Hell Is Always Today

by Jack Higgins

  “Oh, Gunner, God help me now.” The words rose in her throat, almost choking her as she turned and stumbled into the hall.

  The outside door was still locked and bolted. The handle turned slowly and there was a soft, discreet knocking. For a moment her own fear left her as she remembered the old woman who still lay in bed, her Sunday habit. Whatever happened she must be protected.

  Ma Crowther lay propped against the pillows, a shawl around her shoulders as she read one of her regular half-dozen Sunday newspapers. She glanced up in surprise as the door opened and Jenny appeared.

  “You all right, Gran?”

  “Yes, love, what is it?”

  “Nothing to worry about. I just want you to stay in here for a while, that’s all.”

  There was a thunderous knocking from below. Jenny quickly extracted the key on the inside of her grandmother’s door, slammed it shut and locked it as the old woman called out to her in alarm.

  The knocking on the front door had ceased, but as she went down the stairs, there was the sound of breaking glass from the living-room. When she looked in he was smashing the window methodically with an old wooden clothes prop from the yard. She closed the door of the room, locked it on the outside and went up to the landing.

  Her intention was quite clear. When he broke through the flimsy interior door, which wouldn’t take long, she would give him a sight of her and then run for the roof. If she could climb across to the metalworks and get down the fire escape there might still be a chance. In any case, she would have led him away from her grandmother.

  The door suddenly burst outwards with a great splintering crash and Bruno Faulkner came through with it, fetching up against the opposite wall. He looked up at her for a long moment, his face grave, and started to unbutton his raincoat. He tossed it to one side and put his foot on the bottom step. There was an old wooden chair on the landing. Jenny picked it up and hurled it down at him. He ducked and it missed him, bouncing from the wall.

  He looked up at her still calm and then howled like an animal, smashing the edge of his left hand hard against the wooden banister rail. The rail snapped in half, a sight so incredible that she screamed for the first time in her life.

  She turned and ran along the landing to the second staircase and Faulkner went after her. At the top of the stairs she was delayed for a moment as she wrestled with the bolt on the door that led to the roof. As she got it open, he appeared at the bottom.

  She ran out into the heavy rain, kicked off her shoes and started up the sloping roof, her stocking feet slipping on the wet tiles. She was almost at the top when she slipped back to the bottom. Again she tried, clawing desperately towards the ridge riles as Faulkner appeared from the stairway.

  She stuck half-way and stayed here, spread-eagled, caught like a fly on paper. And he knew it, that terrible man below. He came forward slowly and stood there looking up at her. And then he laughed and it was the coldest laugh she had ever heard in her life.

  He started forward and the Gunner came through the door like a thunderbolt. Faulkner turned, swerved like a ballet dancer and sent him on his way with a back-handed blow that caught him across the shoulders. The Gunner lost his balance, went sprawling, rolled beneath the rail at the far end and went down the roof that sloped to the yard below.

  The Gunner skidded to a halt outside Crowther’s yard and dropped the motorcycle on its side no more than four or five minutes after leaving the phone box. He went for the main gate on the run and disappeared through the judas as the Mini-Cooper turned the corner.

  It was Mallory who went after him first, mainly because he already had his door open when Miller was still braking, but there was more to it than that. For some reason he felt alive again in a way he hadn’t done for years. It was just like it used to be in the old days as a young probationer in Tower Bridge Division working the docks and the Pool of London. A punch-up most nights and on a Saturday anything could happen and usually did.

  The years slipped away from him as he went through the judas on the run in time to see the Gunner scrambling through the front window. Mallory went after him, stumbling over the wreckage of the door on his way into the hall.

  He paused for a brief moment, aware of the Gunner’s progress above him and went up the stairs quickly. By the time he reached the first landing, his chest was heaving and his mouth had gone bone dry as he struggled for air, but nothing on earth was going to stop him now.

  As he reached the bottom of the second flight of stairs, the Gunner went through the open door at the top. A moment later there was a sudden sharp cry. Mallory was perhaps half-way up the stairs when the girl started to scream.

  Faulkner had her by the left ankle and was dragging her down the sloping roof when Mallory appeared. In that single moment the whole thing took on every aspect of some privileged nightmare. His recognition of Faulkner was instantaneous, and at the same moment, a great many facts he had refused to face previously, surfaced. As the girl screamed again, he charged.

  In his day George Mallory had been a better than average rugby forward and for one year Metropolitan Police light–heavyweight boxing champion. He grabbed Faulkner by the shoulder, pulled him around and swung the same right cross that had earned him his title twenty-seven years earlier. It never even landed. Faulkner blocked the punch, delivered a forward elbow strike that almost paralysed Mallory’s breathing system and snapped his left arm like a rotten branch with one devastating blow with the edge of his right hand. Mallory groaned and went down. Faulkner grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and started to drag him along the roof towards the railing.

  For Miller it was as if somehow all this had happened before. As he came through the door and paused, thunder split the sky apart overhead and the rain increased into a solid grey curtain that filled the air with a strange, sibilant rushing sound and reduced visibility to a few yards.

  He took in everything in a single moment. The girl with her dress half-ripped from her body, crouched at the foot of the sloping roof crying hysterically, and Faulkner who had now turned to look towards the door, still clutching Mallory’s coat collar in his right hand.

  Faulkner. A strange fierce exhilaration swept through Miller, a kind of release of every tension that had knotted up inside him during the past twenty-four hours. A release that came from knowing that he had been right all along.

  He moved in on the run, jumped high in the air and delivered a flying front kick, the devastating mae-tobigeri, full into Faulkner’s face, one of the most crushing of all karate blows. Faulkner staggered back, releasing his hold on Mallory, blood spurting from his mouth and Miller landed awkwardly, slipping in the rain and falling across Mallory.

  Before he could scramble to his feet, Faulkner had him by the throat. Miller summoned every effort of will-power and spat full in the other man’s face. Faulkner recoiled in a kind of reflex action and Miller stabbed at his exposed throat with stiffened fingers.

  Faulkner went back and Miller took his time over getting up, struggling for air. It was a fatal mistake for a blow which would have demolished any ordinary man had only succeeded in shaking Faulkner’s massive strength. As Miller straightened, Faulkner moved in like the wind and delivered a fore-fist punch, knuckles extended, that fractured two ribs like matchwood and sent Miller down on one knee with a cry of agony.

  Faulkner drew back his foot and kicked him in the stomach. Miller went down flat on his face. Faulkner lifted his foot to crush the skull and Jenny Crowther staggered forward and clutched at his arm. He brushed her away as one might a fly on a summer’s day and turned back to Miller. It was at that precise moment that the Gunner reappeared.

  The Gunner’s progress down the sloping roof had been checked by the presence of an ancient Victorian cast-iron gutter twice the width of the modern variety. He had hung there for some time contemplating the cobbles of the yard thirty feet below. Like Jenny in a similar situation, he had found progress up a steeply sloping bank of Welsh slate in heavy rain a hazardou
s undertaking. He finally reached for the rusting railings above his head and pulled himself over in time to see Faulkner hurl the girl from him and turn to Miller.

  The Gunner, silent on bare feet, delivered a left and a right to Faulkner’s kidneys that sent the big man staggering forward with a scream of pain. As he turned, the Gunner stepped over Miller and let Faulkner have his famous left arm screw punch under the ribs followed by a right to the jaw, a combination that had finished no fewer than twelve of his professional fights inside the distance.

  Faulkner didn’t go down, but he was badly rattled. “Come on then, you bastard,” the Gunner yelled. “Let’s be having you.”

  Miller pushed himself up on one knee and tried to lift Mallory into a sitting position. Jenny Crowther crawled across to help and pillowed Mallory’s head against her shoulder. He nodded, face twisted in pain, unable to speak and Miller folded his arms tightly about his chest and coughed as blood rose into his mouth.

  There had been a time when people had been glad to pay as much as fifty guineas to see Gunner Doyle in action, but up there on the roof in the rain, Miller, the girl and Mallory had a ringside seat for free at his last and greatest battle.

  He went after Faulkner two-handed, crouched like a tiger. Faulkner was hurt—hurt badly, and the Gunner had seen enough to know that his only chance lay in keeping him in that state. He swayed to one side as Faulkner threw a punch and smashed his left into the exposed mouth that was already crushed and bleeding from Miller’s efforts. Faulkner cried out in pain and the Gunner gave him a right that connected just below the eye and moved close.

  “Keep away from him,” Miller yelled. “Don’t get too close.”

  The Gunner heard only the roar of the crowd as he breathed in the stench of the ring—that strange never-to-be-forgotten compound of human sweat, heat, and embrocation. He let Faulkner have another right to the jaw to straighten him up and stepped in close for a blow to the heart that might finish the job. It was his biggest mistake. Faulkner pivoted, delivering an elbow strike backwards that doubled the Gunner over. In the same moment Faulkner turned again, lifting the Gunner backwards with a knee in the face delivered with such force that he went staggering across the roof and fell heavily against the railing. It sagged, half-breaking and he hung there trying to struggle to his feet, blood pouring from his nose and mouth. Faulkner charged in like a runaway express train, shoulder down and sent him back across the railing. The Gunner rolled over twice on the way down, bounced across the broad iron gutter and fell to the cobbles below.

  Faulkner turned slowly, a terrifying sight, eyes glaring, blood from his mouth soaking down into his collar. He snarled at the three of them helpless before him, grabbed at the sagging iron railing and wrenched a four-foot length of it free. He gave a kind of animal-like growl and started forward.

  Ma Crowther stepped through the door at the head of the stairs, still in her nightdress, clutching her sawn-off shotgun against her breast. Faulkner didn’t see her, so intent was he on the task before him. He poised over his three victims, swinging the iron bar high above his head like an executioner, and she gave him both barrels full in the face.

  21

  It was almost nine o’clock in the evening when Miller and Jenny Crowther walked along the second floor corridor of the Marsden Wing of the General Infirmary towards the room in which they had put Gunner Doyle.

  They walked slowly because Miller wasn’t in any fit state to do anything else. His body seemed to be bruised all over and he was strapped up so tightly because of his broken ribs that he found breathing difficult. He was tired. A hell of a lot had happened since that final terrible scene on the roof and with Mallory on his back, he had been the only person capable of handling what needed to be done. A series of painkilling injections weren’t helping any and he was beginning to find difficulty in thinking straight any more.

  The constable on the chair outside the door stood up and Miller nodded familiarly. “Look after Miss Crowther for a few minutes will you, Harry? I want a word with the Gunner.”

  The policeman nodded, Miller opened the door and went in. There was a screen on the other side of the door and beyond it the Gunner lay propped against the pillows, his nose broken for the fourth time in his life, his right leg in traction, fractured in three places.

  Jack Brady sat in a chair on the far side of the bed reading his notebook. He got up quickly. “I’ve got a statement from him. He insists that he forced his way into the house last night; that Miss Crowther and her grandmother only allowed him to stay under duress.”

  “Is that a fact?” Miller looked down at the Gunner and shook his head. “You’re a poor liar, Gunner. The girl’s already given us a statement that clarifies the entire situation. She says that when you saved her from Faulkner in the yard, she and her grandmother felt that they owed you something. She seems to think that’s a good enough defence even in open court.”

  “What do you think?” the Gunner said weakly.

  “I don’t think it will come to court so my views don’t count. You put up the fight of your life back there on the roof. Probably saved our lives.”

  “Oh, get stuffed,” the Gunner said. “I want to go to sleep.”

  “Not just yet. I’ve got a visitor for you.”

  “Jenny?” The Gunner shook his head. “I don’t want to see her.”

  “She’s been waiting for hours.”

  “What in the hell does she want to see me for? There’s nothing to bleeding well say, is there? I’ll lose all my remission over this little lot. I’m going back to the nick for another two and a half years plus anything else the beak likes to throw at me for the things I’ve done while I’ve been out. On top of that I’ll be dragging this leg around behind me like a log of wood for the rest of my life when I get out.”

  “And a bloody good thing as well,” Brady said brutally. “No more climbing for you, my lad.”

  “I’ll get her now,” Miller said. “You can see her alone. We’ll wait outside.”

  The Gunner shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  Miller and Brady went out and a second later, the girl came round the screen and stood at the end of the bed. Her face was very pale and there was a nasty bruise on her forehead, but she was still about fifty times better in every possible way than any other woman he’d ever met. There was that strange choking feeling in his throat again. He was tired and in great pain. He was going back to gaol for what seemed like forever and for the first time he was afraid of the prospect. He felt just like a kid who had been hurt. He wanted to have her come round the bed and kiss him, smooth back his hair, pillow his head on her shoulder.

  But that was no good—no good at all. What he did now was the most courageous thing he had ever done in his entire life, braver by far than his conduct on the roof when facing Faulkner.

  He smiled brightly. “Surprise, surprise. What’s all this?”

  “I’ve been waiting for hours. They wouldn’t let me in before. Gran sends her regards.”

  “How is she?” The Gunner couldn’t resist the question. “They tell me she finished him off good and proper up there. How’s she taken it? Flat on her back?”

  “Not her—says she’d do it again any day. They’ve told you who he was?” The Gunner nodded and she went on, “I was in such a panic when he started smashing his way in that I locked her in the bedroom and forgot all about the shotgun. She keeps it in the wardrobe. She had to shoot the lock off to get out.”

  “Good job she arrived when she did from what they tell me.”

  There was a slight silence and she frowned. “Is anything wrong, Gunner?”

  “No—should there be?”

  “You seem funny, that’s all.”

  “That’s me all over, darlin’. To tell you the truth I was just going to get some shut-eye when you turned up.”

  Her face had gone very pale now. “What is it, Gunner? What are you trying to say?”

  “What in the hell am I supposed to say?” He snapped
back at her, genuinely angry. “Here I am flat on my back like a good little lad. In about another month they’ll stick me in a big black van and take me back where I came from. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  She had gone very still. “I thought it was what you wanted—really wanted.”

  “And how in the hell would you know what I want?”

  “I’ve been about as close to you as any woman could get and…”

  He cut in sharply with a laugh that carried just the right cutting edge to it. “Do me a favour, darlin’. No bird gets close to me. Just because I’ve had you between the sheets doesn’t mean I’ve sold you the rights to the story of my life for the Sunday papers. It was very nice—don’t get me wrong. You certainly know what to do with it, but I’ve got other fish to fry now.”

  She swayed. For a moment it seemed as if she might fall and then she turned and went out. The Gunner closed his eyes. He should have felt noble. He didn’t. He felt sick and afraid and more alone than he had ever done in his life before.

  The girl was crying when she came out of the room. She kept on going, head-down and Miller went after her. He caught her, swung her round and shoved her against the wall.

  “What happened in there?”

  “He made it pretty clear what he really thinks about me, that’s all,” she said. “Can I go now?”

  “Funny how stupid intelligent people can be sometimes,” Miller shook his head wearily. “Use your head, Jenny. When he left your house he was wearing shoes and a raincoat, had money in his pocket—money you’d given him. Why did he telephone you?”

  “To say he was giving himself up.”

  “Why was he barefooted again? Why had he got rid of the clothes you gave him? Why did he come running like a bat out of hell when you were in danger?”

  She stared at him, eyes wide and shook her head. “But he was rotten in there—he couldn’t have done more if he’d spat on me.”