Dead North (Sam Williams Book 1)

by Joel Hames

  It’s a dark blue Land Rover Defender. We can’t see the plates from the angle of the second camera but I’d bet my last penny they say PK11 VAX. Ahmet does his usual, steps out into the road, holds out his hand, the Land Rover stops.

  You can half-see the man inside, not clearly enough to know what he looks like, but clearly enough to identify his gestures. He’s speaking to Ahmet, nodding, and pointing at something in his other hand. As the hand comes up and out of the window you can see it’s a phone.

  There’s no sound and I’m no lip-reader, but it’s obvious what he’s saying.

  I’m the one who called it in.

  Ahmet nods, then gestures at him to turn around and go. He’s right. The guy’s got to go, no matter what he’s seen or who he’s called. Instead, the guy opens his door and steps out, and Ahmet shrugs in a resigned sort of way and turns back to Milton to ask her something.

  He never gets the chance. The man from the Land Rover raises one arm, whatever’s in his hand isn’t a phone any more, and an instant later Ahmet’s on the ground.

  “Jesus H Christ,” said Roarkes. Gaddesdon swallowed loud and hard, his eyes fixed on the screen. No one sighed. No one else made a sound.

  Fiona Milton has turned to talk to Carson again, but the sound of the shot jerks her back round to face her fallen colleague. Carson’s looking, too, but neither of them are facing the camera so we can’t see their expressions.

  The man from the Land Rover is looking at the camera, though, or at least in its general direction. He smiles, briefly, and I can see he’s a well-built man, not short, not tall, not fat, just solid and well-built, he’s in his late fifties, probably, or early sixties, a little grey, a lot bald. He raises his arm again, and Milton’s down. Carson bends over her, and then straightens back up and looks at the man with the gun. The man with the gun smiles at him and says something, it’s not clear what, even though his lips are in full view, he shakes his head, and walks back to the Land Rover. He reaches in, pulls out a piece of cloth, wipes down the gun, and throws it casually into the hedge across the road. He takes a moment to look around, staring briefly right at the camera and nodding to himself. Then he gets into his car and drives away.

  He doesn’t drive straight onto the main road, though. He drives up a track and out of sight, and I know without following him that this is the track to the farm where the CCTV footage is held, and that in the brief visit that now comes, the hard drive will be removed and the farmer will be terrified into complicit silence.

  Carson has bent back down to Milton. There’s no point. Both officers, the medics say, died seconds after being shot. He stands up and runs over to Ahmet, puts his head to the dead man’s chest, gets back up, walks over to the Fiesta, sits on the ground with his back against it. Nothing happens. Two minutes later, he pulls himself back up, walks over to Milton’s body and retrieves something from her hand.

  His keys.

  He walks back to the Fiesta, gets in, and drives away, in the direction he was already facing.

  Three minutes later another car stops. A woman, alone, in a gleaming white Mini with 2015 plates. She sees the flashing lights, gets out of the car, spots Ahmet’s body, runs over to it and bends down, sees Milton’s, runs to her and does the same thing. She’s a paediatric nurse returning from her shift on the children’s unit at the Royal Blackburn Hospital, she’s done stints at Accident and Emergency before, if anything could have been done she’d probably have been able to do it. But nothing could be done. She runs back to her car and makes the phone call.

  Malhotra hit stop. For a moment, there was silence. Then everybody was talking at once, including me, and no one could hear a word anyone else was saying.

  “Shut the fuck up!” shouted Roarkes. It worked.

  “You,” he pointed to Malhotra. “Back it up to the shootings. I want to see the bastard that did this again and I want his face on every TV channel between here and Outer Mongolia by the time the main news bulletins go out this evening. And get this over to facial recognition. I want to know who this man is. You,” and now he was pointing at Gaddesdon, who was already returning to his red-faced self, “get hold of Serena Hawkes. I don’t give a damn if she’s sulking. I want her here now. Tell her what we’ve got. That should make her jump. I’m going to have a nice quiet word with the super at Chetwood and explain to him that if I don’t have Tarney in this station within the hour I will have him shot. If Tarney isn’t shot first.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Malhotra.

  “Once this bastard sees himself all over the news it won’t take him long to realise someone’s landed him in it.” Roarkes was pointing at the screen, where Malhotra had frozen the tape on as clear an image of the killer’s face as we were likely to get. “If they let Tarney out and it turns out he does actually know something useful, he’s as good as dead. I want him here, and I want one of us watching him every second of every day until we’re all dead or he’s dead or the case is closed.”

  Malhotra nodded. I remembered what Tarney had said, keep it between us. He wouldn’t actually be named, but it was far too late for that now. Roarkes was right. He might have smashed my nose up, but we couldn’t just let him die.

  “What about me?” I asked. He looked at me and smiled, suddenly, unexpectedly, almost warmly.

  “Go back to your hotel, get some sleep. I brought you up here to crack Carson and find out why he did it. You’ve cracked Tarney instead, and you’ve got Carson off the hook, so I reckon you can feel pretty pleased with yourself. Meanwhile you’ve been beaten up twice and you claim to have some kind of magnetic attraction to moving vehicles. Claire might think I’m the acceptable face of British policing, but I’ll never hear the end of it if I send you back even uglier than you arrived. I reckon you’re done, Sam.”

  I started to argue with him, because disagreeing with whatever Roarkes was saying had become second nature over the last few days. I opened my mouth to tell him he was talking shit again and suddenly realised he wasn’t. Carson might have been as helpful as a florist in a fist fight, but he hadn’t killed Ahmet and Milton and as soon as he could stand up and walk around, he could go home.

  Or maybe not go home, not quite, because even if he hadn’t pulled the trigger, it looked like he knew the man who had. One way or another, Carson was involved. He was off the hook, but he was still in the lake, and there were some pretty nasty sharks in there with him. I wasn’t ready to give up on Carson.

  But more than that, I was tired and hungry – I couldn’t recall eating a thing all day – and fed up with worrying where the next fist was coming from or who was going to try to drive their car into me. Maybe the hotel wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

  22: A Terrible Mistake

  I WAS MOST of the way back there when my phone rang. I glanced down, recognised the number, thought about it for all of two seconds. I’d have to speak to her eventually, I realised. It might as well be now. I pulled over and answered on the fourth ring.

  “Hello, Mia,” I said. I didn’t get the chance to say anything else.

  “Don’t you hello Mia me, you piece of shit. I had everyone lined up waiting for your big story, and it turns out you’ve got fuck all!”

  “I can explain –” I began.

  “Don’t bother. I’m more interested in what you’re doing about all those nice little leads. There’s a glacier in Argentina that might have some secrets, I hear.”

  Those bastards. Again. I wondered whether they actually solved any crimes at all, or just spent their days chatting to journalists and beating up lawyers. Folgate had more holes in it than Carson’s mole-ridden field.

  “I can’t talk about that, Mia. You know I can’t.”

  “No great surprise there. You’re a tight-lipped bastard, even for a lawyer. What about the planning angle? Has to be one or the other, right? Planning or Argentina?”

  She was persistent, I had to give her that. And I did owe her an apology, or something.

  Or something
. I had something. It would be news in an hour or two anyway, and sure, it would be old news by the time she went to press, but the Mirror had a website, which meant she wouldn’t have to wait till morning.

  “As it happens I have got something for you, Mia.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “Really. But you have to promise me one thing.”

  “What?”

  “When I give you this, you don’t go hassling Roarkes or Serena or any of the others, not until the story’s out with everyone else. Then you can ask whatever you want. Till then, it’s just you and me and however many people look at your website. And don’t go telling anyone who your source is, either.”

  “Source? You? Like you’ve got anything worth printing.”

  I waited a few seconds before replying. Mia Arazzi was all dressed up in cynical and angry, but the clothes didn’t fit. She’d paused herself, for a moment, before replying, and it might have been the quality of the signal but I thought I could hear a faint tremor in her voice. She was still keen.

  “We know who killed Ahmet and Milton,” I said, as calmly as I could, and the sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line told me I’d been right.

  “Who?”

  “I don’t have a name, and I can’t give you the photo. But I can tell you it wasn’t Carson. I can tell you there’s footage of the killing taking place, that Carson was deliberately set up, and that the killer drove a dark blue Land Rover Defender with cloned plates. That enough for you?”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  I thought about that for a moment.

  “OK, here’s the deal. You publish and it turns out to be bullshit, you can name me. I’m the bastard that put you up to it, I’m the lawyer Roarkes brought in, I’ve fed the press a heap of crap, that’s a story itself, right? But you’ll want to be fast. The guy’s face’ll be all over the news by nine.”

  That gave her a little over ninety minutes, which wasn’t much of a scoop. But if she was the journalist she thought she was, she could write it in ten, get it approved and uploaded in five more, and all over Facebook an hour before anyone else knew a thing about it. I knew how it worked, Claire had explained it all to me. Juicy story, lots of clicks, happy advertisers, happy editor, happy journalist. I reckoned I’d paid Mia Arazzi back.

  I pulled back onto the road and continued towards the hotel. It was raining, as usual, and even though rush hour was supposed to have ended a while ago, it looked like I’d picked the wrong time to drive, again, with what felt like half of Manchester headed the same way. Plenty of time, stuck in the fumes and the red lights, to think it all through. The planning angle, Argentina, Carson, Grissom, there might be a connection, but nothing that explained what had happened to Milton and Ahmet. And Carson might not have killed them, but if he was Grissom then he’d been part of a gang who killed routinely, who killed anyone that got their way and didn’t care how they did it. You pissed them off, you died, or – what was it Crick had said? They threatened your family, and they were convincing enough that you’d do their own work for them. Charming.

  You’d top yourself. That was it. That was what Crick had told us. The man who was so afraid he killed himself to protect his family.

  I heard car horns behind me. The lights had changed, they were green, there was a rare patch of empty road in front, ten whole beautiful yards of it.

  I couldn’t move. The horns went on, there were more of them now, two, three, a dozen?

  It didn’t matter.

  To protect his family.

  They’d sent Carson a message. Two messages. What had the killer said? I tried to think back to the footage. Now I was starting to understand what was going on, I thought I could guess what the man from the Land Rover had said to Carson before he’d got back in his car and driven away.

  “Over to you.”

  That was the first message.

  The second message was just as straightforward, and a little more practical.

  It was a belt.

  By the time I’d come back to the real world the lights were red again, and the noise from the car horns behind me had stopped. I didn’t realise why until I heard a click and the door swung open. A tall, thick-set man with no hair and boxer’s nose stood there in the rain, arms crossed, staring at me with a look that blended superior with violent and was oddly familiar.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re playing at?” he asked. Familiar accent. A fellow Londoner. I glanced down from his face to his arms. There was a lot of muscle in those arms.

  “Get out the car,” he said. His voice was still level. I looked back at his nose. My own wasn’t in the best of nick, but it was still some way short of the mess his was in. I recognised the expression on his face, now. Tarney and his friends had been wearing it while they smashed me to pieces.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Not good enough,” he replied, and reached towards me. I held up one hand to stop him.

  “Walk away and get back in your car,” I said. “Do it now, and I won’t have you beaten so badly that nose’ll be the prettiest thing left on you.”

  I watched as the smile formed on his face. I smiled back. He didn’t seem to be expecting that. He frowned. I picked up the phone beside me. He walked away, shaking his head. I was tempted to call him back and ask him to shut the door, but that would have been pushing my luck. There was a quieter side road to the left. I drove in and parked, and as I glanced in the mirror I thought I saw a red Astra cruise slowly past along the main road. But how many red Astras were there in Manchester? Hundreds? Thousands, maybe? It didn’t matter. There were more important things to worry about than my paranoia. Real things. I dialled Roarkes, who answered on the first ring, and I explained what I’d realised. Carson had been given the chance to kill himself before the man with the Land Rover went looking for more people to kill. He’d tried to take it, and failed, and it wouldn’t be he who had to face the consequences.

  Roarkes understood. He was sending a unit to Bursington even while he was talking to me. Whoever the man with the Land Rover was, he’d killed Milton and Ahmet just to make a point. If he wanted to make it again, Sally and the boy would be top of his list.

  “Get them there before the news bulletins go out, Roarkes. Whoever this bastard is, seeing his face on TV isn’t going to make him any happier.”

  “Go and get some sleep, now,” he said, and I agreed, but there was no way I was going back to the hotel. Not yet. There was someone I had to speak to.

  The sergeant at the hospital looked familiar. I approached her with my hand outstretched and in it the card I’d been issued at Folgate. She frowned as I drew closer, and then she nodded, and her features settled into something closer to a smile. She knew who I was, at least. I just hoped the patient’s lawyer hadn’t been in touch and made sure no one let Sam Williams within a mile of her client.

  I was lucky.

  “Go on through, Mr Williams,” she said. There was another police officer sitting on a hard plastic chair outside the door to Carson’s room, but he’d seen his sergeant wave me through, so his contribution to the security arrangements was to stand up and open the door for me.

  Carson was awake. His eyes were closed as I approached the bed, but I’d seen him close them when I’d glanced through the glass window before the constable had opened the door. I walked up to the bed, past all the machinery that wasn’t really necessary any more, because Thomas Carson was doing just fine on his own, breathing and eating and pissing and shitting without anyone needing to do it for him. I bent down to whisper in his ear.

  “I know who you are, Grissom,” I said, watching for the slightest movement. Nothing. Just the gentle rise and fall of his chest as he went on pretending to sleep. He was good, Grissom, or Carson, or whatever his name was, but, I figured, he’d had plenty of time to prepare for this.

  “And we know who killed Milton and Ahmet. We know it wasn’t you.”

  Not even a twitch. I tried a different tack. />
  “We even know why you tried to kill yourself, Grissom,” I said. “We know why you did it and we know what’s going to happen now you’ve failed. They’re going to go after Sally, aren’t they? Sally and…”

  For a moment the boy’s name escaped me, and I paused, and then I remembered. But I didn’t say anything.

  “Matthew,” he said. He said it quietly but clearly, through a throat that sounded like it had been cleaned out with a wire brush. It was the first word I’d ever heard the man say.

  He opened his eyes and turned towards me and smiled, and spoke again.

  “If you know who I am, Mr Williams, and you know who they are, then surely you must realise that speaking to you would only make things worse.”

  He turned away, and closed his eyes, and I realised suddenly that I’d made a terrible mistake. Grissom had always known his wife and child were in danger. He’d tried to keep them safe by keeping his mouth shut, permanently, if he had to, but that hadn’t worked. And now we knew a little more of the story, there would be round-the-clock protection, policemen with guns and radios and infrared motion-detecting devices screaming if the wrong person got within a hundred yards. There was no rush. Eventually the police would find the killers, and things would return to normal. Until then, Sally and Matthew would be safe. As far as Thomas Carson was concerned, nothing else mattered. I’d taken the key and turned it, but I’d turned it the wrong way. Carson was locked up tighter than ever.

  I left without saying another word.

  I’d just sat down on the bed at the First Quality Inn and started trying to work out what I was going to do with the rest of my evening when a text came through.

  You’d better be on the level, it said. It was from Mia Arazzi and it included a link to the Mirror website.

  I briefly scanned the article. It had been live for less than forty minutes and there were already more than a hundred comments. It had everything I’d told her, and no more, apart from a basic recap of all that had happened since Ahmet and Milton had been found dead. She hadn’t given away my name, either. I hoped she’d keep it that way.