Dead North (Sam Williams Book 1)

by Joel Hames

  “So you’ve got nothing?”

  He sounded convincing enough. And yet. His wife had gone somewhere, and I didn’t think she’d gone to stand next to a field and look at the grass. She’d gone to find the people who killed her family. She knew where they were.

  Another one of those long breaths. And then a name.

  “Derek Lyons.”

  I’d got as far as “Who’s De—” when I heard more footsteps, a shout, and the unmistakeable sound of the phone being snatched away.

  “Sam?”

  Uh-oh.

  “Hello, Serena,” I said, trying to sound like I didn’t know what was coming.

  “What the almighty fuck are you playing at, Sam?” she said. Her voice was level and quiet and almost calm. I didn’t believe that voice.

  “I know what’s going on, Serena. We were right – I was right. Carson is Grissom. The wife – Sally – she’s gone after the people that did this.”

  “Enough,” she said. The voice hadn’t changed, but now I recognised it for what it was, a voice you didn’t want to argue with, flat, restrained, just a hint of what it was restraining in the background. “It’s enough. I’m here now, and the police are here. You can stand down and just go home or go back to your hotel or something. We’ve got a name. We’ll find Sally Carson soon enough.”

  She was probably right, I thought. Malhotra was there, she’d be onto Gaddesdon and getting that name fed through every database in the country.

  “OK,” I said.

  “Speak to you later,” she replied, coolly, and ended the call.

  I was done.

  Derek Lyons.

  I’d stopped the car and turned it around. I might be done, but that didn’t mean I knew what to do next. I didn’t want to go home, even if I could get myself there. I didn’t want to go to Folgate, and I certainly didn’t want to spend another night alone in the First Quality Inn. It suddenly occurred to me that if someone had suggested a night out in Manchester, I’d have taken it, a new city, a bit of life, a few drinks to dull the reawakened ache in my arm and wash the last few days out of my brain. But everyone I knew in Manchester was in Folgate police station or standing next to Carson’s hospital bed waiting for him speak in some kind of tongue they understood. I thought for a moment and texted the name to Maloney, Derek Lyons, because Maloney had the kind of database Roarkes would kill for. It was a long shot, but it was better than nothing. And then, because I didn’t know what else to do, I turned on the radio and drove north, into the darkness, out of Burnley.

  The story had broken. The BBC had the CCTV stills and whatever else Roarkes had seen fit to give them, but even with all that there wasn’t a great deal to say, not without throwing out more guesses than an idiot on a gameshow, and certainly not enough for an expert analyst to sink its teeth into. The BBC had expert analysts queueing up five hundred deep so they jammed one in anyway, a woman who’d clearly done this before, reeling off the complete range of motives from domestic to organised crime to terrorism, and seasoning all her suggestions with little pinches of caution like ongoing investigation and must not prejudice and at this early stage. It was a slow news day. Guesswork was better than dead air.

  Hills rose ahead of me, fields either side. I hadn’t even noticed the town disappearing. I folded myself into the darkness. Hill to wooded hill. Signs to villages with names like Noggarth and Roughlee, Blacko and Barley. Manchester might be rough, but at least it was twenty-first century rough. Burnley was staggering gamely out of the twentieth. These places still had some way to go.

  My phone rang and I managed to find the answer button without looking. A familiar voice.

  “Where the hell are you?”

  “Roarkes,” I said.

  “You were supposed to be going back to your hotel and getting some sleep. But now I hear you’ve been in Burnley and you’ve been upsetting Carson and getting Serena all worked up, which doesn’t take much, admittedly, and I don’t know where you are now, but the one thing you’re not doing is getting some sleep at your hotel.”

  He sounded calm enough. I felt calm myself, suddenly, the exhausted, done-in calm at the dead end of the dead-end road.

  “Sorry,” I said, and I was about to go on and explain where I was, and why I was there, because I was tired of hiding things and trying to second-guess everyone else. But then my phone gave a long solid beep and the call was dead. I glanced down and saw the signal had gone.

  Too many of those wooded hills.

  I drove on another half mile, looking for somewhere to turn around so I could follow Roarkes’ advice and get myself a soft bed in a warm room, even the First Quality Inn would do, and then, to my surprise, my phone rang again. This time I looked down before answering.

  Maloney. I toyed with the idea of ignoring it. I was tired and I wasn’t involved any more. Done. I could ignore it if I wanted to.

  I picked up the phone and hit “ANSWER”.

  “I’ve got it, Sam.”

  Maloney sounded uncharacteristically excited. Still like a fat, middle-aged man having a leisurely game of pool in the pub, but maybe a game with ten pounds riding on it. For Maloney, that was excited.

  “Got what?”

  “Got your address.”

  For a moment I didn’t understand what he was talking about, and then it hit me.

  “Derek Lyons?”

  “The one and only. Didn’t even have to call Crick. He showed up here himself a few minutes ago. Said he’d seen the guy on TV and there wasn’t really anything to protect any more. Wanted a grand.”

  I whistled. The snitches were getting greedy.

  “I gave him a hundred quid and said I’d tip him off if I heard anything about Lyons’ people coming after him.”

  “So where is it?”

  “So it’s up in the arse-end of nowhere is where it is. Near Burnley.”

  “Oh,” I said. Carson had been right about that, at least.

  “I’ll text it to you, OK?”

  “Thanks, Maloney.”

  “You owe me one.”

  I’d given up trying to figure out who owed who what. If Maloney said I owed him, he was probably right.

  “So do me a favour, right?” he went on.

  Never say yes before you know what you’re saying yes to. I waited.

  “Hand this straight to Roarkes, will you? I don’t like the sound of these people. You don’t want to be going anywhere near them.”

  “OK,” I said, and hung up. I’d seen what Derek Lyons and his friends could do to people. Maloney was right. I didn’t want to be going anywhere near them.

  A second later the phone beeped again, with Maloney’s text. The address.

  Black Moss Farmhouse. Stang Bottom Lane.

  Stang Bottom Lane. It was like someone had sat down with a toddler and asked them to come up with the street names.

  Barley Road.

  That sounded familiar.

  Roughlee BB9 2RD.

  I dropped the phone and turned to my left. There was a sign there, just behind me, wreathed in darkness. I backed up, turned a few degrees, shone the full beam on it.

  Roughlee ¾m, it read.

  I sat there for a moment, wondering what to do and who to tell, searching for a clarity that wouldn’t come. The facts didn’t help. It all comes down to instinct in the end.

  I picked the phone back up and dialled Roarkes.

  PART 3

  BLACK MOSS

  26: Chiara

  THIRTY MINUTES, ROARKES had said. Thirty minutes and help would be on its way.

  It was out of my hands now. I was done. That was what they’d said, all of them, Serena, Maloney, Roarkes. Sit tight. Hand it over. Piss off. You’re not a cop. You’re done.

  Of course Roarkes had also told me to drive straight back to Manchester, and instead I’d driven down a narrow track in the dark with my lights off for the last quarter of a mile, and now I was standing next to my car looking up at a house where someone was probably going to die
before those thirty minutes were up.

  If they weren’t dead already.

  It was an old house, and an ugly one, a farmhouse with lean-to extensions jutting out on all sides, roofed in slate and plastic and aluminium and whatever else Derek Lyons might have found lying around. I didn’t picture Derek Lyons as the sort of man who cared for the niceties of building regulations. There was one light on inside, upstairs, a bare bulb splashing stark white light onto a patch of exposed stone wall and a chunk of dark wooden beam. Shadows crossed the wall from time to time. There was someone up there.

  There was also a familiar, cloying smell. It was something obvious, just a tiny mental hop away, but so much of my brain was caught up in the painful pulse in my arm, I couldn’t think clearly enough make that hop.

  I heard a ringing and reached instinctively for my pocket, but it wasn’t my phone. It came from the house. The ringing stopped and was replaced by a voice, and I pulled out my phone and switched it to silent, just in case.

  The window was open. The window onto the room with the light in it. A man was speaking, and by some fortunate quirk of the wind and the channels cut through the air by all those slanting bits of roof, I could hear every word.

  “Here?”

  Silence.

  “Well it’s brave, at least. Stupid, but brave.”

  The accent was subtle, the kind of accent you wouldn’t remember if someone asked you about it afterwards. The kind of voice that could dial 999 and talk shit about a man with a weapon and still, somehow, be as memorable as a blade of grass in a field.

  “You screwed up. We’ll talk about that later.”

  The person on the other end of the line clearly didn’t agree, because there was a moment’s pause, before the man cut in again.

  “No. You listen to me. You take care of the loose ends where you are. We’ll sort out the ones here.”

  A figure suddenly appeared between the light bulb and the window, and I saw him clearly. He was walking across the room, in sight for no more than a second, but it was enough: a man with a phone pressed to his ear, a well-built man, not short, not tall, not fat, just solid and well-built, a little grey, a lot bald.

  Derek Lyons.

  The call had ended, and now there was another voice.

  “What is it?”

  Another man, a thinner, frailer voice, a nervous voice. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking. I was terrified. Someone else being nervous would help.

  “We’re expecting a visitor. Get Mike, go outside and see if she’s here yet.”

  “What do you want done to her?”

  “Just bring her inside. We’ll figure it out then.”

  My body was frozen, and most of my brain, too, but part of it was jumping from question to conclusion before the rest of me had started processing what it had heard.

  Lyons knew someone was coming.

  Who?

  She.

  There was only one candidate, really, and now they knew she was on her way. She was, undoubtedly, a clever woman, and a determined one, but I doubted that would be enough with Derek Lyons and his friends all primed and ready.

  And the police were still thirty minutes away. More like twenty-five, now. Nothing before that, because there were no helicopters available and there might be a single patrol car nearby, with an unarmed officer or two in it, but after what we’d seen on the CCTV footage no unarmed officer was going to be stupid enough to take on Derek Lyons.

  That twenty-five minutes rested on one pretty large assumption, too, which was that Roarkes was on the level. That Roarkes hadn’t been working all along with Tarney and Astra man and Derek Lyons and his friends. That Roarkes hadn’t deliberately lured me out into this this cold, wet relic of the past, with its farmhouses and barns squatting on the earth like stone carcasses in primordial mud, to laugh at my stupidity and watch me die.

  I stood there, in the stone and the mud, and I smiled to myself, because now I’d spelled it out, now I’d followed my thoughts to their logical conclusions, I could see how absurd those thoughts had been. Twenty-five minutes was a long time, and something still wasn’t quite right, but whatever it was, I knew it wasn’t Roarkes.

  The voices upstairs had stopped, replaced by footsteps. I knew I had to move, but I also knew they’d be out in seconds and there weren’t enough of those seconds to get back in the car, turn it around and drive away. I’d parked it in a patch of shadow by a corner of the house, but it wouldn’t take much bad luck for them to walk out, turn, and shine a torch on it.

  The footsteps faded into nothing, and then I heard something else, faintly, from the other side of the house. A splashing, the gentle tinkle of liquid on earth and stone. The hop was made. I knew that smell.

  It was petrol.

  Sally Carson was here, somewhere, outside the house, with a can of petrol and twenty years of revenge bubbling its way up. I wondered, briefly, whether she’d heard what I’d just heard, the phone call, the fact that Lyons knew she was there, and if she had, why I hadn’t spotted her flying back past me to safety. Only briefly, though. Twenty years, and a can of petrol. Now she’d got here, Sally Carson wasn’t about to leave before she was done.

  I heard a door open round the far side of the house and took a few steps back, coming up against the reassuring cold metal and rust of the Fiat, and thanking a god I didn’t believe in that whoever had come out had chosen the back instead of the front door a handful of yards from where I stood. There was just enough light for me to make out the contours of that door. It hadn’t been painted in a while, and where it had, the paint had run into points and ridges of indeterminate colour. I looked at the door and it stared blankly back at me, a broken animal, a flightless bird, a dumb portent of death.

  It was a front door. What the hell was I thinking?

  I ducked down and watched it, not that ducking down would do much since the thing I was ducking down behind was a car that wasn’t supposed to be there any more than I was. Just because the first bastard or two had chosen the back door didn’t mean the next one would.

  The front door didn’t move. More noises round the back, footsteps, a shout.

  “Can you smell that, Ray?”

  Then a reply, the same voice I’d heard talking to Lyons.

  “Oil. Line must be leaking.”

  No gas round here. Oil tanks in the fields and the gardens, and pipes through to the boilers inside. But I knew what oil smelled like, and it wasn’t this.

  I wasn’t the only one.

  “Use your nose, Ray. That’s not oil. That’s petrol.”

  “Are you – look, Mike. Over there.”

  More footsteps, faster now, and the sound of something metal dropping to the ground. Then another shout from Mike.

  “Don’t you fucking move, bitch.”

  I recognised that voice, now. I’d heard it only once, and briefly, but once had been enough. Get your nose out of Thomas Carson’s business, it had said, and then the fist attached to the voice had come swinging back into my face. I remembered that fist. I remembered Roarkes telling me it wasn’t much of a lead.

  If I was lucky enough to get out of here alive, I’d be having a word with Roarkes about what did make a lead.

  The footsteps had stopped, all silent and still. All except me. I hadn’t realised I was doing it but now I was halfway between the car and the house, crouching low, rubbing absently at my arm.

  “Turn around. What’s that in your hand?”

  “It’s a cigarette lighter, boys.”

  It was Sally Carson, but it wasn’t the Sally Carson I’d heard before, the one with the little eyes and the little nose who didn’t know what was going on or how it would all end. There was no emotion at all, not in the first four words, at least, just a clear, bland statement of fact. But that last word, boys – I turned the corner of the house as she said it and suddenly I could see her, squinting at the torchlight shining in her face.

  Boys – if it hadn’t been for the half-smile it would hav
e been a hiss – and that was it, of course. The control, the hiss. A cat, toying with its prey. On the surface, it looked like they had her. One gun, maybe two, pointed right at her – and suddenly I realised where I was, that I was actually here, right in the middle of it, or closer to the middle than I wanted to be, and I inched back to the hard cold stone. But she had them, too. Petrol everywhere, from the smell of it, and a flame in her hand in the moment it took either of them to squeeze a trigger.

  So this was what balance looked like. The moment of choice. The coin up and spinning, the instant between ascent and swift and brutal fall. But death on heads and death on tails, inevitable, inescapable, unless something new appeared, some hand to reach out and grasp it from the air. There was something new on its way right now, the police were coming, but not for as many as fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, so Sally couldn’t count on them. There was nothing new for her.

  I heard a noise above me, a window opening, and shrank back further into the stone.

  “Have you got her?”

  Derek Lyons. I’d heard that voice once on a recording, and a second time, just minutes ago, and there was still nothing memorable about it, but knowing who he was and what he’d done made the difference. I didn’t think I’d be forgetting Derek Lyons’ voice in a hurry.

  “Erm, sort of,” came the reply.

  “What? Bring her up here, will you. I’ve got some questions.”

  I stared at Sally Carson and tried to look through her, into her mind, tried to work out what she was doing and how much she really meant it, whether she knew her choice was no choice at all. She could drop the lighter and let them take her inside, and I didn’t think it would be tea and biscuits waiting for her there. Or she could snap her fingers, burn to death, take one or two of them with her. I found myself sniffing the air, feeling something wet against the stone, bringing my fingers to my nose, moving an inch or two forward again. Realising that fifteen or twenty minutes might be too many, but there was something new here already, something that might tip the balance ever so slightly Sally Carson’s way.