Francis exhaled slowly through his nose and fantasised about squeezing his employer’s neck. The only good thing about his employer was that he was predictable. Well, that and he paid well. The earl had so much money it no longer had any meaning to him. He was utterly bonkers with all his talk of the world ending. He planned to live in an underground bunker and gorge himself to death on the world’s finest food. He could buy whatever he wanted, but many of the things on his list of required foods were not the sort of thing a person could easily buy in bulk quantities. Also, getting them to his bunker, which he wanted as few people as possible to know the location of, meant secretive movements and that was why he employed Eugene and Francis. They were to arrange to obtain certain commodities, and people. The earl had a list of people he wanted to work in his kitchen. They were captives, of course, not employees, but the earl was crazy enough to believe he was saving them. On top of cooks and chefs and such, there were people to look after livestock, farmers to grow his plants, which was a highly specialised thing because it was all underground. He had three men just for mushrooms!
The saved, as the earl liked to call them, were all prisoners, but they were well-treated provided they accepted escape was impossible. Poor Joel Clement was the first person they’d had to kill for their new employer, but not the first person either man had killed. The list was well into double figures for each of them. Some were legitimate kills from their days in the special forces, but there had been an equal number since.
Francis quickly snaffled a chip from his bag before responding to his boss. ‘We are waiting for an opportunity to take the target cleanly, Your Earlness. I anticipate this will occur very soon, certainly in the next twenty-four hours.’
‘You had just better make sure it does,’ snapped the earl. He knew how to handle men like Francis. He could trace his family’s lineage all the way back to King Henry the seventh’s court. His family had been lording it over lesser men for centuries. The general populace were layabouts and brigands the lot of them and could only be controlled with a firm hand.
Eugene and Francis had decided they quite fancied a couple of pints and an early night. The earl had them working all kinds of hours, but away from his constant demands they could claim it took longer than expected to safely obtain Victor Harris and who could possibly prove otherwise? They would come back in the morning and maybe intercept him on his way to work.
Stuffing another vinegar-soaked chip into his mouth, Francis repeated his promise to return within twenty-four hours and ended the call.
Bookkeeping
Albert was no accountant, but he knew his way around a set of books. It was one of the things he’d taught himself as part of his job. He wanted to know as much as he could and believed his determination to have a rounded education was what helped him rise through the ranks of the Kent Police while others floundered. Money was so often the motivation behind the murders he investigated, that having a basic knowledge of cashflow, profit and loss, and other regular accounting statements helped him zero in on what might be going on.
Not so this time.
If there were false entries here, or numbers that failed to tally, he wasn’t seeing them. Checking over his shoulder to listen for Victor, he reached into his jacket to produce his phone.
‘Hi, dad?’ said his daughter, Selina, when she answered.
Albert tried to split his phone calls between his children, wanting to limit the number of times he asked them to do things for him so he wouldn’t seem like he was always snooping into someone’s business. Of course, he knew his kids talked to each other, so his attempts at subterfuge were largely pointless, but he did it anyway.
‘Hello, Selina, how are you and how are my grandchildren?’ he asked to get the conversation started.
‘Everyone is sick, actually. Except me, that is. Some kind of tummy bug. The kids started exploding from both ends this morning and now their father is too. I’ve had to take the day off to deal with them all.’
This was not the news Albert wanted to hear. Obviously, he never wanted to hear that his grandchildren were ill, but he wanted Selina to be in work and able to use her contacts to get the books checked over. At home, and with a sick family, she wasn’t in a position to help and he wouldn’t ask.
‘That’s terrible,’ he said, secretly wishing he’d called Randall now because he didn’t have children or a wife. ‘Do you feel okay?’
Selina sighed. ‘I could do without this, but yes, I’m fine. I don’t get sick.’
Albert remembered how rare it was for her to ever be ill as a child. ‘No. No, you don’t, do you? Well, I guess I had better let you get back to it then. Sounds like you have your hands full.’
‘No, Dad,’ Selina protested. ‘I could do with a break from them. You called
