The Sh0ut Read online

  Contents

  Also by Stephen Leather

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Read More …

  Also by Stephen Leather

  Pay Off

  The Fireman

  Hungry Ghost

  The Chinaman

  The Vets

  The Long Shot

  The Birthday Girl

  The Double Tap

  The Solitary Man

  The Tunnel Rats

  The Bombmaker

  The Stretch

  Tango One

  The Eyewitness

  First Response

  Takedown

  Spider Shepherd thrillers

  Hard Landing

  Soft Target

  Cold Kill

  Hot Blood

  Dead Men

  Live Fire

  Rough Justice

  Fair Game

  False Friends

  True Colours

  White Lies

  Black Ops

  Dark Forces

  Light Touch

  Jack Nightingale supernatural thrillers

  Nightfall

  Midnight

  Nightmare

  Nightshade

  Lastnight

  If you’d like to find out more about these and future titles, visit www.stephenleather.com.

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Stephen Leather 2018

  The right of Stephen Leather to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 473 67182 9

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Thorne

  1

  He smiled as he looked down at the body sprawled across the bed. Her name was Emma Fox and she was in her early thirties, a natural blond with shoulder-length hair splayed across the pillow. She had been dead for twenty minutes so she was still warm. Her eyes were wide and staring, the whites flecked with pinpricks of red. That was what happened when people were strangled. Petechial haemorrhages they were called, ruptures of the capillaries.

  It had taken Emma the best part of forty minutes to die. He had wanted it to be longer but strangulation was an inexact science. He had tied her hands to the bedhead but left her legs free. She couldn’t struggle much because most of the time she was unconscious, but when she did struggle it felt so much better. He’d used a length of cord to restrict her air supply, looped twice around her pretty neck. It was a delicate balance, cutting off her air. He wanted her conscious, but if she was conscious she could scream and that would spoil everything, so he used pressure on the cord to keep her precariously balanced between being awake and being out cold. He had ejaculated inside her, and that was when he had pulled the cord too tight for too long and the life went out of her. The cord lay coiled at her feet. The fire would destroy it, the way it destroyed all the evidence of what he had done.

  He dressed. He could smell her scent on him and he wouldn’t shower or bathe for two or three days, not until it had faded completely. He went over to the sash window and opened it a few inches. A fire needed three things to burn efficiently – heat, fuel and an oxidising agent. It was what they called the Fire Triangle. Oxygen was the perfect oxidising agent. The heat would come from the book of matches he had in his pocket. And the room was full of fuel. The bedding, the mattress, the carpet, the curtains, her clothes, all of it would burn nicely.

  There was a nightdress lying across a chair in the corner of the room, pink and frilly and quite long. It would burn, but it was polyester so it would leave a residue, which meant she had to be wearing it. He picked it up and carefully pulled it over her head. It took him a while to get her arms through the armholes, but he took it slowly. Eventually he pulled the nightdress down her long, lithe legs. He found himself getting hard again and wondered if he had time to have sex with her one more time. He found himself growing harder as he pictured himself on top of her. He looked at his watch. It was eleven o’clock, the time that she usually went to bed. And sex with the dead was never as satisfying as sex with the soon-to-be dead. Better to set the fire and go.

  He knew pretty much everything about Emma Fox. He had befriended her on Facebook with a fake profile and chatted to her on Twitter under another identity. He had watched her apartment from the cafe across the road and followed her to and from her work. She was a shop assistant in Top Shop in Oxford Circus. Early on in his stalking he had approached her in the store and asked her advice on buying a pullover for a non-existent sister. That was one of the most exciting things he had ever done. To stand next to her, to breathe in her fragrance and look into her eyes, knowing that one day he would own her. He had thanked her and walked away, almost shuddering with anticipation. That had been two weeks ago. And now she was dead.

  He pulled the duvet from under her, then placed it on top of her. He took out a toilet roll and a plastic spray bottle he’d filled with diesel. He pulled a length of ten pieces of toilet roll and laid it on the floor, then repeated the process six times. He lined the lengths up so that they were touching and then sprayed them with diesel. Diesel in its natural state was almost impossible to ignite, but when sprayed over tissue it became deliciously flammable. He put the spray bottle into his backpack and then laid the strips of toilet tissue over the duvet. The
y would burn quickly and hotly and would be totally destroyed in the fire.

  He took out a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches from his jacket pocket and placed them on the bed. In his backpack he had a small can of lighter fluid. He poured a little of the liquid over the foot of the bed and watched it soak into the quilt. It was important not to use too much as that might leave a trace for investigators to find. He put the can back in the backpack and took a final look around the room, making sure that he would be leaving nothing behind.

  Satisfied, he lit a cigarette with one of the matches, took two drags on it and then clipped the cigarette into the book of matches so that the burning end was about two inches from the first match. It was a Benson and Hedges, the same brand that Emma smoked, but they were counterfeits that he had bought at a car boot sale in south London, almost certainly manufactured in the Far East. Since November 2011, all cigarettes sold in the UK and the European Union had to be reduced ignition propensity cigarettes, designed to go out if not drawn on regularly. The RIP cigarettes had been designed to cut down on the number of fires started by smokers but the counterfeiters weren’t bound by the EU regulations and would burn down to the filter. He carefully placed the book of matches on the bed and stood up to admire his handiwork. The cigarette would take at least ten minutes to burn down to the matches by which time he would be long gone. The matches would ignite, the lighter fluid-soaked duvet would catch fire, boosted by the diesel-impregnated tissue and within minutes the room would be ablaze.

  He shouldered his backpack, left the bedroom and headed for the front door. There was a smoke alarm in the hallway but he had taken care of that. By the time anyone realised the flat was ablaze the fire would have reduced the bed and the body to ashes. He took a final look around the hallway and left. He didn’t plan on waiting around to see the fire brigade arrive. Most arsonists were caught eventually because they stayed to stare at the flames. He wasn’t an arsonist. He took no pleasure from watching things burn. The fire was a means to an end, and that end was for him to continue to kill. That was what gave him pleasure, the taking of human lives. But not just any lives. He had a type. He knew that was a weakness, and that having a type was as likely to get him caught as watching the buildings burn. He knew that as well as he knew that night followed day, but he couldn’t help himself. It was in his nature. Or his genes. He wasn’t sure which, but then it didn’t matter, all that mattered was that he loved taking lives and he had found a way of doing it and getting away with it.

  A cold breeze blew down the street as he stepped out on to the pavement. He turned up the collar of his jacket and walked away, whistling softly to himself.

  2

  The blue flashing lights were reflected off the shop windows either side of the fire engine, and the noise of its sirens cut through the night as the eleven-ton vehicle sped along the city streets. What little traffic there was had pulled over already and Dom Laffy was able to keep their speed close to forty miles an hour. There was a red traffic light ahead of them but just as Laffy was preparing to go through it changed to green and he pressed his foot down on the accelerator. He grinned. ‘I love it when that happens,’ he said.

  ‘What’s the story, Vicky?’ asked Gary Jones from the back. He was the oldest member of the crew, coming up to fifty, grey-haired and cheeks peppered with red veins, the result of his love for sailing.

  Vicky Lewis scanned the printout she had torn from the printer before jumping on to the fire engine. She was crew manager and had taken the front passenger seat as usual. Vicky was approaching thirty, though she looked five years younger, with her upturned nose sprinkled with freckles and her blond hair cut short in a functional bob. She was still sometimes asked for ID in the pub, much to the delight of the guys on her shift. ‘Fire in an abandoned building,’ she said. ‘No alarm but a passer-by called it in.’

  ‘Probably another fucking hoax,’ said Laffy.

  There had been more than a dozen hoax calls over the past week, all made from phone boxes. It was probably kids getting a kick out of wasting the fire brigade’s time, but it was close to midnight and most of the hoax calls had come in within an hour or so of the schools closing. With Jones in the back were Colin Noller – a thirty-something recent arrival at the Kilburn station – and Mark Beech, a beefy West Indian with almost twenty years’ experience under his belt. All were wearing full gear and had their yellow helmets on.

  Laffy was driving a Mercedes-Benz Atego fire engine. It was equipped with a thirty-foot ladder, more than a thousand feet of hoses – though firefighters referred to them as lines – breathing apparatus, chemical suits and pretty much anything that might be needed to rescue people from burning buildings or crashed cars. About fifty yards behind them was another fire engine, this one a pump ladder carrying everything that was on Vicky’s vehicle but with a ladder that was fifty per cent longer. The driver of the pump ladder was Billy Moore, a veteran firefighter who had been a keen kick-boxer in his youth and who spent most of his down time in the station’s well-equipped gym. With him were Frank Westworth, Andy Mitchell and Mike Wells, who when they weren’t putting out fires ran a very profitable landscaping company. London firefighters worked two ten-and-a-half-hour day shifts followed by two thirteen-and-a-half-hour night shifts, and then four days off. Many firefighters put their off-days to good use and the station gossip was that Westworth, Mitchell and Wells were now making more from doing up gardens than they were from their LFB salaries.

  Like Vicky, Westworth was a crew manager, his rank shown by the two black rings around his yellow helmet. Whoever got to the shout first would be incident commander and in charge. Vicky’s pump was in the lead partly because she’d switched Westworth’s boots around in the station, costing him a few extra seconds in the rush to pull on their protective gear.

  Laffy indicated left and the tyres squealed as the truck took the corner at close to thirty miles an hour. A young couple walking arm in arm stopped to watch them hurtle by. Ahead of them a black cab switched on its hazard lights and pulled over.

  The shout was the sixth Vicky had attended since she had started the night shift at 8pm. Three had been malfunctioning fire alarms, two in shops and one in an office block, one had been a kitchen fire caused by an elderly women pouring water on to a burning frying pan, and the last one had been a burning skip, probably caused by a passer-by tossing in a lit cigarette.

  A set of traffic lights resolutely refused to change from red so Laffy slowed and looked left and right as they rolled through. The road was clear to the left but half a dozen cars had stopped to their right. Laffy accelerated. Vicky leaned forward and looked at the nearside wing mirror. The pump ladder was about a hundred yards behind them now.

  The next lights were on green, then Laffy took a left and slowed. ‘Here we go,’ he said. A group of half a dozen onlookers were gathered on a street corner staring up at a building. Smoke was billowing up from the ground floor. Laffy parked at the side of the road opposite the building, making sure there would be enough room to unload the ladder. Vicky climbed out and surveyed the scene. She could see immediately that it was definitely more than a two-pump fire. Four appliances would be needed, possibly six. There was a bar on the ground floor of the four-storey hotel building. It had its own entrance to the left and to the right was the main hotel reception. The doors and windows were boarded up and there was an estate agent’s sign announcing that the property had been sold. The bar was clearly on fire, smoke was seeping out through the boarded-up door and around the sheets of plywood that had been nailed over the windows. There were no other buildings next to the hotel, which meant that its chances of spreading were limited. There were flats opposite the hotel and lights were on in many of the windows as the occupants looked out to see what was going on.

  She looked up at Laffy. ‘Dom, get on to control. Make pumps four.’

  Laffy grabbed for his transceiver to call for two more fire engines as Jones, Noller and Beech climbed out of the pump and joined
Vicky on the pavement. ‘Let’s get two lengths of forty-five on it asap,’ she said. The pump had two sizes of hose – 45mm and 70mm. Vicky figured the smaller diameter would do the job and it was much more manoeuvrable than the 70mm version. ‘One of you do a three-sixty and let me know what’s happening around the back.’

  Jones and Noller hurried to the pump and started pulling out the seventy-five-foot lengths of hose while Beech went around to the rear of the building to see what the situation was there.

  There was a fire hydrant on the other side of the road so water wasn’t going to be an issue. The pump carried 300 gallons of water but that wouldn’t last more than a minute when it was pumping flat out and to deal with anything major it had to be connected to a water source.

  Vicky looked around for the police but they didn’t appear to be there so she headed over to the crowd of onlookers. ‘Ladies and gentlemen!’ she shouted. ‘I know everyone wants to watch a fire, but you’re a bit too close for comfort! Can I ask you all to please move away a good hundred feet. For those of you using the metric system, that’s about thirty metres.’

  No one moved.

  ‘I won’t ask you twice!’ she shouted. ‘If you’re still on this corner in ten seconds, I’ll get those nice men over there to spray you with freezing cold water. Your call.’ The onlookers were already moving away like startled sheep as she strode back to the pump, just as the Kilburn pump ladder arrived. Frank Westworth climbed out of the pump ladder and jogged over to her. ‘Don’t think I don’t know it was you who fucked with my boots,’ he said, wagging a finger at her face.

  ‘No idea what you’re talking about, Frank,’ said Vicky, straight-faced. ‘Anyway, I’ve made pumps four.’