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  ASSASSIN

  He heard a sound that was all too familiar.

  The swish-click of a flick knife.

  Then he felt it against his cheek, the point gouging into his flesh, digging deeper until blood began to run from the wound. And yet the knife was wielded with immaculate skill, drawn in light quick movements through the skin of Weller's face to expose the network of muscles beneath his forehead then down the other side of his face.

  When it reached his neck he did pass out.

  The figure with the knife cut the last piece of flesh free then slid two fingers beneath the skin as if it were some kind of mask.

  Pulling carefully, the figure pulled the skin free, coaxing it away from the eyes with the aid of the blade.

  It came away in one piece.

  One dripping piece of skin.

  The figure turned to those watching and held the mask of living flesh aloft like some kind of bizarre trophy.

  Two of the others stepped forward and began removing Weller's clothes, tossing them aside until he was naked.

  Then they set to work.

  Also by Shaun Hutson:

  BODY COUNT

  BREEDING GROUND

  CAPTIVES

  COMPULSION

  DEADHEAD

  DEATH DAY

  DYING WORDS

  EPITAPH

  EREBUS

  EXIT WOUNDS

  HEATHEN

  HELL TO PAY

  HYBRID

  KNIFE EDGE

  LAST RITES

  LUCY'S CHILD

  NECESSARY EVIL

  NEMESIS

  PURITY

  RELICS

  RENEGADES

  SHADOWS

  SLUGS

  SPAWN

  STOLEN ANGELS

  THE SKULL

  TWISTED SOULS

  UNMARKED GRAVES

  VICTIMS

  WARHOL'S PROPHECY

  WHITE GHOST

  Hammer Novelizations

  TWINS OF EVIL

  X THE UNKNOWN

  THE REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN

  CAFFEINE NIGHTS PUBLISHING

  SHAUN HUTSON

  Assassin

  Fiction to die for...

  Published by Caffeine Nights Publishing 2013

  Copyright © Shaun Hutson 1988, 2013

  Shaun Hutson has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998 to be identified as the author of this work

  First published in Great Britain in 1989

  by Star Books, a Division of W H Allen & Co Plc

  CONDITIONS OF SALE

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, scanning, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher

  This book has been sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental

  Published in Great Britain by Caffeine Nights Publishing

  www.caffeine-nights.com

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-907565-51-9

  Cover design by

  Mark (Wills) Williams

  Everything else by

  Default, Luck and Accident

  ASSASSIN

  Introduction by Shaun Hutson

  ASSASSIN was originally written in about three months back in 1988 and it was the first time I produced what some critics would go on to call an “urban horror novel.” Some called it totally different things but what do they know? It was also the first time I mixed horror with such concentrated and concerted use of guns, something that would continue throughout most of the books that followed it. But for all its gangland connections it is still very much the kind of Gothic horror that I had become known for.

  As with everything else I've ever written it started out from one or two little nuggets of stuff that caught my interest, the first one being that one of the Kray Twins victims had just been found after about twenty years encased in concrete somewhere under a flyover near London. The other was the growing desire to work into a book more and more heavy metal lyrics which I'd been doing in chapter introductions or at the beginning or end of books. I thought of an assassin who listened to rock music while he was doing his hits and the two elements came together again.

  ASSASSIN was great fun to write and it contains one of the most disgustingly famous scenes I have ever committed to paper. Those of you who've already read the book will know the one I mean and those of you reading it for the first time will know it when you come to it! I won't spoil the surprise. During promotion for the book it was difficult to describe this scene and many an interviewer looked at me as if I'd just wandered in from the local nut house when I was trying to do it. I can remember doing a radio show with the wonderful old actor Sir Michael Horden who just gaped at me dumbfounded as I tried to describe this scene but, enough of reminiscing.

  Lots of the character names in this book belong to real people because people did and still do ask to be victims in my books. This was the first time I'd done this on such a large scale but it wouldn't be the last.

  So, enjoy ASSASSIN and yes, all the weapons described are accurate and during a TV show for the BBC I actually re-enacted several scenes from the book firing blanks from those very weapons! This was the same show that sent me to a Harley Street psychiatrist for a laugh. He said I had borderline psychotic tendencies! Ah, those were the days.

  Shaun Hutson 2013

  Acknowledgements

  It's strange but I was looking back at the acknowledgements in the original edition of ASSASSIN and reflecting a little sadly on how many of the people in those acknowledgements from 1988 are now missing from my life for various reasons but enough of that. This time around I would like to thank, as usual, my agent Brie Burkeman and publishers, Graeme Sayer, all the management and staff at Cineworld, Milton Keynes and of course I would like to say a very heartfelt thank you to all my readers, old and new. But most of all, thank you to my daughter who, for some bizarre reason, seems to find the fact that her Dad wrote all this stuff quite fascinating! No accounting for taste I suppose...

  Shaun Hutson 2013

  For my wonderful daughter, Kelly. Everything I do is for her so it seems fitting that this novel should be dedicated to her and it is with all my love.

  Better to burn out

  than fade away

  '... Look like the innocent flower.

  But be the serpent under't ...'

  Macbeth

  Catalyst

  The priest was mad.

  The men who forced him into the back of the ambulance had seen the face of insanity before and they recognised it now in those haggard features.

  He screamed, he cursed, he threatened.

  All to no avail.

  He warned them that they were committing heresy. A word none of them had heard spoken before. A word better suited to distant years. To superstition.

  And, as he fought to escape their grasp and return to his derelict church they found that superstition was a word which circulated with greater intensity inside their minds.

  He told them they were making a mistake, told them they were desecrating Holy Ground, destroying something of untold value but they didn't listen. The old priest was in
sane. Who else but a madman would have lived in a derelict church in London's East End for the past eight months with only damp, mildew and rats for company? The windows had been broken, the holes boarded over in places but the priest had not left. He could not leave he had told them as they hauled him from his haven and into the waiting vehicle. They must not enter the church, must not disturb its contents.

  When they told him that the remains of the church were to be demolished, that a block of fiats was to be erected on the site he had grown even more uncontrollable, flying into a paroxysm of rage which the uniformed men found difficult to cope with. He had run back towards the church screaming words which made no sense to them.

  Someone had suggested sedating him but one of the men had feared the effect which a calming drug might have on a man of such advanced years and such precarious health. So, they had let him scream.

  Scream that he had something valuable in his possession.

  Scream that he guarded a secret.

  That he and he alone knew that secret.

  That he, in that stinking, vermin infested shell which had once been a place of worship, had kept the thigh bone of a Saint hidden.

  One of the ambulancemen had chuckled quietly to himself as he'd listened to the aimless rantings.

  To the priest's exhortations that the bone could bring life to the dead. That these men, these builders who were coming to destroy his home, were also eradicating a power which came from God himself.

  The power to raise the dead.'

  He must have the bone.

  He had to have it. Had to retain the power. The secret.

  They strapped him to the stretcher inside the ambulance to prevent him damaging himself, then they drove off, one of them seated in the back of the vehicle still listening to the madman's insane ramblings.

  The church must not be destroyed.

  Must not be ...

  Must not ...

  Must ...

  He had lapsed into unconsciousness within a few minutes, his eyes bulging wide for a split second then his chest falling as if all the air had been drawn from him by a powerful suction pump.

  Despite the efforts of the man in the rear of the ambulance, the priest had died before reaching hospital.

  A day later the builders moved in.

  Within a week, the church, and all it contained, was rubble.

  Tuesday, 3 September

  Prologue

  It looked like a battlefield.

  Thick clouds of dust and smoke rolled like banks of noxious fog across a landscape of devastation. The thunderous roar of collapsing buildings was punctuated occasionally by the sound of explosions and the ever present rattling of caterpillar tracks.

  But this was no war. It was organised destruction. Not the hectic random obliteration which comes with conflict but a carefully contrived scheme, plotted and planned by experts and now executed not by an army of uniformed men but of civilians.

  There had been three tower blocks on the East End development originally known as Langley Towers. Three blocks designed to house up to a thousand people - they had intruded onto London's skyline like so many before them, jabbing towards the heavens like accusatory fingers. Around them shops had been built, even a youth club, but the residents of the blocks had been more concerned with the structural faults in the buildings than with how to occupy their leisure time. Countless complaints of cracks appearing in walls had flooded into the local council offices, some within less than a month of the blocks being occupied but, as is their way, the civil servants had seen fit to ignore the complaints.

  When the stairwell in the second of the blocks had finally collapsed, five people had died.

  No one knew how it happened. The builders didn't know. The architects were baffled. The complaints which had been filed were relocated to avoid embarrassment.

  The decision had been made there and then to re-house the residents and demolish the blocks. Besides, those who owned the land had seen the sense of selling off the acreage for development.

  Hence the arrival of the demolition men.

  JCB's and other vehicles battled over and through the tons of fallen concrete and steel, like vast metal dinosaurs over some surreal new world. Men in yellow overalls swarmed over the ruins like termites - only their business was destruction not construction. Others watched from a distance as the tower blocks were brought down, men in white overalls untouched by the dirt and grime of this devastation they had engineered.

  The ball of the crane swung into the side of one of the buildings smashing through the stone as if it had been balsa wood. As the metal ball swung back it carried fragments of the tower's interior, pieces of girder which hung from it like metallic intestines.

  There was a loud explosion as one of the men clad in a white overall pressed a button on the console he held. Bricks were sent flying by the force of the blast and the third of the blocks fell like a house of cards, several hundred tons of concrete and steel crashing to the ground, adding to the piles of debris which already rose into the air like eroded cliffs.

  The smaller buildings such as the youth dub, the supermarket and one or two of the other shops which had once served the residents of these vertical housing estates were still intact as yet. Their windows were smashed, their insides gutted, but their exteriors remained untouched by the ferocious attentions of the men and machines whose only function was to eradicate these final testaments to the. stupidity of modern architecture. It had cost more than fifty million pounds to erect the trio of blocks two years earlier. More than one man on the site thought that it would have made as much sense to merely shovel the money into a furnace. The blocks had been built too quickly, too many comers had been cut but it had taken the loss of five lives to demonstrate such niceties as architectural inadequacies. Still, five lives were small change in the world of property speculation.

  And how grand were the replacement buildings to be? Fine new houses, fit for anyone to live in. Provided they had an income in excess of half a million a year. The East End was being cut up, split down the middle between the poor and the rich, the `haves' and the `haven't got a hopes'. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer.

  And more resentful.

  A bulldozer moved effortlessly across the uneven terrain, pushing a huge mound of debris ahead of it, its tracks scraping the very foundations of the first block.

  The foundations had been laid deep but even they had been laid bare by the strategically placed explosives planted by the men in white.

  Smoke and dust mingled with the clouds of bluish fumes which belched from the exhaust of the bulldozer as it tumbled past.

  Half a dozen mechanical diggers drove their buckets into the shattered remains of the buildings, lifting tons of brick into the backs of waiting lorries.

  The massive iron ball on the crane continued to swing back and forth.

  The destruction continued.

  No one saw the hand.

  It protruded from the cracked concrete foundations of the first block, mottled green in places, caked in dust and dirt.

  And as the ground shook the concrete cracked open even more widely.

  The arm attached to the hand appeared. Slowly at first.

  No one noticed.

  Just as no one noticed when the fingers on that hand flexed once then balled into a fist.

  PART ONE

  `Where Lie your greatest dangers? - In pity.'

  Nietzsche

  `All hell's breaking loose,

  In the streets there's a brand new way ...'

  Kiss

  One

  The gavel banged down hard, the sound reverberating around the panelled walls of the Old Bailey's Number One court.

  There was only a brief pause in the frantic babblings – so Lord Justice Valentine gripped the wooden mallet more tightly and brought it crashing down repeatedly, continuing even after the murmurings had finally died away.

  The judge glared reproachfully around him, his eyes flicking from
the witness box to the public gallery then to the barristers and clerks who were gathered before him like bewigged undertakers.

  During his thirty-three years as a High Court judge, Valentine had presided over many trials but none that he could remember had generated public and media interest to match that over which he now presided. Members of the public had been warned beforehand by the media that the facts of the case were particularly repellant. That simple statement alone had been enough to ensure that the public gallery was full every day and, so far, the trial had reached its third day. Valentine flicked at his plaited wig and exhaled deeply, anticipating another outburst shortly. The evidence which had sparked the last bout of indignant chattering was to be repeated.

  `If there are any more disturbances I will have no choice but to clear the court,' said the judge before looking towards the tall, thin-faced QC before him and nodding. 'You may continue Mr Briggs.'

  Thomas Briggs nodded curtly and stepped towards the witness box, his robes flowing behind him like the black wings of a huge carrion crow.

  The occupant of the box regarded him impassively through eyes which resembled chips of sapphire, unblinking and quite relentless in their appraisal of him.

  The counsel for the prosecution glanced down at his notes then looked directly at the defendant.

  'Did you know that Mrs Donaldson was still alive when you cut off her breasts?'