The Facebook Killer (13 page)

“Oh you don’t have to tell me. It’s worse if
there’s a storm coming in. They keep you up all night and then they
just seem to sleep during the day. Just like babies they are,” she
laughed.

Albert finished his vodka and orange and made
to leave.

“Oh go on have another one. On the
house?”

He looked around the deserted bar and sat
back down on his barstool.

“OK then you twisted my arm,” he said, “So
how long have you had this place then?”

“Oh it was Mike’s parents. When his father
passed away it became too much for his mother and she asked us if
we wanted to take it over. Must be about eighteen or nineteen years
now.”

“Tell me. I’m having trouble monitoring the
lesser-spotted warblers in this area. They’re a very skittish
breed; the sight of a human and you won’t see them for dust. Do you
know if there are any birdwatcher’s hides around here where I can
watch them without being seen?”

The landlady considered Albert’s question.
Albert’s test.

“No, not that I know of. There used to be a
few I believe but after that last murderer, I forget his name, hid
out in the forest for months. The police got a court order to have
them all removed and destroyed. There’s nothing up in them trees
now apart from bird nests and leaves.”

“Shame,” Albert replied, knowing now that
Laputa was even safer than we had first thought.

He felt a little sorry for Helen, that was
the landlady’s name. Whenever he was at the van he would see her
working. Whether she was cutting grass, sorting out the rubbish or
running the little shop they had and now she was here running the
bar until midnight. He decided to keep her company and throw a few
quid over the bar to make it worth her while. Albert reckoned that
he could with a bit of human company. He’d been spending a little
too much time with Norman and Kalif lately, it would do him the
world of good to talk to a real person for once.

Two hours later and he was onto his sixth
vodka, he decided that would be his last. He had work to do. We
hadn’t even checked the news to see if the Bridgewater family had
been found yet. As it turned out, there was no need.

“I don’t know what this world is coming to,”
spat Helen’s husband as he came into the bar breathless.

“What’s up now love,” she asked.

“It’s just been on the news, they found a
mother and two kids murdered in Bermondsey.”

“Shit that was quick,” said Albert before he
could stop himself.

Helen and Mike both looked at him.

“I beg your pardon?” said Mike.

“I mean, I just saw you chopping logs and you
had a massive pile. You must have finished them quick.”

They both laughed when they realised what he
had meant.

“They’re dry as a bone, split like
butter.”

“Anyway dear what were you saying about this
family? To be honest I don’t know why you let it bother you
anymore. It’s happening every week nowadays.”

“Yeah but not like this Helen. This was
horrific. Even the news woman was holding back tears when she was
reporting it.”

“What channel was it on?” Albert asked.

“Sky news,” Mike replied.

“I’ll make sure I avoid that then. I’m very
squeamish about that sort of thing.”

“I’ll give you the details when he’s left
then Love,” Mike said to his wife.

“OK dear, but I’m not really sure I want to
know myself now.”

Albert drained the glass, made his excuses
and left. Twenty minutes later we were back at Laputa. The
treehouse in the sky, which didn’t exist. I lowered the rope
ladder, climbed inside, pulled it up and locked out the world.

Laputa. A place I could be myself. I threw
Albert onto the bed, cursing him for drinking so much. I took a
cola from the fridge, checked the solar power meter and went
online.

Fuck me! The entire Sky News webpage was
taken up with the latest apple picking. A photofit of Kalif was in
the top right hand corner. Breaking News scrolled across the
screen. “Barbaric Insanity” read the headline. Jesus Christ what
had he done?

My cheek was pulsing. My head was spinning.
The only thing I could compare the feeling to was when I was at
university. I had got blind drunk and smoked a spliff or two before
going out to a bar. The next thing I remembered was waking up on my
bed, my knuckles bruised and cut, my shirt torn and covered in
blood. But it wasn’t my blood. I couldn’t remember a thing. I never
did find out what happened. That was the last time in that life, my
last life that I ever got drunk.

I clicked on the big white arrow to play the
news report.

“Good Morning this is the midday Sky News.
I’m Clive Barnstaple. The main story this morning, a triple murder
in Bermondsey, London which the police have described as an act of
barbaric insanity. The coroner, Mr. Roger Bell, said that in forty
years, he has never witnessed such a horrific crime scene as
this…”

I paused the video. Jesus! What had those two
done? I opened the shutters. I needed air.

Play: “We’re going to go live now to
Bermondsey where Sky reporter Glenda Dodd is at the scene. Glenda
can you here us?”

“Yes Clive.”

“Can you please bring us up to date with
what’s happening down there in Bermondsey?”

“Well, the bodies were discovered at around
seven o’clock this morning by another resident in the same building
who says he noticed the door to the flat had been left open. The
police have confirmed that as a result of what he discovered, he is
now under sedation in a nearby hospital.”

“And can you tell the viewers just what this
act of “barbaric insanity”, as the police are calling it, exactly
was? ”

She was taking deep breaths. Blinking.

“Well Clive. The ..erm.. what we have been
told so far by the police is.. erm.. that the deceased are believed
to be a mother and her two 21 year old sons, their official
identities haven’t been released yet but local sources name them as
the Bridgewater family, Marie aged 45 and her twin sons Michael and
Brian.

It appears that the two boys were tortured
before their death and their mother died of a single knife wound to
the heart, but what has shocked the police and in fact the nation
is the way the boys were killed.”

She didn’t want to say it. She couldn’t say
it.

“Police say that both the boys appear to have
been skinned whilst they were still alive.. erm.. they also believe
that parts of their mother were actually cooked and force fed to
them…”

She was holding back the tears. Choking.

“…
We’ve been told that
after the twins were….erm…skinned, they were strapped to chairs.
Back to back. The killer or killers then covered them in
salt.”

She was breaking down. A wipe of the left
eye. Something being said in her earpiece. A nod of the head.

“The boys were given a button each. These
buttons were reportedly wired up to the flat’s electric supply. It
is believed that the killer must have told them that the only way
to end their suffering was to electrocute the other. We know this
because Michael’s button was connected to the wiring inserted into
Brian’s chest and vice versa. One of the cruelest twists to this
murder is the fact that Brian’s wiring ran through a step-down
transformer reducing the voltage to one hundred volts, not enough
to kill a person. It’s believed that it took him approximately five
hours to die in agony after having killed his own brother.”

That was it, she broke down entirely.

“I’m sorry…I can’t..”

“Thank you Glenda,” the screen cut back to
the studio, the anchorman raised his eyebrows, “ well as you can
see a crime that has shocked not only the police but the nation as
a whole. We are going to go live to our Thames studio where
Assistant Chief Constable Peter Burgess joins us. Mr. Burgess,
thank you for your time. I have just one question for you.
Why?”

“Well Clive at this point in the
investigation that is the question we are all asking ourselves.
Having said that, even though it’s early days we already have a few
solid leads which we are vigorously following up.”

He went on to describe Kalif, as his photofit
flashed up onto the screen; he explained how he had posed as an
insurance investigator blah, blah. Then a photofit of Dmitri came
on the screen. Luckily he had been wearing a baseball cap in the
café. He was probably halfway back to Latvia by now anyway.

The next piece of the puzzle caught me
unawares.

“The main focus of our investigation at this
early stage is on the owner of the apartment whose son was recently
acquitted of murder and rape charges brought against him. We
understand that at least one of the tenants was a friend of
his.”

“So what you’re saying Assistant Chief
Constable is that this could have been a revenge killing?”

“I’m not saying that but at this point we
can’t rule anything out of this investigation.”

FUCK! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!

I opened Hamid Properties website and there
it was under residential lettings. Hawksley Road, Bermondsey. The
dirty blue front door. FUCK!

Chapter 18

Since my family, hopes, dreams and life had
died. I hadn’t really said goodbye to any them. When Laura and Anna
were buried I was already in hiding. I knew now that the Kill
Family Robinson might not be as clever as we had first thought. It
was time for me to pay my last respects; after all their graves
were the only fixed points in my new life. If the Apple Police got
their act together they would start watching them.

I decided not to use the camper for a while.
What if someone recognised it from the pub car park? So for the
first time in my life I caught a bus, or rather Norman did.

It took what seemed like hours for us to get
to the cemetery. A bus here, a connection, a bus there, and then a
taxi. Throughout the whole journey I searched deep into my soul for
some remorse, something to make me feel human, but I found nothing.
Only darkness. When I looked inside myself, which I tried to avoid
doing, I could see only smouldering ashes, like my house, my home.
Only desolation but a fire still raging beneath. A fire, which no
man could extinguish. A fire which would only burn out when it’s
time was up.

Saint Gregory’s Cemetery, London. Full of
dead people and plastic flowers. We didn’t even know where Anna and
Laura were. I assumed, unaccustomed as I was to the layout of
graveyards, that they worked on a similar principle to housing
estates. The first built, or buried in this case, would be at the
front. All I had to do was find the shiny new ones with digging
equipment and piles of soil surrounding them. An analogy that
worked. We moved from the 1890s to the 2000’s in a couple of
minutes.

It wasn’t like I had expected. To see my
darling wife’s name etched into a gravestone next to my beautiful
daughter. To see the vicar standing over them with the police
officers. To see the fire still smouldering on top of their graves.
To see Anna’s headstone smashed. To see the word “whore” sprayed
over Laura’s.

Norman did the right thing and walked past,
head down. Nose clean. Mr. Nobody. Inside, the timebomb had just
started ticking. Norman could hear it, smell it, taste it. The
fury. The rage. He could feel it in his cheek. Pulsing like battle
drums on the march to war and this is where we were heading. No
holds barred. No mercy. No surrender. The apples had struck
back.

I swore to myself there and then, on that
gravel path under the shade of the old oaks, that no matter what it
took I would finish this quest. I will probably go to hell for it
but I am fucking sure I’m taking Abdul Hamid with me.

We had whittled Hamid’s loyal band of merry
men down from thirteen to just four remaining. Four of his worst
devotees. It had to be quick. The news reports said that the police
were looking over the twins’ computers. They were bound to find the
questionnaire I had sent out as Neilson, Hamid’s barrister. Sooner
rather than later they would link all the deaths, be it suicide,
accident or murder. Damn it, I should have told Kalif to destroy
the boys’ computers or at least get them out of the flat. It would
have given us extra time. Things were starting to go wrong. I knew
that. I wouldn’t be able to use Kalif again. His mock-up was on the
front page of every newspaper in the country, probably half of
Europe as well. He was finished. I just hoped that the people who
made Kalif didn’t recognise their own handiwork, surely not.

I had to do something. My mind was going over
the worst-case scenarios. If the police linked the apples together
then they had a list of who was to come. They would put them in
police protection. Alert the Pakistani authorities. The farmer
would come looking for me with two hundred of his mates,
pitchforks, shotguns and hungry dogs.

There was only one option. I had to get rid
of the list. I had to close Abdul Hamid’s Facebook page. But how? I
could try and find him now. Jump the gun but that would ruin
everything or I could call Serge.

“My friend,” answered Serge, “your boss must
be one pissed off motherfucker,” he chuckled.

“This is his boss,” I replied, “Kalif is
dead.”

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that, Sir, such a
polite young man. Anyway, how can I help you?” he asked.

“Did all of the shopping arrive?”

“Yes Sir, it’s safely locked up in your
supermarket.”

“I need one more thing.”

“Name it, but remember the odds have been
raised. They’re will be a lot of worried people out there. The
prices will be raised.”

“Whatever! I need a computer expert.”

“A hacker?”

“Yes. The best and I want him now.
Today.”

“I have someone in mind for you but this is
enough talk on the phone. We should meet. Do you know where your
little friend used to come?”