Ahead of the Game

by JD Kirk

  On the side where the sound was coming from, the metal was scratched and a little bent. Logan took his keys from his pocket, and wedged the long blade of his front door key into the gap.

  The thin sheet of the drawer front’s metal bent outwards like folding cardboard. As soon as the gap was big enough, a small black object slid out and clattered against the back of the drawer.

  “Now, that’s more like it,” Logan said, as his eyes fell on a key of another kind.

  There, propped against the back of the drawer, was a USB thumb drive.

  “What the fuck are you doing? What have you done?”

  Sinead twisted on the floor, rolling herself upright, her hands raised defensively in front of her. The grip on her hair had been released as soon as she’d fallen, and she now stood looking down at a young man in school uniform, kneeling at Lana’s side.

  “Mum? Is that…? Is that my mum? What did you do? God! Mum! What did you do to her?”

  “Bennet. Bennet, it’s OK. It’s OK, calm down,” Sinead urged. “I’m with the police. The ambulance is on the way.”

  He had his hands on her, and was giving her a shake, like all the gore and the damage might just fall off her onto the carpet. His fingers were already slick with blood, his black jumper shiny, his white shirt turned red.

  “What did you do?” he wailed. “Mum! Mum! Please, Mum! Please, Mum!”

  Sinead put a hand on his shoulder. He drove an elbow back, trying to shrug her off, but she moved her grip to his upper arms, and gently steered him back.

  “Give her some space, Bennet. Let her breathe,” she instructed. “It’s going to be OK, the ambulance is coming. The ambulance is on its way.”

  He fell back so he was sitting on the floor, all snot, and tears, and blood. His body shook with big violent trembles he couldn’t possibly hope to control. He hadn’t been able to take his eyes off his mum since entering the room, but he turned away now, like she was the last thing on Earth he wanted to look at.

  “This is your fault! If you hadn’t come here… If you hadn’t dragged her into all this…!”

  “Calm down, Bennet,” Sinead told him. “OK? Just calm down. We’re going to get her help. We’re going to get her seen to.”

  Bennet’s eyes fell on the hammer lying there on the floor, wet with his mother’s blood.

  Sinead moved, but too late. Bennet scrambled for the hammer before Sinead could stop him. He snatched it up and backed away a few paces towards the door.

  “This is… Is this my dad’s?” he asked, turning it over in his hands. His voice was flat. Level. Almost indifferent.

  “Put it down, Bennet,” Sinead instructed. “Put the hammer down. It’s evidence.”

  “Evidence?” he said, like the word was some strange made-up one she was trying to bamboozle him with. He looked from the hammer to his mum, then back to Sinead.

  “Put it down, Bennet,” Sinead instructed.

  He didn’t.

  His fingers tightened around the rubber grip.

  Far off in the distance, a siren wailed.

  Tyler was almost enjoying this. If you ignored the rising nausea, the growing panic, and the nagging suspicion that he might shit himself at any moment, it was actually quite fun.

  The flashing lights and sirens helped, of course. He wouldn’t dream of overtaking so close to a bend, for example, were it not for the car ahead slowing and pulling in to the left. He dropped a gear, found the clutch’s biting point, then powered smoothly past, the engine not just giving him the power he needed, but urging him to demand more, to push it harder, to go faster, faster, faster!

  The last time he’d driven like this had been… when? Back in his Uniform days? Even then, high-speed pursuits had been few and far between, and he’d hated them when they’d happened.

  Now, though, with the Audi chewing up the straights and hugging the corners, he thought about opening a window and letting the wind blow through his hair, and wondered why he didn’t do this more often.

  There was a bend ahead, coming up fast. He knew this part of the route well. The long curve to the right dead ahead would lead to another straight section of road, then a sharp left turn that would require a bit of thought on the braking.

  If nothing was coming, he’d be able to swing out onto the wrong side of the road and follow the racing line, reducing his need to slow down. If there was traffic coming the other way, he’d have to drop down a couple of gears, stick to the left, and make up time on the next straight.

  There was a house just a little past the corner. A man and a woman stood in the garden, waving both arms above their heads, trying to attract his attention as he sped towards them.

  Tyler rounded the bend, and saw a car coming up fast on the wrong side of the road.

  Close.

  Too close.

  He hit the brakes, foot all the way to the floor.

  He gripped the wheel so tightly the mounting nut groaned, like the whole thing might come off in his hands.

  There was a bus on one side of the road, the overtaking car on the other. Someone’s brakes squealed. Someone’s horn blared. Someone screamed.

  That last one was probably him.

  The car shuddered under the weight of the braking. He was doing fifty now. Forty. The approaching car easily matching that.

  No one was stopping. No one had time. No one had a chance.

  They were going to hit, and hit hard.

  Tyler wrenched the wheel to the left. Noises filled the inside of the car, none of them good. Crunches, creaks, thumps, and cracks. The piercing monotone of his horn crying out for help.

  He saw a fence, briefly, then it was lost beneath his front wheels, and all he could see was bushes, and bracken, and trees, and a steep drop into a field below.

  The wheel bucked and spun, far too violently for him to hold onto. He released his grip, screamed some more, and braced himself for the—

  BANG!

  The airbags deployed, filling the cabin. The car stopped moving forwards and started moving upwards, instead. Coins and pens and other debris floated in the space between the deflating balloons of the airbags, as if gravity had been turned off. He could reach out and touch them, he thought, time slowing enough that he could marvel at the way they hung there. He could reach out and pluck them right out of the air.

  Time rushed back to its regular speed, and the second impact came. It came suddenly and without warning. It came with a fanfare of breaking glass and rending metal, as the car finished its forward flip and smashed, roof-first against an embankment of heather, crumpling the pillars and filling the air with diamond-like fragments of windscreen.

  The engine gave a final cough and a wheeze, and smoke billowed in through the vents. The metal carcass of the car groaned as it settled into its resting place, back wheels thunk-thunk-thunking as they slowed to a stop.

  And then, the only sounds from the car were the pinging of cooling metal, and the solemn single note fanfare of the horn ringing out across the wilderness.

  Bennet stood in the driveway, blinking like he’d just woken up. The sound of a siren echoed off the house behind him, as a police car pulled sharply in off the road and came to a stop just a few feet ahead.

  He watched, saying nothing, as two officers jumped out—one male, one female. They both stared at him for a moment, wide-eyed with horror, and then the female officer took charge.

  “Sir? I’m going to ask you to put down the hammer,” she said.

  Her words sounded far-off and distant, and it took Bennet a few moments to make sense of them. He looked down at his hand, at the hammer, at the blood. He could feel it on him, the blood, its warmth cooling in the early-evening air.

  “Drop the hammer, sir,” the woman said again. She couldn’t have been much older than he was. Twenty-two or twenty-three, maybe. She was trying to sound confident, but he could see through her charade. She was scared. Scared of him.

  Just like the one in the house had been.

  T
he male officer was talking into the radio on his shoulder, too quietly for Bennet to make out what he was saying.

  Not that it mattered now.

  Not that he cared.

  “Sir, I’m not going to tell you again. Drop the hammer, or—”

  Bennet dropped the hammer. He wasn’t sure if it was deliberate, or accidental. The blood had made his fingers slippy.

  The female officer was on him in an instant, gripping his arm, twisting it painfully behind his back. He felt a cable tie loop around it and tighten, binding one wrist to the other. He turned his head, and the woman in the uniform flinched when she saw his face, and heard the cold, matter-of-fact rumble of his voice.

  “She’s in there,” he said, twitching his head in the direction of the front door. “I think… I think she’s dead.”

  Hamza regarded the USB drive in the evidence bag, turned it over a couple of times, then raised his gaze to where Logan stood on the other side of his desk.

  “Where’d you get this, sir?”

  “The key in Fergus Forsyth’s stomach? I found what it opened,” Logan announced. “That was inside.”

  “Bloody hell. Nice one, sir,” Hamza said, sitting up in his chair. “What’s on it?”

  “I’ve got no idea. Thought I’d leave that to you to find out. He went out of his way to hide it, so I’m hoping it’s something interesting.”

  “Good find, Jack,” Ben called over from his desk. “We’ll make a real detective of you yet.”

  “Aye, well, let’s no’ get ahead of ourselves,” Logan said. “I still prefer kicking in doors and shouting at people.”

  Hamza reached into his desk drawer, removed a pair of blue rubber gloves from a box, then began to peel open the evidence bag.

  “Tyler and Sinead back with Lana Lennon yet?” Logan asked, looking around at the empty chairs of the Detective Constables. “Any joy getting her to press charges?”

  Hamza shot Ben a look, kicking the question up the chain of command. Logan spotted it, and his brow shifted like tectonic plates before an earthquake.

  “What is it?” he demanded, looking from the DS to the DI. “What’s happened?”

  “Lana Lennon’s been attacked,” Ben explained. “She’s in a bad way. They saw Clyde Lennon leaving the house. Tyler’s giving chase.”

  “Tyler?” Logan said, his voice rising half an octave. “Giving chase? You can’t be serious? Has that useless bastard even got a real driving licence?”

  “Uniform’s on the way to the house, and moving to intercept the suspect,” Hamza said. “Last I heard from Tyler, he was heading north on the A82.”

  “What do you mean, last you heard from him?” Logan demanded. “Where is he now?”

  “We, eh…” Hamza deferred to Ben again with another imploring look.

  “We don’t know, Jack,” Ben said. “We can’t get hold of him.” He cleared his throat and glanced away, unable to hold the DCI’s stare. “We can’t get hold of either of them.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  Pain.

  No, worse than that. Agony.

  That was what Tyler had been braced for.

  It hadn’t hit him yet. It would, of course. It would strike any second now. He’d find his legs broken. Or his arms shattered. Or his ribs sticking out through his back.

  Any second now, it would kick in.

  Any second.

  “Fucking Nora! You alright, mate?”

  Tyler turned in the direction of the voice, but slowly so his head didn’t fall off.

  An upside-down man was squatting by the window. He looked happy. Or maybe sad. It was hard to tell with his mouth at that angle.

  Did he know he was upside down, Tyler wondered? Should he tell him?

  “What?” he heard himself asking.

  He could speak, then. That was good. It meant he still had a mouth, and all the other apparatus involved.

  “I said, are you alright?” the man asked. “Are you hurt?”

  “Not yet. But it’s coming,” Tyler said.

  The man’s expression changed. Into what, it was hard to say.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you mean?” Tyler retorted, then he hit him with the awful truth of his predicament. “You’re upside down.”

  The man turned away, said “I think he must’ve banged his head or something” then turned back again. “Can you get out?”

  Tyler had just started to ask, “Of what?” when the brain-fog lifted enough for him to make a little more sense of his situation. “Oh. Shit,” he remarked, looking around at his surroundings. “Am I still in the car?”

  “You are, yes. We’ve called for help. You probably shouldn’t move.”

  Tyler fumbled for the seatbelt catch, heard but didn’t fully comprehend the warning from the other man that he probably shouldn’t do that, then he fell head-first onto the roof of the car, and almost broke his neck.

  “Fuck! Who put that there?” he demanded, although it wasn’t immediately clear what he was referring to.

  After a bit of sprackling, significantly more swearing, and a gravity-assisted sideways topple, he managed to focus enough to conclude that the doors were too fucked to ever open again, and that he might have to spend the rest of his life here inside this upturned vehicle.

  Fortunately, that particular panic passed quickly, when a woman in stout Wellingtons opened the boot, and beckoned for him to crawl out that way.

  He emerged, coughing, and blinking, and stumbling on the uneven marshy ground. The woman was talking to him, but there was a delay between the sound leaving her mouth and it reaching his ears, and it took him several seconds to realise he was the one she was talking to.

  “What?” he asked, interrupting her halfway through a sentence. It didn’t throw her off for long.

  “I just said we’ve reported it umpteen times. Council. Police. Anyone who we thought might do something about it. I mean, it’s ridiculous how often it happens. Ridiculous. How many’s that now, Ian?”

  “A dozen, easily.”

  “A dozen, easily. And that’s just since we moved in. How long ago was that, Ian?”

  “Three years, give or take.”

  “Three years, give or take,” the woman echoed. “A dozen in that time. Easily.” She shook her head, visibly disgusted by whatever the hell she was banging on about.

  Tyler dabbed at his head, expecting to find blood there. His fingers came away clean, and he almost didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.

  “This is a first, though,” the woman continued. “Two in ten minutes. Too bloody fast for the corner, that’s the problem. There should be a sign. One each side. ‘Slow. Corner.’ Something like that.”

  Tyler stopped searching for injuries, as the jumble of words tumbling from the woman’s mouth fell into an order that made some sort of sense.

  “Wait, what? Two what in ten minutes?”

  “Accidents,” the woman said. She gestured down the slope to the field below.

  A line had been churned through the grass—a long brown scar through the greenery.

  And there, at the end of it, lying on its side, surrounded by three older men and a disinterested sheepdog, was a van.

  They found Sinead in the living room. On the floor, next to Lana Lennon.

  “Is the ambulance here?” the Detective Constable demanded, rising to her feet. “Her pulse is weakening. She needs the hospital.”

  “It’s on its way,” the female constable replied, her gaze fixed on the horror-show that was Lana Lennon’s face. “Jesus Christ. What happened? Was it the kid?”

  “No. I don’t know. I don’t think so,” Sinead said. “Did you get him? I sent him outside to get you.”

  “He… he had a hammer,” the constable said.

  “I know. It was here when I came in, he picked it up and wouldn’t let it go,” Sinead said. “He didn’t go for you with it, did he?”

  “No. No, he dropped it. Eventually. He’s in the car.” He
r eyes drifted back to the woman on the floor. “But… Jesus. Who does that to someone? Who could actually do that to another human being?”

  Sinead didn’t look down at Lana. She didn’t need to see the face again. It was burned in now. She’d be seeing it for years to come.

  “Someone angry,” she said. “Someone very, very angry.”

  Clyde Lennon had not escaped his crash as lightly as Tyler had, but things could certainly have been a lot worse for him. There was some blood. Not a lot, but some. It trickled from a cut on his forehead, and would have been covered by his hair, had his hairline not receded as far as it had.

  The impact of his crash had been less. Unlike Tyler’s dramatic end-over-end flip, Clyde’s van had remained on four wheels for most of its off-road descent, before hitting a bump and rolling onto its right-hand side as it reached the bottom.

  The design of the van meant the storage area at the back was inaccessible from the front, so Clyde’s only way out was through the passenger door, which was directly above him. Neither of the older men watching on, nor the sheepdog, were making any attempt to help him, and he was battling unsuccessfully to clamber out on his own when Tyler stumbled the last few steps down the hillside.

  The DC’s legs still weren’t quite working properly, and he could only stop his descent by thudding against the back doors of the van. This hurt more than the crash had, and he stood there, stunned into silence for several seconds, the men and the dog all watching him to see what he was going to do next.

  Shaking away the cobwebs, Tyler made his way around to the front of the van, leaning on the roof for support.

  At the front, his eyes met those of the man inside through the windscreen.

  “Clyde Lennon,” Tyler began. He patted himself down, searching for his warrant card, before concluding he must’ve dropped it in the car. “Fuck it,” he slurred, too far gone at this point to care. His finger gave a squeak as he pressed it against the glass, pointing to the man inside. “You’re nicked!”