Hell Is Empty

by Conrad Williams

  ‘We have to wait for the street to clear,’ Mawker said. ‘We’ve got civvies dawdling with cups of coffee and a cyclist at the moment. Give us a sec.’

  Each time it looked as though we could patch through a green light, a car or a van turned into the street. We couldn’t create any kind of blockage or diversion because it was too risky. People stopped to look when that happened. Traffic started to build up elsewhere, which inevitably meant car horns. The moment a crowd gathered, the Merc men would notice and take off, no matter how thick they might be. Hence we’d evacuated people by dribs and drabs. They’d separate and scarper to one of any number of safe locations, well away from where we wanted them to go. So we sat on our hands, and we bit our tongues. And waited.

  And then Mawker was on the radio, shouting ‘GO! GO! GO!’ but before he’d finished there was a great lick of orange fire that spurted from an underground grate, and a manhole cover came spinning out of the road like a coin toss by God, followed a split second later by the roar of the explosion.

  ‘Fucking hell!’ said Mawker, not unreasonably.

  ‘That was contained?’ I asked.

  But he was on the radio, checking for casualties. Voices flooded back. Everyone fine. ‘Sounded worse than it was… That was what you wanted, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Keep an eye on that Merc,’ said Mawker to the driver. ‘As soon as he leaves you give it some welly.’

  The figures remained in the car, and in position. That, at least, erased any lingering doubts that they might not have any involvement in the bombing. Sirens and alarms were going off all over the place. People were screaming and running away. People were standing around filming the fire on their mobile phones.

  The ambulance tore past us and parked obliquely across both lanes.

  ‘The fuckholes,’ Mawker said. He was on the radio barking orders but the ambulance crew were in emergency mode. A fire engine turned up. Police cars blocked the road behind us. At the other end of the road I could just see enough of the Merc to know they had a clear getaway should they be satisfied that I’d died in the blast.

  ‘We have to move,’ I said to Creamer. ‘Get us out of this fucking jam.’

  But he argued that if he took us on to the pavement we’d be right up the backside of the Merc and it might spook them.

  ‘Everyone’s fucking spooked,’ I said. ‘What does it matter? Do it!’

  ‘Hang on,’ Mawker said. ‘We have to wait for the body bag. Otherwise they might not see it.’

  We waited for an interminable time, but I guess they had to play the fake right. If they wheeled ‘me’ out too soon, it would look wonky and they might smell a rat.

  Ten minutes. Fifteen. Sirens descending like holy hell.

  Movement. My stunt double came rattling out of the doors.

  ‘Shift it,’ said Mawker as the Merc’s exhaust trembled and breathed.

  Creamer got the car on the pavement and we rounded the front of the ambulance just as another bunch of ambulance staff came rushing on to the pavement. Creamer stamped on the brakes. The Merc took off.

  ‘Jesus fuck,’ spat Mawker. ‘Could this day fill up with any more shit?’

  It could, because Creamer stalled the car the moment the path became clear again.

  ‘You close that gap within twenty seconds,’ said Mawker, ‘or I’ll have you out of the force before you know it. I’ll make sure you have trouble getting a job cleaning cars, let alone driving the fuckers.’

  Credit to him, Creamer sent the Volvo flying up the Caledonian Road.

  ‘There they are,’ said Mawker. ‘The grievous little cunts. Do not lose them.’

  Creamer eased back as we came within five hundred feet of the Merc, three cars between us. ‘Shall I call a chopper in?’ Creamer asked. ‘Just in case?’

  ‘No,’ Mawker said. ‘No excuses for them to abort whatever it is they’re in the process of doing. You can atone for your sins, Mick.’

  We followed them through Archway and Highgate towards Henlys Corner where the A1 meets the North Circular.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ said Mawker. ‘They’re going for the motorway.’

  ‘What did you expect?’ I said. ‘Tann in London? Hiding in plain sight? He’ll be in some rancid little panic nest in Luton or Toddington.’

  I was saying it but it didn’t sound convincing to me. Part of me was kicking me in the pants telling me I knew exactly where he was, if I’d just cool my jets and apply cognitive reasoning. But I thought that about everything. My dumb brain gave me a kick in the pants to say Tokuzo could be tamed if I just gave her a back-rub and half a pound of Iberico ham.

  ‘Come on, Creamer!’ Mawker yelled. The Merc had scooted through the lights on red and we were stuck behind a conscientious driver with a green P sticker on the back of his Vauxhall. Mawker wound down the window. ‘Oi, P for prick! Shift it. Now!’ He sent out a few whoops on the police siren and the seas parted. By the time we got to Junction 1 the Merc was well gone.

  ‘How about I put you on a charge?’ Mawker blistered into Creamer’s face from a distance of around one millimetre.

  ‘How about I put you on your arse?’ Creamer said.

  Frost filled the car. Creamer turned the car around at Staples Corner and we shifted back through the diesel-stained streets of north London in a fine mist of rain. The wipers on the windscreen flailed occasionally and I found myself lulled by their infrequent rhythm, trying to anticipate when they’d swipe again. I slumped back in the seat and watched the windscreen load with moisture and the eventual

  beat

  of the wipers while Mawker and Creamer stewed in their juices like an old married couple who have bickered with each other to the point of standstill and

  beat

  it became hypnotic, soporific, because the heat in the car had built from the tension and testosterone and I could go a five-minute nap, all things considered, despite

  beat

  losing the Merc and realising that my beautiful Saab was now nothing more than a ton of mangled memories. I closed my eyes and saw the shadow of the blade continue, left to right, then right to left. It reminded me of something and I was on a shingle beach and Becs was up ahead, hair whipping around her in the wind, her hand outstretched.

  Come on, I’m fucking freezing.

  The car’s totalled.

  Probably for the best. You’ll have to make it up to Jimmy Two.

  Shit. It was more his car than mine, really. He spent more time with it.

  At the end of the day, it’s just a tin box that takes you places. Slowly.

  What are we doing here?

  You tell me. This is your fantasy.

  What if it was yours?

  Bit Ed Al Poe, isn’t it? Bit Twilight Zone?

  My whole life is a bit Twilight Zone. How could it not be, with Mawker in it? I keep expecting his head to split open at any moment and some tentacled, many-mouthed thing to come slithering out.

  You should go a bit easier on him.

  See, this must be your fantasy. I wouldn’t think that.

  I think you’ll end up together. Sitting in bed reading each other verses of erotic poetry.

  Enough… We came here, didn’t we, early on?

  Your idea of a romantic day out.

  Dungeness.

  The tide was some distance off, a seam of pale grey that stitched the lead of the sky to the dun of the beach. Fishing boats trapped on the shingle faced the sea, their bows raised as if impatient to return. Collapsed light. The air was thick. It seemed to coat the beach in something you could tease back from the pebbles. We had photographs of all of this, in an album gathering dust and cat hairs back home, under the bed. And some things I couldn’t collect. Explosions of static from the boats’ radios. Her footsteps crunching through the shingle.

  I remember the sea was affecting the light in some subtle way I had not recognised before, but my camera couldn’t capture it. It erased an area above the horizon, a band of vague ochre that was perhaps full
of rain, that shivered and crawled as if it might contain text, or the barest outline of it, some code to unpick. An explanation.

  The beach was slowly burying its secrets. Great swathes of steel cable, an anchor that had lost its shape through the accretion of oxidant, cogs so large they might have something to do with the Earth’s movement. All of it was slowly sinking into the endless shingle.

  Us too if we don’t keep moving.

  Black flags whipping on the boats. They seemed too blasted by salt and wind to be up to the task of setting sail. White flecks on wave crests. It was getting rough out there. Small fishing boats tipped and waggled on the surf, bright and tiny against the huge expanses of blue-green pressing in all around them.

  Rotting fish-heads and surgical gloves, thin, mateless affairs flapping in the stones like translucent sea-creatures marooned by the tide. You notice how the shingle creeps over the toes of your boots; always the beach was in the process of sucking under, of burying.

  I kissed you and I could taste salt on your mouth.

  It’s this way.

  The strange, stunted vegetation like hunks of dried sponge or stained blotting paper trapped between the stones: sea campion, Babington’s orache. Weatherboard cottages. A weird sizzle in the air, maybe from the power station or perhaps it was the taut lines of the night fishermen, buzzing with tension as lugworm and razor clam were cast into the creaming surf.

  She moved ahead rising above another dune of pebbles. She waited for me, pointing. The moon was behind her. I couldn’t see her face. And then I could. And then I couldn’t. She was pointing at the lighthouse. When I got to her, she was still swaddled in dark but I could see the beam of the lighthouse coming again. Her voice, full of liquid: Tōdai moto kurashi. I didn’t want to see her face this time. Because I knew it wouldn’t be her standing next to me. I knew exactly who would be here in her stead.

  * * *

  I flew up out of that, swearing, sweating in the airless confines of the Volvo. Mawker and Creamer were gone. We were parked in a layby. I could see them up ahead standing in front of a caravan with a sign inviting motorists to try their breakfast bap’s, tea’s and cofee’s. Mawker no doubt trying to wangle a free cuppa.

  They came back and Mawker apologised, said he hadn’t got me anything because I was sleepy bye-byes.

  I waited until they stopped giggling about that, and then I said: ‘I know where he is.’

  21

  Mawker was put out that he hadn’t made the connection, I could see it in his furrowed brow and murmuring lips. That was the career copper in him. It didn’t matter that we had some purpose, or that we might be an inch further along the road to saving Sarah’s life. He was worried about the long game: the medals and citations that sparkled just beyond the finishing post. It hadn’t gone unnoticed that when he got on the radio for backup, everything uttered was prefixed with ‘I’.

  ‘Of course,’ he said now, as the car swept along the M1, somewhere north of Watford, ‘there’s no foundation to this. Just because some smart-dressed noodle-sucking doorman with nice hair signs off with some soppy platitude before he commits harry-carry, doesn’t mean anything in my book.’

  ‘That’s because your book only ever has pictures in it,’ I said. ‘Of your mother with her tits out. And it’s harakiri, you twannock.’

  ‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘We’re still pissing in the wind.’

  ‘Fuck off, Ian,’ I said. ‘It’s called following a lead.’

  ‘It’s called a waste of police resources.’

  ‘If it’s cold then blast me with both barrels. If there’s something in it, then you’ll take all the glory anyway. Win-win.’

  ‘I’m not happy.’

  ‘You’re never happy. They say there’s no such thing as bad pizza or bad sex. But I bet you’ve had both.’

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘Fuck knows,’ I said. ‘Your so-called parents.’

  ‘That prison was razed to the ground,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing left of it.’

  ‘So why are there security guards on site?’

  ‘I don’t know. We didn’t arrange it. NOMS set it up, maybe. It has to be watched, doesn’t it? You don’t want kiddies fannying around in there. Fucking death trap, isn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘I think Henry wanted to help. At the last.’

  ‘I think he wanted to put you off the scent.’

  ‘Christ, Mawker. I’ll go alone. Drop me here and go running back to your bosses at the Kremlin. See what they think about it.’

  He went quiet but I could see he was still seething. He was going to get us into a sackful of trouble if he went in with his dander up. I wondered if I should risk arrest by knocking the fucker out. I’d rather take my chances just with Creamer than have Inspector Clouseau tagging along.

  We got off the motorway at Aspley Guise and I directed Creamer to my bucolic parking spot. It was beginning to rain again. I wished I’d packed a hat and gloves. It was hellish cold after the heat of the Volvo.

  ‘What have we got in here, weapon-wise?’ I asked.

  ‘This isn’t an armed response vehicle, Sorrell,’ Mawker said.

  ‘Why not? We were responding. To people who are armed. Logic dictates—’

  ‘Give it a rest,’ he said. ‘We’ve got handguns. And firepower is on its way.’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘Talk them to death.’

  So no gun safe. No carbines. No launcher. No fucking battering ram.

  I led them through the trees to the area above the prison. It was gone four o’clock and the sky was heavily bruised. Lights were on in the Portakabin. We could see three or four figures in black moving around the grounds and the black Merc parked off road, on a swell of green a few feet away from where the cinders took over.

  ‘Where’s the backup?’ I said.

  ‘On its way,’ said Mawker.

  ‘So we what? We wait till they get here?’

  ‘Looks like that,’ said Creamer.

  Both of their voices had lapsed into neutral police mode. Vapid faces. They could have been on duty at the reception of the local nick, filling out HORT/1 forms. I wanted them gone. Creamer waiting in the car and Mawker anywhere else, including up his own arsehole. I wanted time to think, to strategise. Company meant compromise, pressure and rushed decisions.

  But really I wanted to be here alone, without any backup, because I didn’t want anyone coming between me and Graeme Tann. I didn’t want anybody to see what was going to happen to him.

  ‘The place is fucked,’ said Creamer. ‘I can’t see anywhere to hide.’

  ‘That’s just it,’ I said. ‘He’s hiding in plain sight. Henry was right. The base of the lighthouse is dark. The light can’t pick out anything below. And he’s in its shadow.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘We’d have had him by now,’ Mawker said, which was a bit cocky of him, and not necessarily true, but at least it meant that he was coming around to agreeing with my hunch.

  ‘When it’s full dark,’ I said, ‘I’m going to nip down there and have a look around, see if I can find a prime spot to get in. You need to keep wat—’

  ‘No you’re not,’ said Mawker. ‘Creamer can do it.’

  ‘But this is my play,’ I said, hating the whine in my voice. ‘My collar.’

  ‘Your collar,’ scoffed Mawker. ‘You can’t “collar” if you’re not one of us. Be a good boy and sit tight. Otherwise I’ll have you taken back to Broadway and you can wait for me there.’

  ‘Ian. I have to see him.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked, his face darting into mine, searching my expression. ‘I know exactly what you’ll do, or try to do, and it’s a good job we’re here to pull on your leash.’

  ‘Nobody need ever know,’ I said.

  ‘Need know what?’ he said.

  I looked at him and I looked at Creamer. I’d already said too much, but he wanted me to fall into the hole. I backed down. There was nothing to b
e gained by pushing Mawker’s buttons, or suggesting he throw away the rule book and go rogue, apart from a couple of hours in a holding cell while they tidied up here, put Tann in a different cage and then I would be back to square one.

  ‘Fuck it,’ I said, and went into sulk mode.

  They talked about possible ways forward, all of them unimaginative, suicidal. I couldn’t hear anything in the way of backup and half an hour had gone by. No police helicopters. No TAU vans.

  ‘What’s going on, Mawker?’ I asked. ‘Where’s the cavalry?’

  ‘Shut it,’ he said. And then a weird crack of sound. I saw red in his eyes, and then I saw red in Creamer’s eyes. And then there was red in my eyes: Creamer’s blood, because half his face had snapped off and he went down a second later, like an actor in a play who suddenly realises his death moment has arrived.

  ‘Fuck!’ Mawker yelled. And he kept yelling it. I got to him and shoved my hand over his face, but everything was slicked with Creamer’s blood and I couldn’t gain purchase. I dragged him back into the trees. He had the shakes, proper convulsions, and getting him to calm down, to focus, was becoming impossible. He was lashing out, crying, foaming at the mouth. I slapped him hard across the face and his head snapped back and connected with a tree trunk. Maybe he’d been knocked out but I wasn’t so lucky. At least it shocked some calm into him. He sat there breathing hard and staring at me with a look that was either Who the fuck are you? or Do that again and you’re dead.

  ‘That was a sniper,’ I said.

  ‘A sniper?’ His voice was all wrong, like something filtered through tons of cracked ice.

  ‘Yes. Laser-guided. Creamer is dead. We need to move.’

  ‘Move?’

  ‘Yes, move. They know we’re here. We have to do something right now or Tann will be away.’

  ‘A sniper?’

  I shared his bafflement – it was rare to come across sniper rifles of any kind in crime (organised or otherwise) in this country, let alone a marksman skilled enough to use one – but now was not the time to play Criminal Intelligence Analysts.