by Matt Brolly
Lambert ignored the startled faces of the other drivers as he pulled up beside the Mini. Behind him, Robertson and his colleagues made the same manoeuvre. Lambert didn’t see the Mini driver’s reaction as drove past, though he noticed Matilda’s hand gesture to the teenager as they pulled directly in front of the car.
‘Totally oblivious,’ said Matilda.
Lambert sped on, knowing every wasted second was a chance for the Fireman to escape.
‘Shit, the signal’s dead,’ said Matilda, as they headed into Chislehurst.
‘Christ,’ Lambert yelled, thrusting the gearbox into a lower gear as he sped by another idling car.
‘Next left,’ said Matilda.
As they rounded a corner Lambert skidded and applied the brakes, almost tipping the car onto two wheels as he screeched around the corner. All he could think of was Caroline Jardine. Was she alone somewhere? Did she know her husband was dead?
Lambert skidded to a stop outside the block of flats. ‘Do we have a location for him?’ he asked Matilda, rushing out of the car.
Robertson pulled up alongside. ‘The signal’s gone dead,’ he said.
‘Where was he when he spoke to us?’ said Lambert.
The estate before them was monolithic in scale, an amalgamation of four high-rise buildings and various extensions which had been added on piecemeal over the years.
‘I’ve been trying to break it down on the journey over,’ said Robertson. ‘The signals seem to be coming from floor five. That building there,’ he said, pointing to the largest of the high-rise buildings.
‘I had a look at the electoral register but the only Hodge on the estate is a Sidney and Eleanor and they don’t appear to be any relation,’ he added.
‘Do you have an address for them?’ said Lambert.
Robertson nodded.
‘Right, you go over there,’ said Lambert, to one of Robertson’s colleagues.
‘Robertson, you and your colleague here guard the stairwell. When the local plod honours us with their presence, tell them to cordon off the whole area. I want no one in or out. Do you understand?’
Robertson nodded.
Lambert turned and with Matilda made his way up the stairwell.
The journey was not a pleasant one. Lambert had visited such places many times before, especially during his period as a probation officer. Estates like this were tiny parcels of land forgotten by society. Only streets away, people were living in relative luxury, in semi-detached houses with two-car driveways. Here, the majority of people were struggling to make ends meet, living day to day off meagre benefits and whatever other forms of income they could scrounge together.
The stairwell was damp and had clearly been used as a makeshift lavatory. The bitter scent of ammonia stung Lambert’s eyes as he made his way past the graffiti-laden walls. He was out of breath by the time he reached the fifth floor. An iron-plated door decorated with flecks of battered paintwork blocked their path.
‘Is this to keep them in or us out?’ said Lambert, as he pulled open the heavy piece of metal. ‘Any signal now?’
‘Nothing.’
From the gateway, they were able to head in two directions. ‘You go left, I’ll go right,’ said Lambert.
Matilda nodded, her baton already in her hand. ‘Let’s meet in the middle.’
The local force arrived as Lambert made his way along the corridor. He glanced over the balcony, where he saw Robertson speaking to Bickland.
Lambert tried each door, peering through the windows into other people’s lives. Many of the doors were chipped or even broken, boarded up with random planks of wood and plastic. From one door, he heard the loud thudding of house music, the first sign of life he’d encountered since arriving at the building.
The technology Robertson used was superior even to what they’d had a couple of years ago, but it still sometimes made mistakes. There was a chance the call had come from the fourth or sixth floor and Lambert was simply chasing shadows making his way along the dank corridors.
However, even if the Fireman had escaped, it was unlikely he would have taken the Jardines with him, or Caroline, if what Hodge had said about Marcus Jardine was to be believed. It would have been too much to move the body, willing or not, in the time it had taken Lambert to arrive. That was, of course, assuming he was holding Caroline captive in the estate.
Lambert was almost resigned to a doing a door-by-door search of the entire building when Matilda stuck her head around the corner and called to him. She waved her hand urgently, her baton held high in her other hand. Lambert sprinted along the corridor, skipping over an ornamental flowerpot a resident had left in the middle of the gangway.
‘There are signs of a break-in,’ said Matilda in hushed tones as he reached her. ‘Just down here.’
Lambert followed her halfway down the landing. She stopped outside flat 516, the door of which had clearly been smashed open. The upper hinges of the door had been obliterated and the door dangled from the lower hinges at a diagonal angle across the threshold. Lambert pushed the door against the inside wall and made his way into the building.
The parallels with the derelict bungalow in Romford were obvious. The carpet was a patchwork of stains and litter, the smell just as repulsive. Lambert called out, his voice echoing from the bare walls. He pulled out his baton and tore through the living room door with a firm kick to the lock. The room was completely bare, save for one large object in the middle of the wooden floorboards.
The body of a man, surrounded by a growing pool of blood.
Chapter Thirty-One
‘Call it in,’ said Lambert, as he moved towards the man he believed to be Trevor Hodge.
Despite the drama of the situation Lambert remained calm. His approach was slow as he tried to assess Hodge’s injuries whilst keeping an eye out for explosives. The man’s head was turned to the left, half his face submerged in a puddle of blood.
‘Trevor, is that you?’ said Lambert, leaning nearer so they were face to face. The man lowered his eyes and didn’t speak.
‘Trevor, my name is DCI Lambert. Can you tell me where you’ve been injured?’
Hodge was lying on his front, and blood pooled around his lower half. Lambert feared moving him before the paramedics arrived. He lifted up the back of Hodge’s shirt revealing a deep laceration to his lower back.
‘Paramedics are on their way, Trevor. You’re going to have to hang on there. Who did this to you?’
Hodge began convulsing. Lambert stretched his hand out and placed it on the man’s back, holding it in position.
‘The same people who told you to kill the Jardines?’
Hodge nodded, the movement so slight Lambert wasn’t sure if he’d imagined it or not.
‘Where’s Caroline Jardine, Trevor?’ he said, his tone neutral. ‘Come on, Trevor, you can do one more good thing. Just tell me where she is.’
The colour was fading from Hodge’s face and the shaking had stopped. A pair of paramedics appeared and pushed Lambert out of the way.
‘Do you think it’s self-inflicted?’ said Matilda, moving up next to him.
The paramedics couldn’t get any sense from Hodge. They lay a stretcher on the floor, and when they turned the body over Lambert understood why. It was remarkable the man was alive at all. His abdomen and chest were punctured by what appeared to be tens of deep wounds. Blood flowed in a fierce torrent from one particular wound. One of the paramedics tried to stem the flow whilst the other placed an oxygen mask onto Hodge’s mouth. They strapped him to the stretcher and were about to lift him out of the room when Hodge removed his mask.
‘What is it, Trevor?’ said Lambert, leaning towards him.
‘Sir, you need to stay clear,’ said one of the paramedics, but Lambert brushed him aside.
Hodge tried to speak as blood trickled from his mouth, but only air escaped.
‘What was that, Trevor?’ Lambert said softly, leaning closer to the man.
Hodge paused and took
in a large breath before uttering one hushed word to Lambert and shutting his eyes.
The paramedic Lambert had brushed aside returned the favour.
‘What did you say, Trevor?’ said Lambert, raising his voice, but Hodge had uttered his last words.
Matilda followed the two paramedics out of the flat with Lambert close behind. As he crossed the threshold, he noticed something in the shadows of the flat. The second paramedic must have noticed the same thing, his face turning white with fear.
Lambert didn’t waste any time. ‘Run,’ he shouted. He was less than twenty metres down the corridor when an explosion ripped through the building.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Lambert lay on his side, clutching his chest.
The explosion had driven him across the passageway, the brick wall which separated the floor from the drop below breaking his fall. His eyes stung as he scanned the smoke-filled area. He must have been knocked unconscious. He checked his head for injuries, noticing flames dancing in the smoke by the doorway. His first thoughts were of Matilda. She’d been in front of him just before the explosion and he prayed she’d escaped unharmed. It was impossible to see from his prone position, and he was unable to make out the shapes of the two paramedics and Hodge. He opened his mouth to call for help, his lungs invaded by acrid smoke. The burning sensation spread through his body until it was too painful to move.
He recalled Hodge speaking to him seconds before the explosion. It had only been one word but in all the commotion, Lambert couldn’t be sure if Hodge had spoken it or if it had been a trick of his imagination. Either way, he needed to remember it. He was sure he’d read it one time during the case, even if he couldn’t quite place it now. He mouthed the word to himself over and over, a nonsense mantra he hoped would one day make sense should he escape his present situation.
He tried to push himself up, collapsing immediately. The procedure in such situations was to keep low, to search for pockets of oxygen and await rescue. He laid his head on the concrete floor and tried to stay awake. His eyelids were heavy and although he tried to fight it, he sensed he was seconds away from falling unconscious again.
From the gloom came a voice. Lambert couldn’t make out the words. He realised his eyes were closed. As he opened them, acid-like tears streamed from his eyes and rubbing them with his grime-covered hands only intensified the burning sensation. He risked one more look, the heat even more intense. This time he glimpsed a break in the smoke as a hand reached for him and placed a mask over his face.
* * *
The next thing Lambert knew, he was lying on a stretcher at the top of the stairwell, the chilled air around him a relief. His eyes still burned but he managed to open them, relieved to see Matilda walking by the side of the stretcher. He went to speak, his throat burning from the fumes he’d inhaled, but the oxygen mask was still on him. He tried to pull it off, only for Matilda to hold it in place.
‘Give it a few minutes, Michael,’ she said.
It must have taken a lot for her to be there, so close to an explosion for a second day in a row, after what had happened to her. But Lambert didn’t want to wait a couple of minutes. He pulled off the mask and instructed the paramedics to allow him off the stretcher.
‘Let’s wait till we get you back in the ambulance,’ said one of the pair.
‘Now,’ said Lambert, a painful stabbing sensation hitting the back of his throat as he made the hoarse, garbled sound.
‘Wait till we’re in the back of the ambulance,’ the man repeated, focusing his attention elsewhere.
The lift was out of order so they made slow progress down the flight of stairs. Matilda led the way, guiding the first paramedic as they carried Lambert as gently as possible to the bottom of the stairwell. Once placed in the back of the ambulance, Lambert tore at his constraints. An onrush of dizziness hit him as he sat up but he didn’t let on.
‘You need to go to hospital,’ said one of the paramedics. ‘You’ve taken in a lot of smoke.’
‘I could do with some water,’ Lambert said to Matilda, ignoring the man.
Matilda held a bottle to his lips.
‘Just sip it,’ said the paramedic.
Each drop of water pained him and he tried not to wince as Matilda studied his reaction.
‘Hodge?’ he asked, taking a final sip and handing the bottle back to Matilda.
‘He didn’t make it. I don’t think the explosion was as powerful as yesterday’s. It blew out the front window, but the majority of the partition wall is still intact. That’s why you’re still alive. I think Hodge was gone by the time he’d left the flat. You saw his wounds.’
A vision of Hodge’s torso sprang into Lambert’s mind, the lines of tiny puncture marks like an absurd decoration. Lambert had lost track of time. He didn’t know how long ago the explosion had occurred and didn’t want to ask Matilda in case she tried to insist he go to the hospital.
As if reading his mind, she updated him on the situation. ‘We’re still not letting anyone in or out. My guess is whoever’s done this to Hodge is long gone. There are hundreds if not thousands of residents in the estate and it’ll be a near impossible task questioning all of them.’
Lambert took another sip of water, the pain easing. He swung his legs off the stretcher, groaning at the effort.
Matilda reached out her hands, as if to hold him in position, before thinking better of it.
Lambert could hear the blood drum behind his ears and for a second wanted nothing more than to lie back down on the gurney and to spend time recuperating in the hospital. But he had to find Caroline Jardine.
He thanked the paramedics, who looked dismayed he was leaving their care.
‘I need to get to a laptop,’ he told Matilda. ‘There’s something I need to check out.’
Chapter Thirty-Three
From the look of the faces in the incident room, it appeared the rest of the team shared Lambert’s melancholy at the death of Trevor Hodge. Although the man who’d been responsible for at least three fires and possibly the deaths of Jonathan Turner, Maxine Berry, and Marcus Jardine was no longer at large, they were no closer to finding Caroline Jardine.
The team looked up as Lambert entered the room before returning to their laptops and phones.
The Fireman was dead, but there was still a missing officer.
He needed to go home, shower and change out of the clothes which were contaminated by his proximity to the explosion, but time did not allow for such frivolities. He’d left Matilda at the scene, working with the local CID to somehow make a dent in their house-to-house searches.
Lambert remembered the man’s dying words and repeated them to himself, as if somehow they could be forgotten. He’d read the words before in the case files. They were common words, but the context in which he’d read them wasn’t.
He logged onto the System and hesitated before entering the words. He hadn’t yet shared with anyone what Hodge had told him, and now felt loath to enter the details onto the System where it would be forever linked with him. Instead, he searched through his saved documents and selected one of the old case files.
Trevor Hodge’s dying words were ‘the manor,’ and Lambert remembered where he’d seen those words before. After speaking to Tillman, following the tip-off from Caroline’s ex-husband Linklater, Lambert had studied the files of DS Alistair Newlyn, Caroline’s ex-colleague who had committed suicide.
Like Caroline Jardine and DS Florence Colville’s files from the weeks before Newlyn committed suicide, much of the file was blanked out. The case was an investigation into people trafficking, and Lambert had remembered the entry, as it stuck out in the case notes.
For one, the word was hyphenated due to a page break. Instead of ‘the manor’, the word was included in the document as ‘the man-or’, with the ‘-or’ starting a new page. It could have been coincidence, but to Lambert it suggested Newlyn had entered the word purposely this way, as if he wanted someone to spot it. As if he wanted to pr
event someone blanking out the phrase.
Alone, it meant nothing. The sentence read simply, ‘possible connection to the man-or.’ But coupled with Hodge’s dying words it started to take on a greater significance.
Knowing he was almost definitely under surveillance, he couldn’t risk entering ‘the manor’ as a search term. Instead, he began the slow process of reading a number of other files, starting with Caroline Jardine’s most recent cases. He had to search for the phrase manually, reading each text from each case from beginning to end. It would take hours, so he began scanning the cover sheets of her cases trying to ascertain which was the best to study. An hour in, he realised the search was pointless. If his theory was correct then he imagined Jardine would have been as reluctant as he was to enter the details anywhere they could be traced. That left him with only one option. His time in the Group had taught him a number of cheats. He logged out of the System and used a different laptop to log in to HOLMES, the police database, using a proxy ID. He couldn’t run a search on Jardine or Newlyn so instead he ran a search on the manor, relating to recent cases.
Again, the results were numerous, but after a bit of refining one case caught his eye. The local CID had been searching for a known paedophile, Kevin Clarkson, and following a tip-off, had found the remains of a body in an area called Waverley Manor.
Lambert ran a search for the location, but it didn’t appear on the internet. He began reading the details of the case and quickly discovered ‘the Manor’ was a colloquial term. Lambert read the notes of the lead investigator, DI Greene, only to discover many of the notes were blanked out in a style reminiscent of Caroline Jardine and Alistair Newlyn’s earlier files.
Lambert considered his options for a few seconds before deciding time couldn’t wait. He picked up his phone and called DI Greene, who agreed to meet him at her office within the next two hours.
He was about to leave when Tillman entered – as usual, not bothering with the pleasantries of knocking on the door.