by David Wilson
Inside the house, Brock had dropped the rifle and was by Morag’s side.
“Here we go,” he said. “It’s time.” Morag looked up at him as he pulled a short fishing knife from a sheath attached to his ankle. The blade snapped open with a flick of his thumb. Brock’s eyes were glassy, his hands were shaking.
“You don’t have to do this,” said Morag.
“I have to do this,” said Brock. He stroked her hair and lightly touched her cheek, she recoiled but she was restrained by the ties. The hair on the back of her neck was soft, spiralling like the clouds which swirled in the blue sky he used to gaze at when he was a boy, lying on his back in a field, his fishing rod by his side, birdsong lulling his soul, the sun beginning to set, telling him it was time to go home.
Brock reached behind her and cut the ties that held her to the chair. He dropped the knife and lifted her up at the same time as he pulled the pistol from his belt. He held it behind her head, pointing upwards. He led her around the bodies of Lomas and Sandel to the front door. “Open it,” he said. Morag snapped the bolts and pulled the door towards them. They were met by a wall of smoke, thick, choking, the motorcycle was still on fire but the flames were dying. Brock could only vaguely make out the massed ranks of marksmen and firearms officers aiming their weapons in his direction. Suddenly he heard the slow whomp-whomp of the police helicopter as it descended from the sky and hovered close to the road sending powerful down-draughts along the street, fanning the smoke away, until Brock and Morag emerged from the clouds, now pin sharp in the sights of the police marksmen.
Brock put his arm around Morag’s neck and the gun close to her head. “Where’s your father?” he said. She pointed to Munro who stood behind the bonnet of one of the ARVs. “I want you to bring him out into the open, I want him in the middle of the street where I can see him clearly.”
“Dad, dad,” Morag screamed, oblivious to the dangers. She waved at him desperately. Munro moved forwards.
“Get back,” shouted Harvey.
“Easy now,” whispered Brock in Morag’s ear. “When your father’s in the open, I’ll let you go, I want you to run to him, don’t look back, whatever you do don’t look back, do it quickly, I won’t harm you, please don’t let me down.”
Munro was walking towards them, slowly, tentatively. Suddenly Brock released his grip around Morag’s neck.
“Go,” he said softly.
She ran as fast as she could into her father’s arms and for a moment time stood still. Brock watched Munro hold his daughter as tight as he could and he knew, for an instant, in a split second that was infinite, that he would never let her go.
Brock raised his arms in the air and stared at the heavens. The clouds were grey with smoke and low and the evening was coming down, but as the clouds shifted, he saw a break, a glimpse in the gloom of bright blue sky.
“Drop the weapon,” it was a distorted voice through a loud hailer.
“Drop the weapon now.”
Brock watched the blue of the sky slowly disappear. He lowered his arms, but did not drop the weapon. He aimed the pistol.
Instantly the air was rent by high-velocity sniper fire and Brock’s body was torn apart, round after round shattering his torso and head and chest, the bullets keeping him upright, dancing like a marionette until the shooting stopped and Brock pitched forwards onto the concrete pathway, kidney-shaped pools of blood rapidly forming all around him.
Epilogue
After forensics and scene of crime officers had undertaken a thorough crime scene examination, recording blood splatter patterns, latent and bloodied fingerprints, recovering relevant fibres from bodies in situ, and notating victim and assailant positioning, the three bodies were bagged and the clean-up began. By now the press had been allowed limited access and the police let the photographers arrange the best angle and composition for their pictures before moving the bodies to the ambulances that waited in the street. Yellow sand was scattered over the wide arc of blood spray and pooling on the path leading up to the house. Later that evening someone placed a small bunch of flowers on the spot where Brock was gunned down, pink carnations and a red rose, like a moment of desert bloom. There was no note attached.
The police arranged a hasty press conference to catch the BBC and ITV News at Ten and to staunch the flood of social media speculation, Twitter commentary and footage from those who had managed to get close enough to snatch a piece of the action on their phones. Everything from the toxic effects of hallucinogenic drugs to the existence of terrorist cells and Islamic State insertion was being discussed with ever increasing paranoid certainty.
The media gorged on the story, creating heroes out of Knight, Munro and Kate, who were “defiant”, “fearless”, “plucky”, “indefatigable in their search for the missing teenager and the solution to the hideous murders that had been occurring at Greenbank”. Munro was singled out as the “apotheosis of fatherhood” for the way he risked his life to recover Morag in the face of the vicious gunman’s threats.
Munro refused to allow the press any access to Morag, so she became “the brainy beauty who charmed her way out of the clutches of a murderer”. She seemed, on the surface, remarkably unscathed by her experience and demonstrated a resilience beyond her years. But the nightmares would come though and when they did, shortly afterwards, Munro resigned from his position as governor of Greenbank and rented a cottage in Cornwall for a year. He arranged for Morag to take a year off from her studies and she joined him to paint and write, but mostly she watched TV and slept, while Munro tended the small garden and spent many long quiet days fishing on the beach. Despite Margery Hardy’s opposition, Munro had been offered the position of governor of HMP Wakefield should he decide to return to the prison service. HMP Wakefield had been dubbed “Monster Mansion” because of the high number of category A offenders who were held there, and the notorious Charles Bronson was an inmate. Munro had yet to decide.
Morag’s mother Anne visited the Cornish cottage frequently and, with time, a slow healing appeared to take place amidst the cry of gulls and the lap of waves against shingle.
Knight received a police commendation and promotion, but one day, just a month after the Oxford siege, whilst on his way to work, the patient subservience he’d employed throughout his career as a police officer snapped and he left the police force. He sold his Alfa Romeo and moved to Bristol where he rented a small flat overlooking the downs. Early every morning he ran on the dew-sodden downs, working out the despair that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. There were times on his runs when he saw the Clifton suspension bridge in the distance and he’d contemplate the sharp fall into oblivion, how quick would be the release. He bought a second-hand Gibson Les Paul and practice amp from eBay and quietly and painstakingly tried to channel the least resistant of his demons into some form of musical harmony.
*
After the siege, Kate had the press camping outside her house. Someone had leaked the information that she’d been deeply involved in Bobby Lomas’ therapy which the press conjectured must mean an affair and may have been the catalyst for the bloodshed that followed. Kate left the country and returned to Chapel Hill in North Carolina where she had attended university, taking a job as a barista in the Carolina Coffee Shop on Franklin Street. She obsessively followed the story online as the media tried to incinerate Greenbank for its liberal regime, and she prayed the heat wouldn’t cross the Atlantic and consume her. Eventually interest in Lomas died out but the embers were briefly reignited by the report, three months later, that Liz Duffield had taken her own life and had tried to take her daughter Harriet with her but a neighbour had saved the two-year-old before the exhaust fumes from the car could overcome her. Kate felt her heart break at the thought of Liz, her terrible final choice and young Harriet’s abandonment and she thought about adoption but there was so little stability in her life. The strain of the last few months was taking its toll and she found herself wandering aimlessly down the streets of Chapel
Hill at night, among the lost souls of the hookers and the homeless, not knowing how she’d got there.
*
There was a knock at the door. Knight glanced at his watch, it was 3.30 p.m. He looked out of the ground floor bay window of his flat. His heart skipped a beat.
“La belle dame sans merci est retournée,” he said on opening the door.
“Alone and palely loitering?” said Kate.
“Right on both counts,” he said.
He was thinner and more toned, and there was an articulation to his movements that seemed natural and unhurried, thought Kate. He was inhabiting his space, no longer being crushed by it. She sensed something was missing though, he was a little too eager to please, and something about him was in conflict as if he was constantly preparing for a battle, the location of which he couldn’t quite divine.
“So what have you got for me?” he said. “Divorce, fraud, custody battle, missing cat?”
Over coffee Knight explained that when his savings had nearly dried up he decided to set himself up as a security consultant and private investigator taking on anything and everything that came his way. His office was his front room. It was dominated by a forty-two-inch TV and a Sky box.
“I want a job,” said Kate.
“I haven’t got any business yet let alone the funds to employ anyone.”
Kate looked around his room. “Is that your guitar?” she said pointing to the sunburst Gibson on its stand in a corner. “You sad middle-aged wandering minstrel, you’ll be wearing a Doors T-shirt next.”
“It’s the most valuable thing I own,” said Knight.
“Then I’ll work for nothing until we make some money,” said Kate.
“Why do you want to hook up with a burnt-out hopeless case like me?”
“I have a hunch we go well together, and I’ve had enough of psychopaths in my life.”
“There’s a psychopath in all of us,” said Knight.
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