by Joel Hames
It was fury.
“You don’t scare easy, Mr Williams. We’ve been kind to you, as a favour, but I think the time for favours has gone.”
I guess when you’re used to shooting people for no reason at all, a punch in the face and a near miss with a car probably do constitute a favour. I couldn’t imagine why I’d been lucky enough to receive it, but I wasn’t complaining.
“Put the knife down,” I said, and Lyons laughed. He didn’t say anything, just laughed, and I saw the knife flick out a fraction of a millimetre, and then settle back, and now there was a thin line of red on Sally Carson’s cheek, thickening as I watched.
She didn’t so much as wince.
I realised suddenly why she was angry and who she was angry with. It wasn’t Lyons, the man who’d killed her family, framed her husband and was currently digging a knife into her cheek.
It was me.
Sally Carson was furious with me because I hadn’t finished off her work for her and set fire to the building. All she’d wanted was Lyons dead, and if I’d done what she’d wanted me to do, that was precisely what he would have been. As things were, he might yet live.
Sally Carson was furious with me and Derek Lyons was laughing at me, except now he’d stopped laughing and was shaking his head slowly with his mouth shut and curled into the smirk of a man who was about to show an amateur how things were really done, and suddenly I was furious myself. I noticed he’d stepped a few inches away from Sally, confident he had nothing to fear from an injured lawyer with a gun. I remembered what I’d been told years back, by one of my less savoury clients, about the stomach being the best bit to aim for, because of its size, and I remembered how badly my first shot at Ray had gone. The bigger the target, the better. And he'd just moved another inch away from Sally.
I squeezed the trigger.
The knife fell to the floor and landed next to the power cable for the silent stereo. I’d knocked out the plug when I’d come rolling into the room.
Lyons fell more slowly. The smirk was gone, in its place a wide-eyed astonishment. I looked for the wound in his stomach, but there wasn’t one. His leg was bleeding instead. His right leg. I’d aimed for a stomach and hit a leg, and that was probably fine, because the important thing was that Derek Lyons was no longer holding a weapon, and I was, and Sally Carson was already up from the chair and walking towards me, no longer furious, just determined.
I tried to reach out my near-useless right arm to grab her and run, but she moved quickly down and inside and took the gun from my left. I knew what was about to happen, and I tried to say something, but I didn’t know what that something should be.
She turned, and I followed her with my eyes, and I saw Lyons knew what was coming, too, and the wide-eyed astonishment was a desperate pleading fear. In the moment before the gun fired he shook like a child that had fallen from his bicycle. Then there was another deafening crack, and a large and bloody hole appeared in his head.
The police are on their way, that was it, that was what I should have said, I realised, as his body jerked and settled onto the floor. It was too late for that now. The room shifted, and I looked up, and Sally Carson was there looking down at me, which didn’t make sense at all until I realised I’d fallen, too. My arm was no longer hurting, but it was pulling at me, dragging me down and keeping me pinned to the floor. I watched as Sally Carson bent down, put her arms underneath mine, and levered me up. She must have been stronger than she looked, because she got me on my feet without a hint of help from me.
“Come on,” she said, and dropped the gun. I nodded, dumbly, and found my legs were now willing to follow instruction, suddenly vigorous, shot through with adrenaline. We took the stairs two at a time, Sally in front and disappearing through the back door even as I took the final step and vaulted the body lying beside it.
I was outside half a second later and round the side of the house before I realised I was alone. I turned to make my way back, and the rush that had brought me that far fell away. It was as much as I could do to stagger round the corner, my whole body telling me to stop where I was and drop to the ground. If I survived, so much the better. If I didn’t, I’d beaten the odds so long it was only fair I lost this time. The number of things that should have killed me, or at least could have killed me – well, really, I should be grateful I wasn’t dead already.
I tried not to worry about what was behind the silent surrender of my limbs and forced myself back round the corner.
Sally Carson was standing in the shadows, barely visible. She held something in her right hand, and I couldn’t see it clearly but I knew what it was. There was a sudden brief flare of light, a tiny oval of flame in the darkness, and then a great rushing sound, and the tiny oval had grown vast. It was everywhere. It was all around me.
I was on my knees, my head in a dozen places at once, upstairs with Derek Lyons and his leaking head, downstairs with dead Ray and down the track with poor flattened Mike, in the hospital with Thomas Carson, in the police station with Gaddesdon, grinning from ear to ear as someone told him again what an idiot he was, in Malhotra’s car as we bumped down another useless dead end, in my own flat, drinking coffee and watching Claire emerge from the shower, in court watching David Brooks-Powell dissolve from tyrant to nervous wreck, in the pub with Maloney and the cell with Tarney, and back further, in a bus, in a tiny office that stank of cigarettes, in another pub where faces loomed red and pregnant with laughter.
The scenes turned. My life unravelling before me, except I wasn’t dying. I was all of these people and none of them, I was Sam Williams on his knees outside a blazing farmhouse and the brightness was unbearable. I couldn’t be dying.
Everywhere was burning. Nowhere was dark.
Sally Carson appeared above me, again, and I felt myself being lifted onto my feet. My legs jerked back into life. My right arm, which had gone numb, now felt like someone had cut it open, inserted a lump of smouldering coal, and sewn it back up again.
I was definitely alive.
28: Falling Into Place
THE LIGHT FRACTURED into individual beams, cones of brightness, white, blue, the sound suddenly distilled from a solid roar into single, comprehensible noises. Shouts. Sirens. I opened my mouth to shout, stopped, collapsed to the ground. This time Sally didn’t pick me back up. She didn’t need to.
There were two of them, a police officer in uniform and a paramedic. Figures in brown and yellow rushed by. I looked up, my eyes following them towards Black Moss Farm, or what was left of it.
The paramedic was talking to me. I concentrated on his face, round, wide, lightly-bearded, red-cheeked, and topped with a little crown of brown hair. I looked at his lips and tried to work out what he was saying, and then I realised I could hear him, I could pick out the words even in all the noise.
“Can you hear me, Mr Williams?”
I nodded.
“Can you speak?”
“Yes,” I said. It came out deeper and hoarser than I’d expected, but it came out.
“We need to get you to a hospital. I think there’s something wrong with your arm.”
Maybe there was something wrong with my arm. Maybe there had been something wrong with my arm ever since Russell Tarney had stamped on it.
“Wait a moment,” said the police officer. “Is there anyone left inside?”
I nodded.
“Yes. Two of them. I think they’re dead.”
She looked up at the building, and then back down at me, and returned the nod. I didn’t say anything about Mike. The police had made it this far, so if they hadn’t driven past Mike on the way up then they’d driven over him. They knew about Mike.
“Come on, then.”
The paramedic was smiling at me, eyebrows raised in invitation, and I luxuriated, briefly, in the prospect of an ambulance, with a bed, and drugs I could sink into until nothing mattered. I shook my head and looked around. Sally Carson was sat on the bumper of another ambulance nodding at another paramedic and
another police officer. I tried to walk towards her and remembered I was sitting on the ground. The paramedic – my paramedic – shook his head.
“I need to speak to her,” I said. He shrugged and helped me to my feet and even though there were a hundred thoughts buzzing around inside, I managed to keep that one thought, the thing I had to say to Sally Carson, front and centre until I was standing there murmuring to her and praying she could hear me.
She nodded. I wasn’t sure she understood and I wasn’t sure it was me she was nodding at, but it would have to do. I’d see her soon enough, anyway.
“Come on, Mr Williams. Let’s get you checked out.”
I nodded, dumbly, and then stopped.
I couldn’t go to the hospital. I needed to see Roarkes or Malhotra first. I couldn’t remember why, but I had to speak to them. There was something.
There was something wrong. There was still something wrong.
I looked over to the farmhouse and then across to Sally, who was being helped into the ambulance with a dressing pressed against her bleeding face, and I tried to figure out what was wrong.
I’d remember it when I saw Roarkes and Malhotra.
“No,” I said, and tried to explain. The paramedic listened to me, still smiling, and told me I was suffering from shock and the police would be able to take care of everything. I shook my head.
“Malhotra,” I shouted, and the police officer, who had started to walk back towards the phalanx of patrol cars and vans that had suddenly appeared, turned and stared at me.
“Can you get me to Folgate?” I asked. “I needed to speak to DI Roarkes. It’s urgent.”
She was still staring at me, tall and blonde and serious-looking with a frown on her like the hood on a cobra.
“What is it?”
I shook my head.
“I need Roarkes and Malhotra.”
She held out her phone, and I shook my head again.
“I need to see them.”
She sighed, and walked over to speak to the paramedic. I could see him argue, but he wasn’t putting his heart into it. I blinked, and a moment went by, and he was in front of me, no longer smiling.
“You’ll need to admit yourself as soon as you’re done with the police,” he said.
I nodded.
“Do you want anything for that?”
I nodded again. The arm was hardly bearable, a bastard bully of an arm, dominating every other thought I had. With something to push it back down, maybe I’d be able to remember why the hell I was so desperate to see Roarkes and Malhotra.
The journey was short and violent, the lights flashing and the sirens wailing and the pain still there, just a little further below the surface than it had been. I stepped out of the patrol car and found I could walk, one foot in front of the other all the way to the main entrance, where I was nearly sent flying by Serena Hawkes rushing the other way.
“Have you heard?” I asked, and she shook her head.
“Come with me,” I said. She needed to know what had happened. I put my left arm across her back – as if I had the strength to move a box of tissues let alone another human being – and a moment later we were inside.
Roarkes had been told I was coming. He ushered us straight up to his office, where Malhotra was already waiting.
Roarkes began.
“Sally’s in the hospital. She’s going to be OK. Apparently she won’t talk to anyone except her husband and we’re still trying to figure out if we should let her.”
“Let her,” I interrupted. “It’s over, Roarkes. Lyons is dead. They’re all dead. No way anyone walked out of that house.”
“Are you going to tell us what happened?”
“Sure,” I said. “Just not right now.”
“Want to get your stories straight, Sam?”
I forced myself to concentrate on his face, which was swimming in and out of focus like the memory of Saturday night on Sunday morning. He was frowning, and if he decided to take a serious interest in what had happened at Black Moss Farm then Sally Carson was screwed, and me with her. I’d have to cross that bridge before it burnt down.
“So they’re really dead?” asked Serena. She was leaning against the wall of the office, pale, drained but relieved, like I’d just told her she wasn’t getting hanged in the morning. She hadn’t enjoyed the case, but it was over. Even after everything I’d been through, I found a moment to feel pleased for her.
“No one could have walked out of that fire, Serena. They’re dead.”
“All three?”
I nodded. No need to mention how Mike had met his end.
“So why did you want to come here?” asked Roarkes. “They said you weren’t in great shape, and from the look of you they weren’t exaggerating.”
I paused. I knew there was something I needed to tell him, something we still had to think about, and I’d hoped it would come pouring out at the right moment, but it hadn’t. I shook my head, at myself as much as Roarkes. Here I was in a police station with a bunch of clever people (I noticed Gaddesdon wasn’t in the room), people who could crack anything if they put their minds to it, and I had nothing for them.
There was a muted buzzing and Serena fished her phone out of her bag, stared at it, and shook her head.
“Sorry. Got to take this,” she said, and slipped out of the room. It didn’t matter. If I couldn’t figure out what had been bothering me, I might as well check myself into the nearest hospital and get some sleep.
It was probably nothing, I realised. It was probably just my brain playing tricks on me, a hangover from one of those other versions of Sam Williams I thought I was but wasn’t after all, an idea some previous incarnation of me hadn’t quite brought to fruition. I sighed and slumped down in the chair Roarkes had pushed me into, and sipped at the glass of water Malhotra had placed in my hand.
“I don’t know,” I said, eventually. “I had an idea something wasn’t quite right, something didn’t add up. But I can’t figure out what.”
Roarkes nodded. “Shock,” he said, and even though it was dumb and patronising, and the one thing this wasn’t was shock, I didn’t argue.
We sat there, me, and Roarkes behind his desk, and Malhotra standing beside me like a portrait of a Victorian nurse. We sat, and stood, in silence, for all of thirty seconds, and then the silence was broken.
Gaddesdon didn’t so much enter the room as bring it whirling into orbit around him, and where there had been peace and empty space, now there was Gaddesdon, panting noisily, and outside the room shouts and a loud, steady wailing that sounded like a very serious alarm.
“What is it, Gaddesdon?” asked Roarkes, clearly annoyed. Two more breaths, and he was able to answer.
“It’s Tarney, sir. He’s dead.”
Tarney being dead wasn’t the something wrong I’d anticipated, and part of me wondered whether it really counted as something wrong at all, but I pushed that part away and tried to see if this fitted into anything I knew.
Roarkes was shouting, and Gaddesdon was trying to answer, but every time he opened his mouth to say something Roarkes shouted another question at him. It took Malhotra bellowing “Stop!” at the top of her voice to bring the other two to a halt, and then she smiled, apologised, and quietly asked what had happened.
“Knife wound, says the doc. Knife in the neck.”
Roarkes took one of those long, slow breaths through his teeth that sounded like gas escaping. Dangerous, explosive gas. When he spoke again, he was quiet, each word picked carefully out and released into the room.
“You were supposed to be watching him.”
Gaddesdon nodded. “I know. I don’t understand. I was outside the room the whole time. It doesn’t make sense.”
“When did this happen?” asked Malhotra. Gaddesdon shrugged.
“Doc thinks some time in the last hour.”
Malhotra was still probing, the calm, quiet voice of sanity. “In his cell?”
Gaddesdon nodded. “Yup. Same one we had
Carson in.”
Roarkes was thinking aloud. “So Tarney knew something else.”
There was a short silence. Three frowning faces, I saw, my own no doubt the same.
“What else was there to know?” asked Roarkes, to the room in general. I could see he was trying to stay calm. He wasn’t doing a great job of it.
Something occurred to me.
“He was involved from the beginning, right?” I asked.
Malhotra nodded. “That’s right. He was on custody. Shift records showed he signed in early, and now we know why.”
“And nothing else unusual? Back then? At the start?”
She shrugged.
“I don’t know. You could try asking Serena.”
“Right,” I said, and then, “so she was there at the start too?”
“I think so,” she replied. “None of us got to speak to him that first day except Tarney and the arresting officer, and by the time I showed up Serena was already there warning us off.”
“How long after he was brought in was that?”
She shrugged again. “Dunno. Half an hour, hour maybe?”
An hour. It was feasible, but it seemed fast. Unusually fast. And there was something else. Serena hadn’t been appointed. Not by Carson, not by his family. You could imagine some chequebook lawyer rolling in like a greasy lead bullet when the local millionaire’s son earned himself his first drunk in charge – I’d been that chequebook lawyer myself. But Serena wasn’t.
“So who brought her in?” I asked, and Malhotra looked at Gaddesdon and Gaddesdon looked at Roarkes and Roarkes looked at all three of us, and even though none of us knew, we all knew.
“Tarney,” I said, answering my own question.
“Oh,” sighed Gaddesdon. It was a quiet “oh”, but now the shouting had drifted away, and the closed door had turned the alarm into a faint background whine, it was a breath of revelation into a still and silent room.
“Oh what?” asked Roarkes.
“With Tarney. Just now. I was outside the room. I mean, yeah, I know you said no one could see him except the three of us, but she was his brief, so I thought—”