by Andrew Grant
There was only one question in my mind. Was she trapped there, herself? Or was she there to trap me?
The reason she was facing me rather than looking straight ahead turned out to be simple. She was straining with all her might to free her right hand. I could see the iron digging into her flesh. Her skin was tearing, and blood was dripping down to the ground from her wrist.
I felt like I had my answer.
“Melissa, stop that,” I said, stepping closer. “You’re hurting yourself. Let me help.”
“David, what are you doing here?” she said. “Get out of the way.”
I could see tears in her eyes, but before I could reach the shackle she gave a last almighty heave and tore it free from the masonry.
“Jones called me,” I said. “He told me there’d be a trade, for you. Are you OK?”
“So far,” she said, raising her blood-soaked hand. “Don’t worry about this. There was a method. Look closely - the wall was damaged when that nearest hole got smashed in it. You can see little cracks running across. They reached the place where my right wrist was attached, so I figured it would be the easier one to get free.”
“That’s smart. Do the cracks reach your left one?”
“No, sadly, they don’t,” she said, wrapping her fingers around the enormous spike that was still attached to the dangling shackle. “So it’s time for phase two. Dig for victory. I’ll soon get this other one loose.”
“It’ll take ages,” I said. “See how deep that thing went in? Here. Let me help.”
“Not a chance. You need to take cover, somewhere, and...”
Her next words were interrupted by the sound of a huge, dog-rough diesel engine spluttering into life. It was coming from the crane. We spun round together, to look, but I still couldn’t spot anyone in the cab.
“What’s he doing?” Melissa said, glancing nervously at the gaping holes to her right.
“Nothing,” I said. “He’s just trying to scare you. The wrecking ball isn’t even attached. He didn’t have time. And if he pokes his head out to take a shot, it’ll be the last mistake he ever makes.”
As we watched, the crane’s jib started to move. It was turning anti-clockwise, away from the asylum building, and kept going until it was sticking out sideways at ninety degrees, the cable swinging harmlessly in impotent circles below it.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Leckie’s just putting on a show. He wants to rattle you.”
“What do you mean?” she said. “Leckie’s...”
Then the crane itself began to move, drowning out the rest of her words. The track nearer us was locked, but the one on the opposite side must have been engaged because the entire vehicle was slowly rotating. It kept turning, practically on the spot, tearing up the ground beneath it, until it was facing directly towards us. All of a sudden the lack of a wrecking ball didn’t seem like such an obstacle.
The Beretta was in my hand, but I had no shot into the cab. Moving closer wouldn’t help, unless I could make it all the way to the crane’s bodywork, climb up on it, and fire through the broken window. But that wasn’t a viable option, either. I’d be too exposed for too long to stand a realistic chance. The only way to stop whoever was at the controls would be to gain some height. Not too much, or the cab’s metal roof would protect him. The first floor window would probably give the right angle. But getting there quickly enough was the problem. I could climb back in through any of the ground floor windows, but as far as I knew, the only staircase was at the far end of the wing. I’d have to run all the way back there, go up one floor, and run all the way to the front again. I could move fast, when the occasion called for it. But it would still take too long. The crane would be able to reach the building in half the time. That would leave a square hole in the stonework, rather than another round one. But the distinction would be purely academic as far as Melissa was concerned.
“You pull,” I said, leaning closer to her ear and taking hold of the spike that was still hanging from her right wrist. “I’ll work on the mortar. Together we’ve got a much better chance.”
Melissa started to strain against the shackle, and within a couple of seconds blood was beginning to seep from a fresh wound on her left wrist. I had nothing to show for my efforts. I was trying to dig away at the point where the iron stem disappeared into the masonry, but was making no impact at all.
“Time for brute force and ignorance, again,” I said, letting go of the metal and casting around the immediate area for a suitably sized piece of brick or stone. “I need something to hit that thing with.”
I spotted an ideal brickbat about twenty-five feet away, and as I moved across to grab it the sound of the crane’s engine grew suddenly louder. The driver must have been revving it hard. I turned to look, and it gradually returned to idling speed, like a petulant beast that demanded attention. I stood perfectly still and watched for half a minute, and the note didn’t change. Then I took a step towards Melissa. The noise instantly increased, and the crane began to move. Slowly at first. Almost imperceptibly. But my eyes weren’t playing tricks. Its speed was increasing. It was heading directly at Melissa. And the shackle was still holding firm.
The crane’s speed peaked at maybe four miles an hour. The kind of pace that would drive you insane if you were caught behind it on a public road. But to me, at that moment, it felt like a meteor couldn’t travel faster. Or be harder to knock off course. I couldn’t shoot the driver. I couldn’t get to a place where I even had a chance of shooting him. And even if I could be sure of killing him - if the rock in my hand was magically transformed into a grenade, for example - there was no guarantee that would stop the crane’s relentless, grinding, forward progress.
Melissa was thrashing wildly from side to side now, pulling with all her strength. Blood was pouring from her wrist and I caught a glimpse of shiny white bone gleaming through a wide gash in her skin. The crane had already halved the distance between its starting position and her. She had twenty seconds left before it would crush her against the stone, no more, and the way she was acting showed she knew it. She put her right foot on the wall at waist height, then her left, so that all her weight was on her wrist. Then she started slamming herself backwards, bending at the waist and pushing with her legs like a naughty toddler trying to escape a parent’s iron grip. It must have been absolute agony. And it was all in vain, because despite everything she tried the shackle refused to yield.
I knew there was a risk of her being hit by a ricochet or a fragment of flying stone like the informant had been, but we were both running out of options. So I raised the Beretta and aimed for point where the shackle was anchored to the wall. I fired. And missed. She was in a blind panic now, gyrating like an ancient berserker, and I’d pulled the shot for fear of hitting her directly. Which gave me an idea. It was a desperate one. Something that might make her hate me for the rest of her life. But with ten seconds left to save her, I didn’t think I had a choice.
I took a step to my right, to change the angle. Then I fired again. And this time I hit my target.
Melissa’s left wrist.
Chapter Forty-One
The bullet severed Melissa’s hand and she fell back, hitting the ground hard before I could get close enough to catch her. The best I could manage was to grab her under the arms and drag her sideways, a second before the crane slammed into the wall. Dark arterial blood was pumping from the mess of ragged, torn skin and splintered bone of her now shortened left arm. Her face was pale, almost green, and her eyes were glazed and unfocussed. I pulled off my belt and looped it round her bicep. The crane’s engine had stalled in the impact, but I could hear blocks of dislodged stone still raining down on its bodywork. I pulled the makeshift tourniquet tight, and kept on increasing the pressure until the flow of blood from her wound had slowed to a dribble. Melissa groaned, just once. Then I heard two other sounds. Footsteps, close behind me. And a shotgun cartridge being crunched into place.
“Leckie?” I said, slowly raising my hands.
<
br /> “Is she all right? Don’t let go of her. We’ve got no time. We need to...” he was saying when I dived away to my right, rolling over and reaching for the little .22 to replace the Beretta which I’d dropped when I was stopping Melissa’s bleeding.
A gun fired behind me. But it wasn’t the deep boom of a shotgun. It was the lighter snick of an automatic pistol. I spun round, still on my knees, and saw Leckie lying face down on the ground. About fifteen feet away. He had a single bullet hole in his smart blue overcoat, located neatly between his shoulder blades. Another man was standing behind him, twenty feet further back. It was Tim Jones. He was breathing heavily. His face was bruised and battered. And his Sig Sauer was in his right hand.
“So much for Stan Leckie,” he said, striding forwards and putting two more bullets into the back of his head. “May he rest in pieces.”
“I guess you weren’t as far from London as you thought,” I said.
“I guess not. And you’re welcome, by the way. I’m happy to help you. Specially after you came back to Melissa’s to help me, yesterday.”
“Let’s just call it square,” I said, standing up, tucking the .22 into the back of my waistband and retrieving my Beretta. “Now, where’s your car?”
“Over there,” he said, nodding towards the hole in the perimeter wall. “Why?”
“Melissa’s hurt. We need to get her to hospital.”
“Where is she? What happened? Is it serious?”
I guessed it was natural he’d ask. If he’d arrived after the crash, he wouldn’t have seen the crisis develop. Or how it was resolved. And the crane would have obstructed his view of Melissa from the spot where he’d stood to shoot Leckie.
“She lost a hand,” I said, leading the way to where she was lying. She’d rolled over into a fetal position since I’d moved, and was hugging her injured arm to her chest. “And a lot of blood. It looks like she’s going into shock.”
“Leckie did this?” he said. “The bastard.”
“No. She lost the hand because I shot her.”
“You did? Why?”
“Because there was no time, she was moving, and the shackle was too narrow to hit.”
“Wow. That’s hard-core. But they’re very narrow, David, those shackles. You can’t blame yourself for this, you know.”
Jones’s patronising tone reminded me of the conversation I’d had with my control when he told me I was being seconded to MI5. That was the morning after I’d hospitalised Jones himself, ironically. How had my control described my actions? As doing more harm than good? I’d dismissed his words, back then. But now, looking down at Melissa’s crumpled body, I couldn’t be so sure he was wrong.
“I know,” I said, consciously shaking off the doubt. “I don’t blame myself. It was the only way to save her. Now, we better hurry. She needs treatment, fast.”
“I’m with you,” Jones said. “What do you want me to do?”
“Drive us,” I said, hoisting Melissa onto my shoulder. “My car’s too far away.”
“No problem,” he said. “Come on. Follow me.”
I fell in step behind him, trying to balance my urge to hurry with the need to not shake Melissa around too roughly as we moved across the treacherous ground. Jones reached the car comfortably before me, paused for a moment, then opened the front passenger door and reclined the seat to its limit.
“You know, David, you’ve been through a lot today,” he said. “You’ve saved two lives, already. Why not let me take care of things from here? There’s no need for you waste your time in another hospital. I know you hate them.”
I didn’t reply until Melissa was in her seat with the belt fastened around her.
“That’s a generous offer,” I said. “I do hate hospitals. But no thanks. I think her chances of pulling through will be a little higher if I take her.”
“Why?” he said.
“Because otherwise, I think it won’t be long before I get another distraught phone call telling me that despite your best efforts, she bled out en route to the hospital. So you’ll be staying here, and I’ll be taking her.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I do. And I just have one question before we go. Who was driving the crane, just now?”
Jones was silent for a moment.
“Stan Leckie was driving it,” he said, finally. “Of course.”
“A word of advice,” I said. “If you’re going to lie convincingly, you need to not hesitate so much. And don’t elaborate. Answer quickly, simply, and try to keep your eyes still.”
“I didn’t hesitate. I mean, I didn’t understand the question. I was trying to figure out what you meant.”
“You were? I’m intrigued. Which part of the question was particularly confusing?”
“It’s not that. It’s because you already knew Leckie was driving it, so I couldn’t understand why you were asking.”
“Leckie was driving. What was he trying to do?”
“Kill Melissa.”
“Just Melissa? Or me, too?”
“Both of you.”
“I can understand Melissa. She was chained up. She couldn’t get away. But me? I was mobile. And he had a shotgun. Why didn’t he just shoot me, instead of leaving me free to release her?”
“He must have wanted to use his trademark method.”
“So, not only to kill us, but to make sure the world knew who’d done it?”
“I guess.”
“You’re quite new to this game, aren’t you Tim? Have you crossed paths with many killers?”
“Not too many, no.”
“Because here’s a word to the wise. There are lots of reasons for killing. Money. Revenge. Panic. Covering your tracks. But announcing your own guilt? Inviting the police to catch you? That’s not high on many murderers’ lists.”
Jones didn’t reply.
“And there’s another problem,” I said. “Leckie wasn’t threatening me with that shotgun. He was about to tell me something. And then you conveniently shot him.”
“Leckie was guilty,” he said. “He was tied into al-Aqsaba’a up to his elbows, and I can prove it.”
“Maybe you can. But can you prove who was helping him? From inside MI5? Or are you trying to do the opposite?”
Jones didn’t answer.
“I don’t have time for any more nonsense,” I said, after five seconds of silence. “Where’s your phone?”
“In my pocket,” he said. “Why?”
“Take it out,” I said, leveling my Beretta on the bridge of his nose. “Call your mother. Tell her goodbye.”
Jones didn’t move.
“What’s wrong?” I said. “Don’t you have a mother?”
“No,” he said. “I do.”
“Then don’t you care about her? Don’t you think she’d appreciate the chance to say goodbye to her son? Because if you don’t tell me what I want to know, I’m going to do to you what you did to Leckie.”
Jones started to move his mouth, but it was a couple of seconds before any sound came out.
“OK,” he said. “You win. It was me. I was driving the crane.”
“You were?” I said. “How did you get in place to shoot Leckie so soon after you crashed into the wall?”
“I didn’t wait for the impact. I jumped out as soon as it started moving.”
“So why didn’t I see you?”
“The crane was between us.”
“It couldn’t have been, or you’d have been on the other side of Leckie when you shot him.”
Jones shrugged.
“I could call your mother for you,” I said. “After you’re dead. And explain how you were a traitor. How does she feel about Islamic extremists, by the way? Is she a fan?”
“It’s not like that,” he said, as a sharp red dot appeared on his forehead. “No one was supposed to get…”
I dived forward, trying to knock him to the ground, but I heard the bang while I was still in the air. When I landed on him his body was alread
y slack. The red dot had been replaced by a neat, black-edged hole. The back of his skull was missing. And what had passed for his brains were soaking into the dirt next to his corpse.
Chapter Forty-Two
My suspicion about the crane driver had been proved right, but a little more dramatically than I’d planned. I rolled off Jones’s body and scrambled closer to the car, desperate for cover, and trying to steal a couple of seconds to think. I knew from experience that where you found one traitor, a second usually wasn’t too far away. A young, naïve one to do the donkey work, and be thrown under the bus if necessary. And an older, wiser head to lie low, pull the strings, and walk away untarnished. Jones fitted the first bill. But who could his puppet master be? I doubted it would have been someone I hadn’t come across before, because they wouldn’t be close enough to the case to influence it in any major way. The problem now, though, was they were close enough to influence me, permanently. If I could just figure out who it could be, that might give the tiny edge I’d need. I had precious little else to work with, beside a critically injured girl I had to get to the hospital.
I heard stones rattle, somewhere in front of the car. Someone was moving. Changing their angle. Coming closer.
I ran back through the people I’d met since first arriving at St Joseph’s. The things that had happened. The discussions we’d sat through as a result. The opinions that were expressed. The decisions that were taken. And then a couple of subtle phrases and an unexpected set of orders suddenly tied themselves into Jones’s last words, making a shaky kind of connection in my brain. That may not have been significant. But the red dot reappeared. And that was. Because it was hovering over the centre of my chest.
The vague connection was all I had. There was no choice but to gamble.
“It’s a little ungrateful to shoot me, don’t you think?” I said. “Considering how much I helped you, today?”
The red dot started to twitch. Then it moved. Across my body. Up the side of the car. And onto Melissa’s abdomen.
“You didn’t know the fire at the school was just a diversion, did you?” I said.