Exit

by Belinda Bauer

  Calvin pounded up the stairs and grabbed the towels off the rail in the bathroom. All the time, he called down inane encouragement about buns and rolls. The biggest threat to Mr Moon now was shock, and as long as they were talking about baked goods that was unlikely to kick in. He hurried downstairs, trying to avoid the bigger pieces of glass, to find Donald Moon unconscious in his chair.

  Things after that became a blur for Calvin – of no pulse, and lips turning blue, and laying Mr Moon on the carpet, and finding the right place on his sternum and starting to pump, while shouting for help, but nobody came and nobody came and, with Old Greybeard uppermost in his mind, he finally hoisted Mr Moon roughly on to his shoulders and stumbled out into the war zone of flames and smoke and dust and fire engines and ambulances and police cars.

  Everybody rushed to help then, and Mr Moon was quickly loaded into an ambulance, which sped out of Black Lane, past Reggie Cann’s stricken face pressed against the back window of the police car.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ shouted a fireman into Calvin’s face, and Calvin looked down at his navy suit and white shirt, covered in blood, and said, No, and could only hope it was true.

  The firefighter disappeared and Calvin went next door and checked on deaf Mrs Digby. Her windows had shattered, but not come in. Then he crossed the road and met DCI King coming out of Bob Wilson’s house.

  ‘Jesus, Calvin, are you hurt?’

  ‘No, ma’am,’ he said.

  She’d checked that side of the street. Minor lacerations and shock. Three people had been sent to hospital. Bob Wilson was unscathed and already complaining about bricks strewn across his lawn. In the gathering crowd, Calvin saw Hayley Pitt and her sisters, goggle-eyed and giggling.

  A team of gas engineers in hi-vis and helmets arrived to secure the main.

  Calvin and King stood at the kerb and looked at the the ruin of number 3, where the firefighters had stopped pouring water and started to work through the smoking rubble. The destruction of the house was nearly complete. Here and there was something recognizable – a chair leg, a spatula, a microwave oven – but everything was the same brick-dust colour, which made one lump of something look very like another.

  Calvin walked to the edge of the rubble and spoke to a firefighter.

  ‘Did you find anyone yet?’

  ‘Nothing yet.’

  ‘He’d have been in the front bedroom.’

  ‘Thanks. We’ll search that as soon as we find it.’

  Firefighter sarcasm. He was just in the way. He turned to go.

  Body.

  Calvin felt the word more than heard it. It was a weird thing. A strange undercurrent of information passing through the firefighters around him. Something in their manner, their look, the way they moved, was suddenly subtly different.

  All of them staring at one spot.

  ‘Hey!’ The sarcastic firefighter beckoned him over. ‘You know the resident?’

  Calvin’s blood ran cold. He nodded. Didn’t look at Reggie. Didn’t look at anything beyond the dark cloth and hi-vis flashes on the firefighter’s trouser legs as he followed them carefully across the rubble. His hands itched with sudden sweat. Would Skipper Cann even look like a man? Or just another thing covered in brick-dust? He wished he didn’t have to be the one to find out. Wished he was back at the nick eating bad fruit cake, or cleaning piss off an otter.

  Worst job ever.

  He followed the legs until they stopped beside three similar pairs.

  Calvin took a breath and looked down and saw the shape of a man’s torso, covered in brown dust. Face down, thank God. Most of the body still buried in brick. One arm was gone at the elbow, but the head was almost intact.

  Almost. He tried only to look at the bits that were still there.

  ‘Is it him?’

  Calvin looked up. DCI King had brought Reggie to the edge of the rubble.

  ‘Is it him?’

  ‘No,’ he said, and turned to Reggie. ‘It’s not him, Reggie.’

  Reggie’s face crumpled. ‘Then who the hell is it?’

  ‘Jesus!’

  Everybody looked at Calvin in confusion, but he could only point past them and down Black Lane, where – through the post-apocalyptic dust and smoke and rubble – came an old man leading a small black-and-tan dog.

  The Loser

  Everybody cried. Even the firemen.

  Paramedics sat the shaken Skipper Cann down in the back of an ambulance and, between puffs of oxygen, he told them he’d been down to Bouchers in Bideford to put the house in Reggie’s name.

  ‘But now there is no house,’ he said mournfully.

  ‘The house doesn’t matter, Skip,’ Reggie said huskily, and everyone cried again.

  Then Reggie hugged his grandfather and said, See you soon, and they closed the doors and took him off to hospital.

  Calvin suddenly felt very tired. Very tired and very dirty. He looked down at his suit, which was ruined, and his shirt, which was stuck to his belly with Donald Moon’s blood. Old Greybeard’s St Christopher medal glimmered through the gore. Calvin picked it up and looked at it. He wasn’t religious, but something had protected him today. Something had protected them all . . .

  ‘St Peter,’ said Reggie, as if he’d heard Calvin’s thoughts.

  ‘Sorry?’

  Reggie pointed at the medal. ‘St Peter.’

  ‘It’s a St Christopher,’ said Calvin.

  ‘Nah,’ Reggie insisted. ‘See, he’s holding the keys to the kingdom of heaven?’

  Calvin looked down, and he was. ‘What does St Christopher do then?’

  ‘Just stares off into the distance, I think.’

  ‘Didn’t know you were religious,’ Calvin said, and Reggie shook his head.

  ‘I’m not. But Skipper had one just like it when I was little. St Peter’s the patron saint of fishermen.’

  Calvin turned the medallion over. ‘Do you know what this means?’

  Reggie squinted. ‘BD77? It does ring a bell . . .’ But then he shook his head.

  DCI King came over. ‘I’ll take Reggie to the hospital now, Calvin, but I want to know who the hell that dead man is. I’ve told them to call you as soon as they’ve got him out so you can check him for ID.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’ He watched her take Reggie and the dog back to the car.

  An alert on his phone sounded and Calvin sat down heavily on the kerb and watched Seaspeak come round Tattenham Corner as if he were on rails, and power up the Epsom hill to win the Derby.

  He nearly cried that Old Greybeard wasn’t here to see it.

  Rumbaba trailed in ninth, so Calvin was a dead man, but he was far too tired to muster any interest in his own fate. He propped his head on his hands and his elbows on his knees, and let the noise and the dirt and the mayhem swirl around him.

  A firefighter woke him twenty minutes later to identify the corpse.

  It was Shifty Sands.

  Calvin knew it the moment he looked down at the fully exposed and water-washed corpse, but he went through the man’s pockets too, to confirm his identity. There was only a debit card in another man’s name, and a thin sheaf of A5 flyers, folded in half. Calvin opened one out. NEED MONEY? it said in bold letters. And, under that: BIG CASH FAST! Call Terry NOW! and there was a mobile phone number.

  He was still standing over the body when Maria, the paramedic, called to tell him that Donald Moon was going to be OK. ‘He lost tons of blood. You saved his life for sure,’ she said.

  ‘One out of two ain’t bad,’ he said. He had no idea where she’d got his number.

  ‘You still at the scene?’

  ‘For a while.’

  ‘Stay safe.’

  ‘That’s the aim.’

  ‘When you’re free, Dan and I will buy you a drink for doing our job for us.’

  Da
n. The other paramedic. ‘Great,’ he said, ‘thanks.’

  ‘But Dan can’t come,’ she said, and – even here in the ruins – Calvin caught the tease in the silence that followed her words.

  So he laughed and she said, ‘You have my number now, so use it.’

  ‘I will,’ he said, and felt like Ryan Gosling.

  He hung up and asked the nearest firefighter if they’d need him for anything else.

  ‘Not unless we find another body,’ he winked.

  Calvin nodded gratefully. It had been a long, rough day and he was ready to go home and get drunk.

  He headed back over the rubble. It was a precarious business. He took a bad step, dislodged a chunk of masonry and nearly fell. A glint of gold was exposed under his right foot, and he bent to pick up Albert Cann’s carriage clock. The one he had kept beside his bed. It was broken, of course – the face hanging off like a ­comedy eyeball, and the case buckled. As Calvin turned it over in his hands, the back swung open and two bits of folded paper dropped out.

  He bent and picked them up. The first was a flyer that read NEED MONEY? Calvin knew what the other was before he even touched it. The size, the colour, the quality of the paper were all instantly, embarrassingly, familiar.

  He unfolded the betting slip.

  SEASPEAK DERBY £5000 WIN.

  He lost his breath. Had to read it twice. Three times. Five thousand pounds? To win ?

  Silly money . . .

  Old Greybeard’s words echoed in his head. First in the ­bookies – and then at the funeral.

  But Albert Cann hadn’t given them the slip. He hadn’t given anyone the slip.

  Although he had taken a price . . .

  50–1.

  The betting slip in Calvin Bridge’s hand was worth a quarter of a million pounds.

  The Big Secret

  They broke down Dennis Matthews’ front door at dawn the next day so that they had the element of surprise. But Matthews turned out to be a morning person and put up a good fight. He cut Pete’s forehead open on a chunky ring, and got Calvin in a headlock before they managed to grapple him to the bedroom carpet and sit on him.

  While they were down there, they spotted a holdall under Matthews’ bed which turned out to be stuffed with money. Later Jackie Braddick would count it (and take selfies with it) and make it just shy of seventeen thousand pounds.

  Despite that, when they finally managed to manhandle Matthews to the car and force his enormous head through the rear door, he growled at Calvin, ‘You owe me five hundred quid.’

  ‘That’s racing,’ shrugged Calvin – but only because Matthews was already cuffed.

  On the way back from East-the-Water, DCI King called to say they’d done a reverse directory search on the NEED MONEY? flyer and had an address for Terry the loan shark.

  ‘You’ll never believe it,’ she said, ‘but we’ve been there before . . .’

  They all went to Exeter. Two cars. Calvin in uniform, because he’d had to throw away his navy suit and didn’t have another one. Before they left, he checked he had the medallion around his neck. It was stupid. He wasn’t even at sea – let alone fishing – but after yesterday, he felt naked without it.

  ‘So Geoffrey Skeet lent money to Albert?’ said Pete, on the way.

  ‘Maybe to all of them,’ Calvin said grimly, and wondered whether he’d missed something in the Exiteer files that could have got them here sooner.

  ‘So the Exiteer boss lent money to people, then got it back when their wealthy relatives killed themselves . . . as arranged by the Exiteers?’

  Calvin nodded ruefully. ‘All this time we thought the borrowers were using the Exiteers to hurry things along and inherit more quickly. But now it looks like the Exiteers were using them in the first place. Skeet, anyway. Creating demand with the loans and supplying the solution via assisted suicide.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Pete. ‘I did not see that coming.’

  Calvin thought that spoke well of Pete, because you’d have to be pretty sick to see that coming.

  They parked a street away so as not to tip off Skeet. He was hardly a flight risk, but they didn’t want to give him time to destroy the evidence they knew they’d have to work harder to find this time round.

  No tea towels.

  King knocked and they waited, then knocked again, and they waited again.

  The next-door neighbour poked her head out of her door and said, ‘He’s in there. Keep trying.’

  And indeed, as King lifted her hand to knock again, there was a definite noise from inside.

  ‘Probably getting in his chair,’ said the neighbour helpfully. ‘Has he done something wrong?’

  ‘Go inside, please, ma’am,’ said King, and knocked again.

  This time there was no sound from inside. ‘Mr Skeet?’ she called loudly. ‘Police. Please open the door.’

  Nothing.

  ‘Right, we’re going in,’ she said.

  And they did.

  But when they got in, courtesy of a police-issue crowbar, there was nobody home.

  Geoffrey Skeet’s wheelchair was in the hallway. His crutches against the banister, the house empty, apart from a small, friendly black-and-white cat.

  ‘Weird,’ said King. ‘Look again. Including the attic.’

  Skeet was not there.

  King left Jackie and Pete to start the search for evidence, while she and Calvin went back to the car to scout the area. As they got in, Calvin did a double take.

  A man had just crossed the far end of a nearby alleyway. A fleeting glimpse, but . . .

  ‘I think that was him, ma’am.’

  ‘In a chair?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Bloody walking!’

  She started the car, while he ran down the alleyway and out the other end.

  He was right! It was Geoffrey Skeet. Striding down the street! And carrying a bag not unlike the one they’d found under Dennis Matthews’ bed that very morning, only bigger.

  ‘Geoffrey Skeet!’ Calvin ran after him. He expected a chase. If Skeet could walk, he could probably run. But instead Skeet turned at the sound of footsteps, then headed up a garden path, down the side of a house, and stopped and waited for Calvin to catch up.

  ‘What the hell are you doing? You’re walking !’

  ‘Miraculous, isn’t it?’ Skeet laughed. ‘Nobody wants to believe a cripple can be a crook. At least, nobody wants to be the first one to say it.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said Calvin, ‘Well, I’m saying it. Geoffrey Skeet, I’m arresting you for conspiracy to murder. You do not have to say anything, but—’

  ‘You’re not arresting me,’ Skeet interrupted with such imperious conviction that Calvin stopped mid-sentence. ‘If you arrest me, I won’t give you half the money in this bag.’

  ‘I don’t want money,’ snapped Calvin.

  ‘Everybody wants money,’ said Skeet. ‘And there’s half a million quid in this bag. It’s very heavy and I’m quite old and – as you know – an invalid . . .’ He laughed and Calvin longed to punch him. ‘So you’d be doing me a favour taking half off my hands. Or more than half. Please. I insist.’

  Calvin shook his head and started again. ‘Geoffrey Skeet, I’m arresting you for conspiracy to murder. You do not—’

  ‘Your mother is Cynthia Curley.’

  The words hit Calvin like something physical.

  Geoffrey smiled at him and went on. ‘Thief, low-life and biggest fence in four counties. Spent fourteen of the last nineteen years behind bars – deservedly so, I have to say. Your father is Michael Bridge – since the divorce only the second biggest handler of stolen goods in the West Country. Your brother is Louis Bridge, thief, fence, burglar and now sole proprietor of Bridge Fencing and heir to the Bridge family throne of corruption. Your other brothers are junkies and your sister is a fucking
whore.’

  Calvin felt a hole gape open in his chest. Everything he’d done since the age of sixteen had been about keeping this secret. He’d left home, cut ties, broken hearts – his own included – to escape his family. To escape his destiny. He’d made a new life for himself – a different life – somewhere else. He’d started over. Alone. He missed his family but he could never go back, because the Bridges destroyed everything. Everything and everybody. They couldn’t help it. It was their curse. And they would destroy him too. Who would trust him once they knew what he was? What he’d come from? Nobody. Neither coppers nor cons. And the job was all about trust. If you couldn’t be trusted, you couldn’t be in the job – and the Bridges were not to be trusted.

  The smile on Geoffrey Skeet’s face was that of a man who’d played an unbeatable ace. Calvin didn’t know how. It didn’t matter. Skeet knew, and there was nothing he could do about that now. If he cared about his job, Calvin had only one option.

  He spun Geoffrey Skeet around and shoved him so hard against the side of the house that his dentures fell out on the concrete pathway and – after Calvin had cuffed the dazed, bleeding old man and read him his uninterrupted rights – he accidentally stepped on them.

  Twice.

  When DCI King caught up with them Calvin had the back of Skeet’s jacket bundled tightly in one fist, and half a million quid in the other.

  It really was heavy.

  DCI King and Jackie Braddick drove back to Bideford with the prisoner.

  On the way, Geoffrey Skeet told them every bad thing he knew about Calvin Bridge. Every miserable, low-down, scum-of-the-earth detail of his family’s criminal past, present and probable future.

  He did it even though it wasn’t easy for him to talk. The deep cuts to his lips couldn’t congeal properly while he struggled to make himself understood, and he had cracked a front tooth. He winced and grimaced throughout, but DCI King was patient, and kept making eye contact in the mirror to encourage him to go on, even when it was hard for her to understand him without most of his teeth and with his torn lips, and when he had to repeat himself four or even five times.