Redlaw - 01

by James Lovegrove

  By the time Father Dixon reached the vicarage, he was one of the last few pedestrians abroad. Motor traffic was still dense, but foot traffic was negligible. He strode briskly up the garden path and could not deny that he was glad once he was indoors, within walls.

  He found Redlaw conked out in an armchair in the lounge, feet up on a pouffe. The man had plainly been through the mill and was exhausted. Father Dixon let him sleep a little longer while he helped himself to a pale ale and some leftover chow mein from the fridge. Then he went round the house turning on lights and drawing curtains to ward off the dark. Redlaw came to with a sudden sharp intake of breath.

  “What’s the news?” was the first thing he said. “What did Wing find out?”

  “See for yourself.” Father Dixon triumphantly presented Redlaw with the two sheets of printout.

  Redlaw began reading:

  Lab results—Delilah Wing, PhD

  Abstract

  Presence of unexpectedly high concentration of arginine vasopressin (AVP) in sample of bovine haemoglobin taken from BovPlas pouch, batch # BP5/7601H/PR.

  Materials and Methods

  Sample was subjected to a battery of standard tests, but for the purposes of this text only the results of endocrinology testing are relevant. AVP was found in the blood at a level of 25 pg/ml (picogrammes per millilitre), 500% higher than the median level commonly found in...

  “You were right,” Father Dixon said. “Something very dodgy going on with the blood. Been tampered with.”

  Redlaw, still studying Dr Wing’s conclusions, set his mouth in a grim line of satisfaction. “It fits. It’s cynical in the extreme, but it fits. Nathaniel Lambourne’s been manipulating the ’Lesses, and Parliament. He’s manufactured a crisis, and the Prime Minister has played right into his hands, giving his Solarvilles the go-ahead. All this is—all this has ever been—is a business proposition. The ’Lesses get out of hand, people get scared, but oh, look, Lambourne has the tailor-made solution. How handy.” He gave a disgusted grunt. “Never mind that people have died and vampires have been put to the torch. No, that doesn’t matter one bit. Long as Lambourne and his consortium make a killing on this.”

  “What do you intend to do?”

  “Put a stop to it, of course. Expose the whole miserable fraud for what it is.”

  “But how do you—”

  The doorbell chimed, startlingly loud.

  “You expecting someone?” Redlaw asked.

  “No,” came the reply. “But folk call on me at all hours. It’ll be some parishioner in a tizzy about something or other. It always is. That or Jehovah’s Witnesses. I tell them I’m at the rational end of the Christian spectrum but they keep coming back.”

  “Ignore it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Pretend you’re not here.”

  “Every light in the house is on. The place is screaming ‘The vicar is in.’ What are you fretting about, anyway? No one knows you’re here.”

  “I don’t know,” said Redlaw. “I’m just not happy.”

  “When are you?” The doorbell went again, sounding somehow more urgent this time. “Whoever it is really wants me,” Father Dixon said. “And if they’ve made the effort to come over on a night when everyone is battening down the hatches, they must have a good reason. I have to go and let them in.”

  “All right,” Redlaw conceded. He drew his Cindermaker and flicked off the safety.

  “The gun, John? Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  “Well, keep it out of sight. If you must.”

  Father Dixon set off down the hallway. He didn’t have a spy hole in the front door. Spy holes were for the mistrustful, and that wasn’t him. He did, though, have a security chain. He wasn’t a complete idiot. He twisted the catch and cracked the door open.

  A size-thirteen boot kicked from the other side, hard, snapping the security chain and ramming the door into Father Dixon’s face with stunning force. He was thrown back against the wall, and fell sideways. He grabbed the coatrack for support, but it toppled with him, and he hit the floor tangled up in an anorak and a mackintosh. He heard feet thudding down the hallway. Next thing he knew, hands were grabbing him, freeing him from the coats, hauling him unceremoniously into a sitting position. He stared up into the face of a uniformed SHADE officer.

  “Just sit there, reverend,” the man said. One side of his face was badly scarred. “Be a good boy and don’t move a muscle. This’ll all be over in no time.”

  Sergeant Khalid burst through the lounge doorway to find Redlaw standing in the centre of the room, his Cindermaker levelled. He skidded to a halt. The second shady, Qureshi, pulled up behind him. Redlaw covered both of them with the gun, which trembled slightly in his grasp.

  “Now then, Redlaw,” said Khalid. “There’s no need for that. Put that thing away. No one here wants any gunplay. We’ve come to take you in. Just let us.”

  “Why would I let you? So you can dump me in a holding cell and hand me over to the cops?”

  “That’s the general idea, yes.”

  “I can’t allow that to happen.”

  “You can’t afford for it not to happen. What are you trying to prove, anyway? You’ve been haring all over the city like a lunatic. Give it up. Just admit that you’ve snapped. Whatever’s been eating you these past few months has finally got the better of you. I’m sure with counselling and medication you’ll soon be right as rain.”

  Redlaw laughed, roughly. “I’ve not gone crazy, Sergeant. You’re the one who’s crazy, thinking you can just bash down my friend’s door and come stampeding in. If Father Dixon’s not all right...”

  The gun-wielding arm drooped. With effort, a grimace of pain, Redlaw raised it again.

  “You’ll what?” said Khalid. “You can barely keep that gun up. And you aren’t going to shoot me or anyone, because that’s not who you are, Redlaw.”

  “Try me. This injury’s your fault, anyway. Don’t think I don’t know it was you who set me up on the Isle of Dogs. You somehow warned those ’Lesses I was coming.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Of course you’d say that, wouldn’t you? But I know.”

  “Honestly, Redlaw, this isn’t just crazy any more. It’s beyond crazy. I don’t like you, yes, but not so much I’d arrange to have you killed. I’m not that... that petty.”

  “Well, maybe you aren’t.” Redlaw firmed his grip on the Cindermaker. “But maybe I am.”

  Khalid took a step towards him, arms out to the side, presenting his own chest as a target. “Go ahead, then. Do it.”

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  “You’re not that sort of man.”

  “You keep telling me I’m crazy. Crazy people do all sorts of things they wouldn’t normally.”

  “Even so, you don’t kill. You won’t. Especially not a SHADE officer.”

  “All right. Perhaps not.” Redlaw angled the gun so that it was pointing at Khalid’s thigh. “But how about shoot to wound?”

  “Too great a risk with Fraxinus-round calibre. You could easily hit my femoral artery. I could bleed out. You want my death on your conscience? I think not. Sura 5:32, ‘If anyone slays a person, it will be as if he slays the whole people.’”

  “Forgive me for not being swayed by a quotation from a scripture that has no value to me.”

  “Do not belittle the holy Qu’ran, Redlaw,” Khalid rumbled. “Do not dare mock my faith.”

  “Out of my way. You too, Qureshi. I’m leaving. You’ll regret trying to stop me.”

  Redlaw sidestepped around the two officers, making for the doorway. His Cindermaker remained poised between him and them, but the cost of keeping it there was too great. The gun dipped, and Khalid smashed it sideways with a whipcrack backhand swipe. Redlaw’s hand hit the door jamb and he involuntarily discharged a round into the floor. In the ear-ringing aftermath of the gunshot Khalid drove the heel of one palm into Redlaw’s collarbone. Redlaw howled lik
e a whipped dog as his shoulder impacted with the wall, and Khalid twisted his wrist, forcing him to drop the Cindermaker. He attempted to follow this up by putting Redlaw into a wrist lock, but Redlaw jerked his hand back, driving a left-handed uppercut at Khalid’s jaw. Off-balance, he cuffed Khalid on the ear instead.

  Khalid sneered and drew back a fist. “The Commodore said ‘in one piece.’ But I might risk disappointing her.”

  The blow never landed, as Redlaw took advantage of Khalid’s little moment of preening to ram his knee up between the Sergeant’s legs. Khalid’s cheeks and eyeballs bulged and he sagged to the floor, letting out a sound like a steam whistle. Redlaw snatched up his Cindermaker and staggered out into the hallway.

  Qureshi knelt by Khalid. “Sir, are you all right?”

  “Get him!” Khalid said, red-faced, spewing spittle. “Blow the damn kafir away if you have to!”

  Qureshi took a few steps into the hallway, where he found Redlaw confronting the third SHADE officer, Heffernan. Father Dixon was slumped at Heffernan’s feet, looking dazed and ashen. Blood trickled from a cut to his forehead.

  “Move,” Redlaw said. “That’s an order.”

  Heffernan was a former doorman who had found God during an unusually violent bar brawl, when a vision of the Virgin Mary appeared before him and prevented him from walloping a troublemaker who was brandishing a broken bottle at him. He now bore the facial scars from that encounter, along with an unyielding sense of mission. Very little intimidated him.

  “I don’t take orders from ex-shadies,” he said. “You’re not getting past me.”

  “I’ll shoot.”

  “He won’t,” said Qureshi.

  Redlaw didn’t glance round. “You’ve hurt Father Dixon. Right now I’m in the mood to put a bullet in all three of you.”

  “I’m okay, John,” Father Dixon said wanly. “It’s nothing, just a bump on the noggin. Don’t be shooting anyone on my account.”

  “This is unacceptable,” said Redlaw to Heffernan and Qureshi. “You’re SHADE, not thugs.”

  “Put the gun down,” said Heffernan. “You’re not leaving this place unless it’s with us.”

  “I beg to differ.”

  Redlaw squeezed the trigger, and a hole appeared in the front door just inches from Heffernan’s head. Heffernan recoiled, clutching his cheek, which had caught the splinters. Redlaw charged him, driving his left shoulder into Heffernan’s meaty midriff, clubbing the shady’s skull with the butt of his Cindermaker. Heffernan yowled and groped blindly, angrily, for his attacker. Redlaw twisted under the man’s flailing paw, and grabbed the door handle. He was just seconds from making good his escape.

  He heard a bellow behind him. Khalid came furiously out of the lounge, his Cindermaker out and pointed straight at Redlaw. In his maddened, streaming eyes there was clear, murderous intent. A bullet in his gun had Redlaw’s name on it.

  “No!”

  This from Father Dixon, who lurched to his feet.

  Khalid fired.

  Father Dixon, throwing himself in front of Redlaw, took the round in his upper abdomen. He was hurled back against his friend, and both men struck the door.

  “No!”

  This from Redlaw, who clutched Father Dixon. All at once, any thought of getting away had left him. He took Father Dixon’s weight, lowering him gently down onto the doormat. The vicar’s body was going into spasm. Blood spilled down his shirtfront from a teacup-sized cavity in his ribs.

  The three SHADE officers were too aghast to move. All stared at the wounded man, none more wide-eyed or gape-mouthed than Sergeant Khalid.

  Father Dixon turned his head to Redlaw. He tried to speak.

  “You’ve... you’ve got to...”

  “Save it,” said Redlaw. “We’re getting you an ambulance. Ambulance!” he shouted at the shadies. “Somebody bloody call one!”

  Qureshi delved into his pocket for his phone.

  “It’s... I hope to God I’ve been right all this time,” said Father Dixon. “Otherwise... it’d really not be funny.”

  “Let’s not have any of that. You’re going to be okay. I don’t think it’s too bad.”

  But the wound was making a sucking sound, and Father Dixon’s breath was rattling wetly at the back of his throat.

  “God’s work, John,” he choked out, spitting blood. “Never forget... you’re doing...”

  He shuddered. His head lolled. He went limp.

  St Erasmus’s parish no longer had its pastor.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The ambulance arrived, futilely. As paramedics rushed up the vicarage’s front path, Redlaw was frogmarched the other way at gunpoint. Heffernan, jowl quilled with splinters, shoved him into the back seat of a patrol car and slid in beside him. Sergeant Khalid tossed Redlaw’s Cindermaker and weapons vest onto the passenger seat and took the wheel. Qureshi had been assigned to stay behind to handle the paramedics and, when they came, the police.

  “Shouldn’t have resisted,” Khalid said as he pulled out into the road. His groin was still tender. “It was your fault. You brought this on yourself.”

  Redlaw said nothing, just stared fixedly at his knees.

  “If you’d only come quietly, none of it would have happened. Things wouldn’t have got so out of hand.”

  Redlaw continued to stare. If he was listening, if he could even hear Khalid, he gave no sign.

  “If it wasn’t for you, he’d still be alive.”

  Khalid checked in the rearview mirror. Redlaw had raised his head. Their eyes met, and the sheer venom that radiated from Redlaw’s glowering gaze made something inside Khalid shrivel, like wax in flame. He focused his attention back on the road, knowing that he was hated by the man in the back seat as he had never been hated by anyone.

  “Allahu akbar,” he consoled himself under his breath. Everything was God’s will. Even accidental deaths.

  The holding cells were on the third floor of SHADE HQ. Khalid and Heffernan took Redlaw straight up there from the sub-basement garage. Both were handling him brusquely, as though he were still a potential threat and flight risk, but the fight had gone out of him. Father Dixon’s death had left him hollow and raw.

  He went meekly, numbly into the cell. The officer in charge of incarceration, Noakes, closed the door on him and shot home the locking bar.

  “It’s a crying shame,” Noakes said with a wistful shake of the head. “I mean, Stokers, vampire wannabes, druggies who think they’ve been bitten, the odd Sunless, yes, I’ll happily bang them up for the night... But Redlaw?”

  “An object lesson to us all,” said Khalid. “Look after these.” He handed Noakes Redlaw’s gun and vest, then turned to Heffernan. “You should go and have your face seen to.”

  Heffernan fingered the splinters gingerly. “It’s not so bad. Not compared to this.” He traced the bottle scar that ran in a jagged line down the right side of his face. “I’m just as pretty as I ever was.”

  “Still, don’t want it to go septic, do you?”

  “True.”

  Heffernan trotted off to the minor injuries unit on the second floor. Khalid headed in the opposite direction, up to the Commodore’s office on the eighth. Concerned though he was for Heffernan’s welfare, he had sent him downstairs mainly so that he could bring Macarthur news of Redlaw’s capture on his own. That way the credit would not have to be shared, and he could come clean about the shooting of the vicar. If he gave Macarthur his side of the story first, before she heard about it from anyone else, she would be more understanding and, he hoped, more lenient.

  There was, after all, a captaincy going begging in the north-east quadrant. Khalid felt he was long overdue for promotion, and bringing in Redlaw ought to have clinched it for him. Father Dixon notwithstanding, the position might still be his, assuming he played his cards right.

  Macarthur was on the phone when Khalid knocked and entered. She looked harassed and irritable. “I have nothing to tell you right now,” she said to whoever was on the ot
her end of the line. “Events are in motion. Perhaps by the end of the night, when the first phase of the transfer operation is complete, then I’ll be in a position to make a statement. Until then, stop bothering me. Goodbye.”

  Clunk went the receiver. She looked up at Khalid. “Bloody journos. Bet you anything you like there’ll be another one ringing in a moment or so. Press time’s looming and everybody wants a comment. Anyway, I’m guessing by the glint in your eye that you did it. Mission accomplished.”

  “He’s down in the cells,” Khalid said with a nod.

  “That’s a relief. Well done. Were there any problems?”

  “There was... collateral damage, I’m sorry to say.”

  “He’s hurt?”

  “Not Redlaw. The priest, Dixon.”

  “Oh, no. How badly?”

  Khalid did not reply, and that told her how badly.

  “What happened?”

  He explained: Redlaw resisting arrest, attempting to flee, causing grievous bodily harm to both Khalid and Heffernan, not to mention discharging his firearm twice with intent to wound, possibly to kill.

  “When I fired, it was meant as a warning shot, to bring him to heel, but I did feel that my life was in danger, so it was more or less self-defence. Father Dixon just got in the way. He moved unpredictably. A split second earlier, a split second later, all would have been fine. The situation was fluid, chaotic. I deeply regret the loss of life. I can hardly express how saddened I am. I know Father Dixon and you were on friendly terms. I’m sorry, marm, truly I am.”

  It galled Khalid to have to abase himself before this... this woman. In a fair and just world, a world that lived according to the tenets of the One True Faith, the likes of Macarthur would not hold positions of public responsibility. She would cover herself appropriately, as Khalid’s wife Zaina did, and remain out of sight, in keeping with the Prophet’s decrees. She would not cut her hair so short, either. She would not unsex herself like that and deny the feminine attributes God had given her—such as they were, for Gail Macarthur was not one of life’s great beauties.