Random Bullets Read online

  ‘Okay, don’t rub it in. We can’t all be Super Stud. I tell you what, if I had your sexual stamina, you wouldn’t see me for dust. I’d be making porn full-time,’ Divesh said. ‘Really miss being on set with you, even if I’m never filmed.’

  ‘Yeh, this is what’s really behind all your whinging at me. You miss the free bangs after I’ve done my bit with the girls.’ Bob laughed knowingly, tapping the side of his nose.

  Divesh laughed too, and jokingly punched Bob’s arm. ‘Can’t deny missing sharing the wild life with you, but I’m also thinking of a better lifestyle for you, Pauline and your boys.’

  ‘But at what price?’ said Bob.

  Divesh ignored his friend’s question. ‘I can carry on getting my end away anyhow at other shoots, because I’m still letting them use my taxi, but it’s not half as much fun when you’re not around. The girls are really missing you, too.’

  ‘Oh, how sweet of them,’ Bob replied sarcastically.

  ‘Let’s be honest, you’ve only got a few years of messing around on a porn set left in you. You might as well make the most of it while you can. Think of Pauline and your retirement. It won’t be that many years before you’re both wetting yourselves and playing bingo in some care home. You should stick a few quid away for a rainy day. Not everyone has your enviable sexual talents. The production company have been bugging me to see if I can get you to return to them … you were great for their business,’ Divesh said.

  ‘Soon you’ll be rattling out the tired old ‘sex sells’ phrase,’ said Bob. ‘I’ll be frank. I’m struggling with my decision to quit and really miss it all, but I can’t carry on being such a prick to Pauline. I admit I’m totally dissatisfied with endlessly driving around London. My temper’s beginning to flare up at work more than it ever did before I got into making porn. I’ve even started losing my rag with Pauline and the kids.’

  ‘Do everyone a favour and come back to the fold.’ Divesh hoped if he kept the pressure up, then it wouldn’t be long before Bob caved in.

  Bob could stand Divesh’s nagging no longer. His resolve snapped; he phoned the porn production company. They were delighted to welcome him back, because he’d been sorely missed, having made a name for himself in a comparatively short time. There was an endless stream of porn stars hammering on their doors for employment, but Bob was such a likeable, popular, salt of the earth chap, who just happened to also be able to fornicate for England with style.

  Bob still carried on with his regular taxi driving career, but after a year or two, his porn activities increased to such a degree, he considered himself to be more porn star than taxi driver. He was addicted to everything about it, yet loved his wife with all his heart, despite the passion having died off years before. Walking away from his marriage to devote his life completely to porn was never a consideration. He’d have been as devastated as Pauline if she’d ever discovered his secret. She would have certainly thrown him out of their comfortable Kilburn home if it ever came to light. He wouldn’t have blamed her in the slightest.

  Pauline was the opposite of all the girls who Bob worked with, but he would never love them like he loved his wife. Her self-loathing at the way her body looked made her keep her husband at arm’s length in their bedroom. She was as comfortable as his favourite old jumper, good-hearted, intelligent and, above all, she made him laugh. He knew she cherished him, in her own platonic way. He also admired her prodigious accountancy skills and self-sacrificing dedication to him and their surviving children. Despite being fully aware of all the wondrously positive benefits his marriage to Pauline brought to his world, Bob selfishly wanted to have his cake and eat it, too. Pauline just wanted cake.

  Edward – 13:47 15 th June 2015

  Down a road close to the Hammersmith Park, the first loud bang rending the air apart, heralds Sam’s instant death. He’s been shot at close range by his uncle, Edward Le Cornu. The young man’s brains now decorate the grimy London pavement. A couple of curious pigeons, which have flown skyward at the noise, are now bravely advancing to investigate.

  Seconds before, Sam’s sixty-two-year-old uncle had managed to sneak up unnoticed behind the heavy-set youth. Edward has shot a bullet into his spiked-up, strawberry-blond hair during Sam’s walk to the park to enjoy a lunchtime break in the sun. Edward has been lurking in wait for over an hour behind a bank of large wheelie bins in a narrow side road, attempting to blend in with the shadows.

  On the verge of aborting his mission, Edward’s heart lurched on finally seeing a door open and Sam heading alone down the steps of the management training building, where he’d been honing his management skills. Sam had reluctantly signed onto the course to help him, now he owned his recently deceased father’s seafood restaurant in Cornwall.

  Edward had been stalking his nephew for the past two days, trying to work out the best time and place to execute his plan. He’d always realised, despite his intense brain confusion, that he stood little chance of escaping unscathed after the hit.

  Although the street is now almost free of pedestrians, Sam’s murder is naturally not going unnoticed. A couple of young French holidaymakers have been approaching the tense crime scene, intent on spending a relaxing few hours in the nearby park. As soon as they hear the loud bang, they struggle to take in what’s happening. The man grabs his girlfriend’s arm, wrenches her around and screams, ‘Vite! Sauve qui peut!’ They disappear in confused terror back from whence they came, before Edward can raise his arm to fire at them.

  Bugger it! Let them go. There’ll be plenty more bastards to choose from. Edward has always hated the French for no reason he could articulate. On hearing them shouting wildly in French, he regrets not firing into their fleeing backs. ‘Those bloody snail guzzlers! I should have bumped them off while I had the chance,’ he shouts, as the traumatised couple run for their lives.

  Edward looks up at the towering, smart buildings flanking the narrow street. Inquisitive, anxious faces of office workers slide into view at most of the windows, intent on finding out what has caused the sharp explosion. In the building directly opposite where Sam’s lifeless, bloodied body lies with the top of its skull missing, the windows are quickly lined with more agitated, horrified faces. It’s the office of a rival advertising agency to the one where Claire and Pauline work. Within a few seconds, dozens of hands stretch out to grab telephones to summon the emergency services.

  More than half the workers lining the windows are filming the murder scene on their smart phones, intent on posting them on social media, it being the modern-day, knee-jerk reaction to every event. Most of the people who’ve filmed the body of Sam think better than to download it, but some keep it as a personal record of the closest they’ve come to a murder. They are sensitive enough to be mindful of the feelings of anyone who might’ve known the dead stranger not to post it in public arenas like Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.

  Two amateur filmmakers have no such sensitivities. They appal their online followers on their social media with their gory video clips of dead, horrifically damaged Sam. Contrary to what the two men have wished for, namely more followers, they lose hundreds of their more squeamish followers.

  Several of the more sensible, alert witnesses take accurate videos of the gunman. Their swift action will come in handy when the police eventually arrive to resolve the tense situation. It gives them a good idea of the weapon Edward is carrying, although, at this point, they are unaware he has a second loaded handgun in the pocket of his baggy beige shorts, although they know this could be a possibility.

  A bit about Edward

  Three days before the shooting, Edward had been doing a great deal of muttering to himself on the train from Manchester to London. ‘It doesn’t matter a hoot whether I escape afterwards or not. My fucking life’s fucking over, anyway,’ he jabbered, loud enough to be heard.

  His behaviour caused a middle-aged Indian woman in an expensive suit to frown and look at him accusingly. Edward met her disapproving stare, refusing to let
it go. She was finally forced to lower her eyes in submission.

  The woman turned to her husband and said in Urdu, hoping the strange man opposite them wouldn’t understand, ‘This is where care in the community seriously falls short.’

  Her husband whispered back in Urdu, ‘I agree. Too many mentally unstable folks are left to wander wherever they like to upset the rest of us. Better be quiet, just in case he’s an expert in Urdu.’

  ‘Doubt that very much. He doesn’t look like he knows what day it is, let alone understand what we’ve just said about him.’ She sniffed in disgust. ‘He might be playing it cool. Phew! He really stinks of stale sweat and mouldy clothes. What a pong! So glad we’re getting off this train soon.’ She took a peppermint out of her bag to try to mask the smell of the gibbering stranger. Eventually, they made their escape and were able to breathe marginally sweeter air; London can be fairly malodorous.

  On his first night in London, Edward had booked himself into a cheap, rundown bed and breakfast establishment near to where his nephew was attending a management course. He badly needed a shower, but the water pressure was pathetically weak, so he didn’t bother. On the second night, he booked into a hotel, knowing there was every chance he would no longer need his limited cash after wiping out his money-grubbing nephew. I’ll most likely soon be dead. He wallowed in the depths of a luxurious bubble bath, emerging smelling fresher than he’d smelled for months. His body’s sweeter odour sadly didn’t last long; he was soon sweating with nervous energy, knowing what lay ahead of him if all went to plan.

  It was essential for Sam not to spot him as he monitored the youth’s movements, trying to work out the best place and time to destroy him. If Sam notices me, then the game’s up. The penultimate meeting of nephew and uncle had been when Edward had stayed briefly at his half-brother, Charlie’s, house down in the depths of Cornwall. He’d visited them a few months after they’d discovered that their mother, Florence, had as good as stabbed Edward through the heart, by unexpectedly disinheriting him.

  To Edward’s fury, when his mother’s Will had been read out, it was clear his crazy mother had disinherited him. My name was never even mentioned. The bitch!

  However, she’d not chosen to disinherit Charlie, who’d always been her favourite son by far. In the Will, it was made clear that, in the future, Charlie was to eventually be heaped with even more bounteous gifts.

  Marcus was Edward’s stepfather and Charlie’s biological father. On Marcus’s death, Florence had decreed that only Charlie should inherit the sprawling family home set in its own woods in one of the most popular parts of Jersey. Naturally, Marcus would not be cruelly thrown out onto the street now that his wife was dead, even though he was wealthy enough in his own right to have afforded his own comfortable pile. The property needed modernisation, but because of its enviable position overlooking a picturesque bay, and the fact it sat in a sprawling plot of land, the property was worth at least a couple of million pounds. It could even be demolished and a hotel constructed on the site, making the property even more valuable. Space has always been at a premium on the small island, and its sandy shores are a haven for many millionaires, pricing the ordinary Jersey-born natives out of the house-buying market.

  Like lemmings, both Edward and Charlie had left the beautiful, yet overstuffed, island in their late teens to seek further education and to find their fortunes in England, as do so many of the island’s youth.

  When Marcus died, the enviable spread in Jersey would become the property of Charlie, with Edward never to be allowed a look-in. Any children who childless Edward might have sired in the future would also have been automatically disinherited by their vicious grandmother. Charlie’s children and grandchildren would prosper, whereas Edward and any of his future heirs would all remain comparative paupers. Charlie had been given a hand up in the world, with all his financial worries immediately ended.

  By stark contrast, Edward and any of his future heirs had been delivered a powerful kick in the genitals. Edward had no intention of producing offspring. However, the injustice of what had been inflicted on the future prospects of his imaginary unborn child by Florence’s dead hand eventually, drop by poisonous drop, drove Edward further out of his already challenged mind; a potent cocktail of hurt, envy, injustice, and anger will eventually do that to a person.

  The losing hand dealt to him by his mother became too much for Edward to endure. ‘It’s the principle of the thing,’ was a phrase often repeated when anyone was brave enough to listen to his life story, when he’d detail the life of purgatory his mother had sentenced him to.

  ‘I’m the disowned, the dispossessed,’ he’d rant. His reluctant audience usually looked at him with concerned pity, as his eyes sparked with anger. They could usually tell he was becoming unhinged, and would opt to give him a wide berth in future. Florence’s cruel actions gnawed away at his innards, no matter how hard he tried to push the hurt from his mind. ‘It can never be rectified, because my mother’s now dead. How can I now argue with her to convince her of the enormity of her actions on my life?’ he’d ask, his guts churning with bitterness.

  ‘You should put it all behind you and move on. You can’t let it ruin your life. Don’t forget, the best revenge on someone is to be happy,’ were all phrases often trotted out by caring, positive-thinking folk who couldn’t stand to see Edward’s pain.

  ‘Easier said than done,’ he’d say.

  Even if she’d remained alive, he knew his mother had been such a heartless sadist, where he was concerned, that she could never have been persuaded to bequeath him his rightful dues. Florence had planned to cause trouble in death as effectively as she’d always revelled in causing mischief while alive.

  Her sadistic streak was an integral part of her complex, undiagnosed mental condition, a psychosis which had transferred to her eldest son, Edward. It had lain mostly dormant inside his brain, popping out increasingly over the years. The mental illness had erupted full force after he was disinherited and disowned in his late forties.

  Although Edward’s disinheritance was unexpected by everyone, especially Edward, it was the sort of irrational, hurtful behaviour his mother had displayed towards him, and towards his father, Gregory. Edward’s father had realised his young wife, Florence, was emotionally unstable early on in their marriage. She’d wrongly accused him in their bedroom of cheating with one of her best, long-suffering, female friends, all the while brutally attacking his head and shoulders with a heavy, ornate hairbrush.

  ‘Ouch! Lay off me, you mad mare! I was only talking to Mags about her holiday in Sardinia. I’ve never cheated on you in my life.’ Gregory had tried to grasp his wife’s wrists as the blows rained down on his upper body.

  ‘A likely bloody story! I’ve seen the way you look at her,’ Florence had screamed, her green eyes flashing dangerously. Gregory could see no love in those eyes, only a ferocious, burning hatred, and something else which he could only identify as insanity.

  ‘Calm down, woman. You’re literally foaming at the mouth.’ At last, Gregory had managed to take the brush away from her. He’d looked at his beautiful blonde wife as though she were a stranger, something he did increasingly as her paranoid fancies worsened over their few unhappy years of marriage.

  As her jealous, unfounded rants and physical attacks escalated, her husband had sought solace from her vicious tongue-lashings and physical assaults in the welcoming arms of a local sympathetic barmaid. Megan was a buxom wench who opened her legs to many of the misunderstood husbands in the locality. His adultery only came to light after Gregory picked up a nasty dose of Chlamydia from Megan, which he unfortunately spread to his wife, who naturally became incandescent with rage.

  His doctor’s examination of his genitalia during Gregory’s STD appointment unearthed a large lump on his patient’s testicles; it proved to be an advanced case of virulent testicular cancer. Watching his father disintegrating daily had cruelly affected Edward. Although he’d only turned five at the time
of his father’s death, he never forgot the image of that once-strong, handsome man he loved so much, lying in bed with pale, paper-thin skin, lack-lustre eyes, his thick, black hair gone, annihilated by the chemotherapy treatment.

  Still livid with her husband for cheating on her, Florence had been put in an awkward position now he was ill. She’d wanted to throw him out of the house when his affair with the barmaid had been unearthed, but she would’ve looked ruthless in the eyes of society if she’d cast a dying man out of the house. She made his last months on earth hellish, showing no warmth, and doing the bare minimum to keep him alive.

  Although only a small child, Edward would spend far more time than Florence ever chose to spend in his father’s airless bedroom. Gregory had reclined, suffering horribly, in his sweat-soaked bed. Edward had often spent the night cuddled up in his father’s double bed after Florence had taken over the guestroom as soon as Gregory’s cheating had been exposed.

  Edward had only been nine when Florence had thrown his father’s adultery in Edward’s face during one of their many rows. Her son was looking increasingly similar to her now deceased husband, a fact that riled Florence greatly, not that her son could do anything about the resemblance. Edward had the full mouth, thick, dark, curly hair, large brown eyes and hooked nose of his father. His lanky body was as skinny as Gregory’s had been.

  With almost indecent haste after her husband’s death, the new widow had seduced and married another wealthy man, called Marcus. He’d been an enemy of Gregory’s from their school days on the island. The newlyweds had swiftly procreated, and Charlie was soon born for Florence to dote on and worship. Five-year-old Edward was mostly ignored, side-lined for being a product and reminder of Florence’s past, unhappy marriage that had ended so grimly.

  Marcus was corpulent, due to his genes, a situation made worse by indulging in too many expensive restaurant meals with clients. The extra food treats which Florence foisted upon Charlie did her precious son no favours. Charlie soon became a chubby, docile boy who was bullied at school because of his size. Less favoured Edward didn’t experience that problem, although had many other, far more damaging problems foisted upon him, courtesy of his neglectful, spiteful mother and hostile stepfather.