Free Nemesis - John Kane's revenge by Bill Carson

set fire to it, and this once lawless, vibrant, raucous venue had just been allowed to slowly slide into obscurity and die. Harold carefully picked his way over the debris and eventually found the locker room, and then beyond that was the door he was looking for. He opened it, and stepped into what was once the vice king’s office, which was where the most gruesome murders had occurred.
     
    What a terrible mess , Harold thought, as the precise, needle-thin beam from the penlight torch sliced through the darkness and illuminated the debris as he moved forward. At their recent meeting, Jimmy had told him that his brother had kept a secret ledger,   a small, leather bound pocketbook which contained all of the names and addresses of the people who owed Tony money. The book was kept in a secret crevasse that had been specially carved into the thick door frame by himself, and Jimmy was the only other person who knew of its whereabouts and existence. He had a set-up of a similar nature for his most private and important clients, as they quite rightly didn’t trust computers to house certain types of information.
     
    Harold slotted the penlight between his teeth and used the razor-sharp switchblade to find the almost invisible edge of the slot, which Jimmy had said was two thirds of the way up the doorframe. He slowly eased the thin blade into the joint of the soft decaying wood, and prised the wooden plug free. The torchlight searched inside the crevasse and illuminated the spine of the little leather bound book. He pulled it out, quickly flashed the beam over the pages and then, happy with what he had found, he snapped the book shut. He was back outside the dilapidated building within seconds, and vanished amidst the shadows of the cold, murky night.
     
    Half an hour later, Harold was back in the shabby single room that he’d rented in the rundown Victorian house on the outskirts of north London. He pulled the small book from his inside pocket and brushed the dust from the cover with a yellow cloth from his pocket, and then sat down and carefully studied the contents of the journal and at first was disappointed with the information it offered as most of the entries were quite old and were of little help. However, as he turned over the second from last page, a glimmer of hope was revealed as he spotted a name which had been double underlined in red biro, meaning a non-payer and was the only one in the entire book written in red ink. The address and some other details, like the amount and the guarantor’s name, were all there:
     
    Terry Jackson, 9 Park Road, Essex a good place to start and I wonder what Mr Jackson will have to say for himself, thought Harold, as he locked the door and placed the book under his pillow next to a fully loaded Colt 45. He then neatly folded his clothes over the back of a chair, switched out the small bedside lamp, and lay flat on his back and went to sleep.
     
    As Harold approached the wrought iron gate of 9 Park Road, the fading radiance of the winter sun had cast his lengthy shadow along the straight, wide, wet pavement. He stood outside the gate for a moment and studied the ‘For Sale’ sign which had been almost swallowed by the unkempt privet hedge. The stiff gate begrudgingly opened, and he tiptoed across the clumps of wet grass on the messy lawn and peeked in through the front window. The place had obviously been deserted for some time, judging by the black sooty residue courtesy of the motorway traffic that was deposited on the windowpane. He created a small circle with his gloved index finger in the grime and put his eye up close to it and peeked in. He continued his inspection of the property by trying the garage doors, which were locked, and just as he was about to break the lock with the small gemmy, a shrill unrefined voice of an elderly woman suddenly called out.
     
    “I say, can I help you?” she asked, as Harold slowly crooked his neck in the direction of the voice.
     
    His