Dead North (Sam Williams Book 1)

by Joel Hames

  I opened my eyes. There was a shape in front of me, leaning over me. I closed my eyes, resigned to whatever pain was coming, and prayed it wasn’t going to kill me.

  Nothing came. I opened my eyes again and waited for the shape to come into focus, but even before it had progressed beyond a blur I could see it wasn’t Tarney because it was half his size and there was a dark patch that looked like hair on top.

  “Are you OK, sir?”

  A woman. Dark hair. A uniform. A police officer.

  I turned my head. Tarney was on the ground, on his belly, arms behind his back, a big guy in uniform on top of him. One of his friends was in a similar position. The other one was nowhere to be seen, and from the distant shouts coming at me through my still-ringing ears it sounded like he’d made a run for it.

  “Sir?”

  I looked back to the police officer. She was wearing that expression that forces itself onto your face when you don’t want it there, the one I usually try to hide from my clients when the prosecution pulls a zinger out of the bag, the one that says, “You’re screwed, mate”. I didn’t know why she was asking if I was OK. I only had to look at her to know I wasn’t.

  Time to get up, I thought, and stretched out my right arm for support. My right arm was the one Tarney had just put his boot through, and didn’t seem to want to play ball. I tried the left, and the police officer shook her head and told me to stay down until the paramedics arrived, “Just in case.”

  I tried not to think about what “just in case” might mean, and concentrated on what was happening a couple of yards away. Tarney wasn’t behaving like he was supposed to. He was on his feet now, one hand palm-out in front of his face in that “calm down” stance that says I’m going to do what you want me to and is about as believable as a Volkswagen emissions test. I didn’t trust that expression and a moment later I knew I was right, because his other hand, the one that wasn’t in front of his face, was heading to his pocket. I tried to say something but the nerves in charge of my mouth still weren’t up to the job.

  It didn’t matter. The police officer who’d brought him down had spotted the same thing I had, and pounced on the hand before it had a chance to get where it was going. One hand on Tarney’s wrist, the other round the back of his head, pushing down in a goose-neck grip, and turned slightly to the side in case Tarney decided to use a knee. Part of me was impressed with myself for seeing all this. Another part was saying if I knew so much about self-defence I might have tried actually using it when it was me Tarney was beating the shit out of, but it was too late to worry about that now.

  Tarney was down again and the police officer was digging around in the pocket looking out for whatever weapon the bastard had been planning on using. Out came the hand. The contents of the pocket followed. A knife, I guessed.

  Only, it wasn’t a knife. It wasn’t a weapon at all.

  It was money. It was a roll of bank notes. And it was thick enough to make a short man tall.

  8: Dead Man’s Name

  TWO HOURS. TWO hours just to get out of the bloody hospital when right from the start they’d told me I probably didn’t need to be there and it didn’t look like there was anything broken anyway. Two hours sitting there, the first hour with a uniformed constable from Blackmoor, the one who’d brought down Tarney’s mate with, he proudly told me, a reverse flying scissor-kick. I didn’t know what a reverse flying scissor-kick was, I didn’t remember them from my class, but that didn’t mean he’d made it up. There was a lot I couldn’t remember from that class, like how to avoid boots and knees and fists, so I sat there and looked suitably impressed while trying to stem the flow of blood to my nose with a few strips of toilet roll.

  After an hour Gaddesdon had shown up, sent by Roarkes, who appeared to value his own leisure time more than the well-being of his tame “adviser”. Gaddesdon had glared at the uniform and the uniform had glared back before he realised that anything was better than sitting in the waiting area at Manchester Royal Infirmary’s Accident and Emergency department with a bloody-nosed Londoner who didn’t want to be there either. Good, I’d thought, Gaddesdon won’t care whether I stay here or not, but I’d been wrong, because Detective Inspector Roarkes had, it emerged, given very clear instructions as to what I was to do and when I was to do it, and that included not being allowed to step outside the hospital until I’d been seen and given a clean bill of health.

  Gaddesdon was taking his duties as chaperon more seriously than I’d expected, and this annoyed me more than it should have done, because unless he fancied pulling his lazy arse out of the pub, turning up and arresting me, Roarkes had no more right to keep me here than he’d had dragging me up to Manchester in the first place. I told Gaddesdon this, and he seemed to find it amusing, which annoyed me even more. I didn’t tell him the other thing that was annoying me, which was that I could have been having a quiet drink with Serena Hawkes instead of sitting here with blood all over my clothes surrounded by vomiting drunks.

  I’d resigned myself to a long wait, so two hours shouldn’t have pissed me off that much, but it did. The doctor who finally saw me spent all of ninety seconds asking me questions and prodding at my nose before he told me there was nothing wrong with it, nothing he could do anything about, anyway. Tarney hadn’t broken it, which demonstrated a particular skill that shouldn’t have surprised me. He poked at my stomach a couple of times and said there was nothing wrong there either, and the best thing I could do would be to go home, clean out my arm, and take some painkillers and some antibiotics, in case of infection. I laughed when he said that, “painkillers,” like I hadn’t just built up a tolerance for the things on the strength of a mild cold, and he frowned at me and shook his head, then looked me up and down and frowned again, more deeply, as if there were something else he wanted to say. Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been important, or at least not any more important than the line of more seriously injured people waiting their turn outside, because he shook his head again, turned away, and opened the door for us to leave, while Gaddesdon stood there smiling at me like all this was good news rather than no news at all. I got up, ignoring the box of pills the doctor had placed on the table in front of him, and walked out without saying another word.

  I stopped outside the waiting area. I had no idea where I was or how to get back to Blackmoor, where I assumed my car was still waiting in the car park for me to come and drive it away. It was raining, worse, it was hail, hard, vicious little balls of ice, and it was dark. There was a line of ambulances waiting to drop off the sick, injured and dying, but there was no sign of a bus-stop or a taxi rank or anything that might get me away.

  “Wait up!” shouted Gaddesdon, unnecessarily loudly for someone standing just a couple of feet behind me. I turned to him, wondering what on earth Roarkes had planned for me now. “Don’t you want to see Carson?”

  I frowned. The last I’d heard, Carson wasn’t far off half-dead himself. I couldn’t imagine what seeing him would achieve, unless Gaddesdon thought I’d get a kick out of looking at someone even worse off than I was.

  I shrugged. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea.

  “He’s just upstairs.”

  So it was a lot more than two hours, in the end. And Roarkes, to his credit, wasn’t in the pub at all, but standing outside yet another room with a big glass window in the wall and Thomas Carson inside it.

  Carson was hooked up to a machine and there was a screen with green lines flowing smoothly up and down. Everything looked calm and ordered and you’d never have guessed the chaos this guy had thrown everything into just a few hours earlier.

  Carson might not be saying much – which wasn’t a huge change from when he was conscious, I thought – but Roarkes was full of news. Once he’d satisfied himself that I wasn’t about to drop dead in front of him – and asked Gaddesdon to confirm every point, I noted – he started in on what the hell I’d been doing following Tarney in the first place.

  “Trying to get under his skin, were y
ou?” he asked, with what looked suspiciously like a sneer. “Looks like he got right into yours.”

  And then a lecture on the state of Carson’s health in the kind of medical detail I neither needed nor understood. After a couple of sentences I cut him short.

  “Just tell me if he’s going to die.”

  Roarkes shook his head slowly, and reminded me suddenly and forcefully of my old English teacher, who’d given me exactly that look when I’d informed him that Macbeth was just a Scottish Maggie Thatcher.

  “No, Sam. He’s not going to die. In fact, the doctors tell me he’s probably going to wake up quite soon and when he does I’m going to have that bastard’s story out of him one way or another.”

  I pointed through the window, at the screen and the mass of wires and tubes that was keeping Thomas Carson alive.

  “You think all this is going to turn him into Mr Chatty, do you?”

  Roarkes leaned forward, face so close to the window he was practically touching it. A cloud formed on the glass and he wiped it into an oily smudge with his sleeve.

  “I don’t give a damn whether he wants to talk or not any more. We’ve been too easy on him.”

  “He tried to kill himself, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Nothing to do with me. I’ve hardly been waterboarding the bastard.”

  That was true enough. Whatever had prompted Carson to hang himself, it wasn’t police brutality. Roarkes had put a stop to any hint of that the moment he’d arrived in Manchester.

  “Oh, something else, Sam,” he said. There was a look on his face I didn’t recognise.

  “Yes?”

  “What do you make of this?”

  He passed me a piece of paper. I kept my eyes on his face as I took it, and his expression clicked into place. He looked awkward. Sheepish, almost. Maybe he felt bad about the battering my face had taken. It wasn’t like he’d told me to follow Tarney to the pub, it wasn’t like it was his fault at all, but if he wanted the blame he was welcome to it. I nodded to myself and looked down at the paper.

  It was grey, but it looked like it had spent a lot of time in someone’s hand or someone’s pocket and it had probably once been white. It was A4 sized, folded three times, and there was a single line of writing on it, one letter, one word, twelve numbers, in faded blue ink.

  A Lopez, it read. And beside the name – because it was obvious at once that it was a name, and I had a pretty good idea whose name it was – were the numbers.

  41 12 17 71 50 00.

  I handed it back. Awkward and sheepish were right, but it wasn’t my beating Roarkes felt bad about.

  “Lopez,” I said, and looked hard at Roarkes. He must have known what was coming, but he didn’t blink. “You assured me none of this had anything to do with Argentina. You told me it was a dead end.”

  He nodded.

  “This Lopez,” I said. “It’s the business partner, isn’t it? Alejandro?”

  He nodded again, folded the paper up and put it in his pocket. “I’m sorry, Sam. This is probably nothing.”

  “Don’t give me that, Roarkes. Where did you get it?”

  He sighed. “Found it in a book. In the house.”

  “What are you doing searching the house now?” I asked, because this was something that should have been done a week ago. He shook his head.

  “We’re not. They searched the house and found it while he was still on the run and filed it in the wrong bloody place. First time I saw it was an hour ago. They’re muppets up here. If they’re not keeping things from me on purpose.” He shook his head, lost in thought, contemplating the depths of Mancunian incompetence, and for a moment I was right there with him until I realised he was just trying to change the subject. I wasn’t about to let that happen.

  “So? What else is there?” I asked.

  “Well, normally we wouldn’t have thought twice about it, people write things, put them somewhere, forget about them, years later they turn up and it’s not exactly a big deal.”

  “So what’s the difference now?” I asked.

  “So the difference is, the book was No Prayer for the Dying.”

  “Sorry, don’t know it.”

  “Neither do I. Wife tells me it’s a cracker. The important thing is it only came out last year.”

  I thought about that for a moment, and why it should matter. It only took a moment, which was longer than it should have taken, but I was tired and I’d been smashed about a bit, and I was starting to regret having turned down those painkillers.

  “Which means whoever put that bit of paper in that book, they did it back in England. Years after the business partner went missing.”

  “Exactly,” said Roarkes. “It’s probably nothing. Probably started out as a bookmark in some other book and ended up getting used for the next one, too.”

  It was possible, I supposed.

  “Did you ask her about it? The wife?”

  He nodded. But Sally Carson hadn’t known a thing. His handwriting, she’d said. Her husband’s. And his book, too. Not her sort of thing.

  “Any ideas on the numbers?”

  He grinned at me. “Gaddesdon thought it was the lottery, didn’t you?”

  Gaddesdon was still there, staring through the glass at Carson as if he was expecting the guy to stand up and walk out. He turned and nodded at us, and went right back to staring at Carson. There was none of the usual big blank nothing on his face. Instead there was an expression so out of place there it took me a few seconds to put my finger on it.

  It was hatred.

  Roarkes was still talking. He hadn’t noticed Gaddesdon’s face.

  “Didn’t seem quite so likely to me. Not with the 00 there.”

  I’d been thinking about those numbers for all of a minute so far, and lottery numbers hadn’t crossed my mind. But even with the mystery of Gaddesdon’s expression taking up half my mental capacity, something else had.

  “Coordinates?”

  Roarkes raised his eyebrows and nodded again, impressed.

  “Not just a pretty face, are you, Sam? Mind you, you’re not much of a face at all right now.”

  I gave him two fingers. He raised an eyebrow again – just the one this time – and went on.

  “But you’re right, of course. South and West. Got one of the uniforms to look it up for me. It’s a glacier. A great big bloody glacier halfway up a mountain in the middle of nowhere.”

  “But in Argentina, right? The middle of nowhere in Argentina? Near where they used to live?”

  Roarkes nodded.

  “So this bit of paper has a dead man’s name on it, or at least a man who’s been missing for years, and a location in the middle of nowhere, and it turns up on the other side of the world in a book that only came out last year that just happens to be owned by a guy who’s suspected of murdering two police officers, and you’re still telling me it’s a dead end?”

  Roarkes opened his mouth to say something, but he didn’t get a chance. My phone was ringing. I looked at the display, a mobile number, not one I recognised. I answered it anyway.

  “Sam Williams?”

  It was a female voice. Manchester accent. Last week I wouldn’t have known it from Leeds or Preston, but it was pretty much all I’d heard for the last thirty-six hours.

  “Yes,” I said, and instantly regretted it.

  “This is Mia Arazzi. I write for the Daily Mirror. I understand you’re involved with the Carson case and I was hoping you might have something to say about it to our readers. We haven’t had a sniff out of the police for days.”

  The press had been pretty quiet since the arrest, and I’d assumed it was because they were doing the right thing and keeping a discreet distance until the trial came round. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  “No,” I said, and killed the call. One word. Probably more than she deserved. I turned back to Roarkes, anxious to get the bastard back on the ropes and explaining himself to me like he’d been on the verge of doing before the journalist had
called, but before I could say anything my phone rang again. I picked up, ready to give Mia Arazzi a piece of my mind, and heard a very different voice.

  “Sam? Are you OK, Sam?”

  Claire. I hadn’t spoken to her since the day before. A lot had happened since then.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Roarkes told me you were in hospital.”

  She sounded upset. I glared at Roarkes. When I’d finished this call, Roarkes was going to be getting more than a little grief from me.

  “I’m fine, Claire. I really am. Just a bruise or two. Probably better-looking than when you last saw me.”

  She didn’t laugh.

  “I don’t like you being involved in this, Sam. Not if it’s going to end up with you in hospital.”

  And that was it. Claire didn’t like it. I felt that sudden shift, that slip, that step forward into empty space and anger. It wasn’t fair, it was hardly Claire’s fault, she hadn’t dragged my sorry carcass two hundred miles up the M6, she hadn’t smashed my face up or allowed my almost-client to almost-kill himself, she hadn’t withheld key facts from me or refused to say a thing to save her own skin, and she hadn’t phoned me and asked for a comment for the Daily Mirror, but she was the one on the end of the phone when it all came out, and that was her bad luck.

  “Who the fuck do you think you are?” I said. I said it quietly enough, and my voice was level and calm, but nobody who heard me would have thought I was calm underneath.

  “Sorry, Sam?”

  That edge was back in her voice. I knew Claire well enough not to speak to her the way I’d just spoken. I ignored the edge, and the voice in my head that was telling me to stop.

  “I said who the fuck do you think you are, Claire? My mother? My fucking boss?”

  “No, Sam, I just—”

  “Don’t give me the I just, Claire. I’ve come up here to do something. I’m going to try and do it. When I’ve finished I’ll drive down to London and you can go back to telling me what to do all day, but while I’m here I’ll do what the hell I want to and you will not tell me otherwise. Do you understand me?”