48 Hours

“Don’t raise that gun or I’ll shoot,” I stated firmly. It was my voice, but it didn’t sound like me.

Hickstead gurgled a laugh from the bloody mouth that hung open to gasp at the air.

“I’m the killer, Josh, not you,” he reminded me as he began to level the gun.

I pulled the trigger on my spear gun and the stainless steel shaft flew straight and true. In a fraction of a second the barbs had penetrated Hickstead’s chest and showed through the back of his jacket.

I thought he would be dead instantly, but he fell to his knees, holding onto the bulkhead for support. I took the gun from his hand.

“Finish it!” he yelled, spraying bright red arterial blood all over the deck.

I left him leaning on the bulkhead and went to find my wife. Expecting the worst, I looked over the side to see the Captain assisting Dee to the ladder. With relief flooding through my body I lifted her into the boat. She was soaking wet, but I couldn’t see any blood. She lifted her left arm and there was a new bullet hole just inches from the other one.

I led her to a recliner and laid her down. The Captain bound the wound tightly, but it was difficult because the bullet had entered underneath her armpit and exited behind the shoulder.

The Captain said he would get the yacht started and we would be back onshore in five minutes.

“I thought Dee had damaged the main ignition cable,” I said, a little naively.

“No, she didn’t. She pressed the emergency fuel cut off in the engine room and came onto the deck brandishing the cooker cable. So I had to get inventive.”

I smiled and held Dee tight. I looked across at Hickstead. There was still life in him, although it was ebbing fast. He certainly wouldn’t make it to shore. As he kneeled, breathing his last, he looked up and saw Dee sitting up, holding her arm. He must have realised at that point that he had robbed me of nothing, nothing at all.

Epilogue

I kissed Dee goodbye at the tube station entrance. She made her way to No. 1 Poultry and I headed off to Ropemaker Street. Dee still had her left arm in a sling, but I knew for a fact that she would discard it as soon as I wasn’t looking.

I arrived at the office to find the Times on my desk, open at the obituary page. I read the most prominent of the articles.

‘Arthur Hickstead, formerly Lord Hickstead, has passed away peacefully whilst on a retreat in Cyprus. Former Trade Union President and European Commissioner, he was a committed public servant. Friends say that the reason the Lords withdrew his peerage was so that he could try his hand at helping Labour back into power as an MP.

At his request the burial was a small family affair. A spokesman for the family said that Arthur never liked pomp and ceremony and so didn’t expect it at his funeral.’

I folded the paper and looked at my messages. DCI Boniface wanted a statement to confirm that Lord Hickstead had admitted to the murders of Sir Max Rochester and Andrew Cuthbertson. I would probably walk over to Wood Street at lunchtime and do what I could to ensure that Charlotte Cuthbertson benefitted from Andrew’s life assurance policy.

We loss adjusters have hearts as well.

J Jackson Bentley writes both fiction and non-fiction books and has been a published author for over sixteen years. He now works as a Legal Consultant in the UK, the USA, the Middle East and the Far East. His spare time is spent writing at home in the UK and in Florida. Married with four grown children he is currently writing a new thriller set in Dubai which has a horse racing theme.

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Extract from:

CHAMELEON

A City of London Thriller

By

J Jackson Bentley

Prologue

Vastrick Security, No 1 Poultry, London, Monday 9am.

Dee exited Bank tube station and was assailed by the biting cold wind. Banked snow still lay on the edges of roads and pavements but it was now deep frozen and granite hard. The ground underfoot was slippery where the occasional light rain had speckled the ground with water droplets that turned to ice on contact. She could feel the crunch of ice and frost under her boots.

Luckily, Dee didn’t have far to walk. The office block accommodating Vastrick Security was less a hundred yards away, but even that distance was a challenge in this, the coldest January since records began. Almost everyone was wearing scarves across their faces, and those that weren’t had frost forming on their cheeks where their expelled breath had frozen onto their skin before it could evaporate.

The sky was dark grey and heavy laden with black clouds. The winter solstice had passed just a couple of weeks earlier, and there seemed very little difference in the level of daylight between now and the shortest day. At nine in the morning it was just begi

Dee looked both ways before crossing the street, and whichever way she looked it was as if Ansel Addams had taken monochrome photograph of a city in winter. Most of the commuters looked as though they were wearing dark colours to match their dark mood. The occasional colourful outfit stood out like a beacon in this conservative area where neon was rare and the colours used for shop fronts were subdued.

Dee entered the office building through the swing doors and felt the immediate heat of the door curtain scorch her head. In the summer the door curtain would blow a wall of cool air across the entrance to stop the heat penetrating into the working areas. Today the wall was a wall of radiant heat which could have cooked a chicken. She passed through the invisible wall of heat and into the lobby area, which was several degrees cooler than it was designed to be. Glass atria may be great to look at, but they don’t keep much heat in.

Dee took the lift to the Vastrick Security offices. She had officially become a Vice President of Vastrick on January 1st this year, mainly, she suspected, because she had managed to get herself shot three times on her last big case.

When she stepped into the lobby she noticed that Andy was on reception duty. Andy was an investigator and so he was usually in the back office, but Dee guessed that the disruption to the roads and trains meant that some of their people would be working from home again. She was right; there were four backroom staff in the office, one investigator and one close protection operative, other than Dee herself.

Geordie, the other close protection operative, had been stuck in London since yesterday due to the failure of the trains to run from Kings Cross up to Newcastle, where he lived, and from which region he took his nickname. Everyone had called him Geordie for so long it was rare for anyone to refer to him by his real name, Pete Lowden, but everyone in the business knew who Geordie was, and he didn’t mind anyway, and so it really didn’t matter too much.