Fran’s face paled. Siren noise mercifully drowned out her reply. An ambulance cornered into the street and stopped behind the uniformed car. Stark beckoned urgently to the paramedics.
‘Shot through and through, left calf,’ he called as they came running up. ‘No fracture. Then again through the deltoid muscle, back to front. Heavy blood loss, pulse thready.’
The paramedics were already moving Barclay aside. The young constable stood over them, face ashen, his bloody hands shaking. Stark knew that look.
‘Right,’ he said, turning to the others. ‘We can’t wait. Start getting officers out the back of the station but keep them away from Royal Hill, Kirsch will see them. Get them over the rear blocks and out through Gloucester Gardens, and get on to Lewisham for help clearing streets and windows. Get eyes on every exit from the school at safe distance until Firearms take over. We have to keep Kirsch contained. Tell the officers in the cash office to stay put, and direct the SFO team to the rear courtyard for ingress. Give me your ASP, CS and radio.’
‘What are you going to do?’ asked Clark.
‘Be a distraction.’
Fran stared into the eyes of a stranger. Or perhaps she had seen this face once before, when he’d taken a knife from their attacker outside a rancid squat. Fran recalled that instant of murderous fury in his eyes. This was like that, but a colder, distilled, icy fury, hardly less frightening; his face scratched, splattered with mud and smeared with blood.
Clark complied. A sergeant with what … twenty-five years on the job? Nodding to a constable. Fran shook her head, disbelieving; but she was no better. Stark had assumed command without hesitation, and those that lead are followed.
So much so, that the reality of his words only sank in as he was stuffing the items into his jacket.
‘No!’ she barked, grabbing for his arm …
Too late. He’d already turned and sprinted away through the gardens and towards the open street.
‘Stark!’ she shouted, but it was futile. The bloody fool!
Something splintered off a tree just after he passed but Stark didn’t miss a step, bursting from the garden opposite the college entrance steps and out into the road, right in front of the tower’s windows. No showy zig-zagging, just a full-out sprint, or the best he could manage favouring one leg.
‘RUN!’ Fran screamed, as if that would help, as if he might not already think it prudent, as if he could go any quicker on his stupid bloody hip. How long did it take to change a rifle magazine, anyway? It was only thirty metres or so but it looked like Stark was in slow motion, wading through water. Any second now he was going to die, she knew it like it had already happened, like some horrible déjà vu. He was going to die and she was going to watch it happen.
But then he bounded up the steps into the darkness, as a chunk of stonework shattered off the modern portico.
‘Shit!’ she breathed, exhaling where she’d not known she was holding her breath. ‘Shit! SHIT!’ She turned to Barclay whose eyes were like saucers.
Fran was still trembling and nauseous. If her mother ever found out what her only daughter had done today she’d have a coronary out of spite. Worse, her dad would give her that look he always produced when she’d tried to do something one of her elder brothers had done and hurt herself in the process; the look that said she was his precious little girl.
She shook that off.
She had work to do …
‘Barclay,’ barked Clark, startling the young officer out of his thousand-yard stare. ‘Go the long way round to the back of the station and find Inspector Cartwright. Anyone hurt gets help, anyone not helps us. Roadblocks every junction. Megaphones, door to door, any building with a view of the tower – warn everyone to keep down and away from windows. Now!’
Fran already had her mobile out, dialling Groombridge. They had to get this out on the news too. ‘Come on, COME ON!”
Stark’s eyes struggled to adjust from daylight to gloom but there was no mistaking the shape on the floor, or the glazed expression staring across the marble. Blood from a chest wound, centre-mass, pooled dark and tacky around the corpse. Stark checked for a pulse all the same. The skin already felt cool.
PC Steve Lamont. The name came to Stark, unbidden.
Chirpy, professional, often the centre of a pocket of laughter in the canteen or locker room. Unmarried, no kids, as if that were solace. Wouldn’t have been standing here were it not for Stark’s call. Probably the first person Kirsch saw, walking in expecting a building full of targets. Ornate marble steps led up to the main reception through glass doors, crazed with four bullet holes. Five spent cartridges littered the floor. Kirsch had reloaded his revolver here.
Stark closed Lamont’s eyelids with a silent agnostic prayer for the fallen – remembrance, and vengeance.
He considered not broadcasting the news, but intel was king and morale the padre’s problem. He thumbed the radio. ‘Officer down. School of Management foyer. Officer RG-762,’ he read from Lamont’s collar number. ‘Fatal shooting. DC Stark in pursuit of suspect.’
Peering round he picked out the floor plans inside the front door; next to the fire alarm panel for the brigade’s use. Wrenching the frame from the wall he studied them, turned right through doors, running along a corridor …
A dull thud echoed to meet him. The sound of the suppressed rifle amplified within the larger suppressor of the stair-tower.
‘Two.’
77
The car slewed to a halt, thumping up a kerb, the driver ducking down behind the wheel. Groombridge dropped his phone into the footwell with a curse, then blinked at the neat, frosted circular hole through the centre of the windscreen. Peering round he saw where the bullet had disappeared through the rear seat, leaving another hole, less neat, with seating foam feathered out of it. A cloud of dust motes floated in the sunlight. The driver – Groombridge realized he couldn’t think of the girl’s name … bright girl, potential – was trembling. He reached out a hand to comfort her, but the windscreen shattered into thousands of pieces and fell over her, over them.
She screamed.
Looking over his shoulder again he stared at the second hole in the back seat, not ten inches from the first. A second bullet. He’d not realized; he’d thought the screen had just given way from the first. Stupid.
No more stupid than sitting here waiting for a third.
Reality snapped home with stomach-clenching nausea. ‘Stay down!’ he shouted, pushing the sobbing girl lower. She was panicking, wildly thrashing at her hair to shake off the myriad glass cubes as if each were a biting creepy-crawly. ‘Constable! Stay down! Get as low as you can!’
He was already thrusting the door open with one foot and pulling himself out of the car. The siren’s wail was deafening outside the car, and the lights … Stupid! What had they been thinking?
The radio messages were garbled and contradicting. They’d tried to reach the station’s side gate down Royal Hill, but it had brought them face on to the clock tower.
As if his own glare were responsible, part of the lights exploded right in front of his face. Something bit his cheek. He felt at it. Blood. A piece of the light. He staggered back, away from the car, tripping on the kerb into pots arranged outside the florist.
The constable was screaming again, sitting up in plain view, taking deep breaths between screams. Groombridge felt himself step forward, but she was opening her door on the far side and climbing out.
‘Stay down,’ he bellowed.
She shot sideways, knocked aside like a doll.
Another five. Fresh target, thought Stark, cursing. Who was on the other end of those shots? Had someone else just been knocked to the ground by an unprovoked bullet they never heard coming?
He peeped round the corner up to his right. A generous, four-sided stair with corner landings; the base of the tower. The crunch of a magazine snapping into place, bolt action, a thump, another bolt action and the sound of an ejected shell casing bouncing down hard stai
rs.
One.
Stark took the steps two at a time, ignoring an early warning from his hip and a pointed reminder from his ribs.
Groombridge ran round the back of the car and saw her sprawled across the bloody pavement. He reached out for her epaulette and dragged. She was a slim girl, but as dead weight … dead weight …
He leant out further and dragged with all his might. Friction gave way to his desperation and she slid behind the car with him.
Staying low, he rolled her over. Her eyes were closed. He’d expected the glassy stare of death, but they were closed. He tried to find a pulse.
The car rocked ever so slightly as the rear windscreen shattered above his head. No gunshot, he realized, remembering the report from the old house basement; silenced rifle. It was only then he noticed the number plate was smashed. There were two jagged exit holes in the metal panelling of the boot, each a little Mount Fuji shape tipped with bare metal for snow, level with his head where the first two bullets had gone right through the car. Level with his head. He stared at them dumbly … then blinked. Grabbing the girl under her arms he dragged her across the road towards the florist, expecting any second to be knocked sideways himself.
Something whipped through the air and smacked the road away to his right.
He barged the florist’s door expecting it to open, but it rattled on its lock. Through the glass he glimpsed the florist peering terrified over her counter.
‘Police, emergency! Open up!’
He dragged the girl sideways so not even her feet were visible from the tower around the slight curve in the road.
Another bullet tore into the car, then, several seconds later, yet another. Potshots. Vexation, perhaps. There was blood on the road, dragged in a ragged line towards them. Growling a vicious curse, Groombridge felt for his phone, but it was still in the damn car.
Twisting, he banged on the florist’s door. ‘Police! Call an ambulance!’
Five, in quick succession. Oil-blue gun-smoke hung around the fourth level.
Stark closed the distance as fast as possible, but turning the corner into the third-floor landing he heard a change above … no mag change … but activity … footsteps! He accelerated, but heard a door slam shut.
Moments later he was on the final flight, the carpet giving way to bare steps, littered with rifle shell casings. The stairwell stopped. This whole last landing obviously hadn’t been decorated in years. Kirsch had been able to walk in and ensconce himself up here out of sight with a perfect view of the station. The photo of Harper from here was probably recon as much as stalking. There was a set of small lift doors and a sign across them announcing the lift defunct, itself decrepit. Adjacent, a plain door … to more stairs. No handle, lock broken … barred from the other side.
He couldn’t hope to kick it down with his unreliable hip, or shoulder it open with cracked ribs. His primary objective, after stopping Kirsch getting off shots into the street, had been to prevent him from retreating upwards.
‘Suspect heading up tower,’ he barked into the radio. ‘DC Stark in pursuit.’ Cursing his slowness, he cast around and snatched up a fire extinguisher, took a step back and rammed the latch with all his might, bursting the door open with a splintering of wood.
Footsteps echoed down the bare concrete stairwell.
Stark growled, and ran.
78
Fran turned to Clark, whose cohort had swollen by three. They’d all heard it. ‘We should head inside.’
Clark shook his head. ‘Not without armed support.’
He was right, but she wasn’t much for rules right now.
Officer down! crackled Clark’s radio for the second time in the space of a minute. Not Stark’s voice, but familiar.
Faces already shocked with grief and anger, paled once more. No bullets had hit the station in the last minute, but they’d all heard the screech of tyres round the corner up Royal Hill, and faint sounds of smashing or impacts, achingly out of sight.
Garbled messages overlapped, but Fran picked out a name – Groombridge.
Her heart froze in her chest.
It was several seconds before news emerged that it wasn’t him who was injured, but an officer with him, though how badly no one knew. Another ambulance was inbound and one of Clark’s uniforms was speaking with them on his radio, directing them down Royal Hill with caution.
‘He’s stopped firing,’ said Clark.
‘What the …?’ exclaimed another, peering over Fran’s shoulder.
She turned to see a news channel satellite van pulling up. Out climbed two guys with cameras and lighting and a woman with platinum-blonde hair in a long, fitted red coat.
Straight flights of ten, dog-legging, two flights per floor. Each level had a narrow single-glazed window facing west away from the station and a high, bare windowless cavern in the main body of the tower, the first stacked with old desks and chairs and assorted forgotten items, thereafter empty with the concrete cross-bracing visible. The unbroken noise of Kirsch above allowed Stark to pass each ambush point without caution, but he could feel himself slowing.
Always too slow.
To join the dots and clear this building before anyone got killed. To see through Clive Tilly. To see through Mark White in time to prevent the murder of James Rawlings and the fresh terrorization of Susan Watts. To recognize the ambush that claimed Miriam Kirsch and could just have easily have claimed Fran …
The nausea rose up. Seeing his fears confirmed in Miriam’s eyes; that he’d let them be led into a kill zone. He fought down the urge to stop and vomit.
Weakness. Always weakness.
Now PC Lamont, and how many more outside? How many more lives? He cursed his useless body, cursed the sodding bandages restricting his breathing, cursed his stupidity and cursed Simon Kirsch.
Suddenly he registered a cessation in Kirsch’s footfalls above.
Looking up, he saw Kirsch peering down, gasping too, ruddy face twisted in what might have been a snarl or a grin as he started up again. Stark did likewise, but the pause had allowed lactic acid to pool in his legs like hot lead.
Four more flights and his steps were all but drowned out by his ragged breath and thumping pulse. His thighs burned and his ribs stabbed, each step telling him it must be the last, screaming at him to rest. No, no, NO!
Madness rolled through Stark, an intensity of fury that almost brought tears. If that fucker kills one more person today I’ll throw him from the fucking roof, even if I have to drag him over myself!
‘If you want to be useful,’ Fran barked, ‘tell everyone within sight of the clock tower to stay away from their windows.’
‘Excuse me?’ asked the reporter, turning away from the camera, mid declaratory utterance.
Fran plucked the microphone from her hand, pushed the polished parasite aside and stared into the lens, trying not to think about her dishevelled, muddy, half-crazed appearance.
She’d lost it; she could see that, as if she were trapped inside some separate irrational being, and the only thing preventing her from screaming was the tiny rational Fran inside that was far too cross to blow it now.
Some idiots liked this sort of thing, living off the ‘buzz’ or whatever moronic jargon they used to justify their self-indulgence. It just made Fran feel like vomiting. Stark was one of those idiots, dashing off as if death hadn’t just blown several kisses in his direction. This was his fault! Some people fought and some froze. She hated being the latter and hated him for not. She hated him so much right now.
‘This is Detective Sergeant Millhaven of Greenwich Police. A dangerous suspect has been cornered in the Greenwich clock tower armed with a rifle. He has proven himself willing to kill with it. Anyone within sight of Greenwich clock tower should get as far away as possible and keep away from windows until we give the all-clear.’
‘Sergeant, can you confirm the suspect is Simon Kirsch?’ demanded the reporter.
Fran flicked the microphone switch off and h
anded it back. ‘Repeat my warning every thirty seconds or I’ll arrest you.’
‘For what?’ asked the woman imperiously.
Fran rounded on her angrily, thrusting her hand over the camera lens. ‘For your part in whipping this madman into a killing spree.’
‘And what about your part?’ demanded the woman. ‘What about police blame?’
‘My people are risking their lives to stop this,’ roared Fran, forcing the woman to take a step back. ‘What are you and yours doing?’
The concrete stairs finally gave out to a cast-iron tight spiral stair with daylight glaring through a door. The glazed observation deck, below the roof level. Kirsch had ignored it, going for the roof, another level up.
Stark’s baseline fitness had narrowed the gap but injuries old and new meant there still was one. He attacked the spiral steps, but the combination of climbing and turning sent a jolt through his hip. Not now, he railed inside. Not today; he’d pay double tomorrow, gladly, if he could just have today for free.
Kirsch disappeared from sight above.
Stark made it to the top of the second spiral, gasping. Two hundred and sixty steps, the military OCD announced unbidden. Why did they call it a spiral anyway, when it was a sodding helix?
A doorway with no door opened into another bare antechamber, containing an ancient lift winch. On the far side Kirsch was struggling to pull a heavy rucksack after him through a two-foot-square crawl door – to the lower balcony, thought Stark. The only way out. If Kirsch barricaded it Stark would have to try climbing from the observation deck windows below – a low probability option with a steep downside.
Between the Crosses (Joseph Stark) Page 35