The eastern horizon is now a yellow slash and the treetops on the high ground are changing colour. The helicopter is in the air but still half an hour away. It’s another call-sign in the chorus of chatter and static on the radio.
Ellis seems to be slowing down, still turning at every roundabout and doubling back. He’s on the A38, passing under the M5. At the next roundabout he takes the second exit on to Bridgewater Road and after half a mile turns left towards Berrow and the coast. The landscape is flat and windswept, broken only by occasional villages and the Mendip Hills in the south.
Kieran points to a satellite image that shows clusters of white boxes along a six-mile beach stretching from Burnham-on-Sea to Brean Down. Caravan sites, chalet parks and holiday cabins are like miniature communities set out in grid pattern with narrow tarmac roads dividing the squares.
The tailing cars are all within a mile of each other as we follow the Coast Road through small villages touched now by a morning sun that paints the cottages in pastel colours and turns fields a brighter green.
There are caravan parks on both sides of the road, along the beachfront and spread in neat rows across fields that were once farmland. Some of the caravans have small gardens, washing lines and faded awnings. Others look closed up and packed away for the winter.
‘Is there a fairground near any of them?’ asks Cray.
‘Brean Leisure Park.’ Kieran points to the satellite image on screen, which shows up as a series of circles, spiders and snake-like rides, flattened of perspective by the angle of the camera.
The green dot on the screen continues along the Coast Road for another five hundred yards before turning left into a shopping centre. Ellis slowly circles the deserted car park and pulls up near a pathway leading from the shops to the beach.
He waits, sitting behind the wheel, watching the entrance. A motorbike passes and disappears along the road. One of ours. The other surveillance teams are hanging back.
The sun has risen above a torn ridge of clouds, bleaching the whitecaps. We’ve stopped moving and parked at the entrance to the fairground, where the rides are tethered and silent. I can hear flags and canvas beating out a rhythm in the breeze.
Minutes pass. The engine ticks over. Cray’s nerves are like guitar strings. I want to ask her about the court case. What did she decide to do? It’s not a subject we can talk about openly.
A woman is walking towards us with her dog. She has tight pink leggings and a mass of dyed black hair that matches the colour of her poodle. Crossing the road, she looks at us suspiciously.
Safari Roy on radio:
‘Target’s moving. He’s out of the car. Taking something from the boot . . . It’s a petrol container. He’s on foot.’
‘Where?’
‘Heading down the beach track.’
‘Stay put. He could double back.’
‘Mobile Two: I have visual contact.’
‘Don’t get too close.’
Cray is sick of looking at dots on a screen. She wants to be outside, on foot, closer.
‘Mobile One: Target’s on the beach.’
‘Mobile Two: I’ve lost visual . . . no, I see him again.’
‘Copy that.’
‘Mobile Three: I’m staying at the car.’
‘Where’s the chopper?’ asks Cray.
Kieran answers, ‘Eight minutes away.’
‘You still with him, Roy?’
‘I got him.’
‘What’s he doing?’
‘He’s cutting over the dunes, back towards the road. You should see him in about ten . . . five . . .’
‘Mobile Two: He’s walking between ’vans.’
Cray over the radio: ‘Nobody move until he identifies the van.’ Then she taps Monk on the shoulder. ‘Get us closer.’
Pulling on to the Coast Road, we travel a hundred yards and turn into a driveway. The other cars are closing in, sealing off the entrances to the caravan park. I catch a brief glimpse of Ellis about sixty yards away, walking between caravans. A hooded sweatshirt covers his head. One hand is in the pocket of his dark jeans. The other holds an orange petrol container. He stops, crouching on his haunches, scanning the park, but his gaze returns to a particular ’van.
Cray has an earpiece nestled in the shell of her ear. ‘Wait for my word.’
I can feel the tightness in my scalp . . . in my bladder. Cray is out of the car, making a scuttling dash to a low brick wall. She peers over the top.
For ten minutes nobody moves. I keep trying to fit Sienna’s recollections into the real world. She could see the canopy of a merry-go-round, yet the leisure park is a hundred yards away.
Ellis straightens and reaches into his pocket. Something’s wrong. It’s too easy.
‘It’s not the van,’ I whisper to Cray.
She looks at me.
‘It’s not in the right place. Sienna’s statement.’
‘Maybe he moved it.’
‘Or he knows you’re here.’
‘Bullshit! We were careful.’
‘Sienna didn’t see Billy that night she woke. Ellis could have a second van. He’s going to lead you to the wrong one.’
The DCI is staring at me. ‘I can’t let him get inside. What if he has a weapon? I can’t risk a siege situation.’
Ellis is only feet away from the door of the van.
‘It’s not the one.’
I can hear Cray grinding her teeth. She presses her radio. ‘Hold your positions. Nobody move.’
Ellis has reached the door. He motions to put a key in the lock and then turns, skipping across the narrow tarmac road, disappearing from view.
Safari Roy: ‘Mobile One, I’ve lost visual contact.’
‘Mobile Two, I can’t see target.’
‘Does anyone have a visual?’ asks Cray, growing agitated.
The answers come back negative. Cursing, she makes a decision. She wants the park sealed off, locked down, nobody in or out.
Running in a low crouch, I return to the car and ask Kieran to bring up the satellite image again. Studying the layout, I run my finger in a rough circle around the screen.
‘Where are you going?’ asks Kieran.
‘For a walk.’
My left leg is jerking and my arms don’t swing in unison, but it’s good to be outside, moving. Following the main road, I walk past Brean Leisure Park and then vault a low brick wall, heading in the direction of the beach. There are caravans on either side of the narrow road and more down cross-streets. Occasionally, I turn and look for the canopy of the merry-go-round.
I take out my mobile and punch Cray’s number. Almost in the same heartbeat, I see Gordon Ellis emerge from a row of trees about forty yards away. In a half-run he disappears behind a shower block and emerges again, stopping at the last caravan.
Without waiting, he unscrews the lid from the petrol can and begins dousing the walls and windows, swinging the plastic container in long arcs that send liquid as high as the roof.
‘Hello, Gordon.’
He turns, holding the petrol can at arm’s length. His other hand reaches behind his back and produces a pistol from beneath his sweatshirt. It must have been tucked into his belt, nestled against his spine.
‘I assume you’re not alone,’ he says.
‘No.’
‘So you brought the police.’
‘You did that all by yourself.’
I can see him calculating the odds, pondering an escape route. There is a movement in the scrubby hedge behind him. Safari Roy is hunkered down, talking on his radio, summoning back-up.
‘You’re different from the others,’ says Ellis.
‘What others?’
‘The police. They want to know how, but you want to know why. You’re desperate to know. You want to know if I was abused as a child; if I was buggered by some uncle or the Parish priest. Did I lose my mother? Did I wet the bed? Did she make me sleep in soiled sheets? You think there has to be cause and effect - and that’s your weakness. Th
ere’s nothing to understand. I’m a hunter. It’s how we all started. It’s how we all survived. It’s how we evolved.’
‘Some of us have evolved a bit further than others.’ I want to keep moving to stop my legs from locking up. ‘Tell me something, Gordon. Were you grooming Charlie?’
He gives me a crocodile smile. ‘What did you do to that poor girl? She’s a timid little kitten.’
‘She’s had a rough few years.’
He nods. ‘I can tell. I thought somebody had got to her first.’
That same smile again. He’s goading me.
Almost in the same breath, I hear Cray’s voice over a megaphone, demanding that he put the gun down and raise his hands above his head. Ellis swings around and hurls the petrol container in my direction, where it bounces end over end.
He turns and puts a key into the lock. Behind him I can see Safari Roy emerge from cover, running hard, his gun drawn. Cray is yelling, ‘Move! Move!’
The van door swings open and the air seems to wobble like God is shaking the camera. I see a puff of dirty smoke, grey like the sea, and then feel the pressure wave created by the bomb. Gordon Ellis is blown backwards, like the scene is playing in reverse, speeded up.
The caravan disintegrates from within - windows shooting outwards, the roof lifting off, walls splintering into a jigsaw of flying debris - a sink, a toilet, cupboard doors, plastic, stainless steel, reels, spindles - blasting across the park, tumbling to earth.
A hail of metal fragments, nails or ball bearings that must have been packed around the explosives, are sent hurtling outwards, punching holes through fibreglass and flesh.
Knocked from her feet, Ronnie Cray picks herself up. Running. Her hair wet with blood. A nail embedded in her shoulder. She yells into her radio, deafened by the blast and unable to moderate her voice. She wants paramedics.
Ellis had a darkroom. The explosion has ignited the chemicals on the inside and the petrol on the outside creating an orange ball that boils up and evaporates in a wave of smoke and debris. Scraps of photographs, torn paper, twisted negatives and scorched contact sheets are carried by the breeze, clinging to branches and shrubs, skipping across the grass.
Two caravans are burning - one on its side and the other pocked like a Swiss cheese. Roy is lying between them. Monk gets to him first. He signals to me. The front of Roy’s shirt is soaked in blood. I rip it off and see half a dozen puncture wounds. Two of the nails are still embedded in his chest.
Someone hands me a first-aid kit. I pull out bandages and dressing, instructing Monk what to do. Roy is conscious and cracking jokes to Ronnie Cray.
‘Hey, boss, I’m taking a few weeks off. I’m going to buy ten boxes of condoms and work my way through them.’
‘You’d be better off buying ten lottery tickets,’ she replies.
‘You think I’m that lucky?’
‘I think you’re that unlucky.’
Crouching next to me, she pulls the nail from her shoulder and squeezes a bandage beneath her bra strap.
‘He should be OK,’ I say, looking around for more wounded. The nearest caravan has had its side ripped away. Gordon Ellis is lying in the wreckage. One arm is reaching out for something while the other is only a spike of bone jammed into a wall.
The skin on his face has been peeled away and one eye is a bloody hole. I look at his chest, which has been crushed by the blast. He’s dying. He can go in seconds or a few hours, but he’s going.
I tell him to hold on, the paramedics are coming, a helicopter . . .
His one good eye is staring at me and words bubble in his throat. ‘You have a fatal curiosity.’
‘I’m not the one who’s dying.’
His tongue appears, licking at the blood on his lips. Can he taste death?
‘Who did this?’
He sucks in a ragged breath and coughs.
‘I wasn’t useful any more.’
He’s talking about Novak Brennan.
‘Why were you helping him?’
‘Novak collects people.’
‘He blackmails them?’
‘He’s a hard man to refuse.’
Ellis grimaces. His teeth are like pieces of broken ceramic sticking from his gums.
‘What about Ray Hegarty?’
‘The girl must have killed him.’
‘No. There was someone else in the house that night waiting for Sienna. You wanted to silence her.’
‘Why would I bother? I owned her.’
I can hear sirens in the distance, getting closer. His blood is running between my fingers, over my hands. Ebbing away.
Something brushes my shoulder - a scorched photograph, blown by the breeze from the roof of the caravan. A black-and-white image of a naked girl, snap-frozen, my daughter’s best friend, with her arms bound to her ankles and her body, arched backwards. Exposed. Obscene. Unconscious.
I look at Ellis.
I look at my hands.
I walk away.
Rotors flash in the sunshine, beating the air, pushing it aside. Faces appear at the windows of the air ambulance. A door slides open and paramedics sprint across the swirling sand, their hair flattened by the downdraught.
Ronnie Cray is yelling orders and barking into her mobile. Scotland Yard is sending a team from Counter Terrorism Command and the Bomb Squad, while Louis Preston has also been summoned.
The blades of the chopper are spinning more slowly. Safari Roy and Gordon Ellis are strapped to litters and I watch them being carried to the helicopter. There’s room for one more. Cray looks nervously at the rumbling chopper. ‘You go with them. I hate those things.’
‘What about your shoulder?’
‘I’m fine. I’m needed here.’
The last of the litters is lifted into the chopper.
‘Why booby-trap the van?’ she asks.
‘Ellis had become a liability. He was attracting too much unwanted attention.’
‘So Brennan ordered this?’
‘He’s tying up loose ends.’
‘Did Ellis say anything about Ray Hegarty?’
‘He says he didn’t kill him.’
Cray doesn’t look at me, but I know what she’s thinking.
‘What about the trial? Are you going to stop it?’
‘That’s not your concern.’
‘Ruiz says it could cost you your career.’
‘It might not come to that.’
She pauses and gazes past me along the beach to where a wooden lighthouse on stilts seems to be trapped between the waves and the shore. The daylight is behind her.
‘Do you have a lot of friends, Professor?’
‘Not too many. How about you?’
‘Same. Why do you think that is?’
‘I know too much about people.’
‘And you don’t like what you see?’
‘Not a lot.’
She nods judiciously. ‘Decency is badly undersold.’ Her eyes are jittering with light and her lips move uncertainly. ‘I went to see Judge Spencer last night. I showed him a photograph of Sienna. I was sure he was going to deny it. I thought that underneath the robes and wig he’d prove to be just another lawyer who knows how to play the game - deny, deny, deny or say nothing at all.’
Cray runs a hand through her bristled hair. Dust and debris cling to her palm.
‘What did he say?’
‘He said he didn’t know she was only fourteen. He uses an escort agency occasionally when his wife is away. Same old story - lust, desire and the lure of forbidden fruit.’
‘What’s he going to do?’
She shakes her head. ‘Hopefully, the right thing.’
She points towards the chopper. The engines are revving and the rotors accelerating. A helmeted co-pilot gives a thumbs-up.
‘You’d better go.’
Fine sand blasts against my trousers and my face as I run in a crouch and hoist myself on board. Seconds later my stomach lurches and the tail of the helicopter lifts. We leave the earth an
d swiftly rise, watching caravans shrink to the size of toy building blocks and the roads become black ribbons.
Higher still, we’re above the whitecaps and rocky shore, higher than the Mendip Hills and the patchwork fields, where everything is bathed in lustrous sunshine that makes a mockery of all that is dark about the day.
51
Frenchay Hospital on the northern outskirts of Bristol was built in the grounds of a former Georgian mansion, a sanatorium for children with TB back in the 1920s, when lung diseases were as Welsh as male voice choirs.
Little of the old seems to remain. The A&E is decorated in primary colours with modular furniture, cushions and even bean-bags. The Intensive Care Unit is on the ground floor, along a wide corridor that squeaks beneath the rubber-soled shoes of the nurses.
There have been too many hospitals lately and the smell seems to stick to the inside of my nostrils, reminding me of my childhood. I grew up around places like this, one of a long line of surgeons until I broke the mould and quit medicine in my third year. My father, God’s-personal-physician-in-waiting, has only just forgiven me.
The metal doors swing open and a small Asian woman appears. Dressed in green surgical scrubs, she has a short hair, a round face and teeth as white as brand-new. Her name is Dr Chou and she has a Birmingham accent and honey-coloured eyes.
‘The detective is out of any danger. We removed fragments from his bowel, but his other major organs seem to have escaped serious damage. We’re going to X-ray him again to make sure we haven’t missed any shrapnel.’
She consults a clipboard. ‘I can’t give you similar news about Gordon Ellis.’
She begins listing the extent of his injuries, but most of the details wash over me except for her final statement: ‘Basically we can’t stop the bleeding. X-rays also show there is a nail embedded in his spine and he has no sensation below the neck.’
She pauses, wanting to be sure that I understand what she’s saying.
Bleed For Me (joseph o'loughlin) Page 37