by Gavin Smith
He brought up the incident log entitled, ‘Fire – Persons Reported’, scrolled through twenty pages of machine code, situation reports and resource allocations, found room to type and used his two fastest fingers to give his instructions in five hundred words of scrappy prose. As his words solidified on the screen, an almost identical text appeared from DCI Brennan.
Harkness hadn’t seen any trace of him in the office and supposed he must be observing all from HQ. He liberated his radio from a locked drawer and switched it on, expecting to be summoned by the channel he was least likely to be using.
The ‘nominals’ tab was flashing on the screen. He clicked on it and was surprised to find the names and dates of birth of every occupant of 13 Marne Close, along with one of their neighbours. Then some of the lines of numbers began to make sense; the incident handling system had linked all previous police call outs to the address. Harkness drew himself over the screen like a preying mantis, and busied himself scribbling notes, opening new screens and printing out reams of data.
Symmetrical green digits resolved themselves into jagged, human shapes. A dozen late night phone calls from Suzanne Murphy reported violence from Dale, actual or threatened. Half a dozen weary reports by uniform showed that they’d attended domestic disputes and found all quiet on arrival with no offences disclosed. Suzanne made half a dozen formal complaints of assault, but the suspect left before police arrival, no arrests were made and the complaints were withdrawn the next morning. A dozen computer generated reports were added to the mountain of paper given to the solitary domestic violence officer to climb.
Marjorie Jennings made occasional reports of excessive noise from next door, not violence but music and drunken arguments; the noise was therefore a civil matter, she was advised, and should be referred to her local authority. Anonymous and vague reports of child abuse were referred to social services with no further police action.
Dale Murphy’s was the only name to appear on the crime system, linked to two complaints that had been discontinued before they could cost him his job. Both were made by guests at Her Majesty’s pleasure, one claiming ABH, the other false imprisonment. With an involuntary shiver, he noted the complainants’ names; one was new to him, while the other was as familiar as a lover’s
On both occasions, Murphy had obligingly turned up at Beaumont Fee with his solicitor and federation representative and made full and frank denials. The incidents had not been witnessed and the victims lacked credibility. Nothing had stuck to him. He was innocent or covered in Teflon. Harkness added these records to the torrent of paper flowing from the printer, taking care to include conviction and nominal prints for the gaoled assault victims and daub a fluorescent marker all over references to them. It might all be relevant. He might get to read it all.
The phone rang with the monotone of an internal call. He glanced at his watch, amazed to find he’d been lost in the database for half an hour. The call was bound to be Brennan. He unclamped his teeth from the mutilated cap of his biro and picked up the receiver, idly wondering how Slowey was getting on.
A cherubic friar lay against a barrel, legs splayed before him, winking at Slowey as he quaffed from a stone jug. The artist’s use of perspective was so adept that Slowey feared he might get an unwelcome glimpse under the friar’s cassock if he stood any closer to the sign. The sign for the Friars Vaults was by far its most distinguished feature. A rusting satellite dish and a hanging basket of dead stalks and desiccated soil nearly obscured the friar’s view of his neighbourhood.
Slowey parked his car in the one space at the side of the pub not littered with shards of glass, next to an ancient caravan with disintegrating tyres and traceries of mould on its sills. Not much bigger than the terraces surrounding it, the pub had been daubed in cream paint to mark it out. A steel bin had been pushed up against the caravan’s tow-bar to make room for a smoker’s terrace; four plastic chairs and a folding umbrella. The frosted windows of the ground floor were dark, but net curtains and open windows upstairs suggested the landlord lived on the premises.
The sky was brightening but this street smelled no cleaner; stale beer and ancient urinals coloured the air. Slowey slammed the car door, drawing a cascade of barking from someone’s back yard as if some cur had been waiting wide-eyed all night for just such a provocation.
He looked in vain for a way to rouse the landlord without waking the street. Nowhere could he see an intercom or doorbell, and hammering on the stout double doors at the front would make him sound like Marley’s ghost. If there was a back door, it was beyond the tangle of barbed wire and nettles that were busy claiming the caravan. A fire door at the side had no external handle, but was, he noticed, ajar by an inch or two.
Hands in pockets, he ambled towards the door, peering into the line of darkness. The dull embers of dawn at his back showed little but the glimmer of optics and horse brasses. He patted his inside pocket and discovered he’d left his torch and phone in the car. Then he looked at the door, wedged open with a folded beer-mat, gouges and new splinters in the woodwork where it should have been secure. Silence swelled, breath being held. He heard himself mutter under his breath. Shadows inside gathered and surged outwards with a smack of metal on wood.
Slowey felt the world cease to spin on its axis for a second as adrenaline surged through him, pins and needles in his veins. He’d thrown his weight against the door, heard something grunt and fall to the floor. There was more barking. Already his shoulders were sliding on the black emulsion coating the door and his worn shoes scrabbled for purchase in the gravel. He reached into his jacket again, fumbled with a press stud as the door bucked against him and felt the coarse grip of his baton.
Slowey flicked the baton, felt a twinge in his wrist as it extended and locked, and clenched his teeth. A silent second stretched and plans jostled for attention in his mind. Should he run for the car and his phone, shout for the landlord, announce himself to those inside and demand they come quietly? Should he stand aside from the door just as this villain reached their full momentum in the hope that they might land stunned at his feet? Surely it couldn’t be Murphy?
He was looking at his watch; it was always good to know the correct time of arrest for statements. Then he was lifted from his feet and sitting on the gravel, staring at blue eyes and gritted teeth in a red balaclava. The eyes were moving, the thief getting up, moving more quickly than he was, tracksuit bottoms ripped at the knee with a gloss of new blood, crow-bar in one hand. There was barking somewhere, closer, in a different place.
The figure was standing now, one foot pointed at the street, eyes darting between Slowey and a clean escape, crow-bar still raised. Slowey felt pain seeping into his back where it connected with something blunt. He was too old and clapped out for this nonsense. A small voice wanted to reason with this person, to conjure up logic of such beauty that anyone listening would declare that it was a fair cop and handcuff themselves to his car. Slowey listened to a louder voice.
He flung out his legs, scissored them around the figure’s ankles and rolled blindly. The crow-bar connected with some far off part of him; perhaps a spent blow, perhaps he was just numb. He rolled upright, hurling phlegm and fricatives and flailing with the baton. Pressure loomed behind his eyes as a glorious anger burst its banks. The shock of the baton’s impacts registered but weren’t felt. Weak blows to knees and elbows and ribs then, as he rose to his knees and gained some space to swing, to the shoulders and the base of the skull and the knuckles where they gripped matted hair, the man now shrunken, foetal.
Someone was imploring, a big man’s voice becoming smaller, an echo from the bottom of a well; Slowey’s vision condensed until he could see only the stricken youth hemmed by an oval of shadow. There was blood and hair plastered to the tip of his baton and he couldn’t flick them off, no matter how hard he tried.
A sound behind him might have been another footstep slewing on the gravel. A wail began between his ears, slowly, like arthritic hands cranking an air
raid siren into life. He was the good cop, a talker, not a pummeller. What did his body think it was doing? The back of his head was so wet. Had he fallen asleep in a puddle? He couldn’t find his feet but he remembered squeezing them into the shoes that had never fitted properly but he’d lost the receipt and shoes never fitted him anyway. His teeth bit hard, a taste of metal, his head tried to jolt itself from his neck, vision flaking into grey. Warm wet head then head hit hard. Wasn’t that the wrong way round?
CHAPTER THREE
One side of Firth’s face bulged and ached, nerves electric with pain. Even the timid caress of the sun as it cleared the cathedral and the tower blocks and crept over his windowsill drew new sparks from it. He sank further into the armchair and pulled the hood fully over his head.
He was wearing all his layers and had puffed his way through another twenty quid’s worth of mediocre draw but he couldn’t stop shaking, couldn’t bring the roll-up to his lips without it zigzagging like a bluebottle. The carpet was strewn with lager tins, some half full and leaking, some crushed and brimming with fag ends. He’d no idea how many he’d sunk tonight.
He’d wanted to get so wrecked that all the memories piling up in his head would just dissolve into fog. But where he’d wanted emptiness, he’d found fear and hatred and longing without form. If he let himself get sober, they’d resolve themselves into pictures and sounds to loop through his mind again and again. He knew he couldn’t win, but he could make sure he didn’t care.
He had seen his face in the bathroom mirror and didn’t want to see it again. Knowing what it looked like just made him feel the pain in all its hues. Purples, blacks and greens stained and bloated the left side of his face around the eye, its white stained red. If he closed his good eye, it was like looking out from inside a cherry-red letterbox.
He was glad the flat was empty. He knew it was somehow important to be alone today. The place was in his name anyway. Even though Ali Bongo brought in money and a variety of pharmaceuticals, he had some very bad habits and would bring the filth back with him sooner or later. He wasn’t magical enough to make handcuffs disappear for long. With another year on probation, Firth didn’t need uniformed visitors.
He didn’t even know if Ali Bongo had called in that week. The mail had been piled against the radiator by the opening of the door, a paper snowdrift. There would be the usual rubbish of interest to neither of them: junk mail and final demands for the previous half dozen occupiers; new bills he never intended to pay; other people’s pre-approved credit card applications begging to be abused if only he had the energy or the nous.
There would also be official looking missives from the probation service and the benefits agency that he really should look at. By now, Tesco might have written to enquire why he no longer saw fit to come and push trolleys for minimum wage. His solicitor, fit bitch but way up herself, might have tried to tell him again that he had to stand up in court against the screw if he wanted to see a penny of compo.
His hands had moved back to his face of their own accord, wanting to probe the bruising but not daring to. He pursed his lips, tasting neither nicotine nor heat. The roll-up lay on the arm of the sofa, its fire dead. The tartan fabric boasted a dozen faded scars where butts that he’d dropped while sleepy or stoned had failed to ignite the fire retardant material. The housing association took such good care of their properties.
He’d have to try harder if he wanted to go the way of his old mum, comatose on vodka and stout, number thirty-eight of her forty a day habit dropping down the seam of the charity shop sofa and burning her alive in the front room of that two-up, two-down while she rolled and roared and puked. He’d been out, prowling, not up to mischief for once, not on a school night in his first week at the big school, just wanting to be away from her and swallowed up by the cool, quiet darkness.
Blown home by the breeze, he’d stood alongside the gawping neighbours for minutes, beyond the cordon and the fire engines, expecting the silly, useless cow to show herself. Then he was noticed and the neighbours put up a cordon of whispering and shuffling around him. A female hand or two almost reached out for him but were stung into retreat by hissing male whispers.
It all made what his dad did to himself seem like pure, cold logic. It taught him that what he’d done to other people, even before his parents went off the rails, was a curse that would show him horror before it let him die. He’d tried to grow out of this notion, an all too neat fantasy of childhood, his very own macabre fairy tale. Yet everything he’d done since made it seem fair and true.
Most people weren’t capable of understanding the way things really were. They went to work and sweated on their treadmills and mowed their lawns, never knowing that the nuclear furnace rolling through the sky above their heads and the flames eating up their garden waste were glimpses of the chaos that would one day burn the flimsy fabric of this world to ash. Then everything would be clean and simple again.
He’d once shared a cell with a gormless teenage smack-head who’d had an expensive education, professional parents, skiing holidays and expectations before he fell into another world. When he didn’t cry himself to sleep at night or wall himself into catatonia, and provided nobody was around to smack him for presuming to be different, he became an encyclopaedia. Trotting out facts as if they were strange and wonderful jewels he couldn’t remember acquiring seemed to soothe him, as if he’d aged sixty years in six months. ‘e=mc²’ lodged in Firth’s mind, its mysteries repeatedly reeled off in a voice clever enough for TV but a dangerous liability inside.
It made so much sense to find that every ounce of this corrupt, breakable matter was a store of unimaginable, destructive energy, compressed, caged and biding its time. He liked late-night sc-fi films where the world had been cleansed by nuclear war, leaving random people free to roam a purged world in safe anonymity. Oddly, they always drifted together, to become known, to re-build society, to bicker and fight.
He wished it was him. He’d embrace the emptiness, treasure it. To be truly alone with no use for your memories was a sweet dream. All the buff folders and computer records and criminal justice professionals that kept those memories alive would just be anonymous specks in the endless, irradiated dust.
The TV was still blaring in the corner, a nice little flat-screen that Ali Bongo had scored from somewhere. The blonde man in a suit had the studio bouncer at his shoulder and a baying crowd at his back as he laid down the law to a pair of seventeen year olds. A chair had been knocked over and a kid dripping with nine-carat gold was screaming at a fat, pasty girl about drugs and shagging and how he could bring up babby any fuckin’ way he liked, innit.
Firth couldn’t see the remote so he pitched a full tin of lager at the off button, missing it and hitting the centre of the screen. The braying persisted but the image had gone, replaced by a jagged spider’s web, silver seared onto black where crystals in the screen had memorised the moment of their destruction. One flick of the wrist and chaos had found a way in.
He held the dead roll-up between his lips and steadied his disposable lighter with both hands. He squeezed the trigger, hearing the whisper of gas, and rolled the flint, once, twice, three times. He couldn’t make it live, his thumbs like rubber. If they could see him on the wing; Pyro, Fireman Firth, Crispy Duck, couldn’t even strike a light in his own armchair now.
He squeezed it hard, trigger down, plastic cracking under his palms, squeezing the ridges of the flint into his thumb, rolling it, and the flame lived, purring and breathing again. He rolled both eyes inwards as he focussed on its tapering dance, pushing his chin towards the flame, not daring to move his hands, sucking on the roll-up as it flared back into life, tasting treacle and ash.
For a second he was staring at the piled mail through the flame, thinking how dangerous it was to leave it all near a letterbox and how greedily it would burn, how badly it wanted to burn, how many problems it could solve. He shook his head, killed the spark, dropped the lighter, let his eyes roll up and his head
sink into the top of the sofa as the draw slowed his heart to one beat an hour and filled his head with beautiful, warm porridge.
Lights sparkled and popped in blue and gold and red and the safety curtain went up, hundreds of feet of greyness hoisted away into the gods. Slowey’s head dropped again, still so heavy, and he was looking again at the floor of the stage, oddly formed from gravel and glass. He rolled his neck and saw the curtain proper, a thin fabric of purple paisley that didn’t quite reach the floor. The roaring was fierce now but didn’t come from the auditorium, which in any case seemed empty.
“Come on, wake up.”
How rude, he thought, about to take another bow. Had someone just slapped him? He was so outraged it made him dizzy.
“Come on, mate. Ambulance is coming. For fuck’s sake, don’t you be properly hurt.”
Slowey was back in the pub car park, eyes wide open, feet lashing out, baton still clenched in his right hand, nails digging hot furrows in his palm. The world appeared still but his head and stomach told him he was plummeting. A purple paisley dressing gown failed to accommodate the testicles of the figure crouching before him.
“I’m police,” said Slowey. He took in the figure’s hairy arms, hefty jewellery and bifocal glasses before he turned and vomited onto the tow bar of the caravan.
“Course you are, petal.”
A Staffy appeared and began lapping up Slowey’s vomit with growling gusto. The man stood and dragged the dog backwards by its collar.
“Daphne, don’t be so rude. Maureen,” he shouted. “Come and take Daphne. Did you phone like I asked you?”
The man disappeared through the fire doors, the dog straining against his grip and licking its lips. Slowey braced himself against the caravan and willed himself to stand. Sirens were howling somewhere. He did hope all that fuss wasn’t for him. Then the man was propping him up, guiding him away from his car, his keys left dangling from the door lock.