Degrees of Darkness

by Tony J. Forder

  Swain was grateful to any god who cared to listen that he was the sort of man to keep himself physically fit. He felt good, he felt strong, and he felt fleet of foot. No one was going to catch him. If he kept his wits about him he was going to make it away from this place safely. Despite his confidence, he wondered how the hell he had so nearly been caught.

  Tanner? Had the man somehow suspected? If so, Mr Tanner is going to get an unannounced visit one of these nights. He is going to discover the true meaning of pain and misery, and then he is going to die screaming.

  Swain burst out of the same rear door through which he had so recently entered, his legs pumping high like those of a sprinter as he headed down the narrow alleyway that took him back out onto the streets.

  It was impossible, but the doors seemed to fly open again only seconds later. Surely no one could have caught up with him so quickly. He was too big, too strong, wing-heeled like a god. As he ducked into a turn that emerged into the street from an archway, he risked one swift glance back over his shoulder.

  The shock almost caused him to lose his balance and stumble.

  Frank Rogers.

  Overweight and long out of shape, Special Detective Frank-fucking-Rogers.

  You knew he was good, Larry. You knew as soon as you saw his photo in the paper. A worthy adversary, I believe was your initial impression. Worthy? A little more than that, wouldn’t you say?

  Shut up!

  He snapped the voice off. It wasn’t a phantom speaking into his mind this time. It was the voice of his father. His father, who had never once had a good word to say for his children, never praised their achievements, then wondered why they stopped attaining anything. His father … the dead man.

  Absurdly, Swain began to laugh as he ran, lips curled back, teeth bared in a wicked snarl.

  The street’s pavements were mercifully deserted, the way ahead clear. Swain ran through his mental street map. He had to keep off the main routes for as long as possible, out of the public’s reach. He had to keep on running, keep on thinking. There had to be a way out of this.

  As Nicky maintained a steady half-dozen paces behind Frank, he barked directions into his radio. Capel and his men had scampered back to the van, its engine screaming in protest as they hurried to head off their quarry.

  ‘He’s heading north into Brackenbury Road.’

  ‘Take a right,’ Capel said instantly to his driver. Then into his radio: ‘We’re turning into Dalling Road, Nicky. It comes out at the top of Brackenbury. I sent a team around back but they would’ve been far too late to even see him.’

  ‘They’re in pursuit with us.’

  Static for a moment. Then: ‘He’s turned east … into Coulter Road.’

  Warren Capel cursed. They would now emerge too far north of their man, and his knowledge of the area was limited. ‘Right at the top,’ he said to his driver. ‘We’ll follow them instead.’

  Because the van was used for observations only, it had no siren or flashing lights. It gave no warning of its high-speed approach. As it flew out into Brackenbury Road it was confronted by a Luton Transit that seemed to fill its windscreen. Ben Watkins, Capel’s driver, swung the wheel hard to the left. But the van wasn’t a squad car, wasn’t nearly so well-balanced or built for such a manoeuvre.

  Watkins felt it slide first. He had time to utter a cry before the van flipped over and, sliding along the tarmac on its side, ploughed into a line of parked cars. Its initial speed kept it going, metal screaming, engine still racing, until finally it rolled over one last time and buried itself halfway inside an open-top Morgan.

  The engine snapped off. The revolving tyres eventually came to a grudging halt. For a full minute before the first cries of pain, the silence of death filled the street.

  Frank felt his entire body protest. His head felt swollen with pain, blood thumping in his temples like a hammer-drill. Across his shoulders and chest there was a fire raging out of control, and its flames licked inside his throat and worked their way down into his lungs. Cramps tore at his legs, insisting he stop using the muscles, or at the very least, slow down. But out of necessity, Frank had found that place beyond pain that great athletes force themselves to strive for. It consumed him, but he was able to ignore it.

  He wasn’t gaining on the bastard, but he wasn’t getting left behind, either. The man’s baseball cap had flown off, and his gleaming dome of a head was like a beacon to Frank. It was all he could see, all he needed to see. It was his way back to Laura. His only way. If the man escaped, Laura was dead.

  The man weaved back and forth, finally heading south again toward the Hammersmith flyover and the underground station. Once there he could be lost. He couldn’t allow the man to make it that far, but couldn’t see any way of catching him.

  Where the hell was Capel?

  He could hear Nicky breathlessly snapping out road names, but they had been running for several minutes now, and the van had to be close. Had to be … or the madman would be swallowed up by the subterranean railway system and lost forever. With him he would take Frank’s heart and soul. His reason for living.

  Sweat blinding him, Frank asked even more of his body. He begged and pleaded for one last surge. But within seconds he knew there was nothing left to give. The tank was empty. And as his eyes fixed on that head of flesh, it seemed to draw away from him.

  He gave a cry. It was filled with pain and anguish. And the desperate sense of loss.

  53

  Perhaps the only thing that saved Warren Capel from greater injury was his instinctive reactions when entering a vehicle of any description: he had put on his seat-belt.

  Ben Watkins hadn’t been so sensible or so fortunate. The whole of the van’s off-side was just about gone, but where the door had crumpled like an aluminium can, Watkins had crumpled with it. His body was grotesquely twisted, limbs jutting at obscene angles, and his face had almost been shredded of flesh by the road surface and the collision with the other vehicles.

  Capel saw this in glorious technicolour close-up, the van’s momentum having pressed him tight against the still-warm body. Hearing a shrill cry of pain, the Detective Sergeant tried to look back over his shoulder to see how the two men in the back had fared, but as his head swivelled, an explosion of pain rose up from his neck. Bile rose with it, shock settling on him like a nest of rattlers. He began shaking uncontrollably.

  Don’t move your neck again, he told himself. Something’s wrong there. One more twist and you could be a vegetable for the rest of your life. Just keep still and wait. Ignore the cooling body next to you. Forget the fact that the petrol tank may have ruptured, that you’re sitting in a perfect incendiary device. Just close your mind to it all. Help must be on its way.

  He began surveying the damage to the rest of his body. Careful to move only his eyes, he saw plenty of blood spattered over his clothing, though he couldn’t decide whose it was. Then his glance travelled down and he saw a curious thing. His left leg was stretched out straight, but the area from his knee down to his ankle hung at a right-angle. It was an impossible angle. The joints simply weren’t designed that way. Unless …

  He swallowed thickly. Through the torn material of his trouser leg, splintered bones jutted like jagged strips of driftwood. He stared at them, so white they seemed to glow with an eerie phosphoresce. Warren realised that his fibula and tibia had somehow been thrust upwards with such brute force that they had slammed through the patella. His knee was shattered, his entire left leg ruined.

  ‘That’s bad, Warren,’ he said to himself. ‘That really is bad. But it can be fixed. I’m sure it can. And if not … so what, you’re breathing. Be grateful for that. Ben would be right now.’

  And then something else struck him. He felt something shift inside his stomach, a tight knot forming there. His neck was obviously in a bad way, his leg in an even sorrier state. So why wasn’t he screaming with the pain of it? Why could he feel no pain at all below the waist?

  He tried to move his s
hattered leg, perversely hoping that the sudden jolt would send a shock of blinding pain through his system. Nothing happened. He tried moving the other leg. Same again. He had to move them somehow, had to feel a glorious flash of pain. Had to.

  A figure suddenly appeared at the side window. The Luton driver. His face visibly paled as he saw what had become of the two men in front. ‘Okay,’ he said to Warren. ‘Help is coming. Hold on.’

  Capel turned to him. ‘Please,’ he whispered. ‘Let there be some pain.’

  Out on the main road, the pavements were more liberally sprinkled with human flotsam and jetsam. A couple of filth-encrusted winos scrabbled through rubbish bins fixed to street lights, last night’s chip wrappers containing a meagre source of cold nutrition. A young shirt-sleeved postman gave them a wide birth, while a female jogger, wearing only a tight pair of shorts and a vest, thundered past, oblivious to everything but the music playing on her iPod. The postman glanced at her heavy breasts bouncing beneath the thin material. He continued to look back at her, not watching where he was going, and so the sudden jolt of fourteen stones of speeding muscle knocked the wind out of his lungs and sent him flying.

  Swain had rounded the street corner with no thought for other pedestrians. He and the postman hit the ground with a solid thump, the latter’s head striking the pavement so hard it opened up in a wide gash and let loose a torrent of blood.

  You buffoon, the voice of Swain’s father roared at him. You can’t even get this right, can you?

  ‘Get the fuck out of my head!’ Swain yelled as he scrambled to his feet. He looked around, eyes wild and staring. Frank Rogers was only yards away, bearing down on him like an express train. To his right, several other figures were hammering down the pavement toward him; they had come another way to cut off his escape. That left the road or …

  Yards away there was a small butcher’s shop, cuts of fresh meat already hanging from sharp and shiny hooks in the window. At this time of morning it was the only shop open along this stretch of road. There was no more time for thought, only reaction.

  Frank had him, looming large right in front of his eyes, and then he was gone in a puff of smoke. The tall, lean monster swivelled to one side, out of Frank’s clawing reach, and dashed through the open doorway of a shop. Frank slid on the pavement as he turned and saw the window display. He wondered at the irony that had sent such a vile beast into a place like that. It was so fitting.

  Frank quickly weighed up the situation, glanced down at the postman who lay groaning and twitching on the floor. No time for him. Had to get the madman. Had to get him before he could arm himself. But when he looked up again at the shop, the door was now closed, and beyond its glass pane stood the monster. And the monster was smiling.

  The man held a meat hook in his right hand, swinging it by his side. And his smile was getting broader with each passing second.

  By now the pavement around Frank was bustling with activity. Nicky, Tom and his men had arrived. Two men were attending to the stricken postman, Tom was bawling into his radio. Nicky drew in great lungfuls of air, hands resting on his knees.

  And the monster was still smiling.

  ‘Warren’s had an accident,’ Nicky gasped. ‘Don’t know how bad. But we’ve got this fucker cornered now.’

  Frank’s body felt as if it wanted to either burst or expire. The commotion around him was like a distant throng, Nicky’s words a vague drone. It took a moment for their meaning to seep through the whirring cogs.

  Yes.

  The man was cornered. But like an animal, he wouldn’t come out of that corner without a fight. The butcher’s was open. Someone had to be inside. Maybe several someones. They weren’t visible right now, but how long before they discovered their intruder? If the madman got hold of them there would be carnage here.

  And the monster continued to stare directly at him, the smile growing impossibly broader still.

  Frank shook his head. No. It wasn’t going to happen that way.

  He took a single step back, then charged at the shop door and threw himself forward through the air. Even as he hit the sparkling pane his mind was telling him it was only in films that people didn’t get hurt by glass. In real life, people got badly hurt. Often, they got themselves killed. But by then he was through it and he had delivered himself into the arms of fate.

  The single pane of glass shattered with the sound of a small explosion. Frank had thought to shield his face with his arms, but the backs of both hands and forearms were now shrouded with slivers of glass, blood welling from the wounds. His only saving grace was that he had landed at the feet of the madman who, caught unawares by the sheer stupidity of the attack, had been sent sprawling backwards.

  Frank was the first to react.

  As he stumbled to his feet the soles of his shoes slid on the debris of shattered glass and he pitched forward again. He felt the bite and tear as more broken shards found purchase in his flesh, but the greater urgency came when he saw the man rising up like some vengeful demon. The bald head looked immense, both eyes filled with hate and grim purpose.

  Still on his knees, Frank scrambled wildly, seeking to gain a foothold without slipping. He couldn’t. He could do nothing but give a guttural cry as the madman stepped forward and brought the gleaming hook down into the meat of his shoulder. Frank’s next cry was one of immense pain, the hook biting deep into cartilage and muscle and sinew, narrowly missing the collar-bone. Through a gathering mist of confused agony, he saw the monster’s triumphant expression, a gleam in those cold eyes that would not be denied.

  The pain increased alarmingly as the madman wrenched the hook around, trying to pull it free. All he managed to do was drive the sharpened point deeper into the wound. In the midst of this, an absurd thought ran through Frank’s mind: if this is how a fish feels when it’s caught, I’m never going to hook a carp again.

  As the world began to diminish around him, Frank’s survival instincts took over. It was the one advantage he had over this monster. He reached up to the hook, clasped his own hands over the other man’s, and yanked as hard as he was able back towards himself.

  His opponent hadn’t expected this. He wasn’t balanced, wasn’t prepared, and so his whole weight dipped forward. As it did, Frank allowed his legs to collapse, and the man went over his back and out across the threshold of the doorway.

  All this took place inside ten seconds. It was the longest ten seconds of Frank’s life. It had given no time for Nicky or any of the others to react. But when the monster came rolling back out of the doorway, they moved as one. He was pounced upon, boots and knees and fists unconcerned about where they landed. His hands were gathered behind his back, wrists cuffed and he was then rolled onto his side. The meat hook lay behind him, a generous portion of Frank’s shoulder still attached to it.

  His wounds temporarily tended from items taken from the shop’s impressive first-aid box, Frank allowed Nicky to help him back out onto the street. A large gathering had now surrounded the shop, and somewhere in the distance sirens heralded the approach of emergency vehicles. Tom Whelan and the other officers stood around the kneeling man, who hadn’t said a single word since his capture.

  As they walked past him, Frank had to look. Down there, the man didn’t look like any monster. Or madman. He looked just like any other criminal in similar circumstances: frightened, frustrated at being caught, wary.

  Frank stood over him and glared into the man’s eyes. ‘What have you got to say for yourself now, you fucking lunatic?’

  The monster’s mouth stretched thinly. ‘I had your darling little daughter, Frank. Used her, abused her. Then I disposed of her.’

  And then he laughed.

  He kept on laughing while Nicky and Tom Whelan fought to keep Frank from killing him there and then.

  Captured at last, the monster laughed until he wept.

  54

  Frank realised he must look as if he’d been in a car wreck. His hands and arms were swathed in bandages, as
were his legs beneath a fresh pair of trousers. The bulge of padding and even more bandages was obvious beneath his shirt. Various cuts and abrasions littered his face, and bruises were beginning to attain angry colours. He looked so badly wounded that when he was brought back to Leyton police station where the prisoner was being held, Nicky immediately pulled him to one side.

  ‘Are you sure you want to do this now?’

  Frank nodded. ‘When else? We have to find out where Laura is.’

  ‘But, Frank. He said—’

  ‘And I can’t afford to believe him.’ The voice was a hard rebuke. ‘I take it you found nothing of use on him.’

  ‘Not a thing. He had a mobile, but it was the one we’d already traced. We checked it out; last calls made, last calls received, everything. It was all wiped clean. He must do it after every call, covering his arse every step of the way.’

  ‘We can get those details from his provider, though, yes?’

  ‘In time. It’s a delaying tactic, nothing more.’

  Frank nodded. ‘The sooner I get in there, the better, then.’

  ‘But are you fit enough? You lost a bit of blood back there, mate.’

  Frank lifted his head. ‘Stop mothering me, Nicky. I’m okay.’

  ‘I suppose you heard about the obs van.’

  ‘Yeah. Shit, what a fucking mess. It’s early days, but they reckon Warren may be paralysed.’ Frank shook his head wearily. ‘I don’t know who was luckier.’

  ‘We’ve tried talking to our man, but he won’t have it. He’ll speak only to you.’

  Frank nodded. ‘That’s the way I want it.’ His voice was cold and hard.

  ‘How are you going to play things?’

  ‘As coolly as I can. If Laura is dead, then I can’t help her now. If she’s not, then we have a little time. I can’t steam in, bully him for information, or he’ll just clam up and play more games with me. He’d enjoy that. I have to develop some kind of rapport with him, let him loosen up, even pander to his ego a little. Most of all, I have to get him to talk. If he opens up about what he did to the girls, he may just say enough for us to establish where he’s keeping Laura. It’s the only way. For the time being.’