Dead North

by Joel Hames

  “Well whoever looked at it should have their licence to practice removed.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Was it broken?”

  “Broken?” She shook her head. “No, that’s one thing it wasn’t. But there was foreign matter in the wound, and it clearly wasn’t cleaned properly, if it was cleaned at all.”

  I’d showered since then. But I didn’t think that was what she meant.

  “Really, it’s hardly surprising there was infection at the site,” she continued. “A nasty dose of septicaemia, that’s what you’ve got, and that’s more than enough to cost you your arm if it’s not dealt with in time. If not your life. Frankly, you’re lucky it’s taken so long to hit you.”

  I remembered the doctor, in that very hospital, the comment about antibiotics and infection and the box of pills on the table. I’d been so bound up in my nose the arm hadn’t even crossed my mind.

  She disappeared for five minutes, and returned with a nurse and an orderly and a fitting for my drip. I’d be mobile now, I thought, and then I tried it out and realised I was about as mobile as an aircraft carrier in a supermarket car park. But that was better than not mobile at all.

  “You need to rest,” said the nurse, shaking her head at my efforts, and then I was alone and trying to fit it all into the same picture, septicaemia and foreign matter, and Derek Lyons and Serena Hawkes and Charlie Gaddesdon.

  The picture fell to pieces whenever I got close to Charlie Gaddesdon. Charlie Gaddesdon was too much to handle alone and in silence. My phone was on the table beside me, with my keys and my wallet, but the battery was dead, and I was all set for another five minutes with my finger on that big red button when there was a knock on the door and Thomas Carson walked in.

  “Oh good,” he said. “You’re awake.” And then he turned around and walked back out again.

  He was back three minutes later, and he wasn’t alone.

  Sally was pale and there was a bandage covering her left cheek, but she was smiling. If the last twenty-four hours had taught me anything it was that I’d lost the knack of pinning people down, splitting true from false, but that smile looked real enough to me. I hadn’t seen Sally Carson smile like that before. If I had done, it wouldn’t have taken so long to recognise her mother in the old family photograph.

  She stopped a couple of paces from the bed, and looked me up and down, the smile wavering, and then she rushed over and grabbed my hand – the one without a needle in it – in both of hers.

  “You’re alive,” she said. I nodded, and all those who weren’t flashed through my head again like the images in a child’s flip-book. There was a pause, and then a quiet, deliberate cough from Thomas. He was stood with his back to the door, arms folded, staring at his feet.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wanted to say that. I’d probably be dead if it wasn’t for you. Sally. Matthew, too. We’d all probably be dead. And if it hadn’t been for me…”

  He trailed off. I got the feeling he wasn’t a man to whom gratitude came easily. Or apology. But gratitude, as Elizabeth Maurier once told me, don’t pay any bills. Me and the Carsons, we still had work to do.

  They didn’t know precisely what had happened since the fire at Lyons’ farmhouse, so I kicked off there, with the truth about Serena Hawkes. I stopped short of Gaddesdon. I wasn’t ready to look at that. After a moment’s wide-eyed disbelief Thomas nodded.

  “Makes sense,” he said.

  “How so?”

  “All she ever said was I should keep my mouth shut. Don’t trust anyone, she said. Even you. I thought she had my back. Guess I was lucky she didn’t put a knife in it.”

  Sally, meanwhile, was nodding away like everything suddenly made sense. It did, too. Just not in a happy-ending sort of way. And then she asked me something I hadn’t been expecting at all.

  “So are you our lawyer now?” she said.

  I blinked. Fire prevention, door-breaking, murder: I’d done all these and more for Sally Carson and her husband. But legal advice was something new.

  “I am if you want me.”

  She looked at her husband for a moment and they had that can we trust him I don’t know silent conversation I’ve seen take place between so many clients. The answer must have been yes, because after a moment Sally nodded, sharply, and turned back to me.

  “I did what you told me to,” she said. I nodded. What I’d told her to do, sitting on the bumper of an ambulance outside the farmhouse, with the sirens blaring and the fire raging, was keep her mouth shut until we had a chance to get our stories straight.

  “I’m sorry you’ve been dragged into this,” said Thomas. “But what the hell do we do now?”

  “Lie,” I said, and then I set it all out.

  Thomas was Frank and Sally was Chiara, there was no getting round that, they’d have to come clean. But the more recent past, that was a whole different kettle of fish. I’d killed two men. Ray had been self-defence. Mike had been on the ground with my tyre-marks all over him, and then he’d stirred. The arm that had moved had been his left, and one minute later I’d been picking a gun out of his dead right hand, but nobody knew about that, and nobody ever would.

  Sally’s position was a little less straightforward. I knew why she’d gone to that farmhouse. I’d seen her shoot Lyons through the head while he was lying down injured and unarmed, and I’d seen her set fire to the house and destroy the evidence. She’d gone there to kill. She’d gone there for revenge. She’d got it.

  Except, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that wasn’t it at all.

  The new truth was this: Sally Carson had tracked down Derek Lyons and gone to his farmhouse to plead for her life, for her son’s life, for her husband’s, to swear eternal silence. Derek Lyons had laughed in her face, tied her up and cut her, and if I hadn’t intervened she would have died, and Lyons and his friends would have been out of the country by midnight. She’d shot Lyons, true – the forensic teams would find a bullet in the ash and a hole in the skull to match it – but she’d shot him in desperation, in the act of escaping; she hadn’t even seen where that bullet landed. Lyons, or Mike, or Ray, one of them had already lit the fire that was meant for her. It was a miracle she’d got out of there alive (and that was true in every version).

  The old truth was one of those things the police didn’t need to know, and it turned out I only knew half of it myself, because after I’d finished and the Carsons – I decided to think of them as the Carsons, it was easier that way – had sat in silence for a moment to digest my strategy, they spun me a tale of their own. It was the truth, the old, hard truth, and it went like this.

  They’d been away for years. They’d become the Carsons. Nobody back home cared about Francis Grissom or Chiara Moretti, and certainly not enough to come looking for them. That was what Thomas had thought.

  He hadn’t reckoned with his wife.

  Even before they’d set foot back on British soil, Sally Carson had started her search. The men who’d killed her family were out there somewhere, the same men her husband had been running from for close to twenty years. They’d burned her parents. They’d burned her little brother. She had names, details she remembered from her youth, snippets picked up from Thomas before he refused to talk about it any more. She had eight thousand miles of distance in which to make her discreet enquiries, and in the end all they told her was that the Corporation was a shell of what it had been, and two of the three men who’d run it were dead.

  But the other one wasn’t.

  Derek Lyons was alive. Nobody knew much about Derek Lyons, he had half a dozen names and a face you wouldn’t remember even if you saw it, which few people did, because Derek Lyons kept himself tucked away in his web and sent other people out when anything needed to be done.

  Derek Lyons had made a lot of enemies. Thomas and Sally Carson were just two of them, probably the least important, certainly the furthest away. No doubt that was what Derek Lyons thought, if he thought about them at all. But Sally Carson thought about Der
ek Lyons. And she worked. She worked quietly and cleverly and nobody, not even Thomas, knew what she was doing. She found people who knew people who knew other people at the fringes of the web. She found people who developed sudden coughing fits or stammers when particular names were mentioned, and then went quiet and didn’t return her emails or calls any more.

  And then she came back to England, and those same people found it harder to ignore her when she was turning up and knocking on their doors, chatting to their neighbours, taking photographs of them from across the street. She was closing in on Lyons, working her way in towards the centre of the web. She knew who his colleagues were and where they lived. She knew what he sold and which businesses he used as fronts. She knew where he got his Chinese takeaways and his favourite brand of Scotch.

  But she still didn’t know where he lived.

  She found herself getting impatient, being less careful, less concerned with covering her own tracks. Instead of whispering, she shouted. Instead of cajoling, she threatened. Word got back to Derek Lyons. In the end, he’d found the Carsons before Sally had found him.

  So in a way, she said, a catch in her voice and all smiles forgotten, it had been her fault. All of it. Fiona Milton. Naz Ahmet. Russell Tarney. Serena Hawkes.

  And Charlie Gaddesdon, I thought, but it still wasn’t time.

  And then, suddenly, it was, because there was a knock on the door and now it was me the police wanted to talk to, the same sergeant who’d done such a great job guarding Thomas Carson back when he’d been a murder suspect. She was polite and apologetic, but she was determined.

  “Sorry, Mr Williams, we won’t be long, but you’re probably the best witness to what happened over in Marston.”

  “Apart from Mia Arazzi,” I replied.

  “Mia Arazzi’s still in shock. She won’t be talking to anyone for a while.”

  I couldn’t blame her. Mia Arazzi might have been a thorn in my side, and a poisoned blade in Roarkes’, but she’d been useful, in the end, and she’d come closer to getting herself killed than most of us.

  I asked the sergeant for another few minutes. She nodded and left the room, but I could see the top of her bob floating up and down through the window like a bad wig. A few minutes was all I’d get.

  It was time to tell the Carsons what had happened. So I did.

  Thomas stopped smiling right away. Sally frowned.

  “Gaddesdon?” she said. I nodded.

  “Charlie Gaddesdon, the boy who kept coming with you to Bursington?”

  I nodded again. The frown deepened, and she shook her head, slowly.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Denial. Gaddesdon was the kind of boy who’d inspire that kind of feeling. And no doubt she felt a little guilty. She should feel guilty, I decided, she’d lied to us all and maybe if we’d known the truth—

  I stopped myself. If we’d known the truth then what? Nobody had covered themselves in glory. If Sally Carson had told us the truth then she’d have wound up either dead or in police protection for the rest of her life, and so would her son and her husband, if he hadn’t managed to top himself in the meantime.

  “I’m sorry. I really am. But I was there. I saw him get shot.”

  I didn’t know what else to say. I only knew what I’d seen.

  Sally put her hand on my shoulder. She was still shaking her head, but she wasn’t frowning.

  She was smiling.

  “I know he got shot, Sam. I saw him come in. I was on my way to see Thomas and they wheeled him past and he didn’t look good, there was a lot of blood and every doctor in Manchester seemed to be running alongside trying to get to the wound, but he was sitting up and talking to them.”

  My mouth fell open.

  “Wait here,” I said, and I was out of that room as fast as a clumsy man in a wheelchair who has to argue with the police on his way out can move.

  31: Hindsight

  FIVE MINUTES AND half a dozen identical corridors later, I was face-to-face with Gaddesdon. They were prepping him for surgery. The painkillers had slowed him down and his speech was a little slurred, but he’d never been the fastest guy in town.

  He patted his stomach and winced, and then he pointed at me.

  At my arm.

  “Still got your limbs, then,” he said, and laughed, and fell into a fit of coughing. Even I could tell that “still got your limbs, then” was five words too many for a man who’d been shot in the stomach. I glanced up at the doctor leaning over him, a young man with an old man’s face, or just the face of a man who’d been on shift since The Beatles had split up.

  “Don’t worry, mate,” he said. “This guy’s immortal. He’s already been in once, got the bullet out, started to patch him up, heart rate went mental so we had to pull him out, and he’s due back in theatre in five minutes. How the hell he’s still awake is beyond me. But he’ll pull through. How’s your arm?”

  How did this guy know about my arm? Did everyone in bloody Manchester know about my arm? I must have looked confused, because he carried on.

  “Charlie here told us all about it. Blood pouring out of him, and all he can tell us is Sam Williams and his arm. We were all over you looking for a bullet, thinking she’d put one in you, wondering where the hell it was, we didn’t know he meant someone’s bloody stamped on it. But good thing he told us. Led us straight to the infection.”

  So Gaddesdon was the mysterious colleague. Gaddesdon, lying there with a hole in him, and he must have looked round and seen me getting wheeled off and remembered my winces and my whinges and Sergeant Tarney’s boot. The late Sergeant Tarney, I reminded myself.

  I’d been right in the end. None of it was inevitable. I was more than a helpless spectator.

  And Charlie Gaddesdon was alive.

  I was woken at eight next morning by Claire, who took the visiting hours about as seriously as an email from a Nigerian billionaire. She’d packed her bags and got herself up to Manchester the moment she’d taken the call from Roarkes, and she hadn’t really known what she’d find there.

  I wasn’t sure myself. My arm was still aching, most of my body was aching in cruel sympathy, and thinking felt like walking waist-deep in mud, every step a struggle. But Claire was here, and she’d forgiven me, and that was one bright spot I could look at.

  She took my room at the First Quality Inn and drove round dutifully for four days in a row to keep me company. I spent most of those three days linked up to the IV drip. My door wouldn’t lock, the blind only covered half the window, and Claire had been told by the doctor I needed to rest and should avoid exertion, but for all that, it had been too long since we’d had anything more than a snatched few hours together. On the second afternoon I watched, perplexed, as she produced a doorstop she’d taken from the hotel and wedged it under the door. She taped a black binliner across the window and started unbuttoning her shirt, and for the next hour I forgot all about Manchester, Roarkes, Tarney, the Carsons, and Serena Hawkes.

  Mia Arazzi hadn’t forgotten, though. On day three Claire brought that morning’s Mirror along with her. It turned out Mia’s inability to discuss what had happened in Marston hadn’t extended beyond the police.

  Mia had gone for Roarkes, which I’d been expecting, but she had a surprising take on Serena Hawkes. I spent two hours trying to get hold of someone at Folgate for any kind of confirmation before Malhotra walked in (knocking first, thankfully, and waiting outside while Claire pulled her jumper and jeans back on and kicked her underwear under the bed) and told me that as far as they knew, it was all true.

  Serena Hawkes had been in from the start. She’d leaked lies to the press, tried to confuse the investigation, and told Carson to keep his mouth shut. She’d phoned Lyons and tipped him off that Sally was on her way, she’d stabbed Tarney to death in his own police station, she’d taken Mia Arazzi hostage at the point of a gun. I’d assumed she’d done it all for the money.

  She hadn’t.

  In spite of everything, Mia’s profes
sional instincts hadn’t deserted her entirely during the brief period of the siege. It had all started harmlessly enough, if rather unpromisingly. She’d fired unanswered questions at Serena’s back for five minutes and got nothing except increasingly frantic requests to leave. Eventually she’d tired of watching a woman running around a house picking things up and putting them in bags, so she stood at the bottom of the stairs, down which Serena was attempting to drag a hold-all bigger than she was, and announced she wasn’t moving until she got some answers. Serena had shrieked at her and disappeared back up the stairs.

  Mia was still standing there with her arms crossed when a wild-eyed Serena returned waving a gun in her trembling hands and things took a more serious turn. But in the midst of the terror, Mia had managed to get a short and bizarre travesty of an interview out of her captor. She’d even had the presence of mind to hit record on her smartphone. The article quoted whole sections verbatim. And if you happened to be Sam Williams, it made for uncomfortable reading.

  I’m sorry, Mia. [Serena Hawkes is suddenly calm. She has a hostage. The situation has changed.] If you’d gone when I’d asked you to, you’d be sitting at home having a glass of wine or whatever it is you like to do on a Thursday night, and I’d be halfway out of Manchester. You slowed me down. You brought this on yourself.

  I don’t understand any of this, Serena. What are you doing? How did you get into all this?

  They threatened me. Derek Lyons.

  How did you come across Derek Lyons, then? How did he come across you?

  I was defending a lad. Drugs. Nothing big. Got him off, then I got a call asking if I’d be interested in working for the people who’d supplied him. I said no, of course, I mean, they’re admitting on the phone they’ve actually supplied the drugs, that’s not the kind of client I need, but they called again next day and when I said no they said go downstairs and there’s a man standing in my garden holding a gun.