by Jack Gatland
‘You weren’t gonna be killed, fed,’ Macca tched. ‘You were gonna be the witness to three crime lords offing themselves.’
Declan noted the other two guns, still aimed at their targets.
‘I see that,’ he said. ‘Three gangland bosses meet in a room and shoot each other. Monroe wakes up, finds the bodies. Calls it in.’ He looked to Lawson. ‘I’m assuming you’ll be playing the victim, the one that wakes the drugged DCI in the process?'
‘Well, I was going to, until you spoiled the plan,’ Father Lawson replied. ‘I’m guessing that you’re Declan? I thought you’d be shorter, from how Derek spoke about you.’ He broke into a grin. ‘Wait! I remember you! I saw you on the train!’
‘Shouldn’t have gone to see The Twins,’ Declan replied. ‘Only reason I found you.’ He looked back to the others. ‘Drop them, or we all die.’
‘Some of us might want that,’ Harrison hissed, gun unwavering. Monroe stepped forward.
‘Would Angela have wanted that?’ he asked. It seemed to do the trick, as Harrison reluctantly nodded, dropping the gun to the table. Macca wavered, gun in his hand.
‘You don’t know what this bastard did to me,’ he said, indicating his father. ‘He needs to die.’
‘You don’t have the guts,’ George Byrne turned to Macca, now pulling out his butterfly knife, one-handedly opening it. ‘Oh, you gonna slit my throat? Go on then.’
‘I ain’t gonna do that,’ Macca replied. And then, before Declan could stop him, he rammed the blade down, spearing George’s hand to the table.
As George screamed, reaching for the blade, Macca looked to Moses and nodded. Just like Harrison, Macca and Moses dropped the guns.
‘You don’t know what you’re interrupting,’ Moses said as Declan took the guns, passing one to Monroe who gratefully replaced the pin in the grenade and threw it to the side. Declan meanwhile placed the third gun in his trouser band while aiming the other at the people in the room while Monroe, pulling out a handkerchief passed it to George Byrne, taking the freshly pulled out and bloodied blade from him.
‘I think I’ve worked it out,’ Declan said to Father Lawson, pulling out some cable ties, throwing them onto the table. ‘Indulge me, while your three accessories are secured?’
As George, Janelle and Danny rose, cable tying their progeny’s hands behind their backs, Father Lawson walked over to the table and sat down.
‘I’m all ears.’
‘Let’s start with the elephant in the room.’ Declan walked to Father Lawson. ‘Have you told them who you are yet?’
‘I have,’ Father Lawson replied. ‘I didn’t want them going to Satan without knowing. And yes, they also know that Angela and Gabrielle were my children.’
‘Okay, so let me see if I can work everything out,’ Declan smiled. ‘You shared your role with your brother, and he was the one who worked with Danny. You did after all play with each other as kids. Stephen and Danny brought drugs in from Africa, and before you knew it, you’d found yourself in above your head.’
‘He knew exactly what he was getting into,’ Danny hissed. Declan held up a hand.
‘My story,’ he said. ‘So there you are, stuck in this situation, and then you find a small ray of hope. Sister Nadine. You consider leaving the priesthood, perhaps. You definitely conceive twins together.’
Father Lawson nodded silently.
‘But this causes issues,’ Declan continued. ‘Nadine can’t keep a secret, and you can’t tell her the truth. ‘Father Lawson’ is supposed to be in Africa right then, and you’re here, out of sight.’
‘I had to see her,’ Father Lawson admitted. ‘It was stupid.’
‘You’re damn right,’ Danny Martin hissed.
‘So then we have the babies being born. You’re told to go away, to stay here. Stephen takes over your duties.’ Declan looked to Danny and George. ‘And that’s when you both come in.’
Danny folded his arms. ‘I’m innocent here,’ he protested.
‘You have the drugs by now, but not the supply,’ Declan suggested. ‘The Twins aren’t that interested in your plans, and you need a new distributor. Enter George Byrne. Craig Chapman now works with him, and there’s an opportunity. Craig’s wife is pregnant, Danny’s wife is pregnant, the plan is made to have both men in the same Mission while their wives give birth, to hammer out a deal with Stephen Lawson where nobody sees it. But things go wrong.’
Danny nodded. ‘Cheryl died.’
Declan paced around the room as he spoke. ‘Now here’s one bit I can’t really confirm, but this is what I think,’ he said. ‘At the same time, Nadine gives birth. Twins. The nuns name them Gabrielle and Angela. The two babies from the two wives die from complications. Now the nuns have a dilemma. What do they do? They call in Father Lawson, who we all know as Stephen, and he speaks to Nadine alone, but tells the nuns that things were too stressful on Nadine, and she’s passed away.’
‘He killed her,’ Father Lawson replied. ‘He admitted it to me. He smothered her with a pillow.’
‘So now the nuns need to decide what to do with the bairns,’ Monroe continued. ‘And they have these two convenient families there that don’t know that their own babies are dead.’
‘I’m guessing this was Stephen’s idea. That you didn’t know this,’ Declan looked to Danny who nodded quietly. Declan continued.
‘So Barry Lawson, the real one, returns from Beachampton and sees that Nadine and the babies are dead. He blames Stephen, blames everyone. He tells you he’s not doing this anymore. That he’s ending the incredibly lucrative deal you have going on. And you decide to remove him.’
‘We didn’t want to kill him’ Danny replied. ‘Just get him out of the way.’
‘By setting me up!’ Father Lawson snapped. ‘You ended my life! Threw me into purgatory!’
Danny didn’t reply.
‘It was Derek, wasn’t it?’ Declan asked. ‘He was the arresting officer. You had him falsify the fingerprints, prove without a doubt that Barry here was his brother.’
Danny nodded his head. Declan looked to the others in the room.
‘And then Barry becomes a footnote,’ he said. ‘For the moment. Because meanwhile, in the years that follow, Gabrielle Chapman and Angela Martin grow up, unknowing of each other. And Danny here works out an alternative plan to take over everything.’
‘He told me to introduce Angie to Macca,’ Harrison, now sitting on the floor beside the sideboard, said. ‘He wanted me to whore her out to him. But before that he’d already introduced her to Moses.’
‘But by this point, she already knew that he wasn’t her father,’ Moses added, looking at Danny. ‘She told me so.’
‘Exactly,’ Monroe took over the story now. ‘She did this DNA test and learned that daddy dearest wasn’t. So, she went to the Mission and spoke to the nuns. She learned of the sister she didn’t know that she had, and she went to Birmingham to find her. I never spoke to the nuns there, but I think I know what she found. Gabrielle Chapman was barely there. She’d suffered a debilitating brain injury when she was a child, maybe from when her parents died. With nobody to look after her, the nuns, feeling a sense of duty for the child of one of their own, took her in.’
‘She was almost catatonic,’ Harrison replied. ‘Angie took me to see her once. She didn’t even know when her own sister was in the room.’
‘At this point, Angela wanted out of this world of crime,’ Declan continued. ‘She was in love. Wasn’t she, Harrison?’
Harrison nodded. ‘We were gonna run away together,’ he said. ‘We’d use Gabby as the way out. We weren’t gonna kill her, just let everyone think that Angela had suffered some kind of stroke while we ran away with everything. We knew the nuns would have to help us, they were terrified of the truth coming out, and the police taking away their house. Angela ensured that she and Gabby were identical. We tattooed a rose on Gabby’s shoulder, and Angela had to break her own forearm while on a school trip to mimic one that Gabby had gaine
d somehow. And while we did this, Angela kept doing what Danny asked; she pretended to go out with both Macca and Moses. Danny thought she was building up his empire, but all the while we all worked together.’
Declan looked to Janelle Delcourt. ‘At what point did you work out what was going on?’ he asked. She shrugged noncommittally.
‘Moses would never take over the Sisters,’ she said. ‘So he thought that he could bring in that bitch, remove me and replace her as the Matriarch.’
‘I didn’t want to control your bloody sisters!’ Moses shouted. ‘I just wanted you to accept me!’
Janelle didn’t look at her son.
‘I should have spent more time with you,’ she said. ‘It would have strengthened you. Not led to this weak fool I see in front of me.’
‘So you got together?’ Declan said, more a statement than a question. It was George that replied.
‘By this point Danny had learned that she wasn’t his kid. She’d told Stephen in confession, thinking that he was her actual father, you see. So we got together, here, a year or so back. We didn’t know they were working together, just that the little cow was causing issues. She’d started taking drugs at this point. Lots of drugs. She was becoming a liability. We knew we’d be better off without her.’
‘So you hired someone in this room, a year ago to kill Angela Martin.’ Monroe spoke now. Danny nodded.
‘An old friend.’
‘Derek Salmon,’ Declan said. ‘You hired Derek Salmon to do it.’
Janelle Delcourt nodded.
‘Danny had used him before, but we had him on our books,’ she said. ‘We paid him to kill her, to make it look like an accident. But he killed the wrong girl.’
‘He killed the idiot one,’ Danny hissed. ‘He was scared, thought he’d been spotted, didn’t bother turning the light on when he found her. If he had he would have realised that although she was identical, she wasn’t that identical, you know? He gave her a drug overdose, but it wasn’t enough. She started to moan, to scream. Salmon realised about now that he’d done the wrong girl, and so the idiot strangled her with a Rosary and then ran off, leaving us to clear the shit up.’
‘That’s when Harrison and you took the body and buried it. When Alfie Mullville saw you.’
‘I thought Danny’d killed Angela,’ Harrison said. ‘I was gonna kill him and bury the body. I didn’t realise until we got to the Lickeys that it was Gabby in the back. He wouldn’t say who did it, but hinted that it was Moses.’
‘And what about Angela?’ Monroe asked.
‘Salmon again,’ Danny replied. ‘He found Angela in London, but didn’t have time to fake the death as an overdose. He killed her with the same Rosary and then buried the body.’
‘So Derek did do it,’ Declan raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘And the Sisters told him to.’
‘Sometimes the best misdirection is based in truth,’ Monroe suggested.
‘We let the boys think that the other one did it,’ Janelle added. ‘We wanted them suspicious of each other rather than helping each other against us. And at the start, it worked.’
‘Until you came along.’ Declan looked at Father Lawson, who beamed, nodding.
‘Until I came along,’ he repeated. ‘About time we got to the good part.’
31
Countdown
Billy and Anjli stood outside The Immaculate Conception of St. Mary The Virgin, testing the door to the church, in case it opened. It didn’t.
‘This can’t be right,’ Billy backed away from the door, looking around. ‘There’s literally nobody here. And the ones that are seem to be local and would have noticed something.’
Anjli nodded, walking back to the gate where several members of Milton Keynes finest stood ready to assist in the church's storming.
‘I think we might be in the wrong place, guys,’ she said reluctantly. She was angry at herself; time was running out. Declan should have been here by now, as the train he had been on had stopped at Milton Keynes a good half an hour earlier. She was worried that perhaps Father Lawson had carried on to Birmingham, and Alex Monroe was still in the West Midlands, or even dead by now.
‘It has to be the right place,’ Billy was holding his phone in the air as he turned in a slow circle, looking at it. ‘We’re almost literally between Birmingham and London. Is anyone else not getting a signal either?’
There was a sound from the village, a speeding car. The police officers with Anjli and Billy, all in heavy combat gear turned to face whatever was coming, but they didn’t expect the furious forms of Doctor Marcos and DCI Bullman driving up to the church at speed, screeching to a handbrake skid mere yards from them as both Doctor and Detective bounded out of the car and ran to the constables.
‘Are we too late?’ Doctor Marcos said. ‘Have we gone in yet?’
‘No,’ Anjli shook her head. ‘There’s no sign of anyone being in, and if Monroe had been brought here, there would have been people seeing it. That couple over there by the bench, for a start. They’ve been weeding the older graves for the last three hours.’
Bullman looked around the crossroads beside the church. ‘Then which way do we go?’ she asked. ‘It has to be around here. I can’t…’ she stopped as she stared up the Thornton Road.
‘Is that Stripe Mullville?’ she asked, pointing.
Doctor Marcos looked up the road and started running towards the approaching figure, Billy running beside her. A moment later they brought an obviously shaken and tired Stripe to the small gathering of police cars by the church.
‘DCI Monroe and DI Walsh are in danger,’ Stripe said. ‘They told me to say that.’
‘Who did?’ Bullman asked. Stripe stared at her as if she was an idiot.
‘DCI Monroe and DI Walsh did, obviously.’
‘Where are they?’ Doctor Marcos knelt before the boy now. ‘You came from that direction. Is it that way?’
Stripe nodded. ‘It’s a house about a mile down there. Took me ages to run here.’
‘Can you show us on a map?’ Bullman asked as Anjli and Billy already ran for their car, the officers doing the same. Stripe nodded.
‘I can do better than that,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you there myself.’
‘I spent seventeen years in Belmarsh Prison,’ Father Lawson explained. ‘None of these old bastards came to visit. But I got visitors.’ He pointed at Harrison. ‘Angela, looking for answers and gaining none from my brother, came to see me with Harrison. They were the first people in over a decade that believed in me. She said she’d try to get me out, to prove my identity, but I never saw her again. I never knew why until I was released six months ago and learned of her disappearance.’
‘Is that why you killed your brother?’ Declan asked. Father Lawson shook his head.
‘No, I’d decided to kill him a long time earlier,’ he explained. ‘But my problem was I was thinking too literally. I killed him and regained my life way too fast. I should have tortured him, learned everything first.’
‘That doesn’t sound like a very priestly thing to do,’ Monroe muttered. Father Lawson shrugged.
‘I stopped being a priest the day I arrived in Belmarsh,’ he said. ‘Revenge kept me alive.’
‘So how did you find out about the murders?’ Declan asked.
‘Derek Salmon,’ Father Lawson chuckled. ‘He’d been trying to fight cancer, but they’d just given him the diagnosis that said ‘pack your bags, buddy.’ He was scared, convinced he was going to Hell, which he was by the way, so he decided that a bit of confession wouldn’t hurt. He thought I was Stephen, but I played dumb, said he needed to say everything as if I was a stranger. He got on his knees in the confessional and admitted to everything. The murders of my daughters. My incarceration. I almost killed him there and then, but I realised that he could be useful in bringing me to the people that truly deserved my wrath.’ He indicated the three young men sitting on the floor. ‘And I realised I wasn’t the only one wanting vengeance. I gave him absolut
ion and sent him on his way. I then passed a message to Harrison, proving that I was the Lawson he spoke to in prison, the real father, and that I wanted to gain revenge.’
‘By taking everything from them, like they took it from you?’ Declan suggested. Father Lawson laughed.
‘That was the plan to start with,’ he said. ‘I worked with Macca and Moses, talking to them through confession, just like Angela had done before. We compared information. We worked out the best way to gain everything from this.’
‘Gang war,’ It was George Byrne who spoke. ‘Use it to remove us all and replace us.’
‘I never wanted to replace you,’ Macca snapped in anger. ‘I wanted you to accept me, and to lose something that you loved!’
‘At least you had that opportunity,’ Moses replied. ‘My family wouldn’t accept me because I was a man.’ He looked to Declan. ‘I loved Angela like a sister. But we were never lovers.’
‘So why the whole thing with Derek?’ Declan asked Father Lawson. ‘Why did he admit to the murder?’
‘That was never part of the plan,’ Father Lawson admitted. ‘Derek was dying. It scared him that he might run out of time before he could end your career. He jumped the gun a little there. All I’d asked him to do was to reveal where he’d buried Angela. Not start some singular mission. And I hadn’t expected the boy to have seen it.’
‘So why did you kill him?’ Declan continued. ‘When you gave him his Last Rites?’
‘Because I’d promised to take his pain away,’ Father Lawson said. ‘I smothered him with his own pillow. Take that as a confession of my own.’
‘So you did all this to lead to today?’ Monroe looked confused now.
‘This wasn’t the plan,’ Father Lawson admitted. ‘We wanted to take this longer, to make the families, all the families hurt more. But then Derek started getting impatient and got you involved, and the bodies appeared… We realised quickly that we had to escalate this fast and end it quickly.’
