by Ken McCoy
‘It’s Sep – he’s alive.’
Sep had dragged himself over to where Roscoe was lying and was now wearing the thug’s fisherman’s hat. He’d begun to need it badly, if only to make the time he had left on Earth a little more comfortable.
He was barely conscious when Fiona and Winnie found him. Winnie was in tears as Fiona rang for an ambulance, then she turned Sep over. He peered up at her through the rain and narrow eyes, but she was shining her torch on him, so he couldn’t see her for the glare.
‘Who – who the hell are you?’
He said it with as much belligerence as he could muster, which wasn’t much. Maybe they were cronies of Roscoe. If so, their presence wasn’t good news. Fiona pointed the torch away from him and at herself and Winnie.
‘It’s Winnie and Fiona.’
His dejection took a turn for the better. Here were the two people he most wanted to be with him at this time.
‘Wha—? How did you, er, know I was here?’
‘Sep, you rang me, that’s how. We’ve rung for an ambulance. It should be here in ten minutes, as will the police. I’m sorry but I had to tell Hawkins. Couldn’t cover something like this from her.’ She nodded in the direction of the body. ‘That’s Roscoe, is it?’
‘Is it? Oh, yeah, I think it is.’
‘He looks dead. How did he die?’
‘He shot me. I shot him … He er, he fell.’
Sep managed to raise an arm and point from where Roscoe had fallen.
‘You shot him? What with?’
‘Gun.’
‘Of course a bloody gun. Where is it?’
Every word was an effort to him. ‘Pocket … shot dog … there.’
He pointed again. Winnie went over and saw the dead dog. ‘Yeah, there’s a dead Rottweiler over there. Fiona, is Sep going to be all right?’
‘Roscoe shot my leg …’ said Sep. ‘Bloody dog bit it.’
‘He’ll probably need a tetanus injection,’ said Winnie, determined to make light of what she knew might be a terminal injury. ‘We’d better tell them he’s been bitten.’ She was still standing at a distance, as if her proximity to him might affect Sep’s chances of survival. Fiona had no such reservations.
‘Bloody hell, Sep!’ she said. ‘You’ll get shot if Hawkins finds out you’ve been using an unauthorized weapon.’
Fiona took the gun from his pocket and examined it. Winnie recognized it but said nothing. Then Fiona went over to Roscoe and tried to find out where Sep had shot him. No obvious bullet wound to his head and none to his body.
‘Winnie, I need your help to check this murdering bastard for bullet wounds.’
‘Oh right. Didn’t he take a couple of bullets back at the cottage?’
‘Yeah, but they’ll have healed up more or less.’
Winnie’s eyes were on Sep as she and Fiona rolled Roscoe over and shone the torch on him, searching for a fresh bullet wound.
‘Sep. Are you sure you shot him? We can’t find a bullet wound.’
Sep’s voice was now almost inaudible. ‘He fell.’
‘I can see he fell, but did he fall because you shot him?’
‘Up there.’
The two women looked up to where Sep was pointing and saw the broken handrail hanging loose high above them.
‘I bet he fell because the handrail broke,’ guessed Winnie, in defence of Sep. Speaking on his behalf was all she could do to help him right then.
‘Better that than Sep shooting him,’ said Fiona.
‘Well, he was shooting at Sep, surely Sep’s allowed to shoot back.’
‘I very much doubt that he’s allowed an unauthorized gun to shoot back with,’ said Fiona. ‘Anyway, I’ve got an idea, but we need to make absolutely sure Roscoe hasn’t taken a bullet.’
The two women spent the next few minutes closely examining Roscoe’s pulped body for a bullet wound but they found nothing. It was a grisly task. The body was twisted and he’d probably sustained many broken bones. His head was bashed open by the fall, but there was no indication that a bullet had entered it or passed through it before it landed on the concrete.
‘Could the bullet still be in his head?’ asked Winnie, ‘or maybe in his innards?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Fiona, turning the gun over in her hands. ‘Not if he’s been shot with this from down here. They’re small but bloody powerful, these guns. If the bullet struck his head it’d go straight through – probably land a mile away. She sat back on her haunches and said, ‘I think you’re right about the handrail breaking and causing him to fall. So first we need to throw that dog in the canal. We don’t want anyone asking who shot it and where’s the gun?’
‘What if someone asks where it is?’
‘Who’s going to ask? Not me, Winnie, it’s just gone, that’s all.’
Between them they dragged the heavy animal to the canal, threw it in and watched it sink beneath the water out of sight. Fiona wiped the gun free of prints and threw it over to the far side of the canal.
‘Greasy fingerprints can survive in water,’ she explained to Winnie.
‘Why would Sep have greasy fingers?’
‘Who knows what he might have put his hands in while he was grovelling about around here.’
‘Good job you know your stuff.’
‘It was just a precaution – probably unnecessary. The story is that, as far as we know, the only person with a gun was Roscoe Briggs. It’ll be around somewhere. She looked upwards. ‘Maybe still up there. Wherever it is we just leave it to my colleagues to find. Oh, Sep’s got some bullets in his pocket we need to get rid of them as well.’
Winnie was throwing the bullets into the canal when they heard the sound of an ambulance siren. Fiona ran to meet it. Winnie went back to Sep and knelt beside him, stroking his head, having now regained some of her composure. This man needed her to be cheerful and optimistic not miserable.
‘You’re going to be all right, Sep. How long since all this happened?’
‘Dunno … a while.’
‘So, why did you leave it so late before you rang Fiona?’
‘My phone was flat … Heard his phone ringing … Thought it was ice-cream man.’
‘Ice-cream man?’
‘Wasn’t an ice-cream man. I thought it might be a phone ringing … Crawled over here.’
Winnie took a while to understand what he’d said, then she nodded.
‘So it wasn’t an ice-cream man, just a ringtone? What was it, “Greensleeves”? It’s always bloody “Greensleeves” with ice-cream vans.’
‘It was in his pocket … ringing,’ Sep said.
‘You did well to remember Fiona’s number. Why didn’t you ring me?’
‘Couldn’t remember your number.’
Winnie thought a little banter might not go amiss. ‘Oh, you remember Fiona’s number but not mine?’
Sep’s voice was little more than a croak but he managed to protest. ‘My leg hurts … I’m frozen silly … Don’t need a … b-bollocking!’ He paused for a breath and added, ‘I thought – thought I’d had it, ’specially when he shot me.’
‘Yeah, I can imagine how you’d think that. Anyway I think we got to you in time. The ambulance is here.’
‘So I’m not going to die, then?’
‘Not if you don’t want to.’
Winnie tried to put as much conviction as she could into her answer, but she couldn’t even convince herself that he was going to survive. He looked like death warmed up. What the hell did she know?
‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to die today.’
‘Sep,’ said Fiona who had come to his side ahead of the ambulance crew. She spoke earnestly and into his ear so that he would hear every word. ‘It’s important that you remember this. Are you listening?’
‘Yeah,’ he wheezed.
‘Right, we’ve got rid of the dead dog and your gun and the ammo in your pocket. We can’t find any new bullet wound in Roscoe. I repeat, we can’t find a fresh bulle
t wound in Roscoe, so you didn’t shoot him; he just fell. That’s your story.’
‘Didn’t shoot him …’ repeated Sep. ‘He just fell.’
‘That’s it. Sep, your story is that he just fell. The handrail broke when he was shooting at you. You didn’t bring a gun. I repeat, you did not bring a gun. Can you remember this? He was shooting at you and you saw him fall.’
Sep nodded his head, closed his eyes as he took all this in. Despite his pain and dizziness he saw the value in what she said.
‘I didn’t … bring gun … He shot me … fell.’
Fiona nodded. ‘Yes, please keep that in mind. That’s the story. It’ll save a lot of trouble in the long run. I imagine you’ll be in trouble enough with the story you’re giving, but you did catch Roscoe, which has got to be in your favour.’
‘Just do as you’re told for once, Sep,’ said Winnie who had been nodding in approval at this conversation. The ambulance crew arrived, fitted a neck brace to him, wrapped him in a blanket, loaded him onto a stretcher and carried him to the ambulance.
‘Do you want to come with him?’ asked a paramedic of Winnie.
She hesitated. She didn’t know how she’d cope if she was there when he died. Fiona understood this, from both sides.
‘Winnie, he’ll want you with him. It’ll help him.’
‘Of course I’ll go with him.’
‘Are you with the police?’ asked the paramedic.
‘Sort of … yes.’
‘The other man’s dead, I’m afraid. There’ll be another ambulance coming to take him.’
Winnie didn’t take her eyes off the white face of her lover during the fifteen-minute ambulance ride with blues and twos flashing and blaring and creating a clear path for the driver to put her foot down.
The paramedic tending to Sep half turned to Winnie. ‘We’ve got Mad Angela driving. She’ll have us there in no time. She used to drive Formula One, but Ferrari kicked her out for speeding.’
Winnie gave his joke a bleak smile and asked, ‘How’s he doing?’
‘He needs stabilizing as soon as possible.’
The ambulance skidded to a halt outside A&E at St James’s hospital and within seconds Sep was being wheeled inside by the paramedic and Mad Angela, who pushed a trolley with the same urgency as she drove an ambulance. Winnie was running to keep up as the paramedic called out the baseline observations: ‘This is Septimus Black, forty-eight; police officer; shot in the right femur; pulse – ninety-eight; blood pressure – one ten over seventy-five; GCS – eight.’
‘He was bitten by a dog,’ added Winnie.
‘Yeah, dog bite as well,’ confirmed the paramedic.
A doctor called out, ‘We have a theatre ready and waiting for him. Follow the porter and take him straight through. Mr Griffin’s already scrubbed up and waiting for him with a full team.’
Winnie stopped in her tracks as the trolley was pushed away from her. The urgency and efficiency with which the medics were treating this scared her. If experienced professionals who dealt with death night and day were worried, what chance did Sep have? She sat down on a lone chair in a corridor and tried to stem the flood of tears and control the awful sickness in her stomach.
She knew all she had to do was ask where they’d taken Sep and she’d be taken to wait outside the theatre, but that was not where she wanted to be. What she wanted was to be out of this bloody awful existence she had with him, never knowing if he was going to live another day. After sitting there for a while she got to her feet and went home where she had a bottle of illicit sleeping tablets she kept to take care of the extreme emergency which she had always suspected might arise, such was her life. In the end, she took just three and cried herself to sleep.
It was the ringing of her house phone that woke her up the following morning. She looked at the bedside clock and at her bottle of sleeping tablets. She’d taken enough to knock her out but not kill her. She wasn’t ready for that, yet. Although she might be if she picked that bloody phone up. Before she left she’d given the hospital her landline phone number to keep her advised of Sep’s situation and she knew they would only ring her if the worst happened. It was a number which very few people had; she almost always used her mobile. She glared at the phone with fear and hatred, swearing at it.
‘Oh, shut the fuck up! I’m not answering. I know it’s happened.’
The ringing stopped and a few minutes later her mobile rang. She knew this wasn’t the hospital. They didn’t have this number.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello, is that Winnie?’
She didn’t recognize the voice. It sounded male and juvenile.
‘It is, yes. Who’s that?’
‘It’s me … Adam Piper. I’m ringing because of what happened to Mr Black.’
Oh God, she thought. Adam will know the worst … or was it the best?
‘What about him?’
‘It was on the television news that he’d been shot and I wondered how he was, because if he was dead me and Simeon have nothing to worry about.’
‘What?’ Winnie screamed the word down the phone. ‘You stupid bastard! What do you want him dead for?’
‘Because he’s the one who knows about me and Simeon.’
‘What does he know about you?’
‘He knows about Snowball. Why was it on the news? Is he famous or something?’
‘In his own way, yes. But he’s famous for being a good man, not a dead one.’
‘Oh, I’m very sorry for saying I want him to be dead. Anyway, he isn’t dead; he’s alive.’
He sounded as if he’d somehow regressed into a former existence which wasn’t quite of this world.
‘Alive? Are you absolutely sure?’
‘Yes, I am very sure. You can ring the hospital if you don’t believe me.’
‘Did you say you were Adam?’
‘I am, yes. Adam Piper.’
‘Oh, you sounded like Simeon.’
‘That’s because we’re brothers. I would like to come and see you.’
‘What about?’
‘Me and Simeon are scared and we’d like to get away from here and I don’t know how.’
‘How did you get here in the first place?’
‘Mr Santiago helped us to come and work for him, but he’s dead now.’
‘Adam, did you say you were scared because Sep knew about Snowball?’
‘Yes, I’m sorry for saying that.’
‘Why would that scare you? Was Snowball your idea?’
‘It was, yes. Can I come and see you?’
‘Oh right. OK, why not? Do you know where I live?’
‘I do, yes.’
She didn’t bother asking him how he knew. His thought process was a mystery to her.
‘Can you be here in two hours?’
‘Yes, I can. Shall I bring Simeon?’
‘No, just come on your own.’
‘I’ll be there in two hours from now.’
‘I’ve no doubt you will,’ she murmured, looking at the clock – three minutes past eight. After five minutes of pacing up and down her mobile rang again. The screen told her it was Adam ringing back.
‘Yes, Adam?’
‘I rang the hospital and asked how Mr Black was doing. I told them I was his brother, because they don’t tell you if you’re not his brother. Is that all right?’
‘Er, I suppose so …’ She hesitated for a while, before asking, ‘How is he?’
Adam took a while to answer as he collected his thoughts. His hesitation told Winnie it was bad news.
‘For God’s sake, Adam! Spit it out!’
‘He’s been …’ He paused as he tried to remember the word. ‘… Stabilized.’
‘Stabilized? So he’s alive.’
‘Do you have to be alive to be stabilized?’
‘You do, Adam. Sorry to disappoint you.’
‘I’m not sorry. I’m very glad because it makes you glad.’
‘It does, Adam. Very glad in
deed.’
‘I will see you at three minutes after ten o’clock.’
THIRTY
Sep’s journey to the hospital had been a time of intermittent consciousness, mainly due to the pain-killing injection he’d been given. He was operated on with the alacrity befitting a senior policeman seriously injured on duty. When he awoke in a recovery ward he was told by a nurse that the operation had been a success and that his femur had been broken by the bullet on its way through his leg but it had been fixed with a metal pin that he’d be wearing for all his days, which was OK by Sep, who was just glad to be alive.
‘It’s not the only … piece of metal holding me together.’ His voice was raspy but his mental faculties were returning.
‘So we’ve noticed. You’re apparently held together like a Meccano man. How are you feeling?’
‘Woozy … like … like I’m drunk.’
‘That’s the anaesthetic wearing off, but you’re hooked up to a morphine drip.’
She handed him a small plastic gadget with a red button on it. ‘Whenever the pain gets too much just click the button and it’ll give you a small booster dose.’
Sep took it and clicked it twice.
‘I said when the pain gets too much. There’s a timer on it limiting you to no more than one click every five minutes. We don’t want you overdosing. Do you understand?’
‘I was just trying it out.’
‘Right, a porter will take you on to a ward. Are you up to having visitors? I believe one of your colleagues would like a word. First you need to get some rest. You should be OK in three or four hours or so. It’s half past six now so I’ll tell her half past ten, shall I?’
‘It’s a woman, is it? Did she give her name?’
‘I believe she said her name was Hawkins. Do you want to see her?’
‘Not really, but I might as well get it over with.’
‘I gather you found out where Briggs was from Stanley Butterbowl. Why didn’t you call this in?’ said Hawkins.
Her manner was a little brusque but not too unfriendly. Sep thought he might be getting away with a reprimand and possible loss of seniority. This was perfectly OK by him, in fact, after his ordeal. Just being alive was OK by him; he’d only be back to where he was before Wood lost his marbles. During his three-hour recuperation he managed to remember Fiona’s pep talk about him not saying he’d gone armed and that Roscoe had no fresh bullet wound, he’d just fallen. He also managed to get the rest of his story straight.
