CHAPTER NINE
Retribution
Then she remembered her first experience with hardened criminal types. She had been 14 at the time. Persephone’s father, Thomas Stone was a dedicated, popular teacher and a bit of a bleeding heart. He loved teaching at the local prison on Portland, the island where their family had been for generations, which is where he found himself after having abandoned the school system a short time earlier and finding it impossible to return once he was over his mid-life crisis.
The jail was a very bleak place. In the First World War it had been an armaments depot and was basically a series of stone buildings built into a large hill at the top of the island. It was very secure because if anyone escaped there was only one way off the island and the police found it very easy to spot anyone trying to leave along the exposed road on the causeway to the mainland.
This didn’t stop prisoners regularly trying, and at least once or twice a year when Persephone was on the school bus going to Weymouth, there would be a roadblock where a poor young constable would board the bus and deal with several rowdy teenage girls yelling “He’s here! Under my seat! Get over here copper, he’s got a gun!”, accompanied by wolf whistles and catcalls from all aboard. Funnily enough, no prisoner had ever been brave enough to escape via the school bus method.
Over the years, the prison had come to be used to house serious offenders – murderers, rapists and other violent offenders who had served several years of their life sentences and were leading up to being released on parole or licence. These prisoners had often spent most of their lives in reform homes and jails and were ill equipped for life on the outside of this highly structured system. It was Thomas’ new mission to transform them through education into potential valuable members of society with the writing ability to at least fill in a dole form.
Thomas loved his work. He applied his enthusiasm and professional experience to tailor programmes to suit his new pupils and a number of them gained GCSE ‘O’ levels in English, maths and science (although there was very little practical chemistry taught). He made a number of new interesting acquaintances among the student body and regaled the family over dinner with hair-raising tales of murder, extortion and mutilation. The entire family was fascinated and horrified in equal parts and were drawn into the drama that Thomas was now living.
The only fly in the ointment for Thomas was that following their release into freedom and after a fairly short break, many of his star pupils kept reappearing in his classes. They had broken their licence conditions after being launched into the world with their 1953 suits, bus fare and nothing else and were relieved to be back home in the safe regulated world of the prison with its 3 square meals a day and interesting chemistry theory classes. Thomas was determined that he would do something to help these poor men transition into normal society in such a manner as to improve their chances of being successful in ‘real life’.
For a few weeks, dinnertime stories revolved around the sad and sorry tale of Ron, the reformed murderer and rapist. Persephone and the rest of the family listened enthralled to Thomas as he recounted the sorry story of a boy born into a violent and criminal family who was given no choice but to follow in his father’s footsteps into the family business. This had been a protection racket involving a number of brothels and illegal gaming houses and had undergone significant turmoil when Ron’s father died (in the arms of a prostitute with insufficient cash to hand over on the day but who happened to be skilled with a cutthroat razor) when Ron was in his early twenties. Rival protection racketeers had seen the opportunity to move in on the business, leaving poor young Ronny in the unenviable situation where he had to resort to extreme violence to hang onto the business, just to put food on the table for his family. This all sounded vaguely romantic to the teenage Persephone, and sitting safely at the family dinner table, was even better than the telly.
They really shouldn’t have been as surprised as they were when Persephone, her sister Pandora and brother Matthew turned up to breakfast one Saturday morning to find a heavily tattooed man wearing a rather fine if slightly old-fashioned grey pin striped suit with large lapels sitting quietly at the table.
“Say hello to Ron” announced Thomas to the three open-mouthed children, “and Persephone, will you please put some proper clothes on.” Persephone looked down, realised she was dressed only in her underwear, sprinted out of the room, screaming, and found some jeans and a t-shirt to put on.
Pauline, Persephone’s mother, was sitting at the table, arms crossed, looking less than happy about the situation and the girls sat down at the table trying unsuccessfully not to stare at Ron. Ron, however, sat quietly waiting for his food. Persephone and Pandora were far too scared to say anything. Matthew, at ten years of age though, had no such problems.
“Are you really a murderer?”
Ron looked at him, expressionless. Persephone and Pandora interpreted this look as the steely glare of the serial killer previously described by their father. They prepared to bolt. At his young age, Matthew was not aware of the potential ramifications of his innocent question and just thought that Ron hadn’t heard him. He asked again, slightly more loudly, “So, are you really a murderer, Ron? Who did you murder?”
Ron was struck dumb. The last time he had to deal with a ten year old was when he was in the school playground and one of his classmates had been giving him stick about his sister’s habit of taking boys out the back of the bike sheds, taking off her knickers and making the boys touch her in an inappropriate manner. He really wasn’t sure how to deal with Matthew, as knocking him down and giving him a kicking until he bled all over the dining room carpet was probably not the best idea in the circumstances. So he just sat there and didn’t move or speak.
Thomas came to his rescue in quick order. He backhanded Matthew sharply across the side of his head.
“Don’t be so bloody rude to our guest you little shit!” Thomas remonstrated, “ Ron will be staying with us for a few days or maybe a couple of weeks while he finds his feet.”
Thomas looked everyone in the eye, challenging them to object. Not including Ron, of course.
“I want you to treat him as a member of the family. You are to behave with respect and courtesy towards him at all times and help him out if he has any questions with how things work round here.”
Pauline smiled at Ron in what she hoped was a friendly encouraging way, but to Persephone and Pandora she looked more nervous than friendly. Ron smiled back, also trying to be friendly, but to Persephone’s view, he now looked menacing, as the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. Breakfast was completed in very quick time and the girls announced that they had to tidy their bedrooms before going out to meet friends at the park. Matthew said nothing and slunk away from the table as soon as his plate was clean. Pauline announced that she had shopping to do and asked Thomas and Ron to clear the table and wash up as she stalked from the room.
That night, Persephone couldn’t sleep. After an hour of staring at the ceiling and worrying about the safety of her family, her bedroom door slowly opened, and in the dark, she saw someone sidle up to her bed. Terrified, she lay like a statue, held her breath and tried unsuccessfully not to make a sound. Pandora jumped into bed next to her, wrapped her arms around Persephone, begging her to let her stay. Persephone screamed, somehow muffling the sound with her pillow. After the initial shock wore off, Persephone was now irritated. She had fought for years to have her own bedroom, and now her boring little sister thought she could just turn up whenever she felt like it. How could Pandora be so selfish? Her own fears of a few short minutes before forgotten, Persephone snarled,
“Piss off! You’re cold!”
Pandora however, had Persephone in a death grip and wasn’t going anywhere.
“Please don’t make me go! He’s going to kill me!”
“Don’t be stupid, of course he’s not going to kill you.” Was Persephone’s reassuring answer, “but I might if you don’t g
et your feet away from my legs!”
Pandora relaxed a bit and Persephone was now able to breathe again. After a little while, realising that she wasn’t going to get any sleep with Pandora now snoring away in her ears, Persephone started to ponder. Maybe Ron was going to rape and murder them in their beds. After all, he had been deprived of female company for years, and he now had easy access to two nubile teenagers with no locks on the doors. Then she had an even more shocking thought. Actually, maybe while he was in prison he had been more use to sex with men, and now Matthew was in danger!
Persephone was freaking out. What could she do? Thomas was unlikely to be sympathetic to her concerns, as he had brought Ron there in the first place, and was notoriously grumpy if woken up in the middle of the night in any case, so she was not really keen to raise the issue at that point. Despite being terrified, Persephone decided that the only course of action was for her to check it out herself. The house was very old and had thick inside walls that effectively muffled sound, so she was not worried that Ron would hear her coming, but she pulled on a black tracksuit and grabbed her hockey stick from the wardrobe just in case. First, she checked Matthew’s room by holding her breath (she had learned years beforehand that this was the most effective way to avoid the sickening odours that pervaded everything in Matthew’s room), opening the door, running over and poking the lump on the bed to see that he was still alive. Temporarily reassured, she exited the room and then exhaled.
Okay, seems like Matthew hasn’t been anally raped, otherwise he would have been whining and crying like he normally did when Persephone or Pandora hit or pushed him around. This didn’t mean though, that Ron wasn’t planning something later in the night. Given that her single bed was already over-full with her snivelling sister, Persephone was not keen on inviting Matthew to join them both for the night, so the only course of action was to keep watch over Ron in the spare room. If this worked tonight, maybe the siblings could take turns each night while Ron was staying.
The spare bedroom was down the hall away from the children’s and parent’s bedrooms, and Persephone crept quietly along its carpeted length, staying close to the walls, as this is what the heroes did in movies. She got to the door and carefully pressed her ear to it. This was completely ineffective as the door was two-inch thick oak. Ron could have been using a chainsaw to cut up the mutilated bodies of Persephone’s parents and she still wouldn’t have heard anything.
“Well that’s it then” she thought “nothing more I can do.”
She turned around and started back along the hall. After a couple of steps she caught herself and with steely determination, turned back to complete her task of protecting her family from slaughter.
Never has a door taken so long to open. Persephone turned the handle so slowly that time-lapse photography would have been needed to spot any movement. After several minutes and with her heart in her mouth, Persephone opened the door just enough to get her head inside so that she could see the bed. Her eyes had already adjusted to the dark, and there was enough streetlight coming through the curtains in the spare room for Persephone to see quite well.
He was there in the bed!
In the gloom, Persephone could see the shape of Ron’s entire body under the sheets. He was lying on his back with his arms down at his sides and just his face protruding from the bedclothes, facing straight up towards the ceiling. He wasn’t making a sound and was completely motionless. Persephone slowly let her breath out. Maybe he was dead!
Suddenly there was a tiny movement from the bed. It was so subtle Persephone almost missed it. Ron’s eyes moved. Towards Persephone.
Transfixed, her heart pounding, Persephone searched for something to say or do. Ron was not moving, just staring at Persephone with a vacant expression on his scarred and wizened face.
They both stayed there for a few seconds, neither moving nor saying anything. Ron’s eyes stayed fixed on Persephone, whose feet were frozen to the floor. Persephone thought she might pass out from the terror.
After what seemed to her like an endless moment, but finding herself still conscious, and with Ron’s gaze boring into her terrified eyes, Persephone slowly backed away and shut the door behind her. Her knees finally gave out and she collapsed onto the floor just outside the door. She decided to stay there and keep watch – partly due to her sense of duty to protect her family from this monster and partly because she was trembling so badly that she couldn’t walk anyway. Despite her best intentions, exhausted from the night’s adventure, she soon fell asleep.
Early the next morning, Thomas woke up and went to make a cup of tea to give to a still very pissed-off Pauline. As he staggered down the hall towards the stairs, he spotted a small back bundle near the door to the spare room. His heart nearly stopped. What had Ron done? Upon discovering Persephone was merely curled up fast asleep, he picked her up and took her to her bedroom, where to his surprise, Pandora was in residence in Persephone’s bed. Trying to keep it simple, he then took Persephone to Pandora’s bedroom, put her in Pandora’s bed and went back to his own bed. Pauline immediately booted him out to get her the promised cuppa that he had completely forgotten.
That Sunday, Persephone and Pandora had a job on their hands. After praying hard for divine intervention at church during the morning communion service, they tracked down some of their friends to get some help. One of the boys secured a couple of flagons of cider and they all retired to the beach to discuss the problem.
After abandoning ideas involving kidnapping Ron and throwing him off a cliff, bribing him to go (with the £3.50 that they scraped together), tempting Ron with the skankiest girl in the group so that he would rape her and go back to jail (the most popular idea for a while with all but Trudy going for it), the group came up trumps.
Ron’s stay in jail had been ordered and predictable. To make Ron so uncomfortable that he would have to leave, the kids decided to make it the exact opposite.
The first action would be a ‘kid-swap’. They would achieve this by random children turning up to meals at the Stone household. As this happened on a frequent basis anyway, Pauline would not be particularly alarmed and Persephone suspected that even if their scheme was rumbled that her mother would be supportive anyway. The trick was that they would just turn up in place of Persephone, Pandora or Matthew, who would get their food at that child’s home. They would then act as if they were the Stone children, even calling Pauline “Mum” at the table.
This was carried out for three days and the kids reported that Ron was looking quite disconcerted, while Pauline was clearly finding the exercise amusing and Thomas, who was completely focused on Ron’s rehabilitation, had totally failed to notice. Ron, however, was still in residence, so clearly phase 2 was now needed. It was time to re-form THE BAND!
This required two days of non-stop auditions. Luckily Portland had an ample population of completely talentless spotty teenagers for whom volume was a totally appropriate substitute for tone. Matthew was in seventh heaven as the band drummer. Matthew even managed to find four aspiring ten-year-old punk rock chicks who danced around the house in rags, screaming obscenities at the top of their lungs and generally crashing into furniture and people trying to avoid the caterwauling. They were probably the straw that broke the camel’s back for Ron, who took off to the pub over the road as soon as it opened on day four of the campaign.
Ron still appeared for dinner that night, but was so drunk that Thomas had to admit that his attempt at prisoner rehabilitation was a failure and that Ron was now behaving in a manner that wasn’t really appropriate in a house full of his children. The following morning, Thomas asked Ron to leave. By lunchtime, Ron had left, along with Pauline’s food money from the jar in the kitchen.
This experience didn’t deter Thomas, who over the next few months brought home a ragtag assortment of ‘students’. The band was only needed once more, when a cross-dressing axe murderer got into Persephone’s wardrobe an
d then Thomas’ tool shed.
Persephone marvelled that she had forgotten about the procession of criminals that her father had brought home. “God, that was a long time ago”, she thought. “I wonder how Dad is going?” She hadn’t spoken with her father in years, having fallen out with him over her move to Australia. She only thought about the family she had left behind on the other side of the world from time to time when she was feeling a bit low. She generally fixed this with chardonnay or gin, and consequently had no idea what most of her family were doing these days. Now was definitely not the time to be rekindling family ties. She had a job to do, and her skin was going wrinkly from being in the shower for so long. She climbed out, dried herself off and got ready for day two in the Élan office.
Persephone spent the next three days interviewing managers at the insurance company and putting red dots on her chart. On the Friday, she had booked a 4pm meeting with Craig Sellars in her office. Steeling herself, she prepared to meet the man that she had demonised in her dreams the past three nights. When he turned up, he was far from the horned devil she had in her mind’s eye. In walked a six-foot tall, self-assured attractive man in his mid-forties with a deep tan, blonde sun-streaked hair flowing over his collar and looking every inch the surfie dude he clearly worked hard to portray. It was really only his bloodshot eyes and slight tremor that gave any hint that he was a habitual drug user. She came out from behind the desk and shook his outstretched hand.
“Craig Sellars, pleased to meet you Poppy. Nobody told me you were so gorgeous”
Instantly, the spell was broken. Persephone saw the smarmy, narcissistic junkie that she was determined would pay for his deeds. She smiled, said nothing in reply and motioned Craig to join her at the conference table. Once they were seated, she opened the conversation with a brief businesslike description of her role and the work she was there to do. Craig smiled and nodded and waited for Persephone to get to the point. Persephone, however, was in no hurry. She wanted to find out what made Craig tick. Information she gleaned during this meeting could prove critical in her planning for his punishment.
“Tell, me about your department Craig. Can you take me through what you and your team do? I really want to understand you and how you work.”
Like all narcissists, Craig was only too happy to talk about himself and Persephone sat back and pretended to take notes every time Craig said something that could have been significant in a downsizing exercise. All the while, she was looking for personal information and any hints as to how he was feeling about the current situation. She was particularly looking to see if he was worried about the changes. Surely he realised that once he was not working at the insurance company he would be unable to intercept any person enquiring about his fraudulent claims. Her big question was whether this was going to be a worry for Craig.
“So is my name on the list?” Craig asked with a small smile, “Assuming there is a list, that is.”
“How would you feel if it was?” replied Persephone with an enigmatic grin, “of course assuming this hypothetical list currently existed.”
Craig paused for effect. He was actually dead keen to get made redundant. After 15 years at the company, he was up for a sizeable payout, but knowing how tight the company was, he reckoned he had no chance. But then again, he thought, who knows these days?
“Do you know what, I would love it. I’m a bit of a surfie, actually more than a bit: I could actually be a professional – I’m that good. It’s always been my dream to quit work, buy a little pad up at the Gold Coast and spend my days surfing some of the country’s greatest breaks. You know, the Gold Coast isn’t the best surf, but it’s pretty central to lots of great beaches and Queensland is much cheaper to live.”
“Aren’t there really great surfing beaches in the Pacific Islands? Wouldn’t you be able to stretch your payout much further there?”
“Sure, but I’m a bit of a redneck at heart – love my footy, beer and Aussie babes. I reckon we live in the best country on earth and I’m planning on spending my retirement swapping tales about great breaks, footy games and where to get the best pie in town.”
This was not actually what Persephone wanted to hear. If Craig were not planning on leaving the country with his loot, then a careful man like him would be sure to tie up all his loose ends. There were at least ten people out there who she realised were now in dire danger. She would have liked to let Craig think that he was unlikely to get the payout so he had no reason to start a killing spree. Unfortunately it now looked like it was a bit late for that and she had opened the door by putting the idea in his mind.
Craig realised he had been a bit too open about his plans. “Look, I reckon I could lose 4 people out of my team without much impact on the throughput, the ones that I reckon we could most easily lose with nice low payouts are these four.” He pointed to four names on the organisation chart. Persephone highlighted them and thanked Craig for his time. Craig left, thinking about how he could influence the redundancy decision in his favour. Being so completely self-absorbed, he had totally forgotten about the drunken romp with Sophia at the Christmas party so she didn’t even come into his consideration. Perhaps he could talk to the Head of Claims and suggest a real restructure – amalgamate the group from four claims departments to three, getting rid of his entire team in the process including himself. He could certainly get the support of the other claims managers who would then retain their jobs with no change to their team numbers and only a minimal increase in workload. Given the amount of time they seemed to spend doing team building off site exercises, impromptu office parties, and ‘early marks’ with the lot of them adjourning to the pub at lunchtime and not returning, they could probably take up the slack without even noticing. All fired up with his plan, he went home to plan how he was going to secure his other ‘retirement fund’.
Persephone went straight home. She was now a bit worried. Her big problem was that she had no idea how to deal with the ten ex-policy holders. She wanted to warn them, but that would be impossible without alerting Craig that something was amiss and exposing her involvement. She also had a resource shortage problem in that there were ten of them and only one of her. Isaac was a great hacker and friend, but she was not sure she wanted to involve him in the messier side of this job. As far as Isaac was concerned, the plan was to relieve Craig of his money and use it to set up Persephone in a lifestyle to which she wanted to become accustomed. She had no way of working out which person Craig would eliminate first, nor had she any understanding of how he was planning on doing it. This was all coming apart at the seams. This was not the start to her career as a corporate avenger that she had planned.
She needed a clear head to think this through. She poured herself a glass of chardonnay, tore off a large sheet of butchers paper from a pack she kept in her office, laid it out on the dining table and started to write. First thing, what did she know about Craig? She wrote a list under the heading ‘Craig Characteristics’: single; careful, narcissistic; patient; surfer; drug user; greedy. She thought the list a bit short, but she could always come back to it. Now she needed to think like Craig. If she could put herself in his shoes and pull together a plan for how to get rid of the remaining people who were risking his retirement, then she reckoned she had a reasonable chance of stopping him by implementing targeted countermeasures. Given the characteristics that she had listed, she reckoned that Craig would plan this carefully before he rushed into anything, but given his previous success he wouldn’t be having difficult conversations with himself about whether he could kill them, these conversations would be more likely about how quickly he could get this done and knock at least the first three off. She didn’t think he would hire anyone to do the job as that would have increased the risk, but it couldn’t be ruled out.
She put another two headings on the paper, “Craig’s Objectives” and “Craig’s Challenges”. Under the first heading she wrote: ensure all
ten policyholders actually dead; don’t get found out; keep the money; get out of Sydney. Under “challenges” she wrote: making sure deaths are ruled accidental and not linked together by police; time pressure – after leaving Élan, can’t intercept anyone; need to find the people while still have access to Élan systems.
This was a good start. She felt that the paramount need for Craig to tie up these loose ends soon would override his natural caution and he would rush this, improving the chances that he would make a mistake. She couldn’t rely on this so she set about making a plan to kill ten people, putting on the mantle of the narcissistic Craig.
Step 1:
Establish the current location of the ten people at risk. Isaac had already got the list of names and basic details, and Persephone was sure he could track them down and find out as much information as possible.
Step 2:
Rank them in order of risk that they or a close relative will do something like Alice and discover the lapsed insurance policy and contact the company. This has always been a risk, but it is far more serious once he leaves. Given the need to balance speed with safety and being methodical and careful, Craig would work out which of his victims was most likely to expose him and start with them. She needed to discuss with Isaac how they were going to rank them, as that would guide him in what sort of information to gather. Things that would matter would include: having a terminal illness; being under severe financial stress; undergoing a major life change such as divorce; birth of the first child; major promotion; moving or returning from overseas (as that is what triggered Brad’s incident). That was a big enough list for a start. Isaac might come up with more, but this was a lot of work for him to get hold of even this information for ten people whose last contact with the insurance company was up to four years ago.
Step 3:
Devise a way of killing them that would look like an accident. For a target group of ten individuals, he would need at least three different methods, with the ability to tailor each method to the individual. There were a few of fairly straightforward options: Drug overdose (illicit or prescription depending on target); anaphylactic reaction/poison; falling off a balcony drunk; and traffic accident. Disappearance was more problematic, as he would have to get rid of the body, but then again, this had worked with Brad, so it was maybe the fall-back option. Persephone made a note to get Isaac to find out the driving record and any evidence of drug use or mental illness for each person.
Step 4:
Draw up a schedule for the exercise. This would have the target and timings identified with details of how each specific killing would be undertaken, including preparation time. This needed to fit in with Craig’s work schedule, as he couldn’t be taking large amounts of time off to execute the plan.
The first thing that Persephone needed to draw up the plan was the information on the people on Craig’s list. She picked up the phone and called Isaac. “I’m heading over. Got anything to eat?”
By the time she got there, Isaac had ordered a Thai feast for them both. Persephone fell on it like a she hadn’t eaten in a week. After Isaac successfully fought her for the last fish cake, he sat back, patted his stomach and asked Persephone to tell him where she was up to, and how the meeting with Craig had gone. Persephone proceeded to tell him, and after a bit of an internal battle, also confessed that she thought she had made the situation worse and that now Craig was probably going to go after the remaining people whose policies he had used for his scheme.
“No shit, babe,” was the exasperated response from Isaac, “What on earth did you think you were getting into? This guy almost certainly killed Brad Jones, maybe his sister as well and you thought you could just waltz in with your charts and spreadsheets and make the world a better place? Of course you have moved his plans up and probably made it more likely that he will kill again. You need to stop feeling sorry for yourself and get onto stopping him.”
Persephone was miffed. That was exactly what she had been doing, she just wanted a bit of sympathy. Clearly she wasn’t going to get it from Isaac. She explained what she had been doing prior to coming over and unfolded the sheets of butchers paper, pushed the empty containers aside and put them on the table so Isaac could read them. She explained what she needed Isaac to do and asked him how long it would take.
“For all ten? Give me a week. I have to fit this in between some other jobs. Should be pretty straightforward. How about I get mobile phone numbers for all of them as well and then we can track them real-time when we need to?”
Persephone thought that was a brilliant idea and immediately agreed. They opened a bottle of rather nice cabernet sauvignon that Isaac had been given by a grateful client and snuggled up against each other to watch a murder mystery movie on the TV. They didn’t get any inspiration from the movie, but Isaac had a great time fantasising about what he was going to do to Persephone as she snored noisily for most of its second half.
Saturday came and Persephone woke up again in the spare bedroom at Isaac’s penthouse. She snuck out before Isaac noticed she was awake and went home to undertake the planning for her own objectives.
First and easiest thing for her to deal with – how was she going to get hold of the money that Craig had hidden, presumably overseas? Isaac had promised not only to do this, but also to show her how he did this sort of thing, so that she could take on at least part of this job herself. She would call Isaac later that morning and set up a time to go over and have her first lesson.
Next thing though was how to deal with Craig. Given the events of Friday she was now forced to confront the fact that she was dealing with a murderer, who was in all likelihood and unless she stopped him, was about to murder again. She had finally accepted that there was only one way to stop him, and she was now able to reconcile this with her conscience. The trick, a bit like Craig’s problem, was how to do it without getting caught. She thought she had the germ of an idea, but that could wait.
Timings were going to be critical. She didn’t want to set off alarms in Sydney by making Craig disappear too soon after he left the company, as he might still be in touch with workmates for a while after he left. She needed to wait a while after he moved away up the coast, but she also needed to strike before he moved the money so that she could still secure it for herself. Perhaps there was a way of setting some sort of alarm on his accounts so that if he tried to access it, she would find out before he had a chance to move the money. She would have to ask Isaac about that. She also needed to get the money before Craig had any chance to realise that something was wrong, as that might make him more alert and more difficult to kill.
There. She had said it, at least to herself. Now she had to make sure that nobody, not even Isaac, knew about this part of her plan.
After a quick check with Isaac, she now knew that she had a 48 hour time window between when Craig tried to move the money and when she would have her hands on it. She decided that she would wait a minimum of six months after the redundancy and then move on Craig and the money. If he accelerated this by accessing the money before her six-month deadline, she would have 48 hours to eliminate Craig. She needed a plan therefore that could be executed quickly without compromising her anonymity. She needed to do some research, making sure that there was no record of her searching for the methods that she would need to make sure that Craig disappeared from the face of the earth and was never found.
She had a lot of balls in the air. She needed to: get the redundancy sorted, both for Craig and the rest of the unfortunates; intercept Craig as he tried to eliminate the other ex-policyholders; work out how to eliminate Craig; get her hands on Craig’s money.
Getting the redundancy sorted was the easiest. She had already prepared the report and financial impact spreadsheet for Sophia, she just needed to finish interviewing managers at Élan and finalise it. The report already had Craig’s name included and she still had a little bit of work to do to find some more long-se
rving management types to include so that Craig’s name and rather large payment didn’t stand out too much. Luckily Élan seemed to have a policy of promoting arseholes to middle management where they were almost universally hated by their underlings and looked upon with distaste by the senior management who were frequently called upon to deal with their most recent act of bastardry and other general harassment that was the long standing hallmark of this organisation. She was well on track to have a first draft to Sophia by the end of the month, so that was pretty much ticked off.
Intercepting and stopping Craig’s next murder was more problematic. She needed to get the results of the research that Isaac was doing for her, pick the top three most likely targets and set up some sort of surveillance on these three. Ten was just too many to watch given her limited resources so she would just have to hope that her assessment of the priorities was the same as Craig. Her big issue here was what does ‘intercept’ actually mean? Obviously she needed to head off any attempt to eliminate these people, but what was she actually going to do if she spotted Craig making a move? She decided to go for a stroll and pick up a coffee at her local. Maybe the distraction would give her inspiration.
When she got to the coffee shop, Vinh made her a double espresso without being asked.
“Sit down and relax darling, Mai has prepared some authentic baklava just like the wogs do – try a piece and let me know what you think.”
Vinh shoved a piece of pastry dripping with honey and walnuts at Persephone as she took up a seat inside the café. As she was licking the honey from her sticky fingers, down through and wrist and nearly to her elbow where it had somehow ended up, she glanced at the television in the corner. One of the early morning shows was doing a blatant piece of advertorial for a holiday company. The impossibly skinny announcer was raving on and on in a piercing nasal twang about how “fabulous” the holiday was, and how for only $26,000, it was a “real bargain” and she was planning on going there next summer with her boyfriend Jayden.
Persephone suddenly froze. What a great idea! All she had to do was remove Craig’s potential victims from his reach for a while – that would at least give her time to set up the ‘permanent solution’ without Craig being suspicious that someone had spotted his crimes. She was going to wait and see if he moved on any of them, then they could ‘win’ a long overseas holiday to somewhere exotic that they had always wanted to visit, only catch being they had to leave pretty much straight away. This could work! Persephone jumped up from the table, gave an extremely surprised Vinh a big hug and ran back to her flat.
“Looks like the baklava was a hit, Mai.”
Persephone gave Isaac a call and asked him to find out the favourite holiday destination for each of the top three ‘targets’. Once he found out why, Isaac was quite impressed with the idea and also offered to do the research to find suitable holiday packages that Persephone could use as the prize. Persephone did a quick check of her finances, and worked out that she could afford to spend up to $30,000 which she reckoned would be a pretty compelling holiday for someone whose lapsed life insurance policy was for less than a million. Telling them that they had won this in a way that didn’t look like some sort of internet scam was fairly simple, given the information they had on these people. She would use one of the loyalty programs they were on and tell them they had been entered into a prize draw for this holiday as they had racked up a certain number of points that month or year or something, and that they had won. She would give them a phone number to call and claim the prize and she would then make all the arrangements. She would even have them take part in a promotional photo shoot with their winner’s certificate and luggage to make the whole thing more real for the winners. This was not without risk, but looking at the numbers of people who actually fall for scams where they have to give money to strangers, surely these people wouldn’t look this particular gift horse in the mouth? She would make sure that the holidays were with reputable and well-known travel companies to mainstream destinations so they wouldn’t worry about being kidnapped either.
She was now committed to the project and had $30,000 of skin in the game. She still needed to work out how to kill Craig and get away with it.