The Perfect Crime (2015) by Roger Forsdyke

Author:Roger Forsdyke [Forsdyke, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Mystery, Murder & Mayhem, Hard-Boiled, Serial Killers, Thriller & Suspense, Mystery; Thriller & Suspense
Amazon: B014HHBM12
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2015-08-24T12:00:00+00:00

FORTY FIVE

The Black Panther was in a pensive mood. It seemed to him that the price was always too high. Someone or something always conspired to thwart him; the bar was continually being raised. It had always been the same. When in business – legitimate business – he was happy to complete a job, but then it would be spoiled by people not wanting to pay the full amount, or not even paying at all. If he needed £500 for some work, or project, he would only be able to raise £300. When he applied for a mortgage, he was asked for £900 deposit. There was only £700 in his bank account.

The same pattern extended to his criminal exploits. With little effort or outlay, he could carry out many house burglaries during the course of a week, but would make relatively little profit. Graduating up to breaking into sub post offices proved a mixed blessing. Returns were potentially higher, but the cost in terms of investment in resources, time for reconnaissance, travelling time and the inherent danger in carrying firearms – both to him physically and the possibility of being caught with them, was exponentially greater. Also, paradoxically the more crime he committed, the less he seemed to be making. He had netted less than £2,000 in cash from the last four raids, three of which involved him in having to shoot someone. There were no moral qualms here. He rationalised to himself, had they not come at him, he would not have been forced to shoot. They attacked, he defended himself. The matter was simple, but it formed part of the price and the ever increasing risk to his wellbeing and career prospects.

The revelation he experienced, standing in front of the safe, having accidentally entered a sub post office thinking it was a private house, was about to be repeated, albeit in a somewhat different manner. He read ‘Murder in the Fourth Estate’ by journalists Peter Deeley and Christopher Walker. In explicit detail, the book told how, in 1969, brothers Arthur and Nizamodeen Hosein kidnapped Muriel McKay, wife of the then chief executive of the News of the World, in the mistaken belief that she was Rupert Murdoch’s wife, Anna. It was bungled, from the very start, by all concerned. The Hosein brothers tried to extort £1 million from Rupert Murdoch for someone else’s wife. The police and the papers quarrelled about publicity and both factions continually lied and tried to gain advantage over the other. The investigation turned out to be such a dog’s dinner that Mrs McKay was never seen again and, more to the point, to the Panther’s way of thinking, the ransom was never paid. There was a theory that her body had been dismembered and fed to pigs on the brothers’ farm in Stocking Pelham in Hertfordshire, but whatever the truth of the matter, no trace of her was ever found. The Panther read the book avidly, more than once and decided that he could use it as a form of instruction manual for his next big job.

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