by Nick Oldham
Her eyes flickered down, momentarily distracted – and Henry launched himself at her.
In his mind he knew exactly where he intended to take her. In the midriff. It would be a bone-crushing, organ-compressing tackle, underneath the gun, slamming her back against the door and using his shoulder to heave upwards, at the same time pinning her right arm against the wall. He had it all worked out in that micro-second. Visualized the point of impact, driving the breath out of her lungs, crushing and disarming her.
He dived like the rugby player he had been many years before.
Difference was that when he was nineteen or twenty, he hadn’t weighed almost fifteen stone and had been fit, agile and super-fast. Thirty plus years ahead, too much spread, too much weight, had slowed him right down. For his age he knew he was pretty fit, could still run three miles a day, visited the gym regularly . . . but it was all relative. In fact he was older and slower than his brain led him to believe.
Janine reacted instantly.
Whilst Henry was in mid-air, she pulled the trigger. In the confines of the small room the sound of the discharge was ear-shatteringly loud, accompanied by a spectacular muzzle flash and a bad recoil that jerked her hand up.
The bullet still connected, hitting Henry with such force that he felt like he’d slammed into a brick wall. The impact stopped him, spiralled him off course, threw him back and he landed face down in an untidy heap, almost at the point from where he’d jumped.
There was no pain. Just a huge, spreading numbness radiating out from somewhere around his neck and right shoulder. He tried to move but his limbs didn’t respond to any of his brain’s demands. With a great effort of will he pushed upwards, but then his hands slipped in something thick and oily and warm and went from under him, and his face hit the floor in the wetness.
With a surge of panic he realized he was lying in his own blood and that he had been shot.
His eyes were open. He saw Janine’s feet. His mouth popped like a stranded fish and he tried to speak.
She was standing over him.
More immense effort. He moved his head slightly and looked up through the corner of his eye to see her pointing the gun down at his face. The black circle of the muzzle was maybe four inches away from him. Her finger curled around the trigger. The cylinder started to revolve. Henry could just about focus on the tips of the bullets seated in their chambers, fitted snugly like mini-missiles.
It rotated.
The hammer went backwards. The trigger was pulled. Henry didn’t even have the energy to wince, to prepare himself for the impact into his brain. There was a metallic clunk as the firing pin smacked down onto a dud. It didn’t fire. In anger, she yanked the trigger back twice more – both duds.
‘Shitty fucking ammo,’ she said.
Henry’s eyes closed slowly. His face relaxed into the spreading pool of his own blood. He heard footsteps, a door closing . . . then blackness.
NINETEEN
Because his mother had not been particularly religious, the funeral service was conducted by a humanist preacher who had spent a couple of hours in the company of Henry, Lisa and Henry’s two daughters a couple of days before. It had been good to talk about his mother, and the preacher had been skilled at getting the four of them to open up. Henry actually enjoyed the process, which was something of a catharsis, recalling not only the significant events in his mother’s life (such as his twenty-four-hour birth, which she often described as excruciating) but also more trivial, funnier ones. From their chat, the preacher had put together the speech he was to make at the crematorium.
His mother’s body had been brought to his house in Blackpool before the funeral cortege rolled from there out to a crematorium near Kirkham. It was only a small convoy; first the hearse, then a long funeral limousine carrying Henry, Lisa, Leanne and Jenny, and behind that another limousine with Rik and Alison and her step-daughter Ginny, plus Henry’s old friend from the FBI, Karl Donaldson, and his wife Karen. A few other cars followed, carrying a couple of distant relatives Henry didn’t even know existed and a few of his mother’s friends. There were not many: the old dear had proudly outlived most of her contemporaries and most of those still drawing breath didn’t have the physical capability to get there.
Henry liked this. The fewer the better as far as he was concerned.
It went as well as any proceedings at a crematorium could, and afterwards they adjourned to a local hostelry near Kirkham where a meal had been booked.
It was ten days since Henry had been shot and he had been warned by his doctor not to do anything strenuous. Anyone, who for whatever reason, had almost bled dry and then been given a transfusion of six pints of blood, he was told, should take things easy for a long, long time. Henry argued that attending his only mother’s funeral was unlikely to be too taxing; overdosing himself with powerful painkillers, he had hobbled there, paid his respects, said goodbye and stifled his tears.
Throughout the service he had held Alison’s hand and when he glanced at her she was crying a river.
The meal was muted, but pleasant enough, and afterwards he sat back and sipped the green tea he had opted for, pulling his face at each sip and wishing it was a pint of Stella with a JD chaser.
He rolled his shoulder to keep it moving. Ten minutes of inactivity made it stiffen up and become very sore.
‘How are you doing, darling?’ Alison asked, sitting next to him. This was the first time he had ventured either beyond his house or the Tawny Owl. Although pleased by her concern, it was getting a little OTT for his understated taste. He did not like being fussed over.
‘I’m good.’ For the hundredth time.
She squeezed his hand. ‘I’m so sorry about your mum.’
‘I’m just gutted I wasn’t there when she died. But at least Lisa and the girls were – and the DNR thing didn’t have to be addressed. She had some familiar faces around her when she went. Of course I would’ve been there if I hadn’t been contemplating the end of my police career in a puddle full of my own blood.’
‘Thank God that hospital porter spotted your blood pooling out under that storeroom door.’
‘I’ll always be grateful to a hospital porter,’ Henry said. ‘And the fact that the gun was loaded with home-made shells.’
Sometimes, at night, he could hear the metallic smack of the firing pin hitting the useless bullets in Janine’s gun. And sometimes, the bullets fired.
Alison’s face creased at the thought. She turned and looked earnestly at him. ‘Henry, I don’t want to go through that again.’
‘It was just a bit of bad luck, really.’
‘What – being shot by a madwoman! You take it all so . . . so . . . God, I don’t know. Like it’s a joke.’ She was infuriated by his attitude. She smacked her fists down onto her thighs. She found she couldn’t say anything else and her eyelids fluttered over new tears. She had lost her first husband in a very ugly incident in the Middle East where she and he were both serving in the armed forces. Henry was aware the memory still affected her even eight years down the line. ‘Look,’ she eventually said firmly, turning her whole body to him to make her point. ‘You asked me to marry you and I said yes. I’m not going to rush you or anything, but I really would like to get married as soon as possible . . . it means so much to me, honey. And I’d really like you to retire from the police. You keep saying you will, but you don’t do it. But I absolutely hate you turning out to murders and horrible stuff like that.’ She paused. ‘I know you think you were born to hunt killers, but can we get on with our life without that at the Tawny Owl? I know you want to, and I want it – us – to be a success, but I want you to be by my side all the time . . .’
Henry looked up to see Rik Dean crossing the bar, mobile phone clamped to his ear, looking urgently at Henry and making excitable gestures.
‘What do you say, love . . .?’
Before Henry could answer, Rik said bluntly, ‘Henry – look, sorry to cut in, I can see this is a lovey-dovey mome
nt, but there’s a bit of breaking news here . . .’
Alison stared incredulously at Rik. Henry saw her reaction and for a moment was torn . . . what the hell was so important? He did the balancing act in his head and it came down in Alison’s favour.
‘Just give us a minute, pal?’ He arched his eyebrows pointedly at his friend, trying to get the message across.
‘But—!’
‘One minute,’ Henry insisted.
Rik’s eyes narrowed. He ended his phone call and walked over to the bar where Karl and Karen Donaldson were standing, glancing back at Henry, curious and a little alarmed.
‘Alison.’ He touched her knee. ‘I will retire in the near future, I promise, and I can’t wait to get legitimately serving beer to all those sozzled villagers in Kendleton . . . though I do have the feeling that me running a pub might be akin to Herod running a nursery. But I do have a few things to sort and a desk to clear . . . but for the first time in my life, I’m going to have a very long period off sick and milk the system, during which time I will do the decent thing by you and go down on one knee somewhere a bit tropical. But only when I know I can get back up without having to use a cane or a crane.’
‘Sod the painkillers.’ Henry slapped Rik on the back, having managed to creakily get to the bar. ‘I need a pint . . . and what’s so all-fired important on that telephone of yours?’
‘They’ve tracked her down.’
‘Where?’ Henry gasped. His insides did an empty spin.
‘Marseilles, would you believe?’
‘France?’
‘I think that’s where Marseilles is . . . but get this . . . she’s holed up in some grot-flat near the seafront and has opened fire at the bloody gendarmes . . . there’s a bloody siege going on.’
Henry shook his head. ‘Who’d’ve thought it . . .’
‘Told you she was a black widow.’