by Zoe Sharp
“Langford?”
I met his gaze without flinching, but couldn’t give him the reassurance he was after. “I don’t know,” I said truthfully, “it doesn’t really fit, but somebody’s trying very hard to point us in that direction.”
“Well,” Sean said, “let’s not disappoint them, shall we?”
We drove the rest of the way out to Heysham without further conversation. At my suggestion, Sean passed the open entrance to the site, and pulled into the same neglected industrial estate where I’d hidden the Suzuki on my previous visit.
Fortunately, whoever was occupying the units that weren’t standing empty there didn’t believe in working late. A quiet circuit of the place found no lights showing under the roller-shutter doors of any of them.
He nosed the Patrol to a halt under the shadow of a building, and cut the engine. Without artificial lighting, the brightness of the full moon was revealed, bathing the concrete in silver splendour. For a moment we sat there in a heavy silence. Then Sean leaned over and flipped open the glovebox lid.
Inside was the Glock semiautomatic, with a spare clip tucked in behind it.
Sean picked the gun up, slipped the magazine out and checked it anyway, almost a ritual, although he must have known it was full and ready to go.
He slotted the mag back into the pistol grip, pushed it home with his palm, just as I’d done when I’d found the Glock under the seat of the Cherokee. But this time, he pinched back the slide. I heard the twin snap of the first round loading, and shivered.
Sean shoved the gun into the back of his belt, under his jacket. The extra magazine went into his jacket pocket. He looked across at me.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to use this unless I have to, otherwise I’m definitely going to have the cops on my tail,” he said quietly, “but if Jav’s telling us the truth, and Langford is here, and he is behind all this, he could turn nasty when he’s cornered. Are you ready for this?”
I shrugged, trying to act casual despite the adrenaline pulse. “As I’ll ever be,” I said, reaching for the door handle.
But as I made to get out Sean put his hand on my arm. “I’m sorry you’ve been dragged into this, Charlie,” he said, “but I’m glad you’re here.”
I nodded, swallowed. “You can thank me later,” I said, throwing him a quick, hard smile. “Let’s just get this done.”
Not surprisingly, perhaps, nobody had tidied up between the units since I’d last passed that way. The loose slats in the wooden fence were still hanging loosely by their rusty nail.
Once on the other side, the moon clearly highlighted the stretch of mud in front of us. I followed Sean across the expanse of it, slithering behind him while he picked his way without seeming to miss a step. It was a relief to get on to the compacted hard-core.
We carefully circled the Portakabins where Mr Ali had his site office, but each of them was secured with bolts and padlocks. There was no way Langford could be hiding out inside, unless he was content to be locked in every night when the site closed down.
We moved on.
Then Sean jogged my arm, and pointed to the partially-completed office building itself. At one corner of the top floor, we could make out the glow of a light.
We edged closer, hugging the shadows, acutely aware that our possible enemy had the advantage of superior elevation. All the time, we kept one eye on the window above us, but there was no change in the light to suggest movement.
The building had a lot of glass which, in my opinion, was an open invitation to the local kids to throw stones. The windows made us feel vulnerable, as though we were under surveillance from every angle.
We had to search three sides of the block before we found a way in. There were fire doors on every side, but when I gave the handle of one an experimental tug, it pulled open without difficulty. Several layers of gaffer tape held the latch compressed. We moved through, easing the door quietly closed behind us.
Inside, the office block was a darkened tangle of unfinished pipework and dangling wires. Although the floors were in, it seemed that most of the internal walls had yet to be completed, and we skirted carefully round piles of thermalite blocks stacked up on yards of plastic sheeting. I wondered briefly if the wires were live, and how anybody managed to work in such a minefield.
There were two staircases leading to the upper floors, at opposite corners of the building. Sean nodded to the nearest one, and we made our way cautiously up it to the top.
The effort of keeping up with his quietly economical movements made sweat break out along my hairline. My mouth was as dry as my palms were damp. At that precise moment, if I’d had more faith in my own intuition, I would have turned and run. It was screaming at me.
The top floor was closer to completion than those below it, but not by much. It seemed that the centre of the office was going to be an open-plan layout on this level, with separate cubicles around the outside edges.
The building work had reached the stage where the side walls of the cubicles were up, but not the ends. The unfinished walls stuck out like breakwaters along a beach. We used the cover they provided to work our way closer towards the corner office until we could make out the reflected glow of a lamp bouncing off the tinted glass of the windows and the pale plasterboard ceiling.
Then Sean stopped abruptly, and I stiffened behind him as I heard the murmur of voices. It was only when a burst of music replaced them that I realised we were listening to a radio.
Sean caught my eye, and I read his meaning, wondering if he could hear my heartbeat. It was loud enough to be deafening me.
We reached the final wall that separated us from the last room. Sean paused for a moment, as if gathering himself, then we both stepped round it, into the light.
And froze.
Langford had made a comfortable nest for himself in that end office. A military surplus sleeping bag lay rumpled on a piece of camping foam against one wall. The lamp we’d seen, and the radio, were next to an overflowing ashtray on a paint-encrusted table to one side, together with a chipped mug that was striped down the outside with trails of old coffee.
To go with the table there was a single wooden chair, which was now lying on its side in the middle of the floor.
Langford’s corpse was still tied to it.
We didn’t bother checking for a pulse. It’s difficult to see how anyone could have lost the amount of blood that was pooled around his fallen body and have survived the experience.
It spread outwards around the vigilante’s torso, still liquid, but congealing so that it had the consistency of syrup. The smell of it turned my stomach. Langford’s head rested in the lake of blood. It stained his temple and matted in his short hair. His nose and mouth were caked with it.
We didn’t have to wonder how he’d died. The knife was still embedded in his chest, leaving only the camouflage-coloured plastic handle showing. The blade had been inserted somewhere between his sixth and seventh ribs on the left-hand side, slanted slightly upwards, and driven home with a vengeance.
Langford’s eyes were open, rigid, frightened. Incredulous, even. He’d never thought it was going to happen. Hadn’t believed that he was destined to die this way.
Sean crouched by the body and regarded it for a long time without any emotion showing.
“They were aiming for his heart,” he said at last. “Looks like they missed.”
He was right. The wound was too low, or the angle was too shallow for that. Instead, Langford must have suffocated slowly as his lungs flooded with his own blood. It would not, I judged, have been an easy way to die.
The heart is a small organ, all things considered, barely five inches by three, and not easy to hit. Our weapons handling instructors had always advised us to pick another target, if we had the chance. Like the throat.
My own scar prickled in nervous sympathy. I stepped round the body on the pretence of examining the rest of his hideaway, but it was more so I didn’t have to keep looking at the knife, an
d at the dead man’s eyes.
I was careful to keep my feet out of the spilt blood. I noticed, with a detached eye for detail, that his hands had been bound behind him with wicked thin cord. He’d fought against the restraint, which had cut deep into the flesh of his wrists.
I was making a conscious effort to breathe through my mouth, so I didn’t gag from the sickly stench of the blood. Instead, I could almost taste it, and I’m not sure which was worse.
I glanced away, took in the contents of the table instead, the coffee cup and the ashtray. It was only then that I noticed what was wrong about that cup. There was a wisp of steam still rising from it. I passed my fingers over the rim, felt the faint warmth, and then the implications started to roll in.
I turned to find that Sean had leaned over and touched the backs of his fingers to the dead man’s cheek, almost a parody of affection. He stood up fast then, tense.
“Come on,” he said, “we’ve got to get out of here – now!”
“The coffee’s still warm,” I told him.
But Sean was already on the move. He turned back as he reached the far wall of the office, and nodded towards Langford. “I know,” he said, grim. “So’s the body.”
We set off across the office floor with much less regard for stealth than we’d exercised on the way in. I reckon we made about one-third distance. Then the gloom of the interior shattered in a flare of light and deafening sound.
I heard the sound of the shot change abruptly as it swerved off one of the partially-completed walls. It must have hit part of the wooden framework, rather than the blocks.
I dropped instantly, diving behind the nearest pile of thermalite blocks and thankful of the solid cover. Sean, I saw, was already down, making a mockery of my reflex time. He’d been forced further away from me, and was only just sheltered by a low wall of plasterboard off-cuts. He was trying to ease a look over the top of them.
I kept my own head well down. It was getting to the stage where I’d had enough experience of being shot at to recognise the fact without needing visual confirmation.
Sean didn’t even manage to get his head up to clear his eye-line before the second shot discharged. I don’t know what it hit. One of the block walls to our right, by the sound of it, and sizzled off harmlessly into the darkness.
Breathing hard, Sean delicately tried to alter his position.
“Charlie,” he whispered, “can you pinpoint him?”
I screwed round, keeping low, and peeped cautiously over my protective stack of blocks, expecting the blaze and the thunder of another shot. None came. I glanced back to Sean, shook my head.
“Keep looking.”
I’d just time to cram my fingers into my ears before he risked another exposure. It helped stop them ringing as we were treated to a third deafening concussion.
The shooter was getting his eye in with practise. This time the bullet hit close to Sean’s head, scouring across one of the sheets of plasterboard and disintegrating part of it into a puff of white chalk. He ducked back fast, swearing under his breath.
I blinked a few times, trying to clear my vision, but the four dazzling outward streaks of the muzzle flash in the low light seemed permanently burned across my eyes. I shut them, but it didn’t help much.
“He’s in the stairwell, I think,” I told Sean quietly.
“In that case,” he murmured, “you’d better take this.”
I opened my eyes again to find the Glock was out in his hand, and he was offering it to me. Before I’d a chance to argue, he threw it across the gap that separated us. I caught it automatically, closed my hands round the pistol grip, and slipped my right index finger onto the trigger.
And, suddenly, I was back in the killing house on camp. Back inside the skin of the girl who’d trained to be a soldier. Back up against the system that hadn’t wanted me there, didn’t believe I had what it took to succeed. Back with the observers waiting for every hesitation, and mistake.
I swung my arms over the top of the blocks, holding the gun straight out in front of me, and snapped off two quick shots in the direction of the stairwell.
I dropped back into cover almost, it seemed, before the empty shell cases had finished bouncing onto the chipboard.
As my ears cleared, I thought I heard movement, the clatter of feet, but by the time my hearing had recovered enough to be sure, the noise had faded. I glanced across at Sean, still keeping low.
“D’you think he’s still there?” I whispered.
“I don’t know.” He slithered round again, grabbed a piece of plasterboard in front of him and rattled it enticingly, but there was no further response. “I think you might have scared him off.”
“I damned well hope so,” I said, shaky. “It would have been enough to scare me.”
I left my protective stack of blocks reluctantly, tiptoed round the obstacles between me and the stairwell, keeping the gun up and ready. Nobody shot at me on the way there. I rushed the last few metres, hit the wall and waited a beat, listening, before I swung my body round it, breathing hard.
The stairwell was empty.
I crossed to the window, stared down through the glass at the unfinished site below. At first there was no sign of anyone running away, then I caught a silvered flash of movement, right over by the road. It was brief, disappearing quickly behind one of the earth movers, but it had to be our man.
As I watched, I realised that the very character of the moonlight was changing, from silver to blue.
Flashing blue.
Oh shit.
I spun round, to find Sean at the doorway behind me. “Come on!” I shouted. I was compensating for the ringing in my ears, speaking too loudly. I lowered the volume and went on. “It’s the police – we’ve got to get out of here, right now!”
I was on the first step before I realised Sean wasn’t hard on my heels. That he was still in the doorway, leaning against the wall. I stopped, and found myself invaded by a swift, stark fear.
Shoving the Glock into my pocket, I moved back to him. He started forwards then, belatedly, but as he reached the top of the stairs, he staggered, and almost fell.
I grabbed him on reflex, recoiling as my hands came away slick with blood.
“Christ! Where are you hit?” I flipped him round, braced him against the handrail, and yanked open his coat with numbed fingers.
“Left shoulder,” he muttered through gritted teeth. “That first one ricocheted and got me. Don’t worry. It’s not bad.”
Not bad. Oh God . . .
His words seemed to convince himself as much as me. He went first down the stairs, moving faster than I’d feared he might. I kept a wary eye on his back as we stumbled across the lower floor, and burst out through the fire door.
The moon, which had proved so useful to light our way into the site, now seemed like a curse. We had to take the long way back towards the gap in the fence, moving from one piece of cover to the next, in bursts. As we ducked behind a big Cat digger I could just see the pair of squad cars that had pulled up close by the entrance. The lights flashed in and out of sync as the patrolmen talked together in undertones.
We waited, tense, until they’d picked up torches and moved in towards the office building drawn, as we’d been, by the light in the top corner. I tried to remember if we’d shut the fire door as we came through it, but my recall failed me.
“We haven’t got long before they find him,” I muttered.
Sean was pale as death. He swayed, eyes closed, and I pushed him back against the digger’s panelwork with the flat of my hand, fighting down the sudden flare of panic.
“Sean!” I said roughly. “Stay with me, sergeant!”
His eyes opened slowly. For a moment he looked at me without seeing me, only bringing himself back on track with a visible effort. “Giving me orders now are you, private?”
“You better believe it,” I bit out. “Can you make it to the truck?”
He nodded briefly and, with a last check to make s
ure the cops had their attention focused firmly on the building, we set off again.
Once we were on the mud, the going proved harder. Where Sean had seemed so nimble before, now he moved heavy and slow. It seemed to take forever to cross the last few metres. My back had never felt so exposed.
The gap in the fence had shrunk since we came in, and getting through it to where the Nissan waited was a painful struggle. I had to loop Sean’s arm over my shoulder and half-drag, half-carry him the rest of the way.
As we reached the Patrol, Sean dug in his pockets and handed me the keys. “You’ll have to drive,” he said tiredly.
I took them without argument. After all, we had enough of a job to heave Sean up into the passenger seat. There was no way he could have got behind the wheel.