Scared to Live bcadf-7

by Stephen Booth

  ‘Well, that’s a positive development,’ said Hitchens. ‘We’ve got a definite lead at last.’

  ‘There’s more,’ said Abbott. ‘I didn’t expect this, but we got some prints off the underside of the dashboard, where it hadn’t been burned too badly. They’re in the system, too. Somebody’s been in this car who has previous form.’

  Hitchens took the print-out. ‘Brilliant.’

  Fry leaned closer to look. ‘Anyone we know?’

  ‘The name means nothing to me. Anthony Donnelly, aged thirty-seven, with an address in Swanwick.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘He has several past convictions for theft from a vehicle and taking without consent, plus all the usual extras — no insurance, driving while disqualified, et cetera, et cetera.’

  ‘Just an average car thief,’ said Fry, feeling unreasonably disappointed.

  ‘Mmm, maybe. The most recent charge on his record was in connection with an organized lorry-jacking scheme. Truckloads of white goods diverted to new owners via a lay-by on the A1. I remember that case — five or six people went down for it. But it seems Donnelly was acquitted.’

  ‘So it could be that he’s gradually moving up in the world, getting involved with more serious operators.’

  ‘Driver for a professional hit man?’ said Hitchens. ‘Well, let’s go and ask him, Diane.’

  ‘If that information is from the PNC, then the first thing we have to hope for is that the address is accurate for once.’

  The wheels and cables were still humming and rattling, but it no longer seemed to be merely the whir of machinery, the hiss of high-tension steel passing through the air. The noises formed words, murmuring and whispering, mumbling and chattering.

  And then John Lowther looked down into the valley again. The fragile crystal of his mind had cracked. He could see the fragments lying on the ground, fading and turning brown, as if they were mere ordinary clay. Through the fracture in his consciousness, he heard the final voice. It was still faint, but he recognized it. Oh, he recognized it all right. In the past, this voice had forced him to do things that he had never wanted to do. And now the voice was back. He had no idea what it would make him do next.

  ‘Johnny, you know what you have to do.’

  They would come for him soon. They would scent him out, sniffing the fear in his sweat. They would use dogs to listen for his voices when they became too loud. And they’d follow him when he left the house, track his movements wherever he went. And one day the searchlights would catch him on the corner of a street, and the lights would probe deep into his mind and see what was there. And the whole world would know his evil.

  Cooper could see John Lowther on the platform at the top of the stone tower, leaning over the parapet. Even from this distance, he could tell that Lowther was trembling violently, as if he was no more than a leaf shaken by the wind blowing across the hillside. Strands of hair fell over his forehead, and his eyes were fixed on the horizon. He might have been listening for some distant call that would summon him away, an echo that would reach him from far in the south.

  Lowther seemed completely oblivious to the knot of people beginning to cluster round the base of the tower. Their heads were tilted back to stare up at his silhouette, black against the sky. But not once did Lowther look down at the ground.

  ‘He’s been up there for some time now,’ said the staff member. ‘A visitor started to get uneasy about him. She said he was behaving oddly.’

  ‘All right. Thank you.’

  ‘Is there anything else I can do?’

  Cooper looked at the concrete apron the tower stood on, and the rough boulders built into the base. ‘Right now, you could help us most by keeping everyone clear of the tower. Well clear — back as far as the play area.’

  The man followed Cooper’s gaze, and turned pale. ‘You don’t think he might …?’

  But Cooper put a hand on his shoulder. ‘If you could just move these people back, sir.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Georgi Kotsev was examining the doorway to the tower. It was arched, like the entrance to a church, but so narrow that Kotsev looked as though he’d hardly be able to squeeze through it. Signs either side of the doorway warned visitors to take care on the steps. And they gave the building’s name — the Victoria Prospect Tower. Right now, it seemed ironic. Cooper wasn’t looking forward to the prospect at the top.

  ‘A tricky location,’ said Kotsev.

  ‘It couldn’t be worse.’

  As he’d approached the tower, Cooper had called Control to report the situation. Help would be on the way, and it looked as though he might need it. But it would take time.

  When Cooper looked up at the parapet again, a fine mist fell on his face and trickled into his collar. Lowther must be getting cold and uncomfortable up there by now. He wasn’t even dressed for the rain.

  ‘OK, let’s go and talk to him.’

  Rain had blown in through the doorway, creating a dark patch in the stairwell. Inside, the view upwards was dizzying. Stone steps curled away into the tower, with bare tree trunks zigzagging overhead from wall to wall. Cooper could see both the outer and inner surfaces of the staircase at once, which seemed entirely wrong. His instincts were telling him that it was impossible to walk on stairs that coiled so tightly and rose so steeply.

  Standing close to the wall, Cooper took hold of the handrail and began to ascend. Mounting the spiral staircase was like walking up a twisted ribbon, or climbing a strand of DNA. It was a sort of stone helix, cold to the touch and smelling of earth. You had to be careful on these steps, or you could fall right through the spiral and plummet to the base of the tower.

  Just before the last turn, the bulkhead lights on the wall ended, and Cooper stopped when he saw daylight from the platform. He jumped when he became aware of Kotsev’s breathing below and behind him on the steps. His mind had been so distracted that he’d forgotten his companion.

  ‘Georgi, you’d better stay back out of sight. We don’t want to frighten him too much.’

  ‘Dobre. I’ll be right here, behind you.’

  Cooper’s heart was beating harder after his climb. All the way up the tower, he’d been conscious of the narrowness of the steps, and the drop through the spiral. One slip could be disastrous.

  Slowly now, he eased himself the last few feet on to the platform, trying not to make any sudden noises. Leaving the stairwell was like emerging into a different world, with light and air and an awareness of the valley all around him — banks of trees whispering in the breeze, the cables hissing as they pulled another string of swaying cars across the river. Lowther was standing nearby, his hands resting on the parapet.

  ‘Mr Lowther, do you remember me? Detective Constable Cooper.’

  Lowther seemed to become aware of him for the first time. He tried to back away, but he was already pressed hard against the parapet and could only scrape slowly around the platform until he was on the eastern side. He stood with the Heights of Abraham behind him, birds swooping through the woods, water dripping from branch to branch, cable cars descending to the base station.

  Cooper took a step backwards, trying to judge a safe distance that wouldn’t make Lowther feel under too much pressure. At the same time, he had to find some way to keep the man’s attention on him. At the moment, his concentration seemed to be wandering, his eyes darting around the landscape, distracted by the whir of cables and the voices of people on the ground below.

  ‘Just take it easy, sir. There’s nothing to worry about.’

  He felt faintly ridiculous as soon as he said it. He could see from the expression on Lowther’s face that the man had plenty to worry about. Real or imagined, it was all there in his eyes and in the twist of his mouth. Fear, verging on panic.

  ‘You’re quite safe, Mr Lowther. I’m here to help you.’

  Trying to inject a calmness into his voice that he didn’t feel himself, Cooper spread his hands in a reassuring gesture. His fingers to
uched the edge of the parapet, and he saw the stone was yellow with encrusted lichen.

  ‘Is there a dog here somewhere?’ said Lowther.

  Cooper smiled then. Bizarrely, it sounded like progress. ‘You recognize me, don’t you, sir? You remember me? I’m DC Cooper. We talked yesterday. I was with a colleague, and you told us about your neighbour’s Alsatian.’

  ‘Tyrannosaurus.’

  ‘And we showed you a wooden dinosaur, that’s right.’

  ‘You don’t have to believe what they’re saying.’

  A gust of wind brought the sound of children’s voices up the valley from Gulliver’s Kingdom. Laughter and screams. Kids hurtling over the switchback, plunging into the log flume, their mouths open, their clothes flying.

  Lowther inclined his head. ‘They’re there,’ he said. ‘Not far away now.’

  Cooper was concentrating so hard on the other man, tensed for a sudden movement, that he was hardly aware of movements on the edge of his vision, the increasing number of sounds around him. He reminded himself that John Lowther saw the world differently, and was probably already in an entirely abnormal state of mind where he saw things that didn’t exist and heard voices that Cooper couldn’t.

  For some reason, Cooper couldn’t stop his thoughts wandering. He remembered thinking about the indoor area at Gulliver’s Kingdom, the place his nieces wanted so much to visit. The Wild West, an ice palace, jungle adventures. It was just there, in the distance, prominent among the trees. He could see it without taking his eyes from Lowther’s. Right now, Cooper could imagine himself in the middle of a Wild West shoot-out, that nerve-jangling moment when two men waited for each other to make the fatal first move. Or maybe that wasn’t it. Perhaps he was in the ice palace. Skating on very thin ice indeed.

  ‘There’s nothing to worry about, sir,’ he repeated. ‘Let’s just go down to the bottom of the tower, and we can talk. We can talk about whatever you like.’

  Lowther shook his head. ‘It’ll soon be Monday,’ he said.

  ‘Monday?’

  Frowning, Cooper found the lines of a song going through his head. An old Boomtown Rats classic.

  ‘So what don’t you like about Mondays?’

  ‘Not Mondays,’ said Lowther. ‘Next Monday. The thirty-first of October.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Of course. Halloween. The time when the forces of evil were at their most powerful, the night when the doors to the underworld stood open and it was possible to communicate with the dead. Another belief that died hard, despite the efforts to make it all about pumpkins and apple bobbing.

  ‘I can’t be alive by then,’ said Lowther. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘All we need to do,’ said Cooper, ‘is get you down from here and take you to see a doctor. They can stop the voices, John. You know they can. They’ve done it before.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ said Lowther, shaking with agitation. ‘Mum said you understood, but you don’t. When people talk to me now it’s like a different kind of language. It’s too much to hold in my mind at once. My head is overloaded and I can’t understand what they say. It makes me forget what I’ve just heard because I can’t hear it for long enough. It’s all in different bits, you see, which I have to put together again in my head. Until I do that, it’s all words in the air. I have to try to figure it out from people’s faces. But their faces always say something different from their voices.’

  ‘Mr Lowther, please calm down and stop talking for a minute.’

  ‘I have to keep talking, to drown out the voices.’

  ‘We’ll get you some treatment, to make the voices go away.’

  ‘They’ll never go away — not completely. They’ll always be there …’ He seemed to be listening to something. Whatever he heard terrified him, and he shouted the next few words. ‘It’s Lindsay’s voice. Lindsay — and the children. I heard them scream. I’ll always hear them scream.’

  ‘Look — ’

  What happened next, Cooper wasn’t quite sure. He’d been trying to concentrate on what John Lowther was saying, so he could respond and reestablish a connection. He’d been trying to maintain eye contact, to hold the man’s attention and keep him talking. But something had spooked him. Lowther jerked backwards against the parapet as if he’d been shoved in the chest or pulled back by an invisible hand.

  Then he was going over, and Cooper was diving forward to grab hold of him. He found only clothes to clutch at, smooth material that slipped through his fingers and left him nothing to grip. He felt Lowther’s weight shifting inexorably outwards as gravity seized him and dragged him over the edge.

  ‘Georgi! Help me, quick!’

  Kotsev came thumping up the steps, gasping as he reached the top.

  ‘Dyavol da go vzeme! Oh hell!’

  But Kotsev was too late. Cooper felt his muscles scream against the effort of holding on to Lowther’s coat, fabric stretching and tearing between his fingers. Lowther was doing nothing to help himself. Before Georgi could reach over the parapet to help, Lowther slipped out of Cooper’s hands. His arms and legs flailed in the air, and his body bounced once off the stones of the tower as he fell, his mouth open, his jacket flying.

  It was only in the final second that John Lowther’s screams joined those of the children that he could hear. A second of screaming, and then the impact. And all the voices were silenced for ever.

  34

  When the call came in, the helicopter unit had been responding to a Casevac request, the recovery of a paraglider who’d made a heavy landing on the slopes of Kinder Scout and broken his ankle. By the time the casualty had been evacuated to a hospital in Chesterfield and the aircraft was free to be re-tasked, the suspect vehicle was already on the M1 and heading south.

  Anthony Donnelly was on the run in his beige C-class Mercedes. The first sign of a police car in his street in Swanwick, and he’d legged it. A sign of experience, that, having the car warmed up and ready to go, facing the right direction. Without the helicopter, he might have got clean away before he even reached the motorway.

  Normally, Oscar Hotel 88 could be airborne in three minutes from a call, with an average transit time to an incident of seven minutes. It took far longer for officers dealing with an incident on the ground to decide they needed the helicopter deployed.

  But now the helicopter unit was airborne a mile west of the M1. On board, the observer was following the Mercedes on his video camera, the zoom facility picking the car out easily from the surrounding traffic. Even the officers following at a distance in an unmarked Omega had no idea the helicopter was there, until its call sign cropped up on their talk group.

  If he’s heading for the airport, we need to intercepthim before he enters the terminal.

  We don’t have units in place yet. We’re waiting forFirearms Support.

  How long are we going to wait?

  As long as it takes. We have to assume the suspect isarmed.

  Understood.

  Listening to the exchange, Fry could detect the underlying anxiety at the prospect of an armed confrontation in a public place. And it would be a very public place, if the suspect got as far as the concourse in the airport terminal building.

  She checked her map. Coming south from Sheffield, the M1 passed through part of Derbyshire, entered Nottinghamshire near Pinxton, then crossed back over the border again for the last stretch towards the airport. The confusion of jurisdictions made no sense in policing terms. It was an anomaly that someone always pointed out when the subject of merging police forces came up.

  East Midlands Airport lay right by the M1, between junctions 24 and 23A. From the north, the Mercedes would take 24 if it was heading for the airport. Right now, it was approaching the slip road into Trowell Services.

  Watch for him pulling off.

  Have we alerted our neighbours?

  Control rooms are in the loop.

  One result of the M1’s waywardness was that Trowell Services lay over the border in Nottinghamshire, despite
being within two miles of Ilkeston nick. Permission had to be obtained for an operation on neighbouring territory, and officers would have to keep the control room at Sherwood Lodge informed as well as their own at Ripley.

  But the Mercedes went past the services and drove another eight miles down the motorway. The helicopter’s observer kept up a running commentary to guide the units converging on the suspect.

  Leaving the motorway now.

  The vehicle came off at junction 24 and took the fourth exit at the roundabout on to the A453 in the Donington Park area. At the next roundabout, it would have to stay on the same road and bear right at the lights into the airport. But it didn’t do that.

  Turning into the Travelodge. It looks as though he’sparking up.

  OK, take up positions and await FSU.

  Fifteen minutes later, Hitchens gave Fry the thumbs-up, and a big grin. Their suspect was in custody.

  ‘So you don’t want to tell us about Rose Shepherd,’ said Hitchens, watching Tony Donnelly across the interview-room table.

  ‘I’ve got nothing to say.’

  They’d been trying for a long time, struggling through the kind of interview that Fry hated — the kind that made her think of banging her head repeatedly against a wall. Good only when it stopped. In fact, she had a suspicion the average wall would crack long before this suspect.

  Donnelly and the duty solicitor stared back at the detectives across the table. They had an air of being two visitors at a zoo, wondering when these strange creatures were going to do something more interesting.

  ‘What about Lindsay Mullen, then?’ said Hitchens.

  Donnelly hesitated slightly before he answered. ‘No comment.’

  ‘Where did you first see Mrs Mullen?’

  ‘No comment.’