Last Rites cr-10

by John Harvey

  Planer aside, they had the place to themselves.

  Cassady drew level with Preston and flicked on the pencil torch. The study was down three steps and to the left. The brass handle stuck and then turned.

  Books were shelved floor to picture rail along two sides; an old-fashioned roll-top desk, big enough to hide a man inside, took up most of the third wall. There was another desk toward the center of the room. Two broad armchairs upholstered with studded leather, one with a green-shaded reading lamp close behind it, a Dick Francis on the table nearby, an empty whisky glass.

  “Now,” Cassady said quietly, “just give us a hand.”

  Working from either end, they maneuvered the rolltop far enough away from the wall to give them access to the safe. This was the series of numbers he’d not been able to commit to memory; the Gold Standard business card he’d written it on was in his back pocket.

  “Here,” he said, giving the card to Preston. “Read them out, why don’t you?”

  Cassady punched in the numbers and nothing happened, nothing budged.

  “Read them again, careful. You must’ve got one wrong.”

  Again no reaction. Cassady snatched the card back and held it in one unsteady hand, while he used the other.

  “It’s not gonna fuckin’ work,” Preston shouted.

  “Hush your mouth, can’t I see that?”

  “What the fuck we gonna do?”

  “Keep your voice down, will you? Get Planer down here, that’s what we’re going to do.”

  Cassady snapped on the light in the hall. Planer was already midway down the stairs, a fleshy man in his late fifties with silver-gray hair. He had a silk Paisley dressing-gown on over his pajamas, a pistol, one of the ubiquitous Glock 17s, in one hand.

  “Drop it!” Preston shouted. “Drop it fuckin’ now!”

  Carefully, Planer extended his arm until it was over the banister rail and dropped the pistol to the floor, where it bounced and skidded against the oak skirting board. Preston picked it up, ugly fucking gun, and stuck it into his belt.

  “Come on along down here,” Cassady said to Planer. “We’re in a little need of your help.”

  Planer started to descend, but not quick enough for Preston, who ran toward him, two broad steps at a time, and jammed the Uzi in his ribs. “Get fuckin’ down!”

  In the study, Planer looked over at the safe and smiled.

  “Open it,” Cassady said.

  Planer turned toward him. “Surely you’ve got the number?”

  Cassady moved in very close. “I wouldn’t advise it now, being clever. Foolin’ around.”

  “There’s an extra number,” Planer explained. “It changes all the time. A bit like the Lottery, I suppose. That’s why, when I thought Paul Finney had the rest of the combination, I wasn’t overly worried.”

  Preston swung at him with the barrel of the Uzi and Planer fell heavily to his knees, a bloody line raked across his face.

  “Never mind your fucking mouth, give us the fucking number. Now.”

  Wincing, Planer touched his cheek. Preston raised the gun.

  “It’s two numbers,” Planer said. “Seven and one.”

  Cassady moved quickly to the safe.

  “I called the police, you know,” Planer said, pushing himself up on to one knee. “From the bedroom, before I came downstairs.”

  “You’re lying.”

  Planer smiled his smug smile. “Do you really think so?”

  Faint, not so very far off, the sound of sirens filtered through the heaviness of the room.

  “Bastard!” Preston said and squeezed the trigger.

  As if in the grip of a sudden fit, Planer’s body flailed and shook along the floor.

  “Jesus!” Cassady exclaimed. He fumbled with the numbers, all fingers and thumbs.

  “Quick! Quick!”

  The sirens were louder, closer.

  “It’s too late. Get out!”

  They ran for the front door, flung it open, and raced across the courtyard, out through the gate. Cassady pulled the car keys from his pocket, dropped them on the road.

  “What the fuck!”

  At the second attempt, he retrieved them and unlocked the doors. The engine fired to life first time. The sound of police vehicles was almost upon them now, headlights visible on the road behind. Cassady floored the accelerator and took off with screaming tires.

  “Lose ’em, fuckin’ lose ’em!” Swiveling back in his seat, feeling Cassady accelerate again, Preston snapped his seat belt into place.

  Swerving left and right, the car rode up on the curb, skidded, kept its balance: when they turned at the intersection leading back toward the city, another police car was heading directly toward them.

  Cassady gripped the wheel tight and held both line and speed. At the last moment, the driver of the police car swung over hard, his off-side striking a low wall, before spinning broadside on to block the road. The BMW struck the other side of the police car as it passed and glanced off, careening on its way.

  “Great!” Preston yelled. “Fuckin’ great, man. You did fuckin’ great.”

  “Didn’t I, though,” Cassady said. “Though I say so myself and shouldn’t, didn’t I just?”

  At a fork in the road beyond Oxton, he took the turn too fast, went through a hedge and crashed, head on, into the trunk of an English oak.

  For several moments, Preston couldn’t breathe. He felt as if he’d been slammed against something invisible but strong. There was pain across his chest and down his spine, his neck. One of the headlights was still shining, a spool of light spilling across a field of yellow rape. He released the seat belt and got, unsteadily, out of the car.

  Cassady had been hurled through the windscreen and now lay wedged between the front of the BMW and the tree, his neck at an impossible angle, his face shredded by glass.

  Preston could hear another vehicle, one at least, approaching from a distance. The Uzi he pushed under the driver’s seat and seizing the keys, opened the trunk and lifted out the shotgun and as many shells as his pockets would carry. The Glock was still in his belt. Limping slightly, he ran off into the dark.

  Forty-two

  Resnick was awake when the phone rang: downstairs at the front of the house, listening in the near dark to Thelonious Monk warily threading his way through “Ghost of a Chance”; fingers testing the keys as if afraid what each cluster of notes might hide. It was close to three-thirty. Resnick had given up trying to sleep and was drinking coffee, strong and black. If he thought of Lynn, that thought led him, as often as not, to Hannah’s sardonic, knowing face. When he began by thinking of Hannah, he finished up imagining himself in Lynn’s arms. It was a relief to pick up the ringing telephone.

  Helen Siddons’s voice was loud and jagged. “More shit on the fan, Charlie. Big time. Planer, you know the …”

  “Yes, I know who he is.”

  “Seems as if he was woken by intruders in the house. Rang us. Then instead of staying low, waiting for the cavalry to arrive, he went downstairs to investigate. Either that, or they dragged him out of his bed.”

  “They?”

  “Two men, we think only two. Liam Cassady and one other.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Trying to break into Planer’s safe and didn’t succeed. I think we got there too soon.”

  “This second person, Planer couldn’t identify him, didn’t know who he was?”

  Resnick heard Siddons lighting a cigarette at the other end of the line. “Planer’s not identifying anyone. Half a dozen bullets in him, more. And from close range. My guess the same weapon used on Raymond Cooke; same team probably, same shooter.”

  “Clean away?”

  “Not exactly clean. Cassady wrapped himself round a tree. DOA on the way to hospital. Totaled the car. Looks as though whoever was with him got away on foot.”

  “No sign?”

  “Not so far. There’s a helicopter out waking all the sleeping farmers. Tracker dogs, the works. If he w
as injured in the crash, he’ll be lying low. If not, my guess is he’s hijacked another car somewhere.”

  “There’s road blocks?”

  “Where we can. Main roads, motorways. He’ll be wanting to put as much distance between himself and the incident as he can.”

  “No.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I said, no. He won’t. Listen, where are you speaking from?”

  “Headquarters. There didn’t seem …”

  “Meet me at the corner of Woodborough Road and Mansfield Road. Four, five minutes. I think I know who he is and where he’s going.”

  Preston had already arrived.

  The owner of a Ford Mondeo, heading back late after the annual pharmacists’ dinner-dance, had been left at the roadside in evening dress, lucky to be unharmed. Preston’s neck hurt him as he drove, and as he crested the hill that would take him down to Lorraine’s house he ground his teeth, sensing the relief. Since being back in the city, the only sounds of police activity he’d heard had been distant and sporadic, moving away.

  He hurried, still limping slightly, across the front lawn and pressed his finger hard against the bell, hammered with the stock of the shotgun against the door. Come on, come on, come fucking on! Then it was Derek, calling from inside, wanting to know what was wrong. The kitchen blinds moving, Lorraine’s face. Her voice raised in fear, anger. Both voices, arguing. Preston yelling, striking the door again. Harder. Back across the street, one bedroom light went on and then another. Someone, inside, unbolting the door, freeing the chain.

  As soon as the door began to open, Preston pushed it wide.

  Lorraine had pulled a cardigan over the shoulders of her nightdress; her face was ashen as she moved back against the wall. Farther along the hall, Derek, wearing pajamas, was standing by the telephone, receiver in his hand.

  Preston slammed the front door shut behind him; three strides and he’d wrenched the phone from Derek’s fingers, smashed the set from the wall with the gun, torn the wires free with his hand.

  The children, Sandra and Sean, were clinging to one another on the stairs.

  “Lock it,” Preston said to Lorraine, pointing toward the front door. “And then get them back upstairs. And you …” He rounded on Derek, the end of the shotgun barrels hard against his neck, under his chin, forcing back his head. “Get in my way, anything, you’re dead. Understand?”

  Eyes wide, Derek nodded.

  “Don’t hurt him,” Lorraine said. “There’s no need to hurt him.”

  “I thought,” Preston said, “I told you to get those kids out of the way.” Sean was crying, Sandra trying to comfort him. “While you’re there, get some clothes on, chuck a few things in a bag. Passport. We’re leaving.”

  Lorraine’s eyes widened in understanding. “Oh, Michael. Michael, Michael.” She sighed and slowly shook her head, eyes closed.

  “Do it,” he said. “There isn’t the time.”

  She looked at him, looked at her children. “The gun,” she said. “You won’t need it.”

  Preston nodded. “We’ll see.”

  Sitting alongside Resnick in the back of the car, Helen Siddons was busily punching numbers into her mobile phone. “If you’re wrong about this,” she said.

  Resnick shook his head. “I’m not wrong.” The pieces were in place now: he knew. “Maybe I wish I was.”

  “What happened to your head,” Lorraine asked. They were in the middle room, the dining room, partition doors closed across. She had sent Derek upstairs to be with the children. “It’s swollen, there above the eyebrow. There’s blood. A cut.”

  Preston touched it absentmindedly. “I don’t know.”

  “What happened?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  Lorraine had pulled on a T-shirt and cotton sweater, sneakers, jeans. There was a black travel bag near her feet. “Michael,” she said, “you know this is stupid. Crazy.”

  “Get me an aspirin,” he said. “Something. Then we’re going.”

  Hearing her in the hallway, Derek called down in a loud whisper, asking if she were all right. She didn’t answer. Back in the dining room she gave her brother two Neurofen and a glass of water.

  “Michael, please …” She touched the back of his hand, sliding her fingers between his. “Listen to me.”

  “Come on,” he said, pulling away. “We’re leaving.”

  They were almost at the front door when an amplified voice broke through from outside: “This is the police. We have the house surrounded. I repeat, this is the police …”

  There were four of them inside the command van: Siddons and Resnick, Bill Claydon, in charge of the Tactical Response Unit, and Myra James, a sergeant with special training in hostage negotiation. With the telephone in the house out of commission and Preston showing no disposition to engage in dialogue, negotiation was difficult.

  Three monitors gave them grainy black and white pictures of the house; one camera by the fence at the far end of the garden, covering the rear; another, using a zoom lens, was focused on the front; the third was in the helicopter, turning noisily overhead.

  Thirty officers from the Serious Crimes Squad and the Special Support Group were surrounding the house; of these, all were wearing body armor and half were armed. Six marksmen from the Tactical Response team were positioned at intervals around the building, each in continuous contact with Claydon through their headsets.

  There were two ambulances waiting on standby, uniformed police holding back the television crews and cameramen. The houses close by had been evacuated.

  It was now almost fully light.

  Claydon pointed toward one of the screens. “We could be through those French windows in what? Five seconds, six. Set up a diversion at the front.”

  “He’s got kids in there,” Resnick said. “Two of them.”

  “We don’t know if they’re with him, if he could harm them. If he would.”

  “We don’t know enough.”

  “We don’t even know,” Siddons said, “what he wants.”

  Claydon laughed. “What he wants, get out of there in one fucking piece, a plane to the other side of the earth, untold riches, happiness ever after, that’s what he wants, poor sod.”

  They sat in virtual silence, save for the helicopter chattering overhead.

  “Seven,” Claydon said, suddenly clapping his hands. “Seven on the dot. If he’s not given us something by then, I say we go in hard. What d’you say?”

  “He’s already killed twice,” Resnick said.

  “Three times,” Siddons corrected him.

  “Three times,” Resnick said to Claydon. “Why are you in such a hurry to have him do it again?”

  Inside the house, Preston had watched Derek and Lorraine, as under his instructions they moved furniture to barricade the front and rear doors. When the police made their move, and he was certain they would, he wanted what little time these precautions would earn him. One minute. Two. What he didn’t yet know was how he would use it.

  “Talk to them,” Lorraine kept saying. “You have to talk to them.”

  Myra James knew the bulletproof vest she was wearing under her blue sweatshirt would protect her from anything but the highest velocity bullet fired at close range. Maybe. But the helmet? Ruefully, she smiled. So much of her unprotected. Her Gap jeans already had a small tear below the knee.

  Using the megaphone, she announced her intention: to walk toward the front door and place the mobile phone she was carrying down on the step. All someone had to do was open the door a few inches and take the phone inside. Then they could talk, find a way out of this situation before anyone was hurt.

  After setting down the phone, Myra forced herself to stand there for several moments, staring at the door and waiting. But nothing happened, there was no immediate response. Slowly, she turned and walked away, willing herself not to lengthen her stride the closer she came to safety, not to run. The sweat was running freely down her back and legs and soon, she knew, unle
ss she could change, it would be chafing her thighs.

  Sandra came and stood just inside the dining-room door, working her lower lip between her teeth. She looked at the shotgun, which now lay diagonally across one end of the dining-room table. She felt Preston staring at her and, though she didn’t want to, made herself look back at him. He seemed old, older than her mum and dad. Tired. She wondered what it was he’d done. There was a lump, a bruise, right over his eye. She tried to remember him, there at their house, in that room after the funeral; the way he’d looked at her when she’d handed him something to eat, smiling, but still sort of funny, and his voice, nice and soft, not like now.

  “What is it, sweetheart?” Lorraine asked.

  “It’s Sean. He’s in the toilet. I think he’s being sick.”

  Lorraine started to move toward the door and Derek stopped her, a hand on her arm, a shake of the head. “Run back up,” he said over his shoulder to Sandra. “Sit with him. Hold his hand. He’ll be okay.”

  Sandra hesitated, looking past Derek at her mother, wanting to do the right thing.

  “Go on,” Derek said. “Do like I say.”

  When she’d left the room, Derek said to Preston. “Let them go. Let the kids go, why don’t you? What harm have they ever done to you?”

  “Derek …” Lorraine began.

  “What? You going to take his side about that as well?”

  “Don’t be so ridiculous, I’m not taking his side.”

  “Like hell you’re not.”

  “You’ve not got the first idea what you’re talking about,” Lorraine said.

  “No?” Derek looked at them, one to the other. “Don’t I?”

  Preston got to his feet. “Bring them down.” He told Lorraine to fetch the mobile phone from the front door, waiting fast by her as she eased it open, ready if the police should try anything. But all that happened, as soon as they had it inside, the phone rang.