There was a great crash as they imploded into Johnston. He fell heavily to the floor and it felt as if his chest was being crushed by the weight suddenly on top of him. He tried to shoot, at anything, whatever was there, but he found that the Brocock was no longer in his hand. He saw it across the room, some yards away, where it had been thrown by the impact and he knew that he couldn’t hope to get to it. Doyle saw it too – and was happy to leave it there. It was fine where it was, he thought. Roughly he planted his knees firmly on the carpet and pushed at Mel. She and the chair slid awkwardly away, stopping only as she hit the table, knocking it onto its side. Mel lay there, on her back now, her once yellow dress had fallen back to her waist revealing her blood stained thighs and knickers and her head rested limply on her shoulder like a broken rag doll. Neither Doyle or Johnston gave her another thought.
There was nothing now in between the two men. They could feel one another’s rancid breath assail each other’s nostrils. The could see through each others eyes and deep into their souls. They both saw death’s dark shadows.
Although Doyle had him effectively pinned, Johnston, who had been winded by the attack and until then quite still, now began to writhe and twist with as great a ferocity as he could muster. Doyle knew that he had to becalm him again and with a great and sudden forward force he leant down, and, thrusting his head suddenly upwards, he smashed the prominent, bony ridge of his forehead squarely into the bridge of Johnston’s nose. Déjà vu. The bone shattered with a sickening crunch, much as it had done the first time Doyle broke it, so many months before and Johnston’s nose was spread flat, once again, across his face in a semi-solid bloody mush. He howled pathetically in pain. It started as a low guttural roar gradually increasing in intensity, culminating in the fevered, intense agony as Doyle head butted him, quite unnecessarily, for a second time.
Johnston lay on the floor prone and motionless as Doyle hauled himself to his feet. He knew that he would be unable to move so he didn’t even try. It was the realization that he had failed in his one desperate act of revenge that transfixed him. He felt destroyed. He had been so sure of his success but now he was suddenly deflated, spiritually and mentally as well as physically. It was a feeling he knew only too well. It had been born in the harsh unyielding fires of failure that had been his constant companion, accompanying him in all things great and small, throughout his life. He hadn’t been able to kill Doyle and Bellini was already dead. He accepted that his life had now reached an end, and the end was, like the beginning and middle, a dreadful anti climactic disappointment. Johnston shed his tears once more, just as he had done in the bedsit in Clapham, just as he had done in the hospital and just as he had done so many times since. He remained motionless now, apart from the contorted jerks of his body as he sobbed. Doyle had lowered himself to the floor again and sat besides Johnston with his back to the wall. He was still breathing heavily because of the violence of his sudden exertion, straining and struggling to catch his breath. Both men were now swathed in a terrible bloody gore, their own blood mixing with that of their adversary and both being subsumed by that of Mel, which now seemed to have spread out and engulfed the entire room. Doyle reached across and he raised Johnston’s head and shoulders from the floor and placed them, almost gently, on his lap. As Johnston continued to cry, Doyle reached behind and pulled out the Desert Eagle. He held it in his right hand, close to the back of Johnston’s head, just clear of his line of sight. His breath was returning to him and he spoke as he gently stroked Johnston’s dark, greasy hair with his left hand.
“What a pair we are, Micky. Look what we’ve turned into. It seems that all my life I’ve been dancing with the devil. Dancing a lovers’ dance. Slow and seductive. Like the last waltz. He holds you tight, you know. You feel safe and warm and you never want him to let go. I’ve been doing it for so long now, it’s the only dance I know. It’s everything that I am. But now it’s all over for me. I sold my soul a long time ago. Many years ago, and now it’s time now for to finally pay the price.”
He lent forwards and placed his lips serenely on Micky Johnston’s blood soaked forehead, like a father kissing his sweet little child goodnight. Softly he slid out from underneath and rose to his feet. For the first time, he felt the wound in his shoulder sting and shock his flesh with an unexpectedly fierce intensity. He had been shot at twice that day and had survived both. The old Francis Doyle would have taken this to be a sign that he lived a charmed life, that he was immortal. The new Francis Doyle knew that he was not. To him it was no more than a fleeting respite from the inexorable finger of his fate that had long since pointed squarely in his direction. It could be no more than the briefest stay of execution.
The Magnum was held limply at his side in his now much weakened right hand. He stretched out his left hand, offering it to Johnston, who reached up and took it feebly. Doyle pulled him up to his feet. He felt a sharp, clearly defined pity for Micky Johnston. Not that he could readily identify the emotion. It was a rare, treasured sensation, one that Francis Doyle was not used to experiencing and not one that he could really understand or deal with. Perhaps he was only able to appreciate it at all because the Micky Johnston that stood before him had descended into a state of being that was some way less than human. As Doyle closely looked him up and down, he felt that he was looking into a mirror.
“You’d better go. The chances are the police are on their way by now. You can’t expect this much noise to go un-noticed.” With this Doyle turned and walked out of the house.
“What the fuck just happened?” Johnston was in complete turmoil and said out loud to himself as the tears continued to flow. Why had Doyle let him live? Again. He had stopped crying now but he could still feel his tears, diluting the blood that ran from his face and sharply stinging his eyes. He staggered across the room and retrieved the Brocock revolver. He could still get another shot off at Doyle, if he was quick and this time he wouldn’t make any mistakes. He could shoot him down on the street as he was getting into his car. Doyle would regret not killing him this time. But Johnston wasn’t quick enough. He tried, God knows he tried, but his leg was twisted and by the time he got to the front door, he saw Doyle’s small car, headlights blazing and burning into the night, accelerate off into the distance.
“I swear, Doyle, I swear by everything I hold sacred, that one day, one day soon, I will fucking kill you.”
He knew that Doyle was right, though. It was no good staying here. Not now. It had all happened so quickly, it could be no more than a couple of minutes since the gun shot but this was a residential neighbourhood and everyone for a block and a half would have woken up. Then there was the screaming and shouting as well. Someone must have called the police. Definitely. And Johnston thought he didn’t much want to be found there, in a scene more resonant of a medieval battlefield than a twenty first century seaside resort. What a fuck up, he thought as he picked up his bag. Why did things always conspire against him? It wasn’t his fault. But then it never was his fault. He was drenched in blood. He wouldn’t get far like that. Thank God he had a change of clothes in the bag. He thought about changing in the hall but now he just wanted to get out of the house and get as far away as possible. He had passed a park that afternoon in the taxi, he remembered. That would do. He could change there.
As he reached the door, he stopped suddenly in his tracks. How could he be so stupid? He walked back down the hall and went into the kitchen. Scott was sitting there still, as he had been left, several hours before. He was rocking gently, rhythmically back and forwards against his bonds, no longer thinking coherently. He didn’t see what was coming. That was a small mercy. Johnston pulled the Brocock from his pocket, where it had been safely lodged. He put it to the back of Scott’s head to make sure that he wouldn’t miss this time and he pulled the trigger. The transformation was at last complete. Micky Johnston had become Francis Doyle.
When he first heard it, the sound of the siren had seemed no more than a brief incursion from a quie
tly distant dream. At first, he wasn’t even sure whether it existed only in his imagination, but by the time he had reached the front door it had become deafening, piercing both the still of the night and the sensibility of his ears. He saw the lights, swirling and twirling and flashing with an intense brilliant blue that burnt into his eyes. He stood, transfixed by them. He couldn’t run. He had gone beyond that. Way beyond.
There was a screech of brakes as two cars screamed to a halt blocking the road. A third pulled up just behind.
“Armed police. Throw down your weapon.” The voice seemed strangely nervous and high pitched for such an imperious command. It came from a young copper from one of Essex Constabulary’s S.O.19 armed response units that, thanks to the rise of gun crime, were now based in every major town in the county. He was crouched behind the open door of his marked white B.M.W. squad car. To Johnston he didn’t look any more than sixteen. The image of youth was compounded by the baseball cap he wore, bearing a chequered band and the badge of the force as proudly as any team’s colours. He wore a thick, dark blue, Kevlar backed padded vest which, he hoped, would stop just about anything thrown at it. The window was open and through it the officer’s arms were extended and a semi automatic pistol was trained at Johnston’s head.Hewould not miss. The driver of the car too had a weapon aimed at him across the vehicle’s roof. Johnston cast his eyes slowly to the other two cars. Both had men in identical positions.
“Armed police” the man repeated. “Throw down your weapon or we will fire.” The words were shouted but clearly and deliberately articulated, just as he had been taught. They hung on the clear, still night air.
Johnston was immobile. Not for the first time in his life he didn’t know what to do. Christ, that bastard Doyle had dropped him in it again. Big time.
“Armed police. This is your final warning. Throw down your gun or wewillshoot.” Johnston knew that he was serious. He didn’t want to give up now but he had looked death in the face too many times that day to be able to do it again. He raised his gun slowly, up from his side. The armed response unit, to a man crouched a little closer to their cars and their fingers tightened almost imperceptibly on their triggers, poised for an immediate response. Johnston opened his hand and it seemed to him that the revolver almost floated to the ground, a couple of yards away from his feet.
“Hands in the air. Where we can see them. That’s good. Now, lie on the ground. Face to the floor. Arms outstretched ahead of you.” Johnston tried to do as he was told, but with his prosthetic leg, it wasn’t easy to comply.
“Do it now.” The voice was more demanding than ever and Johnston knew he could not disobey it. He fell forwards with his arms outstretched, hitting his chin heavily on the rough concrete of the path. As he hit the ground, three of the policemen moved in cautiously, never moving the aim of their pistols away from Johnston’s head. Their colleagues covered them from behind their cars. It seemed to Micky that orders were being yelled at him, in a thousand different voices, at top volume from every direction.
“Don’t fucking move.”
“Arms ahead of you.”
“Hands behind your back.”
They all seemed contradictory but he tried to deal with each of them in turn as best he could. He felt a knee jab sharply into the small of his back closely followed by the full weight of the young policeman as it came down onto him, fixing him tightly in place. His arms, he thought were being wrenched from their sockets as they were dragged upwards and then behind his back. It came as a relief when he finally felt the harsh, unforgiving metal stab of the handcuffs bite into his skin as they were snapped tightly onto his wrists. As he lay there, he heard more police sirens, two more cars and a van this time and the slightly less abrasive howl of an ambulance. He wondered which was for him.
“Jesus Christ. It’s like Hell in there.” Three of the police officers had gone through the house, pistols raised, covering each other every step of the way as they searched, room by room, to make sure that the assailant had been alone. They were hard men, every one of them. They’d all seen their share of action and their share of bloody crime scenes. But nothing in their training could have prepared them for the sight that greeted them in the living room. It was a scene of carnage far beyond even the worst excesses of their imaginations. Ten thousand times worse than the shock of the first autopsy they had all been required to attend. Of course everyone of them had seen sights that would make an ordinary man’s hair stand on end, scenes that would give them nightmares for a year but not one of them had ever imagined that a body could shed so much blood. It was as though a collective shock had enshrouded them. How could a man could commit such atrocities on a woman? It’s good that they could still be shocked. In a way it’s comforting, that to some people, decent, moral, ordinary human behaviour still counted for something. After the sight of Mel, it was almost a relief for them to find the relatively sanitized execution of Scott in the kitchen.
When they came out they looked at Johnston, still lying prone on the floor, still with a gun pointed at his head. They couldn’t believe that this little man could journey through life with a demon of such intense, evil monstrosity alongside him. One man heaved and retched violently by the door, as if trying to forcibly rid himself of the stench and taste of death, but nothing came out. More police cars had arrived by this time and officers attired in more conventional uniforms were trying to usher people back into the relative safety of the domestic cocoons of their homes. Johnston was hauled to his feet, roughly, and as he arose the fittings on his leg finally gave way and it fell loose from his trouser leg and he followed it to the floor. One of the officers laughed at him. One who had not been in the house. Johnston looked up at him, his eyes full of dark, brooding, impotent hatred. His eyes never left the man, not until he was dragged into the back of the police van and the door slammed shut. The face of that policeman, full of a bitter, sneering contempt for him, was to be Micky Johnston’s last memory of the free world for a very long time. It was a world in which he had never properly fitted in. He had lived only a half life, on its margins since his early childhood. It was a world that had rejected him, he had lost count of how many times and in how many ways. The face of the policeman stood as a ghastly metaphor in his mind for it all, the whole bloody lot of it. He wasn’t sorry to be leaving it.
Chapter Seventeen
Chief Superintendent Goodwin sat in the protective womb of his car. He had told Morris fifteen minutes but now it was nearer twenty five. Annoyance had given way to fear. Now a terrible, blind dread was starting to possess him and it sent a cold shiver through his body although the night was warm and the car warmer. Was he going to show? Had those pangs of his bloody Welsh conscience finally got the better of him and sent him scuttling upstairs to the internal affairs department. He wouldn’t put that past him. He was an old fashioned sort of copper. Straight as a die. One who played everything by the book and would have a fit of apoplexy if any well meaning philanthropist ever offered him a brown envelope. He wasn’t good at the politics that were so central a part of police work nowadays – he wouldn’t go far in the Force. But Goodwin feared him. He knew that he could not rely on him to do as he was told. His best hope was, he felt, to get him involved as deeply as he could and to see how he reacted. But that’s if he showed up at all. What the hell had Pat Todd been thinking of? He couldn’t get over his stupidity, spilling his guts in front of Morris and kept revisiting it, over and over again. He had worked with Morris for long enough, he knew what he was like as well as anyone. Wasn’t it him who had coined the nickname Mother Superior behind his back? – although Goodwin, as their ultimate governor wasn’t supposed to know about it. Most of what Goodwin had said to Todd and Morris in his office earlier that evening was true. Well some of it was true, but what really worried him was the precariousness his own position. The whole set up had been his responsibility. It was Goodwin who had come up with the plan to send in a man to infiltrate the beating heart of Bellini’s organization.
Everyone knew exactly what Bellini was up to, he had never really tried to hide it. But he was very careful about tidying up behind him and real, tangible proof, of the sort that his Q.C. would not be able to rip to shreds, the sort a jury of twelve good men and true could accept as being beyond reasonable doubt, even when they were being offered substantial bribes or their families were being threatened, was very thin on the ground. It was Goodwin who had selected Tommy Windsor for the job and many of the upper echelons at the Yard accepted him as the Chief Superintendent's protégé. It was Goodwin who gave him enough rope to hang them all, even when Charlotte Ashworth had lost confidence and wanted him out. Her records would show that, he had no doubt. Bloody bitch. Really, it was Goodwin who had got her killed. And her husband. He knew it. It was this that hurt the most. But what good would it do to bring everything out into the open? Charlotte and Steve were dead. Did they really need a public form of justice now? Although he would deny it with every fibre of his being, perhaps they needed it more than ever.
At last he saw Morris ambling aimlessly towards him, illuminated in the ark of the car park’s street lamps. He was carrying a carrier bag and it looked to Goodwin to be well stocked. Thank God for that. His relief was palpable.
He wound down his window and spoke.
“I told you fifteen minutes. Where the bloody hell have you been?” There was no answer. As Morris stood there, Goodwin did up his window, got out of the car and locked the door. “We’ll take the tube. We don’t want our cars anywhere near his place and, besides, we’ve both had a drink. He took the carrier bag from Morris and examined its contents. He seemed to have everything they might need. That was good, he thought as he handed it back. He wasn’t going to bloody well carry it. When they left the car park and turned left towards the nearest tube, he gave Morris his next instruction.
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