Maitland stood by the driver’s door, his gun hand splayed across the woman’s chest, forcing her against the side of the vehicle. The barrel of the pistol rested just beneath her chin. Rickman crept closer as Maitland fumbled the key, trying to fit it into the lock. It slipped, and he dropped the fob. Cursing, he took his hand from the woman’s chest and bent to retrieve it. Rickman scrambled out of the ditch and launched himself at Maitland.
He saw the gun, the glint of firelight on the car bonnet, the keys, the top of Maitland’s head. But what he saw most clearly was the terror in the woman’s face. Maitland straightened, already raising the pistol, aiming at Rickman’s chest.
‘Run!’ Rickman screamed.
She ran. Maitland fired.
Rickman felt a powerful blow, like a sledgehammer to his chest. He fell backwards, gasping for breath.
He must have blacked out for a moment, because when he next became aware, Maitland was standing over him, the gun at his side. ‘The smart-arsed gatecrasher,’ he said. ‘Get up.’
Rickman tried to force air into his complaining lungs. Maitland reached down and hauled him to his feet. Rickman dry-retched. Gradually the pain eased to pressure, but he felt sick and it hurt to breathe. The gun battle seemed far off and the clatter of chopper blades a distant echo.
‘You’ll do just as well.’ Maitland handed Rickman the car keys. ‘You’re driving.’
Rickman tossed the keys into the darkness. Maitland cracked him across the head with the barrel of the gun, and he fell to his knees, bleeding from a gash over his left eye.
‘I’m gonna blow your fucking brains out.’
Rickman was blinded by the blood and the swelling in his left eye. The vision in his right was blurred, but he could see the gun. ‘Don’t.’
‘Give me one good reason.’
A whole slew of reasons came to Rickman in a jumble — a race, his thoughts tumbling over each other, rapid as his heartbeat. I want to take care of my brother. I want to see my nephews grow up and graduate — I want to see them marry and have families of their own. I want to repair the damage of the past. And secretly, not daring to allow the full meaning to intrude, I want to see Tanya again.
He forced reason and authority into his voice. ‘Kill a cop,’ he said, forcing himself upright against the pain that felt like a solid mass in his chest. ‘You’ll stay in prison for the rest of your life.’
‘If they catch me, I’m in for life anyway.’
This was the logic of the street fighter — personal honour, the rep of a hard man. Never show fear, never back down, never apologise.
Was Maitland close enough for him to make a grab at the gun? The thudding pain in Rickman’s chest said not.
‘You know why murder’s taboo?’ Maitland asked.
‘Because life is precious.’ The pain in Rickman’s chest wasn’t entirely due to the impact of the bullet.
Maitland shook his head. ‘Once you’ve tasted that kind of power, you want it again, till you can’t stop.’
‘Are you talking about Carter or yourself?’
Maitland shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter — I’m gonna save you the bother of finding out.’ He slipped the safety off the gun, and Rickman thought of Tanya, the warmth of her body next to his, her long fingers curling around his neck to draw him closer, and he ached for her.
‘Don’t,’ Rickman said again.
A movement behind Maitland caught his eye. Lee Foster stood, braced in a triangular stance. Rickman saw the dull gleam of a gun in his right hand, his left supporting the weight.
An adrenaline surge sent electrical shocks of energy into Rickman’s scalp and the major muscles of his legs and arms, but neither fight nor flight was possible, though his body screamed for action.
Shoot, he willed Foster. Shoot the bastard!
He heard a dull thumping, and at first mistook it for the deafening thrum of his heart in his ears. He felt a draught of air on his blind side. Maitland half-turned, his eyes widening, gun swinging towards the imminent threat. A streak of red and black stripes took Maitland mid-thigh. He crumpled with a yell of pain. The gun discharged harmlessly, skittering a few yards away.
Rickman rested on his heels, taking small sips of air, and trying to make sense of what had happened. The blurring of his vision slowly cleared, and the striped form resolved itself into DC Tunstall.
One broad hand held Maitland in a wrist lock, the other a pair of handcuffs. His right knee was firmly pressed between Maitland’s shoulder blades.
‘Chris — where the hell did you come from?’
‘The match, sir.’ The big man’s face was a picture of puzzlement. Still dressed in his rugby kit, a smear of mud across his cheekbones, he had the feral look of an ungainly boy plucked from the pages of Lord of the Flies.
‘I think he meant how did you find us?’ Foster helped Rickman to his feet.
‘Oh . . . I was only up the road.’ Tunstall clicked the cuffs on Maitland. ‘I’d’ve been here sooner, only the bloody idiot who took the message waited till the end of the game to tell me, and they’ve put roadblocks up. Oh, and — Sod’s Law — my warrant card was at the bottom of my sports bag.’ He pulled Maitland to his feet and gave the scene a quizzical once-over. ‘Anyway, you don’t have to be one of the Wise Men to follow this star.’ He squinted up at the hovering Eurocopter, its Nightsun beaming down like a beacon.
Rickman laughed, immediately regretting it. His body armour had absorbed much of the bullet’s impact, but he would have a bruise the size of a tea plate for weeks after. He rested his hands on both knees and breathed gently, wincing with the pain.
Foster patted his shoulder. ‘Get Mr Maitland settled into something small, with an outside lock, will you?’ he said to Tunstall.
Maitland didn’t resist, but he stared at Rickman as he passed, the light in his eye somewhere between hatred and hunger.
Rickman watched as Foster pocketed his pistol, leaving Maitland’s for the CSIs to process as evidence. He waited until Maitland was out of earshot. ‘You’re not cleared to carry firearms,’ he said, easing to an upright position.
‘It’s like riding a bike,’ Foster said, deliberately misunderstanding him. ‘You never forget how.’
Chapter 51
They buried Mark Davis next to Jasmine and Bryony Elliott. It was a dazzling day. Sunlight twinkled on the frost-thaw of the closely cropped lawns, and the last few leaves drifted in brilliant colour onto the paths as if to hush the sound of footsteps.
Bryony’s remains were placed in a small white coffin in the grave with her mother. Rickman attended, performing the role of pallbearer alongside the other members of his team. Tunstall shed a few tears as the tiny coffin was placed in the earth.
The chief mourners were Kim and Lars Lindermann. Jasmine’s former teacher, Mrs Staines, stood next to Jenni, the sober-faced sixth-former who had spoken up for Jasmine. Ed and Hilary Shepherd arrived as the coffins were lowered into the ground.
Foster made a move towards them, but Rickman stopped him. ‘They have as much right to be here as any of us, Lee,’ he said.
‘They should be behind bars.’ The Shepherds were under investigation by a team of specialists gathered from the Family Crime Investigation and the Child Protection Units, but for the moment, they were out on police bail.
Foster stared hard at the couple, but they avoided his gaze, fixing instead on the coffins. Mrs Shepherd held a rosary in her right hand, fretting at the beads as she recited her prayers, and bowing her head at each repetition of Jesus’s name.
‘The adoption agencies are cooperating,’ Rickman said. ‘But it’s a huge task. Give them time.’
‘We haven’t got a snowball’s chance in hell of proving a case against them two,’ Foster said. ‘No DNA to match up, none of the families identified — apart from the Kirkhams — and you’d have to track them down first.’
Rickman would have liked to reassure his friend, but he had the unhappy notion that Foster’s pessimism was well fo
unded. ‘Melanie’ had remained stubbornly silent since their encounter at her mother’s house, and there was no official record of her sister having given her baby up for adoption. The CPS were unwilling to proceed on the basis of Ed Shepherd’s oblique confession, they had no photographs, and nobody willing to stand up in court. The entire police case hung on proving that the Kirkham adoption was illegal, and investigations had so far failed to turn up the official signatories on the adoption papers.
Kim Lindermann cut a dignified figure. She stepped forward without hesitation when the priest offered her a sprinkler of holy water to add her benediction to his own. Ed and Hilary Shepherd had remained a little apart from the rest of the mourners, but now they approached the grave, each clinging to the other for support. Foster shut them out, staring angrily at the priest as if he were to blame for their intrusion.
Afterwards, Kim Lindermann shook hands with Rickman. ‘I’m ready to do whatever is necessary,’ she said. She was talking about Carter’s barbarity, the evidence of her own scarred body.
Rickman placed his hand over hers and thanked her. Carter had survived the attack, though his bodyguards had not. He denied all knowledge of the murders of Jasmine, Mark and Bryony, but his DNA matched that found on a bloody splinter of wood in the coach house basement. Maitland’s gunmen were recovering in prison hospital. With Eames gone, it seemed unlikely that Graham would stand trial for the murder of Michael Aldiss. The one glimmer of hope was that against all expectations, Maitland was willing to testify against Carter. Carter’s counter-allegations of hit lists, hired killers and drug smuggling would keep the Crown Prosecution Service busy for a good while, but Rickman was confident neither man would see the outside of a prison cell for some time.
Rickman shook hands with the priest and joined the rest of his team. They stood awkwardly at an intersection of the tarmac drives that interlaced the cemetery.
‘A short while ago, Lee asked me what I believed in.’ Rickman looked around the group. ‘I said I believed in evil.’ Foster looked at him, his expression unreadable. ‘Well, if you believe in evil, you also have to believe in good.’ In answer to Foster’s sceptical look, he said, ‘Basic law of physics, isn’t it? Like Tunstall with his kettle — a decent brew is the superglue that holds the universe together.’
Tunstall blushed.
‘You all did some good here.’ Rickman looked at each of them, making sure that they looked back at him, so they could see he meant what he said. ‘Not just today, but in the way you conducted this investigation.’
‘Doesn’t make no difference to Smith though, does it?’ Foster said.
DS Cass was under investigation for his part in the events leading to the shooting of DC Smith. The rest would be difficult to prove. Smith had suffered a punctured lung and lost so much blood his heart went into arrest before the paramedics reached Warrington Hospital A&E. He was revived but suffered multiple system failure and died of a second heart attack, two days later.
‘Doesn’t make no difference to them.’ Foster looked past Rickman to the open graves. ‘They never stood a chance.’
His words might have stood as an epitaph for all the lost children — the begotten and forgotten.
Epilogue
Foster’s flat was cold. He went straight to the kitchen and poured himself a whisky. He hesitated a moment, then reached inside the cupboard a second time and took down the biscuit tin, taking a punishing swallow of whisky before smoothing a hand over the surface and lifting the lid. He found the envelope addressed to him in his mother’s hand and held it, tracing his finger over his mother’s uneven scrawl. One day he would open it, but not yet. He left the kitchen, snatching up his jacket and keys as he hurried to his car.
At Black Wood Children’s Home he walked around the grounds, visiting the scene of old triumphs and scrapes, remembering. For a while, he stood outside the coach house. Hard to recall this rotting, damp ruin as their den, their playhouse. It was barred and shuttered, the perimeter of the CSIs’ search grid marked by blue-and-white police tape. A length had torn loose from its moorings, and it fluttered and twisted in the breeze, like a tattered banner.
‘Thought I’d find you here.’
He spun round. ‘Naomi.’ He hadn't heard her approach.
The sun was low, its rays glancing through the shrubs and saplings at the edge of the clearing. Hart, still dressed in black, stepped out of the shadows and the sun caught her hair, beatifying her for a second, then she was not-so-plain Naomi again.
They stood side by side, staring at the slumping wreck that used to be the coach house. Soon there would be no trace of it.
‘They’re moving out tomorrow,’ Foster said, meaning Ed and Hilary.
‘I thought you weren’t religious,’ Hart said.
‘I’m not.’
‘So you won’t be setting yourself up as an avenging angel.’ There was a challenge in her clear blue eyes, but no hint of mockery.
‘I can’t let them walk away from this, Naomi. If they’d come to us — if they’d told us Mark had been in touch . . .’ He stopped. He had been over this many times in debriefings and in long, drink-fuelled sessions with Jeff Rickman. It didn’t matter that Ed and Hilary Shepherd were responsible — directly or indirectly — for the deaths of Mark Davis and Bryony Elliott. Without proof, the law judged them innocent.
‘Lee, it’s not your case anymore,’ she said.
‘No.’ He still felt a slight tingle when she called him by his Christian name. ‘I know that.’ But he was thinking that he might be able to achieve what the CPS could not. If he was patient and kept vigil, somebody would call, or Hilary would arrange a meeting with one of their families. Maybe they’d get greedy and take one more commission, and when they did, he would be watching.
‘Haven’t you got a home to go to?’ he demanded, choosing attack as a form of defence.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘But it seems a bit empty at the moment.’
‘Phil on the late shift, is he?’
‘Dunno,’ she said. Foster looked at her. ‘Big mistake, getting Phil involved in all of this.’ She shrugged. ‘He couldn’t handle it.’
Foster took a breath, ready to say something meaningless and reassuring.
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I know when I’ve screwed up.’
‘We all do, some time or other,’ Foster said.
There was a silence, and he had the sense that she was building herself up to something. ‘Thanks for smoothing things over for me with the boss,’ she said, after a struggle.
‘Who says I did?’
‘DCI Rickman.’
He winced. ‘He just can’t keep his gob shut, can he?’
She laughed, and he smiled despite himself.
‘Fancy a pint?’ he asked.
‘A pint.’ This time there was a hint of mockery in her eyes, and a warning, though unspoken. And that’s all you get.
Fine, he thought. I’ll settle for a pint of draught in the company of a friend for now.
* * *
A light was on in Rickman’s sitting room when he arrived home. He felt a thrill of excitement, quickly supplanted by disappointment. Tanya had been gone ten days, excusing herself immediately after the power of attorney was settled.
Rickman should have felt relieved: he no longer felt sick with guilt and self-recrimination. But he would rather that than the hollowness he now felt at his centre. His drinking sessions with Foster brought a welcome, if brief, oblivion. But he grew weary of waking in the small hours, his mind racing and his body so restless that it allowed him no peace.
The bruising to his chest disbarred him from running, but he would cover miles at his long, loping pace, unable to settle, much less sleep, unless he was exhausted.
He dropped his keys into the bowl on the hall stand and slung his coat over the newel of the staircase. The old house ticked as the timbers warmed over the heating pipes, and when he exhaled it seemed he heard an echo of his sigh. He paused between the sitt
ing room and the kitchen, undecided if he should cook or get comprehensively and unapologetically hammered. The light creeping from under the kitchen door drew him on — he thought he had turned those lights off as he’d left for the funeral. He pressed the flat of his hand against the door.
Tanya was sitting at the table.
She rose to meet him, and his heart leapt, but seeing the hectic colour of her cheeks, the agitated way she clasped her hands, he was struck by a terrible foreboding.
‘Has something happened?’ he asked. ‘The boys, are they—’
‘They’re fine.’ She refused his embrace. ‘Why would you think—’
‘I didn’t expect to see you,’ Rickman said. ‘The way you left—’ He broke off, he didn’t want it to sound like recrimination.
She lowered her gaze. ‘I’m sorry for that. I shouldn’t have gone without talking to you — explaining why I had to leave.’ She frowned. ‘It’s just that when you’re as lonely as we have been, you take comfort where you find it.’
Rickman felt a tightening in his gut.
‘I didn’t want to make love out of loneliness, Jeff,’ she said.
Rickman nodded. Even if he could find the words, he didn’t think he would be able to voice them.
‘I’m married—’
‘I know,’ he said, his voice hoarse with emotion. ‘You did the right thing.’
She gave an impatient shake of her head. ‘Let me finish.’ She took a breath and started again. ‘I’m married to a man who doesn’t know me.’ She gave a shaky laugh. ‘God, what a horrible cliché!’ She blinked and gritted her teeth, and Rickman saw that she was trembling. ‘He doesn’t want me . . .’ She faltered. Lifting her chin, she forced herself to go on. ‘He doesn’t want me, and I think you do.’
He sighed and she look into his face, a question in her eyes.
DON'T SCREAM an absolutely gripping killer thriller with a huge twist (Detective Jeff Rickman Book 3) Page 39
