[Eddie Collins 01.0] The Third Rule

by Andrew Barrett

Her spiteful eyes were gorgeous. He missed her.

  She turned away. “Better go now, before he gets really upset.”

  “Yeah,” he said quickly. “On my way.”

  Drink was the most ruthless mistress imaginable. She, too, had gorgeous eyes, always changing colour, depending on your poison, and always seductive. She was a hard bitch as well; once she had her claws in your back it was game over.

  Even if he could ditch the booze, it didn’t follow that Jilly would take him back. And even if she did, he’d be on permanent probation. How could he live like that; afraid to have a row in case she revoked his licence? Life was shite.

  Driving across the estate to Josh’s, he had the windows down, letting the breeze rip away at the mess in his head. And through the window came a sound so familiar to him that he was inclined to ignore it: that of a siren.

  – Two –

  Sam crouched, elbows hovering above his knees. From across the garden, Josh placed the ball and stepped back. He ran and kicked, aiming top left. Sam dived, got a finger on the leather and knocked it clear over the wall more than twenty feet away. Sam hit the dust elated because he got to the damned thing, he made contact – God, he was good!

  “Shit!” Josh shouted.

  “Josh!” shouted Mrs Potter.

  “Sorry, Mum.” He strode over to Sam. “You knocked it over the wall, dummy.”

  Sam grinned, slapping the dust from his tracksuit bottoms. “I saved it, Josh. I saved a penalty.”

  “As a reward, you can go and get the bloody thing, I went last time.”

  “You shouldn’t have kicked it so hard.” Sam put his hands defiantly on his hips. “You go.”

  “Think of it as a compliment, Sam; I have to kick it hard to get it past you these days.”

  Sam’s chest puffed out. “Okay,” he said, walking to the gate, “but it’s your turn next time.”

  “Absolutely.”

  – Three –

  Henry sped down Westbury Avenue, thinking of nothing other than getting home and lying low for a few years. “What’s the sentence for manslaughter now?” His father was working on something big, spending a lot of time in Whitehall with policy-makers on this committee or that committee. It was something big, he’d say, but wouldn’t go into detail, other than saying crime would be cut drastically for the first time in modern British history.

  “Shit!” Henry swerved the Jaguar. The tyres squealed as he slewed to the left. A ball flew across the front of his car, and Henry almost had a heart attack. His eyes were wide, searching for the youth who would invariably follow the ball. None did. It was okay to kill a tramp, he thought, but not so good to cream a fucking kid!

  He dragged a sleeve across his face and noted the stench of warm urine drifting up from his lap, and then noticed the smear of red on his sleeve. “Oh God, I wish I could wake up at seven o’clock this morning and start again.”

  The Jaguar roared past the bouncing ball and was only a hundred yards away from the tee-junction and freedom when a police car cruised past. It stopped. Its reverse lights came on.

  Henry’s heart boomed. His flabby jowls tightened. He brought the Jaguar to a swift halt, turned quickly in the road and set off back the way he had come. He studied the rear-view mirror, and saw the police car turn up Westbury Avenue, saw the blue lights flash. Henry pressed the throttle harder.

  – Four –

  Sam saw the green car speed past.

  He trotted across the road after the ball, catching hold of it as it settled in the gutter.

  As he walked back he bounced the ball, checked his watch, and discovered his dad was over an hour late. It was an hour less time they had together.

  He pulled down the peak on his New York Yankees baseball cap and hurried across the road towards Josh’s gate.

  His dad was a fucking drunk! Mum said so. He’s always late because he’s always drunk. He could see it in his mum’s eyes, and he even saw it Mrs Potter’s eyes, and what did she know? He might be a drunk, but he was Dad. And he really was wonderful.

  Sam was a yard from the kerb when the roar of an engine pulled him free of thoughts of his dad. For the briefest of times he saw the green car and he saw the windscreen, the sunlight glancing off it, and through it he saw a fat man with blood smeared across his face.

  Then he saw no more.

  – Five –

  Henry sped back up Westbury Avenue, thinking of his dad, his arse still slipping in a puddle of piss, and somewhere not too far behind, a police car was screaming after him. He rounded the gentle bend and smacked the AC knob again with his fist, desperate to cool down. And then he stared into the rear-view mirror. How far behind were they, how much of a lead did he have? And then he glanced into the frightened eyes of a boy who was no more than twelve.

  The kid met the Jaguar in the very centre of the bonnet. There was a hideous crack as his legs snapped and a dull thud when his head hit the windscreen. The floppy body flew silently over the back of the car; milliseconds grew into days.

  Henry screamed as the car slewed to a halt against the kerb, and then held his breath, knuckles white, heart on pause. He waited for the briefest of times, looking in his mirrors. The ball bounced away out of sight and a New York Yankees baseball cap fluttered to the kerb.

  The kid didn’t move.

  Henry took his foot off the brake and applied lots of throttle.

  Henry stopped at home just long enough to change his clothes and to mop up the foul-smelling liquid from the seat. He was shaking, mind working so fast that it wasn’t working at all. He grasped the enormity of what had just happened and it flew away from reason just as quickly as it plunged into a desperate panic, and all he could think of was driving away from there and a double manslaughter charge as fast as he could.

  They would already be looking for him, well, looking for the car, and here was the first place they’d check, assuming they had the car’s registration number. And if they didn’t have it… well, that was just too optimistic to consider right now. How long would it take them to run all the British racing green Jaguars in Yorkshire through the system and begin checking their addresses?

  Henry set off on his last journey behind the wheel of his beautiful green Jaguar.

  4

  Friday 29th May

  Near a village called Great Preston, there’s a place that is as abandoned as it’s possible to get in West Yorkshire. At one time it was part of a vast mining community, great opencast mines with machines as big as a block of flats dragging the coal out for power stations. It’s quiet now. Dead, deserted. Acre upon acre of slag mounds covered in thin, unhealthy weeds that swayed in a warm breeze.

  Meandering between the slag mounds was a track that led to the old site office, a wooden building with smashed windows, something nature was busy reclaiming. In places, the track was almost green right over with soft brome and Yorkshire fog growing, hidden from the gentle hum of everyday life that went on in Great Preston half a mile away.

  Henry thought about the track, and what an ideal place it would be. He’d played there as a kid, only a few years after the coalmine shut down and the cobwebs grew freely on the great iron gates into the compound. Rusting machinery stood by the flat-top where the coal was stacked, and the small concrete admin offices and weigh-bridge looked like something from a WWII aircraft base complete with its own lookout tower.

  It was a great place to play, a wonderful place to be whoever you wanted to be. SAS; that’s what Henry wanted to be, and he’d stormed that old fortress where the encryption device was, or where the terrorists were holding a British ambassador, or where the missile battery was, more times than he could remember. His childhood was wonderful, what little he was allowed to have.

  Things began to get ugly for Henry not long after his first visit to the track as one half of a newly formed courting couple. He remembered it being dark, but his erection had pulled him along the twisting track as though it was equipped with night vision. The anticipation was ove
rwhelming. Launa Wrigglesworth was his first conquest and he still recalled the way she squirmed and groaned beneath him, and by the time they’d finished losing their virginity, his jacket, laid out on the long grass of a slag mound, was a crumpled testimony to how well it had turned out. His knees, covered in the grey muck of years-old clay, and scratched and torn and bloody, were testimony to how one emotion – ecstasy – could easily blot out another – pain. Pity that particular talent faded as you accrued the years and the knocks, he thought.

  His father had moved into politics shortly after Henry had moved the earth and that was about the time his world turned into a downward spiral of strict discipline, a change of school and an enforced adulthood that frightened the crap out of him. He wanted to be a kid, he wanted to be Superman, he wanted to be Peter Pan and never grow up. But party politics forced it upon him as it forced weeklong attendance in London on his father, and weekend beatings for Henry. It was the stress of junior politics that loosened his teeth and turned Henry’s eyes the colour of overripe plums.

  The old site office and the lean-to that was the manager’s car parking space, was where he had ended his short relationship with Wriggler Wrigglesworth. She refused to oblige one night, a night when Henry felt particularly virile. So he punched her in the jaw and walked away, massaging the bulge as he went. She landed flat on her back, out cold.

  Twenty years later he found himself in the very same spot where she fell. It was dark again but the moonlight was strong enough to see that the old lean-to had rather more lean than it used to, and the site office had fared equally badly, its windows smashed by the creaking old building moving on its foundations. The door had warped and fallen inside leaving a dusty old shell with creepers growing through the floor and fungus sprouting in the joists. No place to bring a potential conquest now, Henry thought.

  He turned in the dust and looked at the black shape of his beautiful green Jaguar, moonlight kissing its curves, dancing in the crazed glass of the windscreen. He tutted, kicked at the dirt and opened the boot. He found the torch and stared around his steed one last time. It had killed two people today and it could kill a third – him – if he were found in its company again. And Henry quite liked his life; shitty though it was. Time to part company.

  He needed a rag of some description and spent ten minutes searching until he cursed his bad luck and ripped a sleeve from his expensive designer shirt. He took off the fuel filler cap and stuffed the sleeve into the tube as far as he could, leaving a dangling cuff. And then, wondering why he ever gave up smoking – a cigarette lighter would have been fairly useful now – he reached into the car and pushed the cigar lighter into the socket. He sat wondering why these things happened to him; he wondered why he had a shitty father, why he had no woman, and then he smiled. “Cause you’re a wanker, Henry Deacon, that’s why.”

  The lighter popped out and Henry popped back into reality. He snatched it and ran to the cuff, pressing it hard onto the cooling coil until wisps of smoke drifted into the silent air. But that was it. Just a tiny glowing ember was all he could manage and blowing on it succeeded only in extinguishing it altogether. “Bastard!” How come the car thieves manage to set fire to things so damned easily?

  He plugged the lighter back in for a second go, and while it warmed up, he pulled the sleeve back out and brought it into the car, ready this time for full heat. This time it caught, this time he didn’t have to blow and the smoking cinder produced a beautiful orange flame that took quickly. “Shit, shit, shit.” Henry scrambled around to the filler, flames licking dangerously close, and pushed it towards the tube. But the sleeve was blazing now and he couldn’t get it inside. The fire was hot, the shirtsleeve curling, turning a crispy grey as he shouted and screamed for some good fucking luck for a damned change.

  And then his hand felt hot, he felt the hairs on it curl away, smelt the singe of flesh and cried out in pain. But he kept pushing, almost not daring to touch it but having no choice, and when it was in the tube and he was about to run to safety before the car blew up in his face, the flames grew thinner and thinner and then died.

  The world turned dark again and Henry leaned against the flank of the Jag, head in hands, wondering what to do now.

  It was a long walk to the nearest bus stop.

  5

  Wednesday 3rd June

  Life soon caught up with Henry. He came back from Great Preston wearing tattered clothes, and with a blistered hand that throbbed.

  “Damned thieves,” he made himself say over and over again, until he almost believed it. It was them, he thought, who had hurt his hand, it was them, he said, who made me miss all my appointments.

  “There.” Julie put a coffee on his desk, and sat opposite her boss. “What happened then?”

  Henry’s good hand massaged the bandage on his left. He sipped coffee and tried out his story on Julie. “They robbed me.” His voice was hurt, his chin wobbled, but he looked her straight in the eye. If Julie believed him after all the times she’d caught him lying, then the police would be a walkover. “Damned thieves. They car-jacked me! You hear all this stuff on the news, how these thieves wait for you in multi-storey car parks, or while you’re at a red light, and then, wham! They pounce, shouting and screaming at you until you don’t know what the fuck happened.”

  Julie raised her eyebrows, but didn’t yank back on the reins simply because he swore.

  He couldn’t hide a smile; it was a smile of impending triumph, but he dressed it up nicely by adding, “I’m sorry about that, Julie, I shouldn’t–”

  “Never mind,” she said, concern etched across her face. “Go on, dear.”

  He shrugged. “Well, they hauled me out, punched me in the mouth.” He pulled out his lip so she could see. “Tooth went right into it.” She looked closely and hissed. “They gave me a kick in the back of the head just for good measure, and when I stood and tried to… I don’t know what I tried, but I stuck my hand back inside, either trying to get them out of my car, or trying to get me back in, I don’t know. But when I tried, they slammed the bloody door on my hand.” He lifted the bandaged hand. “Throbs,” he said.

  “Oooh, bet it does, too.”

  “Anyway, I went home.” He looked up with his best puppy-dog eyes, and for a moment, he thought she was going to cry for him. Inside he laughed. “I couldn’t stand going out, and I didn’t answer the phone.” He glanced away. “I felt… Julie, I felt raped; I thought they were going to kill me.” Was that a tear in her eye? Fucking jackpot! “I’m sorry for not answering your calls. I know you rang a thousand times, and John and Chris too.”

  “They called around a few times as well.”

  “They hate me, don’t they?”

  “No,” she said through a laugh, “don’t be preposterous. No one hates you. They thought you’d just vanished, though; with your car not being there and there were no lights on, they–”

  “I just couldn’t bear it. Has anyone been looking after my appointments?”

  “Henry,” she soothed, “always thinking about work, even at a time like this. Stop worrying, we all mucked in and took care of everything.”

  “That’s great. I owe you all a drink, eh?”

  “Several!” She smiled at him, a motherly smile. “Have the police contacted you?”

  “I gave them the details over the phone, and they said they’d be in touch.”

  “And they haven’t?”

  He shook his head. “Service is appalling, isn’t it? I mean, my car could be anywhere by now. Wish I’d had a tracker fitted.”

  “Oh, you poor boy; you’ve not heard, have you?”

  “Heard what?”

  She looked away.

  “Julie, heard what?”

  “It’s been all over the news, and every vidiscreen in town is plastered with it.”

  “What, dammit!”

  “They killed two people.”

  His heart speeded up, and he knew this because his hand throbbed faster. But he kept cool, d
idn’t glance away, didn’t blink, and even refused to allow his eyes to widen; he’d known this was on the cards and was prepared for it. “Who killed two people?” He looked suitably confused.

  “We don’t know. Someone driving a green Jaguar knocked two people down. It happened on the same day they stole your car.”

  Henry looked shocked. Now he allowed his eyes to widen. “Those poor people,” he said as though shocked. “That’s awful; what did they do? How did it happen?”

  “I’m not sure. Except that one of them was a young boy, about ten, I think. Dead instantly.”

  “Oh my dear God.”

  “The police’ll catch them, and when they do, Henry, they’ll be on a Rule Three, and then they’ll die instantly.”

  “Wait a minute, you think someone stole my car, and then they…”

  Julie nodded.

  “Well that explains it, then.” He bit his lower lip and winced.

  “Explains what?”

  “The police. They think I did it; they think I ran those two people over.”

  “No.”

  “That’s why they haven’t been to see me yet; they’re gathering evidence, aren’t they? They’re formulating their plans.”

  “Henry,” she laughed again, “you’re overreacting. They haven’t even found the car yet, so how can they gather evidence?”

  “You think I did it, don’t you? I can’t believe you, my own–”

  “Henry!” she snapped. “Calm down this instant! If you say you had your car stolen, then I believe you. And anyway, no one said it was your Jaguar that killed them; could have been another. There’s no proof one way or another, so stop fretting. When they find the car, we’ll all be able to sleep better.”

  Oh, they won’t find the car, Henry thought. Not in a million years.