The Facebook Killer (3 page)

Pushing the front door open after all these
years felt like stepping back in time. The same brass bell hang
from the doorframe, tinkling like an old friend welcoming me back.
The same layout of tables, the familiar pictures still hanging on
the wall, mainly skyline views of New York including a an aerial
shot of the Twin Towers under construction. My God! How the world
has changed, I thought.

The dining area was deserted. Either too
early or the business had gone down the drain. I looked over to the
window table, still there after all this time. The conversations
came flooding back. That first date, the uncomfortable talk about
families and careers, followed by the bottle of Pinot Noir, “the
lip loosener” as Anna like to call it. Then the flirting and jokes.
Another bottle. The Steak for me and the crab salad for her.

“We’ll be serving lunch in around ten
minutes, Sir, if you’d like to take a seat”, the waiter announced,
my thoughts retreating like the tide.

“Thank you” I replied heading to our window
table.

“Oh, I’m sorry Sir, that tables reserved” the
waiter stated apologetically.

Too late. I was already seated.

“Who is it reserved for?” I asked.

“For the owner’s parents, Sir” he replied
humbly.

“Then tell the owner that I am prepared to
pay his parents one thousand pounds for the inconvenience. After
all I am sure they will have plenty more times to sit here, but in
my case, this is the last.”

No doubt a phone call was made, although I
wasn’t aware of the outcome. The next thing I knew was the menu
being offered to me by the same young fellow. I knew it wasn’t his
fault, in fact I felt a little embarrassed on his behalf but the
selfishness was creeping in like dry rot.

“I’ll be back for your order in a few
minutes, Sir. Would you like something to drink in the meantime?”
he asked politely.

“Give me a bottle of Pinot Noir and two
glasses, please”.

Sitting at
our
table the tide started
to come back in. It was in this very spot that I was first
introduced to her parents, where I persuaded a waiter to serve her
the engagement ring instead of desert, where she cried and said
yes. The same table, number seventeen, that our darling baby Laura
had her first taste of meat, sirloin to be precise, diced up
carefully by her mum and fed to her in a nervous silence from both
sides of the table. “Yum” was all she could manage at that age,
“Thank God, she’s not going to be a vegetarian” I joked. It was
high tide and I was swimming in a sea of memories, immersed so
deeply that I only surfaced when the waiter brought me the
bill.

It had been three hours, Anna’s crab salad
hadn’t been touched, it sat limply on the plate, the lettuce leaves
wilting. Her wine untouched just like Laura’s milk. The sirloin
steak so finely diced was cold now, a fly waiting patiently on the
edge of the plate.

“I’m sorry your friends didn’t turn up, Sir,”
offered the waiter.

It took a moment. Like when you wake up from
a dream you are enjoying and desperately want to go back to sleep
to continue it but realise that you have to get up for work.

“Don’t worry son,
they
were
here.
Just that they weren’t too hungry, that’s all.”

The first time we took Laura to Regent’s Park
she was six year’s old. In fact it was her sixth birthday that day.
Anna and I had promised to take her for a picnic and then on to the
zoo. She was so excited; she had only read about all of these wild
animals and seen their pictures in books. As we sat on the grass
eating ham sandwiches, Laura paused; she looked up at me and asked,
“So Daddy, tell me what is this cancer thing?”

And so began the dark days, or should I say
the dark years? Anna swore that she was about to tell me but Laura
had overheard the phone conversation the day before. She fought the
breast cancer for four years until she was finally given the all
clear. As a family, we spent every day like it was our last
together. The worst, yet the happiest four years of our lives.
After a period like that you can’t just go back to how it was
before. We continued living life to the full, we had a good income,
we didn’t worry about the bills, we were rapidly ascending the
property ladder. Life was good.

We had made a solemn promise during those
dark years, all three of us, when I thought Anna wasn’t going to
make it. We vowed that whichever of us went to Heaven first would
buy a house just like the one we had now, with a nice green lawn
and beech hedges. They would be responsible for keeping the fridge
full of our favourite things like ice cream for Laura, olives and
feta cheese for mum and dad’s chocolate cake so that when the rest
of us arrived we wouldn’t be hungry. Laura squealed with joy at the
idea. Anna laughed through rolling tears as she hugged us all
together. The three musketeers Laura called us.

“Do you remember her?” I
called, “you must do. It was only twelve, thirteen years ago. I
thought you had a good memory. I remember
you
! We stood here. Right here on this
spot. She had auburn hair and green eyes just like her mum, she was
here too.”

No reply. People were moving away.

“For fuck’s sake Habul give me a sign. Surely
you must remember. She said she talked to you, she told you her
name was Laura. She said you smiled and said that you wouldn’t ever
forget such a lovely name.”

A distant voice: “Would you mind keeping the
language down a bit, there are kids about you know?”

A wave of my hand, a dismissive sigh.

“Habul. Please. Just give me a fucking sign.
I need to know that I’m not the only one that remembers her.”

“Freak!”

And so ended the final day of Dermott
Madison. Escorted by London Zoo Security to the main gates and
firmly instructed never to return.

I certainly think Pinot Noir heightens your
belief in an elephant’s memory capacity.

Chapter 3

Gillian Baxter

Gillian was my first “apple”. She was the
same age as Hamid and apparently his first girlfriend at the age of
sweet sixteen. They had managed to keep their relationship a secret
for almost two years until an uncle of his spotted them in a park
near his home. Hamid’s parents soon put a stop to the shameful
union but he remained in touch with his first love. Until I came
along that is.

I knew I had to be careful. After all, I had
a lot of apples to pick and I didn’t want the farmer coming along
with his shotgun and blowing my balls off.

I moved out of Hyde Park hotel and into a
much less salubrious suite in a hotel near Kings Cross. My plan
required me to be on a busy transport hub. This lower key hotel
offered the same facilities as my previous home of ten months but I
was allowed to check in under an assumed name, no questions asked.
I paid for three months accommodation in advance. The hotel had
free wifi for it’s guests and directly opposite my ground floor
suite was a door, which lead to the rear car park.

I withdrew all of my money from the bank, a
long and tedious process, believe me, and it was now safely
ensconced in my room safe. I disposed of all my identification,
credit cards and anything else that could link me to the former
Dermott Madison.

I toyed with the idea of having
reconstructive surgery on my long forgotten face but researching
the procedures on the internet I soon realised that I would be
spending months in private clinics, months which I could ill afford
to lose. In the end I made the second investment of my new life.
Three latex masks. The company were located on a small industrial
estate near Bermondsey, specialist suppliers to the film industry
of the most lifelike creations I have ever seen, they agreed to
make me a twenty one year old Pakistani, a fiftyish year old Mr.
Ordinary and a seventy year old white haired pensioner with
matching hands, all for the princely sum of £12,000, cash.

Gillian wasn’t too difficult to find. Her
social networking sites were numerous. It took me all of seven
minutes to find out who her current boyfriend was, where he lived
and where he worked. Which, luckily for him, didn’t matter to me.
He wasn’t on the tree.

I had grandiose ideas of how to pick my first
apple. I had planned to be “Kalif”, my twenty one year old
Pakistani. I had named them all by now, “Norman” was Mr. boring and
“Albert” was my pensioner, nevertheless I digress, I had planned to
approach Gillian and pretend to be a friend of Hamid. Find out if
he still had feelings for her and vice versa but I had already
gathered that much and when it came to the crunch I didn’t yet have
the confidence. That would come soon though, believe me.

Gillian was the hardest apple to pick because
she was the first. I hadn’t done this before. In fact I didn’t do
it, “Albert” did it. He sat at the end of the bar all night,
drinking stout, his shopping bag on the floor by his feet. He knew
she would be there, she had told the whole world that she would be
there. She looked exactly the same as her online pictures. Tall and
slender, her hair cut in a black bob, a little lopsided but
obviously today’s fashion.

As Albert observed, he felt a pang of guilt
emerging. She was bubbly, joined by so many friends throughout the
evening who obviously enjoyed her company, but he knew that it had
to start to somewhere. With someone. They had to start shaking the
tree.

When she left, Albert followed her, walking
stick in hand, practicing his new found limp. The effects of five
pints of stout on a non-drinker raised the heartbeat, raised the
bravado.

As Gillian walked through the park that
night, she cautiously glanced around, she was streetwise, Albert
had to give her that. What threat was a pensioner who could hardly
walk? She could outrun him if he decided to try anything on.

Gillian Baxter was found the next morning.
The strangulation mark from the walking stick hidden forever by the
rope around her neck, suspending her body from the tree, twisting
gently in the wind. The rope creaking against the branch. Her
suicide note soon to be found. Her young life now offline.

When Albert returned to the hotel suite I
made the decision to wait a couple of days before anyone went fruit
picking again.

The next day I trawled the online news
reports. Gillian Baxter’s suicide was nothing more than that, no
suspicious circumstances. A young woman who never got over the loss
of her first love or so said the note in her pocket.

The latest on Abdul Hamid said that he had
gone to ground following death threats. Not from my quarter, I can
guarantee you that.

I took a step back, some time to analyse my
situation. Firstly I had no feelings of guilt whatsoever. What
needed to be done was now getting done but I couldn’t help feeling
that Albert had rushed into this first job. In retrospect it seemed
a little clumsy. What if someone had noticed him sitting in that
bar all night? What if someone had come through the park when he
was stringing her up? All three of them Kalif, Norman and Albert
had to be more careful in future. I had to plan their fruit-picking
trips much more thoroughly. Each one had to be a work of art in
itself if I was to achieve my final goal without being stopped.
Little did I know back then how ruthless my three friends would
become.

I invested in a forged passport for each of
them, Kalif organised the deal through a Russian bar owner in
Wapping. They cost £900 each but by God, they were good.

No one ever came into the hotel suite. I had
arranged from the start to clean it myself and leave the laundry
outside the door on Wednesdays and Sundays; this in turn was
swapped for clean stuff. But how could I be sure that one day an
over curious member of staff wouldn’t decided to have a sniff
around?

So Albert went shopping. He brought back a
hammer, chisel, a heavy-duty motorbike chain and four zip-up
plastic bags. Three hours later they had their own hiding place
under the floorboards along with my laptop. I was quite pleased
with the first joinery job of my new life. Any snooper would have
to remove the plastic panel from the side of the bath and crack the
combination lock that chained the floorboards to the pipe work
beneath.

As the fruit fell from the tree, I knew I had
to be extra careful.

Chapter 4

Robert Chapel

My second apple was almost as easy as the
first to find. He had photographs posted of himself leaning on the
bonnet of an old 3 series BMW in front of his house. The number
plate was clear, RVC 291. What really caught my eye was the A4
piece of paper I could see on the rear window. Looking through his
online pictures I knew that his house must be near the old brick
factory, south of the river. I could see the chimneys in the
background.

Kalif took a cab to the area. After a
ten-minute walk, aligning the chimneys with the streets, he came
upon it. The car was parked outside his house. 1991 3 Series,
98,000 miles. Full M.O.T. £2,000 o.n.o. The mobile number written
beneath.

It was at this point that Kalif realised I
hadn’t supplied him with a phone. A 21-year-old Asian lad in London
without a mobile phone. Now that was suspicious in itself.

“Can I help you Mate?”

Kalif recognised him instantly.

Robert Chapel. Status: single. Age: 30.
Agnostic. Favourite band: U2. Liked Mexican food and getting
smashed out of his head every weekend.

Kalif felt as though he knew this man
already.

“Just looking at the motor mate. Yours is
it?” Kalif’s Anglo-Asian accent was still a little strange but
rapidly improving with practice.