Blue Blood

by Peter Tonkin

  She put the key into the lock of her office’s rear door and turned it. It stuck and she had to work it a little to make it turn. ‘Looks like we’ll need a new lock soon,’ she said, frowning, as the pair of them entered.

  The offices were not large but they were well designed. The rear door opened into a tiny kitchen with washing and coffee-making facilities and a microwave that stood on top of a little refrigerator. A side door opened through into a loo and a main door opened into the main office where the equipment they had come to check stood to the right of a large, solid desk - the tabular equivalent of Jim Constable in teak. Beyond that again there was a door through to a small waiting room and a main entrance through into the lobby, stairwell and lifts outside.

  Without thinking, Robin closed the door behind her. The office was completely internal. There were no windows - their absence no doubt adding to the atmosphere of secretive exclusivity. Frances hit the light in the kitchen, then hurried through into the main office. The light from the kitchen door fell directly on to the recording equipment, and was sufficient for Frances at first. But then she hesitated, saying, ‘Hey, that’s not right...’

  Robin joined her, and together the two women stood looking down at the recording equipment. The reel-to-reel and the cassette recorders were both broken, their spindles obviously empty.

  ‘What the hell...’ Frances crossed to the main light. As she did so, Robin pressed the button on the CD recorder and a minidisk slid out. ‘Here...’ she said, taking it and turning.

  Frances pressed the light switch. No light. Instead, an immediate smell of burning filled the room. The light in the kitchen began to flicker. ‘Get out!’ shouted Frances. The pair of them ran back the way they had come, but almost as soon as she touched it, Robin realized that the faulty lock on the back door had given up the ghost. Her fingers simply slid round the patterned metal of the little knob. The bolt remained immovably in place.

  ‘We can’t get out this way,’ she said.

  ‘Through to the front,’ ordered Frances. But as she spoke, there came a deceptively quiet ‘Whumph’ of sound. The kitchen light went out, but the office was lit by a sinister flickering brightness. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to show the black cloud of smoke that came under the lintel and began to ooze across the kitchen ceiling.

  Frances paused, then joined Robin. Both of them hurled themselves against the door but both knew that it was designed to open inwards and nothing they could do would budge it if the lock was broken. Side by side they turned and looked into the gathering brightness of the office, therefore. The clearer air below the billowing smoke was already thick enough to make them cough and gasp. They only had time for the briefest glance of calculation. The radio equipment was fiercely ablaze, spitting flame and sparks as though it contained an angry dragon. All that side of the room was burning from floor to ceiling. But on the other side, there seemed to be a passageway into the relative - temporary - safety of the waiting room. It wasn’t much but it was all they had. Frances tensed to go at once, but Robin, trained for emergencies such as this on countless supertankers, took her by the shoulder. They invested thirty seconds at the wash-basin, soaking two washing-up towels and tying them safely round each other’s faces.

  Frances took the lead then, and they stumbled forward into the gathering inferno of the main office. The carpet looked like expensive wool but was all too flammable man-made fibre. The flames were flowing eagerly across it. The electrical systems in walls and ceiling were overheating, carrying the flames through conduits and spreading them more rapidly. There was a sprinkler system but in this section of the building it was malfunctioning.

  Frances made it to the office’s main door, though that meant she had to move out of the safe corridor towards the increasing inferno of the recording equipment. She turned the handle, but - as security dictated - it was locked. Choking, eyes streaming, on the very edge of panic, she began to sort through the keys that were still - providentially - in her hand. She felt Robin pressing tightly against her back, all too well aware of the speed with which the fire was surrounding them; with which the smoke and fumes were filling the room.

  As Frances pushed the key into the lock, she felt Robin slide to her knees and gave a brief prayer that her employer was seeking clean air - not fainting dead away. Her own head was spinning and her hand was beginning to shake badly as great surges of adrenaline hit her system. Stubbornly, the key refused at first to slide home. Then, once it was settled correctly, it refused to turn. Frances started screaming at it, blissfully unaware that she was doing so.

  On her knees behind the screaming detective, stooping to find some semblance of clean air, realizing that her shoes were beginning to melt - and the man-made fibres of her overalls were likely to prove as fire-friendly as the carpet - Robin dug the edge of the CD into the palm of her hand. She closed her fist around the recordable minidisk as tightly as she could, using the effort and the pain to steady herself. And, blessedly, she thought, there was a considerable draft of fresh air coming in under the door they were trying to open.

  ‘Gottit,’ shouted Frances and opened the door without further thought. Providentially, instinctively, she pulled the key out of the lock as she turned the handle and pushed.

  Air from the outer room roared into the inferno and the fresh supply of oxygen fed the flames exponentially and instantly. The indraft sucked the women almost fatally back towards the flames - but the explosion blew them both out into the waiting room. Frances flew over a suddenly smouldering leatherette chair. Robin smashed a glass-topped table with her forehead. The magazines piled upon it soared up into the air and burst magically into flames as they flew. But both women, desperate in the knowledge that hesitation could only mean death, scrabbled through the smouldering wreckage.

  Frances was on her knees when she reached the main door and it was only by a miracle that she still held the keys. She found the lock and the key that fitted it by touch and thrust it home.

  The new-fed fire had attained a voice now; it rumbled and roared so powerfully that the outer room trembled in ready sympathy. The reeling Robin’s teeth were chattering. The floor was shuddering like the back of a frightened horse. The door was rattling in its frame as though giants were beating against it from without. Frances forced the key inwards and felt the mechanism yielding almost as intimately as she felt the fibres across her shoulders melting and her hair beginning to crisp and smoulder. Burning paper was drifting down around her as though this were a snowstorm in Hell. She held her breath as she pushed again. She couldn’t actually remember when she had last breathed.

  The door remained wedged, the sucking of the fire forcing it into its frame with simple air- pressure, as it had done with the inner door. Weary unto death, Frances turned and pulled at Robin until her eyes focused beneath the mask of blood flowing down from her hairline into the blackened mess of the soaking towel over her mouth. Little Red Riding Hood, thought Frances drunkenly. She climbed to her feet, pulling Robin up with her. Side by side they leaned against the blistering paint of the door like a couple of little old ladies.

  ‘Won’t it happen again?’ croaked Robin.

  ‘Who cares?’ screamed Frances. ‘We open it or we fry. PUSH!’ The last word was screamed with the last ounce of air from the pit of her lungs. She twisted the handle so hard she sprained her wrist and shoved so firmly she put her collarbone at risk. Robin heaved with equal, desperate determination, and the door swung open as explosively as the door into the waiting room had done.

  Both women were blown out into the stairwell and headfirst down the stairs while the windows above them that overlooked Fleet Street simply exploded inwards to shower them with shards of broken glass.

  ‘What in hell’s name...’ Jim Constable looked up incredulously as the windows along the front of his office building disappeared. The Bentley was easing at a snail’s pace down towards Aldwych and had moved only its own length in the last minute, putting them exactly level with th
e building.

  Jim pushed open the door of the Bentley and sprinted out in front of it, across the road and across the pavement to the doorway. Richard trod on the brake and stopped the car just before the swinging door hit a NO PARKING sign. Then he too was out, his outer door nearly unseating a motorcycle policeman who was weaving his way up the inner lane.

  ‘BOMB!’ shouted Richard. He gestured upward as a backwash of smoke and flame came out through the windows with the last of the glass and frames.

  ‘Jesus,’ said the policeman, and started shouting into the two-way mic. in his helmet.

  He was still doing this when Richard and Jim came staggering back out of the main door. At Jim’s side, Frances was weaving drunkenly, her arm across his broad shoulder. But Robin lay in Richard’s arms like a corpse. As far as the policeman could see, her face was gone, leaving only a mask of congealing blood. Her hair was black and curled into a short afro style - but the clenched hands and dangling legs were white skinned.

  Richard pushed past him, slipping the faceless corpse into the passenger seat of his car. ‘I think she’s dead,’ he said in a strange, dull voice. ‘I have to get her to the nearest hospital.’

  As he spoke, he turned a knob and slid the back of the seat down until it almost made a bed. ‘Help me! She’s my wife...’ The woman’s face rolled over, blood flowing past the black mess and the blisters down on to the battleship-grey leather. There were at least blood-filled pits which might be eyes. A kind of a hump for a nose. Then the blackness began again. It was difficult to tell how bad things were. The policeman was young and inexperienced but they looked pretty bad to him.

  ‘All services alerted,’ said the voice in the policeman’s helmet. ‘Fire Brigade and bomb disposal should be there in one...’

  There was a wail in the near distance. Flashing lights.

  ‘Right,’ said the policeman. ‘St Thomas’ is your best bet, I’d say. Follow me. Is that thing as fast as it looks?’ he added, nodding at the Bentley as he switched on his lights and siren. The traffic along the roadway in front of them parted like the Red Sea for Moses.

  ‘You have no idea,’ grated Richard, ‘how fast this thing can go.’

  Chapter 24: Go

  ‘Captain Richard Mariner is arraigned before you today, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, accused of Corporate Killing. A charge to which he has pleaded not guilty, but a crime of which we, the prosecution, will prove to you that he is guilty. Guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt.’ Quentin Carver Carpenter QC straightened to his full height, and breathed in noisily and importantly, letting the words hang. Then he hunched forward slightly, grasped the edges of his robes and looked earnestly across the already humid air of Court One of the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, fixing the jury with his gimlet eyes, like a winter wolf considering a flock of young spring lambs.

  ‘The charge may be unfamiliar to you, because it has only recently been enacted. This is, in fact, the first time that the indictment has been tried in open court. A circumstance of which you can hardly be unaware, given the speculation which is rife already in almost every form of media in the country. Hence these august and historic surroundings in which we find ourselves today. Hence the world-wide public scrutiny of everything we do and say. Hence, again for the first time, the presence of news cameras within the very court itself.

  ‘But let me assure you of the seriousness of this new but terrible crime. This is no mere media circus, ladies and gentlemen, like the divorce of some film actors or pop stars. Corporate Killing has been listed as a Class One Offence. This places it amongst the most terrible crimes a man may commit. It puts it on a level with atrocities such as genocide, treason, war-crimes and crimes against humanity; murder, torture and crimes under the Official Secrets Act. It is a crime, therefore, which our society views as even more terrible than manslaughter, infanticide, rape, mutiny, and piracy.

  ‘And what is the general nature of the crime which finds itself in such horrific company? It is this: that the accused, as a senior officer in a public or private enterprise, through action or omission amounting to a gross negligence, shall cause the death of one or more persons to whom he might be supposed to owe a duty of care.

  ‘Now, ladies and gentlemen, I can almost hear some of you asking yourselves, “But what do these fine sounding legal phrases actually mean in the real world of everyday life?” Allow me to explain...’

  Richard sat between two uniformed officers, whose duty was to restrain him should he behave inappropriately or try some kind of escape, and looked across the court. His dull gaze swept past the vulpine prosecuting counsel, past the black-robed, white-wigged eagle of the judge, away into vacancy. The air was thick and golden, full of bright motes that blazed like tiny stars and danced dizzyingly. He knew he should be paying the closest imaginable attention to the proceedings, but he was utterly exhausted; absolutely drained. He eased the breadth of his shoulders in the black worsted of his suit jacket and breathed deeply, inflating the snowy whiteness of his shirt-front beneath the sombre darkness of his tie. He rolled the weight of his head in a small circle, hearing his neck-joints crackle and pop. His mind cleared a little.

  There was a clock on the far wall with a calendar beneath it that caught his attention incongruously. It was 10.15 on the morning of Tuesday, 2nd July. Richard knew the date and the time well enough. The case had started yesterday, on Monday 1st, just as His Lordship Justice Burgo-Blackstone had decreed with God-like accuracy several months earlier, and they had just finished empanelling the jury. Now, on Tuesday 2nd, the case itself was getting properly under way. Carver Carpenter was going to make his opening speech for the prosecution, outlining the nature of the charge and explaining how the prosecution were proposing to prove it to the jury’s satisfaction beyond a reasonable doubt. Then he would begin to call the witnesses that he stated would do just that. The witnesses named in the lists Maggie DaSilva had read out all those weary weeks ago. In the order detailed there. Day after day; week after week if need be. And Maggie, as she had said she would, would cross-examine them, seeking to sow that vital seed of doubt even before she called her own witnesses in turn.

  How many times had they discussed the routine? How often had they been through the procedure he must expect throughout the whole of the trial itself? It was as though he were trapped in some corner of Hell where he was doomed to go through the same thing over and over again.

  ‘Now let us turn from the general to the particular, ladies and gentlemen,’ continued Carver Carpenter. ‘What is it that the accused, Captain Mariner, there, did or failed to do that led step by step through what we have called a chain of causation, to the deaths of Captain James Jones and the three officers he took with him on the terrible afternoon in question, desperately using the last lifeboat aboard the stricken and sinking Goodman Richard to seek for help and rescue?...’

  Richard’s mind drifted away, as it so often did, to that still more terrible, much more recent afternoon.

  ‘GO! GO! GO!’ called the motorcycle policeman over the sound of Richard’s Bentley door closing, but Richard hesitated, investing an apparently wasted second in sliding the seatbelt across Robin’s still breast and clipping it gently home. Moving in the dream-like slow motion of shock more terrible than anything he had ever known, Richard gunned the motor, looking along the street at the back of the rapidly moving rider. He flicked his headlights on to full beam, seeing them illumine even the early summer evening. He took one deep, tearing breath to steady himself. Then he floored the accelerator and felt the great car leap into motion.

  It was as well the other cars in front had cleared the road as best they could, for Richard’s foot remained flat on the floor as the Bentley slammed up through the gears, gathering itself into full-sprint. Within five seconds the Bentley was doing 70 and Fleet Street was opening into The Strand beyond the Temple Bar. He went past St Clement Danes at 100mph and Aldwych at 140.

  Richard still didn’t even ease off as he followed the
motorcycle hard round left into Lancaster Place and began to thunder over the great span of Waterloo Bridge. Like a couple of fighter planes, they soared over the slow brown water of the Thames at its flood. Almost shoulder to shoulder the Bentley and the motorcycle soared over the Royal Festival Hall where it crouched beneath the great span on the South Bank, swinging right as they powered down the gradient on to York Road.

  Here at last Richard had to ease off the speed as the two vehicles continued to part the traffic side by side, lights blazing, siren wailing, weaving from one side of the roadway to the other. They hurled past the rear of the old County Hall on to the southern end of Westminster Bridge itself.

  Immediately on the far side of that, St Thomas’ Hospital towered white and multi-windowed, and the motorcycle was able to guide the racing Bentley into the lanes marked for Emergency Vehicles Only, through the gates and up to the covered portal of Accident and Emergency itself. Six tyres left black lines smoking on the tarmac as the two vehicles pulled into the emergency bay.

  The young officer had not been using all his concentration on riding. He had been yelling into his helmet mic. And to good effect. A crash team and a trolley came running out as Richard pulled to a stop. He was out of the vehicle at once, sucking his knuckles where he had skinned them on the release catch of her seatbelt. He pulled the passenger door open as the paramedic team arrived with a patter of footsteps and the scream of a wonky wheel.

  Richard reached in for her, aware that he was in the way but unable to restrain himself. As he did so, her eyes flickered, parting the pools of congealing blood and fixing him with a steady grey stare. Lips parted, stirring the black cloth of her mask. ‘Now that’s what I call a ride’ she whispered, still alive after all. Still alive; just barely.

  He went down on his knees then and the crash team had to pull him away in order to get to her. It was the motorcycle officer who eased him to his feet. ‘We’ll have to get the car round to the car park, sir. We can’t leave it here in the way. Are you OK to drive it or shall I?’