by Gavin Smith
Theirs had been a close working relationship during the two days of interviews, ID procedures and processing Harkness had put into the Byron Street arson attack between Firth’s arrest and charge. The interviews could have been somewhat less exhaustive – while there had been plenty of damage and some hospitalisations, nobody had died. Besides, Firth had eventually admitted setting light to the ground-floor flat he shared with the older woman who habitually and noisily bedded other youths within his earshot and sometimes in plain view.
Yet because he was bright and represented by a savvy solicitor, with whom he’d consulted at length, he’d firmly denied specific intent and unfurled reason after reason why he couldn’t have understood the consequences of his actions. Drugs, alcohol, learning difficulties and jealous rage - all artfully blended into a blinding, devil’s fog of psychological trauma and the sound basis for a lesser charge or an effective plea in mitigation.
Harkness had sunk his teeth into the interview process, both desperate to discredit the well-signposted defence and to understand the workings of Firth’s mind. Slowey had dutifully noted the conversation in his rough book, occasionally scribbling ‘WTF?’ in the margin, his usual signal for simply not seeing the point of Harkness’s questions. The solicitor had been less circumspect, complaining, tutting, whispering and finally, having seen the financial benefit of staying for the long haul, contenting himself with slouching, yawning and checking his text messages.
He didn’t resent his reputation for boring the opposition into submission. Old school detectives thoroughly approved, yearning as they did for the days when sleep deprivation, harassment and coercive, repetitive questioning were de rigeur.
He could argue that understanding Firth and understanding his crimes were one and the same. A rational mind warped by trauma was pre-disposed to certain irrational impulses, but not incapable of rational choices. After all, that went to the heart of Firth’s defence. Perhaps formative trauma changed the rules, allowed a different view of rationality, and conferred a powerful sense of entitlement to break other people’s rules. Perhaps Harkness just wasted miles of interview tape on amateur psychoanalysis. Yet he was compelled to chivvy and drive and probe to understand how guilt could be buried so deeply yet permeate every action so completely.
There had been nothing more than a qualified confession. Firth had known Harkness’s game and declined to take to the pitch. The defence had succeeded at court and a broken man more in control of his own mind than he pretended to be was freed to re-enact the lethal, scorching catastrophe that had formed and branded him. More to the point, he was less then half Harkness’s weight and might just be about to outrun him again, even if he was half-lame.
In one seamless movement, Firth broke eye contact, turned and sprinted away from Harkness, trainers slapping the tarmac hard, limp forgotten but for an involuntary groan on every out-breath. Harkness vaulted over the van’s bonnet, leaving a size-13 scuff on the paintwork as he propelled himself headlong after Firth. He heard Wenban’s voice crackle urgently from the radio clipped to the PCSO, who had already begun to scribble furiously in his book.
In seconds, Firth was rounding the corner where Marne Close joined Somme Avenue, his left leg almost buckling as he leaned into the turn. Harkness hoped the asthmatic gasps heaving from his mouth were some kind of incantation that would conjure forth the athlete he used to be before he hid himself in this middle-aged patchwork of fat, sprains and nicotine stains. He willed his knees to rise and his stride to lengthen, and soon his panting was drowned out by the slapping of his thin-soled leather shoes.
“Stop, you bastard,” he gasped.
He took a wide line around the corner, had to use both hands to spare his teeth from an impact with a post-box, span, stumbled to his knees, scuffed a patch from his trousers, surged back to his feet and ran harder. Looking over his shoulder, Firth frowned, yelled his frustration and redoubled his efforts, ribs flexing and arms pumping as his lungs bellowed, a deathly mechanical process beneath stretched, pale flesh.
Somewhere far out of sight, sirens howled. Curtains twitched and a cat settled on a garden gate to watch the commotion. A passing car missed a gear with a grinding of cogs as its driver gawped at the emaciated, half-naked ghoul being pursued by the ruddy, sweat-sodden giant.
Harkness hadn’t the breath to shout another warning but couldn’t stifle a bark of pain and rage as his body toiled and Firth extended his lead and darted down a cut-through towards Burton Road. Firth couldn’t be allowed to escape again.
Harkness staggered onto the footpath, registered a flash of pain as his knee clipped the metal-clad concrete pillar intended to deter teenage dirt-bikers, and saw Firth near the end of the path, sprinting with his head down. Lungs straining against his ribs and heat radiating from every pore, he willed himself on, seeing only his once pristine brogues pounding into yellowing grass, desiccated dog turds, shards of glass and parched earth.
Somewhere beyond the thumping in his temples, he heard for the second time that day the brief but unmistakeable squeal of brakes being stamped hard, of gravel burning rubber as a locked wheel was dragged inevitably onwards. Then, a heartbeat later, came the dull, metallic percussion of a bonnet or a windscreen deforming under the inertia of softer matter, followed by the tinkling of glass shards on tarmac and a blaring horn, a clumsy afterthought, quickly silenced.
He slowed his aching limbs to a quick walk, knowing the pursuit was over and not sure he wanted to see how it had ended. He should be using his radio but he’d left it with Wenban. Closer now, a siren howled, its high note coarser than usual, persisting by itself even when the siren alternated to the blaring pulse used to bully a path through traffic.
As Harkness exited the cut-through, he knew that Firth had taken up the siren’s refrain with the keening of a stricken animal. A hatch-back had slewed to a halt, its bonnet bowed and its windscreen shattered. Spread-eagled across the centre-line in front of it, at the centre of a circle of onlookers desperate to help but frightened to touch, Firth lay like a broken toy. Gravel and glass stippled his naked torso, his tracksuit bottoms had been twisted out of shape and a trainer was missing. Harkness looked again. The bottoms only appeared twisted; the exposed shin must have been fractured by the impact and now curved slightly inwards at an incongruous angle.
The siren ceased and the keening continued. A car door slammed as a response car parked at the end of the queue of traffic. Harkness produced his warrant card, tucked in his shirt and dragged a cuff across his dripping brow.
“Police, stand back please,” he proclaimed, neither feeling nor looking the part. “If you’re a witness, don’t go anywhere.”
The circle widened to let him through, voices falling to a murmur. A teenage girl chewing gum had produced a camera-phone.
“Use that and I’ll take it as evidence,” shouted Harkness, jabbing a finger. Firth became aware of Harkness, eyes fluttering, craning his neck fractionally over his shoulder, desperate to avoid any movement that might quicken the tempo of his pain. He shifted his right hand from its instinctive grip on his cuffs. He wouldn’t be running for a while.
“No,” Firth screamed, his anguish finding a sobbing, ragged voice. “Don’t you fucking touch me again. You. All of you. Trying to kill me.”
“Nigel,” Harkness stooped, reached out with an open palm, unsure if he was warding or reassuring, “just calm down….”
“You wanna kill me it’s all just fucking pain all just burning don’t you touch me you fucking fucking….” Firth squirmed away from Harkness, sobbing and spitting blood and phlegm onto his chin. In a fusillade of digitised clicks, Harkness heard this tableau of barely veiled police brutality being immortalised for legal files and news websites.
All just burning? What on earth was running through Firth’s mind? Did burning erase pain or bring it to a shattering crescendo? Harkness drew his shoulders back and took a deep breath, enjoying the second or two left to him at the still centre of the hurricane.
/> “Nigel. Look at me. Almost forgot the formalities in all this excitement.” He stooped to cast his long shadow over Firth. “You’re under arrest for the murder of Suzanne Murphy, Brittany Murphy and Justin Murphy. You know all this but you do not have to say anything. It may however harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. As you’ll no doubt recall, anything you do say may be given in evidence. I know you understand.
“Now,” he said, standing, “assuming you’ve all seen enough, has someone actually used their phone to call an ambulance?” Making eye contact with every wielder of a mobile phone, he received a few meek nods. Dusting off his hands, he beckoned to the two uniforms striding his way wearing fluorescent tabards and weary expressions. They were about to have a long but lucrative shift handcuffed to a live wire in A&E. He needed another change of clothes.
CHAPTER SIX
A wondrous expanse of conifers speckled the tundra beneath the gleaming wing-tip of the jet, which fluttered and twitched as it descended through denser, turbulent air. Rory was squeezing her hand and nuzzling against her throat as he craned to see through the crystallised haze of the window. The excitement tingled through them both, an electrical circuit completed, as pristine and exhilarating as virgin snow beneath your skis. Toiling in the darkness made sense when the light could be this bright, the contentment so complete.
That was a long time ago. It had seemed like a dream even then. She had known her delusion for what it was and had passionately embraced it. The simple facts of the affair had been plain enough. She had desired Rory viscerally, without needing or wanting to think too hard about why she’d allowed an older, married man to breach her defences, or whether his own desire would outlast the intoxicating novelty of lust and escape.
They had taken their tryst to Lapland on a triumphal whim. Every moment of that affair was burnished with a luminous clarity undimmed by its tawdry beginning and end. The great and famous victory at Nottingham Crown Court, a painful and plodding year of work resolved in their favour one damp Thursday morning by an impetuous jury bored with legal bickering. An evening of lavish food and drink in an over-priced restaurant. A night of frantic and unabashed love-making in a cheap hotel room.
A Friday morning booking for a lunchtime flight. Bags packed in fifteen minutes flat. Rory careening along the A46 at ludicrous speed in driving sleet, both of them clad in scarves, gloves and ski-suits to save on baggage, skis fluttering madly as they jutted from the back seat of the Boxster, its roof folded away. Whooping and screaming with the soaking slipstream as Rory dodged tractors, cut up pensioners, straight-lined corners and gambled with life as if desperate to win more of it.
The workaday world receded into the murk in their slipstream, taking with it the mud-spattered burglars, bulging files, insomnia, endless pettifogging paperwork, and poky rooms seething with hatred quelled only by boredom. The car was dumped at Humberside Airport, its roof unfolded and locked in place at the suggestion of a passing policeman. Had he known their trade, he’d have gleefully ignored them. Soaring away from fens and fields across the Humber and out into the North Sea, she’d been giddy with a fugitive thrill, having stolen happiness from the working world and crossed the border into some bright new realm.
A four-hour stopover at Schipol had prompted Rory to book an over-priced hotel room which nevertheless felt cheap and sleazy enough for a return bout of love-making. Soberness only piqued their ardour and they boarded at the last minute ruffled and bleary-eyed.
The week flitted by. As one moment of freedom blended seamlessly into another, it became clear that every second of the truncated arctic day was far briefer than its equivalent in her workaday world. Carving arcs of speed across frozen slopes with skis she hadn’t used for far too long; shattering ancient silence and ploughing pell-mell through pine-scented tunnels of snow on a rented snowmobile; tipsy and drowsy love-making in the sweet and resinous air of their dark log cabin as the firewood crackled with white heat then faded gently to grey: all of it as exquisite and ephemeral as a snowflake.
The homecoming was a muted affair, affection masking resignation. Professional masks slid back into place as the world found its true form and time its old, dragging tempo. She took her memories of bliss and locked them away. He inevitably grew distant and, after a week or two of awkward and apologetic dinners, returned to his wife and kids and miniature mansion once more.
Sharon Jennings dragged herself back to the present. When she was lonely, she thought of Rory and cursed herself for it. When she roasted alive, welded to her chair in her ancient, south-facing office with its jammed sash windows, she thought of freezing air, skiing and Rory, and cursed herself for it. When her mother called that morning with another family crisis, she knew she was tired of being everybody’s fixer, thought of Rory, and hated herself for all of it.
She felt compelled to seek a day’s compassionate leave to contain the family crisis. It was only as she started to make her case to the only other soul in the offices of Fitch, Brown & Snelling that she remembered that today was a bank holiday. Rory Snelling assented with a smirk; of course she could take the rest of her public holiday off. Besides, he’d heard about the fire on the drive to work and remembered that Sharon’s parents lived on Marne Close. Should she need his support in any way, she had only to ask. Her mask had trembled but hadn’t slipped.
With a vague curiosity, she wondered why voluntarily cooping herself up at work on a blazing public holiday didn’t strike her as unnatural. She had no children, no significant other and no time-wasting hobbies, but she did have plenty of work to do and no reason not to take advantage of an empty building and muted phones. Rory, she knew, had children, a demanding spouse and more hobbies than socks, and used his authority to keep his caseload manageable; he nevertheless seemed to confine himself to his office at all manner of times supposedly sacred to family life. A supple way with logic, she accepted, will take you anywhere your neuroses need to go.
Her first instinct had been to remain rooted to her desk and caseload. Her mother had a key, the fridge was adequately stocked, and nobody would starve, freeze or burn to death if she finished her work. Yet the weight of social expectation implicit in Rory’s response – “yes, but of course you must go” - told her where her duties lay, and reproached her for actually preferring the wranglings of society’s dregs to the demands of her own damaged family.
She had postponed her appointments by plastering her secretary’s VDU with post-it notes then crammed the boot of her Mini Cooper with the pink-ribboned files she would have to work on whenever a spare minute presented itself. A committal hearing loomed for one of three inept convenience store robbers, each of whom had turned on their fellows to make their lawyers earn their legal aid fees. An irascible but effective barrister would be grilling her with scatological vigour on the defence of provocation she wanted him to use for the heroin-addict single mother who’d smothered her own baby in a drooling stupor. She also had to prepare for another bout with the Prison Officers’ Association in the case of Firth v Murphy.
Now her mother, ailing father and very special brother would be camping out at her bijou waterside maisonette because some lunatic had burned out their next door neighbours. Slamming shut the boot of the Mini, she forced herself to spell it out, mentally rehearsing the plea for guidance she would have to make to Rory and Christ knows how many other, more august or hostile figures.
Firth v Murphy was no longer routine and impersonal. Her parents lived next to the murdered family of missing prisoner officer Dale Murphy, against whom she was litigating on behalf of Nigel Firth, a convicted arsonist. She hadn’t known where Murphy lived until she happened to glimpse him over the fence during a family visit. She didn’t think he’d connected her with her parents and he’d said nothing in conference to suggest he knew or cared.
Firth had been as calm and polite a client as she could have hoped for. He had doggedly sought recourse to the law because he could
think of no better remedy for the beating he’d received from Murphy. The police had dismissed his complaint after mulling it over for six months; whether this was because of solidarity with another uniformed service or the squeamishness of a prosecutor remained moot.
But why would he take his own brand of revenge now, after badgering her into taking out a civil action and nagging her through a dozen case conferences and many more phone calls? Admittedly, he hadn’t replied to the last few letters she’d sent him but that didn’t mean he’d turned into a homicidal maniac. Whatever the truth of it, the police would have their own view and she needed to be ready for them.
A fifteen-point turn eventually got her out of the cramped patch of cracked tarmac rented for the firm’s biggest earners from the nearby Edwardian theatre. The dim prospect of clampers working a public holiday hadn’t deterred the shopping public from blocking her in so that they could save a few of the pounds they wanted to waste on tat they didn’t need and probably hadn’t worked that hard for anyway. With a pang of distaste, she realised that once again, and despite her age, politics and job, her inner monologue had turned into a Daily Mail editorial. She and the Mini were both breathing hard by the time she got onto Clasketgate, the car’s cooling system whirring away while its vents pumped out moist, luke-warm air.
She drove past the police station voicing a silent prayer of thanks that at least she wouldn’t be spending the next eight hours breathing in stale sweat, cheap coffee, institutional hostility and lies. At the end of West Parade, she toyed with the idea of turning right onto Yarborough Road and taking the long, time-consuming route through the village of Burton, an idyllic sprawl of the kind of exclusive and over-priced Victorian cottages she knew she deserved to live in. But the traffic climbing the hill seemed to be static and there was a faint whoop of sirens from that direction.