Even though he was now relegated to the street and its deprivations, Big Greg knew that it was a small cost if it protected those he held dear. If they, the scurrilous element in the security services and the military, knew that he still lived, then his wife and his daughter, even his grandchild, could be threatened.
‘We only need the solution,’ the lead torturer had said.
Big Greg remembered him well: short, swarthy, a London accent. The man revealed that he had been assigned to an army base in Egypt to oversee Egypt’s treatment of Al Qaeda fighters they had brought in from Afghanistan. How he had signed the papers to allow the waterboarding, the electric shock treatment, the beatings, and the sleep deprivation.
‘You’ve held up better than they did,’ the sadistic man had said once. ‘You’ll not leave here without telling us all we want, or else it’s your family. I’ve seen your wife, pretty isn’t she, and how about your daughter? What we could do with them,’ he had said.
Cornered, Big Greg was unable to reason with the man, to explain that what they wanted him to give them was too dangerous to be in the hands of malevolent dictatorships or governments; it was the ultimate weapon, that could generate energy for the betterment of mankind or to destroy vast sections of it. He knew they would not let him leave alive, and if his family were the lever, they’d use them.
Desperate, his ability to resist the interrogation weakening, he plotted his escape. Big Greg, taller than the average and twice the size of his interrogator, and with his bindings loosened after his constant struggle with them, grabbed the man that had been holding him captive using the last ounce of his strength and placed his hands around the man’s throat. The man gasped for breath, attempted to break free, but there was no one else in the room to help him. Eventually, Big Greg placed him in the chair where he had been restrained not five minutes before and made good his escape, but not before maiming another who stood in his way. His only thought was how to protect his family.
The knowledge he possessed was too important; his family was not safe, never would be. The only solution was for him to die. This had not been so easy to arrange. The researcher’s death was assumed, once they had found his clothes stacked on a beach and a suicide note posted to his wife, that he had swum out to his death. Not that it prevented them bringing his wife in for interrogation, a situation that he could not control, but it had not lasted long.
The body of the tramp that he had killed, a man with similar features he had found under a railway bridge, was not hard to deal with: a suitable number of bricks and the man had sunk into the silt on the river bed without a trace. For the first few weeks, the new Big Greg had kept a low profile, allowing his appearance to degenerate, his beard to grow. Once the transformation was complete, he had returned to within a mile of his family and had watched them from a place in a park across from the house that he had shared with them once.
In time, the hurt of seeing them without him had diminished. However, his daughter maturing, making a fool of herself sometimes, getting drunk too often, sleeping with the wrong man, had been difficult, but she had passed that phase and had matured into someone he was proud to call his daughter. Once, she had given him some money as he sat there watching her. ‘Here you are,’ she had said, as she passed by him with his grandchild in its pushchair. He had wanted to lean over and touch the baby, but he didn’t. He knew what would be the reaction of the mother, his daughter, and it was best for all concerned if she saw him as an old tramp down on his luck.
***
Isaac and the investigation team met as they always did at the Homicide department’s office in Challis Street. As always, the ubiquitous presence of Detective Chief Superintendent Goddard, the demand to wrap up the case as soon as possible, which to Isaac seemed yet again to be rhetoric over reality. So far, they had a body, no motive, and certainly no murderer. The fingerprints, according to Gordon Windsor, the CSE, had revealed nothing of value. It was likely due to the cold evening that whoever had wielded the pole had worn gloves.
‘Why Bob Robertson?’ Wendy Gladstone asked.
‘Why not?’ DI Larry Hill said. ‘The man must have had enemies, the same as all of us.’
‘Did he?’ Isaac asked. He had just had two weeks in Jamaica, his parents had come from there, visiting relatives, soaking up the sun, eating chicken jerk in Boston Bay, jumping off the cliff into the sea at Negril, and chasing a few too many of the dusky maidens, yet a murder investigation gave him more pleasure.
Most people would have thought him crazy to find joy in dealing with the underbelly of society, and now in this case, the homeless, but for Isaac that was the real world, not the sun-soaked paradise, although his parents’ homeland had more than its fair share of drug-related crime, including the drug mules taking the drugs into the UK. His team had become heavily involved with drugs, mainly heroin, in a previous case, after a dismembered corpse had been pulled out of the canal in Little Venice. However, knowing
