Murder by Precision

By Andy Jarvis

“I’d seen a gun like it. In the film Get Carter. A bad guy’s gun. Two wide barrels hack-sawn to size along with the stock. A neat little homemade assassin’s device you could slip down your pants and still walk down the street without limping. Both barrels looked me square in the eyes. I put my hands up. There was nothing in here I could grab and Drago could see it.”
Engineers Jake and Charlie believe the death of a colleague crushed in an industrial machine was no accident and talk each other into doing their own investigation. Involving maverick private detective Ron Selby seems a good idea until they stumble on a drug distribution plant run by the director of a rival company. In too deep to back out of a bad situation, they use a combination of street-wisdom, Selby’s expertise at digging out the truth and good luck to get to the bottom of a tense, darkly humorous and violent murder mystery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781678165093

Book preview

Copyright © 2022 Andrew Jarvis

‘Murder by Precision’

First published in 2022 via Lulu Publishing.

Andrew Jarvis asserts his moral right to be identified as the author.

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, recording or otherwise without prior written permission from the author.

The following work is fiction. The names and places of business are fictional. All characters portrayed in this publication are fictional. The actions and dialogue of the characters are not meant to be representative of particular persons living today or in the past or generally representative of any individuals or cultures in any locality in the world. All reasonable efforts have been made to ensure that the characters do not resemble actual persons, living or dead. Any similarity is entirely coincidental.

Cover image by Özgür Ünal

My thanks go to

Vanessa, for her unbiased advice and valuable critique.

ISBN 978-1-6781-6509-3

I’d seen a gun like it. In the film Get Carter. A bad guy’s gun. Two wide barrels hack-sawn to size along with the stock. A neat little homemade assassin’s device you could slip down your pants and still walk down the street without limping.

1.

Monday morning, 6:15 AM,

The Machine Shop, Godfrey & Sons Engineers

I could smell him. Long before I could see him I got a whiff of that Clyde Johannsen aftershave he wears at £480 an ounce. Drawn in on a breeze from the open bay door on that warm summer morning it carried on and above the smell of hot oil and metal. The scent of exotic woods capturing essences of olive grove and citrus blossom in the luscious botanical gardens of an ancient palace sits as out of place in a machine shop as a sardine in a sauna.

I saw him on the main gangway once he was past the security office, making his way up the shop between the scrap metal skips and into the main works where we were already hard at work. The big machines were roaring, whining and cutting away at metal. Metal was cutting metal, hard metal against soft metal; special machines and special cutters with carbide teeth cutting hard against hard, burning and screeching like hell’s inmates howling at the devil’s whip.

He didn’t often come into the machine shop so early. But he liked surprise visits. He thought we were lazy and tried to catch us skiving on the job, making mugs of tea outside of break times and talking to each other unnecessarily. But I smelt him first. I think he used that expensive aftershave as a statement of the divide between us and him. Alfred Godfrey, son of the great - and I’m told - the more benevolent founder of the company: the late Sir Laurence Godfrey. He never spoke to us, only looked around with eyes that betrayed his contempt as he passed on the way to his upstairs office overlooking the machine shop. There he watched us, sometimes for minutes, sometimes longer, arms folded, motionless just staring with coal black eyes beneath a forehead of thinning silver hair swept back over ears and down to the shoulder like some aging rock star with a personality bypass. Always in the same place, as if he had a couple of footprints on his office floor showing him where to stand. I swore then that if I ever won the lottery, I’d get a ladder, climb up to that window and draw a Hitler moustache on the glass in that exact spot where his top lip always is. Even when sat at his desk he could still see us from his wide office window. Always close, no more than a slight turn of the head and he could see everything that happened below. And when the end of the morning tea break buzzer sounded, he’d be right there again watching us, seeing who was late getting back to their stations. The buzzer that sounded the start of a ten minute break to wash hands, brew a hot drink, stuff a bacon sandwich away hardly chewing it. No time to even fart and he’d be there again watching.

Godfrey’s father, Sir Laurence had invested heavily in the company on hi-tech machines, big machines for the heavy duty components we make for the oil and gas industries. Big machines for making big components. Machines as big as a decent sized living room and components so big they needed cranes to load them up. Alfred Godfrey resented the expenditure, believing we could manage on hand driven lathes and millers. The thought that any of the hard labour could be taken out of the machining process must have irked him. He would have fired us all if he could. He told our team leader that we were a necessary evil. We had skills taking years of experience and training and he knew it. He despised us, but he had to endure us.

The early shift takes me a while to come round. Stick a couple of coffees inside me, however and I’m ginger as a cat crossing a ring road, capable of making critical adjustments to my machine station, monitor the controls and keyboard, read the VDU program and watch through the clear Perspex screens protecting the machining processes inside all at the same time. Inside, massive power driven cutting heads ripped through steel with ease, all doused and cooled by jets pounding torrents of clear oil over what to an outsider would look like pure chaos.

Next in, a few minutes after old man Godfrey, came Dorian Brentford, our Team Leader, early shift supervisor and IT specialist. Dorian was late that morning, but for a good reason. He was all duded up for a special occasion. He was soon to be married and the big rehearsal was that day. He was going out later to meet his betrothed for a practice at getting hitched. He was tidied and ready in his finery right down to the carnation in the Armani suit lapel. He kept stopping and looking into each machine as he passed, seeing that everything was running fine and fast. The huge robotic tools were drilling, milling and carving up the steel or aluminium into the myriad of precise complex shapes and industrial components the company manufactured and that production times were all on target.

And he was looking at himself too. He peered through the screens at the operations inside of each machine, then he’d stand back to check himself in the reflection, straightening his tie, face turning left then right, spit on the finger to the quiff.

Then he came to Dooley’s machine. I hadn’t seen Fred Dooley that day. Dooley was early shift, same as me. I usually see him when he starts work. His machine was idle. That just doesn’t happen at Godfrey & Sons. The machines run full double shift – no excuses. If an engineer is absent the machine still runs unless it’s broken down. And in the absence of the operator, one of the other workers is supposed to double up and run two machines.

Dooley’s machine was dead. Fully stopped. No light inside or anything moving. Well, I had noticed this, but I was too busy to query it with any of the lads.

But Dorian noticed and he was hopping mad. I knew it was an act as old man Godfrey was staring down at us and Dorian wasn’t about to look like he was doing anything other than his job as Team Leader. As for Alfred Godfrey, well, he would have noticed on his way through the shop, but far be it for him to lower himself to actually speak to us commoners. No, he left that to his whipping-boy Dorian. So, Dorian was shouting and fuming, making like a good taskmaster for the man in the window, bawling out why the damned thing wasn’t even on, never mind running and producing. Time was money, the god that all of Godfrey & Sons bow down to. So his first instinct must have been ‘switch on.’ He powered the machine up via the mains switch at the side and it lit up. Next there should have been a safely executed start-up procedure that all good machine engineers are trained in. In layman speak it means ensuring the machine is in idle mode and any cutting heads inside are fully retracted away from the component being machined. He ignored that and headed straight for the ‘go’ button.

Dorian stepped back and seemed amazed. Dooley’s machine was up and running, humming away nicely, oil thrashing like a fire hose inside all over the process. And Dorian was acting like he couldn’t believe that it actually started. He was going to come over to me then and tell me to double up, monitor and run that machine as well as mine until Fred Dooley turned up. But not before he checked the machine VDU, studying the program as it scrolled along in tune to the production inside. Now, he was about to turn and start bawling his head off at the rest of us for not noticing a machine being down when I saw it. Even from my vantage point at the end of the shop I could tell something was very wrong.

I put my machine on hold and started walking over. I was no more than a few yards away and seriously worried. Dorian shouldn’t have started up the machine the way he did and my instinct was to run over and hit that big red emergency stop button. So big it stuck out like a polished Macintosh apple at the side of the monitor. But I just froze.

The oil gushing inside Dooley’s machine wasn’t quite right. It was turning darker, first from its light cooking oil shade to amber, like motor oil. Gradually it got darker. Then red. No mistake about it. Bright red like a post box. And no longer transparent. All eyes were on it then. Dorian caught sight of me as I stood transfixed halfway between machines. He looked around at all of us as if it was some kind of prank. Then he stared right up close to the Perspex screen trying to see past the ‘red oil.’

That’s when it happened. Smack. Right up against the other side of the Perspex, stuck to the inside, no more than a few inches from Dorian’s face. Try to imagine a Halloween pumpkin thrown against a windscreen, smashed and distorted, but still a face, grinning, but not orange like a pumpkin. Bright red and stuck to the inside, it seemed to stare insanely from hollow eyes, like some car crash victim. The face must have been ripped clean off the skull to stick like that rather than bounce away, but stuck it was for a moment, before slowly sliding down the inside of the screen and washing away in the red torrent.

Dorian staggered back and collapsed onto his ass. Then it came. Everything he had for breakfast that morning appeared all over his smart new Armani – carnation included.

Lucky girl.

2.

It looked like a fine day on Porthmeor beach. The Atlantic surf was up and a guy in a black wetsuit was heading for the water. Next to him a girl in pink and blue neoprene headed out too. Both had matching blue boards and appeared to be running. The glossy square below the surfers said it was June. They were probably photographed in June.

The wall on which the calendar hung was in greasy contrast. The canteen had been erected two years and not cleaned since. Two years ago when old man Godfrey was forced by law to give us a mid-morning shift break. Ten minutes while he stood and watched. Nobody had time to wipe the coffee or grease stains off. It’s not a big canteen. Just a makeshift shack with Perspex windows stuck in a corner of the machine shop. The same clear Perspex as the machine guards. It’s safe and cheap and doesn’t shatter in shards like glass. And he can still watch us.

I shifted my eyes from a St. Ives beach to the scene of the accident. It was surrounded by screens. People in white suits and masks appeared and disappeared regularly from behind. It didn’t stop me imagining what it looked like beyond. Most of us had seen it. I should visit St. Ives some day. But not today. Today was day two after the accident, unofficially titled explain just what the fuck happened day. 

Not long after Dooley’s machine was powered down and all the unforgiving forces inside had stopped ripping him to shreds, the paramedics, fire brigade and the cops had arrived and herded us all like cows into the place where we usually eat and drink coffee at break time. Nobody did either. Our greasy refuge had felt like a holocaust camp. We were told not to go anywhere even though some of us felt queasy, having seen it as it happened or walked by shortly after.

We were offered counselling by some ‘expert’ in trauma. She was one of the first on the scene, confronted by a group of men stunned into silence, some feeling physically sick, others in what she described as ‘denial,’ with a warning that there could be something called ‘post trauma.’ But none of us took up the offer. As lads we all felt the need to man-up in front of each other. That was a mistake. I think I was the first to phone the helpline we were offered later that night. I couldn’t sleep and the soothing music followed by a soothing voice telling me of all the other soothing help lines available didn’t help. Several cans of lager made no difference. A half pack of Marlboro taunted me. I’d given up. Those were for emergency, like a kid who’s given up a security blanket. They’ve given up but the blanket stays near. Just in case. I shook one out, struck a match and threw both out the window and cracked open another beer. That’s willpower.

So there we were back in work the following day, called back in to the company. Our company, Godfrey & Sons is a medium sized engineering facility on a medium sized industrial estate with the usual amount of litter defiling the mediocre shrubbery decorating the access roads. We make all sizes of industrial components for the oil and gas industry from the large to very large. We’re precision engineers. Precision means just that. Exact. There is no give or take, no near enough, or it’ll do. Everything a precision engineer makes on their computer numerically controlled (CNC) machine is exact, precise right down to microscopic values.

Across the road from Godfrey & Sons there’s a transport depot, more littered shrubs, a slaughterhouse and a hot tub warehouse. I’m not a fan of hot tubs, in fact I hate them. The sign alone annoyed me. Every day to get to work I drive past a giant picture of happy looking people sat around with wine and nibbles on inflatable floating trays. In a hot tub. The slaughterhouse didn’t have a sign. If it did it couldn’t have been worse.

But we weren’t in to do any work. The whole shop was silent, not a machine squeaked. The police wanted to interview us individually, the first being Dorian, as the unwitting fool that had fired the machine up in the first place. And at this time we even felt sorry for him. He was given the Gestapo-style interrogation – first by the police and then by the company. He may be many things, Dorian, unknowingly hasty, out of touch with most of the lad culture, being