by Helen Fields
‘I’m fine. I’ll deal with this bastard. Get inside. It’s already started. Save the women.’
Ava ran in, gun drawn.
Elenuta stepped to one side, allowing the previous winner to fit into the gap. As soon as she was in place, one of the men appeared. There was a hollow thud that stopped them all for a second, an odd moment where everyone in the warehouse responded the same way, human and curious. Even Scalp ceased his incessant commentating. Then the first male walked into their line of vision, showing tobacco-browned teeth as he grinned.
‘One step back,’ Elenuta told them.
Keeping their line formation, they moved a foot further away.
‘That’s it, you’d better be scared,’ he told them. Two drones hovered, one before them, one behind, capturing the view of both their faces and his. He drew closer still. ‘I’m having one of you. You can either decide who it’s going to be, or you can run and see which of you I catch first. Honestly, I don’t fucking care either way.’
‘One more step,’ Elenuta said.
He kept walking. Twenty feet. Fifteen feet. There was a second thud in some distant place, almost thunder, but without the defining whipcrack. This time no one stopped to ponder it.
At ten feet he began to sprint. As one, the women jumped. Elenuta had known they would, however firm they were resolved to remain. It was vital, the burst of adrenaline that might keep them alive. Suzan cried out, ran back behind them. That was okay too. As she opened a gap in their line, Elenuta stepped aside, giving the man the space to break through them.
As one, they brought their weapons up to his neck, stabbing, slashing, making the best of what limited space they had to manoeuvre. He brought his fists into play, but the wounds they’d inflicted were too much for him. As the first slash of blood sprayed the wall, he began to crumble. Elenuta finished the job, pushing him to the floor and clutching a handful of his hair with her left hand, sticking the depth of Lively’s blade into his jugular, and shoving his twitching body to the floor face down.
She directed a level gaze at a second man who’d moved into their line of sight, waiting, watching, further down the corridor.
‘Your turn,’ she told him.
Suzan stepped over the corpse to retake her place in the line.
‘Sorry,’ she whispered to the other three women. Elenuta smiled at her, and put a gentle hand on her arm.
‘This isn’t what I paid for,’ the watching man shouted. ‘They’re not supposed to do this. That’s not in the fucking rules!’
Elenuta couldn’t help herself. She watched the man-child rant, all pointy fingers and pouty lips, as if he hadn’t paid money to be allowed to hunt and kill one of them. As if he were the wronged party. As if death was only ever on one person’s terms. She stepped forward out of the line and raised her knife. It wasn’t Lively’s any more. Not now. Not with another man’s blood dripping from it.
She ran, springing away down the lane. It took him a few seconds, but he reacted, spinning, screaming with high-pitched panic and racing away. Elenuta stopped rather than taking the corner and following him any further. She was enraged, but she wasn’t stupid. To stand any chance of surviving, she needed the group and the group needed her.
‘You fucking bitches,’ Scalp’s voice came from the speakers. ‘You stay right where you are.’
Scalp was coming for them, and he was furious. There was no doubt whatsoever in Elenuta’s mind that he was heavily armed. Shards of glass and a small knife wouldn’t be any match for guns.
The sound of weapons firing reached them before Scalp did. A door opened – smashing violently – then there was shouting, yelling, feet hitting concrete.
‘Run,’ Elenuta shouted to the other women. ‘Hide. Stay down.’
That was the end of their line. Two of them went into the pathways behind their standpoint, splitting in different directions to the rear. Elenuta and the spitting girl went forward, both heading for the bridge. Instinct was telling Elenuta to keep her head down and stay out of sight, but she wanted to know what was coming. She paused below the bridge, looking at the walls, figuring out how to climb up. By the time she was taking her first handhold, Scalp appeared around the corner, his gun stuck deep in spitting girl’s mouth, walking with a swagger in his stride as if he were doing nothing more than strolling down a high street.
‘Get on your knees,’ he ordered Elenuta.
‘No,’ Elenuta replied. If she was going to die, she was going to die on her feet.
‘Get on your knees or I’ll cover you in her brains.’
That was when Elenuta heard the shouts more clearly.
‘Police. Remain where you are. Put down your weapons!’
More gunfire. More screaming.
‘Too late,’ Elenuta told him. ‘Fuck you.’
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Ava didn’t get more than three metres into the building before the stampede hit her. They came down the stairs three at a time, pushing and shoving each other. Then one lost his footing, and it became a human slide. Throwing herself backwards, Ava tried to yell some order into the throng but panic had set in. They jumped over each other, hit their way through, elbows and knees jabbing. Other police officers attempted to enter but by then the first of the escaping men were at the front door and shoving outwards.
Ava pointed the gun at the heart of the group, but firing wasn’t an option. They had to be restrained outside in the open. A man went down in the doorway and others merely trod on him. Ava pushed forward, reaching an arm down, trying to grab his hand, yelling at the others to stop, but it was herd mentality. They’d been caught in the shitstorm of their lives and not one of them was going to stop running. Desperate eyes swivelled up at her, a silent plea, then Ava took a punch to the face and staggered backwards.
‘Stop!’ she shouted, pointing her gun at the ceiling, ready to fire, but the construction of the mezzanine floor above her had involved metal plates on the ceiling. The shot would bounce, as likely hitting her as any of the men. Gunfire stuttered across the main warehouse through the doors behind her, and was repeated outside.
‘Police, stay where you are!’ she yelled.
But bodies continued to pile through the doors. More than they’d been expecting. Not enough boots on the ground outside, Ava thought. There was an ear-splitting crack as an enormous man barged into the back of the exiting crowd and used the neck of the man on the floor as a stepping stone. Finally they began to tail off and Ava stuck her head out of the exit door to request that medics retrieve the bodies tangled on the stairs and in the doorway. The scene in the car park took her breath before she could make any such demand.
Men were running across adjacent fields with officers in pursuit, others were locked in their cars with armed police aiming weapons through windscreens, ambulances were unable to enter the car park, three fights were going on with so many bodies involved – some police, some escapees – that no one was getting a clean shot. The shouting alone was deafening.
She grabbed a uniformed officer who was handcuffing a suspect.
‘Get him in a van, then I need paramedics in the entrance hall. Several bodies, some critical.’
‘Got it,’ the officer told her, hauling his detainee along as more shots rang out from inside the warehouse.
Ava turned and sprinted for the entrance again, Lively and DC Swift following her as she went in. The internal ground-floor doors had been bashed open and Ava ran forward into the maze, following the sound of women’s voices. A man stepped into her path, gun raised, the muzzle close into her face.
‘Die, you bitch,’ he hissed, as he raised his second hand to keep the gun steady against the coming recoil.
Someone wrenched at her clothes from behind, spinning her off to one side, and down onto her knees. She hit a tripod, and a camera crashed to the floor over the top of her. A gun went off close enough for her ears to ring, and a body staggered backwards, tumbling, turning, without so much as a cry. Blood spattered Ava’s
face and she wheeled around to see Swift clutching his shoulder, just at the edge of where his protective vest would have stopped the shot, his hands and the floor beneath him a liquid red mess. The shooter ran for the exit as she scrambled to Swift’s side.
‘Lively!’ she yelled. ‘Get here now.’
He was there in a second, on his knees, putting pressure on Swift’s wound.
‘It’s bad,’ she said. ‘He was too close to the gun. There’s a lot of damage.’
‘Can’t get paramedics in here while there’s still live fire,’ Lively told her.
‘Then get him out. Carry him, drag him, just get him in an ambulance.’ There was a scream from the far end of the maze, a woman, desperate and furious all in one. ‘He saved my life,’ Ava said, standing and picking up her gun from where she’d dropped it. ‘Save his for me.’
Other officers were running in and scattering in all directions. Bursts of gunfire necessitated running low, head down. Up above her Ava could see a bank of screens showing bodies flying around the maze. On one she could see two women together, a man between them. Another screen showed an overview of the maze. Figuring out the route – lefts, rights, bridges – Ava went as fast as she could combine with reasonable caution. Deeper inside the maze, footsteps behind her neared, stopped as she stopped, then moved again, at times sounding as if they were in adjacent alleyways, sometimes fading altogether as shots rang out.
Finally at the far end of the warehouse, Ava heard a low groan ahead of her and rounded the corner to see the rear view of a man, his left arm wrapped around a woman’s waist, half pushing, half dragging her forwards. His right arm was up high, elbow crooked. She didn’t need the front view to understand that the man was Scalp, and that he was holding a gun.
Slowing her pace, Ava crept forward. He was talking to someone else, someone hidden from her view.
‘Fuck you,’ a woman enunciated clearly and precisely.
‘Oh really, fuck me? You asked to be here tonight. Isn’t this exactly what you wanted?’
‘Let her go,’ the woman said.
‘Yeah, let her go,’ Ava repeated behind him.
Scalp turned away from the woman he’d been talking to, dragging the woman in his grasp with him, aiming the gun at his hostage’s temple as he looked Ava up and down.
‘Am I supposed to find you threatening, sweetheart?’ he laughed.
‘You’re supposed to do what I say. The building’s surrounded. There are armed police everywhere. You’re not getting out of here, so let her go, right now, or I won’t hesitate to use lethal force.’ Ava levelled her gun and took a step towards him.
‘You shoot Scalp, I shoot you, bitch.’ The new voice came from behind and to her left.
Ava glanced sideways at the man pointing a gun at her face. He must have rounded the corner behind her silently. She cursed her own sloppiness, failing to cover her back, but in the thin corridor the choices were face forwards or backwards. No other options.
‘The area is full of police officers. You can shoot me,’ she said, ‘but you’re just adding a murder charge to everything else you’re about to be charged with. No way this ends well for you.’
‘Paddy, just get her out of my fuckin’ way. I’m coming through and I’m bringing this one with me as a shield. You grab that police bitch, we’ll tell them to get us a car and that if they follow us they both die. Don’t you worry, mate, we’ll be fine.’
Scalp began walking towards Ava, dragging the woman at his side.
‘Step this way, gun down,’ Paddy told Ava.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘You’re not going to shoot a police officer. Does Scalp here know it was you who let us inside tonight?’
‘I did no such—’
‘Jackie Thomson?’ Ava said. ‘That would be Detective Sergeant Undercover to you.’
‘You did fuckin’ what?’ Scalp screeched. ‘This was you? Holy mother of shit, what the …’
The girl Scalp had been holding in his right arm lashed out, nails flying in the direction of his face. He whipped the gun round at her head as another figure flew at him from behind, using the moment to her advantage.
Ava focused, ignored the gun pointed at her face, and took the shot. Her bullet flew as a second blasted across the corridor, ricocheting on the makeshift metal barriers at either side. The sound in the constructed alleyway was deafening. Ava threw herself to the floor, rolling as she fired at Paddy. Scalp, the woman he’d been holding, and the other woman he’d been talking to, dropped to the floor as if a sinkhole had opened up beneath them. A pool of blood was spreading beneath the tangle of bodies before Ava could get there.
‘Don’t move,’ she shouted. ‘I need paramedics over here!’
One of the women raised her head from the floor, eyes wide, mouth slack.
‘It’s all right,’ Ava said. ‘Just stay still. Help is coming.’
She scrambled over to where Scalp lay, pushing his body over with one hand as she kept her gun aimed at his head with the other. It was in fact only half a head, she realised, as his corpse rolled. Her bullet had hit its mark.
Getting up, Ava reached for the woman Scalp had been holding hostage. Her head flopped uselessly, the back of her neck ripped apart.
‘Bullet hit there,’ the other woman said, pointing up at a cabinet that had been used to construct a barrier. There was a clear dent in the metal, with sideways brush-stokes showing the bullet’s path after impact. Scalp had managed to kill the spitting girl not by skill, but by sheer bloody accident.
‘Are you Elenuta?’ Ava asked her.
‘Yes.’
‘Okay Elenuta, you don’t need to be scared any more. Are you hurt?’
‘Not bad,’ she replied.
‘Can you walk?’ Ava asked.
Elenuta nodded, and Ava reached out to pull her up, slipping an arm around her waist as they limped back toward the exit. She cast a look down at Paddy. Her bullet had hit his chest, straight into the heart, by the look of it. He hadn’t got a shot off. Maybe what she’d said about adding a murder charge had resonated, or maybe he just wasn’t cut out for killing. Either way, she hadn’t been prepared to leave a potential shooter aiming a gun at her. She should have felt more disturbed by it, Ava thought, as she helped Elenuta hobble out through the maze. Two bullets from her gun, two men dead. Killing was remarkably easy when you felt it was completely justified.
There was no gunfire now. Calmer voices were in control. Ava counted a total of seven additional bodies as she exited. It wasn’t exactly a clean operation, but it wasn’t quite the massacre it could have been.
Officers appeared from other corners of the warehouse, two of them supporting the other women. Three were helping injured colleagues get outside to the waiting paramedics.
Tripp met Ava at the door.
‘Swift?’ she asked.
‘On his way to the hospital now. They’re doing everything they can to save him.’
‘Tell me no officers have been killed,’ she said.
‘No. Other than Swift, there’s one nasty knife wound, another got caught in barbed wire, a third took a bullet in the leg but it passed through the muscle. He’ll be okay. Cuts and bruises, maybe some broken bones from the fights.’
‘Thank you,’ Ava said.
Then Lively was at her side, putting his own arm around Elenuta’s waist, guiding her towards an ambulance. The woman rested her head on Lively’s shoulder, and gripped him tight.
‘How bad is it in there?’ Tripp asked Ava.
‘One dead woman. We need to get her identified as fast as possible and locate her family. She fought Scalp. I suspect that if she hadn’t, she might still be alive. It was a ricocheted bullet.’
‘I’ll make the identification a priority. Are you okay?’
‘I killed two men. Scalp, and the guy Lively was dealing with, Paddy. We need to make sure everything’s properly documented for an internal investigation. How many under arrest?’
‘Too many to
count out here, and we’re already getting addresses for the other flats where the women are being held. DI Graham is leading those raids now. The women from the Wester Hailes flats are already on their way to hospitals and safe houses.’
‘Thank God,’ Ava said. ‘Some good came of it.’
‘A lot of good, I’d say.’
Ava gave Tripp a brief, hard hug and went to find DS Lively. She found him sitting in the back of an ambulance, tucking a foil blanket around Elenuta’s shoulders.
‘How are you doing?’ Ava asked her.
‘Okay,’ Elenuta replied. ‘Better now. Girl who died. You can find her family?’
‘We will,’ Lively reassured her. ‘What about your family? Who can we call for you?’
‘My mother is in Romania. I give you her number.’
‘How did you end up here?’ Ava asked as a paramedic pushed between them with a gauze pad and began work.
‘I was told could get work in next town. Got onto truck, they did not stop. Put us inside a van. We went many days, more women get on.’
‘They drove you all the way across Europe. How did you cross the Channel?’ Lively asked.
‘In France they stop. Big lorry with …’ she put her hands in the air and drew the outline of a huge rectangle.
‘On the lorry?’ Lively checked.
Elenuta nodded.
‘To go on ship … on sea,’ she added.
‘A container ship?’ Ava said.
‘Yes, that. They stop van, open door. Wood box inside. One man get out. Put us in, with water, food, bucket. Onto road then ship. Then arrive here.’
‘How many women?’ Lively asked.
‘Eight on ship,’ Elenuta said.
‘You said a man got out of the box,’ Ava said. ‘Can you tell me anything more about him? Was he with the men who kidnapped you?’
‘No. Young man, not okay. He looked weak. Ill.’
‘His age?’
‘Maybe twenty. Dark hair. Pale skin. Scottish. Did not know accent then. Now I know.’
Ava grabbed her mobile from her pocket and scanned through her documents.
‘Was this him?’ she asked, holding a photo up for Elenuta to see.