Jake said, ‘Uh-huh.’ He didn’t want to get caught up in anything.
‘She’s from your part of the world, isn’t she?’
Jake ducked out of it. ‘Manchester? I wouldn’t have said so.’
‘I thought you were southern.’
Jake wove behind the pillars supporting the gallery, keeping his face turned towards the walls, reading the plaques: one of them dedicated to Wesley. ‘I live in London. Maybe I’ve lost the accent.’
‘A Manchester lad, huh? You know, I was thinking you look familiar.’
Jake said, ‘I was thinking the same about you.’
‘Maybe. But I was a policeman. If you met me, you’d have been up to no good.’
‘Maybe in the papers?’
‘I didn’t look for publicity.’
Bollocks, he didn’t. Jake kept quiet and continued walking. Pascal turned with him. Jake was approaching the door now, his feet almost touching the wedge of light that flooded through it. One step and he would turn into a black silhouette against the doorway and a shadow across the floor, measuring a length to the place Pascal stood.
Jake said, ‘God’s Cop.’
Pascal’s arm came up from inside his coat. In his hand some kind of pistol.
Jake kept still between the shelter of the open door and a pillar. Pascal was squinting into the light but his arm was steady. If Jake moved, he would try to shoot.
Pascal said, ‘I knew you were one of them.’
‘One of what?’
‘Another queer boy, come looking for me.’
‘I’m a tourist from London. You’re not going to shoot me in church.‘
‘Wherever the Lord’s enemies take the battle.’
Jake said, ‘Who are you, the village lunatic?’ He looked across the sweep of light from the door – how many paces was that? Pascal was still holding his right arm firm, so rigid that it should have begun to shake. Maybe his craziness gave him a superhuman rigor.
‘I know you, queer boy. The suit doesn’t fool me. You got the same look as the other two.’
Jake leapt across the path of the door, trailing his mac out behind him so he looked like something swooping through the light. The mac pulled free of his hand as Pascal fired: the only thing he hit.
Sheltered in the doorway of the vestry, Jake waited for the echo of the blast to die in the shallow dome of the roof, then said, ‘I think you got a bystander out in the car-park.’
Pascal’s footsteps sounded across the stone-paved floor. In truth, there didn’t seem to be anyone out in the car-park. At three in the afternoon, the village was dead. No one actually worked in it, anyway. Anyone who heard the shot – and its echo – would assume it was a shotgun out in the fields or on the moor.
Jake ducked away, back through the vestry. The only weapons he could see were the banner-poles resting against the wardrobe doors – just as they had been the last time he saw them. He grabbed the shortest one as he ran through the next door and into the committee room. Pascal stayed a steady pace behind him, following on.
The committee table was draped in dustsheets, protection from the same dust that covered his pole and stuck to his hands, mixing with the sweat there. The only cover was beneath the table, or behind the dust-sheeted chairs stacked around the back wall. Jake didn’t trust either place. He pushed through the next door, back into the main body of the chapel. Behind him, Pascal’s hand struck the inner door between the vestry and the committee room.
The stairs to the upper gallery curved away to his left, squeezed between the chapel wall and the pulpit. Jake ran for them, his feet clattering on the wood until he reached the top. Standing framed against the organ, he realized he had made a mistake. There was no other way down. Pascal could back him round and round the gallery until he got tired of the game and shot him dead. Already the man was pounding across the chapel floor to the foot of the stairs. Jake turned and climbed up on the rail of the wooden balustrade, steadying himself as he held his pole like a javelin, hoping he had the height to spear it into Pascal as the man reached the top of the steps. Only now, he noticed the brass fleur-de-lis insignia topping off the pole. Only the middle of the three leaves resembled a spear point, and only bluntly. Pascal was nearing the top of the steps.
Jake looked down; the top of the pulpit lay below him. It was a good leap away, both down and across, but the open face of the lectern gave him something to aim for, a landing place. Jake resettled his spear in his hand, trying for a firmer grip. Pascal came head and shoulders above the step, and Jake let it fly.
The pole wobbled in midair, there was a damp warp in its length perhaps it had never been true. The brass tip struck Pascal with no more than a glancing blow as it veered from him and skittled down the steps. Pascal, unharmed but unbalanced, fired wide.
Jake leapt out into the chapel below. His leading foot – his left – landed square to the top of the pulpit lectern. The heel of his brogues jammed on its lip as the lectern teetered, then sheared from its mooring against the pulpit rail. Carried forward with the momentum of his leap, Jake swung his arms forwards and pushed off from the splintering lectern. He grabbed at the edge of the gallery walkway, holding for a second as his whole body swung forward. His knee smashed into the underside of the steps, and he crashed down in pain.
Pascal was above him. But hidden beneath the gallery, Jake couldn’t see him or be seen. He heard a curse, a clatter of feet. The man shouting, ‘As the others, so shall thee be. You fucking puff.’
Jake hobbled to the foot of the steps where his pole lay. He picked it up again; maybe it was better as a crutch.
‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay. Yea, to the eye as it offends and even unto the last word. Not for thee where righteous walks, but the valley where the lamb will devour thee.’
Jake held the pole like a kendo stick. Pascal – blundering on the steps – ran into the downstroke. It was a good stroke, anyway. Pascal’s head snapped back as the shaft cracked. Jake brought the shattered pole back to his nose in a salute, swung it round in his hands, and drove the point through the man’s chest. This time it pierced, Jake’s full weight forcing it down. When he couldn’t force it another millimetre, he snapped it off.
*
He locked the church behind him and threw the key out of the rental-car window on the stretch of motorway between Salford and Prestwich. Pascal’s body was in the wardrobe, folded amongst the old church banners. It would either be discovered within hours, or within the month; it all depended on whether Pascal had told his wife that he was going to the chapel.
As he passed Salford Quays and followed the canal around Deansgate and behind the G-Mex centre, he wondered again whether he should have visited Mrs Pascal. There was a chance the video tapes were still in her house: if not the ones Johnny left under her Christmas tree, then at least those Kevin Donnelly had brought with him, just under a month ago. By the time he packed and made the 7:30 from Piccadilly, he knew he’d made the right decision. Let someone else find the tapes – he was through trying to protect himself. Travelling first class, in the rhythmic daze of the InterCity train, he remembered that the funny thing about regret is that it’s better to regret something you have done than to regret something you haven’t done.
It was true, he was feeling better already. He could even smile, although that was due to the circumstances in which he had last heard this same advice: at the start of an album by the Butthole Surfers, the first track of Locust Abortion Technician. On the record, a a boy asks what regret means. His father feeds him the ‘better regret something’ line but ends by chanting: SATAN! SATAN! SATAN!’
Maybe he should have run up to Mrs Pascal’s house and shouted ‘Satan! Satan! Satan!’ through her letterbox. If he was ever asked, he could always claim that was his only real regret. What else? He was alive, his wife loved him. It was time he stopped living a half-life fogged by old regrets. Time to invent some new ones.
Chapter Twenty One
Davey G
reen chose the Range Rover; there was more room in the back and he wanted to read the autopsy report on John Pascal. As he drove out to Stockport, he kept it open on his knee. A note clipped to the first page asked for a reply by return post, but that was two days ago. The only reason he had the report with him now was that he wanted some light reading. God knows, he didn’t want to have to talk to either of the two bobbins sat up front, bickering over whether the Playstation or the PC was the better games engine.
When he looked up, DC Draper stopped mid-sentence. He must have been watching Davey in the rear-view mirror.
Green said, ‘One of you cunts, when we pass that drive-thru McD’s, go fetch me a coffee. And a chocolate donut.’
Draper jerked his head up and down. ‘Three sugars, boss?’
What did he think, that the order might have changed since the last coffee half an hour ago in Bootle Street nick? Green told him, ‘Yeah, three sugars, and get a couple of fruit pies for you and Collyhurst.’
‘Aah, boss.’
He always made his team eat a pie every time they went to McDonald’s. It was a good laugh: they always scalded the rooves of their mouths. The whole team was sick of the joke, except Davey.
DC Draper hauled the Range Rover into the McDonald’s car-park and ran to get the coffees. Davey never used the drive-thru option; it seemed undignified somehow. While he was gone, Davey told the other lad – DC Peter Collyhurst – to get out his notebook and take some dictation.
‘To DI whoever, name and address on this sticker…’
Davey waved the front cover of the autopsy report. Collyhurst looked up, took a sken at the sticker on the report’s cover, and nodded. Davey swept on.
‘… West Yorks Police blah-de-dah-de-dah, writing to say we have no interest in the death of John Pascal, retired twat-in-chief. Can’t think of any leftovers of his glorious career still infecting Manchester. We believe his death is a local matter: the old guy freelancing as a security guard down his local church. We’re just glad the loony had something to tide him over in his declining years. Blah Blah Blah. Delete most of it, type it up, and pop it in the e-mail. You got it?’
He wasn’t worried. He knew Collyhurst would end with something suitable. The main reason Green kept him on the team: say what you like about the lad, he could pass as literate.
Davey reread the note attached to page one. He couldn’t imagine West Yorks were serious when they asked for help anyway. It was just form. Davey ripped the note out and passed it over to Collyhurst.
‘If you get stuck for what to say, you can always recycle some of that.’
‘Okay, boss.’ Collyhurst gave it a glance through, memorizing the niceties. A second later, he said, ‘You read the back of this, boss? The West Yorks DI asking if he’ll see you at Pascal’s funeral? You going?’
‘No. I went up and paid my respects to Doris Pascal the second I heard her husband was dead.’
Collyhurst didn’t know that. Come to think of it, no one did.
‘How’s she taking it, boss?’
‘Oh, you know. What can you say? I went up, shared her grieving. I think she felt I’d taken some of the responsibility out of her hands.’
The responsibility – and the video tapes Mrs Pascal had found in her dead husband’s desk drawer. The old witch knew what was on the tapes. She definitely knew about the killing of John Conway, even if she didn’t know about Kevin Donnelly. Maybe she even believed Pascal’s fantasy justification, that a feral queer boy had broken into his house, determined to corrupt and infect him, his sanctuary and his virtue. Though maybe not – she looked mad, but not as mad as Pascal.
Draper returned with three coffees, a donut and two apple pies. Davey told him: careful, he didn’t want any coffee spilled on the upholstery. ‘You feel you spilling it, make sure it goes in your lap, not on the seat. I don’t want it anywhere it’s likely to do damage.’
He waited until they were eating their pies before he asked if they’d had any luck with the fingerprints.
Collyhurst spoke first, spluttering round a lava-flow of fruity stuff. ‘Hing-her-prints?’
‘On Kevin Donnelly’s car, you bobbin.’
Green was off-hand when he presented his team with what he called his hunch, asking them to ring round local forces until they found Donnelly’s car. It turned up, as he knew it would, in Littleborough.
Collyhurst swallowed hard. Davey gave him one more moment.
‘Speak up, son.’
The fruit pie bulged in his neck and disappeared. Collyhurst said, ‘I don’t think forensics have finished with the car yet, boss.’
Well, when they did get round to finishing, they should find the fingerprints of Gary Halliday. If they didn’t, Davey would just send them back. The man told Jake Powell he had broken into the car, so there was going to be some kind of evidence. Davey wasn’t even worried about it. He could tie Gary Halliday to Kevin Donnelly in other ways. He already had a couple of witnesses who remembered Donnelly and Halliday fighting at Piccadilly Station.
Back on the road again, Draper said, ‘This is almost over, isn’t it?’
Davey nodded. Just about.
‘You think you’ll find the videos, boss?’
Davey looked up from his coffee. Playing it dumb. ‘Which videos are these?’
‘The ones Halliday and Donnelly were fighting over, at the station.’
Davey shrugged. ‘How should I know? A couple of witnesses think they saw something – what’s that worth? I’ll believe there’s some videos when I see them.’ Or when he decided to unveil them. At the moment they were in a carry-all, on the floor of the Range Rover. Davey had his feet rested on top of them.
Collyhurst said, ‘So why we going back to Colchester Hall?’
Davey stared him out, slowly chewing his choco-donut. Collyhurst finally dropped his eyes, but Davey had to give him credit: he was a fucking clever cunt.
*
Colchester Hall had already been searched, numerous times. Green spent the past two days building a head of steam before he finally pulled out a rare piece of theatrics, ranting and railing that the place could never have been searched properly. The only thing that was going to satisfy him: he was going over and doing it himself… Properly this time, mind.
They parked at the front of the Hall and had to walk around the building to reach the tennis courts at the back. Davey looked over to the courts; it looked like the whole of the Manchester CID was there, lounging against the chicken-wire fence.
Davey hissed over his shoulder to Collyhurst, ‘Who invited all these buggers?’
‘You wanted a fresh search. They’re all volunteers.’
‘They volunteered? My big fat arse.’
Draper, walking on his other side, said, ‘They just wanted to see a legend in action, following one of his famous hunches.’
Davey grunted, tried not to look their way. He just strode over to the shower block, swinging the carry-all in his hand. Draper and Collyhurst were with him every step. The policemen lined against the tennis courts, they all stiffened and straightened, waiting for the big event.
Davey threw up his hands. ‘Fuck this circus.’
He slammed the carry-all into Collyhurst’s hands.
‘You go and search it. Me and Draper will wait outside.’ He glared over his shoulder at the the rest of CID. ‘Leave us to guard the door, make sure the integrity of the scene isn’t violated by their great fucking feet.’
Collyhurst said, ‘Where shall I look?’
‘Tear the fucking place apart. But don’t take too long over it.’
Collyhurst took less than ten minutes. When Davey saw him coming, he started shaking his head. Telling him to get the fuck back in there, he hadn’t left it long enough.
Collyhurst just sailed past him with a big fuck-off smile on his face, holding the video tapes above his head. The rest of CID started peeling away from the tennis-court fence and crowding in on him, stamping and cheering.
‘Thank you,
thank you.’ Collyhurst making out it was Oscar time and he was just so, so overwhelmed.
Davey knew this had already gone too far.
‘SHUT IT, THE FUCKING LOT OF YOU!’
Davey could at least be grateful his voice was so loud. Once they were quiet, he could tone it down.
‘Collyhurst, you done well. It’s like I always say, you need to think like one of these cunts if you want to catch them.’ And, turning to the crowd: ‘Of course, with Collyhurst it obviously took less of an imaginative stretch, but let’s give him some credit anyway.’
*
Back into Manchester, Davey started to relax. He told Draper and Collyhurst that be reckoned the investigation was over. He asked which one of them wanted the job of putting it all together and sending it over to the CPS.
Collyhurst said he’d do it. Not entirely sure that ordering and classifying evidence for a report to the Crown Prosecution Service constituted real detective work, but it was the closest he’d come so far. Anyway, if he wrote the report, he got to put his own gloss on the final search of the Colchester Hall shower block. Another of Davey Green’s mottoes: half the job of detection was in the presentation.
The tapes would be logged as evidence in both of Davey’s current investigations. The pictures on the tapes added weight to the child-abuse case. The bloodstains on the new videos would link Halliday to someone’s murder… whoever’s blood it turned out to be. It might even belong to Halliday himself. Apparently, Kevin Donnelly had bust the guy’s nose with a video while they were fighting in Piccadilly Station… at least, according to the account Jake Powell finessed out of Halliday on his prison visit. There shouldn’t be any trouble finding witnesses to corroborate the scene in court.
Davey said, ‘It’ll all stand up.’
‘No loose ends?’
He shook his head. ‘If there are, I don’t want to know about them.’ Davey put all the emphasis he could into his words – even though he knew Collyhurst would never take the hint.
Manchester Slingback Page 20