A Wanted Man

by Paul Finch

  Metal clanged loudly from behind.

  Heck reacted instinctively. He knew it could be a diversion, a pebble thrown at the railway lines, but it was a natural reaction to twirl around – it was impossible not to – and perhaps inevitably, as he did, with only a foot between himself and the fence, the Spider sprung up on the other side and threw an arm around his neck.

  The muscles in that arm were like iron cables. The crook of its elbow locked into Heck’s throat with such strength that his air supply was instantly extinguished.

  Heck tried to throw himself forward and flip the guy over his shoulder, but his opponent was unyielding, as if he’d braced a knee against the fence running between them. He clamped Heck’s face with his gloved left hand, giving himself further leverage and blocking off Heck’s nose and mouth, wrenching his head backward. Heck gasped as his neck muscles were pulled taut, choked as he tasted sweat-sodden rubber. He rammed his elbows behind him, but found no target. The pointed tips of the fence slats dug agonisingly into his lower back, but just when he thought his spine was going to snap, the maniac’s hand released his face and snaked down the side of his body, locating his CS aerosol and ripping it from his webbing. Heck jerked his head back, crunching the rear of his skull on his opponent’s nose, inducing a grunt of pain, and then pulling free, at the same time pirouetting and whipping his baton around, smashing it across the hand clasping the canister, sending it flying over the platform.

  Heck followed this with a backhand slash, only missing that nylon-swathed visage with millimetres to spare. If the Spider hadn’t immediately dodged backward, he’d have caught it full on the cheekbone. But he wasn’t quick enough to evade Heck’s other hand, which clutched a mass of flimsy material. There was a rending and tearing sound – just as the attacker lurched back into a ray of moonlight. The top of his clothing was rent away, exposing his naked torso: it was tightly-muscled and gleaming with sweat, but it was also riddled with jagged white scars as if some time in the past he’d suffered a brutal flogging.

  ‘Bastard!’ Heck snarled, attempting to straddle the fence. ‘You’ve had it, mate!’

  Try as he may, he could never feel sympathy for those whose response to being hurt was to hurt others.

  The Spider turned and grabbed something lying near his feet. Heck had just cleared the fence when he realised what this was – an enormous two-handed spanner, part of a railway man’s maintenance kit. The maniac swung it down and around like an executioner with his axe. Heck spun just in time, taking the blow across his back. The impact was sickening, the shudder passing clean through him as he toppled forward against the fence and fell back over it, hitting the platform with his face. At first he was too groggy to do anything. He tasted coppery fluid in his mouth, blood pooling there from a busted nose. Seconds seemed to pass before it struck him that the danger wasn’t over. His opponent was almost certain to come across the fence, to finish him off.

  And yet that didn’t happen.

  As Heck looked dazedly up, he glimpsed the ivory V-shape of the Spider’s upper torso dwindling into the darkness on the far side of the derelict track-bed. Heck swayed to his feet. He clambered the fence again, crossed the other side of the platform and dropped down. As before, his quarry had vanished, but Heck made a beeline for the nearest aperture in the wall of sheds. It led through into a cramped hole filled with clutter and stinking of damp and fungus. Inside, another door hung open on his left, this one shifting slightly, its hinges creaking – as if someone had just gone through it. Heck blundered through as well, barging into the next compartment, where he halted.

  The facing door here was closed. But then a droplet of lukewarm fluid hit his left cheek. Heck looked up and saw his prey spread out across the ceiling, hands and feet jammed into corners to keep himself in place, every muscle tense in his bare, brutalised physique.

  The Spider dropped.

  He landed clean, wrapping his sinewy form around Heck’s head and shoulders, at the same time pummeling his face with a free fist. Again, Heck had lost the initiative. Though his opponent was smaller and lighter, his strength and wiriness were a real problem. Heck stumbled back and forth, before throwing himself shoulder-first at a grimy window overlooking the track-bed. The glass erupted outward as his opponent was dislodged through it, landing heavily on the weed-grown cinders outside. Heck grabbed at the nearest door and yanked it open. The jamb was rotten and the door came away in his hands, clouting his already wounded face. He tottered backward, peppery tears filling his eyes, only managing to glimpse the figure outside as it catapulted back to its feet and dashed out of sight.

  Initially unable to do more than stagger, Heck thrust himself outside, and glanced right, spotting his prey as he disappeared into the black, semi-circular mouth of the abandoned tunnel. On one hand this was good, Heck thought, hobbling in pursuit. The tunnel was barricaded at its far end, so there was one entrance and one exit. On the other hand, if it was dark out here, it would be blacker than the pit of Hell in there.

  It certainly smelled like Hell – more dampness, more decay. Heck ventured into it anyway, feet clumping on sodden, mossy rubble. A short distance in, he halted to listen – nothing. He proceeded again – ten yards, twenty, thirty. Now there was a complete absence of light.

  He stopped, ears straining.

  Utter silence.

  Even if the bastard had run down to the tunnel’s far end, and was trying to smash his way through the hoardings, the noise would carry – in which case it was likely the Spider was much closer than that. Hunkered down somewhere nearby maybe.

  Heck pivoted slowly, unable to distinguish anything – save the tunnel mouth itself, which was already no more than a dim, distant blob. His assailant could be right alongside him, and Heck wouldn’t know.

  A sudden ringing of riveted steel dropped him to a crouch, a repeated clung – clung – clung! For a second it was all around him, deafening, bouncing from one sooty wall to the other, until he deduced that it was actually above.

  Heck gazed up. He hadn’t realised there was a rusty metal catwalk suspended just below the ceiling, running lengthways along the tunnel. As he pierced the gloom with his eyes, an amorphous black and white shape scrambled along it in the direction of the entrance. Heck raced back too, sliding to a halt as he hit the open air, and spinning around – just in time to see the Spider fulfil the promise of his name by clambering over the high, arched lintel, and, with body flat against the sheer bricks, squirm his way up for several feet until he’d reached a narrow ledge, which he promptly commenced to sidle along. Ten yards later, he came to a right-angled corner, from where a gap of about eight feet lay between himself and one of the iron latticework stanchions supporting the footbridge.

  Even Heck held his breath; the drop was a good thirty feet, but the Spider cleared it easily, scaling the stanchion as fast as he could. Not far above, the glassless frame of an old window yawned in the side of the enclosed footbridge.

  Heck turned and raced back across the track-bed, vaulting up onto Platform Two. He staggered on up the stairs, taking it three treads per stride. There wouldn’t be sufficient time to cut the bastard off, but the footbridge, leading only to the station’s front entrance, which wasn’t just boarded over but locked and chained, was a cul-de-sac in itself. He skidded right at the top, belting across the bridge through intermittent light and shadow, and hearing a succession of echoing impacts – a foot clobbering woodwork.

  Heck was maybe ten yards from the point where the bridge ended and the station passage began, when the bare-topped figure skated back into view. For half a second, they faced each other. Heck was sweating hard, one eyebrow split, his broken nose still leaking blood into his mouth, but the Spider’s naked torso was also streaked with gore where he too had been gashed. The pair of them pumped out plumes of smoking breath.

  ‘Okay, pal,’ Heck panted, baton to shoulder again. ‘No ambush this time. No jumping me from behind. We do it toe-to-toe. Let’s see how that works, eh?’
>
  The Spider remained inscrutable behind a nylon mask now plastered to his features with sweat. But clearly not fancying another fight, he abruptly darted left, flying for the open window he’d come in through.

  Heck jerked forward, trying to intercept, but he wasn’t quick enough.

  The Spider was through it in a flash.

  Initially Heck thought the madman had risked jumping all the way down to the ground, but when he stuck his head out, saw that he’d swung himself around from the window frame and was climbing again. Cramming his fingers and toes into tiny niches worn in the desiccated planking, he clawed his way left towards a conveniently placed drainpipe, up which he then ascended towards the footbridge roof.

  Heck felt the energy seeping out of him.

  He didn’t need to stare into the black void below to know that he didn’t want to climb up there – but this was a real moment of crisis. If the Spider got on top of the footbridge, he could run over the station roof to the entrance, from where he only needed to drop a few feet onto Meadowbank Road. After that, there were any number of adjoining streets and alleyways down which he could disappear.

  Heck wrestled the urge to follow. Another lower section of roof, the canopy over Platform Two, was only about fifteen feet down – he could just about see it. But it was a good five yards to the right of this position, so a straight fall would still drop him fifty feet onto the track-bed. And yet – the Spider’s footsteps thudded away into the distance – to be this close and to suddenly hang back? How did that work? This maniac had built his career around going places where the cops wouldn’t, around taking the sorts of risks that would void police insurance claims. It was hugely to his advantage that to most coppers this was only a job, whereas to him it was a vocation. Violent molestation was the thing he lived for, and the thing he would go on living for as long as he was allowed to, as long as he deemed his opponents nothing more than civil servants in uniform.

  ‘Sod this for lark!’ Heck climbed into the window frame, tugging his gloves off with his teeth, cramming them into a pocket, and then turning sideways and, doing his damnedest to avoid even glancing at the abyss beneath, reaching out and wrapping his left hand around the drainpipe. After lugging on it to test it, he swung himself over. The pipe groaned, creaked; flakes of rust bit through the sweaty flesh of Heck’s palms.

  He kicked hard at the woodwork, finding nooks in which to brace the toes of his boots. And then, hand over hand, heaved himself upward. It was rickety as hell – too rickety; with a sound like a gunshot, the pipe fractured. But it was only a couple of feet to the iron gutter running along the eaves, and Heck had already managed to catch hold of this. Blinking the sweat from his eyes, he hauled himself higher, lifting a leg over the gutter, and with hoarse grunts, rolling his body after it.

  For moments he lay gasping on the edge of the roof, which, when he groped at it, turned out to be made from wood and tarpaper rather than slate, and was thickly greased with moss. Rising warily to his knees, unsure whether or not the roof would support him if he tried to stand, Heck peered along it both east and west. From this elevated position, he could easily see beyond the parapets of the cutting, the cityscape stretching in all directions, a soulless, sodium-yellow fairyland. About fifty yards away, the Spider made a diminutive silhouette. Heck watched wearily as the nimble form scrambled over a low dividing wall onto the roof of the actual station. But the fugitive was only half way across this, when something else halted him. Heck strained his eyes, and saw ripples of blue light beyond the main building. Support units had arrived. They couldn’t have known the Spider would come to Meadowbank Station, but it was the quickest way down onto the railway, where they knew Heck had headed.

  ‘Over here!’ Heck shouted. ‘Footbridge roof!’ He grabbed his radio, which, from its crackles of static, had full reception again. ‘1415 to Five, urgent message … I’m on the footbridge roof at Meadowbank Station. The Spider’s up here too. Tell the officers outside to stand guard there, but also to force entry. I need assistance!’

  On hearing Heck’s shout, the Spider had spun around. He now came slogging back, leaping down onto the bridge and approaching at increasing speed. The structure shuddered violently. Heck rose to his feet but kept low, thinking he could rugby-tackle the bastard. And yet before the Spider even got close, he jumped.

  In a seeming suicide leap, he took to the air five yards in front of Heck, sailing diagonally out and away from the bridge, arching downward with arms twirling. Despite the fifteen-foot descent – though it was probably considerably more given his curved trajectory – he landed cleanly on the roof to Platform Two. That too was only composed of light materials, but though it rocked with the impact, it held, and the next thing the Spider was haring along it, back down the cutting in the direction they had first come from. Heck gazed after him, only to see him come to another faltering halt. Further down the cutting, two dark figures were advancing along the railway, the streamlined shapes of dogs needling along in front.

  The Spider backed slowly away. As he did, he glanced right, across the gap to the roof over Platform One, which was just about visible in the dimness. That would be a prodigious leap, clear over the two railway lines. Even though the overhanging eaves of the two canopies narrowed it a little, there was still a good twenty feet to cover. But if anyone could make it, it was this guy. And if he succeeded, it was a much shorter leap from the other side of Platform One’s roof to the cutting’s west parapet, and from there back into the maze of yards and alleys at the rear of Kersal Rise.

  Again, Heck knew he had no choice. He edged along the footbridge roof until he was directly above the roof to Platform Two, sat down with legs dangling and heart thundering – and jumped.

  The fifteen-foot drop was more than it sounded.

  He landed heavily, legs buckling, hitting himself in the ribs with his knees. At the same time, larger and heavier than the Spider, he crashed clean through the canopy. For a nightmarish second, Heck thought he was going all the way through, the splintered woodwork rending at him as he did – only for it to bang up hard beneath his armpits, lodging him fast.

  The Spider had dropped to a half crouch in anticipation of another tussle. But now rose up again. Stooping, hawk-like, he advanced. He hadn’t emitted a single real sound thus far, and he didn’t make one now – but Heck could imagine him tittering under his breath. This was the chance he’d been looking for, the break he’d needed. Heck struggled, but his legs kicked at nothing, his arms jutting out crosswise so that he couldn’t brace himself or gain any kind of leverage.

  The Spider halted and glanced leftward again, trying to judge the actual distance he’d have to cover. Perhaps even he was having reservations about this one.

  ‘Forget it!’ Heck shouted. ‘You’ll never make it! Even a freak-show reject like you can’t jump that far!’

  The Spider rounded back on him.

  ‘And I bet you haven’t got the guts to try,’ Heck added in a jeering tone. ‘It’s okay climbing into women’s bedrooms, especially when they’re all alone. But something like this … a real risk? No bloody chance!’

  The masked figure regarded him with studied silence, before bursting into laughter – a weird, ululating hyena cackle – and then running forward and kicking him in the face: once, twice, three times, each impact stunning Heck into dizziness, exploding inside his head.

  Yet somehow he managed to cling to consciousness. His brain was spinning, but he had a fragment of awareness left, just sufficient to watch as his opponent cackled again, turned, backed up to the east side of the roof, and took a wild charge forward, employing huge strides, before leaping out over the chasm – and crashing headlong into the web-work of suspended power-lines passing between the platform roofs.

  In all the excitement, he’d evidently forgotten about that. Or perhaps he hadn’t even known about it and in the deep canyon gloom had failed to spot it. Either way, he now fell to earth amid a cascade of flashing sparks and spitting cables. />
  As the Spider fell, Heck fell too, his struggle finally having loosened the broken timbers he was wedged between, though he managed to grab one of the slender metal joists underpinning it all. It bent and broke, but it slowed his descent and allowed him to slide by hand another few feet, before dropping the final ten, landing upright, and then pitching down onto his side on the platform’s edge.

  Nearby on the railway line, the Spider lay over one of the metals, still tangled but now juddering and twitching, smoke pouring off him in acrid clouds.

  From somewhere close by there came a hammering and smashing of wood. In his mind’s eye, Heck pictured Bill Murphy wielding the Big Key. A rumble of feet sounded from the stairs as a bunch of uniforms, Murph at their front with sledge hammer in hand, descended, the beams of their torches slashing back and forth.

  The sergeant grimaced on seeing the twisted, blackened thing on the railway, but quickly homed in on Heck, his eyebrows arching at the sight of his constable’s battered face. ‘You’re going straight to Casualty …’

  ‘It’s nothing, sarge …’

  ‘No arguments!’

  Heck tried to get to his feet, two or three helping hands shooting in to assist and steer him towards a bench. Murph moved to the platform’s edge, wafting at the foul smoke. ‘Robbie,’ he said distractedly. ‘Get onto Comms, tell them we want an ambulance ASAP, and to contact British Transport Police. This whole section of line needs deactivating. That’s if it hasn’t already blown. All trains to be cancelled forthwith.’

  Robbie Mulroony, the relief’s fresh-faced probationer, scurried away.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ Shawna McCluskey said, approaching from the stairs and shining her torch onto Heck.

  ‘Looked better, haven’t I?’ he grunted.

  She glanced up at the hole gaping in the canopy. ‘You fell through that?’

  ‘The Spider took a harder fall.’

  ‘How did he … I mean …?’