Blue On Blue

by Dal Maclean

  James stiffened, but Will’s unimpressed stare didn’t shift from Joey’s wickedly pious grin.

  “I could tell you all kinds of things about all kinds of people in your line.” Joey scrunched up his features. “Things you may ‘ave preferred not to know. For your own . . . your own peace of mind let’s say. An’ at the end of it, I’ll be walkin’ out of your station with an apology. Not to mention your ‘eads on sticks. So, I’m givin’ you the chance to back off now. Because I like you. I wouldn’t want you to get into trouble, Will.” He gave a thin smile. “Hols’d never forgive me.”

  Will had the sudden unnerving suspicion that Joey meant it. He actually did like them.

  “Hols wouldn’t have objected to my throat being cut by Eddie Butts though?” Will inquired.

  Joey’s eyebrows rose. “I ‘ave no idea what you’re talkin’ about. Eddie’s abroad on business. Think over what I said. Both of you. I admire guts. I even admire honor. Now fuck off. I’m a busy man.”

  “As are we Mr. Clarkson,” Will hoped he managed to sound weary, rather than terrified. He pulled his set of handcuffs from a pocket in his stab vest.

  Joey eyed the cuffs incredulously.

  “You can’t be serious.” At last Joey’s air of smugness began to fade. “You know I’d be sprung before I’m in the door of the nick.”

  “Then we’ll see who on our end allows you to be sprung Mr. Clarkson, given the strength of the evidence amassed against you.”

  “What evidence? An’ what’ll you do about it? My boys won’t even let you leave the fuckin’ buildin’ alive unless I tell ‘em to. You’re delusional. Paranoid. Vengeful,” he added with a hard glance at Will. “I’d be worried for your mental ‘ealth if I wiz your boss.” One part was true—they couldn’t leave the building without Joey’s cooperation. But they had their cameras. Body cam evidence would only hold up in court if they informed Joey he was being recorded. But that wasn’t the point. The cameras were insurance. If they wound up Joey enough to indiscretion and threats before they told him everything had been sent to a central server, he might be more cautious about immediate recourse to violence once the cameras were turned off. In theory

  “You’re resisting arrest Mr. Clarkson,” Will pointed out.

  “I’m resistin’ wastin’ my fuckin’ time. You got nuffink!’”

  James slid a photograph from a pocket in his stab vest and laid it on the table. It was one of Daria’s—Joey leading Emily away from the corpse of her victim.

  Joey glanced at it, then looked again, eyes wide—a classic double-take. As if he couldn’t believe it was there.

  “Scarlett Monk left instructions to pass Daria Ivanescu’s photographs to us,” Will said. “If anything happened to her. Maybe you should have listened when she warned you.”

  Tell him it was me.

  Joey’s expression closed. “Never ‘eard of ‘er. You doctored that photo.”

  James laid down another photograph.

  It was the image of Fred Clarkson holding a drink and chatting to a man holding a small child amid the perversity of one of their parties. Joey’s face drained of color until his healthy tan looked sallow.

  Will found himself surprised by Joey’s shock. Maybe Hansen had only told him the gist of what they had.

  James put another image down on top. One of Joey and Emily watching the underage sex show.

  “No one likes nonces, Joey,” Will said. “Looks like it runs in the family too.”

  The wheels of Joey’s chair shot backward on the wooden floor as he sprang to his feet.

  “You little cunts just dug your own graves,” he spat. “You fink you can say that about me? About my ol’ man? I’ll crush you to dust!”

  “You can see we have evidence,” Will countered. “If anything happens to us, it’s going to get out there even faster and you can’t stop it.”

  “You think I can’t? You think I can’t bury every fuckin’ molecule of your evidence in the same grave they put you in?”

  “Hols wouldn’t like that,” Will said. His heart was hammering. It felt like daring a monster to eat him. “But she wouldn’t like to find out who her real mother is either. Or how a group of men—to use the term loosely—paid you for the chance to gang-rape her mother to conceive her.”

  Joey’s eyes bugged. His face suffused with blood. This moment, breaking Joey’s control, had always been part of the plan. But it was terrifying. Will stopped himself from taking a step back. Joey’s legendary rages; no one Will knew had seen one, just heard of them. It took a hell of a lot to make him flip, but rumor had it when he did, he lost all control, and someone always died. And everything Joey said and did would go directly into the server.

  “I gave you a fair chance,” Joey snarled. “Before, you wiz just an annoyance. Now you’ve insulted my family. You’re gonna regret that. You’re gonna regret bein’ born. You’re gonna know what it means to make an enemy of me. I know everythin’ about both of you.”

  Of course he did. He probably knew what they had in their bank accounts and what they had for dinner.

  “You’re not in The Godfather, Joey,” Will drawled. Adrenalin pounded through his bloodstream, turning his guts to water.

  Joey stared at him with disbelief. He looked on the edge of a stroke. “You think you’ll be laughin’ for long?” Joey hissed. Then he grinned—homicidal malice. “That’s an idea though. Mario Puzo . . . he had style . . . That’d make you laugh wouldn’t it? Yer boyfriend’s ‘eads under someone’s duvet. Shame you won’t be around to get the full effect. You just signed their death warrants too, you pitiful turds. Remember that before I finish you off. You made it worse.”

  “Talking of making it worse . . . .” Will said. He sounded obnoxiously cocky even to himself. “Threatening two police officers. Tut. Tut.”

  “Mr. Clarkson,” James’s tone was crisp. “You’re under arrest. Hold out your wrists.”

  What happened if they got him out of here and to the station was another matter. This was just the beginning of lethal risk.

  “Fuck you!” Joey yelled. “I own the fuckin’ Met! I own judges! I buy juries! You don’t know who’s gonna stab you in the back first. I ain’t even decided if I’m gonna let you see tonight.”

  Behind them, the office door squealed as it opened.

  Will and James swung round, ready for anything.

  Hansen closed the door quietly behind her. Then she locked it and slid home a heavy deadbolt placed a few inches above the lock.

  She wore a beige raincoat, concealing her uniform; she had a large black leather bag over her shoulder and her hair was damp. No uniform hat, no checkered cravat. It was the same trick she’d played the previous summer when she didn’t want to register as a police officer. Why hadn’t it worried Will then? How practiced she was at artifice?

  Joey snarled, “About fuckin’ time!”

  And that was the moment Will understood that their gamble hadn’t paid off.

  Hansen had broken her cover and that meant their chances really were nonexistent. They couldn’t be allowed to leave here. She’d come here to supervise their removal.

  “DI Henderson, DI Foster,” Hansen said.

  “The fuckers tried to fuckin’ arrest me!” Joey yelled.

  “Not smart,” Hansen commented. There was no emotion in her face. None at all. “Turn off your BWVs.” Will had thought he’d accepted it, but the concrete proof of her choices, of her treachery, still stunned him. Maybe he’d thought she might feel remorse. But she was betraying them to their faces. “Have you informed Mr. Clarkson about their use, as required under the Data Protection Act?”

  “It may have slipped our minds,” Will said. His voice dripped with contempt. “Ma’am.”

  Hansen held Will’s furious eyes, her own glacial gray. “Turn. Them. Off.”

  Joey spat, “What the fuck’s a BMV?”

  “It’s a body camera,” Hansen replied.

  Joey turned to gape at Will and James. “Where?�
�

  “In full view Mr. Clarkson,” Will said and slowly reached up to his shoulder to turn off the masked device. He didn’t know how quickly data was transferred from the hard drive, but he thought keeping the device in one piece for as long as possible was probably a good idea. James switched off his too.

  “The cunts were tapin’ me?” Joey sounded as if he couldn’t believe that anyone could do anything so underhanded.

  “Yes,” Hansen said. “Very enterprising. Not admissible of course, but I doubt that was the point, was it?” She gave Will a cool smile. “Never mind.” She walked to the side of the room, studying the camera monitoring them from the top of the wall, then she pulled a handgun from her bag as casually as she’d extract a pen or a phone and, with no apparent effort at taking aim, she shot the camera off the wall. There was no silencer on the gun and the noise of the shot was deafening.

  Will flinched—he couldn’t help it—and a scream sounded from the annex.

  “Mr. Clarkson?” his secretary shouted anxiously. “Are you all right.”

  “Fuckin’ hell!” Joey spat. “I could have switched it off.”

  “These things can be hacked,” Hansen said. She sounded almost bored. “Whatever’s been said up to now, I’m a witness to what happens next.”

  “I’m fine Nance,” Joey called to his secretary. “The cops went crazy.” He scowled at Hansen. “I told you to brin’ your bitches to heel.”

  Hansen cocked her head to one side. “Some bitches can’t be controlled.” Then, to Will, “You’re not surprised. That’s good. I don’t have time to deal with dramatics. Switch off your radios and hand them to me, with your phones.”

  Will and James looked at each other. They began to move apart; she couldn’t cover them both. But Joey dragged open a desk drawer and pulled out his own gun. He pointed it at Will. “Do it,” he ordered.

  Hansen moved close and took both radios and both phones and dropped them into her bag.

  “I wanted to drag it out,” Joey muttered. His gun was trained on Will; on his face. “But you’re right, the sooner they’re out the better. Two rogue coppers with a vendetta. They shot first. Nancy ‘eard. I tried to calm them down but they tried again. Foster was obsessed. Irrational. I ‘ad to defend myself. Their boyfriends can make up for my disappointment.” He shook his head at Will. “You’re not laughin’,” he said with affected amazement.

  The mask was down; the real man was out. The sadistic psychopath Will had always known Joey to be under the niceties he affected to fit in with society and a family. He was soaking it up, the power to snuff out a person with a flick of his finger as if they were a candle.

  “I’m sorry,” Hansen said distantly.

  Will refused to think about what was about to happen. If he thought about it, he’d be afraid, and he wouldn’t give that to Joey.

  He was staring unblinking at his nemesis, when Hansen shot Joey between the eyes.

  27

  Will had never witnessed someone extinguished in front of him. But Joey’s death was an intimate experience. He saw every microsecond of it.

  The small red circle that burst just above Joey’s two deep, vertical frown lines. The puzzled moment he seemed to understand that something unexpected had happened. The sudden, absolute absence in his eyes. There, then gone. Joey didn’t make a sound as he crumpled to the floor like an empty, discarded sack.

  But his gun had been pointed at Will and as he went down, reflex or spasm pulled the trigger. The muzzle had dropped, but the bullet should still have hit him. If James hadn’t shoved him aside in the same second as Hansen fired her gun, it would have.

  Nancy’s thin anxious voice called again from the annex into the ringing silence: “Mr. Clarkson? Mr. Clarkson?”

  James exhaled loudly and slid to the floor.

  “Jamie!” Will dropped to his knees to support the other man’s listing body. But this time there was no reprieve. The bright red blood already soaking James’s trouser leg was all his, seeping through his fingers as he clutched his thigh. “Christ! You fucking idiot! Why did you do that?”

  But Will knew. He knew if James hadn’t done it, Will would have taken the bullet in his gut.

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” James said, his voice tight with effort. His face was very white.

  The thigh was a dangerous place to take a bullet. But Will couldn’t tell if the wound James was clutching was on the outside of his thigh or the center. And he knew the center was very bad news. The wound was expelling blood fast. But fast enough for a vascular rupture?

  Someone banged on the door and the handle rattled violently. A male voice called for Joey. Then another male voice joined in and a third. Angry, panicked, increasingly hysterical. More banging on the door.

  “We don’t have much time,” Hansen said. Will had almost forgotten she was there, but he twisted his head round to look up at her with disbelief. “The door’s reinforced by metal, but the bolt won’t hold if they manage to shoot the lock out. And they’re going to need blood when they see Joey’s dead.” Hansen’s gun was still raised and she showed no expression, no apparent care that she’d just extinguished a humal life.

  Did she actually think she could get away with it? Even if there was no proof she’d ever taken Joey’s coin, she’d just shot a member of the public—albeit an armed member of the public—without warning, before he fired a shot, without an attempt to disarm him.

  And she’d made sure all cameras were off first. Will and James were the only witnesses. So it was in Hansen’s best interests to dispose of them too. Except Will didn’t believe for a second that she would. She’d saved their lives.

  “He needs help!” Will snapped.

  Hansen sighed, pulled the belt of her raincoat out of its loops and handed it to Will.

  “I need to lift his leg.” Will pointed to a small low table set in a seating area at the side of the room and Hansen brought it to him and helped Will prop James’s injured leg on it, to try to elevate the wound above the level of his heart.

  “Thanks,” James said dreamily. Will grabbed his hand and squeezed it, then looped Hansen’s belt around the top of James’s thigh.

  He remembered reading once that a badly applied tourniquet could do damage itself, that the clock started ticking toward amputation once the tourniquet went on. So it took determination to force himself to tighten it and James’s chalky face and gritted teeth didn’t help.

  As he worked, he could hear Hansen behind him, talking into one of their radios, calling it in. Identifying herself, giving their location. “Shots fired. Officer wounded. Request urgent assistance.”

  “Urgent assistance already requested.” The operator’s efficient voice was clear even over the crackle of the channel. “CO19 on its way.”

  “Interesting,” Hansen said when she closed the channel. “I wonder who called it in. No one here would and no one external would have heard shots.”

  Her business-as-usual serenity finally shoved Will through the last of his caution. He swiveled round on his knees to glare at her, still holding the ends of the tourniquet.

  “What the fuck, Chris?” he yelled. “You set that up! You didn’t have to kill him!”

  All he felt in that moment was rage. Rage at all she’d done, at her lies and corruption and her catastrophic interference now. At her involving himself and James in a cold-blooded murder.

  But Hansen cocked her head, as if Will had just asked her a civil question. “Of course I had to kill him.” She put the radio back into her bag, but the gun remained in her other hand. “I tried to control how much damage you could do.” She sighed like the weary mother of a naughty child. “Not just for me, but so Joey wouldn’t realize he had to destroy you to stop you. I thought, if I could get you off the case by the excuse of your being attacked—somewhere it could be staged and contained—I could save you. Joey promised me it would just be to scare you off. And in exchange I’d acquire and dispose of Stephen Underwood’s evidence. So
I. . . acquired. . . the contents of your phone. I knew I could use the messages you got. Your paranoia about Nick. But when I realized you’d made copies . . . I knew Joey wouldn’t let you live. I tried to abort the trap but you found Nick, and Joey tried to kill you anyway. And I knew it had to end then.”

  “Jesus!” Will exploded. “Using Nick to kidnap Tom? All so you could sell us out to Joey Clarkson?”

  “He owned my father,” Hansen said, still calm. “And by the time I realized that and what my father had done, he owned me too. For a while it wasn’t that bad.” She noted Will’s disgusted grimace with a wan smile. “You have no idea what you’d do to save the people you love, Will. I was propelled up the ranks by people more powerful than me, people he owned too. But I never had to do anything that seriously challenged my conscience. It was a bit like being part of a club, like Joey’s own version of the Masons. And I deliberately didn’t look at what I was doing.”

  The banging began again at the door. Someone fired a shot. More shouting. Another shot that hit the door.

  Hansen stepped closer and Will felt a touch at his cheek, a tender stroke of his skin. He flinched away but her hand remained a centimeter away from his face. He had no idea what to feel anymore. As if all his emotions had locked up when the bullet entered Clarkson’s brain.

  Hansen stroked his skin again, moth-light and Will saw expression in her eyes. Longing. Then her hand fell away to her side.

  “I think I always knew you weren’t going to stop and, this would be the only way to win. The only way. Even if you’d managed somehow, to lock him up he’d never have allowed you be safe again.” She glanced at James, who was looking up at her with pain-filled eyes. “Either of you.”

  Will had known that he and James were doomed. But he could never have done what Hansen had just done, even so. He hadn’t known it himself, until that moment. He’d imagined that, given the chance to get away with it, he’d put Joey down in a second, like a rabid dog. Maybe he was more by the book than he’d realized.