‘I imagine they have after that balls-up earlier,’ said Blount. ‘I thought you said they were highly trained?’
‘They are,’ said Stough, defensively. ‘But it was their first live operation. There were bound to be teething troubles.’
‘Teething troubles? It was a bloody fiasco.’
‘No one warned us that the boat had been booby trapped.’
‘Well, I hope they’re better prepared this time. Because this, I promise you, is definitely not a wild goose chase and I do not want any more cock-ups. Firstly, I want radio silence in case the suspect has some form of scanner.’
‘Is that likely?’ asked Stough.
‘He’s been one step ahead of us all through this investigation. I’m taking no chances.’ In truth, Blount had no reason at all to suspect that the Reverend Savidge could monitor police transmissions, but Quisty could. The man was not going to steal his thunder. Not now that he was so close to an arrest. ‘Right, that building I pointed out to you just now is the vicarage. And inside is the person that I believe is responsible for the murder of Shirley Pomerance.’
‘With all due respect, guv, that’s what you said earlier at the boat,’ said Stough.
‘I was fed duff information by a malicious former police officer,’ said Blount. ‘Savidge wasn’t our man. But his brother is.’
‘You said vicarage. Is he a vicar then?’ asked PC Tom Renny (TRU 2), a born-again Christian. ‘I don’t think I could shoot a vicar.’
‘I don’t want you to fucking shoot him!’ said Blount. ‘I want him captured alive and fit enough to stand trial for murder.’
‘But you say that he’s definitely armed?’ asked Stough.
‘He is. But just hand weapons from what I saw. Spears and clubs and that sort of thing. No guns.’
Stough’s phone began to ring. He looked at the screen.
‘It’s DCI Quisty,’ he said.
‘Ignore it. This is more important.’
‘But—’
‘Ignore it. On my authority. Are you all set to go?’
‘We are. We’re going to use tactical option fourteen.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Blount.
‘I call it the Scorpion’s Tail,’ said Stough, grinning.
‘There is definitely a person or persons being kept in the rear of the van and I’ve seen a man who I believe to be the missing solicitor Andrew Tremens moving about,’ explained Shunter to the group of police officers who’d responded to his phone call. As requested, they’d arrived without sirens and blue lights so as not to alert the van driver.
‘Is Tremens the murderer then?’ asked an officer.
‘Honestly, I have no idea,’ said Shunter. ‘I’ve seen him in the passenger seat rather than in the back of the van so he could possibly be an accomplice. There must be another suspect who was driving the van. I haven’t sighted him or her yet. Just be aware that there is another person to watch out for. My advice is: don’t take any silly risks.’
A car turned up with Quisty and Woon on board. And, to Shunter’s surprise, Helen Greeley and Savidge.
‘I’m just briefing the lads and lasses with what I know,’ said Shunter. ‘Which, to be honest, isn’t much. You can’t see a lot from here with the naked eye.’
‘Let’s try these then, shall we?’ said Quisty, lifting a large pair of binoculars to his eyes. ‘Two women in the back, by the looks of things. They’re in deep shadow and I can only see their legs. Both have their ankles tied. I can see Andrew Tremens – it’s definitely him – and he’s chatting to someone in the driving seat.’
‘What’s the plan then?’ asked Woon.
‘We can’t approach over land as it’s completely flat and there are few hiding places, just a handful of isolated shrubs and trees,’ said Quisty. ‘And while there’s been no suggestion that the suspect is armed, if he, or they, do have a gun they could pick us off far too easily. And, for some reason, I can’t seem to raise the TRU on the radio or by phone.’
‘So what do we do?’ asked one of the officers.
Shunter’s eyes followed the canal a short distance to where he could see the painted boats moored at The Rushes.
‘I have an idea,’ he said. ‘How about this . . .’
‘The boy is clearly unhinged,’ said Mrs Handibode. ‘You’ve seen what he is capable of.’
‘I have. Which doesn’t bode well for us,’ said Andrew Tremens.
A man in a balaclava emerged from the van holding a baseball bat in his gloved hands. The business end of the bat was stained a disturbing reddish brown.
‘You three,’ said the figure, waving the bat menacingly. ‘We’re going for a walk.’
Thunderbirds Jeff Scott John Virgil Gordon Alan Parker Lady Penelope Savidge woke with a start. He reached for his glass of brandy and sipped at it to take away the unpleasant taste of sleep. He’d woken to the theme music of Murder, She Wrote and he smiled as Angela Lansbury’s beaming face appeared on the TV screen. It was a show that he was very fond of, mainly because of his exceptional hit-rate in identifying who the killer was likely to be. He’d been a regular watcher of the show for thirty years and had seen so many episodes that he had started to see patterns emerging. For example, there were certain actors who, as he put it, ‘always played the baddie’, so if they turned up in the cast they were very likely to be the murderer. The same applied to the most famous guest star in any episode, or to anyone who drove a European car such as a Mercedes or BMW; the good guys always drove American marques like Chevrolet or Buick. He took another gulp of brandy. It was Sunday evening, the day of rest, and his work was done so what harm was there in relaxing with a bottle of the good stuff? Well, half a bottle now. It was a very fine brandy.
He got unsteadily to his feet and propped the spear that had been on his lap against the wall. He’d got into the habit of always sleeping with a weapon in his hands during his time as a missionary in South Africa in the early 1990s when a white man, even one who was doing God’s work, wasn’t always safe from the vigilantes that prowled the townships. He walked unsteadily into his kitchen to see what was available to nibble on. Finding a couple of cold sausages in the fridge, he smeared ketchup along their lengths and stood idly chomping them while looking out of the window at his untidy garden and pondering upon what had gone wrong with his life. He’d been an idealistic youth, if a troubled one. Unwanted at birth and adopted by a bully of a man with a foul temper and no qualms about dishing out a good beating, he’d looked forward to the day when he was old enough to move as far away as possible. And that was what he’d done, joining a Christian relief mission inspired by Live Aid the year before. For the next five years, he’d moved around Ethiopia and Somalia before settling in South Africa where he’d found his calling. Inducted as a minister of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, he’d gone on to serve for ten years in various townships. They had not always been happy years. Revolution was in the air and it was difficult to source the medication he needed to cope with his panic attacks and anger issues. Over time he had, instead, taken to drink whenever it was available, and when it wasn’t, he’d distilled his own. It was a brew of such strength and potency that it had rendered him next to useless as a minister. Eventually, the bishop had decided that perhaps he’d be better off back in the UK where medication and counselling were more readily available. The Reverend Savidge had returned home to South Herewardshire in 2001 and had been tending to the spiritual needs of the sleepy parish of Spradbarrow ever since. However, his need for alcohol had, if anything, increased now that it was more freely available.
He returned to his sitting room and saw, to his satisfaction, that an actor who always played the baddie was in the cast of this evening’s episode. Secure in the knowledge that he now knew who the murderer was going to be, the Reverend Thunderbirds picked up his assegai and sat back down in his favourite armchair. An amusing thought struck him; what if the show’s sleuthing heroine Jessica Fletcher was the murderer in every episode? After a
ll, people seemed to get killed wherever she happened to be. He smiled as he considered how much fun it would be to make a final episode of Murder, She Wrote in which it was discovered that Fletcher had been one of America’s most prolific serial killers all along. Perhaps, from now on, he’d watch each episode and try to figure out how she could have committed the crimes.
A sudden noise caught his ear. A decade of living with the constant threat of death had heightened his sensitivity to suspicious noises no matter how drunk he was and there had definitely been an unexpected squeak from the direction of the back garden. Clutching his spear in one hand, he reached down a knobkierie from the wall with the other. It was one of several dangerous-looking weapons that he’d brought back as souvenirs. He then decided that the club, as threatening as it looked, didn’t have the range he might need. He therefore dropped both it and the spear and selected instead a hunting bow he’d been given by the San people of the Kalahari. He swigged directly from the bottle of brandy for Dutch courage and staggered to the kitchen. They’d find him a harder man to kill than most country vicars.
‘I’ve just got another text from DCI Quisty saying that I should contact him urgently,’ said Stough.
‘Ignore it,’ said Blount.
‘But he might—’
‘Ignore it. I take full responsibility.’
‘Okay. If you say so,’ said Stough. ‘We’re in position and ready to go.’
‘Good. So, why do you call it the Scorpion’s Tail?’
‘Distract with the claws and the victim doesn’t see the tail until it’s too late. Watch.’
Two of Stough’s officers were standing one each side of the vicarage front door. One of the officers rang the bell.
Inside the vicarage, the Reverend Savidge heard the doorbell but ignored it. Whoever it was could wait. He was more concerned with the person that was skulking around in his overgrown back garden. The noise he’d heard had been the rusting hinges on his back gate complaining. He’d since spotted a dark figure furtively lurking behind a bushy rhododendron. The movement of a nearby photinia, despite the lack of a breeze, made him suspect that a second intruder was also hiding in his garden. He fitted an arrow to the bowstring and crept towards his kitchen door. He lay down on the welcome mat and gingerly pushed open the cat flap with the tip of the arrow. He could now see two pairs of legs dressed in black trousers moving suspiciously from one overgrown shrub to another as they made their way towards the vicarage. Both of the trespassers, he noted from their hands, had dark skin. And both were carrying rifles. The Reverend’s heart began hammering in his chest and he suddenly found it hard to breathe. His nose began to bleed as a wave of panic rolled over him and, suddenly, he was back in South Africa during some of the worst violence of the late eighties and early nineties. It was a time when he’d seen police officers firing indiscriminately into crowds and thrashing people with their long leather sjamboks; when people, black and white, had been hacked to death with axes and machetes and when Africa had given the world a new and hideous form of execution by way of ‘necklacing’ – putting a petrol-filled tyre over a person’s torso, trapping their arms by their sides and then setting it alight. The Reverend would not let that happen to him. The Bible might tell him that it was a sin to kill another human but there was nothing to say he couldn’t maim someone in self-defence.
‘“And thine eye shall not pity; but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot”,’ he muttered to himself as he carefully took aim. ‘Or a thigh for a thigh,’ he added as he let the arrow fly before passing out.
As the arrow thudded into PC Oduwole’s leg and embedded in the bone, he screamed once and involuntarily clenched his fists, pulling the trigger on his semi-automatic rifle and peppering the rear of the vicarage with bullets.
The man in the balaclava had bound Andrew Tremens’s hands and hobbled his feet with just enough length of rope to allow him to walk with tiny steps. All three of his prisoners had been bound the same way.
‘Let’s go then,’ he said.
‘Please don’t do anything hasty that you might regret,’ said Tremens.
‘Walk,’ said the man. He prodded his three captives in their backs with the baseball bat for emphasis. Tremens took one step and fell over.
The two officers at the front of the vicarage heard the staccato sound of semi-automatic fire and ducked as the front windows of the building blew out in a hail of lead. One bullet grazed the arm of the officer closest to the window and he responded by immediately firing back into the house. One of his shots found the already injured PC Oduwole’s shoulder. In response his colleague, PC Khalsa, returned fire under the assumption that the bullets were coming from inside the kitchen. His slugs tore up the room and two of them passed right through the building and slammed into the window of the Chapel Street hair salon opposite, setting off the burglar alarm. The officers at the front of the vicarage retaliated by firing into the Reverend’s lounge and destroying his television.
Blount watched it all in horror from the safety of the TRV.
‘Stop firing!’ he yelled. ‘Stop fucking firing! I want him alive!’
‘He’s shooting at my men!’ shouted Stough. ‘They have the right to retaliate with reasonable force!’
‘Reasonable force?’ spluttered Blount. ‘They must have let off two hundred rounds already! Can’t they gas the bastard?’
‘They don’t have gas with them.’
‘Why not?’
‘He’s a vicar! We thought the threat of guns would be enough. But there’s a case of gas grenades behind your seat. Grab a handful and get ready. They can’t gas him but we bloody can.’
Stough turned the key in the ignition and the TRV roared from its position in the alleyway beside the Herewardshire Hog and drove menacingly towards the front of the vicarage at speed. As the vehicle screeched to a halt outside the building, the two officers who were pinned down by gunfire leapt into the back. Blount opened his window and pulled the pin on a CS gas grenade. He lobbed it towards the vicarage’s broken front window but it bounced off the wooden frame with an annoying clunk and landed on the pavement, already spewing gas. Blount swore, pulled the pin on a second grenade and was about to try again when a fresh burst of machine-gun fire erupted from inside the house. As the bullets slapped into the side of the armoured vehicle, Stough swore loudly and stamped on the accelerator. The TRV jumped forward and so powerful was the movement that his two officers fell out of the open back doors and Blount dropped his primed grenade into the footwell. As the vehicle began to fill with gas, another hail of bullets hit the TRV, bursting a tyre. Coughing and spluttering and unable to see where he was going, Sergeant Stough drove through the front window of the village store.
The residents of Spradbarrow had started to emerge from their houses to see what the noise was all about. Many were now howling in anguish, as were the two TRU officers, as the billowing clouds of CS gas drifted across the street and caught them in the eyes. Burglar alarms clanged incessantly and police sirens could be heard in the distance.
The Reverend Thunderbirds Savidge was unperturbed. He’d been unconscious throughout the entire siege.
‘Listen, I realise that you have some serious issues with this lady but that doesn’t mean that you have to harm any of us,’ said Mrs Handibode.
The man in the balaclava was beginning to regret his decision to hobble his captives. Their progress was tortuously slow, each step being no more than a few inches in length. All of the captives had fallen over several times and, for the entire length of the journey, Mrs Handibode had been bending his ear.
‘Lord knows, there are times when I’ve wanted to kill Brenda myself,’ said Mrs Handibode. ‘But you won’t feel any better for doing so, mark my words.’
‘I don’t want to feel better,’ snapped Balaclava. ‘I just want to be rid of her.’
‘But why?’ said Mrs Handibode.
‘You really have no idea what she’s done
to me, do you?’ said Balaclava. ‘She’s—’
He was interrupted by the thrum of a distant outboard motor. A small, curiously painted pleasure cruiser was approaching from the direction of The Rushes at some speed.
‘Shit!’ said Balaclava, replacing all three of his prisoners’ gags. ‘Back to the van! Now!’
They turned around and began shuffling away from the canal in a comically slow penguin waddle. Andrew Tremens fell over again.
‘He’s still breathing,’ said Stough. ‘In fact, I’d swear he’s asleep.’
He was examining the recumbent and half-undressed form of the clergyman who had been dragged from the vicarage by the uninjured TRU officers and unceremoniously dumped on the pavement. Somewhere along the way, the vicar had lost his underpants and he was sporting a quite unnecessary erection. At first glance, he’d looked to be seriously injured but the copious amounts of blood around his head and upper body had turned out to be the result of a nosebleed. Otherwise, and quite remarkably, he had sustained no injuries at all. The same could not be said of the TRU officers. In their enthusiasm to take out the murder suspect, two of them had successfully shot each other and one of those also had an arrow in his leg. All were suffering the effects of CS gas exposure. And there had been no trace of a gun found in the house. Stough was looking shamefaced, a condition made infinitely worse by his reddened, weeping eyes and the facial injuries he’d sustained from crashing the TRV into the shop while not wearing a seatbelt.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Stough. ‘My men were sure that he—’
‘Get him under lock and key at Bowcester nick and get your people some medical help,’ said Blount. He had fared even worse than Stough; he’d had an allergic reaction to the gas and his face was bright red and swollen like a tomato. His eyes, already pink and painfully bloodshot, had been reduced to tiny slits. ‘The important thing is that we’ve caught the bastard. We can work out what happened and why it happened later.’
A Murder to Die For Page 25