by Joel Hames
“And then it turns into nothing, just some bloke sitting there with his mouth shut and the police running round in circles. I mean, they got killed, two of them, I was expecting all kinds of grief, all kinds of shit from them, and shit from the police I know how to handle. But instead no one knows what the hell’s going on, and the pricks at Folgate are the usual pricks but Roarkes is bloody helping me, and I’ve still got nothing done, I’ve messed up so badly they’ve had to call you in, and now this.”
She trailed off. The smile was gone. She turned away from me, but not quickly enough to hide the fact her eyes were glistening.
“Serena. Listen to me, Serena. This isn’t your fault. There’s nothing you could have done that would have made this turn out any different.”
She nodded, but she didn’t look round. I carried on.
“And it’s not like he’s dead. Chances are he’s going to be fine. And the police have nothing. Which means eventually they’re going to let him go, and it doesn’t matter what you did or didn’t do, you’ll be the lawyer whose client was plastered all over the news and then released before he even got to court. Have you started thinking about going for the press?”
She turned to look back at me, a frown on her face. It was a nice-looking face, I decided. Unusual, sure. But definitely nice-looking.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean suing the bastards. They’re ripe for it. Bound to get something out of one of the tabloids, at least.”
She nodded. “Yeah. I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Got to get him out first. That’s if he ever wakes up. And he might want someone else acting for him after that. At least they can’t pretend he’s not vulnerable now.”
She smiled, a sad little smile, and sighed. Her glass wasn’t just half-empty. It hadn’t seen a drop for years.
“I don’t know, Sam,” she continued. “I don’t remember the last time I had a client I actually wanted.”
I didn’t know Serena Hawkes well enough to say if she was an empty-glass person or this was just an empty-glass moment. I took a chance, reached across, put my hand on her shoulder. She looked at it for a moment, and I thought she was going to object, but she didn’t. Instead she let it rest there, shivered, slightly, and settled down into the seat. Neither of us said anything for a minute. We looked out of the windscreen at the gloom and the drizzle and let the silence grow around us, feel its way through the car, build a space where nothing could disturb us.
A van sped past, sending a spray of dirty water against my window, and my hand felt suddenly wrong where it was. I couldn’t work out whether moving it away would make it worse. She turned to me and smiled, an uncertain sort of smile that only added to my unease. And then she reached up, took my hand off her shoulder and held it between both of hers.
“Thanks.”
I smiled back at her. She hadn’t let go of my hand. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I certainly didn’t hate it.
“Well, I do my best,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Defusing the moment. I didn’t want the moment defused, or at least I didn’t think I did, but my mouth was ahead of me on the same track it always picked when it went off on its own, glib, comic, deeply unserious.
“Really. I feel better now. Much better. You’re a good man, Sam Williams.”
“You don’t know me well enough to say that.”
Shit. What was I saying? This wasn’t glib. This was worse. And she was buying it, too.
“Hmmm,” she said, and glanced quickly away. I could still see the smile, though, reflected in the windscreen. “Well, if we’re going to be working together, don’t you think we should get to know each other a little better?”
Just in case I hadn’t got the message, she squeezed my hand between hers, hard. I got the message. I couldn’t speak.
“What do you say, Sam? Fancy a drink?”
Her phone rang. She flinched, reached into her bag with her other hand, checked the display, switched it off. But the moment was gone. She’d turned back towards me and released my hand, and the smile was just a nice, normal, friendly smile between colleagues. If I said no, if I was too busy or too tired or desperate not to miss Game of Thrones then that would be fine, it was just a nice, normal, friendly drink between colleagues that hadn’t happened today but might happen tomorrow.
But the words were still there, and the shiver, and the smile, and the squeeze. If I said yes, it was a lot more than a friendly drink between colleagues.
She was still smiling. Half a million ifs passed through my head in the second it took me to open my mouth and say something.
“Sorry. I’d love to. But I’ve got a client back home who’s going to be deported in the morning if I don’t get off my arse and do something for her. Tomorrow, maybe?”
The smile didn’t flicker. I wouldn’t have liked to take Serena Hawkes on at poker. She took my hand again, gave it a gentle pat, turned and opened the door, and I wondered whether I’d done the right thing. Nothing was happening in the Hasina Khalil case and she had no more chance of being deported in the morning than I did. I could have told Serena about Claire, but something was stopping me, and I didn’t want to look too closely at what it was. I could have told her the truth, that I was planning on spending the evening watching Russell Tarney. I could have forgotten about Tarney and Claire and spent the evening with Serena Hawkes, who seemed, as she walked away from me through the rain, to be sensitive, intelligent, interesting and far from unattractive.
It was too late for any of that now.
7: Tarmac
I DIDN’T HAVE time to dwell on it. It was dark enough now for the streetlights to come on, but they hadn’t – either the council was broke or the streetlights, probably both. As luck would have it a car was turning the corner by the police station as Tarney came out of the main door, headlights straight onto his face just long enough for me to be sure it was him.
Even from that momentary glimpse I could see Tarney wasn’t a happy man. He was caught mid-snarl, a snarl at the lights shining in his eyes or the memory of Roarkes screaming at him in front of all his colleagues or the world in general – Russell Tarney seemed the kind of man who didn’t need much excuse for a snarl.
Maybe the snarl was his default expression. He was out of uniform, in jeans and a thick black coat that might have been hiding anything from spandex to a shotgun.
Then Tarney was gone, and a battered green Peugeot was nudging its way out of the car park and onto the road. The boys on the street had vanished – once it was clear there wasn’t going to be any action between Serena and me they’d given up and headed off. I turned the key and started to follow.
Manchester was busy and Tarney was heading right into the middle of it. Christmas markets, even though it was barely November, road closures, half the world on its way home from work and the other half on its way to a bar. There was so much traffic on the road that not being spotted by Tarney was easy, even for an amateur like me. Keeping track of him was something different. I’d lost him by the time I hit the half dozen shops and restaurants they called China Town, and I pulled into a taxi space to work out where I was and where he was going. By the time my phone had woken up and told me, Tarney and his Peugeot were long gone. It didn’t matter. I knew where he was headed.
There was a moment’s concern, when I pulled into the near-empty car park in Blackmoor twenty minutes later and saw no green Peugeot there, but then I spied it in the cul-de-sac across the road. Blackmoor didn’t seem so bad, despite Gaddesdon’s dismissive tone. The bits I’d noticed in the glow of the streetlights looked comfortable enough: quiet, wide pavements, tidy terraces and good-sized semis. And those streetlights were glowing, unlike the ones in Folgate.
The pub wasn’t as quiet as the car park, fortunately, or Tarney would have spotted me the moment I walked in. He was sat with two other men, three pints on the table, all bald and fat and all looking like they’d stepped straight out of an audition for a low-bu
dget gangster movie. I headed in the direction of the slot machine and then veered off to the bar, where I ordered a pint of bitter in my most inconspicuous accent, but made the mistake of saying “please”. The barman stared at me for a moment before turning to get a glass. People didn’t say “please” round here when they ordered a drink. There was a sign next to the bar that said “No Weapons, No Drugs, No Figting”. I decided not to point out the missing “h”.
There was an ancient-looking jukebox next to the slot machine, grinding out the dying bars of a Bowie number, and in the background the usual ambient pub noise of muttered conversation, glass on wood, doors opening and closing from time to time. I took a seat at a table in the corner furthest from Tarney and kept my eye on him.
“Major Tom” floated into silence, and no one bothered to pick a new tune. I sipped at the beer. It was dark and weak, local brewery, stupid name. For a few minutes nothing happened, and then my phone rang. I looked down and saw it was Maloney. I couldn’t take the call, not without raising my voice and drawing attention to myself. I didn’t want to risk walking out to take it, either. I hit the big red IGNORE button and hoped Maloney could wait.
The door beside me opened and a woman the size of a small car staggered out, giggling. I hadn’t even noticed the door. Ladies toilet. I was sitting outside the ladies toilet, and, I noticed as I glanced to my left, just a few feet from the gents. No wonder this was the quiet end of the pub. The phone started to ring again and this time I found IGNORE without even looking at it.
I looked down at the beer and decided it wasn’t worth another sip. I got up and walked back to the bar, and ordered a pint of lager. I didn’t say “please” and I didn’t comment on the fact that I was only a quarter of my way through my last drink, and this time I didn’t get any stares.
Someone fed a coin into the jukebox and it cranked back into life, some awful eighties soul I couldn’t even bring myself to feel nostalgic for. One of Tarney’s drinking partners got up and ambled towards me, and for a moment I thought I was about to get my head kicked in. Then he opened the door to the gents and I breathed again.
Half a dozen teenagers walked in. Fifteen years old, I thought, sixteen tops, but the barman didn’t blink when they asked for their beer and vodka. They brought a bit more noise in with them, and even though they had that same feral look I’d seen on the kids by the police station they still made the pub seem friendlier. I took a sip of my lager and glanced back at Tarney.
Tarney wasn’t there.
I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned. The reason Tarney wasn’t at the table drinking bitter that tasted of piss with his cannonball-headed friends was that he was standing next to me, looking down at me with an expression that mixed sinister smile and angry snarl and was much nastier than the sum of its parts. I swallowed.
“Sam Williams,” he said. It wasn’t a question. I nodded anyway.
“I know why you’re here, Williams,” he said, and I thought I might as well say something, because if he knew I suspected him I didn’t have much to lose.
“Wait, Sergeant,” I said, but that was as far as I got, because at that point he leaned down and whispered in my ear.
“I don’t give a fuck what you think you know, Williams. You don’t know anything. You and your mate Roarkes. We don’t want you here. Now get the fuck out of my pub before you find yourself waking up next to Thomas Carson.”
I could smell his breath, the beer, the sweat glistening on his head. The words hammered at me. Fook. You don’t know anything. Fook. I swallowed again, and nodded. He didn’t move, still bent at the waist with his mouth next to my ear. I nodded again, stood, took a quick gulp of my lager and walked quickly towards the exit. I glanced behind as I left. Tarney was already sitting back with his friends, his beer in his hand, laughing at something one of them had said.
Outside it was still raining, and it was cold, but not cold enough to explain the way my hand shook as I unlocked my car. I swore silently. I’d allowed myself to be bullied by some fat bastard of a cop, and there was nothing I could do about it. The shaking was over soon enough, but I could still feel it inside me, a cocktail of rage and humiliation, at Tarney for threatening me, at myself for failing to stand up to him. What was I afraid of? What did I think he was going to do to me, in a pub, in public, with witnesses? I pictured the witnesses, Tarney’s friends, the barman, the teenagers. I remembered the sign at the bar. I’d probably done the right thing.
Right now I was tired and cold, and stuck outside in an endless drizzle. What I wanted was a whisky, but there was no way I was going back in the Bull to get one. I opened the glove compartment and found the emergency cigarettes where I’d put them a few months back. “Emergency” was probably a little strong. Every now and then, once a month or so, I really wanted a cigarette. If I couldn’t find one, that was an emergency.
I got out of the car and lit up, because I knew if I smoked inside Claire would still be able to smell it days later with the windows open and the air conditioning on full blast. I fished out my phone to look at the time and remembered the call from Maloney. He wasn’t the type to call without a reason. I was about to hit the call back button when I heard a shout.
“What the fuck are you still here for?”
I looked up and saw three figures walking towards me. The pub door was still falling shut, so they were little more than black shadows against the light, but I didn’t need to see their faces to know who they were.
“Just having a smoke,” I said. Surely even Tarney couldn’t have a problem with that.
The pub door closed. There was a little light in the carpark, spilling in from the road, just enough to see that Tarney did, in fact, have a problem with that. He was a couple of yards away, a yard, right in my face, his mates behind and either side of him like a pair of henchmen in a Bond movie, and his problem was rapidly becoming mine.
“Bollocks you’re having a smoke. You can have a fucking smoke anywhere. You’re spying on me, aren’t you?”
“No. Seriously. I was just having a smoke.”
“Where is it, then?”
I looked down at my right hand. It had been there, the cigarette, I was sure of it, I’d only lit it a minute earlier and taken, what, two, maybe three drags, reached down for the phone, where the hell was it?
There. I could see it still glowing on the wet tarmac. I bent down to pick it up.
A second later something hard was driving my face into the back of my head. The pain was excruciating, like something had gone seriously, permanently wrong, but even as it shot through me I was trying to figure out what had happened and worrying about what was coming next. I could feel hard wet tarmac on my back. Tarney had kneed me in the face as I bent down, that was it, he’d kneed me in the face and now I was lying there with blood streaming out of my nose and my eyes barely able to open.
I heard movement beside me and then I was sitting up. I hadn’t meant to sit up, I didn’t think I could sit up, but it was an instinctive reaction to the boot that had just slammed into my kidney. Sitting up brought my face into closer range, and as I opened my eyes I saw another boot heading my way. They hadn’t covered boots in the face at the martial arts class, but I managed to drop back down in time, and I thought it had missed me entirely until I felt it smashing my right arm into the ground. A battered arm, I reflected, in a brief, bootless moment, could hurt a lot, but not as much as a battered face.
The pub door was open again, I could see light in that direction, and I tried to shout, but my throat wasn’t playing ball. Now the henchmen were either side of me and lifting me to my feet and Tarney was saying something. I couldn’t hear him. There was a ringing in my right ear, and I worried for a moment that Tarney might have done me some permanent damage. Then the ringing cleared, suddenly, and I wasn’t worried about my ear any more. My ear was the least of my problems.
“I don’t think Mr Williams has quite understood us,” he was saying. “I get the feeling we need to make ourselves a li
ttle clearer.”
I was pushed up against a car. My car. Driver’s side. I could have turned and climbed in, driven away, gone back to London and Claire and the fifty-five inch television, and Atom Industries, with all their money and their regular, normal job which involved neither murderers nor psychotic police officers. I could have forgotten all about Thomas and Sally Carson and Serena Hawkes and Detective Inspector Roarkes, who I was starting to think had a lot to answer for, not least the state my face was going to be in by the end of the night. Except I couldn’t do any of that, because there was a fat bald man holding each of my arms and another one in front of me smiling like he knew something I didn’t, and when I found out what it was I wasn’t going to like it.
I found out what it was half a second later. It was Tarney’s fist, and behind it the surprising fact that Tarney wasn’t just a fat bald copper who liked his beer, he was someone who knew how to punch a slightly-tougher-than-he-used-to-be lawyer and make it hurt. I crumpled to the ground, or halfway there, because the goons either side weren’t letting me go, and amid the explosions going on in my stomach and shooting through to my head I tried to remember whether being hit that hard in the solar plexus was dangerous or merely intensely painful. I opened my eyes and Tarney was still smiling, drawing his fist back, ready for another crack, and if my throat had been on my side I’d have said pretty much anything to stop that fist where it was, but I couldn’t say anything at all. I tried mouthing the word “please”, but the bastard just smiled a little wider and brought the fist back in, hard and sharp, a left hook to the right side of my head and that same bloody ear again.
A split second later my head smashed against the car and the ringing was back, with shouts and footsteps and the baseline from “Groove Is In the Heart”, which had me worrying about concussion and brain damage until I remembered the jukebox. I was on the ground, the impact of my head against the car had been enough to shake off the goons, and now the music had come to an end, but the shouts hadn’t, those same Manchester vowels that had been bouncing relentlessly through my head for most of the last two days. I was starting to really hate those vowels.