The Fall of Winter Read online

  Bedlam Boy 3

  The Fall Of Winter

  Ian W. Sainsbury

  Copyright © 2020 by Ian W. Sainsbury

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  1. Part One

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  7. Part Two

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Author’s Note

  Books by Ian W. Sainsbury

  1

  Part One

  The endgame. Twenty years after Winter gave the order to kill Tom's family, Bedlam Boy's task was nearly complete. One name remained.

  The Boy ran away from the main road and into a side street planted with mature plane trees. He dropped his high-vis vest into a wheelie bin and walked along the quiet street.

  The third house worked. A wide driveway, set back from the road, five cars. All new, all expensive, all pointlessly fast considering they spent most of their time inching round the North Circular.

  Lights inside the house, loud music playing, and peals of drunken laughter suggested the occupants would be oblivious to his approach. A motion-sensitive security light flooded the driveway when he jogged up to the garage door, but the flashing fairy lights hanging on the windows meant no one noticed.

  Six cigarette butts on the paving by the front door meant two or three smokers popping out at intervals during the evening. One butt still smouldered. Not long since the last smoke break. The door was on the latch.

  The Boy listened for ten seconds, during which no one entered the hallway. He pushed open the door. Inside, it was enough to make him believe in Father Christmas. Or in fate. On a small table just inside the door, next to a vintage Bakelite telephone, a BMW key.

  He grinned.

  A 540 M-class. Bedlam Boy's interest in cars was practical. He knew this model was fast, and he needed fast, because Winter had a decent start on him.

  He slid behind the wheel, started it up, leaving the lights off as he crept down the drive and into the road, putting them on when he reached the junction. Two minutes later, he pulled into a lay-by and took the GPS device out of his rucksack, plugging it into the cigarette lighter. Winter's car showed up as a red dot on the A1, thirty miles away, heading north. Winter owned a house just outside Manchester, and his organisation had representatives in most major cities. He could go to ground in any of them while he planned his next move.

  Bedlam Boy didn't intend to allow him that luxury. It was Christmas Day. Empty roads and a car with 340bhp. He pushed his right foot down hard. The engine sang along with him and the car's electronic brain prevented a skid as the six-cylinders grunted, sending two tons skittering across the tarmac.

  The unnatural quiet of the motorway on Christmas night made a surreal contrast with the violence of the previous hour. Winter fought against the calming influence of the Mercedes' hushed leather interior.

  He didn't want to be calm. Winter wanted fury and outrage to permeate his entire being. He wanted to be soaked in righteous rage, ready to channel it into an orgy of blood and horror, his enemy's head impaled on a spike as a warning to anyone considering insurrection.

  The problem was he'd outgrown that brand of crazed anger. It was useful in the early years, when personally hacking a rival's family into pieces served a purpose. In those days, Robert Winter was unknown. With no family name to trade off, and few resources, he wasn't the only would-be crime boss jostling for position in London. Reputation ruled everything, so he worked hard to build his.

  Back then, he lived by a principle he'd read in an interview with a billionaire entrepreneur: the opposite of success wasn't failure, but complacency. Winter found similar quotes in interviews, books, and recordings. Others named the opposite of success as inaction, or coasting. Winter's least favourite: decay, although the wrongheadedness of the idea amused him. An unsuccessful crime organisation didn't decay, it was destroyed, torn apart, its leaders killed.

  It happened to Irene Lewis. She didn't see Winter coming, because she took her eye off the ball. She and her husband controlled London's human-trafficking industry from their Victorian house in Richmond, cheek-by-jowl with the bankers, judges, and CEOs whose children attended the same private schools as young Tom. Hidden in plain sight, while Irene deterred potential rivals by disembowelling them.

  Irene's attention turned to improving the supply chain, developing a fresh stream of income through an innovative programme of high-class sex trafficking. She trained her protégé—Rhoda—to identify unhappy, disenfranchised runaways to be groomed and sold at auction. Irene Lewis built a profitable business. She didn't deal drugs, she wasn't involved in fraud, robbery, or extortion. Other crime bosses left her alone, as the few who challenged her position, or impinged on any aspect of her business, ended up in abandoned warehouses, cold, stiff, their hands often frozen trying to stuff glistening ropes of internal organs back into their bodies.

  Her mistake had been slowing down when she ran out of people to disembowel.

  No one dared touch Irene Lewis. Which was why Winter killed her. His hostile takeover of the Lewis business fast-tracked him to the top. Not only did he control the London slave trade, he established himself as the most dangerous man in the city.

  It took over a year of planning. Rhoda was the key. She still had family in Serbia and sent money home to her mother every month. Threatening the family might have provided the leverage, but at the risk of Rhoda going to her boss for help. If that happened, Winter was dead. He was an upstart compared to Irene Lewis. Instead, he looked for psychological leverage, and applied pressure when he found the weak point: Tom Lewis. Rhoda treated the boy like he was her own son. Winter promised her Tom would never follow in his mother's footsteps. It wasn't a lie.

  When the Lewis family had been removed, he used Rhoda to continue what Irene started. He showed Rhoda recent photographs of her mother and sister, explaining what would happen should she ever betray him the way she had her previous boss.

  Nothing in the following twenty years came close to giving him the satisfaction of that night in Richmond.

  Winter gripped the wheel, shaking his head. Marty Nicholson. One incompetent coward led to this. One bad shot by a would-be gangster.

  The anger felt good, but it wasn't enough. Winter was tired. He'd decided to step away, his subconscious already detaching itself from the mindset and routines of a boss. But not now. Not when one man came into his home, his castle, and destroyed everything. And not when that man had Rhoda's email confession, and a recording of Winter ordering someone's murder.

  He called Strickland's number. It rang and rang. He tried it twice more. Neither of them used voicemail. Strickland was probably dead. Winter took a few minutes to absorb this. He never thought John Strickland would die in his sleep, but he'd always pictured him falling in battle while fighting a dozen men. Not like this. One on one. Where did Tom Lewis learn the skills to best a man like Strickland?

  Winter would strike back from Manchester. He'd have to lie to his subordinates. If they suspected Tom Lewis achieved this alone, Winter was finished.

  With Strickland dead, Winter controlled the narrative. What happened in Elstree tonight became whatever he said happened. His priority: find Lewis and kill him. Forget the recording. If Winter d
isappeared, it wouldn't matter. Kill Lewis, then live out the rest of his life in paradise, funded by the blackmailed bidders from his auctions. Whichever way you looked at it, Winter remained in control.

  How to find Tom Lewis? He had his description, and he knew the stuttering idiot act for just that - a fabrication. Winter needed everyone on the street, every set of eyes. The crazy bastard wouldn't last a day. He'd find him.

  He called Manchester. The phone rang three times. "Sir?"

  "I'm coming up, Jürgen. Set up a conference call for one a.m."

  "Yes, sir."

  Good. Success demanded action.

  He set the cruise control at sixty-eight miles an hour. No point risking getting pulled over by whichever miserable bastard spent Christmas on traffic patrol. He checked his mirror. Some idiot making the most of the empty motorway was closing fast, doing well over a ton.

  Winter pulled into the left-hand lane and waited for the faster car to overtake. As it pulled alongside, its engine note dropped, and the vehicle slowed. With a sick sensation of inevitability, Winter looked across, unsurprised to see the bald head turned towards him, the dark green eyes fixed on his. Lewis's mouth moved, his body swayed. He was singing.

  Winter stamped on the brakes a fraction of a second too late. Lewis spun the steering wheel, and the BMW slewed across the carriageway, clipping the front of the Mercedes with sufficient force to send it into the hard shoulder, smacking into the barrier. The Mercedes was already slowing, and the sideways swipe scrubbed off another twenty miles per hour, but the airbag exploded with enough force to stun him as the car hit the barrier and jerked to a halt.

  When he opened his eyes, Winter patted his jacket pocket. He still had the Glock. Winter reached for the seat belt release, then stopped. His brain didn't process its relevance fast enough, but he recognised the sound. A car, reversing. It stopped. When the sound of the engine came again, it was accelerating. Louder. Closer.

  "Shit!" Gravity shoved Winter back in his seat as the BMW hit the Mercedes a second time. There was a metal barrier on the hard shoulder along this stretch of the motorway where it followed a line of hills, a steep decline through trees on the far side. The second impact sent Winter's vehicle through the barrier. Suspension rods snapped and springs shrieked as it bounced forward, spinning anticlockwise when the passenger side smashed against something solid.

  An oak tree stopped the car's progress and the right side of Winter's head smacked against the glass, hard enough to disorientate him. He forgot where he was. His head throbbed, and he dreamed he wore a crown, a solid silver and gold monstrosity with rubies and diamonds flashing from its ornate peaks. He didn't want it, didn't want to be king anymore.

  Strong arms pulled him to one side, big hands slid under his armpits and pulled him away. The crown rolled off, but his head hurt. His feet dragged along an uneven surface, bouncing off stones and tree roots. Despite the discomfort, and his sore head, he slept again. Penny tried to tell him something important, but the sound was muted. She slapped him across the face, and he flushed with anger. He was still the king. No one should touch him. She slapped him again. He heard her now, her voice muffled and wrong. He couldn't make out any words. Penny had a mark on her forehead, like a Hindu. What do they call it? A Tilaka. He looked closer at the mark. It was a deep red. Not a mark at all, he realised, but a hole. Penny came closer, and the hole got bigger, stretching as she bent over him. He saw her brain, glistening with blood, then the hole opened like a cave mouth and he was falling inside…

  The slap came again, and Penny vanished.

  Winter opened his eyes. He was propped against a tree, staring at his feet. He moved both arms, flexed his fingers, then did the same with his legs and toes. Pain, but he didn't think anything was broken. He brought his hand up to his face next and carefully placed his fingertips on the right side of his skull. Blood, warm and matted. He pressed. The pain made him wince, but the bone below was solid. He'd have a headache for a while, but he'd live. Then he remembered who had dragged him out of the car and slapped him awake. He'd live, certainly. Just not for very long.

  Looking up from his shoes—which caused a hot lance of agony across his right eye and down into his jaw—Winter saw bare feet, tracksuit bottoms, a sweatshirt. Big hands, skin broken on knuckles. A Glock in the right hand. Winter patted his empty pocket, confirming it was his. A muscled neck on wide shoulders. The moonlight put Tom Lewis's dark green eyes in shadow under his brows, but Winter knew they were staring down at him. The raised scarring on his head was extensive, intricate, a braille transcription of what had happened twenty years ago. Winter didn't need to read it to know. Or to work out what came next. He wasn't afraid. At least, he didn't think so. He was cold, uncomfortable, and he felt his age. Die here, or lying in the sun on a Caribbean island. Were they really so different?

  "Hello, Tom. Haven't you turned out to be full of surprises?"

  Chapter Two

  Bedlam Boy stared down at Winter. Everything led to this moment. From the first awareness of his own separate existence, a new creation, unique, intelligent, and deadly, everything brought him here. Only Winter remained of those who murdered Tom Lewis's family. Tom might never have woken up again, but a pool of darkness grew inside him as he slept, and in that pool the Boy was born.

  The man on the forest floor, the right side of his face streaked with blood, was no threat. Not like the Executioner. Strickland's skills were formidable and practical. Winter was something else. A leader. A thinker, a planner. The man who ordered the Executioner to pull the trigger. Rational, but not reasonable. Colder than his surname. He looked in decent condition for a man his age. If not already in his sixties, they couldn't be more than a year or two away. Bedlam Boy could break him over his knee like rotten wood. Should he kill him that way? As with Strickland, he had no interest in torture, no desire that Winter should suffer a long, drawn-out death. The man just needed to die. Nothing would ever be right while he lived. Justice. Simple justice.

  The Boy guessed the injured man had been unconscious for no more than a minute. Mild concussion. Nothing serious. He wanted Winter to see him, really see him, before the end.

  The Boy had followed the Mercedes through the hole in the barrier, jumping out of his own vehicle as it rolled down into the trees. A pair of headlights rounded the long curve of the carriageway while he stared at the wreckage, but he dodged out of sight. Best-case scenario, he had all night. Worst case, a witness had called 999, and he had ten minutes. Best get on. He lifted the Glock, pointing the muzzle at the top of Winter's nose. Right between the eyes, partner. T-box, like he'd told the Forger. Bam.

  Winter wanted to talk. "You remind me of her."

  The Boy thought of a movie cliché. Two ways this could go. One: the bad guy stalled for time while help arrived. Good guys did the same. Semi-catatonic Tom had watched it play out a hundred times. Two: the bad guy revealed something momentous to the good guy. This rarely ended well for either of them. The good guy, instead of delivering the villain to the authorities, was driven crazy by the last-minute revelation and killed the bad guy on the spot. Or, worse, he spared him, let him go.

  Bedlam Boy had no intention of handing him over to the police, so option two was a really poor choice for Winter. What was he going to do - say something to hurt his feelings? The Boy had no feelings. Revenge was the black flame at the heart of his existence. It smouldered for years, but never went out, always ready to flare up into a dark conflagration.

  "Your mother, Tom. You have her eyes. But it's more than that. You're good at this, Tom. Killing, I mean. You find joy in it. It's only business for me, no more. But your mum, she enjoyed killing. I think she got off on it."

  The Boy should pull the trigger now. Why was Winter resorting to this nonsense, goading him? Pointless.

  Winter nodded as if hearing his thoughts. "Don't let me stop you, Tom. I'm ready to die. I just wonder if anyone ever told you the truth. Rhoda said you never knew. That's why she did what she d
id. She loved you like her own."

  Enough. Time to put things right. Bedlam Boy aimed the Glock. His finger tightened on the trigger and stopped.

  He hummed, tunelessly.

  No.

  He willed strength into his hands. Bedlam Boy's own body conspired against him.

  Winter carried on talking. The Boy concentrated on letting the darkness flow through him, but, somehow, Tom was there. Not awake exactly, but stirring. The Boy held him back, but he couldn't pull the trigger. Not yet.

  "Rhoda said your mother planned to bring you into the family business. Irene saw your potential, and she wanted you to take over when you were old enough. I watched her work once. I was working for Grant Beesley. Before your time. He used to run guns. He got greedy, stiffed Irene on a deal, and she came calling.

  "The writing was on the wall for Beesley. When an armed crew raided his warehouse, I made sure to be there. I knew it would be Irene. Partly because my instincts are good. Mostly because I tipped her off. I watched from behind a crate on the mezzanine.

  "She did it herself once they tied Beesley to a chair. Me, I delegate most wet work to others. Your mum, though, she was hands-on. I watched her slice Beesley with a butcher's knife. She didn't want information, she wanted him to bleed and scream. After ten minutes, she slid the blade deep, both hands on the handle to saw across his belly. She stuck her hand in and showed Beesley his own innards. Then she left him to die.

  "You are your mother's son, Tom. You're smart, resourceful. Best of all, you have no conscience, nothing to hold you back. The apple didn't fall far from the tree.