Belief

by Chris Parker

  Emma fell silent. Anne-Marie waited. Eventually Emma said, ‘If you’re sure that’s what you want me to do.’

  ‘It is. Right now it’s more important to us that you are safe than that we see you again soon. Come back when everything is stable. Then we will be able to make a new beginning.’

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Yes.’ Anne-Marie was lying in the way a photo never should. She hated herself for doing so. Every part of her felt dirty, corrupted. She knew she was going to burn her clothes.

  ‘Can I call you again?’

  ‘Of course you can. Any time. And I’ll tell Marcus you’ve been in touch. We’ll both look forward to seeing you when the time is right.’

  ‘I can’t wait.’

  ‘Make sure you do.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘Good g–‘ Anne-Marie stopped herself from completing the phrase she had been going to use. Her spine shivered uncontrollably. ‘That’s really very good. Thank you.’

  ‘You don’t have to thank me. I’ll, er, call you again sometime soon.’

  ‘I’ll be here. Goodbye, Emma.’

  ‘Bye.’

  Anne-Marie ended the call. She threw up onto a carpet that wasn’t hers.

  47

  Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jones met the firearms team at Sneinton police station. It was less than half a mile away from Ipswich Circus, a horseshoe shaped road looping off Sneinton Dale, the major thoroughfare that cut through Sneinton, a part of the inner city.

  The firearms team was made up of eight officers, seven men and one woman, led by a Sergeant, David Renson, whom Peter had worked with before. He took Renson into a separate room ahead of the formal briefing.

  ‘I’m coming in with you on this one,’ Peter said. ‘I want you to know that, and to explain why, before I talk to the rest of the team.’

  Renson raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s very much out of the ordinary, boss.’

  ‘I know. However the guy we are going in to get is very much out of the ordinary. I don’t know how much you’ve seen, read or heard about him, but nothing you think you know will prepare you for the threat he poses.’

  ‘We are all aware of Ethan Hall,’ Renson said dryly.

  ‘No. You’re really not. You’re aware of the stories. You haven’t been face to face with the man. There’s a world of difference. He‘s like no one you’ve ever encountered.’

  ‘And he’s never had a raid team bearing down on him before. He’s never experienced the speed and aggression we bring to the situation.’

  ‘The problem is, there’s a very real risk you won’t be fast enough. Actually, the risk is that you can’t be fast enough.’

  ‘Before he does what?’

  ‘Look at you. Say something. Make a gesture. I don’t know. It’s not what he’ll do, it’s what the effect will be.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘He’ll get inside someone’s head, hypnotise them, take control of their mind. Once he does that, anything could happen. Christ, this guy could make one of your team fire their weapon on the others. He could cause the sort of chaos that would ruin lives and be impossible to explain later.’

  Renson considered briefly. Peter could see him trying to make sense of what he had just heard. He gave the Sergeant time. For a whole host of reasons he didn’t want to just pull rank, he wanted the team leader genuinely on board.

  ‘Is it really this fucked up?’ Renson asked.

  ‘You know me,’ Peter nodded his head. ‘I wouldn’t be telling you this if there was the slightest doubt.’

  ‘We’d better go brief the team, then.’

  ‘Let’s.’

  The conversation, whatever it had been about, stopped abruptly as the two men entered the room. Eight pairs of eyes looked quizzically at Peter as he strode to the front. He very deliberately looked at each one in turn. He knew precisely the sort of training they had been through and the risks they took. He remembered Liam Hemsall. He dismissed the memory in the forceful way he sometimes ordered an erring officer out of his presence.

  Seven men and one woman, all dressed in black, all carrying Smith and Wesson .38 pistols on their belts along with their Tasers, handcuffs and other equipment, all willing to do whatever was asked of them. Peter knew the weapons and the body armour and helmets too often dehumanized them in the eyes of the public, making it easy to think of them as aggressive, potentially lethal machines of the state. He knew better. He understood the humanity inside the uniform. Seven men and one woman, each ready to stand up and be counted.

  ‘We believe the house we are entering might be a safe house owned by Calvin Brent, who I’m sure you all heard of.’ Peter began. ‘The best Intel we’ve got suggests two men inside. One, a larger, bald guy, is the driver. He probably works for Brent, so he might not be too keen to meet you. Our target is the other man, Ethan Hall. He is five feet nine inches tall, lean with dark hair. He is unusually dangerous, and the important word here is unusually. I know you are all accustomed to front line work, but this guy poses levels of threat you have never faced before. I, for my sins, do have a greater insight into what he’s capable of. That’s why I’m coming in with you.’

  As one the team glanced at Renson. He nodded his support.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Peter continued. ‘I’ll stay at the back and out of your way until the search is complete. The ideal scenario is that we hit them so fast they don’t have time to run. Do whatever you have to with the driver, but if – when – you find Ethan I want you to back off immediately. Just seal the room he’s in and call me. Under no circumstances engage in any form of interaction with him. I will take over from that point on. Is that clear?’

  ‘Crystal,’ Renton said, looking at his team.

  ‘There’s a large off-street parking area at the front of the house. It’s an ex-council semi. The front door opens straight into the lounge. The kitchen is off that to the back. The stairs are in the lounge, facing the front door. Upstairs there are two bedrooms and a bathroom. The rear garden is flat with a lawn and what looks like a six feet high wooden fence on all sides. There’s no shed, or anywhere else where someone could hide. Any questions?’

  There were none.

  ‘Good,’ Renton said. ‘That means, Detective Chief Inspector, we are ready to go.’

  ‘Excellent! Let’s make this happen!’ Peter led them out of the station. No one spoke.

  48

  Marcus Kline had been walking for several hours. He had actually been trying not to talk to himself or even think too much, but that really hadn’t gone very well. A step too far, he had told himself in an attempt to lighten his mood.

  At first he had not had a specific destination in mind, content simply to be surrounded by, and pass through, the normality of the city. The mind-fog that had threatened to engulf him previously kept pace. He could feel it working to insert itself into the space around him. He knew that was its deceit. He knew it was actually inside him. From the Inside to the Out was the title of an article he had once written. Now he was living it in the worst of ways. He tried to breathe it out as he walked.

  Overall the city had paid him no heed; at least, as far as he could tell. He had noticed a couple of people pointing at him, but apart from that everyone seemed too wrapped up in their own world to notice him. Which had been a huge relief.

  Admitting how he was really feeling to Peter and Anne-Marie had felt like the start of unburdening himself. The honesty of weakness was not something he was used to. Until recently he would never have associated with it. Now it was all he had. So he kept walking, neither away from pain nor towards pleasure, just moving because that was the basic requirement of life, the building block of evolution.

  He couldn’t save Anne-Marie if he didn’t change. He was sure of that. Even if he had the capability to influence cancer, he was emotionally far too close to her to give of his best. And, try as he might, he had failed to find the distance necessary. How do you tell your wife, he wondered, that I can�
��t help you because I love you too much? How can love be a barrier?

  He knew the answer to that, of course. The good old human brain, that most amazing of all things. The greatest of all survival tools. Yet even it depended on the right input and support, and he had been incapable of providing that. The brain ensured that people felt emotions before they thought rationally. If you couldn’t control your emotions, you couldn’t operate at your best because your brain was directing resources and energy elsewhere. That was at the very heart of his problem. His brain was too busy dealing with the physical and psychological threat posed by Ethan Hall to give him any chance of healing Anne-Marie.

  ‘She’s going to die because of me,’ he whispered to himself repeatedly. And every time he did, as the fog swirled around him, he simply slowed his pace and kept walking, breathing strongly in and out until his vision cleared. It was whilst doing this thirty minutes ago he had realized where his walk had to take him. And now he had arrived. Southern Cemetery on Wilford Hill, overlooking the city. The place where Simon was buried.

  His grave was marked by a stone bearing the inscription To a Loving Son, Lost too soon. A bunch of red roses was propped up against it. Marcus had never been here alone before. It was unbelievably quiet and still, a place where it was all too easy to think too much. He chose to talk instead.

  ‘I guess I’m using you as an outlet, an imaginary therapist. I guess you know that, right? Actually, I don’t know why I said that because I know you’re not there. I know you are…gone. But in my typically selfish way what I need most right now is an imaginary therapist. Not a real one. They’d answer back. Ask questions. Play clever word games that I’d see through and get annoyed by. And I’d use all of that as a distraction from dealing with myself.

  ‘So, anyway, first of all I just want to say I’m not the man you thought I was. Well, maybe I’m not the man I thought I was. Maybe you and Em always had a different perception of me. I don’t know. There are a lot of things I don’t know at the moment. And those things I do know, I’m struggling to do anything about.

  ‘I should be at home now, but I need space to find my feet again, to get some semblance of control back, to try and lose some things somewhere. Peter is under enormous pressure and Anne-Marie is…well…she is…anyway…They are both insisting I look after myself. It’s the worst time ever and they are still caring about me. That almost makes it worse. Even though it doesn’t. It makes me feel even weaker, even though it gives me more reason to get back on an even keel. It’s all a bloody great paradox, you see? I wanted to be the best in the world. I got what I wanted – or I thought I had – and that turned out to be the doorway to disaster. And it’s a disaster because of what it’s done to everybody else. To you.

  ‘Technically, of course, I’m going through the early stages of the bereavement cycle and I’m suffering multiple losses in all sorts of different ways. It’s to be expected I’m a mess. It’s what any normal human being would experience in a situation like this. Not that any of that helps. Not that it helps at all. I’ve never thought of myself as a normal human being before. And it’s a shit time to confront it. Everything has gone crazy and I find out I’m no different to the rest. Where’s Superman when you need him, eh?’

  ‘Is he your son?’

  Marcus turned sharply, startled by the intrusion. The questioner was a man he presumed to be in his mid-seventies. He was slightly stooped, wearing an aged grey suit that was at least two sizes too big, with a white shirt, a rose-red tie and a Harris Tweed cap. His shoes were brown and polished.

  ‘No. He was, er, a very dear friend.’

  The old man peered at the stone. ‘No age at all,’ he said. ‘That makes it all the worse.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My old lass is over there,’ he pointed with a gnarly finger. ‘A couple of years now. Most of you goes with them, you know, when it happens. And then the emptiness takes over. It’s everywhere. Like it’s been waiting for you. Still, I keep telling her it won’t be long.’ He looked out at the view across the rooftops. ‘Mind you, by and large, life keeps going on, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes it does,’ Marcus said, as they shared each other’s pain.

  49

  The firearms team split into two and travelled in separate police vans along Sneinton Dale. Peter sat in the leading van with the officers who would enter through the front door. The journey time was only a couple of minutes. The officers in the second van turned left onto Skipton Circus, a road looping behind Ipswich Circus.

  Seconds later, the van Peter was travelling in eased its way into Ipswich Circus and stopped. This was the last delay. They would wait until two members of the first team had successfully made their way to the rear of the neighbours’ houses and warned everyone to stay inside with doors locked. With that done, the officers would then position themselves so they were out of any possible line of fire from upstairs windows, but able if necessary to prevent anyone escaping from the back of the house.

  Peter hoped they wouldn’t be needed. He wanted Ethan Hall contained. He wanted whatever problems they were going to face – and he was secretly sure there were going to be some – to be addressed out of sight of the general public. The last thing he needed was the arrest of Ethan Hall with all its associated challenges filmed from a kitchen window and becoming a YouTube sensation.

  The message they were waiting for finally came through via Renton’s body mic. He spoke briefly in response. ‘They are in position,’ he said. ‘Let’s move!’

  The five officers straightened slightly. Peter felt their adrenaline levels rise. He noticed how they all adjusted their posture and breathing to control it. For his part, he kept his body still and his face emotionless. His mind wanted him to visualize Ethan Hall. He silently told his mind to fuck off.

  Thirty seconds later the van pulled onto the parking area at the front of the house. The raid team was out in an instant. Peter, Renton and two other officers held back slightly as two of the team went straight for the front door. It was locked. But only briefly.

  ‘Big key!’ Renton confirmed to the man holding the specially designed battering ram. The Enforcer, as it was formally known, could hit with more than three tonnes of impact. The door lock was no match. It opened on the first blow.

  Renton and his two officers stormed in to the lounge, pistols drawn. Renton was carrying a large, bulletproof shield. He shouted, ‘Armed police! Put down your weapons!’

  As the door swung to the right, one officer automatically stayed left by the foot of the stairs, the second moved to his right, following the door. Renton took the middle ground. The room was small and square, with a leather ivory coloured three-piece suite and a small coffee table in the centre. There was a pair of coffee cups on the table, but the people who had been using them were not present.

  ‘We’re clear!’ Renton said.

  Peter entered with one of the other officers. The final two remained outside, looking for signs of activity in the front upstairs bedrooms. Everything was happening with the speed and professional assertiveness Peter had expected. The intention was to shock and disorientate the inhabitants, to minimize both the risk of resistance and, in the longer term, any suggestion that the inhabitants had not known who they were.

  The man by the stairs stayed in place as Renton led a fast and thorough check of the kitchen. ‘Clear!’ he announced for the second time. The word had no sooner left his mouth than he was making his way upstairs, the other officers right behind him.

  ‘Armed police! Put down your weapons!’

  Peter heard their footsteps on the landing, a door being opened, more shouting and a rush of movement. Then, ‘Clear!’ Then it all happened again. Only this time the voice changed. This time it had even more authority. This time it was instructing someone.

  ‘Armed police! Put down your weapon! Put down your weapon! Do it now! Do it!’

  The officer with Peter stepped forward a pace, peering up the stairs, his gun pointing. Peter forced hi
mself to hold back.

  ‘Stay completely still!’ Renton shouted. ‘Stay on your knees and don’t move! Do not move!’ A brief pause and then, ‘Boss!’

  The officer glanced over his shoulder and nodded, but Peter was already on his way. An officer was standing with his back to him in the doorway of the bedroom at the far end of the landing. His pistol was clearly raised and aimed.

  ‘Jones here!’ Peter shouted as he approached. The man didn’t look, just made enough space for Peter to step inside. Renton was to the right with his shield and pistol in position. The second officer was on the left of the room, with his back to the wall and his pistol pointed. Ethan Hall was sitting on the edge of a double bed.

  A much larger, shaven-headed man wearing a black tee shirt and black Levi jeans was kneeling in front of Ethan, facing the door. He was holding a kitchen knife in both hands, pressing the point down in the space between his trapezius muscle and his collarbone. The sub-clavian artery was only a few centimetres below the skin. It would take virtually no effort and the merest fraction of a second to puncture it. If that happened blood would spurt. It would be potentially impossible to apply pressure to the wound and stop the bleeding. The man would lose consciousness and in all probability die within anything from two to twenty minutes.

  Peter kept his gaze fixed on the man with the knife as he assessed the situation. ‘Sergeant,’ Peter said, ‘I want you and your men to sing a song in your heads. Focus on that and nothing else. Sing it loud and big and bold. If you find that becomes difficult even for a second, you need to say. Is that clear?’

  ‘Clear.’ Renton’s voice was firm.

  Peter gestured gently towards the knife. ‘Why don’t you put that down,’ he said quietly, inching forwards as he spoke.

  ‘Stay back!’ Ethan said. ‘If any of you step over that mark there,’ he gestured to a black stain on the laminate flooring, ‘my friend here will drive the full length of the blade all the way in, penetrating irreversibly. He’ll do the same if I stop breathing. Or if I just tap him on his shoulder, which I am sure I could manage to do even if you did something terrible such as wound me.’