‘Remain Nameless’ 
LYNDA LA PLANTE

CRIME: Professional killer 
PLACE: London 
YEAR: The present

BRIEFING: The hired killer has been a hit man for all kinds of crime and outlawed organisations, from the Mafia to Palestinian terrorists-not forgetting the occasional unscrupulous individual with the necessary money to pay for his deadly talents. Some of these men have ultimately been caught and brought to justice, but a few have reaped the rewards of their ‘art’ and disappeared without trace. A well-documented instance is that of the bizarre Robinson Hilt case in Houston, Texas in 1971, when the mysterious death of a wealthy doctor’s wife led to accusations against her husband and then his death at the hands of a professional gunman before he could be brought to trial. Four years later, an international killer known as Carlos narrowly escaped capture when his hiding place in London was raided by Scotland Yard and a ‘hit list’ was discovered, full of the names of famous people he was after, including Lord Sainsbury, Yehudi Menuhin and Bernard Delfont. The assassin for hire has also been a popular figure in crime fiction: most memorably Arthur Raven in Graham Greene’s ‘A Gun For Sale’ (1936) and the eponymous anti-hero of ‘The Day of the Jackal’ by Frederick Forsyth (1971).

AUTHOR: Lynda La Plante (b. 1946), formerly an actress who worked in cabaret, theatre, films and television before turning to writing, is now one of the most successful creators of crime series for British television. The three Granada series of ‘Prime Suspect’, starring Helen Mirren as Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison-‘the most important female character television has brought us’, according to one review-have attracted vast audiences and the same kind of international acclaim that greeted her earlier productions, ‘Widows’, ‘Civvies’ and ‘Framed’. Her novels, including ‘The Legacy’, ‘Bella Mafia’ and ‘Entwined’, with their strong elements of crime and mystery, have also been bestsellers. Lynda La Plante’s great talent is to get inside the heads of her characters-their problems, their fears and their motivations. This is superbly in evidence in ‘Remain Nameless’, a brutal and yet poignant story about a hired killer and his fate. It is, I think, a salutary and very appropriate tale with which to end a group of stories about crime.

THE STORY:

He had often wondered what it would be like, dying, perhaps because he had killed so many. He didn’t expect it would be so painless. He knew he had been carried and he heard a female voice, hysterically, repeatedly asking: ‘Is he dead?’ There had also been a man’s lower tone and he had detected fear in his voice. ‘Control won’t like this.’
Now the man was searching through his clothes, swearing as he opened the sticky, blood-soaked wallet. ‘Nothing, no driving licence, nothing with the ugly bastard’s name on it... ah! What’s this?’
A small black-and-white photograph of a little boy, dark haired, wearing a hand-knitted pullover and baggy grey shorts, his socks wrinkled at his ankles. He looked as if he was weeping. In childish writing was written the single word ‘Me’.
‘We still don’t know who the hell he is.’ She was calmer now and he felt her thin fingers pushing at the pulse in his neck. He opened his mouth, trying to speak, and she started to scream. Blood trickled from his mouth, dripped from his thick, broken nose; he only wanted to tell her his name.
He was travelling now, he could feel the movement of the vehicle, then bliss as the oxygen mask was placed over his face. It was strange, his body felt warm on the outside but cold on the inside.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Can you hear me?’
‘Who sent you?’
He felt as if he were flying, unaware they were wheeling him on a stretcher towards the operating room. The sounds, the corridors, the disembodied voices, the strange overhead lights-was he entering heaven? Was this the journey? And the eerie noise he couldn’t make out, was it the scissors as they cut away his blood-soaked clothes?

The massive man’s body was a map of scars, with two deep purple sockets from bullets. He was at least six feet seven inches tall and weighed around eighteen stone, but he was muscular, had possibly at one time been a boxer-it was obvious that he was a fighter. The new, fresh, gaping wounds, five in all, were centred around his heart.
A nurse leaned over him and he opened his eyes. They were deep blue, fringed with thick black lashes; there was no pain or fear in them. Beautiful, innocent eyes. ‘What’s your name?’ she said softly.
She leaned closer. He tried to speak, his mouth opened and shut like a fish. He growled and gritted his teeth in a final effort to speak, but she was afraid, he frightened her. He had made frightening people his business, his art. He trusted no one, he had no one, and now fear was the last thing he had on his mind. All he wanted was for someone to know his name, the name his real mother had given him, the one he had before they sent him to the home. The one he had before his life turned bad.
There was no softness any more, no peace, no heavenly journey. He died in a scream of impotent agony because he could not say his name, it hurt too much. It was excruciating to remember what little time he’d had in his life that had been happy.
‘It looks like he’s crying.’
‘What?’
‘The little boy in the photograph,’ she said, about to pass it over. Then her fingers felt the deep indentations left by the pen where the stranger had written the single word ‘Me’.
‘Funny why he didn’t write his name,’ she said.