Justice Is Served Read online

  Justice is Served

  M. W. Leeming

  Justice Is Served © 2019 M.W. Leeming & Markosia Enterprises, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction of any part of this work by any means without the written permission of the publisher is expressly forbidden. All names, characters and events in this publication are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental. Published by Markosia Enterprises, PO BOX 3477, Barnet, Hertfordshire, EN5 9HN.

  FIRST PRINTING, December 2019.

  Harry Markos, Director.

  Paperback: ISBN 978-1-913359-14-0

  eBook: ISBN 978-1-913359-15-7

  Book design by: Ian Sharman

  www.markosia.com

  First Edition

  “Tough times call for tough heroes,

  and Jack Jones may just be the one we all need,

  even if we don’t know it.”

  – Nick Quantrill

  (Author of the Joe Gereghty Trilogy and ‘The Dead Can’t Talk’)

  “Justice is Served’ is an electrifying, non-stop thrill-ride of revenge,

  justice and ultra-violence, occupying the No Man’s Land you

  didn’t know existed between comic books, Chandler and Tarantino.”

  – Nathan O’Hagan

  (Author of ‘The World is [Not] A Cold Dead Place’)

  “This vigilante thriller has all the hallmarks that made

  Helen Zahavi’s ‘Dirty Weekend’ such a controversial hit in the 1990s,

  and more besides. The narrative, hard-boiled to perfection,

  comes across like Jim Thompson rewriting ‘American Psycho’.”

  – John Lake

  (Author of The Leeds Six Trilogy)

  Nathan O’Hagan, Nick Quantrill.

  Cheers, fellas.

  ‘It is better to risk sparing a guilty person,

  than to risk condemning an innocent one’

  – Voltaire

  The boy is ten. His stepfather, Frank, is chasing him with a length of stinging-nettle ripped from the overgrown borders at the back end of the garden. There’s a vague sense of excitement in the boy: he knows that getting Frank riled up will always result in a chase. But the fear he feels comes from knowing that when he is caught, Frank will make him pay. And although the boy doesn’t know for sure whether Frank really understands the nature of his condition, he still knows he’ll end up in tears. Because Frank has that look on his face again. The look of a maniac in a third-rate teen-slasher.

  And the boy knows this look.

  But he’s out of breath. His feet are slipping on the damp grass. He knows he’ll soon fall, or give up and accept what’s coming. Frank is a keen sportsman and could keep this up for hours.

  The chase is up for sure when he feels the whipping of nettle on his bare calves. He doesn’t feel any pain, of course. Just the contact of the tough stalk. But he decides to accept his fate. To slow down and let Frank rugby-tackle him. From here, Frank works in silence. Glaring at the boy with those psycho eyes. Holding his hands down. He kneels, and then straddles the boy, who tries to kick back, but it’s useless. His legs aren’t long enough. Frank pins him down tightly. Staring. Those psycho eyes.

  The boy is frightened. He looks around for something he could use as a weapon. Something to get Frank off him. The only thing he sees is the gun-like nozzle of the garden hose, which is not within reach.

  But Frank sees it too.

  He clamps the boy’s wrists into one big hand. Reaches out, and grabs the hose. The boy suddenly thinks that Frank may screw this up. That he can’t possibly hold two writhing arms in one hand.

  But no...

  Frank is strong, and the boy’s hopes are quickly dashed as Frank dangles the nozzle in front of his face, taunting him with a sadistic smile. Then he presses the nozzle to the boy’s mouth.

  The boy squeezes his lips tightly together. His panicked breathing rushing in and out through his nose.

  Frank shuffles around some more. Readjusting his position. He presses down with his knees on the boy’s arms, keeping the child pinned down and regaining the use of his hands. The boy feels pressure, but nothing else. Then Frank pinches the boy’s nostrils shut.

  A few seconds pass. Then a few more, as the boy holds his breath for as long as he can. He makes about twenty seconds. Until his senses scream for air, and his need is just too much. He opens his mouth and inhales with a loud, desperate gasp.

  In that moment, Frank shoves the nozzle into the boy’s mouth and squeezes the trigger. Cold water gushes in and the boy begins to thrash around. The water froths and churns in the back of his throat. He tries to insist that he’s choking. That he can barely breathe. That he thinks he’s going to die. And he does indeed think that Frank may really kill him this time.

  But Frank doesn’t listen. He keeps the boy’s nostrils pinched. The water flow going. And the boy starts to panic.

  This is it; he thinks.

  And just when it seems he can’t take any more, Frank suddenly cuts off the water flow and gets up. Satisfied. The boy has been put in his place.

  The boy gets up, soaking wet. There are tears in his eyes. Anger and shame.

  Frank has now regained the look of sanity, and he looks the boy up and down, shaking his head. Walks away in disgust.

  The boy adjusts his grass-stained clothing. He looks at the house, and he can see into the kitchen where his mother has been preparing the evening meal. She was watching through the kitchen window the whole time.

  Their eyes meet. And when she turns away with a shrug of the shoulders, he recognises the shame in her eyes.

  If he thought for one moment that it was shame at Frank’s behaviour, the boy might have felt reassured.

  But he knows better.

  Part One

  Justice is Served

  One

  I had this client.

  Reginald Chesterfield was a seventy-five-year-old man who worked as a department store Santa every Christmas. With no previous, he’d sailed through the CRB checks and bagged himself the job with ease. And Christ… he looked the part, too. White hair, white beard, half-moon glasses.

  A few weeks ago, he took his laptop in for repairs. Whilst it was being examined, the repairman stumbled upon some images of children. The really bad kind. As a department store Santa, it was a terrible revelation.

  When I first represented him, he fed me a total bunch of crap. This terrible stuff was research for a book he was planning, he said. I advised him that it might help to inform the police of this during his interview. It would establish his argument at the earliest opportunity, if nothing else.

  The police then bailed him for a CPS review.

  But really, there was nothing that would prevent Reginald from being charged. He had over a thousand of those disgusting fucking pictures and I knew what the CPS advice would be. When I went back for the bail-return, the officer confirmed it. After telling Reginald the news, he looked at me over his half-moon specs and whispered, “That copper doesn’t like me much, does he?”

  It freaked me out.

  * * *

  I was glad to be walking away from the police station after that. Glad to be out of the custody suite. No matter how often I saw the dour-faced cleaning ladies scrubbing the place down, I always left feeling sickened by the invisible filth of junkies, alcoholics and other degenerate wasters. I carried anti-bacterial hand-cleanser and squirted big dollops of the stuff in my palm, rubbing my hands together furiously as I headed back to my car.

  Once inside, I sat behind the steering wheel, thinkin
g for a while.

  Reginald was a lost cause. He deserved prison. No two ways about it. And he’d never work as Santa again, that was for sure. He’d buckled under the strain of his rotten sexual perversions, feeding the industry of so-called ‘child porn’, and he should never be allowed to forget it.

  But someone like him wouldn’t be able to handle prison brutality. If he was convicted and sent down, I was pretty sure the guards would find him hanging one morning. And it was a thought that pleased me.

  With that, I put the car into gear and drove off. I didn’t know what I had waiting for me back in the office, but it didn’t matter. The resentment for my work had started some time ago, and days like this didn’t help at all.

  * * *

  Whenever I got back to the office after a police station call-out, my first port of call was Carol’s room. There, my secretary would thrust at me a stack of all the telephone messages she’d taken in my absence. As I stepped into her room, she looked up at me from behind her desk, her phone propped against her ear by a raised shoulder. She scribbled notes with one hand, and passed me a thick wad of telephone messages with the other, eyebrows raised as though chiding me for not being in the office to take the calls instead, and putting her to incredible inconvenience.

  I stood in front of her desk for a moment, sifting through the pile. Most of it was the usual stuff. Stressed out clients demanding updates, police officers reporting extended bail-returns, barristers chasing missing papers from trial briefs. But among all the shite, there was one that made my guts suddenly turn.

  I hadn’t spoken to Mum in years.

  Why had she phoned the office?

  I crumpled the message in my fist as I turned and walked upstairs to my office.

  * * *

  This is me aged eight:

  I’m sitting alone at the dinner table eating my fish fingers and chips. I don’t really want to eat the peas, though, because I don’t like peas. I feel a slight pang of guilt because Dad went to the trouble of making them for me and I don’t want to make Dad feel bad. And anyway… he says ‘Eat your greens’ because your greens are good for you and make you strong and put hairs on your chest. I’m not really sure I want hairs on my chest, but I do want to be strong.

  As I eat, I’m aware of my smallness in the room. Aware of the noises I make in the silence. Dad served my food up and took himself upstairs. If I listen carefully, I can hear him crying and it’s because Mum left to live with Frank and it still upsets him. She doesn’t love Dad anymore, and she said she didn’t want me to live with her and Dad could have me. That probably means that she doesn’t love me, either, because if she did, she’d surely want me to live with her. But it’s okay. I don’t really want to live with her because I don’t like Frank, and besides… Dad makes me fish fingers and I like fish fingers. And he gives me peas to make me strong, even though I don’t really like peas.

  * * *

  I closed my office door, dropped my briefcase beside my desk and sat down, staring at my phone. I was going to have to ring her. Phoning me at work was not something she’d normally do, so something was wrong.

  I took a deep breath and reached for my phone. Punched in her number. She answered after just a couple of rings.

  “Mum,” I said. “It’s me.”

  “Jack. Sorry to bother you at work. I just phoned to let you know your Gran passed away last night. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Right,” I said. “Thanks.”

  There was a pause. Several seconds of awkward silence. I heard her sigh.

  “Is that all you have to say?” she said.

  I closed my eyes again. “That’s terrible news,” I said.

  “You could sound as though you mean it.”

  “I’m busy, Mum. Text me the funeral details. I’ll see you there.”

  Before she said anything else, I hung up.

  * * *

  “There are things you’re too young to understand, Jack. But you’re not too young to understand that Frank makes your Mum happy.”

  At eight years old, I know that although I myself feel no pain, I’m capable of causing it in other people. And not just physical pain.

  Gran sits at the breakfast table to the right of me, a mug of coffee in front of her. Her hands are laced together as she leans forward to get in close. I have a bowl of untouched porridge in front of me, and a glass of orange juice. I lean forward too, looking up into her face and listening to this familiar sermon. Every time she visits Mum and Frank, she finds an opportunity to sit me down and tell me these things.

  She looks at me, nodding ever so slightly, reassuring herself perhaps, that her lesson is sinking in. She picks up her mug of coffee, lifts it to her lips but instantly puts it back down.

  “And another thing…” she says, stabbing the table-top with her gnarled index finger. “Frank works hard. Earns a good living. Takes care of your Mum. Your Dad never did that. Only ever put himself first. Drifting from one job to another. Incapable of holding a good job, incapable of holding on to friendships. It’s a wonder your Mum put up with it for as long as she did.”

  I look up at her and don’t say anything.

  “You get on with Frank, right? You like him?”

  I think for a moment. I bite my lip, because I’m not sure whether to say what she wants to hear or whether to tell the truth.

  “Well? You like him, don’t you?” she says again.

  “Not when he tries to hurt me,” I say, looking back up at her.

  Gran frowns. Leans back in her seat and sighs loudly. Then she leans forward again. “That’s just his way of having fun with you, Jack. It’s difficult for him. Stepfather to another man’s child. He’s just trying to figure out how to have a relationship with you. And anyway… he can’t hurt you. You know that.”

  This is true. I’ve never been able to feel pain. Not like normal people. Frank realised there was something wrong with me one day when he put a five-pound note on the table and said, “If you can touch it, you can have it.”

  As I reached out a hand, he suddenly slammed one of those hard rubber-soled slippers down WHACK! on my fingers. Feeling nothing, I carried on until my hand was covering the note. In frustration, he walloped my hand two more times, total confusion all over his face. But I didn’t let go of the fiver.

  “Congenital analgesia,” I heard Mum tell him later. “He’s never been able to feel pain. It’s been a major headache for me, over the years. He got it from him.”

  Dad was the same, so she meant Dad.

  But Gran was wrong. She was wrong about Frank. He wasn’t trying to have fun with me. He was trying to have fun at my expense.

  * * *

  The service was underway as I went crashing in through the double doors. Midway through the hymn, ‘Morning Has Broken’, the congregation turned, and momentarily, the singing trailed off into a chorus of mumbles. When they saw it was me, they turned to face the front again.

  I’d arrived late on purpose, not wanting to run into either Mum or Frank. As I took position at the back, I glanced over to Mum, up at the front. She spared the briefest glance in return and promptly turned away. But not Frank. He lingered there, glaring at me over his shoulder, eyes drilling their hate into me, eyebrows raised. An arm wrapped supportively around my Mum.

  (You’re a fucking failure, Jack! I always said so!)

  I ignored the screaming insinuations from his glare and picked up an Order of Service, grimacing at the photo of Gran on the front. An almost perfect resemblance to Mum. Then I glanced back to Frank. He was deep into the hymn again, his back to me, hugging Mum in tight and close.

  The singing continued.

  Gran didn’t deserve my singing voice. Instead, I started playing with the words in my mind, fitting them in with the melody:

  Moaning and croaking,

  Like the last
breath (of),

  A cancer-man smoking,

  Rejoice in her death.

  After the hymn, everyone took their seats with a brief series of hushed shuffling sounds. The service proceeded with all the usual sycophantic bullshit. A wonderful woman, a beautiful soul. Oh, how she’ll be missed. I watched distant family members and barely recognisable friends weeping and hugging. When the congregation finally stood to listen to Michael Jackson’s ‘You Are Not Alone’ the coffin slid away. The curtains closed with an awkward squeaking and off she went with her express ticket to Hell.

  * * *

  I didn’t cause a scene. I could have. I could have exploded into a drink-fuelled supernova of hate but I remained calm and slunk from the crematorium before anyone noticed, deciding to give the wake a wide berth.

  A few days later, a large envelope landed on my doormat. I opened it and shook out the contents. There were two smaller envelopes inside, one which had ‘Jack’ written on the front in my Mum’s handwriting, and one in my grandmother’s.

  I decided to open and read Mum’s letter first:

  Jack,

  Your Grandmother left you some money and a letter (enclosed). We already know what your Gran left you, and we’ll get a cheque to you before probate is settled, as I’m sure you’ll be keen to get your hands on the money. Of course, Frank thinks you shouldn’t get a penny, but who am I to challenge the wishes of your kind and ever-loving Grandmother?

  Mum.

  I sneered at it and opened Gran’s. I wasn’t really sure I wanted to. There was a sudden sickness in my guts. But curiosity got the better of me.

  It said:

  Dear Jack,

  I let you down. I am sorry,

  Gran.

  A while after that, the cheque turned up. It was for fifty thousand pounds.

  Two

  I’d taken a few days off work, playing the part of a grieving grandson. Taking time off was the sort of thing that other people would do and I’d realised some time ago that often in life it’s best to do what other people do. To look normal and fit in. In any event, my head was a mess. Tons of thoughts swirling around my mind, like the noisy rushing chaos of a tornado, not least of which was the money Gran had left me. The anger was still there; a bright fury that smouldered beneath the surface of my outward calm. But there was a massive sense of confusion, too.