afraid to show it.

Something cold and prickly ran up her spine. She found herself willing her DI to blink first and submit to the ex-sniper whose controlled blink reflex used to mean the difference between a mission accomplished or a mission failed. A kill or a miss.

Mason also knew this, and yet his gaze remained firm.

With the atmosphere turning thick and icy, she picked up a copy of Chambers’ number sequence and said to Daniels, ‘Would you mind taking a look at this? Could be military related.’

A moment happened when she thought the ex-soldier hadn’t heard her as he continued to stare at her resolute DI. Then, ‘Of course. Anything to help.’ Daniels turned from Mason, took the page, ran his eyes over its contents and folded it neatly in half.

To Davies, hovering in the doorway of the tense room, she said, ‘What is it, Tom?’

Holding up a phone, Davies said, ‘I’ve got Chamber’s wife on the phone.’

Chapter
Seventy-nine

The American twang was heavy in her accent as Hannah Gosling, formerly Chambers, echoed what Lance Corporal Edwards had said about her husband withdrawing into himself. She’d tried her best after her husband had returned from his second tour with both mental and physical scars, but there was no reaching him. And as much as she loved the man, there was only so much she could take.

Days were spent sitting in his armchair surfing the net and scribbling down quotations about death and suffering and God’s most infamous acts of destruction. He’d fill an A4 pad of paper in a day with the darn things. Only then did he seem content, often mumbling to himself with a quiet smile on his lips.

‘Nights, too,’ Hannah said. ‘Sat in that chair, not sleeping. Still and alert like he was waiting to execute the kill shot. I tried to get him to see a doctor, suggested it plenty of times. But you know what he’d do? He’d just look at me with those dead eyes and shake his head and give me that smile as if
I
were the one going crazy.’

Jessop asked, ‘What about the day you and Beth left?’

A pause. ‘That was the first time I saw him get out of that chair without needing the toilet or food. I tell yer, I aint never been so scared.’

‘Why was that, Hannah?’

‘Because I didn’t know what he was gonna do.’

A chill ran up Jessop’s back. ‘And what
did
he do?’

‘He kissed me on the cheek, ma’am. As light as a breeze it was. Could’ve knocked me down with a breeze I was that shocked.’

Jessop had to admit she was, too.

‘And then he crouched down and looked Beth square in the eye. Didn’t say a word. Just smiled that smile of his. I swear to God, I was ready right there and then to crack his damn head open if he touched her, but he didn’t. He just kissed her softly on the top of the head and went back to his chair. Didn’t give us a second look.’

‘What date was that, Hannah?’ Jessop asked.

‘Seven, twenty-eight, eleven, ma’am. I’ll never forget it.’

She jotted down the date, frowned at it: 7/28/11. Then remembered Americans used the Middle-endian date format of putting the month before the day, the most infamous example being 9/11. ‘Any idea where he might be now?’

‘Uh-uh. If he aint in that darn armchair then he should be in the hospital. Listen, I don’t hate Phil if that’s what you’re thinking. He’s been to hell and back. I know that more than anyone. But I’ve got Beth to think about, and, well… Well, I hope you understand, is all.’

She did. Of course she did. Your children came first. You’d do anything to protect them, to spare them from
the pain of the breaking of the shell of their understanding
. Just as Ray was doing with Vicky. Just as she had done by not telling Vicky and Chloe about Ray’s cancer when she’d had the opportunities.

‘Of course,’ she said.

‘Ma’am?’

‘Yes?’

‘I dunno what he’s done, and I don’t wanna know, either. But I knew Phil a long time before that missile hit his truck. And, well, I married the man, right? He wasn’t always bad.’

No,
and neither were the majority of the killers out there.

And neither was she before Malcolm Hoyt had butchered her family.

She thanked Hannah for her time and ended the call. Rubbed her eyes and slumped back in her chair. As sweet and accommodating as Hannah had been, she hadn’t been much help. Her estranged sniper husband was still out there, and they still had no idea where.

And according to Bryan Daniels, they would never know until the super sly and persistently patient Chambers decided to let them.

Bullshit.

She may have lectured Davies the other day about having to be patient when it came to catching elusive killers, but she had never been one to practise what she preached. Especially when it came to searching for that last missing word in a puzzle.

She surveyed the jumble of notes and files strewn across her too small desk. Just like looking for that final missing word, somewhere amongst the mess was the answer to Chambers’ whereabouts.