by Dal Maclean
“We have to arrest you,” James managed. Will hadn’t even realized he was still conscious. His voice was weak and shaky and he couldn’t arrest a newborn baby, but Hansen gave a grave nod.
Outside a long hail of automatic gunfire began ricocheting off the outside of the door punctuated by a woman’s screams.
“My father has motor neurone disease,” Hansen went on. “A just punishment, I thought. He doesn’t have long. My mother. All she has left is her pride in him and me.” She glanced at the door. “They’re panicking. And they’re still scared enough of Joey to stay loyal to him. When CO19 arrives, it’s going to be carnage. They need blood,” she repeated. Will frowned with irritation at her insistence on that phrase. And then at last he understood.
He jerked up, still on his knees, hand raised to grab her arm but she’d already backed away, out of his reach, gun in one hand, pulling out a radio with the other. He began to lever himself upright.
A bullet slammed into the wooden floor a foot in front of him with thunderous power.
“Don’t,” she said.
Will sank back onto his knees, eyes wide and bleak.
The clamor at the door stopped as if a switch had been pulled, then began again in an instant with still more anger, more hysteria.
“Will,” Hansen said suddenly. She raised her chin. “White gloves?”
Will could barely breathe. His throat was closing up.
“I don’t want you to.” He sounded, to himself, like a child.
Hansen shook her head. Her eyes were dry and she looked calm. “I know. But I can’t stand it any other way. And you get a better chance of getting out alive. I’m still a copper. Please don’t take that.”
Will’s face spasmed with distress. But the terrible thing, the paralyzing thing, was that in her place, in her exact place, maybe he’d make the same choice.
“White gloves,” he said.
She gave a brilliant smile, then turned straight-backed to the door, attaching her radio to her lapel as she went.
James crooked his head to the side on the floor to watch her. He slurred out, “No.”
Will put a hand on his arm.
Hansen looked over her shoulder as she reached for the bolt on the door.
“You always mattered, Will,” she said. “You always mattered far too much.”
She pulled open the door with one hand, gun up and ready in the other. All sound in the annex ceased. She took a couple of steps out of the door, out of Will’s line of sight. Will didn’t hear her speak.
Two shots sounded in quick succession, and then only male voices screaming under the obscene roar of semiautomatic gunfire.
Will squeezed his eyes shut and his body hunched over James as if that could somehow make it stop. And then it did. A moment later something heavy thudded against the outside of the office door and pushed it closed. It clicked quietly shut.
The silence was absolute, sticky with horror.
“Oh Christ,” James breathed. And as if Hansen had scripted it, sirens sounded—far closer than Will had expected.
A man shouted: “That’s one of the boss’s cops!”
More male yelling and then cutting through it, a shrill female voice. Screaming: “You moronic cunts!”
Will knew that voice.
Pauline.
There was a babble of anxious, defensive male responses.
“Shut the fuck up!” Pauline yelled. “Let me see.” Another pause. “How much fucking firepower did you use?”
There was a scuffling noise, something heavy being dragged away. Will swallowed the gorge in his throat. James’s hand gripped his arm in solidarity. Or comfort.
The door squeaked open an inch or two.
“Joey?” Pauline’s hard voice sounded through the gap. “Joey? Are you okay?”
A man edged in then. Will recognized him at once: the shaven-headed driver who’d chauffeured Charles Priestly the night of Jamie and Ben’s engagement party, centuries before. He had a semiautomatic in his hand, and he was visibly agitated. Pauline came in on his heels, dressed in jeans and V-necked jumper. And behind her, Charles himself, as immaculate as an investment banker in his dark three-piece suit and tie.
Will rose to his feet and moved in front of James, trying to shield him. But all the attention of the people standing inside the doorway was riveted on Joey’s desk. Clearly, some part of his body was visible from the door. It was obvious from the shock on their faces.
The armed man snarled and swung round, gun fixing on Will. His nostrils were flared, his large black eyes were wild and pitiless.
Charles stepped in front of the gun.
“One dead cop’s probably enough Rami.” His deep, cultured voice was bizarrely relaxed. No more condemnatory or alarmed than if he were pointing out the unwisdom of turning in a late tax return.
“They killed the boss!” Rami yelled, distraught, as if Joey had actually mattered to him. In the annex, a babble of voices instantly raised in hysterical reaction.
“And you killed a senior police officer,” Charles pointed out. “I’d be trying to get rid of that particular piece if I were you.”
Rami, Will noted. A name for the man who’d killed Hansen.
Rami stared at Charles as if he didn’t understand a word he said. Then his gaze swung back to Will and confusion twisted again to something he clearly felt more comfortable with. Vengeful rage.
Pauline made a contemptuous sound. “Oh just go the fuck to ground, you fucking twat,” she said to Rami. Rami swung round to look at her with disbelief. “It’s easier. Since you don’t have a brain.”
The man’s face twisted into a furious snarl.
“They killed the boss!” he repeated as if she hadn’t understood. His accent wasn’t British, but Will had no idea what it was.
“So I’m the boss now!” Pauline barked. “Fuck off and get rid of your piece!”
Rami’s expression was a turmoil of resentment and bewilderment, but still, after a second of obvious struggle he turned to obey.
“You all need to get your stories straight,” Charles told him. “And close the door on your way out.”
The door slammed with furious force. There was more shouting from the annex. Pauline was already moving round the desk.
She stared down blankly at what lay behind it.
“Joey . . . . ” She leaned down to touch, then jerked back as if she’d been burned.
Will took a deep breath. “Assistant Chief Constable Hansen shot Mr. Clarkson in order to save our lives. ”
Pauline dragged her eyes away from the sight of her dead husband to fix on Will. Then they widened with horrified understanding. “Assistant Chief . . . the dead cop? The boys said she’s one of Joey’s!”
She didn’t know, Will noted with surprise.
“Of course she wasn’t,” James slurred from the floor. Will stiffened and turned to meet his steady, pain-filled eyes. James went on, “She went out to try to calm your men down before armed police arrive.”
Pauline’s disbelieving gaze moved from James to Will and back again. He could almost see the cogs whirring as she calculated the best way out as sirens wailed closer. She hadn’t called the heavies back. That was something.
“What she did,” Pauline said, was suicide. The boys are wound up; she walks out an’ fires her gun over their ‘eads. What did she think was gonna ‘appen?”
Penance. That’s what Hansen had thought was going to happen. Suicide and self-sacrifice and atonement. All three.
Will said, “She wanted to try to avoid a bloodbath.”
Pauline huffed a skeptical breath. “If you say so.” She looked down once more at Joey’s corpse, then stepped over it as if it was a piece of inconveniently placed furniture, to reach the computer keyboard.
“Don’t touch anything,” Will snapped.
The sound of sirens was very loud. Then, suddenly, cut off. Help had arrived.
Everyone in the room stilled.
“I wouldn’t assu
me the situation is contained you know,” Charles said. “Your assault forces,” he said with an edge of contempt. “Will meet resistance. The death of that officer may have saved you from immediate vengeance, but it won’t be enough to stop Joey’s men defending his territory until they get new orders. It’s what they’ve been conditioned to do. Rami won’t stand anyone down.”
“And you’re volunteering?’ Will asked with disbelief.
Charles looked wounded. “You could at least trust my intelligence. At this point, given the circumstances, it’s in my interests to gain points with the police. I’d imagine Mrs. Clarkson has come to the same conclusion.”
There was a loud banging noise in the distance—the front door of the club had presumably been closed and barred—followed by a burst of gunfire.
Charles raised an eyebrow and headed for the office door.
Will hesitated.
“Jamie,” he said. “I have to get a radio and our phones.”
James opened his eyes to blink slowly at Will. His skin looked gray and Will could tell he was on the edge of passing out. But he said, “Go. I’m fine.”
Will found it incredibly hard to turn his back on him but Charles was waiting for him just inside the door. There was a short burst of semiautomatic gunfire in the distance.
“I hope this marks the end of your run of insane decisions.” Charles’s voice was low and impatient. It took Will a moment to understand that the remark had been aimed at him. “Frankly, I’m getting tired of having to make calls to the emergency services to save your skin.”
Will’s eyes widened and kept widening.
“You called the police here?” he breathed. Charles raised his eyebrows, a man waiting for a slow student to catch up. “And the day Eddie had us . . . ? The warning text?” Will thought that he must look like a gaffed fish. “Are you . . . undercover?” he asked. Joey’s consigliere? That would be an irony for the ages.
But Charles said, “Don’t be ridiculous. Eve told me to keep you alive.”
Will’s jaw dropped.
“Not. Easy I might add,” Charles went on. “Since you seem to have a taste for suicidal risk.”
Says the man who’s spent his life obsessed with Eve Kelly.
Some weird, shocked sense of obligation kept the words inside Will’s head. He wrenched his gaze away, too shaken to hold Charles’s cool gaze. But he ran the insane discovery round and round his mind, like brandy in a glass. Eve had plotted to save him from Joey.
He couldn’t even deny that it had helped. Charles alerting the police about the trap at Nick’s had swung the balance with Eddie and his goons. For that matter the sound of sirens now might have panicked Joey’s boys into listening to Pauline, rather than trying to cover up what they did to Hansen by wiping out Will and James too. And Charles had stepped in front of a gun for him.
A sadistic murderer had sent this corrupt guardian angel to protect him from another sadistic murderer. Maybe one day, Will’d even laugh about it.
Charles’s brows were elevated in expectation of Will’s response, but for a split second Will noticed his eyes flick to the side. Will whirled round.
Whatever else Charles had done, he’d certainly intended to cause enough of a distraction to allow Pauline the chance to rummage in Joey’s desk.
“Back off!” Will ordered.
“You owe Eve,” Charles declared behind Will. Then he walked out into the annex.
It took a couple of seconds—an act of determination, to follow him.
Will kept his eyes up at first. The annex was empty; Charles was already gone—out in the hallway. Then Will looked down.
Hansen had been dragged away from the door to Joey’s office; the place she’d died. There was a long, fat, careless trail of rusty blood smeared into the white carpet, to show the way.
She lay sprawled on her back now, at the side of the room, dropped there without care like so much rubbish. Her black uniform skirt had bunched at the top of her thighs and Will had to fight the urge to pull it down, because he knew she’d hate being seen like that by her own officers. There were bursts of scarlet all over her white uniform shirt and her splayed raincoat. Half of the top of her head was gone, the side blown away. Her platinum hair was drenched red and pink. But her face, mercifully—cruelly—was untouched, apart from fine dots of blood and brain matter sprayed like freckles across her still impeccable makeup; black mascara and frosted pink lipstick barely smudged.
Her pale gray eyes were wide-open. She’d watched her death coming.
Will didn’t have time to grieve. To remember what it had felt like once, to touch her. To understand how completely she was gone.
Instead he crouched down beside her and used his gloved fingertips to pull open the top of her bag and extract his phone and James’s and the remaining radio. Then, swallowing his howling emotions, he strode back into Joey’s office.
Pauline was still standing where he’d left her.
“What did you take out of the desk?” he asked.
“None of your fuckin’ business,” Pauline snapped.
“Everything you do is our business now,” Will returned. But he felt as if he was playing a role. Adrenalin was finally starting to fail him. He went straight to James, to find him out for the count. Anxiety gnawed at him. Then he noticed Pauline’s hands edge again toward the keyboard. “Leave it!”
For a second Pauline looked incandescently angry, before her mouth curled into a sneer.
“You think all you’ll need to do is sit down at this computer an’ you’ll have it all, yeah? You think everythin’ ain’t behind the kind of firewalls you’ll never get past? Max . . . Eddie’s bruvver . . . he was smart. He built in defenses to destroy anythin’ you try an’ get into without goin’ about it exactly right. No second chances.”
“Our people’ll get in,” Will said with confidence.
“Yeah?” She scoffed. “An’ if you’re right, what about your people who’ll be ruined? You think they’ll let that ‘appen? You don’t know who to trust. You don’t ‘ave a fuckin’ clue.”
It felt like the story of his life.
They stared it out for tense antagonistic seconds, both desperate in their own way. But she was right. In the end, for all they’d gained, he and James had still failed.
Joey may be dead, but Will still had no idea which of his colleagues had a vested interest in destroying the evidence of their own corruption. And how much power they had to do it. The cops who’d worked with Joey were still in place, still hidden, still available to abuse their power for the next person to fill the vacuum left by the death of the godfather.
Still able to destroy Will and James and anyone they loved if they thought they were a risk.
But still Will said, “Move away from the desk.”
“Listen,” Pauline urged. “Joey loved lists. It’s why he needed Max. To keep ‘em safe. There’re a couple I can get to easy. He told me how, in case I ever needed insurance.”
“What lists?”
“Lists! One’s called ‘The Dairy Farm,’” she said. “Wiv the names of all the . . . fat cows Joey milks. Businessmen, politicians, celebs.”
Instinct began to stir ragged dregs of excitement. “And?”
Pauline chewed her lip as she studied his reactions. “An’ ‘The Pig Farm.’ That’s . . . .”
“Cops,” Will said.
“Yeah. An’ judges. Lawyers. Prison officers. Court officials. Details of everythin’ they did. What he had on them. What he paid them. So.” The watchful expression in her eyes intensified and Will was suddenly, avidly awake. “You want that?”
She was playing him.
“And what do you want?”
“Five minutes,” Pauline said at once. “Give me five minutes on that machine. Let me transfer enough for me an’ Hols to get by from now on. I’m not losin’ my ‘ouse. My garden. Hols’s school. I’ve earned it. Years panderin’ to that monster.”
“Monster?” Will scoffed, but his mind wa
s racing. Calculating. “That’s new. You weren’t exactly planning to bring him down last time we spoke.”
“He hadn’t killed Eddie,” she said. “Last time we spoke.” She sniffed and looked away. “All those years. Eddie did everythin’ for Joey. Since he was a little kid, he licked his fuckin’ boots. He was like family. An’ Ed loses it once . . . he goes off an’ gets his own revenge, instead of Joey’s. He doesn’t obey once an’ Joey just . . . .” Her face blanked of emotion. “Took him to pieces.”
“What about the man Eddie took?” Will asked quickly. “Nick Haining.”
Pauline came back to herself to regard him with disgust. “Who the fuck cares? The people on them lists ain’t gonna let ‘em get out, if they get the chance to bury them. So decide.”
Will’s mind whirred; a feverish dance of possibilities.
“How do I know these lists even exist?”
“I’ll put ‘em on ‘ere.” She opened her hand and revealed what she’d taken from the drawer. A new USB stick, still wrapped in its plastic packaging. “And I’ll send ‘em to you from one of Joey’s darkmail accounts.”
Could he do it? Should he? He was trying to expose cops who bent the rules, and here he was contemplating trading the profits of crime for information.
But there were degrees. And there was the greater good.
It was the same moral dilemma he’d faced all the way through. It had upset Will when Ingham had compared him to James’s absolute adherence to the law.
Would James reject the same offer?
He wasn’t James.
“Show me the files first,” he said.
“Why should I trust you?” Pauline asked, though she couldn’t have expected him to do anything else. “Who’d trust a pig?”
“Who’d trust Joey Clarkson’s wife? Call up the files.”
Pauline glowered but she began to type, then stood back to let Will take her place in front of the PC. He had to straddle Joey’s corpse to fit, as Pauline had done, but she seemed to barely notice what she was doing, focused entirely on her own survival. Her husband’s death appeared to be a matter of indifference, though Will had witnessed their affectionate interactions. Even for Joey, Will found Pauline’s disregard both unnerving and mildly repellent. He had to keep reminding himself what she was. Gangster’s daughter. Gangster’s wife. All she must have seen in her life to harden her. He just had to hope she had her own kind of integrity.