by Carl Goodman
Eva shoved on the door to a fire escape and made her way out onto the roof. Everybody knew that, despite regulations, the handful of officers who clung to real cigarettes would from time to time disappear up here for a surreptitious puff. Some of the evidence lay scattered by the fire escape door, although for the most part smokers were careful enough to remember to toss their incriminating items off the roof. For a perverse moment she wished she smoked too, or indulged in some other unthinking physical activity that could serve as a distraction as she dragged her thoughts into order. She didn’t, though. All Eva could do was stuff her hands into her coat pockets and stare out at the lights of aircraft queuing up to land at Heathrow.
Harred’s conundrum seemed pretty damned obvious to her now. He’s mad, Eva told herself as she watched the lights in the sky. Don’t expect him to behave in any way that’s close to rational. And therein lay her problem. Harred was completely delusional. That meant he might do anything.
She found a low brick wall and sat down, leaned against the side of the building and swung her feet up. Pulled her collar up, wrapped her coat around her, closed her eyes for a moment, forced herself to think. Downstairs, down in the station, police officers equipped with the very best of intentions were running around like headless chickens. Rebecca Flynn, one of their own, somebody they actually cared about. A pain in the arse of an officer but an indisputably good cop, well liked throughout the station. On a bad day Flynn had all the charm of sandpaper. Like Moresby, Eva could not imagine another officer she would rather have on her side.
Mathew Harred: mad he might be, but he was a clever bastard. Talented too. The fresco was a masterpiece; there was no denying the fact. How would people react when they realised it had been painted by a serial killer? That he had included portraits of his victims in it? They would be torn, she thought as she turned her gaze to the road below. The trouble was they were exceptionally good portraits, the kind that a grieving family might long for. And yet again in that one detail Harred had proven just how calculating he was.
A charismatic psychopath, but even that classical definition failed to sum up Harred. If he were that then the terms ‘glib’ and ‘superficial’ would also have applied to him, but Harred was anything but superficial. A true believer with a unique vision, he had created an entire universe of his own, one that was almost two hundred feet long, seventy high and Christ alone knew how many mega-parsecs deep he imagined it to be. Harred’s view of the afterlife, the cult of Harred, Harred as Moses leading his disciples to the Promised Land – a land that required them to die before they could enter into it. Fuck, Eva thought. How do I compete with that?
You start by dying, the voice within her head told her, allegedly so anyway. When she searched inside herself for the truth she knew that the eight minutes she had spent in cardiac arrest were no different to any other extreme injury. Her heart had stopped, but ice-cold water had chilled her skull, so that when Donna the lunatic paramedic had refilled her fluids and jump-started the paralysed organ, her brain had been protected from the damage usually associated with lack of oxygen. An unusual case to be sure, but not unique, although to Harred it must have made her seem like the one person on earth who could truly confirm his theories. What a coincidence that she should have walked into his church and stood in front of his fresco. Too much of a coincidence for a high-functioning sociopath like Mathew Harred.
So what did Harred want? Eva rolled off the wall, went to the edge of the building and looked down. Had he taken Rebecca Flynn? The chances of him not having done so seemed minuscule, she thought as she watched a handful of cars in the street below. Was he simply playing a game with her? Even as the idea crossed her mind she dismissed it. Harred was different. He needed something else. Not sex. Berta Nicholson and Lily Yu could have given him that, had wanted to give him that. At Nicholson’s parties he could have had a dozen women at a time, could have screwed around until he exhausted himself, but he had chosen not to. There had been no signs of sexual interference with any of his victims. He wanted something else. An aesthetic, Eva imagined. He needed to know that his view of infinity was correct. A messiah complex in a cult of one.
She tried to imagine his next step. It was speculation to be sure, but what else could she do? He had placed her on a pedestal, given her some role in his made-up universe. Now he wanted to see if she actually lived up to it. Why? When she thought about it in those terms she felt she caught a glimpse of his mind. Harred was fine-tuning, gathering morsels of information that validated his madness. More than anything else he wanted to be able to stand up in front of infinity and say: I am right. He wanted to know the mind of a God he himself had created, and was prepared to use Rebecca Flynn as a means of doing so. Eva needed Flynn. Harred knew that. In order to get her back she would have to give him a piece of herself. She would, but that was not enough. She needed to know that when she had made that sacrifice Harred would keep his side of the bargain. Of that, Eva thought as she heard the sound of the fire escape door opening once more, she had no guarantees whatsoever.
Newton and Chakrabati clambered hesitantly onto the roof. ‘Ma’am?’ Jamie said, astonishment in his voice, ‘we thought you’d be downstairs trying to figure out where Becks is.’
They thought she had abandoned them. She could tell by the looks on their faces. They were wondering if she had finally cracked under the strain. She needed to disavow them of that idea.
‘Jamie,’ Eva said as she turned her back on the street below, ‘I know exactly where Becks is. That’s really not the problem.’
Chapter Thirty-One
Eva counted twenty cars in the immediate vicinity of New Thought. Marked police cars, black vans carrying the Armed Response Unit, separate ARVs, unmarked cars. All of them had drawn up slowly and quietly. None of them had their beacons lit.
Where else could he have taken Flynn? Where else in the world, in any world, would Harred have wanted to play out his end game? Assuming it was that, she conceded. Perhaps he had something else planned too. Either way, Harred would want this particular denouement to reach its climax in front of his painting, his life work. It wasn’t enough that his masterpiece was finished. Now he had to make some grand statement with it.
‘He knows we’re coming,’ Eva told Jamie and Raj. ‘He’s got it all figured out.’
‘You’re not exactly filling us with confidence,’ Jamie muttered.
She wasn’t. She had to kill the fatalistic attitude right now. ‘Sorry. Look, Becks will be fine. Harred has another objective. So long as he gets it she’ll walk away from this.’
‘Which is?’ Raj demanded.
Eva lied. ‘Not exactly sure. That’s the next thing we’ve got to work out.’
She stood alone in the car park and gazed up at the church silhouetted against the night sky. Norman, originally, she thought as she stared, like so many old churches scattered across the county and the country. This one had fallen into disrepair at some point, and had presumably been deconsecrated. The meeting places of New Thought, the shiny glass-and-chrome structures, melded into the side of the building like the nest of some metallic insect. The main hall, where Harred had created his fresco, stood unlit. At least it appeared that way from the outside. There are only two ways out of here, Eva thought, for Harred at least. Either in cuffs or in a body bag.
Perhaps he would resist arrest, in which case the armed response teams would kill him instantly. Or perhaps he would take his own life, his dying eyes staring at the universe in the painting that he hoped he would then enter.
Or, she thought as she gazed at the spire of the church, perhaps he had imagined a third way. Eva saw Will Moresby giving instructions to one of his constables by the entrance to the car park. Eva went over to talk to him.
The armed response team clustered behind their van. After a while Eva finished with Moresby and walked over to them. The team’s Bronze Commander, the officer with tactical control, was briefing them. Eva only knew Kitson by sight. A powerfully
built man whose grandparents had arrived in England from the West Indies in the 1950s, like Moresby he exuded quiet competence. She doubted he would suffer fools.
‘We should assume a large, empty space with the suspect having a clear field of view,’ Kitson was saying. ‘It’s almost inevitable that when he sees us he will threaten the hostage. I need marksmen in position and ready to use critical force to prevent that.’
‘That isn’t how it will be,’ Eva said.
Kitson turned towards her. He wasn’t used to being contradicted, Eva guessed, especially at this late stage in an operation. ‘Something to add, DI Harris?’
‘Harred used scaffolding towers to paint the fresco. He also used them to hide supposedly unfinished sections from sight. There were metal walkways on the floor when Flynn and I looked at the painting earlier on this evening. He’s got towers, metal panels and polythene sheets. He’s also got spotlights and rigging. You’re assuming you’ll be walking into an open environment; Harred’s had enough time to make sure that’s not the case.’
Kitson might be pissed off with her but he certainly wasn’t stupid. ‘We need visual surveillance,’ he told his team. ‘DI Harris, your report mentioned a window?’
Eva led him towards the entrance to the church. ‘I’m not being difficult,’ she told him as they walked, ‘but this guy is smart, deranged and has had plenty of time to prepare.’ When they reached the front of the building Eva stopped and snorted a laugh. ‘There’s your confirmation,’ she told Kitson.
‘I don’t see a window.’
‘Exactly. He’s boarded it up. You could see through it earlier on. He used it to lure Flynn and me inside. Now it suits his purpose to hide the view. He’s ready for us. This is his game now.’
‘My marksmen are carrying HK417s,’ Kitson told her. ‘They can play games too.’
‘Yeah,’ Eva said as she turned on her heel and walked back to the cars. ‘I’m sure they’d be about to pull the trigger just as a load of scaffolding drops on their heads.’
Kitson wasn’t about to be put off. ‘I want cameras,’ he told two of his team, ‘fibre-optic. Find some woodwork, drill through, let’s take a look inside.’ Two men went to the back of the vans and started unpacking gear. ‘Let’s get forward units in place,’ Kitson said to the rest. ‘Two in the outer entrance to the church, get into a secure position, hold and report back.’ Two officers jogged towards the building. ‘Anything else you can tell us?’ he asked Eva.
‘He’ll want to talk,’ Eva said.
‘Negotiate?’
‘Not in the way you mean. Harred wants something, something specific. It won’t make any sense to us but to him it will be all-important. We need to figure out if we can give whatever it is to him without compromising DS Flynn’s life.’
Kitson scrutinised her. ‘Any ideas what?’
Eva shook her head. ‘Not without talking to him.’
‘Are you suggesting you negotiate, ma’am?’ Kitson had to be ten years her senior, hugely experienced and a consummate professional, but because of a perverse twist of fate Eva had ended up being his superior officer. She was not about to rub that in, though.
‘I don’t see that there’s any other choice,’ Eva told him. ‘It’s what he was looking for all along.’
She heard the soft rattle of body armour as she entered the first hall. Four officers now, two with assault rifles, two with the sniper rifles Kitson had mentioned. Another group of four waited outside, weapons ready and stun grenades in hand. Kitson had cameras watching part of the main hall. As Eva had guessed, Harred had turned it into a labyrinth.
‘Clever bastard,’ one of the officers on the cameras had muttered when they looked over his shoulder at the image on the screen. He had his eye to an eyepiece. He manipulated the fibre-optic camera with a set of controllers. ‘He’s stapled a metal grill all around the window frames. I can’t see what it is, it could just be chicken wire for all I can tell. Whatever it is, he’s already figured out we’d go through the woodwork to put cameras in. I can see some of the hall, just not very much. He’s letting us have a peek but that’s all.’
‘Any sign of Flynn?’ Eva had asked, even though she already knew the answer. The officer had shaken his head.
‘Do we know who this character is?’ Kitson demanded. ‘Where he came from, what he did before?’
‘It’s all superficial,’ Eva had told him. ‘So it’s all probably fake. We do know he’s experienced with rigging and working in high locations though, but that’s obvious.’
The two marksmen crept forward to flank the double doors that led to the hall. Warm light seeped through and spilled onto the floor. It looked different, she thought, subtly so, as though beyond the doors the spotlights had been rearranged. They almost certainly had; Harred would have aimed at least one set at the doors, so that whoever came through them would be temporarily blinded.
She rolled her head from side to side. Her neck cracked. It had been a long, exhausting day. The residue of the sedatives and stimulants Odie had injected were still inside her. They felt like sand in her blood, scratching and scraping through her veins. Her head hurt. It felt tender, abused and pummelled. All she wanted to do was curl up into a ball and go to sleep, to forget the sight of Nicholson and Yu at the bottom of the pool, of Milne tied to the chair in the operating theatre, and of Harred pounding Odie to death in front of her. She couldn’t, though. If she did, Flynn would die. ‘Let’s get this done,’ Eva muttered to the snipers by the door. Then she pushed her way inside.
Spotlights blinded her, as she had expected them to. She raised her hand against them and walked forward, slowly, making sure that the click of her heels announced her presence and marked her leisurely approach. The fresco still looked magnificent. In front of it though, as she had expected, Harred had built a fortress.
‘Mathew,’ she called out as she walked, ‘it’s Eva.’ She made certain that her voice didn’t betray the hatred she felt for him, the rage and fury that came as a direct result of gazing down on the corpses of Nicholson and Yu.
‘Eva,’ she heard him call back from somewhere above her. ‘Are you alone?’
She barked a laugh. Bravado – Harred would respond to that. In his mind she was the destroyer, whatever he might mean by the term. ‘Apart from the guys with the sniper rifles and automatic weapons? What did you expect?’
Harred answered in a lazy drawl. ‘I think you can guess.’
Of course she could, this was exactly what Harred had anticipated. Layers of polythene, metal plates suspended by wires and scaffolding towers stood along the centre of the hall. Above her the ceiling had become a spider’s web of cables. ‘Love what you’ve done with the place,’ Eva said.
‘You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?’ Harred asked.
Her tone was caustic. ‘I’m not in charge,’ she told him. ‘It’s an operational thing. The guy who tells the blokes with guns what to do though, he’s pretty damn bright. So whatever he’s going to do,’ Eva said as she scanned the ceiling, ‘it won’t be stupid.’
He didn’t respond for a minute. ‘Do you want to come up?’ he asked after a while.
‘It’s why I’m here, isn’t it? Which way?’
Harred didn’t answer. Instead a sheet of polythene fell to the floor, revealing a ladder that had been hidden behind it. She walked over to it and began to climb.
What the hell am I doing here? she asked herself as she climbed. The first part of the answer was obvious. Doing her damnedest to get Flynn out alive, because that was her job, and Flynn was her responsibility. And, she needed to admit, her friend too. Flynn could have made her life at the station hell. Instead she had made it tolerable.
The next part was more complicated. She was not at all sure she understood it yet. She knew that if she let the Armed Response Unit tackle the problem Harred would kill Becks and somehow probably kill some of the ARU as well. She hadn’t been exaggerating about the scaffolding, she thought as she looked up,
because like Odie he had thought it all through. She had a fair idea of what he wanted, in the first instance anyway. It was what came after that, though. What would Harred do once she gave that to him? Eva tried to imagine the scenarios in her head. Try as she might though, after that point it seemed all paths led to darkness.
The ladder reached a metal platform and revealed another ladder, which she climbed as well. By the time she had climbed a third ladder she estimated she was around sixty feet above the hard stone floor. She still couldn’t see Harred. Polythene sheets and metal plates obscured her view. Spotlights painted unrecognisable shapes and shadows over the towers. Eva pulled at the corner of one. It slid back along a rail more easily than she had expected. Of course it did, she thought as she took a step backwards. This was what Harred had wanted her to see.
He stood on the edge of another tower, dressed in jeans and a dark-green jacket and backlit by another spotlight. The tower was separated from hers by a gap of perhaps fifty feet. A metal walkway spanned the gap between the two towers. The walkway had no rails. It was perhaps two feet wide. Wires connected it to the ceiling. You have to be fucking joking, Eva thought. Sixty lousy centimetres over a drop that would kill her instantly. He was not joking though, Eva realised as she looked again at Harred. Behind him, crucified on scaffolding, was Flynn.
Flynn was alive. That much was obvious from the wild and hysterical look in her eyes. Eva’s stomach churned. Flynn had every right to be hysterical. Not only was she suspended over the drop with her mouth taped, but a catheter, one of Odie’s she assumed, hung from her neck. ‘Easy Becks,’ Eva called out, voice projecting a calmness she didn’t feel. ‘Everything is going to be fine.’
‘It is,’ Harred agreed. ‘Either in this life or the next.’