Get Cartwright

by Tom Graham

  ‘They’re blowing the front windows out!’ Sam cried, as glass showered into the living room.

  Gene made a grab for Ray’s gun, and for a moment there was an undignified tussle. Then Ray stumbled back, still holding on to his shooter, his face red and angry.

  ‘I came out here to help you, Guv!’ he snapped. ‘Not to give up me gun so you could save yourself and leave me to them bastards out there!’

  With a furious roar, Gene grabbed the big two-handed axe. ‘Right, Ray, you insubordinate sodomite! I’m gonna put this thing right through your undersized head!’

  Sam put in angrily: ‘Stop mucking about, you spanners, the enemy is outside!’

  There was a moment of sullen, macho glowering, and then Gene growled, ‘Well, Raymond, since in all this excitement you’ve forgotten how to take orders, perhaps you’ll tell us what you’re proposing to do next?’

  ‘I’m going upstairs,’ Ray said. ‘I’m going to open fire from a window. And Chris, you’re coming with me.’

  ‘But I ain’t got no shooter!’ Chris howled.

  ‘You’re gonna chuck things.’

  ‘What things?’ He turned imploringly to Gene. ‘What things, Guv?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, Christopher, I’m just the bloody DCI round here.’

  ‘You’re gonna chuck anything you can get your hands on!’ Ray hissed, dragging Chris with him up the stairs. ‘Furniture! Vases! Shoes!’

  ‘Unzip your kecks and take a gypsy’s on ’em if that’s what it takes, Chris,’ Gene called up after them. ‘And you have my blessing to direct that pissy stream straight on DS Carling, the gobby, back-chatting little –’

  More gunfire shook the house. More windows shattered.

  ‘Guv, we don’t have time to muck about,’ Sam urged him.

  Gene gave Annie a rough shove, sending her stumbling back into the kitchen.

  ‘Barricade the back door!’ he ordered. ‘And arm yourself with whatever you can find! Tyler – back me up.’

  Gene strode into the living room, the axe blade flashing. Annie thrust something into Sam’s hand. It was a meat cleaver from the kitchen.

  ‘Please don’t die,’ she said, then raced away to heap furniture against the back door.

  There was no time to hesitate, no time to think. Sam pounded into the living room after Gene. Broken glass crunched under his feet. The Guv was standing to one side of the shattered windows, so Sam positioned himself on the other. They pressed their backs to the wall and waited.

  ‘I’m going to kill that Ray Carling when we get out of this,’ Gene hissed. He was still bloody furious.

  ‘Take it out on them,’ Sam whispered, and he indicated with a nod of his head the unseen gunmen outside.

  Two or three more gun blasts flashed like a tropical storm in the deep night, the bullets racing through the broken window pane and smacking into the far wall of the living room. Then there was an ominous silence.

  Still gripping the meat cleaver, Sam shot an anxious glance at Gene.

  ‘Wait …’ Gene mouthed across at him, and he slowly lifted the axe.

  Above them, they heard Chris and Ray moving about in the upstairs bedroom. Moments later, there were cracks of gunfire, and a table lamp crashed down into the drive outside.

  Sam hopped from foot to foot, psyching himself to attack.

  ‘Wait …’ Gene mouthed again.

  Without warning, a figure came forcing its way in through the broken windows. Sam caught a glimpse of the pig-like face, flattened and distorted by the stocking mask. But his attention was caught more by the twin barrels of the smoking shotgun.

  Gene swung the axe. The blade whistled through the air and caught the gunman on the shoulder. His shotgun went off, blasting books from a shelf in a great flutter of flying pages. Sam jumped out and brought the cleaver down with all his strength, but it swept through empty air. The gunman was gone, back out into the night.

  More shots came from Ray upstairs, and now a glass with a toothbrush and tube of paste came down as missiles from Chris, followed by a slipper.

  Gene grabbed a chair, upended it, and rammed it against the remains of the window. Sam pulled down the bookcase and dragged it across. As he wedged it alongside the chair, shotgun slugs came blasting through it. At the same moment, Annie screamed from the kitchen.

  ‘I’ll hold ’em here!’ Gene bellowed. ‘Get round the back!’

  Sam tore across the wrecked living room and pounded into the kitchen. Annie was flat up against the back door, holding it shut with her body against a series of shattering blows from outside. Her feet began to slide slowly across the floor. The door edged open, and a black gloved hand reached in, grasping at Annie’s throat.

  With a cry, Sam sprang forward and brought the cleaver down. The broad blade sliced straight through the flesh and lodged into the bone at the wrist. At once, the arm withdrew, taking the cleaver with it.

  Looking around frantically, Sam saw the low level Beko fridge. He grabbed it and dragged it furiously across the floor, walking it to the back door to wedge it shut.

  ‘You okay?’ he asked Annie, panting.

  ‘I’m okay. You okay?’

  ‘I’m okay, but I don’t think that bastard out there’s feeling too perky, though.’

  There was movement at the window, and glass broke violently. Sam flung open a drawer, looking for a fresh weapon, and saw nothing but silver table knives.

  Next to him, Annie moved suddenly. She had a pan of boiling water on the stove, which she now flung at the broken window. The stocking-faced gunman briefly glimpsed there fell back in silence.

  ‘I put sugar in it,’ Annie said, her eyes wild and fierce now. ‘Like they do to nonces in prison. Sticks like napalm.’ And then at the empty window she screamed, ‘There’s plenty more of the same if you want it!’

  There was a flash of light and the roar of a shotgun, and plaster exploded from a suddenly gaping hole in the wall.

  And then, nothing.

  Sam looked at Annie, and Annie looked at Sam. They waited, panting, their eyes wide. But still there was nothing.

  It was then that the phone started to ring. The incongruity of it, surrounded by all the violence and destruction, made the sound almost sickening, like a child’s lullaby heard in a graveyard.

  ‘Ignore it!’ Annie hissed.

  But that was impossible. The sound drew Sam irresistibly out of the kitchen and into the hallway. He stepped across broken glass and shattered wood, searching for the source of the sound, and found the telephone sitting innocently on a little table in the alcove under the stairs.

  For a few moments, Sam hesitated, not quite able to nerve himself to reach out his hand and lift the receiver. Part of him was willing it to ring off. But the phone just kept on calling to him.

  At last, he relented.

  ‘Hello?’ Sam said in a toneless voice.

  The line was bad. Through a fog of static a man’s voice said, ‘I want to speak to Annie. Put her on.’

  The voice was indistinct and smothered with white noise, but Sam was in no doubt who it belonged to.

  ‘I said put her on.’

  ‘No,’ said Sam.

  ‘It’s in your interests to do what I tell you.’

  ‘Forget it. Annie’s with me now. You’ll never speak to her again, you’ll never see her again.’

  ‘I’m cutting you a deal, you silly boy. You and your police friends can walk out of here; all you have to do is give me what I came here for.’

  Sam thought hard. He wasn’t going to negotiate, but neither was he going to squander this opportunity to simply hurl insults at Gould. Every word counted.

  ‘Why are you speaking to us?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Because I haven’t come here to get drawn into a long, tedious fight,’ Gould replied through that swirling buzz of static. ‘I’ve come here for her. So put her on.’

  ‘We’re stronger than you thought,’ Sam said carefully. ‘There’s five of us in here. We outnumber yo
u now. That’s why you’re trying to cut a deal.’

  ‘You’d be a fool to think that.’

  ‘You’re a villain, Mr Gould. And Annie is a copper. Through and through. Like her father before her. That’s why she’s with us, that’s why she found herself here, in 1973, in CID A-Division. She might not have had a badge and a rank when she died, but that didn’t make her any less a copper than me or my guv’nor or anyone else in this department. Face it – you’ve lost her, like you’ve lost everything else. The law has won. It doesn’t always win, but this time, Mr Gould, this time, we got a result.’

  And with that, Sam hung up.

  We’re CID. We don’t do deals with scum. And he doesn’t own us. The days of Carroll, Walsh and Darby are over. Gould can go to hell. He can go to hell alone.

  He became aware that Gene was standing behind him, the axe still in his hands.

  ‘Well, Tyler?’

  ‘It was him. It was Gould. He was just trying to unnerve us. I told him to forget it.’

  ‘He won’t give up,’ Gene said. ‘He can’t, not now he’s grabbed the tiger’s tail. He’s in for the duration. He can’t leave here until we’re all dead, and his nasty little secrets from the past are safely buried again. Then he’ll go back to where he came from, back to whatever false identity he cooked up for himself, hidden away behind some dodgy death certificate and an empty grave that tell the world that Clive Gould is dead. Once you and me and Chris and Ray and dopey drawers back there in the kitchen are all done away with, that’s when he’ll call it a day. Until then, it’s war, Tyler. And you know what?’

  ‘What, Guv?’

  ‘I think he’s bloody luvvin’ it.’

  Upstairs, there was a resounding crash, and Chris let out a terrified cry. A door was flung open and then slammed shut, and moments later Chris came pounding downstairs.

  ‘Chris, what happened?!’ Sam cried.

  ‘They’re getting in!’ Chris gabbled in terror. ‘They’re getting in!’

  From the living room came the smash and crunch of breaking wood.

  ‘They’re attacking on every side!’ Sam hissed.

  ‘Ray!’ Raymond! Gene bellowed up the stairs. No answer. He turned on Chris. ‘What’s happened to ’im?’

  ‘There was blood!’ Chris whimpered.

  Gene grabbed Chris by the throat. ‘You left a man behind!’

  ‘There was blood, I was frit!’

  ‘Get back up them stairs.’

  ‘No way, Guv!’

  ‘Get back up them bloody stairs Skelton, you sickly shit – you do not leave a man behind!’

  ‘I ain’t going back up there!’

  Chris struggled free of Gene’s grasp and fell back like a frightened animal.

  ‘God dammit!’ Gene spat, glaring. ‘What the hell’s happened to my department? The whole lot of you’s gone to crock!’

  ‘I’ll go!’ said Sam, pushing past Chris. ‘Just make sure they don’t get in down here!’

  As Gene strode back into the living room, Sam leapt up the dark staircase, only realising he was unarmed when he reached the landing.

  ‘Ray? You okay?’

  As he moved towards the closed bedroom door, he smelt it – smoke.

  Sam took hold of the door handle, turned it.

  ‘Ray …?’

  As he opened the door, he saw a flickering orange glow. It played across the turmoil of the room – the bed with its sheets all pulled off and lying rumpled on the floor, the overturned furniture, the broken glass, the scattered books.

  And there, crumpled against a wall, his face hidden from sight, was Ray. As Sam looked, he saw a slow trickle of blood finger its way across the bare floorboards.

  Sam threw open the door. At once, he saw flames dancing around the windows. The curtains were ablaze, throwing their shifting light on Ray’s unmoving body.

  As Sam moved forward to get to him, he was stopped by a black figure that seemed to come out of nowhere. His saw the twin barrels of a shotgun, black gloved hands clutching the stock and trigger, then a face flattened by a stocking mask. Only, it wasn’t a mask. The face was distorted because the flesh was ripped and tattered, the gaps in it revealing the blood-stained skull beneath.

  It’s Carroll … Sam thought, numb with shock. Or Walsh, or Darby …

  Three gunmen. Three bent coppers, all dead, all in the pay of Clive Gould who even now continued to demand their service.

  The flames leapt behind the skull-faced horror as it stood over Ray’s prone body and jammed the barrels of the shotgun against his head.

  Instantly, Sam threw himself forward, landing heavily on the gunman. His hands locked themselves around wasted, bony limbs with chunks of flesh still clinging to them. As he fell against the gunman’s body, Sam felt the exposed ribs jutting out beneath the fabric of his black sweater.

  Down they went, the two of them, clamped together, wrestling for possession of the shotgun. They fell against the burning curtains, bringing them down on top of them. Sam rolled clear and sprang to his feet, saw the shotgun lying amid the widening pool of Ray’s blood. In front of him, the gunman was slowly rising up, burning now, fire flashing all over his back and arms and head. The strips of fat still sticking to his skull began to crisp and bubble like meat on a barbeque.

  Sam grabbed the gun. It was slippery and wet with blood. He raised it and fired. The blast caught the ghastly dead thing square in the face, obliterating it and sending the headless body hurling back through the window in a great flurry of sparks.

  Chucking the gun out into the hallway, Sam dived across at Ray, grabbing hold of his ankles and dragging him clear of the flames. As the bed caught alight and went up like a bonfire, Sam saw in the sudden flare of light that Ray’s eyes were open and unfocused, that there was blood all over his neck and chest, that there was no sign of life in him at all.

  The room was now a furnace, painfully hot and full of smoke. Coughing and choking, Sam dragged Ray across the floor, gritting his teeth at the effort. He slipped in the blood and went down hard, hauling himself up at once and grabbing hold of Ray’s body again.

  ‘You’re not dead yet, you shitter!’ he bellowed furiously at his DS. ‘You’re not dead yet you fat, ton-and-a-half, bloody great bag of lead shitter! Now, you’re coming with me!’

  With a yell, he got Ray as far as the open door that led onto the hallway, the bedroom blazing all about him, burning debris raining down on him. It was then that Sam heard the screaming – and this time, it wasn’t Annie.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: HELLFIRE

  Smoke was starting to pour into the landing from downstairs as well as from the bedroom. The whole farmhouse must have been ablaze. Down in the hallway, Chris was crying out frantically, ‘We gotta get out! Oh my God, we gotta get out!’

  ‘Chris, I need you up here!’ Sam shouted down to him. ‘Ray’s in a bad way! I can’t drag him around on my own!’

  But Chris was clawing desperately at the sofa wedged against the front door, trying to haul it aside. Great black billows of smoke rolled over him, illuminated by the deep red and orange of angry flames. He screamed, choked, and screamed again.

  ‘Chris! We’re supposed to be a team, for God’s sake!’

  Sam propped Ray up against a wall. A thick finger of congealed blood oozed slowly from his mouth and nose. There was a bullet hole as round as a saucer in his chest. Sam called to him, but Ray stared blankly past him, unmoving, unblinking.

  Fire burst from the bedroom, sending Sam tumbling chaotically down the stairs. The shotgun clattered away and was swallowed up by the suffocating smoke. Pulling his shirt over his nose and mouth in a desperate attempt to filter out the fumes, Sam fought his way blindly down the last few steps into the hall. He encountered an insane mishmash of broken furniture, splintered furniture, and lethal glass shards.

  ‘Chris! Where are you!’

  Holding his shirt over his face with his left hand, Sam groped about with his right. He felt his way along the upended sofa
until his fingers reached what was surely the hem of a jacket. Then he felt an arm, a motionless body, an unresponsive face.

  ‘Chris! Wake up, for God’s sake!’

  He shook him, but Chris slithered away, falling amid the wreckage, completely lost to the impenetrable smoke.

  Now Sam found himself fighting his way along the hall. He could see nothing except thick black fumes and flashes of hellish orange light.

  The furniture – it’s all seventies stuff, packed with synthetics that give off toxins when burnt. This place must be filling up with carbon monoxide and cyanide … It’s a death trap!

  He reached the doorway to the living room. It was an inferno. If Gene was still in there, he was dead. Nothing could survive that blistering, poisonous hell.

  His head spinning, lungs burning, eyes streaming, Sam tried to get to the kitchen, but his legs gave way beneath him and down he went, sprawling blindly in the thick, black, choking soup of smoke. He could just make out flames shooting up all around him, long tongues of fire that licked and lashed at the ceiling and went spreading away along the walls.

  They’re all dead … Sam thought, drawing poison and scorching smoke into his lungs. The team’s gone … And Annie, I’ve lost Annie. I failed her …

  Or had he? Maybe Annie had escaped out through the back door. Maybe even now she was tearing away into the night, racing across open ground, making for safety while Gould was distracted; wasted his time killing Gene and Ray and Chris and Sam himself. Even here, amid this hellfire, on the brink of destruction, there was hope!

  With every scrap of strength left to him, Sam struggled to get back on his feet, but he could do no more than raise his head from the floor. Fire was blazing on every side, but as it burned through the walls and ceiling, daylight began filtering in through the opening cracks. As sections of wall gave way and collapsed, they started to reveal not the night sky and the black fields surrounding Trencher’s Farm, but drab grey clouds, a washed out afternoon light, glimpses of a colourless, broken landscape.