Cold Killers Read Free

sunshine, part of the walls that closed in on him, one piece of the mosaic floor. He was one of the sparrows. He
turned at the words from the commentator.
    Tony can’t leave his luxury villa.
    He stamped his foot and swore at the television before crossing to the coffee table and tipping out cocaine from the packet he kept in a jewellery box. He tapped away angrily, chopping the
cocaine up to a fine powder with a credit card, moving it around meticulously and scraping it into fine straight lines. He picked up a rolled note and hoovered up a long line. Then he sat back to
allow it to settle down his throat.
    ‘   “Tony can’t leave his luxury villa,”   ’ he mimicked. ‘Oh yes, he can, and he will, when he’s ready. When I come out of this place the whole world will
know about it. I haven’t been sat here on my arse for nothing. I’ve been incubating and I’m about ready to hatch.’ He grinned at the image of himself he had in his mind. A
flying moth, bigger than an eagle, flying above the planes fighting with the falcon.
    He turned sharply at the noise of the fireworks on the television and ran towards the screen. He began to roar: ‘Don’t you fucking dare!’

Chapter 3
    ‘How are things now?’
    In Fletcher House, DI Carter was still watching the scene from outside St Matthew’s Church, when his colleague Detective Sergeant Willis walked in. She’d come straight from Bethnal
Green.
    ‘The paramedics had to perform CPR on one lad. He was lucky: the knife just missed his heart. No one from the crowd was hurt in the panic. Just the gangs causing trouble.’
    Carter sighed, relieved. He knew that, even though the day hadn’t gone as well as he had hoped, it could have been worse.
    ‘Did they scrape Eddie Butcher back up okay?’ he asked with a smile.
    ‘Just about,’ Willis replied. ‘It would have been funny, except it wasn’t.’
    ‘Oh, believe me, it made us smile, didn’t it, Robbo?’
    ‘Absolutely not.’ Robbo hid a grin behind a cough.
    Pam, at the third desk in the room, peered from around the side of her monitor and scowled at Robbo and Carter in turn.
    Carter held up his hands in the air.
    ‘Apologies, Pam.’
    Pam was a civilian who worked mainly on collating data from the Internet and monitoring social media groups for investigations. She and Robbo had worked together for twenty years, since back in
the day when Robbo was a serving police officer before he was forced to take retirement and chose to retrain as a crime analyst.
    Willis took off her jacket and threw it over the back of the chair then dropped the black peak cap onto the desk.
    Carter looked at it in disgust.
    ‘Where did you get that?’ he asked. ‘I couldn’t work out what you looked like: tired single parent or drug dealer.’
    ‘Lost property. I was going for a bit of both.’
    ‘Well, put it in the bin, for Christ’s sake.’
    Willis moved it from on top of the desk to underneath it. She intended to keep it.
    Carter swung round in his chair, stood and went across to help himself to a coffee from the cafetière on top of the filing cabinet.
    Willis opened up the post-mortem report on Eddie Butcher.
    She read out loud, ‘No alcohol, no drugs. No food in his stomach. He hadn’t eaten for twelve hours.’ She stood and went across to pin up a photo of Eddie Butcher from the
post-mortem. ‘Cause of death – still awaiting results on the organs. He was reverse-hung,’ she said, ‘with his hands tied behind his back by the wrists; then he was
suspended. It caused his shoulders to dislocate.’
    ‘Strappado,’ said Robbo. ‘It’s a recognised form of torture, normally accompanied by electric-shock treatment. The Colombians love it.’
    Willis pinned up the photographs of small pairs of wounds around the genitalia of the victim.
    ‘Two electrode points which caused fifty-eight injury sites of second-degree burns made by a Taser-type machine.’ She added a close-up of Eddie Butcher’s left