The Killing Room

By John Madderson

The Killing Room.
By
John Madderson

Jack Hammond is a trouble shooter for a branch of the government called the Diplomatic Investigation Unit. The unit works independent of the Diplomatic Protection Service and Scotland Yard, and is responsible for the investigation of politicians suspected of wrong doings where upon Hammond is licensed to correct the situation.
Hammond is called to the residence of the British Ambassador to Honduras Sir James Cartwright where his wife Lady Dianna Scott Cartwright has been murdered.
Hammond quickly realises that her death is similar to others he had read about in the papers but as they did not involve, or were connected to any politicians, their deaths did not call for his attention.
The lady was shot in the head and there’s evidence that she had been bound to some kind of apparatus during or before her death.
During his investigation, Hammond stumbles onto a, “snuff film,” industry ran by two senior politicians and sets out to investigate further and after a while he connects the death of the lady to the bodies of gay men found in the River Thames, who had been murdered in the same method of death.
Soon the two politicians realise Hammond is on their trail and employ an IRA assassin called Dominic Epson to kill him. Hammond travels to Newcastle to seek further evidence but comes against a crooked police sergeant who arranges a drug dealer to kill him; however the drug dealer fails and Hammond is forced to kill him in a cemetery, and he returns to London.
Undeterred, the two politicians continue in their determination to have Hammond killed and soon a battle of wits develop between Epson and Hammond as each men struggles to kill the other.
After a while, Hammond gains the upper hand and although Epson escapes, the two politicians do not. Hammond tracks them to America where he kills them and disposes of their bodies off the coast of Florida.
Epson escapes back to Ireland, but Hammond knows that they will meet up again some day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Madderson
• Release date: Jan 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005477868

John Madderson

Hi.My name is John Madderson and I love writing horror.I was born in the small industrial seaside town of Blyth Northumberland. In 1964 I joined the Army and enlisted into the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers where in 1966 I met my wife Sylvia while on leave from Germany en-route to Aden and active service. On returning to England Sylvia and I were married and in 1968 we were blessed with our son Lee Raymond. In 1977 I left the army and went into self-employment for a great number of years. I have had a full life but now nearing my retirement I have taken up writing and dedicate my time into bringing back the original saga of Dracula and the blood craved beast he was created to be (with a slight twist.)My books, under the sub-title “The Vampire Hunter,” are a series of four books each depicting a separate time in the past, present and future. The two main characters the villain Alucard, and the hero Joseph Beck, are locked in an eternal battle from which there can be but one survivor.EnjoyJohn Madderson.

Book preview

THE

KILLING ROOM

By

John Madderson

CHAPTER 2……....PAGE 27

CHAPTER 3………PAGE 38

CHAPTER 4………PAGE 48

CHAPTER 5………PAGE 59

CHAPTER 6………PAGE 72

CHAPTER 7………PAGE 85

CHAPTER 8………PAGE 95

CHAPTER 9………PAGE 109

CHAPTER 10……..PAGE 119

CHAPTER 11……..PAGE 130

CHAPTER 12……..PAGE 139

CHAPTER 13……..PAGE 151

CHAPTER 14….….PAGE 161

CHAPTER 15……..PAGE 173

CHAPTER 16……..PAGE 186

CHAPTER 17……..PAGE 197

CHAPTER 18……..PAGE 209

CHAPTER 19…..…PAGE 221

CHAPTER 20……..PAGE 236

CHAPTER 21……..PAGE 251

Chapter One

Unable to move her head, the lady stared straight ahead, her expression frozen in time, her eyes motionless in their sockets.

She wanted to scream, shout, but no sounds escaped her mouth.

She wanted to move, run, fight for her life, but nothing moved her body limp and unresponsive to her commands. It was as if she was paralysed, restrained in some kind of apparatus.

She was aware of movement, and noticed two people sitting at a table in front of her, watching her through the darkness, studying her, gloating in her silent terror while the thick aroma of cigar smoke mingled with expensive cologne floated effortlessly in the gloomy room.

A drink with a friend was to be the last time she would ever see him or anyone else as she stared at the glowing red face of the electronic counter on another table just a few feet away, attached to which was the 9mm Browning automatic pointed at her head.

Today was an important day for her. First, she had important clients to see from the Far East; later, a date with a handsome Australian she had been introduced to at a dinner party given by the Hamiltons. But things were not going well for her. She had developed a small but irritating blister on her left foot, and consequently, any attempt at walking even the shortest of distances in her high-heeled shoes brought a twinge of pain, tears to her eyes and a short cry from her lips.

Disregarding the two-piece suit she had bought especially for the occasion, she slipped into black slacks, low-heeled shoes, and a white blouse with a blue striped cravat and a short black Spanish jacket with two silver buttons on each side. With a quick look in the mirror to ensure that it broke evenly across her breasts, she smiled.

Her meeting with the Far East dignitaries had gone well and she was pleased with herself for securing the much-needed donations for what was a worthy cause. Now it was playtime. Now she had the whole day to spend with Jonathan, the tall, handsome, sultry, tanned Australian.

The counter continued to count down – tick, tick, tick – each tick sounding louder than the last as the pointer jerked noisily to each agonising stop. Five … four, she heard her own voice silently count, and her fear intensified as the single pointer neared the top of the clock face. Blood rushed to her head as she cried, screamed and pleaded for pity, but still no sound escaped her mouth. Three … two… A single tear ran down her cheek. One… Then nothing.

The day had started cold and miserable, with a low cloud base threatening to shroud the whole area in a thick mist when he received the call from his office, but now, only a few hours later, the skies had cleared and it was a beautiful day as the early morning sun shone through the large Victorian window in the Cartwright mansion.

Jack Hammond had been standing for some time looking down at the body. He shook his head slowly from side to side.

Now then, my lady, what the devil have you been up to? He sighed.

Lady Diana Scott Cartwright looked calm and peaceful as she lay full length in the centre of the bed. Her arms were crossed, her hands overlapped and lying across her breasts, while her once bright-blue eyes, now clear and colourless, stared up at the ceiling. Her long blonde hair was still wet from the shower and hung loosely across her face and the pillow. Apart from some underwear, she was quite naked, though at first glance showed no indication that she had been raped. However, her killer – or possibly killers – had clearly taken no chances in leaving any form of DNA on her body, having not only showered her dead body, but also taken her clothes.

Lady Cartwright had been a beautiful woman with a remarkable body for her forty-four years, and the only thing spoiling her good looks now was the large bullet hole in her forehead, and the single bead of dried blood at the bridge of her nose.

Hammond raised the camera and took a photograph of the lifeless body.

You haven’t been killed here, he whispered. You, my lady, have been killed elsewhere.

He dropped the camera to his side as he looked at the dead woman, allowing a sigh of pity to escape his mouth as he moved to the side of the bed. He shook his head and placed the camera back into his pocket, then stepped forward to stoop over the bed. Carefully he placed his hand beneath the lady’s head and raised it slightly from the pillow.

Nasty heavy calibre, I should think, he remarked dryly.

The pillow was caked with a small amount of dried blood. He tilted her head to one side and stooped lower to examine the back of her head. The hole was large and red, and although the blood had stopped seeping from the gaping wound, the wet hair had spread the blood over the pillow’s surface.

Hammond lowered her head back onto the pillow and examined the ligature marks around her wrists, ankles and oddly her waist, where the marks were wider, suggesting a rope rather than string.

Curious, he remarked. Shame, bloody shame, though, he whispered.

The bullet had entered her head just above the bridge of her nose and exited high on her crown, an angle he considered most unusual. But the lady’s death was not the first like this; there had been others that had all been shot in the same way. Although these had been young gay men of high birth, their bodies had displayed the same ligature marks and had been thrown naked into The Thames.

Hammond drew in a gulp of air and expelled it slowly through his nostrils as he wondered about a possible connection. Was she gay, or just in the wrong place at the wrong time?

So, my dear chap, the problem you’re faced with is not only to find out who killed the lady, but also a connection between her and the four gay men, he said quietly.

Hammond was a man of the world; he had been around for a while, longer than he would like to admit, bearing in mind that he would be the first to say he was not a particularly easy man to get on with. He was abrupt and single-minded, and took nothing at face value; if you upset him, you were punished, the degree of punishment depending on the severity of the insult.

As a kid on the streets of Newcastle back in the late seventies, Hammond had been bullied, mocked and scorned by others in his class because of his height. At thirteen he was already five foot nine and towered some five or six inches above his nearest rival, one John Watson. Built like a beanpole, Hammond was the focus of Watson’s bid to be the school bully, something he took particularly great delight in demonstrating on Hammond whenever Wendy Stoker was in view. Hammond wasn’t a good looker, and his hair – whilst most of his peers favoured the Beetles or Hollies haircuts – was simply unkempt. His father was a pit miner at the Rising Sun Colliery not far from the Battle Hill area, while his mother worked at Wills cigarette factory in the Wallsend district. Between the two of them they managed to scrape enough together to manage a family of eight, though things were tight.

It was a Tuesday. Hammond remembered it well, as it was the day Wendy Stoker smiled at him as she gently brushed past his shoulders. For a moment her eyes flashed, and then she was gone, walking up the corridor towards classroom 4C. He was still watching her as she entered through the doorway when the first of the heavy blows rained down on the back of his head, knocking him to the ground. He remembered the look of surprise flash across her face just as the heavy boot slammed into the side of his head. His instincts had kicked in and he began to get up and retaliate, when suddenly, the hallway closed in on him and he remembered no more, nor did he feel the other kicks to his body.

It had been over thirty years since that day, but he remembered the weeks that followed vividly and he smiled.

It was just eight days before his fourteenth birthday when he returned to school. Wendy had visited him in hospital, but now he was back and it was time to set matters right. The kicking had done something to him. The bruising and scars had healed on the outside, but he was still wounded on the inside.

The playground was full; the teacher that should have been keeping order was in the toilets having a smoke, and a large circle of kids four deep had formed around Hammond and Watson. It was time for revenge. Watson ran at Hammond, head down, while Hammond stood his ground and then brought up his knee straight into the soft tissue of Watson’s face. Watson’s head went back with a sickening crack and he fell. In a single blow the fight was over; now there was to be retribution. Watson was in hospital with a suspected fracture to his spinal column. The magistrate didn’t accept Hammond’s story of being bullied and he was sent to a borstal school for a year. Upon his release, he decided to join the army as a boy soldier stationed at Sutton Coldfield, ending his civilian life and entering him into a world where he could put his newfound skills into practice and get paid for doing it.

At the age of twenty, Hammond married, but his wife walked out on him after only two years. His daughter, now in her twenties, had told him that she would rather walk across a snake-filled pit than across the street to talk to him ever again. This didn’t bother him in the slightest; all that mattered to Jack Hammond was the law, his law.

He was an ex-military man, having served with the Fusiliers as a sergeant until something happened while serving in Iraq when he was court-martialled and cashiered out of the army. Some say that someone upset him and forgot to apologise!

He had returned home to his beloved Newcastle back in 2000, where he set up an agency specialising in street cleaning! Some say that his method was somewhat unorthodox, but he got the results he wanted, to the extent that, within a very short time, most of the troubled tenants throughout the east end of Newcastle felt that their quality of life had improved immensely, and that they no longer had to walk in fear at night.

It was around this time that, due to the lack of vandalism, drugs and muggers on the streets, newspaper reporters began to look around for other outlets for local news and targeted Hammond, calling him ‘the people’s vigilante’ and ‘a man for the people’. This upset the police, and shortly afterwards Hammond was asked to leave his home city of Newcastle.

Hammond was sat on the sofa looking around the room when the forensic team arrived, and for a short while he watched to see if they found something he had missed, something that would enlighten his day. Later he would get a report on how the lady died, something he had already figured out for himself bearing in mind there was a bloody big hole in the victim’s head. Nevertheless, the report might turn up something else: a fingerprint, a strand of hair, even a sperm deposit, something, anything that might not belong to the lady. Something that would set alarm bells ringing in some office down the hall. But not in his office, where work doesn’t start until it’s time to cover up the whole mess. You see, Jack Hammond worked interference! His whole brief was to protect the government from embarrassing, inconvenient and unnecessary bad publicity, especially when it concerned foreign dignitaries, and he was not averse to giving someone a bloody good kicking should the occasion require it.

The deaths of the gay men were being handled by the local police, but the death of Lady Diana Scott Cartwright was to be handled by the ‘people down the hall’. At this point her death had been reported, but not that she was murdered. Lady Diana had been reported as being killed in an unfortunate early morning riding accident, a report already sent out to all concerned. This had been decided by the ‘people along the hall’ when it was realised that the method of her death was very similar to the deaths of the four gay men, who, fearing that the squeaky clean wife of a British ambassador may have been gay herself, had decided to keep it quiet!

Hammond moved out into the lady’s sitting room and stood for a while in the centre. It was spacious and nicely decorated; a large four-foot-high marble fireplace took centre position on the south-facing wall, above which was a five-foot-high portrait of the lady. Either side was a sash window, each one starting only two feet from the floor and stopping two feet from the ceiling. The east wall, apart from being adorned with various pictures and a set of Victorian drawers complete with clubbed feet, housed the only door, which would take him into the passageway of the second floor. The north wall was covered with two huge bookcases, one either side of a door that would take him through into the lady’s small kitchen.

He turned again to face the bedroom door, then back to the doorway to the hall. The door had been forced open, presumably by Mr Jonson, the housekeeper’s husband, due to the lady’s failure to respond to his knocking, and who, at the present time, was being interviewed by the people from down the hall; this left the only other person who had been in the house at the time – the housekeeper, Mrs Jonson. However, there was one thing blatantly obvious to Hammond and that was the fact that the lady had her own apartments on the second floor and in the south wing of the mansion, whereas Sir James favoured the first floor in the north wing, a clear indication that all was not well in the household or their marriage, though politics and the stiff upper lip of the upper class would protect this fact.

Hammond thought about the unbearable stress the two public people would have had to endure to keep up appearances, knowing only too well what it was like; it had been a tremendous strain when he and his wife had parted, a struggle which resulted in near blows and the family break-up. Although in Cartwright’s case, a break-up could never be on the agenda now! In a rage Hammond had threatened his wife with death, and he was thoughtful of the possibility that the same threats had occurred in this household. Had Sir James, in a fit of temper, threatened his wife, and if so, did any of the servants hear him?

Hammond had been sitting on the sofa staring at the portrait of the lady above the empty fireplace while he attempted to gather his thoughts. Now he got to his feet and began to pace the room. There were no clues other than the dead woman and no expended cartridge case. She had obviously been killed somewhere else, as there was no blood anywhere.

He stopped at the large window and stared out onto the grounds. He nodded to himself as he watched the ambulance take away the body.

This, my dear chap, is going to be a tricky one. The killer knew her and, more importantly, she knew him. He had access to the house, he knew where her rooms were, but what, my lady, did you know of him? What did you see that you shouldn’t have?

He cleared his thoughts as the ambulance raced through the gates and out into the country lane. He turned and walked across the room. He knew that there would be vague if not wholly deceitful answers to his searching questions about the lives of the Cartwright family, but nevertheless, he knew that all aspects of Lady Diana and Sir James’ life would have to be looked into very carefully and investigated to reach an absolute conclusion.

Hammond stretched, then headed across the living room floor towards the door and into the passage, where he turned left towards the door at the end, knowing this would take him down the old Victorian cast-iron spiral staircase to the back of the house and the servants’ quarters, then into the kitchen, where he hoped to find Mrs Jonson.

Mrs Jonson was in her late forties, and had one daughter, Clair. Clair was in her early twenties, and sometimes her mother would ask her to assist with cleaning all three floors of the mansion once or twice a month, usually if the Cartwrights were expecting company.

Mr Jonson was good at multi-tasking and his duties ranged from gardening and handiwork to being general dogsbody. On occasion he would be required to drive Sir James to the station, though never to a venue. Mr Jonson would also sometimes enlist the help of a friend from the nearby village when required.

Hammond pushed open the door at the bottom of the staircase and walked through into the kitchen.

Mrs Jonson had her back to him, and it was obvious that she hadn’t heard him approach, so it was with great alarm as he crossed the stone floor that she screamed, turned and dropped the plate she was holding, allowing it to fall to the floor and shatter into a thousand pieces. She was breathing deeply as she held her chest with one hand, supporting herself