Venom

by Alan Scholefield

  The policeman gave a short laugh. “You must be joking.”

  “It is no joke. We have the boy.”

  “We have a dead policeman.”

  “That is regrettable. We wish to leave soon. Please fetch your superior. Someone who has authority.”

  The policeman stood for a moment, hunched against the cold, then turned and began to walk slowly back along the pavement to the knot of policemen and cars. Howard watched him until his figure became blurred by the mist. Then Philip said, as though voicing all their thoughts, “He’s gone. He’s left us alone.”

  But they weren’t alone, Howard thought, for somewhere in the house was a snake that was not the snake he had thought it was. He recalled the convulsions which Louise had suffered before she died, the difficulty in breathing, the dark blotches on her body. More than two metres long, Jacmel had said. Black. Fast. Like a shadow, Dave had said. Rearing up, most of its body off the floor, Philip had said. There was only one snake which fitted that description.

  Part III

  Friday 7.23 p.m.–9.50 p.m.

  Detective Chief Superintendent William Bulloch of the Murder Squad walked unhurriedly back to his police Rover at the end of the cul-de-sac. He was aware that someone in the house–as yet he did not know how many there were–might take a shot at him but it was a calculated risk. Dirt. Bloody dirt. His whole attitude, careless, contemptuous, dared them to shoot him. As he had stood outside the house he had felt the anger build up in him as it always did. His shield. His buckler. And now as he walked away from the front of the house it was still with him. Dirt, he thought. Bloody dirt.

  Detective Sergeant Harold Glaister and Detective Constable Edward Rich waited at Bulloch’s car, where they had been ordered to wait, and watched their chief come back through the mist, a huge, shambling, bear-like figure which even the kindly blurring of the night could not soften. Their own car was parked some yards away from the others, of which there were now nearly half-a-dozen surrounded by plain-clothed and uniformed policemen. Glaister and Rich waited silently as he came up with them, waited for him to say something, anything, but instead he opened the back of the car and climbed heavily in. Without looking he reached back on to the window sill and tapped his fingers along it, finding nothing. He wound down the window and said, “Rich, where’s my coffee?”

  Rich reached into the front and took a vacuum flask from the shelf, unscrewed the top, poured the steaming liquid into the plastic cup and passed it back to Bulloch, who accepted it without thanks. A strong smell of black coffee and rum filled the back of the car. Then he said, “Got a cigarette?” Rich gave him one and lit it. Again Bulloch accepted it in silence. He sat puffing and brooding in the back of the car while his two younger officers got into the front seat. Detective Constable

  Rich, fresh-faced and looking young enough to be still at school, turned round in the seat and said, “What’s the score, sir?”

  Glaister looked swiftly at him, apprehension on his face, which cleared almost instantly. You didn’t ask the Boss what the score was, he told you if he felt like it; not unless you were Rich, that is, and Glaister had never really understood how it was that Rich had not been expelled to some far-off division, some Siberia of the Metropolitan Police, at Bulloch’s instigation. Glaister, who had been in the force for more than ten years–three times as long as Rich–only knew that he, Glaister, would not have asked Bulloch what the score was, would not have asked him anything, would have been content to await what information and orders he liked to direct.

  The relationship between Bulloch and Rich was too complex for Sergeant Glaister, who was running to fat now and content to be a sergeant, to keep his nose clean, to live out his career in the same job to the best of his ability and find a pension at the end of the road. Until two years before he had worked for Jefferson at Savile Row and Bulloch had only been a name. He’d heard the stories, of course, like the time Bulloch had drunk too much at the Christmas party in 1968 and he and some of his lads had gone out to the Shanghai Moon across the river in Lambeth for a chicken chop suey and how one of the waiters had asked them to leave when they started making a din and how Bulloch raided the place the next day and found a hundred grams of uncut heroin taped to the back of a lavatory cistern. That had been the end of the Shanghai Moon and the end of the waiter and the waiter’s father who owned the place. Like the time he had brought a black woman to a cocktail party at Scotland Yard to welcome the new Deputy Commissioner. It wouldn’t have been so bad, it was said at the time, if she had been unknown, but she had been picked up a few days before in a massage parlour in Brixton, and Bulloch was said to have spotted her in court the day after when he was there on his own affairs. Some even said he had paid her fine. Anyway, she’d been released and he had brought her to the cocktail party. What made things worse–as far as the other wives were concerned–was that she wasn’t more than eighteen and as beautiful as an ebony statuette. Like the fact that they said he dyed what was left of his gingerish hair, that he was a queer, that he was a stud, that he’d never married, that he’d had two wives, that he’d beaten up several prisoners, that he’d killed a man once in Edinburgh, that the only person he’d ever really loved was his mother . . . There were many stories about William Bulloch, some he knew, some he didn’t, he neither confirmed nor denied them; people who wanted to know could go and fuck themselves as far as he was concerned–and that applied to the Commissioner as well. It was not surprising therefore that Bulloch at fifty-two had everything behind him. All he was heading for was retirement and the betting was that he wasn’t going to make it. If he was worried, no one knew that either.

  No one knew very much about him at all except Rich and it was a mixture of some fact–and some guesswork or intuition or whatever one called it. And one did not call it by either name in front of Bulloch for there was one thing he despised and that was guesswork. Not that he was a detective in the Holmesian sense, he did not spend much time gathering clues, he achieved whatever successes he had achieved as a bull achieves coitus, with passion and a great deal of effort. He tended, Rich thought, to confront things head on and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t.

  Rich watched him now in the dim light of the car’s interior and saw the sweat on his neck and remembered seeing it on other occasions.

  “What’s the score, sir?” he said again.

  “There’s no bloody score, Rich. What d’you think this is, Rangers and Celtic? Give us another drop of that coffee.” Rich filled the cup again.

  Suddenly Bulloch said, “They’ve got a boy in there. At least that’s what they say.”

  “How many are there, sir?”

  “Two, maybe more. One’s a foreigner. Sounded French.”

  “And the other?”

  “Didn’t talk. Didn’t even see him properly. Just a shape at the right of the window/ Abruptly he turned to Glaister who jumped slightly. “You sure about the back?”

  “There’s no way, sir. Houses on either side face the other way. No. 412 backs on to . . .” He consulted his notebook, straining his eyes in the poor light, . . . on to Sloane Mews, sir. Rear wall abuts on to dressmaking establishment.”

  “But you’ve got two men there just in case.”

  “Sampson and Hodges, sir.”

  There was a tap on Bulloch’s window and he opened it half way. “What?”

  A policeman lowered his head to speak. “Marksmen just arriving, sir.”

  “How many?”

  “Two, sir.”

  “All right.” He wound up the window and said to Glaister. “You know where they go?”

  “Houses on either side. We’ve got permission to use the upstairs windows. They give a good field of crossfire, sir.”

  “That control vehicle arrived yet? I don’t want this thing,” he pointed to the radio in the car, “squawking on and off all night.”

  Glaister looked out and saw a large dark blue caravan which served as a mobile office in cases like this, pull into the k
erb. “There it is now, sir.”

  “You know what to do then.” Glaister nodded and climbed out of the car. “And Glaister,” Bulloch shouted after him, “tell those forensic people and the photographers not to come any nearer. No one’s to go anywhere near the front of the house or I’ll have him. Got it?”

  Bulloch knew most of the details, which he had checked with Glaister, but he liked things clear and now he went over in his mind everything from the moment he had taken the call on the car radio as he was coming over Chelsea Bridge. By the time he had reached the house in the cul-de-sac he knew everything Nash had known before he died–except why he had gone there in the first place. He knew Nash had been shot and he knew it was with a shotgun, but that was something he would have known whether Nash had said so or not. He had only to turn him over. You couldn’t mistake a shotgun at close range unless it was a bloody howitzer. The why might be answered soon if Glaister did his bit on the radio in the control vehicle. And the who? That too. Who owned the house? Who the boy was? Once they knew the who they might know the why, and when they knew the why they might have some idea of who the dirt was. All they could do now was wait until Scotland Yard turned up some of the answers and while they were waiting keep those in the house in the house. The art of the thing was in the waiting; who could wait longest, us or them.

  The position of No. 412 worked in his favour: the fact that it was the only house fronting into the small street, that it backed on to another building, that it was joined at the sides by two houses facing the other way–all meant that you went in one way and you came out the same way, either by the front door or by the door in the basement area just below the front steps. Anyone going into or coming out of No. 412 had to be visible to Bulloch–and that was just fine.

  “Got a fag, Rich?”

  Rich did not smoke but ever since the first day he had been on Bulloch’s team and had been put out of the car at 3.30 a.m. in the Queenstown Road with an injunction to “bloody well find some, then”, he had always kept a packet in his pocket. Now he gave one to Bulloch and lit it for him. Again he saw the sweat lying like shining threads in the wrinkles of his neck. They said that Bulloch didn’t know the meaning of fear, but Rich knew different. He had been with him on the Sutherland Street siege when two Irish gunmen had barricaded themselves into an upstairs flat belonging to a seventy-two year old widow and he’d been with him when the Turkish Airlines office was held by four Greek-Cypriots, and both times he had seen the sweat lying in the furrows of his neck. Not surprising in view of the way he had run the sieges. There were two ways, he had said; their way, meaning the soft approach, getting on friendly terms, talking, talking, talking, the fashionable way. Then there was his way, Bulloch’s way, the freeze, the deliberate cutting off of all external stimuli like telephones, lights, warmth, noise, speech. He liked to clear everything away, to unclutter the stage, and to place himself there as the only actor. Rich had been appalled by the chances Bulloch took; the needless exposure, the arrogant baiting of the gunmen with his own body, the way he used his own personality like a club to beat them with. And his method had worked. The other method, the softly-softly, catchee-monkey method might have worked too, but that was no argument; there was no gainsaying that he had twice been in siege conditions and twice broken the sieges. The Sutherland Street siege had lasted a fortnight and the fact that the elderly widow had died in hospital three days after her release was, in Bulloch’s opinion, irrelevant to the breaking of the siege and the capturing of the dirt. That’s what his job was all about, capturing the dirt; it was hard luck on the old woman.

  Rich knew that there was certain support for Bulloch’s one-man methods in the Yard itself especially after the Macaroni House siege of 1974 when there had been more Deputy Commissioners and Assistant Commissioners getting into the act than ordinary coppers. And when the siege was over and the officer in charge of the criminal case was preparing court evidence and had asked these senior officers for verbatim notes of the dialogues they’d had with the terrorists, it turned out there weren’t any notes. The senior officers were so senior they’d forgotten to take notes, forgotten basic police procedures. So the one-man show was back in favour and Bulloch was the man. Two sieges, two successes. Rich knew that in the police, as everywhere else, there was nothing like success. So at least in the early stages, none of Bulloch’s superiors at the Yard was going to bother him.

  After he’d broken the Sutherland Street siege and the one in the Turkish Airlines office, Bulloch’s fellow officers had begun calling him Bismarck, but the name hadn’t stuck. In the early days people had called him Willy and Bill, but they hadn’t stuck either. You called him Mr Bulloch, or William, or Sir, depending on your own status. No one ever called him Bull.

  But he was not the iron man, not through and through, as

  Rich well knew. After the Sutherland Street siege, the second he had conducted in less than a month, Rich had been privy to an incident which gave him more insight into Bulloch’s character than both sieges put together.

  Sutherland Street had been a bad business, perhaps because it had come so soon after the Turkish Airlines operation and they were short of sleep or perhaps, in hindsight, because the old woman had died, or perhaps because Rich had never really believed that the Greek-Cypriots would use their guns on the British police while he had no such feeling about the Irish gunmen who had taken over the top floor of the house in Sutherland Street. It had lasted nearly a fortnight and Rich could only remember cat-napping in the car, though he must have gone home to sleep at some stage. Not so Bulloch; he had stayed there day after day, night after night, sleeping in the car in bitter weather, not so very different from the cold they were experiencing now, only then there had been no mist.

  It had turned into a war of attrition between Bulloch and the two gunmen. At certain times each day, and in the early hours of every morning, he had gone to stand outside the house. At first Rich had thought him mad, for they knew the gunmen were well-armed–as it turned out later they had an Armalite rifle, an FN rifle, a machine-pistol and half a dozen hand grenades–and Bulloch seemed to be offering himself as a target. Except for the big man the street had been entirely empty. Parked cars had been towed away, road blocks set up at the Lupus Street end and at Ebury Bridge. It had always seemed to Rich like an empty stage on which Bulloch made his appearances. He didn’t talk, didn’t even move much, just stood, hunched in his sheepskin, implacable, angry; the anger seeming to grow as the siege continued.

  It had worked. At the end of a fortnight the gunmen had given themselves up. One of them, according to the old woman, had been crying a lot. Rich was later told that prisoners in solitary often cried. The gunmen gave themselves up at seven o’clock on the thirteenth morning and Rich could only recall the rest of the day in snatches. After the formalities of the arrest had been finished, and the TV interviews, Bulloch had started to drink. He had taken Rich from one club to another, dark basements tarted up with red plush wallpaper, stained with drink and substances Rich did not wish to analyse. He was never able to recall what they talked about during that lost day. There were long periods of silence interspersed by slurred monologues. He remembered that Bulloch had spoken about his mother, he could not recall what had been said but remembered the tenderness in the big man’s voice because it had come as such a surprise. And then a jumble of other subjects. Golf, he thought, had been one, though why he couldn’t say. And Edinburgh. That was logical enough for that’s where Bulloch came from. About midnight he took Bulloch home, if “home” was a word that could be used in such circumstances. Bulloch’s home was a bachelor flat in a mean street near the Battersea heliport. He had turned it into a lair, a kind of foetid burrow. It comprised one large room off which led a kitchen and a bathroom. The room contained an unmade double bed, with sheets that had once been white but were now a brownish colour, and pillows in their original ticking. By the dirty window stood a formica-topped table on which was the remains of a breakfast eaten be
fore the siege had started. Mould had attacked a loaf of bread and the open pot of apricot jam and had grown an island in what was left of a cup of coffee. Rich had been reluctant to touch anything, even to sit down.

  But Bulloch had swept a pair of stained pyjamas from an easy chair and pointed to it and Rich had sat. Then the big man had rummaged in the kitchen and come back with a bottle of whisky and two glasses. They had sat there drinking for the better part of an hour before Rich began to notice what was happening to Bulloch. He saw it first when Bulloch had had to use both hands to hold his whisky glass. He clamped the fingers of his left hand around his right wrist but still he could not stop the shaking. Rich saw the sweat on his neck and on his brow even though the room was freezing. He was shaking all over, jerking and twitching so much that the whisky began to slop out of his glass. He lurched to his feet and the glass slipped to the floor. He turned away from Rich and gripped the table with both hands, trying to control his shaking.

  Frightened, Rich stood up and carefully put down his own glass. He was very new and very unsure of himself and he did not know how to cope; what he did know, instinctively, was that Bulloch might never forgive him for being a witness to his trauma. He began to tiptoe to the door when Bulloch said, in a shaking voice, “Don’t leave me, lad. Don’t go.”

  Rich had stayed the night. He had held Bulloch’s head while he vomited into the lavatory and had then made him a cup of Nescafe and put him to bed. Bulloch had lain awake for a long time staring at the ceiling until finally the trembling had stopped and he slept. Only then had Rich left.

  He did not see Bulloch for a week, for both men were given leave, but all those seven days he worried at the thought of what Bulloch’s reaction would be when they met again He could have saved himself the distress, for Bulloch never referred to it, never by a single action let Rich know that he recalled what had happened. It was part of the paradoxical nature of Bulloch that where Rich might have expected anger there was none; anger would establish that it had happened whereas clearly Bulloch had decided that it had not. But Rich knew it had and he knew the fear that lay deep down in Bulloch and he knew that Bulloch’s anger at the dirt was some kind of armour, but he never knew why.