Between Two Evils

by Eva Dolan

  She was two chapters in when she heard the noise.

  A low whirring coming from the hallway.

  Some distant part of her brain that barely registered knew what it was, drove her up and towards the door as it increased in pitch and speed.

  An electric lock pick, entry tool of choice for cat burglars and stalkers.

  Ferreira dashed into the kitchen and grabbed a knife from the block. Her vision already swimming, her heart already hammering against her ribs.

  She held the knife low by her side, gripping the handle so hard it hurt. She wanted to run but there was nowhere to go. She wanted to hide but she knew he’d find her.

  The door opened and she felt everything beyond the room fall away into nothingness. There was only her held breath and the cold metal in her palm and the sound of his footsteps coming closer, barely four paces between the front door and the kitchen, and without meaning to she was moving to meet him, her wrist angling, turning the blade, and then they were face to face and she slashed up through the air between them, slicing open Walton’s bare arm from elbow to shoulder.

  She saw the cut, white then red, then his fist coming at her faster than she could duck away from it. She heard bone break and she was temporarily blind, her head snapping back so hard it rattled her brain against her skull.

  The knife dropped from her hand and she dropped down after it. Blood on the floor. Hers and his.

  And then she was moving again. His hand knotted in her hair, dragging her out of the kitchen. She made a desperate snatch at the knife, her fingertips grazing it but he was too strong, pulling her clear too quickly.

  ‘You wanted my fucking attention,’ he said. ‘Now you’ve got it.’

  Every hair on her head was screaming, her broken nose pulsing, but the pain was floating just beyond her. Not felt yet. There was too much adrenaline in her blood screaming at her to get up and fight, grab something, anything, stop this.

  Stop it right now.

  He kept moving, hauling her into the living room, the rug rucking up under her feet as she twisted and kicked.

  Ferreira stuck her hand out and grabbed the leg of the console table, toppling its contents, the landline phone and a pair of lamps and an ammonite on a brass rod scattering across the floor. She snatched hold of a lamp and struck out blindly with it, catching him across the side of the kneecap.

  Walton grunted in pain and let go of her hair.

  Her vision swimming, she quickly scrambled back onto her feet again. She yanked the lamp out of the wall, held it ready to hit him again. Her throat was filling with blood she spat out onto the floor.

  ‘There’s a patrol car outside,’ she said. ‘Two officers, on their way up here right now.’

  Walton shook his head. ‘One officer asleep, the other one on her phone.’

  ‘I called them the second I heard you breaking in, you stupid bastard.’

  ‘No, you didn’t. You’re too arrogant to do that. You’re like all the rest of them. Think you’re invincible, swanning about, making shit for people, abusing your power. You think you can do whatever you want. Until you run into someone like me.’ He threw his chin up at her, coming closer. ‘Look at you, you’re terrified.’

  Ferreira backed away and he lashed out again. She threw the lamp up, blocking the blow.

  The second one caught her. No real power to it.

  She could feel him holding back, knew then that he was going to make this last. Whatever he did to her. He wasn’t worried about being disturbed, wasn’t bothered what happened to him after this.

  Her breath caught in her throat. She couldn’t exhale, couldn’t even blink away the cloudiness across her eyes.

  He was going to kill her.

  ‘There it is,’ he said. ‘The look they all get when they know it’s over.’

  Her hands tightened around the lamp.

  ‘Still got some fight in you?’ He nodded. ‘Good. I reckoned you’d be a challenge.’

  Where was Billy?

  Why tonight? Why had that stupid kid come home tonight and walked straight into a surveillance operation and taken him away from her?

  She would kill him for leaving her like this.

  ‘You should have told your fucking boyfriend to stay away from my family,’ Walton said as if he knew what she was thinking. ‘I warned you. And him. You’ve brought this on yourself.’ He took another step towards her and she took two more back. ‘Everything that happens tonight, it’s on you.’

  Keep him talking, she thought, seeing how fast the blood was running out of his cut arm, pooling on the floor by his feet.

  ‘You don’t think some of it’s your own fault, Lee?’

  ‘I just wanted to make a fresh start,’ he growled.

  Another step towards her. The sound of his blood drumming onto the wooden floor, the beats coming faster.

  Ferreira took another two back, shuffling. Out the corner of her eye she saw her bag, thrown down behind the sofa when she came home.

  ‘You got a fresh start.’ One more step. ‘You got your family back.’

  Walton’s eyes darkened and he lurched towards her, faltered and grabbed at the corner of the sofa, bloodying the leather, splashing the cushions.

  ‘You sent social services,’ he said, drawing himself up again, huge and square, his face flushing. ‘They were going to take my boy away from me.’

  He pushed away from the sofa and Ferreira threw the lamp at his head, dropping onto her haunches and snatching up her bag. He lunged towards her and she kicked out, catching him in the face as he fell, sending him sprawling onto his back.

  She reached into her bag, watching him right himself. Up onto one knee. Then two. Then on his feet again as her fingers fumbled blindly and finally closed around a slim metal canister.

  Walton dived at her and she sprayed the CS gas in his face. He roared in pain, eyes streaming, nose burning, but he kept coming. Hit her again, full-fisted.

  Her lip burst open. A raw, sharp pain that made her cry out.

  His hands fumbled for her throat and she felt the weight of him pressing on her, crushing her pelvis and ribs, his fingers tightening around her windpipe.

  She jabbed the canister into the knife wound down his arm and he screamed, snatching his arm back. She hit the button again, spraying it directly into his open mouth.

  Walton collapsed onto his side and she shoved him away onto his back. She could hardly see now, the gas tearing up her eyes too, burning and raw in her throat, stinging her split lip. She forced herself up onto her knees, bent over him as he bucked and thrashed, trying to wipe his face clean. He caught her a glancing blow to the face and she reeled back, no thoughts in her brain beyond the single notion of stopping him rising again.

  She pinched his nose shut and emptied the gas canister into his mouth.

  He rolled onto his front, trying to spit it out, his eyes swollen shut. The agitation was sending the blood pumping out of his wounded arm even faster.

  Ferreira inched away from him, heart hammering, knowing she should stop this, call an ambulance, call the patrol car that was parked downstairs. She should do the right thing.

  She would do it.

  She had no choice.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

  Mrs Walton’s house was all lit up when Zigic arrived. The only one in the cul-de-sac still awake at half past eleven, but he supposed things were more fraught there than at the neighbours. Harder to sleep when your son was a killer, when your boyfriend was waiting for the slightest reason to hit you, when you knew a murder you’d got away with twenty years ago was poised to come back and snatch away your new and undeserved liberty.

  Zigic got out of his car and looked at the curtained windows warmly lit against the soft pink glow that hung over Orton Wistow, the scent of the bagel factory’s late shift on the air and an acrid hint of cat spray coming from the bushes nearby. Movement at a bedroom window across the road drew his eye; someone who’d heard his car and wanted to see who was about at thi
s hour.

  He should have been at home.

  Would have been if he’d resisted checking his texts and seeing the results of the DNA test they’d run on Tessa Darby’s cardigan. Or if he’d kept it to himself rather than calling Adams to pass along the news.

  He hadn’t expected him to swing into action right away. This could have waited until tomorrow. Should by all rights have waited until they’d rerun the DNA test legally and with the blessing of DCS Riggott, who they needed to reopen the case.

  Tomorrow was going to involve a lot of finessed paperwork, he assumed.

  Adams wanted Walton too badly to pause and think any of the details through, though. And Zigic understood the urge. They’d taken a gamble on this case, pissed off Riggott, risked their reputations and careers. Of course Adams wanted to move swiftly to prove they’d been right, that it was all worth it.

  Adams’s car pulled into the close, a patrol vehicle with its lights strobing but no siren sounding behind him.

  Zigic rolled his eyes. Adams wanted this to be a spectacle and the neighbours were already stirring. Lights going on, curtains and blinds opening, windows and doors following, obscured faces watching as the cars pulled up and Adams and the uniforms got out.

  ‘You two, go round the back,’ Adams said. ‘And watch yourself, yeah? He’s got some bulk.’

  Zigic waited until they were through the gate before he spoke.

  ‘This is stupidly premature,’ he said, voice low. ‘Don’t you think we should have waited until we had proper, legally viable evidence?’

  Adams shrugged. ‘We’re here now, just try to enjoy yourself.’

  ‘And what pretext are you going to arrest him on?’

  Adams knocked on the front door. ‘Relax, we’re just taking him in for questioning.’

  ‘At nearly midnight?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Adams knocked again, harder this time. ‘Police, open up.’

  ‘Sure you don’t want to bash the door in?’ Zigic asked and immediately regretted it because he wasn’t sure if Adams would see it as a legitimate suggestion rather than sarcasm.

  ‘They’re obviously up,’ Adams said, going to the front window where the curtains were tightly drawn, not a sliver of the room beyond visible. ‘If he thinks he can hide in there and wait for us to go away –’

  ‘Sir!’ PC Hobbs emerged from the side gate. ‘You should see this.’

  ‘You go,’ Adams said. ‘I’m not having Walton give us the slip.’

  Zigic went down the narrow path past recycling boxes filled with cartons and old magazines, following Hobbs into the small back garden where a paddling pool sat deflated at the centre of the handkerchief-sized lawn.

  ‘There,’ Hobbs said, hanging back.

  Zigic looked in through the window, the view partly obscured by a set of half-closed wooden blinds, but the blood stood out vividly against the white tiled floor. He could see distinct footprints going in circles around the glass table.

  He tried the door, found it locked. But it was flimsy and old, soft wood badly tended, and it gave on the second blow.

  He could feel it in the air, recent violence. The stillness after desperate breaths and ignored entreaties. He moved through into the hallway following the bloody footprints and the fingermarks on the walls and the staircase.

  The living room was empty. A mug of tea on the table next to a magazine open to a partially filled crossword puzzle and a packet of biscuits. A careful hand had gathered the scattered crumbs into a neat pile to be cleared away later.

  The television was showing a film, some old comedy from the eighties.

  Zigic started up the stairs, hardly breathing, fully braced for what he already sensed he would find. Hobbs followed behind him, heavier-footed and muttering what sounded like a prayer.

  The bathroom door was open, the room lit. Blood on the sink and the towels left on the floor.

  At his back he heard the telltale rasp of Hobbs flicking his baton out.

  Zigic opened a bedroom door, the room empty.

  He kept moving. Opened the next door to the master bedroom, and stopped at the threshold.

  ‘Call an ambulance,’ he told Hobbs. ‘Tell them we’ve got multiple casualties.’

  Mrs Walton lay across the bed, her face turned away from him, and for a few seconds Zigic thought she was still alive. He went closer, checking for a pulse he realised wasn’t coming, seeing the red marks on her neck, the span of Lee Walton’s hands and the strength of the rage that had crushed the life out of her.

  As he was straightening again, he saw a pair of feet poking out beyond the foot of the bed.

  Dani, left where she’d fallen in the narrow gap between the bed and the wall.

  ‘Where’s the kid?’ Adams asked from the doorway.

  He walked away, shouting at Hobbs to search downstairs.

  ‘And get the garage opened up!’ he snapped. ‘If we’re lucky, Walton’ll be hanging in there.’

  Zigic could already hear sirens at distance but they were too late for Mrs Walton and for Dani. Her face was beaten beyond recognition, skull fractured in several places.

  ‘Dani, can you hear me?’

  He inched forward, the space too tight, his feet too big, and it felt like a transgression against the dead but he needed to be sure.

  He reached for her wrist, seeing her pink-painted fingernails still intact, no blood or skin cells under them. She hadn’t put up a fight. Too scared or too quickly overpowered to defend herself.

  No pulse.

  Gently he laid her hand back on the floor.

  The detective part of him was analysing the trauma, the ferocity on display. It saw the purple three-kilo hand weight that Walton had used to bludgeon his girlfriend to death, and its twin sitting just under the bed, lined up with the rest of the set, lightly dusted and long forgotten. Read the sudden flaring of Walton’s temper against Dani and then his mother coming to intervene. Maybe not too fast because she was already used to hearing him rage and didn’t realise at first how much more serious this argument was. Maybe because she was scared to get between them. By the time she came it was too late. Then Walton had turned on her. Put his hands round her throat to silence her and kept them there.

  This was always a possibility, the cold and rational part of Zigic said. The moment Dani returned to Walton she was in danger of an escalation of the abuses he’d already committed against her.

  But the better part of him knew they had hastened this violence. Pursuing Walton so openly rather than working the case quietly. If they’d done things right – if Adams hadn’t let his ego run rampant – the first Walton would have known of it was when they came to arrest him.

  Instead they’d goaded him, backed him into a corner, started to unpick his family around him. Did it deliberately because they thought an unbalanced Walton would be easier to deal with in the interview room. They’d wanted to break him and never properly considered how dangerous he would become with nothing to lose.

  ‘Found the boy,’ Adams said quietly, standing in the hallway, staring at the floor.

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Smothered, by the look of it.’

  ‘We should get out of here before we make any more of a mess,’ Zigic said, walking numbly towards him and shepherding him down the stairs and out of the front door.

  Adams fumbled a cigarette out of the packet, fingers trembling. ‘This isn’t on us. Whatever we did. Walton made that choice.’

  He was right. Technically.

  But Zigic felt the guilt tight around his chest, the pressure of it building behind his eyes. They’d failed to protect Dani and her son and Mrs Walton. Like their predecessors had failed to protect every one of his victims after Tessa Darby, by screwing up her murder investigation and letting an innocent man confess his way into a twelve-year jail term, leaving Walton free.

  And if he’d checked his messages an hour or two earlier, they might have got here before all of this happened and the family wo
uld still be alive.

  His heart ached with the knowledge and he knew it would never fully go away, the guilt would be there for ever, a gnawing black thing in his chest; every time he was with his own family he would think of what happened here and how he could have prevented it.

  Adams walked over to the driveway, the garage door up, the strip light on.

  ‘Fuck.’

  Zigic forced himself to move, look inside.

  No Walton hanging from the rafters, no car in there either.

  ‘Where the hell is he?’

  Adams dropped his cigarette in a shower of sparks. ‘Mel.’

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

  She thought she’d dream about him, but she didn’t. Slept for ten blissful hours, knocked out by the painkillers the doctor in A&E gave her after he reset her nose, a quick, practised flick of his hand that hurt more than the initial break. He had the grace to apologise for it though.

  The pills were wearing off now and she found the packet on the side table but nothing to take them with. Carefully she got up, swung her legs out of bed and stood. There was a dull ache along her jaw where Walton had punched her and when she probed with her tongue, she found two teeth at the bottom were loose. The only thing that could make this worse was a trip to the dentist and she prayed it wouldn’t come to that. The teeth were at the back, she figured she could live without them.

  She trudged into the kitchen, found Billy unpacking two bags of food from M&S.

  ‘Go back to bed,’ he said. ‘I’ll bring your breakfast in.’

  ‘I’m good.’ She filled a glass with water and swallowed a pill. Her throat was raw and dry and she heard the residual burn in her voice, the after-effects of the CS gas she’d inhaled. ‘I thought you’d gone to work.’