Memoirs of a Hitman

According to the National Meteorological Office, it was the coldest night for that month since records began. It was force ten winds with sleet and snow. My barometer registered minus 4c and even though I was inside my car, ice had developed on the inside of the windows and my breath resembled steam as I exhaled. It was a bitterly cold, pitch black noisy night and the time was just coming up to four in the morning. I was parked up in a secluded spot in an unlit, tree-lined suburban side road of Victorian two up-two down terrace houses. Just sitting, waiting.

I had been to this location quite a few times over the last four weeks at exactly the same time and parked up in the same place. My reason for being there was to watch and learn the routine of a certain unsavoury character called Victor Malevich. Victor had been a Serbian fighter in the Bosnian War and he had moved to the U.K. It seemed he had settled in well and had found regular employment at a local factory. Every morning like clockwork, he would leave his house at four on the dot in his Volkswagen camper van and drive the five miles to his work-place. There he would complete his shift by two in the afternoon; then return home. This he did four days a week and he seemed no different from thousands of other honest, hardworking people. Victor’s family consisted of a wife, two young children and two dogs, and from my observations, he was friendly with his neighbours. He would talk to them in a sociable manner after his return from work while taking his dogs for walks. To those around him he acted and presented himself as Mr. Average. I was given this contract six weeks earlier and it was no different from the ten contracts I had carried out previously. With all of them I would go through the same format: find out where they were located and watch their movements to get to know their routines. Once that was established and I was completely satisfied that I could carry out my assignment, I would go to work. My task for that morning was to kill Victor.

This job was a particularly easy one for me. First, I had to trace Victor and to do that, I used my contacts in the Civil Service. These contacts of