Kirsch’s howl moved seamlessly from pain into fury as he lifted a boot and kicked Stark in the side, sending him over on to his back, gasping, berating himself for offering cracked ribs as a target.
Gritting his teeth, with almost maniacal determination, Kirsch straightened his index finger enough to extract it from the trigger guard and replace it with his middle finger.
His next kick landed on Stark’s left hip, right where the titanium plate held him together.
Stark curled up in pain.
‘Oh dear … still tender there, war hero?’ taunted Kirsch. ‘Who’s defective now?’
Stark could only flinch as the big man followed up. He cried out in pain but this time half-faked. He’d twisted enough to take both blows in the meat of his upper thigh rather than his pelvis. He had to eke this out, anything to distract Kirsch from picking up his rifle once more. But he couldn’t afford to be knocked senseless. He needed to remain alive, alert, ready. Give ’em what they want, hissed his instructor. Let them know it hurts. Let their satisfaction distract them. Let ’em gloat. Everyone breaks in the end, but make ’em wait.
The final kick didn’t miss.
Kirsch laughed maniacally as Stark writhed on the floor hoping none of the nuts and bolts had given way. ‘Not so funny now, are you? No more jokes, no more insults? It’s time to beg, war hero.
‘Up!’ he screamed. ‘Up on your knees!’
‘Tell me that’s not who I think it is,’ said Groombridge, staring at the banked monitors in disbelief.
Fran turned, her eyes widening in relief and horror at the dried blood he was caked in, not dissimilar in coverage to the mud caking her. ‘You’re okay?’
He didn’t have any bullet holes, but other than that the jury was out.
The paramedics had shoved him aside and gone to work on the girl. PC Marianne Pensol; her name had come to him. Away in the ambulance, status unknown. Unpromising, from the terse vocab of the medics. They hadn’t asked if he wanted to ride along, just rushed away, wordless and grim. He’d run across the open street to the back of the station without incident, where Barclay had directed him here to what was rapidly becoming the nerve centre for their collective impotence. ‘Never mind me,’ he snapped. ‘Who’s that?’
On screen the hostage got slowly to his knees, the gunman aiming the pistol at his head. Groombridge had already glanced around and done the maths. The look on Fran’s face confirmed his fears.
‘Stupid prick,’ muttered Harper.
Groombridge hadn’t the time to spare on Owen’s pride or prejudice. But if the damn fool was here, Specialist Firearms should be too.
‘Mickey!’ Tony Clark greeted him with a grim smile and a grimmer update.
Behind him, a huddle of armed response car officers broke apart, checked weapons, chambered rounds, and ran.
82
He should be grateful to be spitting blood and not teeth, Stark supposed, but if this carried on he’d be breathing blood from imploded ribs. Genuine dizziness washed through him again and he made the most of it, putting one hand down and raising a foot so he was on one knee as if he was about to be sick again. Kirsch grinned down in triumph.
That’s ten more seconds, arsehole. Give me another ten, I dare you. ‘Let me die on my feet.’
‘No.’ Kirsch laughed. ‘On your knees!’
Stark was out of time. He made a show of trying to get up and slumping back down, playing beaten; not much acting required. Every second was precious. He began again, as slowly as he dared, but unless the SFOs showed up any second now he was on his own.
‘Up!’ Kirsch ordered. ‘Get up on your knees and beg, war hero.’
‘Not in a million years, you spineless shit!’ hissed Stark.
‘Beg!’
He could play along, but it might be the last thing he ever did. Everyone breaks in the end … but not today. Stark shifted his weight, and muttered, ‘No wonder Kimberly despised you.’
With an animal scream of rage, Kirsch extended his pistol arm to shoot.
Stark leapt up. He’d surreptitiously positioned his hand and foot to give him all the thrust he could and he lunged for Kirsch, knocking the weapon aside. But as he did the last bullet fired with a sickening retort. His leg gave way, lost all strength beneath him, and he fell grasping at Kirsch’s bandoliers in a desperate effort, dragging Kirsch down on top of him.
Stark clung on but knew it was futile. His leg felt like it was swelling to bursting with a deep, dull agony front to back. Shot through. And whatever strength that left him would not be enough. Cursing, Kirsch kicked himself free, booting Stark in the face, rattling his brain and teeth. It may even have broken his jaw, he couldn’t tell. It hardly mattered.
Kirsch scrambled up and levelled the pistol at Stark’s head and pulled the trigger.
The satisfaction of finally hearing the hammer strike a spent cartridge and seeing Kirsch’s frantic confusion came too late. Stark was all out of tricks, strength and time. Lady Luck smiled with cold indifference. He could only watch as the pistol was clumsily reloaded. There was nothing left to try.
So be it, he thought. He’d done what he could. Bought time. In the end that was all he could do. He let out a deep sigh as the barrel levelled with his head for the last time.
Kirsch spun round and a distant shot rang out.
The church, thought Stark. The bell tower of St Alfege’s was the only nearby location high enough. Hell of a one-shot for range and elevation. God bless CO19 for all that sodding practice!
It took a second, but when Kirsch’s scream came it was a pig squeal of agony and disbelief as he clutched his side, looking around madly for the shooter. Starting to crumple, he tripped over his bag, staggering back towards the edge of the roof.
Stark made it to one knee, blood gushing from his other thigh. Pain twisting his vision, he launched himself and got a hand to Kirsch as the big man struck the low stone coping and toppled backwards. Stark got a second hand on, just as his own hips and waist slammed up against hard stone. Before he could think he found himself bent over the parapet holding Kirsch by his bandoliers over the hundred-foot drop to the main roof below.
His feet began to lift and he instinctively tensed every muscle in his body, trying to somehow grip the parapet with his midriff, to stop his legs rising and tipping them both into thin air.
Over Kirsch’s shoulder the Magnum spun silently down, seeming to take more time than it should, missed the main roof and smashed itself to bits on the unforgiving ground.
83
Kirsch stared up at him, face a mask of pure terror, mouth working open and closed like a fish out of water. ‘Up,’ he managed. ‘Pull me up! PULL ME UP!’ His voice rose to a shriek.
Stark just held on, frozen by his own fear.
Kirsch’s hands gripped Stark’s wrists desperately, but his left was covered with blood and slippery. Stark couldn’t see the man’s wound but it seemed there was little Kirsch could do to help himself.
‘PULL ME UP!’
Stark was pretty sure he couldn’t, and unsure if he wanted to try. Just around the corner was the narrow ledge-parapet of the tower’s lower roof ten feet below, but there was no hope of him swinging Kirsch on to it, or of Kirsch staying on it if he did. ‘Just wait,’ he gasped. ‘Cavalry on the way.’
With a slow ripping sound the left bandolier started to part slightly. How ironic it would be if Kirsch were to fall to his death because of a cheap military fake.
Kirsch’s hand slipped off Stark’s wrist, snatched back on, but slipped off again.
Panicking, he began frantically fumbling inside his coat, pulled out a small pistol and pointed it at Stark’s face.
Another gun, thought Stark distractedly. This is getting farcical. If the Magnum had looked ridiculously large in Kirsch’s hand, this looked ridiculously small. One of those baby Berettas so popular in the States now, where the addiction to concealed gun permits was growing fast. Trust a fantasist like Kirsch to crave the quietest, th
e biggest and the smallest.
‘PULL. ME. UP!’
Stark stared blankly down the barrel. At the back of his brain he could feel the pain in his leg, but his arms and shoulders were burning now too, his hips and stomach were agony against the unrelenting stone, his ribcage was splitting, every muscle in his legs was at snapping point trying to keep his toes in friction with the roof and he was bleeding from a bullet hole.
He began to laugh. That hurt even more but he couldn’t stop himself.
Kirsch stared up in disbelief. Thrusting the gun higher, inches from Stark’s eyes, he hissed, ‘Pull me up now!’
‘Or what?’ laughed Stark. Every chuckle lessened his breath, lessened his strength, but he couldn’t see past the absurdity. ‘Or you’ll shoot me?’
Kirsch nodded frantically. ‘Pull me up or both of us die!’
‘Do it then.’ The words came out cold, the laughter fading. They locked eyes and Stark felt a chill. ‘Do it, you pointless loser.’
‘I mean it!’
‘So do I.’ And he did. He should probably let go before Kirsch realized that. No one would ever know. Kirsch had made his choice the moment he opened fire on a stranger. Before that it was just twenty years in prison, twenty years to explain, the rest of his life to be a man. Now no one would listen. Whether he came down from the tower dead or alive, no one would care. He’d chosen wrong.
Stark suddenly recalled his conversation with Groombridge, about dangling Kirsch from the roof. Here he was after all. But he hadn’t the breath in him to ask whether Kimberly Bates really was buried in those woods where Miriam Kirsch now lay dead … Or to laugh. Truth and laughter were for others now.
Twisting with desperate effort Kirsch managed to raise the pistol higher, barrel pressed hard against the centre of Stark’s forehead. ‘I will do it,’ he gasped.
The finger tightened on the trigger in front of Stark’s eyes … but a strange peace was descending. Did Kirsch feel it too or was it just Stark? Perhaps the blood loss was beginning to tell. If the bullet had severed his femoral artery he’d be dead already, but it might’ve nicked it. There was a discernible dimming at the edge of his vision. It could equally be that with his diaphragm crushed into the stone the physical effort was slowly suffocating him. Either way, his strength was fading fast. Any second now his toes would lose contact with the roof and their combined weight would carry them both over.
He dragged in one last breath. ‘I … don’t … care.’
Kirsch’s panic was overwritten with blind fury.
The command formed in Stark’s mind but his hands wouldn’t listen. He willed them to open, to give in to their agony, to let go, but nothing …
The trigger finger tensed.
The shot rang out.
Both men looked at each other, at the cold, un-smoking gun. Blood bubbled up from Kirsch’s mouth, and fear in his eyes. He choked. The little pistol fell away and tumbled over and over as his hand gripped at his ribs, trying to stem the gushing blood. He was a dead man, he just didn’t know it yet.
And still Stark couldn’t make his fists open.
Second shooter? he puzzled. They were dangling over the rear corner of the tower, away from the church, he thought idly as he watched the pistol turn all the way down and slam into the pavement near the first. His toes slipped an inch and bit again. Try as he might he could not draw breath. He could feel his face swelling, passing red into purple.
He stared at the dying Kirsch. This was what history would remember. Spree killers turn their guns on themselves, but Kirsch didn’t have the balls. It was never about going out in a blaze of infamy; it was about ego, spite, the fantasy of revenge. Kirsch wasn’t just an arsehole, he was a coward, thought Stark, wishing he had breath to say it aloud. Instead he rolled his tongue round his dry mouth, summoning what saliva he could, and with the final air in his body and every ounce of disdain in his soul, he spat in Kirsch’s face.
Kirsch’s panic turned to horror, and he slipped from Stark’s failing grip just as Stark’s toes lost their battle with physics and tipped him up and almost over.
Balanced atop the stone parapet, arms and legs flailing at thin air, Stark watched Kirsch fall; not toppling as the pistols had, just arcing slowly backward with that look on his face: fear, panic and the knowledge that the very last thing anyone thought of him in this world was to spit in his face.
He clipped the edge of the main roof and spun into the ground like a rag doll.
Stark’s limbs clamped down on stone. He clung there limpet-like, gasping, staring at the body far below. Then movement to his right caught his eye. On the far end of the main building roof … A marksman in black police combats stood up and stared at him, rifle in hand. The second shooter. A much easier shot than the guy from the church, technically. And infinitely harder. Kirsch’s final victim. Condemned to remembering the squeezing of a trigger. The man was shouting something but Stark couldn’t hear it.
Releasing his grip, he fell back on to the roof, his diaphragm imploding to suck air into his lungs.
He rolled up into a sitting position, back propped against the parapet.
Blood seeped from his thigh in time with his slowing heartbeat, not gushing but not stopping, pooling on the roof. He should do something about it … but the effort was daunting.
Maybe he was already too weak. Or maybe it was something else; like his hands refusing to drop Kirsch, refusing to do what they should, the seemingly endless mutiny of soul against mind, between instinct and rational action.
His head was swimming now, vision dimming, lids getting heavy.
So it was blood loss.
And here he was again; much the same. Pain, dull in the background somewhere behind nausea and growing chill, utter weariness and willing capitulation to immobility, encroaching darkness and the overwhelming sense of relief. That peaceful feeling. That you’d done all you could and now it was up to someone else.
This time he was alone, though. No faces crowding round, soldiers talking, reassuring; no medic. People would be on their way, charging up the endless stairs, but they’d be too late. No one to decide for him. Pity.
But faces did flit in his tunnelling vision …
Fran, livid with him, of course.
Groombridge’s penetrating gaze, his unspoken disappointment.
Lovelace, looking on in embarrassment as his mother tearfully thanked Stark over and over in the hospital; then mother and fiancée weeping at the passing of his flag-draped coffin.
Major Collins’ widow, Margaret, defiant morning-yellow dress bleeding to mourning black. He tried to bring her husband’s face to mind, but couldn’t … Couldn’t see any of them any more. He ran through the names instead, roll-call of the dead, culminating with Miriam Kirsch and Steve Lamont. Of course he didn’t know how many lay in the street below, or in ambulances. He tried to remember how many shots Kirsch had made but it was too many. Too many.
Promise you’ll never do anything so bloody stupid ever again! chided his mother’s voice, tearily.
Sorry, Mum, he thought.
The sun broke the clouds, turning its beady yellow stare on him with carrion care from the fluttering sheen of death-black feathers. The darkness was closing in. He should do something about that … But in the end, what was the point? If it came down to him, Joseph Peter Stark; who didn’t fit, never had, never would, not here, not anywhere … He’d lived two years past his allotted time already and given all he could give. Not enough. Never enough. Regret was the only feeling one could never outwait.
But he’d not broken faith. He hadn’t.
Head drooping, he stared down at numbing fingers, white as stone crosses, tainted with poppy-red blood, and the deepening darkness between them.
So be it.
‘Pillock,’ tutted Pierson.
Leave me alone, he pleaded silently. I never broke faith. Leave me alone.
The last voice he heard was Kelly’s. ‘I love you, Joe …’
EPILOGUE
>
* * *
84
Groombridge watched the coffin being lowered into the ground. Funerals never sat easy with him. He’d attended too many, hovering at a discreet distance, letting the families know you were there but staying out of the way. So many of them said thanks. Too many.
Like Brian Bates.
As a murder detective, the moment you strived for was always bittersweet.
Groombridge had sat quietly and let Neville Darlington deliver the news. Bates had listened and nodded and stared at the golden necklace in the evidence bag, his trembling fingers hovering over it as if uncertain whether he was allowed to touch it, or if he dared. Dared believe it was over.
The bones had lain buried in Oxleas Woods all this time. Dental records and preliminary DNA confirmed the following morning. Kimberly Bates. Miriam Kirsch’s one act of truth, right there in the resting place of her greatest lie. Two empty plastic bleach bottles and an empty jar of chilli powder went some way to explaining why the dogs never found her. The weather, manpower and bad luck probably played more part.
Kimberly’s father listened to it all, and then thanked them … That his girl would at last, at least, have a funeral. That he could lay her in the ground beside his wife. Thanked them. And then, slowly, put his face in his hands and wept twenty years of tears.
Inspector Cartwright had joined them for the phone call to Billy Forester’s daughter, Billie, now Linda, married with a child on the way. Neville explained finding her father’s body in Deptford Creek all those years ago and wanted her to know, for what it was worth, that the man most likely responsible had paid for it in the end. Odd that a woman who barely remembered her natural father should cry for him all the same. She’d thanked them too.
Kimberly Bates’ funeral would be in the coming weeks, once the coroner released the remains. Groombridge would be there, and Neville, fate willing. The old DI looked sallow and shrunken in the coat, scarf and hat his wife had swaddled him in. His own appointment with the earth could hardly be far from his mind right now. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stevens would be there too. He’d put himself in front of every camera he could in the last week, trying to prevent his career following his reputation down the toilet.
Between the Crosses (Joseph Stark) Page 37