The Star Witness

by Andy Hamilton

  “Am I being transferred?”

  Henderson lets out a grim chuckle.

  “Tell you what, Carver, I’ll cut you a deal,” says Bluntstone casually over his shoulder. “You don’t ask any more questions and in return I don’t come back there and kick your goolies into fine goolie-dust, how’s that?”

  I fall quiet, but as we trundle out of the speed-bumped avenues into the black emptiness of the country roads, my fear ratchets up another few notches.

  I decide to ask again, very, very politely.

  “Listen, Carver, we can’t answer your questions, ’cos we don’t know, all right? Now shut up.”

  Henderson sounds sincere, but is that believable?

  “You’ve no idea?”

  “I think someone wants to have a chat with you,” says Bluntstone, mischievously.

  A chat? I start spinning through some more sinister possibilities. Are they taking me to some woods to administer a beating? Why? They could have given me a clandestine beating back at the prison. Could it be Dougie? Are they in cahoots with Dougie? Has Dougie arranged for me to be whisked away to some secret location where some of his underworld mates can dispatch me and bury my body? Could that be it?

  “Is this officially sanctioned by the governor?”

  “You’ll find out,” Bluntstone answers, enjoying his power.

  For what seems like hours, we bounce and rattle through the night and, sitting in the gloom, the notion that I will be met by Dougie’s associates takes a grip on my racing thoughts.

  We come to a halt.

  I feel some sick in my mouth. Am I going to vomit? The back doors fly open and it is with some relief that I see a dozen or so policemen in high-vis jackets. Some have guns. A couple of them help me out of the back of the van. One of them, older, steps forward.

  “Sorry to drag you out like this, Mr Carver, but we’ve hit a bit of a dead end.”

  “Sorry?” I am momentarily dazzled by the headlights of an arriving police car.

  “Has nobody explained the situation to you?”

  “No.”

  He looks at the two prison officers.

  “We were just told to bring him here.”

  The senior policeman shakes his head.

  “So sorry, Mr Carver. Communications ‘air-gap’.”

  My eyes are starting to adjust now. We appear to be on the edge of a dark-filled wood and a cordon of about six police cars is forming a kind of barrier. Beyond the cars, there seems to be a field, sloping slightly uphill, and from somewhere out in the middle of that field I can hear the indistinct sound of a shouting voice.

  “He’s said he’ll only talk to you.”

  The voice is fast and manic, pitched high with adrenalin. It takes a moment for me to realise.

  It is Derek’s voice.

  “He seems very upset and he’s got a gun. His only demand, so far, is that he speaks with you.”

  I start to laugh, without wanting to, and the senior policeman looks bewildered.

  “Says you’re a friend of his.”

  “No, that’s not true,” I reply, trying to stifle the nervous laughter, “in fact, I hate his guts.”

  “Oh…oh, I see…um…well, the thing is…we’ve got three armed response boys here obviously…y’know, as a last resort, but ideally I don’t want to have to go down that road…that’ll probably mean another enquiry…but if someone like yourself could just talk him down then…my colleague, Cliff Barham, has been conducting the negotiation so far…he’s out there with him now – but Cliff’s view was that you’d have a better chance of calming him down, given that he’s asked for you.”

  I take a few moments to try and take in the absurdity of the situation.

  “Obviously, Mr Carver, it’s entirely your choice.”

  “This man is not my responsibility.”

  “I appreciate that, Mr Carver, I’m asking you as a citizen.”

  A citizen? When did I become a citizen?

  “It is your decision,” he continues, “and I appreciate your misgivings, I really do, but we would hide a microphone on you. And if we deem you to be in danger then a marksman will take him down.”

  “Take him down? What…? Shoot him in the kneecaps, that sort of…”

  “No, Mr Carver, that only happens in the movies. If someone’s in danger, we always shoot to kill.”

  In the distance, I hear Derek yelling something about the Illuminati. More nervous laughter from me. How did I end up here? In a field, in the middle of the night, being guided towards a shouting, gun-waving wanker.

  “I know we’re asking a lot, Mr Carver.” He studies my face intently, “But it’s our best hope of a satisfactory outcome.” He pauses, still waiting for me. “And it would probably play very well, um…with the parole board.”

  His idea of an incentive makes me giggle. “Right.”

  Behind us, an owl screeches and makes one of the marksmen jump.

  “Give me one good reason why I should say yes.”

  He considers for a few beats. “To stop anyone getting hurt.”

  21

  The Siege

  I have often wondered why I said yes. It’s a decision I’ll never fully understand, but I think it took shape somewhere in the zone between me being myself and me observing myself. Vanity, as ever, played its part. Normally, I am not the kind of man to walk towards the possibility of gunfire, but so many people had now written me off as worthless that I wanted to defy expectations. I guess I had grown tired of disappointing people – especially myself.

  The only truth that I know for certain is that, at that precise moment, I had stopped caring about what might happen to me. Life had become a sick joke. The project that had been restoring a vestige of meaning to my life now lay in ruins. The unlikely friendships that had begun to reanimate me were over, destroyed by Albie’s secret. Sandra was married and happy. Eventually, I would be released from prison, but to what? Days of sidelong glances and unreturned phone calls. I would be poison, I had nothing to lose.

  There was one other important factor. I had come to regard Derek as a ridiculous individual, so I found it hard to believe that he would ever fire a gun. To me, he was someone playing at being armed and dangerous. To the police, he was a life-threatening situation, an unknown factor brandishing a weapon and shouting in the darkness; they had to take him seriously. But I couldn’t. And, needless to say, I thought I knew best. History is littered with absurd little men who no one took seriously. I’d have done well to remember that.

  The policemen in high-vis jackets take me behind the police van and start helping me put on a bulletproof vest. It’s a little big and so it’s not easy to button my shirt over it. The senior officer is nervously jangling some change in his pocket.

  “We really appreciate this, Kevin,” he says, not for the first time. “I mean we could sit it out, but, um, the Chief Constable…” He tails off, realising that whatever he was about to say was not information that should be shared with an outsider.

  “I’m doing this on one condition,” I tell him.

  “Fine, what is it?”

  “No press. No cameras. No journalists. No one filming anything on their phone. Nothing.”

  A sergeant, standing behind the officer’s shoulder, pulls an embarrassed face.

  “Erm…”

  “What is it, sergeant?”

  “Well, sir…there is a local TV crew already here. I’ve tucked them over behind the vehicles.”

  “What?” shouts the officer, before reducing his voice to a whisper. “Who the hell tipped them off? Whoever it was, he is toast, is that clear? Who rang them, eh?”

  The sergeant nods in the direction of the sloping field.

  “I think it might have been him, sir.”

  Of course it was. Derek wouldn’t initiate a siege-situation without summoning the cameras first.

  “Move them too far away to see anything.” I say. “Otherwise I’m not going anywhere.”

  The sergeant s
ighs and turns away, muttering something about transparency. Then a tall man in plain clothes, mostly denim, walks out of the gloom.

  “This is Cliff, our trained negotiator,” explains the senior officer.

  Cliff extends his hand towards me. His handshake is self-consciously manly. As they hide a microphone under my collar, he starts to brief me in a slow, carefully measured tone which is really quite irritating – surely a handicap in his line of work.

  “Alrighty, Kevin…Derek has indicated to me that he would be prepared to talk to you. I’ve been trying to talk him down for an hour but…well, he got very angry at the beginning when I didn’t recognise him…and we’ve struggled a bit after that so…he’s a hard man to get a handle on.”

  “I know…there’s no centre to him.”

  Cliff looks impressed. “Yeh, yeh that’s…that’s sort of it, I think. Now, these are the things I need you to remember, Kevin. One, don’t get closer than ten yards. He might feel threatened. Also, you’ll create a problem for the marksmen. Two. Talk soft and calm, like I am talking to you now. Can you do that?”

  God, this man is patronising. It’s a miracle some maniac hasn’t shot him by now.

  “Three. Try and find out what he wants. But don’t hit him with too many questions. Four, offer him hope. Tell him that, whatever his problem is, we can all work it out. In my experience, people in his situation are looking for an opportunity to give themselves up, provided that it doesn’t involve a loss of face. Five, once you feel he’s calm enough, ask him to put down the gun. Don’t ask too early, the gun gives him his sense of control. So get him calmer first. OK, Kevin? Shall I recap?”

  I tell him that I’ve got all that, but he recaps regardless.

  “One. No closer than ten yards. Two, soft and calm. Three. Find out what he wants. Four, hope. Five, the gun, but don’t rush it.”

  Suddenly, out of the murk, comes Derek’s voice, louder and more shrill than before, yelling incoherent threats.

  Cliff puts his hand on my shoulder. “From what you know of him, Kevin, does he have a propensity for violence?”

  “No, no, no, all this stuff is just bluster. He’s a fantasist. I can’t imagine him using a gun. I bet he doesn’t even know how to use it.”

  Cliff looks a little perplexed.

  “Well…he’s already used it.”

  “…I’m sorry, what?”

  “He’s already used the gun. Has no one told you this?”

  A coldness seeps through my insides.

  “…No…no, that hadn’t been mentioned.”

  Cliff gives the senior officer a look that says “what the fuck…?” The officer shrugs and jangles some more change. Then he steps towards me.

  “I do apologise, Kevin. I thought I’d told you, sorry, there’s been a lot going on. Derek shot a couple of sheep. Then the farmer called us out.”

  I struggle to put the sequence of events together. Derek has shot some sheep in order to get himself surrounded by police? That’s a calculated, cold act of mindless violence. With a firearm. That doesn’t fit with my picture of him at all, and it changes everything. Do I still want to be the man in the white hat?

  “Listen, we fully understand if you want to back out,” says Cliff. “Totally understandable.”

  The microphone has been fitted now. They want me to say something to test it.

  Still disorientated, I mumble: “testing.”

  Cliff asks me if I’m OK.

  Derek is still shouting, out there, in the night, with the dead sheep. Lots of half-lit faces are turned towards me. Am I brave enough to face this sheep-killing version of Derek? Is that really me?

  A voice asks me to test the mic again.

  “Testing, 2, 3, 4.”

  I have often relived that walk through the gloom towards the outline of Derek and his gun. The soft swish of the wet grass against my trousers. The cool breeze caressing my face. But most of all I remember the contradiction; because even though I was walking towards an unknown danger, I felt a sense of icy, inner calm, almost a suspended state, as if the clocks had stopped ticking for me. It was a feeling I had experienced once before, with Sandra, when a van had knocked our car out of the fast lane at eighty miles per hour and we had bounced, in tantalising slow-motion, across the central reservation and into the restraining barrier, which had punched rivets and joints through our doors, the metal scraping and screaming, till we came to a juddering halt. And as we stepped out of the wreck of that car, with barely a scratch on us, I remember being blanketed in that same stillness and clarity, as if I understood everything, as if I was part of everything.

  That was the feeling that had returned to me, and was now slowing my pulse as I walked towards the hardening shape of Derek.

  When I got to within about thirty yards, I could make out two small hummocks on each side of him, which I slowly realised were the corpses of the sheep.

  “Is that you, Kevin?”

  I stop. “Yes, Derek.”

  “Come a little closer.”

  I move forward to within fifteen yards. He peers at me through the gloom.

  “Well, well, old friend,” he begins, “thank you for coming.”

  I search for a response that won’t sound preposterous.

  “I’m here to help.”

  “This is like old times, eh, you and me, together, riding against the law.”

  Oh God, he’s got us down as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

  “How can I help, Derek?” I ask, in a voice that, to my surprise, sounds completely relaxed.

  “I just needed to see you, Kevin, that’s all. Last time we met, it went so badly, I hated that. You punched me in the face.”

  “I’m sorry about that, Derek. I was under a lot of pressure.”

  His voice turns a little tinny. “You were under pressure? My God!”

  I find myself staring at the gun. It’s a revolver, which he is holding in his left hand while gesturing expansively.

  “Pressure? My whole life is pressure. God. I tell you, Kevin, no one has any idea…they…they…”

  As he shakes his head, ransacking his mind for words, I consider asking him to put down the gun. But then he suddenly jabs it in front of his face for emphasis.

  “They’ve…they’ve done for me, Kevin, just like they did for her.”

  “…Her?”

  “Princess Diana.” He cocks his head to one side, like a bird, puzzled and a little offended that I hadn’t made the connection. “Her emotional honesty threatened the establishment. And so does mine. So they just hunt you down.”

  In normal circumstances, I would have felt nauseated by the self-obsession, but my brain seems to have shut down all emotions, or anything that might get in the way of the job at hand. The gun is down by his side. I’ll try hope.

  “Listen Derek, whatever your…um…understandable grievances are, I’m sure everyone can sit down and talk through them constructively with you, but to do that we’re going to need you to put the gun on the ground. Will you do that for me?”

  Derek steps back half a yard. Have I spooked him? His shoulders droop.

  “I shot these sheep,” he wheedles, in a small, cracked voice. “I shot them dead. And I’ve never hurt a living thing in my life. That’s what they’ve done to me.”

  I realise that I am going to have to let this stuff pour out of him for a while, he’s too unstable to force anything. His paranoia seems to be growing and his voice keeps changing in volume and character.

  “They’ve fired me off the show. Can you believe that? The fans are furious, you should see some of the tweets. I know they were ordered to get rid of me by someone high up. It’s a shame Louise left. She’d have stood up to them, she liked me.”

  Now he is cuddling the gun against his chest with both hands, like it’s a teddy bear.

  “I’ve tried all the usual channels to try and make them realise their error. I got told to stop being – and I quote – ‘a pest’.”

  He lets the wor
d hang in the air. I am clearly expected to comment.

  “Right…that’s…not a nice word.”

  “No, it’s not. Rats are a pest…bedlice are a pest.”

  The gun is lowered to his side again. For a moment, he seems intolerably weary.

  “These people…” he mutters, “…they’ve dogged me all my life.” Perhaps this represents some kind of opening.

  “Listen, Derek…the police have asked me to find out exactly what you want, y’know…what are your demands?”

  Suddenly, he looks skywards, as if he’s searching for inspiration. The awful thought occurs to me that he has engineered this whole opera without the faintest thought why. Maybe the opera is the why?

  “Tell me what you want, Derek,” I say, in the smooth voice I once used to advertise cars. “Take your time, I’m not going anywhere.”

  “No, I know,” he chuckles, with a faint spark of malice. For the first time, I notice my pulse quicken.

  “There’s lots of things I want, Kevin…lots of them…”

  “All right then…let’s make the list.”

  “OK then.” He starts to spin the revolver in his hand, like a gunslinger.

  “Can you not do that, Derek? I’m worried there might be an accident.”

  He stops spinning it. “Good point, Kevin. Health and safety.”

  I wonder, for a moment, if he’s made a joke to relieve the tension, but then he continues. “Too many people are cavalier about it. That’s how I got a broken toe in the scene with the cow. I had mentioned my concerns but, guess what, I wasn’t listened to.”

  The hiss of anger has crept back into his voice.

  “Al-righty, the first thing that I want, Kevin, is an acknowledgement.”

  He pauses for effect, so I play along.

  “An acknowledgement?”

  “From you.”

  “What kind of acknowledgement, Derek?”

  “I want you to acknowledge…that we are friends.”

  Is he setting some kind of trap? If I say we are friends, will he accuse me of insincerity?