by Zoe Sharp
Madeleine had helped Sean to his feet. He moved across, producing from the side pocket of his trousers the sling he’d discarded earlier. He thrust it into my hand as he came past.
“Here, stop the bleeding with this and watch he doesn’t bite you,” he said. He still looked pale. “You OK?”
I nodded, and he carried on, bending over West.
Loudly, with expletives, West was demanding a doctor, and an ambulance. He’d pulled out a grubby handkerchief from his pocket and was clumsily trying to knot that round his thigh. Sean eyed him coldly, and made no moves to help.
Then, after a few moments he reached down and took hold of the knife’s greasy handle.
West’s body jerked at the touch. “No, no!” he shouted. “Let them do it at the hospital. Don’t move it. I’ll bleed to death.”
Sean cocked an eyebrow at that less-than-convincing argument, and hauled the knife straight out of the wound with a vicious jerk. West bucked and twisted, swearing.
“You didn’t think,” Sean demanded quietly, “that I was going to leave you with a concealed weapon, did you, you sick fucker?”
West stopped thrashing about long enough to spit at him. Sean leaned closer, ignoring the splatter of phlegm that landed near his feet.
“Did you know that you can pick up virulent infections from dogs’ blood?” he lied conversationally, then turned on his heel and walked away, with the polluted knife still dangling from his fingers.
Sean moved back to where Madeleine and I were trying to patch up Friday’s wound. He held the knife out towards me without speaking, and for a moment I didn’t understand what he was showing me.
It was just a knife. A combat knife with a long serrated blade and a camouflage-coloured plastic non-slip handle. Then I suddenly realised where I’d seen it before.
Well, maybe not that particular knife, but one very much like it.
In fact, I hadn’t seen the blade. That had been buried deep in Harvey Langford’s chest, but the rest was identical.
I didn’t have time to react to the discovery, though, because it very quickly became apparent we weren’t alone any more. That the burning Patrol had served as a beacon for trouble.
Madeleine and Sean turned a slow circle, staring out beyond the area lit by the flames. I came to my feet, also, aware of a tightening in my chest, a drumming in my ears.
Slowly, gradually, there came the slip and slither of feet approaching across the rubble from all sides until at last more than a dozen men took shape out of the darkness, and formed a semicircular perimeter in front of us.
A final figure appeared, and they parted to let him through. Ian Garton-Jones looked much as he had done at our last meeting, shaven-headed and dressed in black. There was one notable exception, however.
This time, he was carrying a double-barrelled shotgun, and he was pointing it unswervingly in our direction.
Twenty-eight
The shotgun was a twelve gauge Browning with stacked over-and-under barrels, a middle-of-the-range sportsman’s gun. Garton-Jones probably used it for clays.
A brief picture of one of my old army weapons’ handling instructors flashed into my mind at that point. There was nothing to beat a shotgun for house clearance, he’d said. In a confined space you hardly even had to aim. They were deadly.
On open ground, though, there was always a chance you could sprint out of effective range. Providing you were prepared to risk it that the gun hadn’t been choked down too far, and the shooter’s aim wasn’t too accurate. With a normal spread pattern of the shot you’d probably escape serious injury at anything over thirty metres. Forty, to be on the safe side.
I glanced across at Sean, but he had that stubborn look about him that said he wasn’t going to run away from this one, even if he got the opportunity. And besides, Friday wasn’t in any state to sprint anywhere. There was no way I was going to abandon the Ridgeback to Garton-Jones’s tender ministrations.
“Let that dog loose on me or any of my men,” he’d said, “and I’ll personally break its spine.”
I stood my ground.
West squirmed round, recognised his boss, and started making a lot of noise. He pointed to the knife which was still in Sean’s hand, screaming that we’d stabbed him, and exhorting Garton-Jones to shoot us.
Garton-Jones silenced him with a dark look, the play from the firelight emphasising the older man’s deep eye sockets, making it difficult to read him. He jerked his head to one of his men, who approached warily and snatched the knife away from Sean.
The man trotted back across to Garton-Jones and handed it over. He studied the knife for a long time, turning the blood-smeared blade over so it caught the light.
“Look at it,” West shouted then. “It’s just the same as the one they used to kill that vigilante bloke.”
I half-turned in surprise at his words. Whatever tactic I’d been expecting from West, that certainly wasn’t it. My eye caught Harlow and Drummond, both now back on their feet and trying to merge in with the other security men. They looked edgy, ill at ease.
Sean ignored them, pinning West with a contemptuous stare. “And just why would I want to do a thing like that?” he demanded in a deadly quiet tone.
West tried to stand, but his leg wouldn’t support him. He fell back heavily, addressing Garton-Jones rather than Sean.
“Like I told you, Langford knew Meyer was trying to take over the turf now he was back on Copthorne,” he said, the lies forcing the sweat out of his skin. “He knew Meyer had killed the Gadatra boy for getting his brother into the shit. That’s why they got rid of him.”
Sean took a step forwards then, intent. “You miserable, lying little—”
“That’s enough,” Garton-Jones rapped. He brought the barrels of the Browning up, just to hammer home his point. “I think I’d like your hands where I can see them, all of you. Now – if you don’t mind.”
Sean put his out by his sides. The left one wouldn’t lift more than a few inches. The blood had reached as far as his hand, trickling down his wrist and dripping from his fingers. West must have blown my father’s neat and careful stitches wide open. He was going to be livid.
At that moment we caught the sounds of shouting, breaking glass, and missiles being thrown. The riot was moving closer, only a few streets away now. The sky was lightening up all the time as more houses fell to the flames.
“I think we should continue this interesting discussion from a fallback position,” Garton-Jones said. He raised his voice. “Let’s move it out.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” Sean said, between clenched teeth. “My brother’s still out there.”
Garton-Jones regarded him levelly. “It wasn’t optional, Mr Meyer,” he said. His cold stare shifted to me. “Ladies first, I think.” He waved the shotgun briefly in my direction. “Over here where I can keep an eye on you, Miss Fox, if you wouldn’t mind.”
I glanced at Sean before I moved, caught the faintest flicker of his eyes, and understood instinctively what he was driving at. To follow Garton-Jones’s orders, I kept out of his line of fire, and that meant crossing behind Sean.
In the middle of Sean’s belt, tucked into the small of his back, lay the Glock. As I moved close behind him it took only the smallest of movements to reach out for the gun. My right hand closed round the butt, warmed to the touch from his body heat. I felt Sean breathe in, loosening the barrel to my grip.
Smoothly, I brought the gun out into view round his body. I didn’t trust Garton-Jones’s bulky clothing not to be hiding body armour of his own, so I took a bead dead centre on the exposed flesh of his neck, just below the ear.
Garton-Jones heard the precise, sharp double click of the first round snapping into the breech, and froze.
The barrels of the Browning were down and away from me by then. It would have taken him much too long to have brought them to bear. He turned his head slowly, blinked twice into the business end of the Glock’s muzzle, ten feet from him, then almost seeme
d to relax. He turned his head back towards Sean.
“It would appear that your girlfriend’s been watching too many bad movies, Mr Meyer,” he said, with a nasty grin.
Sean smiled back at him, harmless as a shark showing its teeth before the bite. “My girlfriend, as you call her,” he said with calm deliberation, “is ex-Special Forces. She’s lethal. At that distance she could shoot your eyeball straight out from between the lids without even smudging your mascara.”
Just for a moment, Garton-Jones looked shaken, then he laughed. “Nice try,” he said, “but I’ll bet she doesn’t even know how to take the safety off,” and started to bring the shotgun up.
“Hold it!” I snapped. He halted on a reflex to the command, and once I’d got his attention, I aimed to keep it.
“This is a Glock 19 nine millimetre semiautomatic,” I said, speaking fast. “There is no conventional safety catch; it’s built into the trigger. As soon as I depressed the first stage of the trigger, the weapon became active. It’s active now, and my finger’s getting twitchy.” I paused, then added quietly, “Don’t think I can’t or won’t do this, if you leave me no other choice.”
I saw Garton-Jones register the utter conviction in my voice and start to waver. Watched as he weighed up the chance that I might be bluffing. Knew precisely the moment when he finally realised that I was not.
He carefully thumbed the safety back on and dropped the Browning into the mud at his feet. An amateur, with no respect for a decent gun. His hands went up as Sean’s came down.
I heard Sean’s breath hiss out, relief escaping like steam as he ducked to rescue the shotgun. He retrieved it, and moved back to my right. Madeleine took the knife, trying to hide her revulsion at the amount of blood that still covered it.
All the time, I kept the Glock level, kept the front sight up, pointing straight at Garton-Jones. And all the time, he kept his gaze locked on mine.
It took every ounce of sheer bloody-minded will I possessed to keep the gun steady, not to let my arm and hand tremble. I was damned if I was going to show him a sign of weakness and I silently thanked all those hours I spent at Attila’s, working out.
“See,” West spat, disgusted by his boss’s capitulation, “I told you they killed the Asian lad. He was shot with a nine-mil, right?”
“Oh shut up, West, you’re starting to bore me,” Sean snapped, swinging the Browning in his direction. It was enough to silence the other man.
I turned back to Garton-Jones, and played a hunch. “I have no idea what’s going on here,” I said, lowering the Glock, “beside the fact that your man West is trying his guts out to persuade you that we’re guilty of something we haven’t done. Maybe you can shed some light on why that is.”
As if on cue, we all turned towards West. His eyes swivelled in panic and he started to hutch backwards, still clutching the now sodden handkerchief to his leg. “She stabbed me,” he repeated, his voice almost a squawk, as if that answered the question.
“Yes, I did,” I admitted. I eyed Garton-Jones again. “But if it’s Sean’s knife, as he’s claiming, then how do you explain the fact that Friday’s also been injured. Do you think we’d stab the dog ourselves? And how does West know what sort of knife was used to kill Harvey Langford? Unless he was there.”
I let that one settle on them for a few moments. Jav had pointed the finger firmly at the security men the last time we’d spoken to him, and he’d been too frightened to lie to us again. It wasn’t his fault that we’d lumped them all together and automatically assumed he meant Garton-Jones, rather than West . . .
“But you were there, too,” Garton-Jones said now, and it was a statement.
Sean nodded. “We were manoeuvred into being at the building site just after West killed him,” he said. “He even took pot shots at us to try and keep us pinned down until the cops arrived.”
Garton-Jones looked at the blood on Sean’s shirt. “Is that what happened to the shoulder?”
“He got lucky.”
The security chief gave West a long considering stare, and it was impossible to guess from his impassive face what thoughts were passing through his mind.
“He told me it was all down to some long-running feud between you and Langford going back to your National Front days,” he said at last, curling his lip. “He told me that Langford had winged you before you’d stuck him. Oh when fascists fall out.” He shrugged. “I didn’t care as long as you didn’t bring it onto my estate.”
“So how did he know what kind of gun was used to kill Nasir?” I asked.
Garton-Jones seemed suddenly weary, barely able to look at his second-in-command. He sighed. “He was responsible for that one, too, was he?”
“No! Ian, you can’t believe these lying shits,” West said, pleading now. “We’ve been working together for ten years. For God’s sake, trust me on this.”
Madeleine, who’d gone back to tending Friday’s wound, had been listening without taking part in the exchange. Now, she got to her feet and moved forwards. “How did you find out about the contract on Lavender Gardens?” she asked.
Garton-Jones stared at her blankly for a moment, as though he couldn’t see the relevance, then something connected. “He put me onto it,” he said, waving a hand in West’s direction, “through a pal of his from the TA. He works for the Community Juvenile office. Chap called Eric O’Bryan. We pay him a commission for putting work our way.”
“O’Bryan’s the one who’s running the crime ring on the estates,” Madeleine said, breaking the news to him almost gently. “O’Bryan’s gang of kids crank the crime rate up until the residents are prepared to pay you to come in and sort it out for them. West and O’Bryan have been making money twice over from the scheme.”
“You can’t believe this crap, Ian,” West broke in, but the desperation was clear in his voice. “I wouldn’t do something like that to you. You’re my mate.”
“You’re his fall guy,” Sean said clearly. “His scapegoat. Once this riot’s over, who d’you think they’re going to blame for antagonising the Asian community, stirring it all up? West and O’Bryan will skip with the proceeds and you’re going to be left carrying the can. Face it, you’ve been had.”
West made another failed attempt to rise. “Ian, I—”
“Shut up, Mr West,” Garton-Jones said without turning his head. “Don’t dig your grave any deeper than it is already.”
I had the nasty feeling that he wasn’t speaking metaphorically.
West wasn’t a fool, he’d seen the tide turning against him, knew when he was beaten. He sat back in the mud, looked at the blood on his hands and gave a high-pitched laugh. “You won’t be able to prove any of this,” he said. “You won’t make any of it stick.”
“You’re forgetting my little brother,” Sean told him. “He’s a witness. You were trying to get rid of him tonight, and you’ve failed. It’s over.”
If anything, that made West laugh louder. “Of course it’s not over,” he said scornfully. “As soon as we saw the jeep and realised you were here we knew you’d probably have found the kid, got him out, so O’Bryan went looking for him while the rest of us kept you occupied. He’s been out there, all this time.” Triumph made his voice a crow. “Your brother’s already dead.”
“You’d better hope not,” Sean told him, his voice icy. “For your own sake.”
Garton-Jones jerked his head to some of his men, who moved forwards to grab hold of West, haul him to his feet. “Get him out of here,” he said, his face twisting with distaste. “And watch those two, as well,” he added, pointing to Harlow and Drummond, who’d been trying to slink back into the ranks.
He glanced again at Sean’s shoulder. “You look as though you need a medic, too.”
Sean shook his head. “I’m OK,” he said. He looked pale, tired, but I knew it was useless to try and talk him out of his objective. “If you’ve got transport, though, can you get Friday out of here? Get him sorted?”
“Of course,”
Garton-Jones said, but when a couple of his men tried to approach him, the dog opened his eyes and did his best to snarl at them. Even battered and wounded, the Ridgeback presented a fearsome obstacle. They hesitated, and I couldn’t say I blamed them for it.
“One of us is going to have to go with him,” I said, my voice hollow. I looked at Sean and Madeleine. There was no way I wanted to let Sean go out after O’Bryan alone, and I didn’t want to let Madeleine go with him, either. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe the dark-haired girl could take care of herself, or of Sean. That wasn’t what I was afraid of.
Pauline had been right. Sean was after blood, and if the chance came up I was afraid Madeleine wouldn’t be able to stop him from taking it.
It was a fast downhill route, through anger to death. Coming back from the power and the thrill of it left you constantly unsure of yourself, like a newly sober alcoholic.
“Don’t worry, Charlie, I’ll go with Friday.”
I realised it was Madeleine who’d spoken. She bent down by the dog’s head, talking to him and stroking his ears while two of Garton-Jones’s men got a coat under him, using that as a sling. This time, the Ridgeback didn’t protest, allowing them to pick him up, start to carry him away.
I put my hand on Madeleine’s arm as she moved past me. “It should be me,” I argued, stumbling to find the right words. “He’s my responsibility. I promised Pauline I’d—”
“Don’t,” Madeleine interrupted, but kindly. “I can take care of Friday. Sean needs you.” She lowered her voice. “I’ve seen him change like this before – when he’s working. He drops into another mode, another skin,” she said, almost sadly. “You move just like he does, Charlie. You can’t help it. Just watch his back for me, OK?”
She smiled at me quickly, and then she was gone, jogging nimbly over the rubble to catch up. I noted that the security men were taking a great deal more care with the dog than they were with West.