by Joel Hames
“So you thought there wouldn’t be any harm in Serena having a bit of one-to-one with her client.”
Gaddesdon nodded, disconsolate. I’d spoken calmly enough, but now I was starting to see what the words really meant.
Serena had killed Tarney.
Serena had stabbed Tarney in the neck, in a police station, and walked out like she’d just been in for coffee and a chat.
I shook my head, hoping something else would come, some other interpretation, some other answer, but there wasn’t one.
Roarkes was already on his phone and shaking his head.
“She’s gone. We can see what the traffic cams have got, but she’s been gone a few minutes. Priya, circulate a description.”
Malhotra got up and left the room. Roarkes was back on the phone shouting at people. Gaddesdon was running around trying to find some footage of what had happened in Tarney’s cell. I sat there in my chair, with the pain just out of range, thanks to the drugs, and my brain turning circles half a mile above my head, and I waited for everything to fall into place.
“All three?” she’d asked, and sure, she might have picked up the number somewhere else, but I was pretty sure I hadn’t said it. No wonder she’d been pleased. Bar one man, everyone who knew what she’d done had died at Black Moss Farm, and that man wasn’t going to be talking to anyone now.
I thought about Gaddesdon running around for the CCTV footage and remembered something similar happening after Carson’s suicide attempt. Carson had been in the same cell. There wasn’t going to be any CCTV footage. Whatever we thought we knew, there wasn’t going to be anything solid linking Serena Hawkes to Tarney’s death.
Someone, I realised, had known about my trip down to London, someone had set me up with a fist in the face in my own flat. Someone had told Derek Lyons he might find me outside the hospital, if he wanted to send me a little green car and a message no one except me would take seriously. And even I, it turned out, hadn’t taken it seriously enough.
And someone had made another call.
That was it, that was the thing that had nagged at me and brought me here to the police station instead of staring at the ceiling of the Manchester Royal Infirmary, eyes-deep in morphine. That was the piece in the wrong place that I hadn’t quite grasped, until everything shifted and I saw half the other pieces were in the wrong place, too. Someone had called Lyons and told him Sally Carson was on her way, and he’d sent Ray and Mike out to pick her up. “You take care of the loose ends where you are,” he’d said, and an hour or so later one of those loose ends had been knifed to death.
For most of the last twenty-four hours it had been Malhotra I’d thought of, rather than Roarkes, whenever I had something to tell or something to ask. Gaddesdon didn’t count: he was just the messenger. Get Malhotra down there. Let Malhotra know. Ask Malhotra if. Roarkes had been on the edge, neither friend nor enemy. Serena had planted that seed cleverly, had watered it and watched it grow.
And it had been Serena all along.
They’d catch up with her, eventually, no doubt. They might even find enough evidence to put her away, although Serena Hawkes was a clever woman and she’d have covered her tracks well. But I didn’t think they’d find her any time soon. I shook my head to clear it, and glanced at Roarkes staring silently at his phone. I couldn’t afford to think about Serena Hawkes. I had some talking to do. Some stories to get straight.
I stood and waved to Roarkes, who gave me a nod in return and went back to his silent stare. I felt a buzz in my pocket, lifted out the phone, which had somehow survived everything, checked the display.
I recognised the number. I couldn’t think what Mia Arazzi would want after everything I’d already given her. Maybe she’d have something for me.
“Hello Mia,” I said.
“Sam,” she replied. “I owe you one. Looks like there’s at least one lawyer who can give a journalist an honest tip.”
I laughed. And then paused.
“What do you mean, at least one?”
“That’s why I’m calling. She’s been feeding me crap all week, hasn’t she?”
I stopped dead, halfway out of the room, suddenly cold and alert.
“What do you mean?”
“All that bullshit about planning, all that crap about Argentina, she was taking the piss, wasn’t she? Stringing me along while she had a good old laugh at the dumb journalist, right? So I thought I’d tell her to take a fucking hike. I tried to call her first but she’s not answering her phone. Not to worry. I can wait.”
Serena. Not Folgate. It had been Serena all along.
One thing. I needed to know just one thing.
“Where are you, Mia?”
“Well I’m at her place, aren’t I? I’m standing outside her door freezing my tits off waiting for her to turn up.”
“Get the hell out of there,” I started to shout, but I’d only got as far as “Get—” when I heard another voice, clear and close, and even though I was hearing that voice down a phone line on the other side of Manchester I could tell the difference, the beleaguered provincial solicitor gone and in her place the woman who’d been playing me, playing us all, picking us up and moving us around her board like little black-and-white chessmen, twisting us to and fro like Roarkes’ dead Lego police.
“Hello Mia,” she said. “What the hell are you doing here?”
The line went dead.
29: Blue Sky, White Sky
THERE ARE PROCEDURES you’re supposed to follow in a hostage situation, there are rules for approach, cordons, communication channels, media blackouts. We broke every one of those rules without a second’s thought.
We went in one car, Malhotra driving, without her beats but still like the devil was behind her, and we’d been going five minutes with the sirens on and the lights flashing before anyone thought it might be a good idea to let someone back at Folgate know what was going on. There was a hostage, there was probably a weapon, there might even be a gun. Armed police would probably be needed. We almost certainly wouldn’t.
By the time Roarkes got off the phone we were just three minutes from Serena’s house in Marston and there was no way anyone was going to beat us there. I put down my own phone – Mia wasn’t answering – and looked around the car. Malhotra in front, eyes glued so tight to the road you could have set a firework off in her face and she wouldn’t have blinked. Roarkes next to her, stony-faced, poised and angry. Gaddesdon next to me, smiling nervously and cracking his knuckles.
They were detectives. They might not have been the first people you’d pick for an armed siege, but at least they might be some use when they got there. I tried to work out what function I might fulfil, when I could have been lying down on a hospital bed getting my arm looked at, or having my first honest conversation with Sally and Thomas Carson. The arm was hurting again, every sharp brake or fast corner releasing another wave of pain to roll up and down between my shoulder and my elbow. I wondered what kind of damage Tarney’s feet had done, and why it had taken so long for me to cotton on to it. Whatever the medics had given me, it was wearing off. They’d assumed I’d be at the hospital by now. I cursed Roarkes for letting me come with, for letting his guard down and forgetting to tell me I wasn’t a cop and I was done and I should just fuck off home.
We were there. There was no screech of brakes, just a sudden halt and the harsh silence as the siren died. We were there and we were out of the car, without noticing it, and following Malhotra across the road to a normal-looking semi-detached house with four windows and a garage beside the front door. Malhotra had left the lights running, so alternating blue and white bathed the whole street, shadows leaping up and lying down again, corners coming hard and bright and receding an instant later into darkness. And that feeling was back, the long-haul red-eye dead-brain blank-sky sense that none of it was real, that anything at all could happen now and it wouldn’t matter, because we’d all just wake up in the morning.
That was the tiredness talking, I realised. Again. The t
iredness and the pain and the lingering effects of whatever I’d been given to kill that pain. Flashing police lights don’t make your problems go away. They bring them home.
The door was slightly ajar. Sirens sounded in the distance. Roarkes looked at Malhotra, who held up a hand to stop him. He shook his head and started towards to the house. Halfway up the driveway he stopped and called out.
“Serena!”
It was a sensible enough place to stop, I thought, although the only truly sensible place for any of us to be right now was a long way from here. There was an authority in his voice that didn’t match his stance, still three or four yards from the door, elbows tucked in, shoulders tight, like he was expecting someone to walk up and throw a punch at him.
He stared at the house and the house just stared back at him. He turned and looked at the three of us, and I saw Malhotra shake her head. I was furthest back, still on the pavement. Gaddesdon took a step forward and went to walk past Malhotra. She held out an arm to stop him.
The sirens were getting closer. Gaddesdon pushed past Malhotra’s arm, and as he half-turned in the act of doing it I saw his face bright in a flash of white light, jaw set, eyes locked on the door ahead of him. He took another step forward and then paused as Roarkes shouted again.
“Serena! Come out, please. And let the journalist go.”
Silence, apart from the approaching sirens. They couldn’t be more than a couple of streets away now, I thought.
“We can talk about this, Serena.”
A window opened and a voice called out.
“Really? We can talk about it, can we?”
Roarkes looked up. The open window was directly above the front door, a patch of darkness against a different kind of darkness. He turned around to us, to me and Malhotra, because Gaddesdon was standing beside him now, then back again to the house and its occupants. He held out his arms on either side and called up again.
“We can work something out.”
Serena laughed, and I pictured her face. A sad, bitter laugh, and an expression to match it.
“Don’t you think it’s a bit late for that, Roarkes?”
The quality of the light abruptly changed, there were cars in the street, more blue and white, and a moment later someone shouted “Go dark!” and the street lamps went out entirely. Doors opened, slammed shut again, more shouts, footsteps, all a blur and none of it meaning a thing.
“Just walk away, Roarkes. All of you. Fuck off and leave me alone.”
I took half a step forward, like someone with something to do, or at least something to say, and then I stopped. I couldn’t think of anything to say, and I’d run out of things to do. I’d been out for dinner with this woman, I’d sat in a car with her and told her everything would be fine. Nothing was fine.
“I said fuck off.”
There was nothing menacing in that voice. I pictured her again and all I could see was desperation, a fish on a hook, a cornered animal casting frantically for a way out.
There was no way out. Serena Hawkes could look for a hundred years and she still wouldn’t find one.
“I’ll shoot you. I will fucking shoot you. Just back off.”
Did she have a gun? Given the people she’d been working with, I wouldn’t have bet against it.
“OK,” said Roarkes, and started to back away, still looking up. There were more shouts behind us, serious, angry voices telling us to get out of the way. I was inclined to agree with them. Roarkes shook his head slowly, sadly, and turned, and Gaddesdon, beside him, took a step forward.
A step in the wrong direction.
“Get back, you idiot!” shouted a man next to me. He was wearing nothing but black and holding a long and nasty-looking gun, and I hadn’t even noticed him crouching down no more than a yard from where I stood.
Roarkes turned back towards the house to see what was happening. Gaddesdon shook his head and took another step towards the house and Serena shouted “Back!”, but all Gaddesdon did was shake his head again and take yet another step and now he was only two or three more steps from the front door.
The crack might have been loud, might have split the air and startled the birds and scared the shit out of Montgomery Street, Marston, but it hadn’t come from nowhere. It had always been there, waiting and gazing dead-eyed from the end of the final step, not at the farmhouse but here, gazing not at me or Sally Carson but at Gaddesdon, as inevitable as the lights and the shouts and the footsteps and the blurs of the journeys that had brought us all here.
Gaddesdon rocked and fell to his knees. He looked down, and then up at the house, and then turned to look back at the street, at the armed units, at me. I wondered, briefly, absurdly, whether he was thinking the same thoughts I was, that everything had led to this moment, this point in the game where one piece fell and the rest stood and watched that fall, helpless and transfixed. He collapsed onto one hand, then both, then onto his side, as if he were letting himself down carefully and deliberately.
It hit me, suddenly, that this was no more inevitable than the throw of a dice. And I was more than a helpless spectator.
I ran.
The police were still shouting but I didn’t care. I ran to him and sat down beside him. I could see him struggling to focus, and then realising it was me.
He smiled.
Blood was pouring hard and fast from his stomach. He was bleeding to death, he’d be dead soon, I thought, unless someone did something, but I didn’t know what to do. I lifted his head and rested it on my legs and tried to remember whether I was supposed to put some pressure on the hole in his stomach or elevate his legs.
More shouts, from behind me, lights suddenly blinding as I turned towards them, lights pounding like fists onto the house. As I turned back to the window – “Armed police!” – I could see something now, dark shapes on a white background, the outlines of faces, one so close to the window it was almost out of it, and – “Put down the weapon!” – something in her hand, the light tinged with blue and her face now clear, looking down, at where I sat with Gaddesdon’s head on my leg, looking up again, an expression of pure and obvious horror, the hand coming up – “Put it down now or we WILL shoot!” – and then the next crack, except it wasn’t one crack, it was several, from directly behind me, from either side, from in front, the window itself, and I jerked back, because if she’d already shot Gaddesdon surely the next person she’d be shooting would be me, or maybe Roarkes, but either way I didn’t fancy my chances.
The gun was still in her hand, poised for a moment, pointing in the direction it had fired.
Pointing at her own head.
Pointing where her head had been, at least, because the impact from the little gun in her hand and several more from the professionals had knocked that head back and away, and her own bullet at close range had taken a chunk out of it, so that frozen in that cold blue-white light against the dark interior of the house it was some strange, irregular shape, something unnatural, monstrous, not fit for reality.
The bullets might have killed her but they hadn’t done anything to arrest her forward motion, the lean through the window, which was no longer just a lean, and down she came, in the glare of all that light, smack down onto the ground just a few feet from where I sat.
There was a moment’s silence, and then an explosion of noise, sirens, shouts, the repeating thud of a helicopter close by. There were screams from the window, Mia Arazzi’s screams, there was a broken body lying just in front of me, and a man bleeding to death on my knee. There were sobs so close by I looked up in surprise, wondering who was crying, felt my eyes blur over and sting, and realised it was me.
Blue and white washed over Gaddesdon’s face. A shadow fell over it, over me. Roarkes. A hand on my shoulder. Malhotra was crouched down the other side of Gaddesdon, paramedics were rushing over, people were talking, to each other, to me, to themselves. I couldn’t hear the words.
Blue sky.
White sky.
Red eye.
Dead eye.
Gone.
PART 4
AFTER THE FALL
30: Release
I’D PASSED OUT in the driveway. I’d been looking up cradling Gaddesdon’s head as Serena Hawkes fell to earth beside me, and next thing my own head had been on the tarmac and the only thing I’d been looking at was the inside of my eyelids.
I came to in the ambulance, but I didn’t remember any of that, either. When I finally got to see Malhotra, she told me the paramedics had told her I was shouting something about a car and a wall and swearing pretty inventively, and these were paramedics from Manchester so what they didn’t know about swearing probably wasn’t worth hearing.
I came to properly in a hospital bed with a needle in one hand and electrodes all over me, which they’d clearly only attached for the hell of it since the monitor they were connected to hadn’t been switched on. Either that, or I was dead, and my arm was hurting way too much for me to be dead.
I looked around the room. A couple of chairs, no other beds, a door (closed) and a long glass window onto what looked like a corridor. I was alone in a silent room, but there was a big red button beside the bed, and five minutes of pressing it repeatedly brought a doctor to the door.
My arm, she informed me, was infected.
“Oh,” I said. I’d assumed it was something more serious. She stared at me with her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed, an awkward cross between an angry headmistress and a cornered cat.
“You’re receiving antibiotics by intravenous drip,” she said. “You’ll be OK, but it’s a good thing we got to you when we did, because much more of this and you’d have been looking at amputation.”
“Amput—” I began, but got no further.
“I understand from your colleague that you recently sustained an injury in that arm?”
I nodded, dumbly, and wondered briefly who that colleague might be. Roarkes, no doubt. She nodded back at me, and for a moment there was a hint of sympathy there. Only a moment, though.