The Big Snow

by David Park

  Blotched, snow-speckled buildings huddled along raddled roads of fading snow as he sped by. A vaporous blue light trembled from the coke-filled brazier of a night watchman on a building site. He knew already that Newburn wasn’t heading towards his home but knew also that this was a man who had bolt-holes all over the city and a potential legion of helping hands. When Newburn’s car was forced to slow at a junction he was able to reduce the distance between them some more. The moonlight stirred the city into pearly striations of light and made its thin thread of streets seem briny, aqueous, as if they had been washed by some beryl sea. And everwhere the city was asleep, blind to what hurtled through its streets, and Swift felt a surge of loneliness that eased his foot off the accelerator, but it was followed almost immediately by a new urgency. Everywhere he looked, the snow was beginning to stain and slither into nothingness. He thought of the nicotine stains on the hands of Burns. Soon the whole world would look like that, and then it would be too late. He had to do this thing while there was still time, and everywhere he looked time was running out.

  The knowledge made him reckless and he began to push the car faster than was safe, his desperation driving him on and the sliding, skidding wheels were nothing more than little pulses on the very edge of his consciousness. A team of salters and gritters pulled back to the safety of the kerb as Newburn’s car shot past them with a warning blast of horn and, as Swift passed, their faces were a pinched and cold-tightened frieze of confusion. In his head he heard the clack of their long-shafted shovels when they scattered their cargo across the road with a twitch and flick of their wrists, and something about their faces made him think of Alma Simons’s father the day he had spoken to him in the morgue. He thought of him sleeping in some nothing of a room where the street lights outside flushed a soft burn of electric over his silent sleep and cradled the small photograph of a girl on a swing that leaned against his bedside lamp. Newburn charged his black car into the heart of the night, its rear swinging on corners and the tail lights staring back like the eyes of an animal sparked into fire. Swift blinked as if to break their spell and then opened his window a little to let the cold night air brush against the heat of his brain. It hissed and streamed against his face and the road ahead was a glittering swathe of light that called him on.

  Soon they were moving out of the city and on to roads that climbed high above it and everywhere there was frozen snow cladding the slopes of fields. He tried to think where Newburn was heading, but couldn’t, and in his rear mirror the city below was a shiver of glassy light, haloed by moonlight and stars. They came to a road junction and Newburn slowed to make a left turn, but had to brake to avoid a collision with a lorry. Swift pressed the accelerator and pushed his back into the seat as the car screeched forward with a piercing whine and he knew there was only one way now, and just as Newburn’s car started to move again he hit it behind the back wheel, sending it spinning a half-circle and his own car into a skidding, shuddering halt. It took him a few seconds to jolt himself free from the car – his chest hurt where it had hit the steering wheel and he could feel the spreading dampness of blood through the ripped knee of his trousers – but he could still move and as he stumbled into the middle of the road he saw Newburn restart his engine and try to drive off. He ran faster but his feet slithered away from him on the polished sheen of the road and he fell. Then while he tried to prise himself upright he slipped again and this time he lay still and watched Newburn’s car reverse towards him, only to lurch to a stop when the buckled rear wheel wedged itself tighter into the mangled metal of the wheelguard. It ground a few feet forward again but then limped to a final stop, and as Swift found his footing he saw Newburn jump from the car and run across the road to the entrance of a quarry dug out of the hillside.

  Swift started to run but was slowed by a sudden surge of pain in his leg and he called after Newburn to give himself up, but as he momentarily paused to ease the pain he saw him vanishing through the haphazard and half-hearted fencing that skirted the entrance and sagged forward on lolling posts. Swift looked round for a house or a phone, for any source of help, but there was nothing and the city below seemed locked in its indifferent sleep. There was only his own help, and he let his hand grasp the Webley that still nestled in his pocket. Then, going back to his car, he gathered the torch, checked that it was still working and as he passed Newburn’s car shone it into the driver’s side. The keys were still there and he took them out and placed them in his pocket, then hurried to where he thought he had seen Newburn disappear through the fence, but when he reached the spot there was no gap to be found and he had to run the light of the torch along its length until he found the slit. In the light he saw that a flap of trouser hung loose at his knee and that what felt like a deep cut was still bleeding, but he squeezed through the gap without snagging his coat on the wire.

  He switched off the light – it only served to pinpoint his own position – and let his eyes acclimatize to the moonlight. In front of him, cut into the gradient of the hill were broad steps of terraces littered with piles of rubble and antiquated pieces of machinery whose function was disguised by their coating of snow and the impossibility of determining where one piece began and another ended. There were tin sheds to one side and a series of wooden outbuildings that leaned against each other under a thatch of snow and everywhere the snow still lay thick and largely untrammelled as if no one had been there since the first falls, and the slow shift of moonlight made everything nebulous, vague and undefined except by what he was able to construct through memory and imagination. The scabbed and pitted side of the hill sheered steeply ahead like a cliff face and great trenches of scree swept down in tributaries of excavated stone. There was no sign of Newburn or any other trace of movement and Swift stood motionless in the shadow of an excavator, uncertain of what to do. It seemed dangerous and futile to start searching such a large area, cluttered with endless hiding places from where his quarry might emerge and attack. It was a lonely, deserted place and for the first time he felt the sharpening edge of fear. It wasn’t a place he would choose to die. He tried to tell himself that Newburn was the one who felt fear and for the first time he took the gun out of his pocket.

  He clambered on to the excavator and leaned against the driver’s cab. There was a stab of pain in his chest – it felt as though he’d cracked a rib. His breathing was a rasp in his throat and sounded loud enough to carry across every crevice and trench of the quarry. He slowly scanned the blue-washed snowy terrain, searching for some sign of Newburn’s presence but there was only the bitter swirl of a rising wind which made his face smart and skiffed fine lilts of snow from the white-capped peaks of rocks or the metal latticework of cranes. A bulbous, hunched rat crossed the open ground in front of him and made him shiver. He crouched down and waited – that was all he could think to do now – in the hope that, if he was patient and silent, Newburn’s desperation would sooner or later cause him to make a run for it.

  He scooped a handful of snow and pressed it against his knee. He wanted something cold against the pain in his chest but knew he had to keep warm. It felt colder all the time and he cursed himself for leaving his gloves in the car, as the metal of the gun burned his skin and made him move it from hand to hand every few minutes. His breath skipped and funnelled in front of his face no matter how hard he tried to stop it, and in his mind it smoked ever higher into a signal of his presence. From time to time he stood up and, holding on to the meshed grill of the frosted driver’s cab, peered across the tundra, but the more he searched it, the more his eyes played tricks on him, and in the blue-shadowed dips and hollows he thought he saw the outline of a crouching man. On impulse he reached for a stone nestling in the teeth of the traction wheels and flung it into the opalescent tremble of light and, as it clattered off a rock, almost immediately felt the foolishness of his action, which in his memory turned him into a nervous child throwing stones at the suspected hiding place of a rat, the burst of bravado trying to disguise his fear tha
t something might emerge.

  As nothing but memory stirred from the re-formed silence, he clawed out his fingers to clasp the mesh of the cab and saw them clutching not at metal but at the eyes that stared at him through the frosted glass. As an involuntary shout burst from his lips, he stepped backwards and in that second the cab door flew open and smacked against his chest, knocking him off balance and sending him tumbling into the snow. Even with the cushion of snow, the breath rushed out of his lungs and left him sucking frantically for air like a drowning man. He had dropped the gun and the pain in his side was a sudden sear. He had dropped the gun and even with its black against white he couldn’t see it. He scrambled in the snow like a dog trying to dig up something previously buried, his head jerking up and round for a sight of Newburn but as he found the torch and switched it on he heard the slap of running feet and knew his quarry was in flight.

  The gun had fallen further away than he had thought possible and as he brushed the snow from its barrel he hurried round the machine and shone the torch after Newburn, whose heels squirmed up puffs of snow as he ran, his arms and legs flailing like cracking pistons, his head enveloped by a gauze of his breath. Swift called after him to stop and the words jittered high and shaky in his throat like birdsong and as he set off in pursuit he saw Newburn stumble and fall, then right himself, before setting off again with his feet bruising and treading the snow. He gave chase but the pain in his chest felt as though it might explode at any moment and throw him to the ground. He watched Newburn running higher, up the steps of terraces, but there could be no escape in that direction and then, saw him veer to the right, probably a prelude to an attempt to sweep round in a circle and back to the road. Swift struck out across the debris-strewn terrain in an effort to cut him off, and when he called out again his voice was stronger, the words ground out with the rhythm of his run. Newburn fell again and took longer to get up this time. Ignoring the pain, Swift put on a shambling, scurrying burst of speed and, close enough to see the terror in Newburn’s face as he measured the closing distance between them, felt for the first time the beauty of the retribution he carried towards him.

  Suddenly Newburn stopped and for a second turned full face towards him and as Swift blinked, it looked as if his black suit and his black hair were blanched and stripped of their colour by the summary fall of age, as if a fierce frost had reached down and grasped him in its hoary grip. And Swift blinked again and saw that Newburn was trapped by a polished swathe of ice that stretched ahead and blocked his escape. He, too, paused, and, trying to summon a final sustaining draw of breath, shone the torch towards Newburn but what it struck now was not his face but his back as he set off across the ice. Swift hurried towards the edge and watched the fleeing figure slither and struggle to stay upright and when he reached where the first thin reeds stuck up through the rim of snow, he drew the gun from his pocket and held out his arm until the final tremble had slipped away and his aim felt steady and true. Newburn slipped again, then clambered into new flight. The back of his coat was spangled and starred with wet and Swift closed one eye and tried to shut out the whispers that riddled the wind that streamed about his ears. Take away the pain. Over and over. Take away the pain. The only way. His finger cradled the trigger and he wanted the sound to block out all the others. Block them out for ever. The shot seemed to crack the night open and it echoed and echoed as if trapped for ever in the chambers of stone. He watched Newburn stumble then cry out as all around him the ice cracked and rucked into jagged splinters and for a second he thought his shot had killed him, but when he lowered his arm from where it had been raised to the sky he knew it was the thinness of the ice that now pulled him down.

  He stood motionless while Newburn floundered in the water, his frantic struggles to escape only serving to shatter the blue membrane of ice and sending him stumbling deeper into the water. It came up to his waist and, if not deep enough to drown easily in, would prove difficult for an increasingly tired man to climb out, and there was a smear of blood where he had cut his hands in his futile efforts to break a channel free. His cries for help rose with the stretch and creak of the ice, each one more pleading than the last. Swift shone the torch across the ice, making it glitter like diamonds, then looked around for a piece of wood or a length of rope but the covering of snow made the search pointless and taking off his coat he strode calmly on to the ice, sure-footed and glad of the lightness that measured his steps.

  By mid-morning the station had been become so crowded with reporters clamouring for information, that the Head Constable had told Maguire to clear them out into the street. The phones rang constantly and there was a whisper that the Inspector General himself was on the way. Newburn had been formally charged and was in the cells awaiting interview, while his solicitor was in the process of summoning bigger guns to take up the case and warning anyone who would listen of the dire consequences for all concerned in ‘this ludicrous charade’. As he passed Swift in the corridor he had told him that ‘his goose was cooked’, that ‘he was finished’, but Swift had brushed him aside without reply, remembering Gracey’s admonition that he was to say nothing to anyone. ‘Play the dummy flute, son,’ Gracey had instructed, ‘and say nothin’ to anyone. Don’t even talk in your sleep. Court’s the place we’ll do our talkin.’ A few minutes later he had followed him into the toilets and stood with his back blocking the door and for a second Swift had thought of that moment in Madigan’s Bar, but this time there were only words of warning. ‘If we frig this up, Swifty, we’re tatie bread – it’ll be over for the both of us and I’m not ready to collect me pension just yet. And you, you’ll be out on your arse before your bum’s even warmed the seat. Understand what I’m saying?’ Swift had nodded as he washed his hands, trying not to look at the washed-out face in the mirror in which the only colour was the blue circles under the eyes. ‘And another thing – get that bloody gun back in the box before you shoot someone and when they ask, say the thing discharged accidentally as you stumbled in the snow. Blame it on the friggin’ snow.’

  Now Gracey sat at the fire in their office and held out his hands towards it. Other detectives stood round the room waiting for him to give them instructions but he only stared silently at the flames and, from time to time, rubbed their heat into his hands. Burns entered and squirmed up to the fire. ‘Bloody freezin’ up that mountain,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘And Swifty, you didn’t half make a mess of that car. Not so much 2 Cars as pushbike for you from now on.’ He winked at someone but no one laughed. Gracey ran a hand through his hair and blew a stream of breath through his lips. ‘I still think Linton’s our man,’ Burns said as he shivered suddenly. Gracey angled his head to look at him, as if seeing him for the first time, but then turned his gaze again to the fire, spitting into its heart and making it sizzle.

  ‘When are you going to interview him?’ Swift asked, looking at the fire over Gracey’s shoulder.

  ‘No rush, Swifty boy. Let him sweat like everyone else. And God knows he needs to thaw out a bit yet before he works up one of those. So patience, young Swift, a bit of patience.’

  ‘When it’s the time, would you let me give him the squeeze?’ Swift asked, hearing his words spread through the sudden silence, until it was broken by Burns’s loud laugh.

  ‘Give Newburn the squeeze?’ Gracey said, turning sideways on the chair while Burns’s laugh collapsed into a snigger. ‘Give Newburn the squeeze? Well, you’ve done everything else, so just maybe you should be the man to finish it off.’

  ‘You can’t be serious,’ Burns said, glancing at Gracey and then looking round the room for support.

  ‘OK, Swift, you can lead the way and I’ll be ready to step in if you give me the nod. Just don’t be threatening to shoot him if he doesn’t give the right answers and Detective Constable Burns, I want you to get your arse out of that suit – you look like a friggin’ leprechaun – and before you do that, sort out Linton and get him off the premises without him talking to the press. They brough
t him over from Crumlin about an hour ago.’ Burns stood, as if drained of words, and as he turned to go Gracey called after him, ‘And put the kettle on and see if you can rustle up a few sandwiches for Swift and me – this might take some time.’

  Swift found a quiet place in the station and sat and planned everything in his head, working everything out, covering all the angles, preparing for all the possibilities and then when it was time headed down to find Gracey. In the corridor with the lime-green walls he met Burns leading Linton towards the back yard. Neither man acknowledged him and Linton stared only at the brown paper bag that held his returned possessions. His face looked thinner and his hair had been cut short. The smell of prison laced his steps. Swift stood and watched him follow Burns towards the back gate, then waited as the small door cut in the large metal gates was opened for Linton to slip through. Burns couldn’t free the bolt and Linton turned for a moment and looked back. Swift’s hand closed round the ring he held in his pocket as their eyes met. The only thing she had ever given him. He took a step forward and then stopped. The door was open and Linton bowed his head as he disappeared. He looked at the ring, at the fading snow. It was time. Gracey would be waiting for him. Then, as Burns locked the door again, he placed the ring on his finger and went inside.