Dead North

by Joel Hames

  Twenty minutes.

  “But I’m right, aren’t I? You took some money from someone who works for this gang that call themselves the Corporation, and you gave Carson a belt so he could hang himself. I know you did it, you know you did it, so why are you pissing around?”

  Tarney shook his head. No doubt he’d been in enough interviews to realise how badly I was handling this one. I’d been in enough of them myself. There’s a line, at a police interview, and on one side there are the things you can say without breaking the rules, and on the other side there are the things you can’t, and if you do say them the lawyer – who’s usually me – will be down your throat before you’ve finished your first sentence. The moment that happens you’ve lost all your momentum and all your authority and the guy you’ve just arrested is doing all he can not to laugh in your face. The best interviewers flirt with that line all the time, dancing along it, putting one toe the wrong side and drawing it back in again before anyone can cut it off. I was playing it too safe.

  Particularly given there was no brief there to stop me.

  I sat back and eyed Tarney for a minute. He shrugged. There was no point playing silent mind games with the man. I wasn’t sure he had enough of a mind to join in. I leaned forward again, and spoke clearly and quietly.

  “Where do you think I found out about Grissom?”

  He shrugged again. “I couldn’t give a fuck.”

  “And the Corporation. Where do you think I heard about them? Here I am, some soft little brief from London, and I’ve got the name of a gang so secret no one in your station’s ever heard of them.”

  “For all I know, Williams, you could have shat the word out on a bit of paper and read it there.”

  I didn’t seem to be getting to him.

  “Because the people who told me about Grissom, and the Corporation, they can put the word out, Russell.”

  He leaned forward himself, now, and suddenly I was right back there in the pub with his I know why you’re here, Williams, and feeling uncomfortably like I wanted a police officer there to look after me.

  “You don’t frighten me, Williams. You’ve got some mates. They can spread some bullshit and say I’ve been shooting my mouth off. But if all they’ve got to spread is one word any old twat could come up with and some name no one knows anything about, well, let’s just say I don’t think I’ll bother locking the door at night.”

  Ten minutes. I sat back again. I’d strolled right up to the line, stepped across it, and for all Tarney cared I might as well have rubbed the whole bloody thing out. Last try.

  “What if word got out about something else?”

  He smiled. He didn’t think I had anything else. He didn’t know about the bird-watchers and their camera.

  “What if word got out about White Hill?”

  The smile shifted. It was back again, half a second later, a tenth of a second, and if I hadn’t been staring at him like a starving man eyeing a wounded rabbit I wouldn’t have noticed a thing, but for a moment, it had disappeared. The moment I said White Hill.

  I knew that shift, that moment when the fact you’ve been saving for the right moment opens up the guy you’re talking to like a blade in a pumpkin, and he doesn’t want you to see it. That’s when you twist the blade a little harder. I had him. I had the bastard.

  “I mean, we could head down there, me and a bunch of your old colleagues, look around, we’d find something eventually. We’ll tie you in, one way or another, what with your car showing up just around the time Carson got nicked. But that’ll take time, won’t it? So I was thinking of something else.”

  Tarney was leaning back again, impassive, like you could smack him in the mouth with a demolition ball and he wouldn’t even notice, but I’d seen that smile shift. I knew it was an act. I leaned back myself and twisted the blade.

  “I was thinking, what if we send you home early, make a big deal out of it, why wait two hours, send you home and tell the press we’re letting you go because you’ve been so cooperative?”

  He twitched. The left side of his mouth, my left, his right, curled up and then down again.

  “And at the same time we announce we’re shutting down all routes into White Hill because of some highly sensitive information we’ve received from a well-placed source. Maybe in the same press conference.”

  I sat forward, and spoke quietly.

  “Don’t worry Russell. We wouldn’t actually say it was you. Not in so many words.”

  I waited. I glanced at my watch. Five minutes. Silence. I could almost feel the seconds ticking by. I looked at my watch again. Tarney didn’t know what I’d done, he didn’t know about Gaddesdon and the call and the wild goose chase we’d sent Serena Hawkes on. I had to look like I was as relaxed as a billionaire behind bullet-proof glass.

  Still nothing. The smile was still there, like it had been for all but a fraction of a second since the moment I’d walked in the room. Four minutes.

  I didn’t feel like a billionaire behind bullet-proof glass.

  Three and a half minutes.

  “What do you say, Russell?” I asked. A last, feeble twist of the blade. I had to say something. What Russell Tarney said was precisely nothing.

  Three minutes. The phone buzzed in my pocket. I fished it out and read the text from Gaddesdon.

  Srna here, it read. getting the hell out. You should too.

  Two minutes. Probably less. It hadn’t worked. I stood up, put on my jacket, wondered how long it would take me to get back to London and whether Serena would report me to the Law Society. Tarney was staring at me now. He’d won. I’d lost the case, lost Serena, Roarkes, got Gaddesdon into all kinds of shit, probably Malhotra too, even though she didn’t have the faintest idea what I’d done. I’d failed to crack the top ten and moved one painful step closer to Atom Industries. And Tarney had beaten me.

  Thirty seconds. I nodded at him, once, and turned around, and as I reached out for the door handle he spoke.

  “I want a deal.”

  20: Where Falcons Nest

  I’D BEEN WRONG about the thirty seconds. I got six more minutes before a flustered-looking sergeant banged on the door and asked if he might have a word. He wasn’t entirely sure what was going on, he said, but he’d been asked to remove me from the cell. Someone was on their way over, someone with questions; I was to wait for them at the station.

  “Am I under arrest?” I asked, all wide-eyed and innocent.

  “Oh no,” he replied. “It’s just – if you could possibly wait.”

  “Sorry,” I said, and two minutes later I was in the passenger seat next to Detective Sergeant Malhotra and praying for a set of green lights. I knew who that someone with questions was, and after what I’d seen her do to Roarkes, I didn’t fancy being on the wrong end of an angry Serena Hawkes.

  He’d asked for a deal. He must have known I couldn’t give him one, but what I’d said had clearly scared the cockiness right out of him and he was suddenly, and very obviously, quite desperate.

  I’d told him we didn’t have long. I’d told him to give me everything he had, and I’d argue his cooperation with Roarkes and the Crown Prosecution Service. He might have been desperate but he wasn’t stupid.

  “I’m not telling you anything till I’ve heard from that bastard Roarkes,” he said. Clearly he didn’t know Roarkes very well. The only thing he’d get out of Roarkes would be a determined prosecution and, if he was unlucky, a set of minor internal injuries to go with it. One thing he wouldn’t be getting was a deal. I shook my head.

  “This isn’t about Roarkes. Not yet. Give me something and then I’ll see what I can do.”

  I thought I could hear footsteps outside, banging, shouting, but this was a police station, I reminded myself. Footsteps, banging, shouting, they were part of the furniture. No reason they should have anything to do with me.

  Tarney was staring at me.

  “You don’t have long,” I told him. He had a couple of hours, still, which was a hell of
a lot longer than I had, but he didn’t need to know that.

  A new set of footsteps approached. Purposeful, I thought. Purposeful footsteps. Or were they the same as any other set of footsteps, and it was just that I was expecting someone to barge in any second and kick me out?

  “Come on,” I said, and looked at my watch again. I was betraying my nerves. Tarney had to realise there was something else going on.

  The footsteps passed by and faded away.

  “In a hurry, are you?” he asked. A couple of minutes ago he’d been desperate for a deal and I’d been in control. I wasn’t in control any more.

  I looked past him, at the wall, dirty-green tiles and smears from the years of coffee thrown at it. I looked down at the table, same green, same coffee. Anything not to look at Tarney and have him stare into my eyes. My phone was on the table, in front of me, and as I reached out for it, an idea took root and grew and sprouted fully-formed into the light.

  I picked it up and scrolled through the latest calls until I found the one I wanted, dialled, put it back down again and turned the speaker on. It rang twice before it was answered.

  “Mia Arazzi here.”

  “Hello Mia, this is Sam Williams. Remember me?”

  “Of course, Sam. How can I help you?”

  “You wanted some information on the Carson case?”

  “Have you got any? All I hear is dead ends.”

  “Oh, I’ve got something for you.”

  I had nothing for her. There was no way Mia Arazzi was getting a thing from me. But this particular deception was entirely guilt-free.

  Tarney was looking at me with an expression on his face I couldn’t read. I had no idea if he was buying it.

  “I’m all ears.”

  I hit the mute button and gave Tarney my toughest stare. Tarney was a career police officer in a not-particularly-nice part of Manchester, so I doubted my toughest stare would have much impact, but it was the best I had.

  “Mia Arazzi’s been bugging me for days, Tarney. She writes for the Mirror.”

  Nothing. Silent and unreadable. I was losing him.

  “Your friends back at Folgate have been feeding her nice juicy lumps of meat for days, but they seem to have run out. This is a very juicy lump of meat, Tarney.”

  He nodded. I couldn’t tell what the nod meant. I reached down for the phone, to take it off mute and drag the bluff a little further, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what I could say that would keep both of them on the hook.

  So it was a good thing Tarney spoke first.

  “OK,” he said.

  I took the phone off mute.

  “I’ll call you back, Mia. Something’s come up.”

  I killed the call before she could say anything that might change Tarney’s mind.

  “I don’t have much, Williams,” he said. Footsteps, again, approaching and passing by.

  “Names, Tarney. Who paid you, what they paid you to do, I want the lot.”

  “I don’t have names. I don’t know anyone’s name. I got a call, got a location, went there, got paid. Got another call a while later, went back, picked up a belt.”

  No names. It was Boris Crick all over again, useless or close to it, except that a cell in Chetwood was still a nicer place to be than The Mitre. “Who paid you?” I asked. “Who gave you the belt?”

  “No one. It’s an old barn, on the White Hill. I go in, there’s a table there, first time there’s cash on it, second time there’s a belt.”

  “What, so someone just calls you up and you go there, you don’t know who they are, why they’re calling, what they want, but you go there anyway and you take their money?”

  “Something like that, yeah.”

  Tarney was lying to me. He had something else, he must have something else, no one would do what he’d done without knowing who was paying them.

  “How did you know what to do with the belt?”

  “Told you. Had a call. They said pick up the item and give it to Carson.”

  “Voice?”

  “Male. Middle-aged. Probably.”

  This was going nowhere.

  “So what exactly do you have for me, Tarney?”

  He smiled and picked up my phone. I couldn’t see what he was doing with it, but after thirty seconds he handed it back and it was on Maps.

  “There,” he said, and stabbed his fat index finger at the screen. I could see the White Hill, or at least the words White Hill, in the top-right corner. Tarney had put a flag down in the middle of the screen, about a mile to the south and west of the peak, if that was what the words meant.

  “That’s the barn,” he said. “There’s a track off another track off the road. Use your phone. You’ll find it.”

  The barn. We’d have found the barn ourselves, eventually, but we might not have known it when we did. If he was telling the truth, at least he’d saved us some time. And I hadn’t given him anything for it, yet.

  Footsteps approached. Stopped. A bang on the door. The sergeant. Someone was on their way over. And I wasn’t hanging around long enough to say hello.

  “You’d better have something better than that, Tarney,” I said as I left. He grinned at me.

  “There’s more where that came from,” he said. “But do me a favour, will you? Keep it between us.”

  My nose gave a convenient twinge as I walked out of the room. It still wasn’t right. It might never be right. The arm was still hurting, too. I didn’t think I’d be doing Tarney any favours.

  Priya Malhotra was a careful, patient driver, the kind of driver we’re all supposed to be but never are. A careful driver wasn’t what I wanted just then.

  “White Hill,” I said, and she started to explain what she’d already explained once before, that there was no point going just the two of us, we needed numbers and a plan of action, the land properly squared off, kilometre by kilometre, maybe dogs, maybe even the bomb squad. I stopped her before she’d hit the second sentence.

  “Look at this,” I said, and passed her the phone. She indicated and pulled over. Detective Sergeant Malhotra wouldn’t look at a phone while she was driving.

  “What am I looking at?” she asked, and I explained, leaving out the bit about Gaddesdon’s phone call and Mia Arazzi. Malhotra wasn’t stupid, though. She’d seen Serena Hawkes leaving in something of a hurry, and she’d seen me come running out of the police station in much the same style, only more so. She gave me a look that said you haven’t told me half of what happened in there, but you will, and hit the gas, and suddenly, mercifully, Priya Malhtora wasn’t such a careful, patient driver after all.

  She wasn’t a quiet driver, either. “I need my beats,” she said, as the needle flew past sixty, and hit some buttons on the console without looking at them. The music was hard and fast, Bob Marley sampled and remixed into something else, heavy on the bass but light on the peace and love. For five minutes or so I thought I quite liked it, and then I realised it wasn’t going to slow down or get any quieter, and I changed my mind. I glanced in the mirror, thought I saw that red Astra again, blinked and it was gone. It wasn’t until I noticed the cars in front of us slowing down and moving out of the way that I realised she’d put the lights on. I must have said something, because she turned to me – driving straight into a blind corner at close to eighty miles an hour – and said, “Give me my beats and the lights and Steve McQueen couldn’t touch me.”

  She had a point. She was fast all right. Ten minutes later we were out of Manchester.

  I recognised a hill or two, I thought, and a village in the distance that might have been Bursington but really, they all looked the same. Very nice, very pretty, very peaceful, if you weren’t in a car with Priya Malhotra and her beats, at least. Within forty minutes we were slowing down, a little, and the road wasn’t something that a civilised part of the country would have called a road at all.

  The clouds were massing, and the sun was finding the gaps, feeling its way through, lighting up the hills in patte
rns that changed so fast they felt like something viewed at double speed. Or maybe that was just the way we were moving. Malhotra turned off the music, reached over, took the phone off me, and frowned at it. She didn’t seem to have such a problem driving and looking at a phone any more.

  “OK,” she said. “We’ll have to guess, a bit. What did he say about the tracks?”

  “Track off another track off the road.”

  “Not much help, was he?” she replied. But she was smiling. It looked to me like Priya Malhotra was one of those detectives who like a challenge.

  We passed a track to her left, and paused while she stared down it, and at the phone, and back at the track again. Then another one, on the right, thirty yards further on. Four more, in quick succession.

  “Any of these might be ours. But I’m going to find the one that leaves the road closest to this spot where he says the barn is, and keep my fingers crossed.”

  “Isn’t there a map somewhere with these tracks on?”

  She shook her head.

  “Not really. Half of them are on the Ordnance Survey as footpaths or bridleways. Half of them aren’t there at all, farmers have just cleared the way themselves to make it a bit easier to get from one field to another.”

  On we chugged, slower and slower as the road got worse and worse. Malhotra was driving a decent modern Nissan. I was surprised Tarney’s Peugeot had made it this far at all.

  “Recognise it?” said Malhotra, suddenly. I looked around. The sun had disappeared again, and the rain was starting, drop by heavy drop, driven onto the windows by a wind that had sprung up out of nowhere. There was nothing outside, nothing at all, not even a tree. It looked the same as it had looked for the last twenty minutes.

  Malhotra was looking around herself, with the air of someone who had something specific in mind.

  “There,” she said, and pointed. There was a grey post by the side of the road, propped up by narrow bits of wood that looked far too flimsy to put up any real resistance to the wind. There was something black on top of the post, and for a moment I thought it was a bird perched there, maybe one of those falcons or kestrels or whatever they were that someone had decided were so important.