Despite the pain she kept up a dogged pace and at last reached home where she took two Paracetamol, forced off her boots, threw down her coat, and crawled into bed. Duvet pulled up to her chin she allowed sleep to take her.
She woke with the light. It shone bright and cold through the gap in her curtains, sunlight reflecting from the blanket of snow that covered the town. Peeling back the duvet, she forced herself to sit, her mind instantly focusing on the pain in her back and the scene at 12 Lovett the night before. Gregor Zekovic was an animal. Anna and Jem were trapped in his house, and Vicky grew more determined with each minute that passed as she cleaned her grazed face and inspected her body for bruises, that she had to rescue them from a future of drugged prostitution and abuse.
Standing naked in her bathroom, the mirror that filled one wall reflected a curvaceous body with muscular thighs and toned arms honed from years of yoga, cardio, and power walking. A purple bruise darkened against skin the colour of milky coffee. Closer inspection revealed broken skin at its centre. Her face too showed the damage of Gregor’s attack. Her right eye was puffed but it was her cheek that had taken the brunt of her fall and then scrape across the snow. She filled the sink with cold water and cleansed the graze, dabbing at it with a cotton wool pad.
Plagued by thoughts of the girls, she ate a hurried breakfast of bread and cheese, swallowed it down with a slug of orange juice that was close to being fermented, then dressed and left her apartment.
An opaque sky greeted Vicky as she stepped out of the building with the promise of more snow to come. As the door swung shut behind her, she was caught by a gust of freezing air. Zipping her jacket to just below her chin, she stepped out onto the snow-covered path. Her feet were already beginning to grow numb.
In the space between her building and the next, a young woman stood with arms crossed, cigarette in mouth. Smoke billowed dragon-like as she thumbed the screen of her mobile and stuffed it back into her pocket with irritation. Two boys in identical jackets and jeans, woolly hats and gloves, scooped up snow and patted it into the lopsided figure of a snowman.
“Danny! Tyler!” the woman called. “Five more minutes. My feet are like blocks of ice!”
Ignoring their mother, the boys continued to scoop huge handfuls of snow. Vicky walked past, enjoying their laughter. Its normality in this bizarre chaos was a refreshing antidote.
The police station was only a mile from Vicky’s home, the rented apartment deliberately chosen for its closeness to work. Halfway down the street, a queue had formed outside a small supermarket. Open from seven in the morning until ten at night, seven days a week, it was staffed by local women. Today it was closed. Jerry Musgrove, a tall man with a perpetually hangdog frown who lived in the flat below Vicky’s banged at the glass door with determined thuds before yelling, ‘Open up!’ She hurried past the shop.
“Hey!” Jerry called. “Hey! Vicky! You’re a copper. What’s going on?”
Ten pairs of eyes stared back at Vicky as she turned. Jerry’s weasel face stared back at hers. What could she say? She didn’t have an answer that made sense. As he stood gawping, she stumbled for an explanation. The other shoppers eyed her with anticipation. “It’s a power cut, sir.”
“Pah!”
“A technical fault at the-”
“Some bloody fault!” A woman in the queue spat back. “We’ve no gas, no leccy, and no Wi Fi. It’s been out since yesterday!”
A grumble of agreement passed through the disgruntled crowd.
“The whole town’s down.”
“You’re not telling me that that plane that crashed was brought down by a power cut!”
“It was the explosion.”
“I’m not saying that-.”
“Terrorists did it!”
Until that moment Vicky had forgotten the horror of the plane crash. Even now it all seemed like some surreal, but horribly realistic nightmare – ‘but ...” Her words petered out as the crowd looked at her expectantly.
“You’re a copper! You should know.” The woman’s voice was querulous, her eyes accusing.
“I’m sorry!” Vicky replied, “I know as much as you do about the plane.” Which was true, the electricity and communications network had all died before anyone had a chance to discover what had caused the incident.
“It’s terrorists! They bombed the shopping centre-”
“That wouldn’t cause a blackout.”
“A blackout wouldn’t cause a damned plane to fall out of the damned sky!”
“Bastard terrorists! They all want shooting.”
“It could have been a gas leak.”
“What? And a bit of debris flew up into the sky and knocked the plane down?”
“Well, it’s not impossible.”
Vicky watched the squabbling shoppers for several more seconds then turned away, relieved that the focus was no longer on herself and her inadequate response.
Twenty minutes later she arrived at the Police Station. The building stood as a squat block, filling the gap between a small retail park and a furniture shop facing the main road. Outbound, the road led to the edge of town, skirted the docks, then led to the motorway. Inbound, it joined the main arterial roads through town, and past the now destroyed shopping centre.
The entrance lobby, viewed through double glass doors, sat in shadow. The windows that lined the buildings over three levels reflected the skies. No light shone from within. At an upper window, the figure of DCI Mulholland appeared. He held a piece of paper up to the light then disappeared into the depths of the room.
On entry, the lobby was deserted, and she had to wait until the desk officer appeared, after repeated knocks at the door, to be let inside the building proper.
“Bit quiet around here.”
“Yep. Operations have shut down. Just got Old Bob in the cells,” he said, referring to a regular inmate, “and looks like we’re going to have to release him early.”
“Oh?”
“Yep. No way of feeding him, or keeping the cells warm with this power cut. Against his civil rights, it is. I’m just waiting for Mulholland to sign the paperwork.”
“He upstairs?”
“Yep. I reckon he slept here.”
Making her way through the building she was surprised at how empty the station was. Only a couple of officers appeared to have turned up for duty and both were sat hunched at their desks. PC Gaynor Pembroke stared at the blank screen on her desk, and PC Steve Freestone was idly doodling on a pad of paper. Joshua was absent, and she made a mental note to contact him as soon as she could.
So far, the team she would be able to assemble in her efforts to rescue the girls would amount to exactly two. She knocked on Mulholland’s door, waited for his response, then went in. His initial response surprised her. He looked taken aback.
“Sir-”
“What the hell happened, Al Farad? You look like hell.”
Vicky touched a gloved hand to her face. “Gregor Zekovic.”
“What happened?”
Vicky spent the next minutes explaining exactly what had happened during the night before requesting an extraction team.
“That’s impossible, Al Farad,” was Mulholland’s determined response. “I thought we’d had this conversation yesterday!”
“But the girls-”
“I understand, but there’s nothing I can do. We have no power, no communications, no vehicles-”
“But we can walk there. It’s not far.”
“Listen. In other circumstances I would have sent in a team to extract the girls, but we’re in a state of emergency-”
“So, their lives don’t matter?”
“Of course they do! But the system,” he gestured to the blank screen on his desk, “is down. And I have no way of ensuring my officer’s safety.”
Exasperated, she asked, “So, what do I do?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing, but sir-”
“You’ve had my answer, Al Farad.” He turned bac
k to look through the window and the snow-covered town.
Realising there was little point in pushing the request further, Vicky left the office. At her own desk she stared out of the window to the opaque sky. Snowflakes fluttered and she pulled her hat a little further down to cover her ears. Without heating, the office was freezing. Despite her superior’s demand that she dropped the case Vicky was unable to forget the girls. Thoughts churned through her mind as she wrestled with going back to her flat, staying at her desk doing diddly-squat, or helping the girls. She wanted to at least reassure Anna that she hadn’t given up on them but realised going back to the house alone would be a mistake. She considered every officer who would be willing to help, realising that she knew the home addresses of just two. Both lived out of town so next to impossible to contact and travelling more than fifteen miles on foot to ask them was unrealistic.
“Jez!” She blurted the name as soon as it occurred to her. “Jez Gallagher,” she said in a quieter voice with a quick glance around the empty room before resting back in her chair, a smile creeping onto her lips. Jez and Fauzia Gallagher were just the people she could ask for help. Jez would know exactly what to do. It was unorthodox, obviously, but Mulholland had said it was a state of emergency and, in an emergency, the old rules did not apply. With renewed energy Vicky left the station and walked the two miles through thickening snow to ask for Jez’s help.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Jez and Fauzia’s shop sat in an unusual location for an outdoor adventure outlet. When her long-time friend had mentioned where he wanted to rent a shop to start his new business, Vicky had been surprised, and offered that perhaps a space at one of the smaller shopping malls would be a better option. Guilt had pricked at her too; Jez wouldn’t have even considered setting up in the backwater town if it hadn’t been for her. She had been wrong, and Jez’s understanding of the customer he wanted to attract - the thirty something urbanite with a desperate need for shareable-on-social-media adventure - was spot on. His business had flourished, and his reputation as an adventure coach had grown to a thriving business and his skills were in demand. That he ran the adventure business despite his injuries was amazing to Vicky. Hearing about the bomb blast that had taken Jez’s lower leg had been horrendous, and she had spent many evenings during his recovery with Fauzia. Being with Fauzia made Vicky feel just a little closer to the man she considered a brother, even if he was hundreds of miles away in a military rehabilitation centre.
That a bright light shone from their small apartment above the shop did not surprise her, but she was shocked to find the windows boarded up. At the back, the door had also been fixed with an improvised covering. There had obviously been a break-in. She knocked and waited.
“Vicky!” Fauzia’s voice came from above and her friend’s face beamed at her from an open window. “Hang on. I’ll be down in a minute.”
After a series of clangs, scrapes, and bangs, the door opened and Fauzia welcomed Vicky in with a quick glance at the snow-covered yard. Immediately aware of her friend’s anxiety, Vicky asked, “What happened?”
“Come upstairs and we’ll tell you,” Fauzia responded as she closed the doors, pushing back the chest of drawers that had blocked it.
“When were you broken into?” Vicky asked as they passed the open door to the shop.
“Last night,” Fauzia replied as she climbed the stairs.
Jez closed the door to his ‘survival store’ as they reached the apartment. Quite what it contained was uncertain, but Vicky suspected he kept something more than the climbing ropes, fire starting kits, and water purifying equipment he showed his clients how to use. Sometimes, being ignorant was the best thing when it came to friends, particularly when you were a member of the police force. Jez had never explained what was in his special cupboard, and Vicky had never asked the question. It would stink of snooping and that was a friction she couldn’t bear between herself and her best friend.
The sight of Jez shocked her. Not only was his face bruised with lacerations along his jaw, but he seemed stooped. One look at Vicky changed his whole demeanour. Anger flickered across his face and he rose to his full height.
“What happened?” they asked in unison.
Both attempted to respond, and again spoke over one another. Vicky laughed and Jez fell silent.
“You’re hurt, Vicky. Sit down. I’ll make tea. Do you still take sugar?”
The normality of Fauzia’s question was a relief and Vicky realised that her last hot drink had been the sickly-sweet coffee from her colleague’s flask yesterday.
“Thanks, but no to the sugar,” she replied, her eyes still locked to Jez’s. Pain sat in his eyes. “What happened?” she asked, stepping in to hug him. Strong arms circled her in return and, for the first time in what seemed like forever, she felt safe.
“Some looters broke in,” Jez explained to the clink of cups. “But forget about that, what happened to you?”
“It’s a long story ...”
“We’ve got time to listen, Vicky,” Fauzia called from the kitchen area. “With this power cut we can’t open the shop.”
“I’ll tell you what happened to me after you tell me about the break-in. Did you report it?”
“There’s no way of contacting the police with the lines down.” Jez spent the next minutes explaining what had happened, but he seemed reticent to give details and it wasn’t until Fauzia returned with a tray of steaming mugs and a plate of biscuits that Vicky discovered the truth. The looters, Fauzia explained, had taken them by surprise. She and Jez were upstairs when they broke in late last night. There had been three men and they had talked about coming back tonight to take more. Jez had been determined not to let that happen, so went downstairs to warn them off.
“I failed, Vicky! Survival 101 – no confrontation.”
His spirit sagged again. Fauzia placed a hand on his knee. “You were defending our home—our business.”
“I failed, Zee.”
Fauzia shook her head. There was no flicker of recrimination in her eyes, or acceptance of his statement. “They were brutal Vicky, and they knew what they were doing ... well, the older one did. He knew exactly what he needed.”
“They were stealing to order?”
“No, they took what they needed to survive through the blackout.”
Jez’s eyes flitted to the door of his survival cupboard before training back on the blank television screen. He picked at lint from the cushion at his side. They were subtle hints of his unease; he was hiding something. Vicky decided she had to know what it was “There’s something you’re not telling,” she said.
“Well, the man, the Russian man-”
“Zee!”
“She should know.”
A bead of sweat had appeared at his brow, discomfort now obvious.
“Jez?”
“They’re armed ... and it’s my fault.”
“No, Jez. It’s not your-”
“Of course it is, Zee. It’s all my fault.”
“The older guy ... he knocked me out cold and took my rifle.”
“I didn’t know you had a rifle.”
“I keep one—just in case.”
“Registered?”
He shook his head.
“Jesus!” The ramifications were enormous. If Jez was caught with an unregistered weapon it meant a five-year jail term—no questions asked, no chance of reprieve. However, hadn’t she come here for exactly that reason – to ask for help – expecting him to be armed? “I’ll never tell a soul, Jez. Never.”
He visibly relaxed, the relief obvious. “Thanks. Still, the guy’s got my gun. He was already dangerous, and now he’s armed.”
“He was brutal,” Fauzia repeated.
“What makes you think he was Russian.”
“He wasn’t. I’m pretty sure he was Albanian, or Serbian,” Jez clarified.
A knot tightened in Vicky’s belly. “Albanian?”
“Yeah.”
“His name’s Gr
egor,” Fauzia offered. “I heard the younger guy call him Gregor.”
Vicky sat up straight, the horror of what she had just heard striking her like an arrow. Gregor Zekovic, the man she had to confront, was now armed.
“They’re coming back tonight, Vicky. That’s why we’ve boarded everything up and blocked the entrances.”
“You won’t’ believe this, but I came here to talk to you about him.”
“You knew about the break in? Why didn’t you say?”
“No, not that. I’ve been tracking him as part of an operation at work. He’s a member of a gang, a county line, running drugs out of Manchester. He’s recently upgraded though and started trafficking women and girls too.”
“Bloody hell!”
“What’s he doing breaking into our shop?”
“I guess he’s taking this power cut seriously.”
“It’s not a power cut.”
“I know.”
“We’re at war. The Iranian’s have detonated a high altitude EMP above us.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s the only explanation for the cars, the grid, the plane ...”
Vicky nodded her agreement, although admitting something that she had only ever considered the fantasy of writers and paranoid governments seemed strange.
“You still haven’t explained why you came here to talk about him ...”
For the next minutes, Vicky explained about the surveillance operation and the two girls. “And if I don’t get them away from him, they could end up dead, or worse.”
“Or you could end up dead.”
“My department won’t help, and you’re the only one I could think of who would know what do to.”
Jez huffed. “The man knocked me out cold and took my weapon.”
“And?”
“And I’m just half a man. How can I help you against a real man?”
Vicky’s anger riled. There was no way she would let him get away with that! “Stop your self-pitying shit right now, Jez You’re more of a man than Gregor Zekovic will ever be. Sure, you’ve got an injury, but when has that ever stopped you?”
Dark Winter Series (Book 1): Dark Winter Page 14
