‘What do you want?’ asked Pink Face.
‘Do any of you own a white Transit van?’ asked Lesley and ran off the licence plate from memory.
Pink Face looked at Squinty Eyes who looked at whoever was in the Range Rover and then past me at something behind me. It was all the warning I needed. Emerging from the back door of the bungalow was yet another white guy in combat trousers and jacket, only this one also had a double-barrelled shotgun and as he walked towards us, he raised it to his shoulder.
From an ordinary policing point of view the best way to deal with firearms is to be outside the operational perimeter while SCO19, the armed wing of the Metropolitan Police, shoot the person with a gun. The second best way is to deal with the weapon before it gets pointed at you.
I cast a simple impello on the shotgun and yanked the twin barrels straight up before he had a chance to take aim. There was a double boom as he involuntarily squeezed both triggers and then I dropped the butt on his face. The man squealed, let go of the stock and staggered back clutching his nose.
I glanced around to see how Lesley was doing, and caught sight of a slim figure in a charcoal-grey trouser suit climb out of the Range Rover. Nightingale has been training us to cast certain spells practically by reflex, and as soon as I recognised her I had my shield up. It saved my life, because the next instant I was struck by a freight train full of icicles.
The impact cartwheeled me off my feet and I saw sky blue and frost white whirl around my head and then I hit the ground on my back hard enough to make my vision dim. I tried to get up, but what was unmistakably a boot crashed down on my chest and drove me back onto the ground.
Above me loomed the man with the shotgun, his nose was crooked and beginning to swell and blood was seeping from one of his nostrils. He’d retrieved his shotgun and had the business end pointing at my head. It was possible he hadn’t had a chance to reload, but strangely I didn’t feel at all tempted to find out.
Varvara Sidorovna’s face appeared above and looked down at me. When she saw me, she sighed and muttered something under her breath in Russian. Then she walked out of my view, her muttering getting louder until she was swearing noisily.
I was struck by what a good language Russian was for swearing in — very expressive.
17
Prisoners of War
Dog fighters don’t see themselves as criminals at all. They see themselves as upholders of a fine rural tradition that dates back centuries and has been unfairly penalised by sanctimonious urbanites. They don’t fight their dogs for the money — although the betting can be brisk and the stud fees lucrative — they fight them for honour, for ego and for the sheer thrill of the combat. The rules of a proper dog fight were codified in the 1830s. The ring is always a square with sides twelve feet long and two feet six inches high, and there’s normally an old carpet laid in the bottom to soak up the blood. It’s really very distinctive and makes them easy to recognise, especially when you’re kneeling in the middle of one with your hands on your head.
The ring was in the old barn, which was much better maintained than the new concrete one and had racks of empty dog cages along each wall. That explained why it had been so securely locked.
They had me and Lesley facing the barn door while behind us stood at least two of the combat trouser brigade — both armed with shotguns. Varvara Sidorovna knew our capabilities and wasn’t taking any chances. We’d been there long enough for my knees to start seizing up and for our guards to forget we were listening.
‘This is fucking stupid,’ said Max, who had repeated this statement at regular intervals since we’d arrived here. By a process of elimination I’d decided this was the round pink-faced guy, and we knew his name was Max because his partner had used it the last time he’d told him to shut the fuck up. I was pretty certain his partner was the squinty-eyed guy and I knew his name was Barry because Max had used it when he told him to fuck off.
‘Shut up,’ said Barry.
‘Well, it is fucking stupid,’ said Max. ‘We should be well out of here by now.’
‘Not until the Comrade Major says it’s time to go.’
‘Fuck the fucking Comrade Major,’ mumbled Max.
‘I wouldn’t try if I was you,’ said Barry. ‘She’ll freeze your balls off.’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Max. ‘Seriously frigid.’
‘Look,’ said Lesley. ‘It’s bad enough that you’re holding us prisoner, but can we at least dispense with the fucking sexism?’
‘You’re a mouthy cunt, aren’t you?’ said Barry.
‘What I am is a police officer,’ said Lesley. ‘And if anything happens to me or my partner here I personally guarantee that you won’t survive the subsequent arrest.’
‘What?’ asked Barry.
‘Damage us,’ I said, ‘and our colleagues will fuck you up big time.’
‘Shut up,’ said Max.
‘Yeah,’ said Barry. ‘Shut the fuck up.’
‘Not them, you dickhead,’ said Max. ‘You shut the fuck up as well.’
My stomach was churning. I didn’t want to die in a dog fighting ring. In Essex, for god’s sake, what would my dad say? And my mum would be so pissed off with me. Better all-round if I avoided the whole dying thing altogether.
‘You know, after today you two are going to be disposable,’ said Lesley.
‘She’s right,’ I said. ‘We tracked you here through the van and we reported in before we came here.’
‘She gets you to top us,’ said Lesley. ‘And then she leaves you hanging out for the police.’
My throat was dry and I had to cough before I could say, ‘That’s a bit too risky. More likely she zaps them and then burns down this place with them in it.’
‘People are always setting themselves on fire when they do arson,’ said Lesley. ‘They’ll think you murdered us and then did yourselves in by accident. Case closed, and the Comrade Major gets away scot free.’
There was a long pause and then Max said, ‘We’re not listening to you, you know.’
But I thought they might be.
I think we might have been there for another hour after that. Barry was complaining that he wanted a slash, my knees were killing me and I had shooting pains in my shoulders from keeping my hands on my head. I did wonder, given how long Max and Barry had been standing there, whether they might be equally stiff and unresponsive.
There was nothing in my forward field of view that I could grab with impello and the bloody Comrade Major Varvara Sidorovna had instructed Max and Barry to randomly move around behind my back and stay separated so that I couldn’t just blindly smack them down. Nothing I could do was going to be faster than their trigger fingers — however stiff they got.
Still, when the barn doors opened in front of me I did my best to clear my mind and be ready for any opportunity.
It was Varvara Sidorovna carrying, I couldn’t help noticing, two plastic jerry cans. Judging from the way they weighed on her shoulders they must have been nearly full and I didn’t think it was with water. By the time I’d registered that, she’d walked briskly out of our line of sight.
‘Okay,’ she said from behind us. ‘In a couple of minutes I want you two to shoot these two in the head and douse everything with petrol.’ She spoke English with the deliberately regionless accent of a BBC Radio 4 presenter.
Being held at gunpoint is a police nightmare and you always tell yourself that should push come to shove and some vile scrote is about to actually shoot you, you’d at least make a play. Go for the gun, duck, attack the bastard with your bare hands. I mean after all, at that instant, what would you have to lose? But shove had arrived and I found I couldn’t make myself move, not even a little bit. It was shameful. I had found the upper limit of my courage.
Fortunately for me, there is no known lower limit to human stupidity.
‘They’re police,’ said Barry, just as Varvara Sidorovna had crossed back into view and was heading for the barn doors. ‘I don’t think
this is a good idea.’
Varvara Sidorovna turned and her face was a picture. I’m having a bad day, it said. And now there’s you — thinking!
‘Listen, Varvara,’ said Lesley. ‘You really want to talk to your boss before you do anything hasty.’
I was still trying to make myself move and practically trembling with frustration. It’s not like I’ve had trouble doing stupid things before, I thought. Why am I finding it so hard now?
‘Varvara, call your boss,’ said Lesley, her voice tight.
‘How do we know you won’t get rid of us once we’ve done your dirty work?’ asked Barry.
‘I still need you to carry the gear when we get back to London,’ said Varvara Sidorovna.
‘Yeah,’ said Max. ‘But-’
‘Don’t make me come back there and do it myself,’ she said.
‘Okay,’ said Max. ‘But I don’t think-’
Varvara Sidorovna threw up a hand to silence Max and cocked her head to one side — listening. Then I heard it too. A car engine drawing closer, tyres crunching in the gravelly verge of the farmyard. The engine cut out and there was a creak as a handbrake was applied.
I felt Lesley tense beside me — no modern handbrake sounded like that.
There was the sound of a car door opening and then slamming shut.
Varvara Sidorovna gestured sharply to get Max and Barry’s attention, pointed two fingers at her eyes, and then at me and Lesley. Then she took a couple of cat-quiet steps to the side of the barn doors and I saw her breathe slowly in and exhale smoothly. Her face became calm, still — expectant.
There was a long silence, I could hear Max and Barry breathing through their mouths and shifting from foot to foot and the tik tik tik of something small and clawed making its way down the line of cages — a mouse? Then suddenly there was a brutal crack like a giant stamping on a plate and daylight spewed through a sudden hole in the front wall of the barn — just above the double doors. Dust exploded into the air to hang in a roiling cloud — gleaming in the sunlight. Then the front of the barn literally unzipped — bricks fountaining up and away in two diverging streams and the doors abruptly ripped off their hinges and went spinning off through the air like something from a catastrophic decompression.
Suddenly I could see the farmyard outside, brightly lit by afternoon sunlight, bricks falling out of the clear blue sky like rain, dust puffing up as they landed, thudding, on the track.
And, having made sure everyone was paying attention to the front, Nightingale walked in through the back door.
The first we knew of it was when Max and Barry came flying headfirst into the dog-fighting ring, landing right beside us. I had a brief glimpse of their shotguns scything through the air at head height — aiming right for where Varvara Sidorovna would have been standing if she hadn’t jumped and rolled to the left.
Max turned to look at me and there was a horrible tearing sensation in my shoulder as I swung my fist down to slam into his face. The pain actually made me scream, but it was totally worth it. He slammed back onto the filthy carpet and stayed ducked down there, as it suddenly got extremely dangerous above waist height. Across Max’s quivering bulk I saw that Lesley had Barry in a headlock — his face red, his mouth open and gasping.
I’d expected ice again. But Varvara Sidorovna threw a brace of fireballs across the barn, which exploded amongst the ranked dog cages. There was a rattling thud as fragments smacked into the wooden side of the ring.
Lesley shouted my name and jerked her head at the gaping hole in the front of the barn. I only realised later that Nightingale had done that deliberately to make it easier for me and Lesley to clear the area.
I glared at Max.
‘We’re all going out the front,’ I hissed. ‘But if you give me any aggro I’ll just leave you here. Understand?’
Max nodded, his eyes wide with fear. I was really tempted to smack him in the face again, but common sense prevailed.
‘One,’ called Lesley. ‘Two. .’
A ball of fire the size of my fist ripped through the air over my head and curved away to explode against a ceiling joint.
‘Fuck it!’ yelled Lesley. ‘Go, go, go.’
So we went, went, went. I kept my eyes on the sunlit farmyard and, hauling Max behind me, I lurched to my feet and ran for it. Outside, the sunlight blinded me but I kept going until I bounced painfully off the Range Rover. I turned as Lesley, pushing Barry ahead of her, caught up with us.
The roof blew off the top of the barn. It didn’t explode. It lifted, almost intact, ten metres into the air before crashing back down and breaking its back. Grey slate tiles cascaded off the slopes and crackled as they hit the ground.
We manhandled Max and Barry around the other side of the Range Rover and pushed them onto their faces in the mud. We didn’t have our cuffs, so we made them put their hands on their heads and hoped they weren’t stupid enough to move. Crouching, I took a careful peek over the bonnet just in time to see the roof of the barn collapse in on itself.
It went strangely quiet as a wave of brown brick dust rolled out across the farmyard, starting to flatten out as it reached the Range Rover. A solitary brick, falling from who knows how high up, thudded belatedly onto the ground.
I heard tentative birdsong beginning again, and the wind rustling in the tops of the hedgerow.
‘Do you think we should. .’ I nodded in the direction of the barn.
‘Peter,’ said Lesley. ‘From a purely operational point of view I believe that would be a really fucking bad idea.’
I noticed then that Nightingale’s Jag, which I swore I’d heard pull up in front of the barn was nowhere to be seen.
I felt a tremor through the soles of my shoes.
A crack. And then the unmistakable sound of breaking sheet glass made me crane my neck to get a view of the bungalow. Left of the backdoor, where I judged the kitchen to be, a picture window had shattered. Chunks of glass fell outwards into the yard. Even as I watched, whorls of frost spread out from the empty frame, the surrounding pebble-dash cracking and flaking and popping off to expose the red brick underneath. Probably improving the value of the house, I thought.
A whimper caused me to check on our prisoners. I finally realised that we were missing one, the guy whose nose I’d broken with his own shotgun. I told Lesley.
‘I know,’ she said.
‘Do you think we should go look for him?’
There was a series of thuds from inside the bungalow, then a crash as an old-fashioned white-enamelled gas cooker exited via the window and cartwheeled jangling across the yard.
‘Not just at the moment,’ said Lesley.
A blue 15kg Calor Gas Bottle fell out of the sky, bounced once off the ground in front of the bungalow and came down again with a loud boing sound.
Me and Lesley hunched down and tried to make sure that every bit of our bodies had some Range Rover between them and the gas bottle.
I was just about to suggest that it might be empty, when it blew up — something that Frank Caffrey swears shouldn’t happen spontaneously under any circumstances.
I managed to bang my head against the wheel arch in startlement, the Range Rover’s windows cracked and a chunk of blue metal casing whirred over my head, over the fence, around the yard and off into the field beyond.
I heard a woman scream with rage and frustration and then grunt like a tennis player. The ground trembled again, and what was left of the Range Rover’s windows blew out and showered us with crystal fragments — something I’d always thought couldn’t happen with safety glass.
There was a rapid series of solid thuds like a boxer would make taking out his frustration on a punch bag.
Then silence and then Varvara Sidorovna said, ‘Enough, enough, I surrender.’
I risked a look. She was squatting on her heels in the middle of the farmyard, her face cast down and her hands raised palms forward. Her natty suit had lost an arm and the pale pink blouse underneath was torn and bloodied.
We stood up for a better look, and saw that the bungalow had been cut in two as if someone had driven a freight train through it. Nightingale advanced on Varvara Sidorovna from its remains.
He was wearing, I noticed, a charcoal-grey lightweight worsted suit in a classic sixties cut which he must have acquired about the same time he bought the Jag. It was, I thought queasily, a suit my dad would have been glad to wear. It looked completely pristine and as he approached he shot his cuffs and checked the links — a completely unconscious gesture.
‘Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina,’ he said. ‘I am arresting you for murder, attempted murder, conspiracy to murder, aiding and abetting before, during and after the fact and no doubt a great many other crimes.’ He hesitated and I realised he couldn’t remember the modern caution.
‘You do not have to say anything,’ shouted Lesley. ‘But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’
I cautiously picked my way through the debris strewn across the yard. Nightingale pulled a set of modern handcuffs and tossed them to me. I helped Varvara Sidorovna to her feet and asked her to put her hands behind her back and slipped the cuffs on.
‘For you, Major,’ I said, ‘the war is over.’
Varvara gave me an exasperated look and then sighed.
‘If only that were true,’ she said.
At which point the Essex Police arrived with the fire brigade just behind them and tried to arrest us all, on the very sound policing principle of arrest everyone and sort out the guilty at the station. There was a certain amount of waving of warrant cards, calls to superiors and veiled threats that what had happened to the farm buildings could easily be repeated if someone didn’t starting taking us seriously, thank you very much. They did take Max and Barry off our hands and a couple of hours later they found our third suspect, whose name turned out to be Danny Bates, five kilometres away, having run as soon as the fireballs started flying. Making him possibly the brightest there.
Broken Homes pg-4 Page 24
