All 2 entries tagged Crime And Deviance

Crime Fiction 2: 'When Needs Must'

January 2nd 1951.

Hands shaking, he lit a cigarette, and drew on it deeply. His head was spinning. How had it come to this? He liked to think he was a 'good' man, and yet he had killed another human being in cold blood.

He walked home, where he knew Katrina would be waiting for him. Good, kind Katrina. She had stood by him through the years and he was all too aware of his dependence, his need for her. Would she still love him, want to be with him, if he told her what he had done?

The very thought of living without her struck a pain sharper than a knife through the core of his soul.

There was no choice. He couldn't tell her. Her unpredictable nature meant that it would be a risk: one he was not prepared to take for fear of losing her.

*

December 31st, 1950.

The state of the country was such that celebrating New Year's Eve was not a priority. Katrina had been hopeful that they would have a small party – well, gathering – in their second floor flat, but she had been understanding when he explained why that would not be feasible.

As a young man, he had harboured a romantic desire for a socialist state in which everything would be equal and he would not have to witness the poor on the streets, starving to death, day after day. Of course, a lot had changed since then. The naïve hope of youth that had shone brightly in his eyes had been stolen by Stalin's Russia and been gradually replaced with a haunting sadness.

Like him, Katrina was a member of an underground rebel group, and in this respect the dictatorship had served a poetic irony in strengthening their relationship. Often they would talk long into the night about how they might overthrow the system, although deep-down they were well aware of the minimal likelihood of success.

At the same time, however, the constant anxiety over whether old Mrs Petrovsky might have drilled a hole in the wall and be a spy, or whether their group members might turn them in, or whether the secret police might raid a meeting, or whether any other catastrophic event which was no longer unlikely to occur might happen, led to tension in their relationship which sometimes resulted in monumental rows.

*

That evening, his group had arranged to ruin the party of a group of rich government officials in Moscow as far as possible by smashing the windows of the hosts' beautiful apartment. Not a particularly sophisticated form of rebellion perhaps, but effective in letting Stalin's cronies know that there were people out there who meant business and were not intimidated by the bullying tactics employed by those in power. (It was also low-budget, which was essential considering the economic climate).

He insisted that Katrina stay home that night. He didn't believe in women participating in the more hands-on aspects of their work, and because she was pregnant he was even more adamant than usual that she was not to get involved. She seemed almost glad – pregnancy had reduced her blazing passion for the cause somewhat. He was worried that she would be lonely, but knew that this was more important.

He set off into the night, wearing what felt like a million layers but still plagued by the icy cold. His comrade, Peter, happened to live opposite the apartment they were targeting. At the meetings, he had described to the group how night after night he would sit in his own flat, shivering and hungry, and watch the goings on of the wealthy residents across the street, who seemed to want for nothing.

*

Together, they huddled beneath the awning of an abandoned shop, hoping they looked like just another bunch of impoverished vagrants. The plan was to smash the windows and then run for their lives, all in different directions in order to confuse anyone who might chase them.

Just as they launched their attack, a face appeared at the window. Petrified, the men were frozen in their tracks and watched, helpless, as one of the bricks sailed straight into that face. After what felt like an hour but could only have been a second, survival instinct triumphed and they took flight, each making his own path into the dark cloak of the night.

*

January 2nd, 1951.

He shuddered. The group had always had a strong principle that violence to human beings was wrong: just because the state sunk to that level didn't mean that they should too. They had witnessed enough atrocities during the war to know it would not solve anything.

The brick that had hit her hadn't been his but it might as well have been. He felt an overwhelming guilt about the incident, which, according to a contact of his who actually worked for the family in question, had been non-fatal but had led to severe disfigurement.

But this was not the primary source of the guilt which now lay heavy at the bottom of his heart.

*

December 31st, 1950.

Someone was chasing him. Shit. He had not anticipated this; the street had been deserted.

On and on he ran, weaving his way through the mean streets of the city, no idea where he was going but painfully aware that with every step he made, his pursuer was drawing nearer.

Eventually, he felt a hand grab his shoulder and he was thrown to the floor. There followed a tussle, and then his attacker was on top of him, pinning him to the ground.

Nothing could have prepared him for this: the fear of death was incredible, ineffable, all-consuming.

Suddenly, with a surge of strength he had not known he possessed, he let out an almighty roar and threw the other man off him. In doing so, the man's gun flew out of his hand and to the ground.

He saw his chance and he grabbed it quicker than lightening. His hunter was now his prey. He ordered the man to kneel with his hands above his head. The man obliged.

He realised that it was either his life or the other man's: if he let the other man go, there was no way this would escape untold to the authorities. People were all too conscious of the fact that even knowing about another person's rebellious activities was punishable with a late night visit from the police and subsequent 'disappearance', and few were willing to risk this.

With a trembling hand, he ended the other man's life with a shot to the head, and then ran.

*

January 2nd, 1951.

As he entered the door of his apartment block, he became suspicious that things were not as they should be. There was an anticipant hush to the building. Normally there were radios blaring and children squabbling, but now it was eerily silent.

His thoughts immediately went to Katrina and the baby. Were they alright? He knew that to go upstairs was to risk death, but he didn’t care. He leapt up the stairs three at a time and entered his flat.

He was too late to save them.

As the police led him away, he numbly thought of his unborn child, dead. Not even given a chance at life. And his wife, left in the room to rot. Immortalised in beauty.

: 31 Oct 2004 21:37 |  Tags: Crime And Deviance |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Week 1 – Crime Fiction (an attempt at…)

Sorry, this has no title!!

As Lisa got out of her cabriolet and ambled to the front door, having cut her afternoon class (key skills – who needs them?), she thought cosily of the evening ahead of her. It would probably entail going in, throwing her bags on the floor (Rosario would pick them up, that was what she was paid for), crashing on the sofa for an hour or two of mind-numbing TV, dinner cooked by Rosario, then out to the cinema with Matt.

Her peers would have given their right arm for Lisa’s life: her doting parents were loaded, she had an adoring older brother and a gorgeous boyfriend. And inevitably enough, she was as happy as any sixteen year old girl could be, although she experienced bouts of love-life-related depression just like everyone else. Her father had made his fortune by investing in an internet search site that had gone stellar practically overnight, which had propelled her from just another ordinary mousey-brown haired English girl to the girl everyone wanted to be. Her family remained in the same area of West London but moved to a house five times the size of their previous one, and she was loving every minute of her new-found popularity. Little did she know, but her grandparents often remarked to each other that she seemed to have changed somewhat for the worse – she was spoilt beyond belief and had adopted an infuriatingly superior attitude to her distant relatives who were still living their dreary lower middle class lives, quite unaware of the new-found social heights she and her immediate family had reached.

*

Upon entering the house, Lisa sensed that something was not quite right. Perhaps it was the lack of friendly woofing from her new pet Labrador, or maybe it was that Rosario didn’t spring forward to wipe up the mud-marks her shoes invariably left on the entrance hall’s parquet flooring.

‘Rosario? Monty?’ Her voice echoed off the newly-decorated walls (her mother had an interior design fetish), and hesitantly she walked through to the kitchen. She promptly threw up.

*

‘And what exactly did you see when you entered the room, Miss Jones?’ enquired the rotund, friendly policeman, PC Davies. Lisa was sitting in the living room, still getting over the shock of what had happened. ‘I saw my dog dead on the floor in a pool of blood and everything was all smashed up all over the place and then I don’t know it all went mad and…’ She burst into a fresh round of tears. The policeman offered her his hanky which, after studying for any suspect marks, she accepted. Davies sighed sadly and continued his questioning. ‘Do you have any siblings?’ ‘Yes, I have an older brother, Charlie – but he wouldn’t have killed my dog for God’s sake – why are you asking me these pointless questions, why aren’t you out there finding the psycho who did this?!’ Lisa was becoming hysterical. ‘We have to investigate all possible avenues of motive Miss Jones. Of course I’m not accusing your brother of having done this, but he may know of someone who had the motive to commit such a crime. Equally, do you know of anyone who might have held a grudge towards you or other members of your family?’ Lisa numbly shook her head. She wished with all her heart that her parents were there – they’d make this horrid man go away and stop asking stupid questions, but they were away skiing in a resort with no mobile signal – she wouldn’t be able to tell them what had happened unless they called home. And where was Charlie – he hadn’t been home the previous night, which hadn’t caused her any concern as he was a bit of a ladies man and often didn’t make it to his own bed, but it was unlike him not to have sent her a text message to let her know of his most recent conquest. After twenty minutes of further questioning (ten of which were spent asking whether she would be alright on her own), PC Davies left her. Rosario had showed up half way though the interview with the policeman and, having explained that she’d been at the dentist all morning and giving him a phone number on which he could check this information, had set to work cleaning up the mess that had been made. Although Lisa disliked Rosario intensely, the house maid being one of the few people who didn’t worship the ground Lisa walked on, she was glad of the presence of another person and helped, or at least pretended to help, to clear up.

*

Just as PC Davies returned to his desk, his phone began to ring. It was a colleague of his with whom he had spent lunch just three hours ago, so immediately he was alert.

‘Just thought I’d let you know – I heard you’d gone down to the Jones household at 29 Autumn Crescent, and this might be of interest to you…’ ‘Go on,’ said Davies tersely. Brenton had the irritating habit of telling you things in a very cloak-and-dagger style, never just stating the facts but making you beg for them. ‘Well I dunno, I know you don’t like any cases that are too deep so maybe I’d better just handle this one myself.’ Davies felt his heckles begin to rise – Brenton was well aware that ‘deep’ cases were exactly what Davies liked, not least because he was hoping for a promotion. ‘Don’t test me mate, just tell me what you know.’ ‘Alright alright. They’ve just found the son’s body in a skip on the Ealing Broadway.’ ‘Holy shit. I’ll be there in five.’

*

Lisa was watching Trisha with her boyfriend, Matt, trying not to worry about the fact that her dog had just been murdered, her multi-million pound home broken into but nothing taken, and her brother hadn’t called in over two days, when the doorbell rang.

PC Davies made sure that Lisa was sitting down, then launched into the speech that, no matter how many times was rehearsed, never got any easier. Lisa tried to comprehend what he was telling her, but she couldn’t. She didn’t feel anything. Matt was rubbing her back so hard that she was practically getting friction burns – he was in nearly as much shock as her – and after a while, PC Davies made his excuses and left them to try and enter, let alone come to terms with, the journey of grief which would soon be theirs.

*

Charlie Jones’s death had been a brutal one, far more long-drawn-out than Monty’s, who had just been shot in the head. He had been severely beaten up and then strangled and thrown in a skip behind a Nepalese restaurant. But the really odd thing was that he had had his hands chopped off. Davies wondered what on earth the Jones boy could have done to upset someone that much.

Charlie had been unemployed, not needing any income due to the ridiculous amount of allowance his parents gave him, but Davies still couldn’t quite understand how he had managed to afford the Porsche he’d driven. Lisa had explained vaguely that her parents gave them each a car allowance and if they wished they were allowed to add some of their own money (although this was just money from their ‘general allowance’, which was also supplied by the parents,) and purchase a better car. However, the Porsche was over ten thousand pounds more than what his parents had deemed a reasonable contribution, and this didn’t quite compute with Charlie’s leisurely lifestyle. Davies began to wonder whether maybe Charlie had been on drugs and not kept up repayments, got in over his head and resorted to borrowing money from loan sharks to pay off his dealer. These things happened with startling frequency nowadays, but then loan sharks wouldn’t generally kill their debtors off because then they’d never receive the money. No, fear and mind games were more the loan shark’s style. So what had Charlie Jones done to inspire such hatred? Davies wracked his brain, then decided to pay a visit to James Sherwood, Charlie’s closest childhood friend.

*

‘To be honest mate, I hadn’t seen Charlie in quite a while,’ said James. He seemed strangely unaffected by the tale of his former buddy’s horrific death, and Davies suspected that something was not quite right. ‘And why was that?’ ‘Once we’d left uni, he just…changed,’ James muttered vaguely. ‘How do you mean, changed?’ ‘Oh you know, this and that…he just wasn’t the same geezer I knew and loved. His priorities shifted.’ Davies was getting a little frustrated – James clearly wasn’t going to make this easy for him. He decided to play dumb. ‘Priorities? What, like he got a new girlfriend?’ ‘Hardly.’ ‘You mean he was gay?’ Davies hated doing the stupid act, it only served to reinforce the stereotype of the bumbling, incompetent bobby, but sometimes it was the most effective way of drawing information out of the less communicative interviewees. ‘No, I mean he turned into a druggie,’ explained an exasperated James, who was clearly beginning to wish he was somewhere else. ‘I see. Hard drugs?’ enquired a slightly mollified Davies. ‘Pretty much anything he could lay his hands on.’ Hm. Not a cheap pastime. Davies began to wonder once more about Charlie’s funding. ‘So how did he afford this habit of his along with the flash car?’ ‘How do you think?’ ‘Well I would guess that he might have been dealing, but obviously these allegations can’t be made without some sort of proof.’ Davies was digging again. It was becoming pretty obvious that Charlie had become tied up in dealing, but he wanted to establish exactly how deeply he’d been involved and whether he had any particular enemies. ‘Yeah well, can’t help you there mate.’ James’s barriers went back up and did not budge for the rest of the interview.

*

Once back at the station, PC Davies decided to give an old friend of his a call. Davies had not always been a policeman; as a young man he had in fact got into some trouble of his own and was still on good terms with another ex-trouble-maker turned good.

Joe Banks had grown up on a rough estate in Shepherds Bush where drug crimes and shootings were not unusual. At the age of thirteen he had followed the almost inevitable route of drug dealing, his father being one of the most notorious dealers in the area, and by fifteen he was addicted to crack cocaine. At seventeen Joe had a spiritual epiphany after a religious vision taught him that his lifestyle was harmful to others as well as himself, and had never touched so much as a joint again. However, due to his family connections he still knew many people who worked on the wrong side of the law, and Davies sometimes contacted him if he needed some info, although he didn’t like doing this too often as it put Joe in a compromising position. A murder of this sort was one of those situations when Davies felt more inclined to take advantage of his contact. He stopped and considered whether subconsciously he saw this case as more important because of the social background of the victim, but quickly brushed that thought to one side. It was because it was such a brutal and personal killing – a random drugs murder would not have had so much thought put into it. He called Joe and asked whether he’d ever heard of Charlie. Joe said he had and that he’d ask some questions and get back to him.

*

Two weeks later, PC Davies drove slowly over to the Jones residence (the parents had now returned, tanned but strangely yellow-looking from the shock of recent events.) Over the course of the investigation, he had experienced a rollercoaster of emotions. In all his years in the force, he had never dealt with such a distressing case.

After many conversations with Joe, it had transpired that Charlie had been well on his way to becoming one of the biggest dealers in West London. He had approached his work, if one could call it that, from a very business-like perspective, and had employed a whole network of skivvies to do the dirty work for him. Drugs had truly changed him from a loving, fun young boy to a sinister, sick-minded man. Having conducted too many interviews to count (people in the drugs world were not known for their willingness to talk), Davies had found that Charlie had mistakenly purchased a dodgy batch of ecstasy tabs, which had resulted in the death of a sixteen year old girl. Her family were understandably devastated, not least because all her friends had confessed that she had not wanted to participate but they had pressured her into it. Her brother, Dom, who was just eighteen, had been consumed with such an intense rage that the only way he could see to make things right was to find the bastard who had sold kids such dangerous substances and make sure he never did it again. He had gone to Charlie’s house one sunny morning and smashed the place up in a fury. Charlie himself had then caught him and, according to the brother, not acted in the least bit remorseful. The dog had then been shot to show that Dom meant business. Charlie had simply laughed. At this point, Dom had become so angry that he grabbed Charlie, shoved him in the boot of his car and driven him to a secluded spot where he had tied him up. By then, Charlie had become scared and was begging Dom to let him go. By way of reply, Dom had chopped Charlie’s hands off to ensure he’d never touch drugs again. Charlie then got nasty, probably needing his next fix. Dom decided to shut him up once and for all, beat him up, and then strangled him.

*

‘But how on earth did you find all this out, officer?’ demanded a tearful Mrs Jones. She simply would not believe that her beloved son could have been capable of such atrocities. Davies explained that he had launched an appeal within the drugs world with the help of his friend Joe Banks, and one of Charlie’s minions had come forward, distraught because he had been the person who directly supplied the group of teenagers. Davies had contacted the grieving family and the brother had made an on-the-spot confession, so disgusted with his actions that he was actually desperate to go to prison and start paying penance for his deeds. ‘So Mrs Jones, that’s what happened,’ he concluded, with a sad sigh. ‘I’m sorry your son is dead but that is the reason for it.’ With a heavy heart, Davies made his way home.

: 04 Oct 2004 17:36 |  Tags: Crime And Deviance |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem