The Borgia Ring Read Free

The sound of the impact was like a coconut being shattered with a hammer. Karim sighed once and was dead.
    Blood had run down the side of the victim’s face and pooled on the concrete. The taller man was panting and his hands were shaking. He stood staring at the body on the ground. With his hands pressed to his head, he kept repeating the same words: ‘Oh, fuck!’
    The other man kicked Karim’s body to ensure the job was done. ‘Grab his feet,’ he said.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Are you deaf? His feet!’
    Moving like an automaton, his accomplice did as he was told. Together they turned the dead man over. He stared up at them through sightless eyes filmed with blood, his hair a matted red flecked with grey. The taller man let out a groan.
    ‘Don’t you dare fucking gag!’ the other man growled, resting the length of pipe across Karim’s chest.
    They half-dragged, half-carried the body the few feet back to the flue. Then the murderer snatched up the pipe again. They lifted Karim’s body almost upright and leaned him against the flue. His head lolled forward. Spots of blood splattered the taller man’s shirt.
    ‘Okay … on three,’ the murderer hissed. ‘One … two … three!’
    They lifted Karim off the ground, using the flue for support, and levered him over the edge. With a final effort they rammed his body inside the narrow opening and it tumbled down into blackness.

Stepney, Saturday 4 June, 2.21 a.m.
    ‘ ROCK DA HOUSE! … I SAID … EVERYBODY … ROCK DA HOUSE !’
    MC Jumbo, a one-hundred-and-fifty-kilo sweaty man mountain in an orange boiler suit, was screaming into the microphone as he flipped a turquoise twelve-inch and slotted it with expert precision on to one of the turntables. With his other hand he fingered a second piece of vinyl on his deck. His real name was Nigel Turnbull and he was a second-year student at Queen Mary College just down the road.
    MC Jumbo went into an indecipherable rant about the greatness of the next track, but Kath and Deb Wilson, twins and fellow students at Queen Mary, took no notice. They were happy simply to dance, trance-like, and to let the tab of E they had taken fifteen minutes earlier do its stuff.
    The room was a heaving mass of over-heated bodies, all pulsating to the incredibly loud bass-driven music pounding from an over-sized PA system. Little more than a concrete cube fitted out with some very expensive lights and a powerful sound system, The Love Shack was an acquired taste. With bare breeze-block walls and rough cement floor, it was a completely windowless semi-basement ventilated via ducted air-con. So, even though the music was played at a ridiculous volume, very little noise leaked out. In spite ofits bland appearance, for many of the students at Queen Mary, situated a hundred yards away along Mile End Road, The Love Shack was the coolest venue in the world on a Friday night. As an unlicensed club, attendance there came with a frisson of danger, and for those in the know, it was the place to score any pharmaceutical under the sun.
    Kath and Deb had been coming here for most of the past academic year. This afternoon they had sat their final exam. It was time to de-stress. Letting the sound flow through them, it was easy to let go. As the track segued smoothly into the next, Kath gestured to Deb that she was going to get another bottle of water. Her twin nodded a ‘Me too, please’. Pointless to try to speak when Jumbo was on a roll. Everything had to be communicated via sign language and facial gestures.
    A few minutes later Kath was back. She handed her twin an ice-cold bottle of Evian and together they moved towards the centre of the dance-floor. Neither of them heard the rumbling sound that came from the ceiling just a few feet overhead, it was completely drowned out by the music. Unheeded by anyone, it grew louder. There was a flurry of scraping and rattling sounds, the grinding of metal against stone.
    Kath barely felt the liquid splatter her face,