He lapses into silence again, staring up at the huge copper creature, its massive wings outspread in demonstration of its power. It’s why the Liver Birds aren’t covered in excrement, for no other bird will dare go near them.
For the moment Chris is distracted, but he still has his crossbow against Webley’s neck. The time is not yet right, but Cody knows he has to build trust, has to remain patient. Chris will make a mistake. It will happen.
‘Tell me about it, Chris. Tell me how it all started for you.’
Chris lowers his head slowly. He has the vacant eyes of a man who is stoned on drugs or alcohol.
‘What do you want to know?’ he asks.
‘Tell me about it,’ Cody says again.
‘What?’
And then Cody utters the magic word. The name that can send a shiver across the whole of Merseyside.
He says: ‘Hillsborough.’
54
Fifteenth of April 1989. The Hillsborough football stadium in Sheffield. Liverpool are playing against Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup semi-final. The Liverpool fans arriving at the Leppings Lane end of the ground are excited, keen to take their places so that they can watch and support their heroes. What they don’t know is that the pens here are already full to bursting point. But the police let them in anyway. The crowds are allowed to surge into a space that cannot possibly accommodate any more bodies without inviting disaster.
Ninety-six people die in the ensuing crush. Hundreds more are injured.
Afterwards, the police cast blame on the fans, claiming that they had rushed the gate. But subsequent inquiries and panels came to different conclusions. Not only did they absolve the supporters of all blame, they also found that the main reason for the tragedy was the failure of police control. Bad enough, but what made things much worse were the findings that the police covered up their culpability by altering statements made by themselves and witnesses, and that attempts were made by the police to malign the reputations of the victims.
‘I was there,’ says Chris. ‘With the other birds. We were there because . . . we just wanted to enjoy ourselves. We were alive!’
‘The other birds, Chris?’
Chris looks sideways at Cody, studying him with one eye. An avian-like gesture of his own as he tries to work out what Cody fails to understand. With his free hand he pulls down the zip of his jacket to reveal a plaid shirt. Then he begins to unbutton the shirt. After the first couple of buttons, he loses patience and rips the shirt open.
And then Cody sees it.
The crest of Liverpool Football Club, starkly tattooed in red on the left side of Chris’s milky-white chest. Exactly where it would appear on the shirts of the team players. It depicts a shield containing a sideways-facing Liver Bird. What makes this particular emblem different, though, is that it has the characters ‘JF96’ running beneath it – a reference to the ‘Justice For the 96’ campaign for the victims of Hillsborough.
It’s the final piece of the puzzle. Cody understands it all now. He sees the relevance of the birds. They were there, at the game. Emblazoned on scarves, shirts, banners, flags and programmes. Huge numbers of those birds carried by supporters crammed into a minuscule space at one end of the ground, like they were factory-farmed chickens.
‘You squeezed the birds into tiny pens,’ says Chris. ‘You crushed us. We couldn’t breathe, and still you forced more and more of us into the space. I was a kid, just ten years old. My dad was with me. I tried to keep hold of his hand, but we got pulled apart. I had never felt so alone, so afraid. People around me were crying. Some were screaming. I saw injured people on the floor, and others were trampling on them because they couldn’t avoid it. And you lot just stood on the other side of the fences, yelling at us and hitting us with sticks and telling us to behave, even though you could see we were dying in front of you. You could see the birds dropping to the ground, all broken and still and no longer singing, but you did nothing to help. You just made it worse. You kept on letting us die, like we were nothing to you. Like we were vermin.’
Tears are streaming down Chris’s face now, and even Cody is finding it difficult to swallow the lump in his throat. What went before, and what is happening now, is sheer tragedy for all. There are no winners or losers, no good or evil. What Chris was as a child was ripped from him forever during those few hours of what should have been one of the happiest occasions of his life. It broke his spirit and it broke his mind. Cody understands this. There is a resonance for him here in this telling of a past trauma that can never be exorcised and that continues to wreak devastation.
‘Chris,’ he says, ‘I’m really sorry for what happened to you, and I’m not going to make any excuses for what happened on that day. But it’s for others to decide who was to blame. It’s not my job to do that, and it’s not yours either, no matter how much you were hurt by it. Yes, I’m a police officer, but that doesn’t mean I think like every other member of the force. It doesn’t mean I have to agree with or support every act committed by other coppers. Sometimes what is done is a disgrace. I have no trouble in saying that. But what you have to realise is that we’re not all the same.’
Chris emits a scornful laugh. ‘No? Then where was the truth immediately after Hillsborough, before the inquests started tearing down all the shields you were putting up? How many of you came forward to say that, actually, no, it didn’t happen like that, it happened like this? Where was the honesty, the breaking of ranks back then? It didn’t happen, did it? What we got was the opposite. What we got was police reports being falsified, witness accounts being altered, police scum at the highest levels lying through their teeth. So tell me, Cody: how many of these decent, virtuous coppers you claim exist were raising their heads above the parapet back then?’
Cody takes another step forward. Stops when he sees Chris tighten his hold on the crossbow.
‘You weren’t the only one there, Chris. You weren’t the only one affected. Some lost wives, husbands, sons, daughters. It didn’t turn them into killers. It didn’t make them think that the only good copper is a dead copper. What makes you so special that you should act on their behalf? What makes you believe that it’s what those grieving family members would want?’
‘Family? You want to talk about family? I’ll tell you about family. Yes, my dad and I walked out of Hillsborough alive. But that didn’t mean we came out unscathed. We were damaged. We saw and heard and felt things that no human being should have to experience. My dad was never the same after that. He lost his sense of humour. His love of football turned to utter hatred of the game. Every time a match was mentioned on the telly, he would swear at it and change the channel. He became morose, depressed. He wasn’t the dad I knew and loved anymore. About ten months after Hillsborough, his car broke down on the M62. He was in the vehicle alone, but he was being filmed by the roadside cameras. He managed to get the car onto the hard shoulder, but then he just sat behind the wheel for about five minutes, doing nothing. Finally he opened the door and got out. Walked straight onto the inside lane of the motorway and into the path of a truck carrying frozen food.
‘It didn’t end there, either. We all suffered. My mum, especially. She had to go on tablets for her nerves. She cried endlessly. She suffered that way for years. Then, the Christmas before last, she took an overdose of her tablets. She died in her bed, covered in vomit and holding a wedding photo of her and my dad.’
Chris wipes away his tears with the back of his free hand. ‘You see, Cody? There weren’t only ninety-six victims. There were hundreds of them. Thousands. Victims like my mum and dad. And it hasn’t come to an end. The fallout will carry on claiming lives. And what’s important is that people get to hear about them too. They need to hear the calls of the birds. That’s why I’m doing this. I’m speaking for the birds, because nobody else will.’
Cody is silent for a few seconds. He finds it difficult to counter much of what Chris has said, not least because it contains more than a grain of burning truth. What
happened at Hillsborough devastated many families, and voices speaking on their behalf have too often gone unheard. Sometimes they have been deliberately silenced. Chris has found a new way to make his words heard. The problem lies not with his message, but in the way he has chosen to convey it.
‘Chris. Listen to me. This isn’t the way to do things. You need to talk to someone. You’ve been through a lot. You’ve had some awful experiences. You need to discuss them, the way you’re doing with me now. There are people who can help you.’
It occurs to Cody that words very similar to his own have been thrown at him before now. He experiences a pang of guilt at not having practised what he is now preaching.
‘Little late for that, don’t you think? Four coppers are dead already. I’m going to prison for life. Whatever I do now will make no difference.’
Cody gestures towards Webley and Dobson. ‘It’ll make a difference to them. Come on, Chris. You’ve got me here now. You can still make your point with me. Why don’t you let them go?’
Again Webley tries to catch his eye. ‘Cody, no.’
Chris prods her with the tip of the crossbow bolt, and she winces. ‘Shut up.’ Then, to Cody: ‘She can go. That’s what we agreed. But not him. Not this two-faced, lying gobshite.’
‘He’s not a copper, Chris. He didn’t do any of the things we’ve talked about.’
‘No. He didn’t do those things. In some ways what he did was worse. I saw it on his phone, Cody. I saw what you found out about him. Didn’t take me long to get the full story out of him after that.’
Cody can imagine the threats of violence, and Dobson caving in quickly. Dobson might be a good investigator, but a fighter he’s not.
‘He was a lot younger back then, Chris. He was trying to make a name for himself.’
‘We were all younger then. We didn’t need to be called thieves, pickpockets, looters. We didn’t need to have those lies told about us. We didn’t need anybody reading that we urinated on the bodies of the dead. That’s what he did, Cody. What this bastard did. He made up the most evil lies imaginable about us, just so he could sell his stories.’
He wasn’t called Dobson back then, and he was with a different newspaper. That’s what Ed Kingsley had told Cody. When the reporter’s name became mud because of the Hillsborough coverage, he changed it, not least because Kingsley offered him a good job at his paper here in Merseyside, where there is no shortage of Liverpool supporters who would gladly tear him limb from limb if they knew what he had written about them.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me. That’s how the saying goes. But Dobson’s words can certainly hurt. His words can be fatal. What he let slip to Chris about the whereabouts of Latham and Garnett led to their being selected as the first victims. And now the words that Dobson wrote about the Liverpool fans all those years ago have come back to bite him with serrated-edge fangs. He too will die because of what he chose to say.
‘It’s funny,’ says Chris. ‘If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be here now, on this roof. I knew I couldn’t go on for much longer. You would have caught me in the end. But I didn’t want to just fizzle out. I needed a show-stopper. You gave it to me. You lit the fuse that led to Dobby. And now I have all the ingredients I need. The police and the media. Representatives of those who did their best to make that day in 1989 such a dark one. It’s time to bring it to an end, Cody. Time for the world to sit up and listen to birdsong.’
Cody hears the tone of finality. Something is about to happen. Something awful. He tries to stall it with further talk, but he can hear the panic in his own voice.
‘So that’s it? This is how you choose to commemorate the deaths of those football fans? With further violence, further killings?’
For a few moments Chris doesn’t answer. He raises his head. Looks at the Liver Bird as if seeking an answer from it.
‘Listen,’ he says. ‘The birds are singing.’
His movement is sudden. Too fast for Cody to react. Since he got up here he has regarded the crossbow in front of him as the item to fear most, a single trigger pull being all that is required to release a bolt of terrible power, speed and deadliness.
He didn’t account for other weapons. He didn’t reckon on the knife. He didn’t imagine for one second that he’d be standing here helpless while a blade is thrust into Dobson’s neck and yanked out again, not straight out, but in a twisting, dragging motion that tears open a huge ragged wound and causes a geyser of crimson to spurt onto Webley’s face and hair.
Screaming. Yelling. Shouting. None of it making any sense, but everyone reacting with sheer emotion to the scene of devastation being played out as a man keels over and kicks and shakes and struggles vainly to staunch the life force gushing from his severed arteries.
Cody wanting to move. Webley wanting to move. Chris panning his crossbow from one to the other as he tries to keep them in check. More shouting. Cody feeling powerless and horrified and incensed and distraught, all at once.
And then the maelstrom collapses into something more stable. Cody and Webley resume their subservient status while Dobson’s thrashing diminishes to become the quivering and twitching of a body in the final stages of shutdown.
Cody lets out a long, shuddering breath, in synchrony with Dobson’s last. The situation has been taken to the next level. The time for talking is over.
He starts backing towards the door.
‘Hey!’ says Chris, his voice betraying panic. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m leaving, Chris. If you don’t let Webley go right now, I’m going to open the door and I’m going to tell the cops inside that you’ve started killing all the hostages. They won’t hold back any longer then, Chris. They’ll think they have nothing to lose. They will come for you in force.’
‘Stop! I’ll shoot.’
‘Can you hit me from there, Chris? Stop me in my tracks? Are you sure? Because even if I’m wounded I can make it through that door.’
He keeps moving. Keeps putting distance between them. Every step is a hammer blow to Chris’s carefully constructed plan.
Chris’s words tumble out. ‘Then I’ll kill her. You won’t let me do that.’
‘You give me no choice, Chris. If you want to complete your mission, if you want to put your message up there in neon lights, you have to let Webley go.’
He knows he’s playing with Webley’s life now, and it’s tearing him up inside. But the situation is spiralling out of control. He has to resort to desperate measures.
He says, ‘I’m at the door now, Chris. What’s it going to be?’
Give him no time to think. Force his hand.
He reaches behind him for the door handle.
‘Wait!’ Chris yells. ‘Okay. Okay. Get back here.’
‘Let her walk, Chris.’
Chris prods Webley in the back with the toe of his boot. ‘Get up. Start walking. Slowly.’
With great uncertainty, Webley gets to her feet, but hesitates before moving.
‘Get the fuck out of here,’ says Chris. ‘Now!’ Then he raises the crossbow and calls over to Cody: ‘Start moving, Cody. Or I shoot your girlfriend.’
Slowly, Cody and Webley walk towards each other. Cody tries to keep his attention on the killer, to be ready to act if he makes a move. But he can’t help but be pulled in by Webley’s fearful eyes as he gets closer to her.
She shakes her head, and the motion dislodges another tear.
‘Not for me, Cody,’ she says. ‘Don’t do this for me.’
He tries to dredge up something profound to utter. All that poetry he has read, all those great works of literature, and yet the best he can manage is, ‘I owed you one.’
As they pass, he puts a hand out and brushes his fingers against hers.
And then she is behind him, and the exchange is made.
‘Here,’ says Chris. ‘Down on your knees. Hands behind your head.’
Cody steps around the growing pool of blood surroundi
ng Dobson’s unmoving form, then lowers himself onto the cold grey paving slabs. He looks across to Webley, who is now at the door. She meets his gaze in a final, lingering look, then flings open the door and disappears inside, safe at last.
And then the only hearts still beating up here are those of Cody, Chris and the pigeons.
55
Something has happened. Blunt can tell from the expression on the face of Haynes.
‘What?’ she asks. ‘What is it?’
‘A hostage has been released. DC Webley.’
Blunt wants to celebrate the moment. Wants to experience hope and optimism. It’s a good thing, she tells herself. One hostage out already. That has to be good, right? Letting Cody go up there must have been the correct decision. He’s doing a great job. Pretty soon everyone will come off that roof alive. That’s what will surely happen.
‘Sir?’ This from one of the uniformed officers watching the building through binoculars. ‘We’ve got some movement up there.’
Blunt looks up as Haynes spins away from her and lifts his own binoculars to his eyes. She can see a figure climbing over the rail at the roof’s edge, as if preparing to jump.
She says, ‘Who is it?’
‘It’s your man,’ Haynes answers. ‘Cody.’
No, she thinks. What the hell is he doing? What the fuck is going on?
‘Tell your men,’ she says, ‘as soon as that bastard Davies shows his face, I want him taken out. I want that fucker shot dead.’
She doesn’t care that she isn’t running this operation. Doesn’t care whether Haynes resents her interference or not. All she cares about is getting Cody out of there alive. And right now the chances of that are starting to look pretty remote.
‘Sir. Another IC1 male getting onto the ledge.’
‘That’s our suspect,’ says Haynes.
‘Take him,’ says Blunt. ‘One of your men down here must have a clear shot now. Do something!’
‘Sir, he’s waving something. It’s . . . It’s a rope.’
A Tapping at My Door: A gripping crime thriller (The DS Nathan Cody series) Page 31