Roman got out of his car angrily. ‘We talked already. I fucking told you enough.’
While he ranted and raged, Shari watched the man he had been talking to, who at first looked like he was going to stand nearby and listen, but then decided to turn and walk away briskly.
‘Hang on a minute, sunshine,’ Shari shouted after him. ‘I want a word with you too!’
The male suddenly bolted away, through the busy car park packed with cars and January sales shoppers, and before she knew it, DC Ansari was in the middle of another foot chase - her nice shoes kicking up slush and dirt as she followed Dante Young over a wall and onto the canal towpath.
Dante was quick, athletic, but the snow was his enemy. Again and again he lost his footing on the cobbled towpath, slipping and tripping as he ran desperately out of the city towards Ancoats. Shari did her best to keep up with him. Like him she was fit, but her shoes and the slippy ground made the chase nearly impossible. She knew already that it wasn’t going to last very long, and hoped that he would fall as soon as possible.
She almost had her wish when he ducked beneath the bridge beneath Great Ancoats Street and almost lost his balance. A metal guard rail at the side of the canal stopped him falling into the icy water and he recovered and carried on. He emerged on the other side, struggled up the polished stone slope aside a lock, and tried to speed up. Shari kept pace with him.
Dante made it to the footbridge. It was a steep, stocky iron bridge with stubby brick legs. The stone steps were deceptive and Dante slipped on the hidden ice that had begun to form on them. He crashed down and when he got back to his feet he was limping – his shin bone bleeding beneath his jeans.
Shari almost caught him here, but she too slipped on the steps and fell with a thud back onto the towpath. She sprang back to her feet, determined not to lose this chance to catch her prey. She half wondered if Andy was coming along, and whether he had seen her fall, but she brushed the thought aside and ran on.
Dante turned right into a back street and she caught up with him just enough to see him scuffling his way through an open door into a block of apartments in the nearby Royal Mill, the largest of the industrial era red-brick mills, now almost wholly converted into trendy flats.
Shari caught the door just before it closed and thundered into the lobby. It hadn’t occurred to her to use her police radio to call for back up, and it was only now that she realised it wasn’t in her pocket where she thought it had been. It must have fallen out when she hit the deck by the bridge.
Cursing, she was gripped by a sudden feeling of panic that Dante had access to one of the flats in the building, and that smoking him out was a task too great for even a team of police officers. She felt the panic grow as the sense of failure overwhelmed her.
But then she checked the stairwell, and heard footsteps clattering up above. ‘Dante!’ she shouted.
Dante Young stopped and looked down the empty chasm in the centre of the stairwell. His shock was almost outweighed by his despair. Shari gritted her teeth and took off.
With every floor she climbed she checked to make sure he had not departed the stairwell. By the third floor she was exhausted, nearly breathless, and when she stopped to look up the centre of the stairwell she just managed to catch him going through a door at the very top. She listened to it bang shut slowly, took a deep breath, and raced on upward.
The top of the stairwell was the seventh floor, hardly Everest but enough to make Shari nauseated with exhaustion. She caught her breath and opened the door, expecting to find herself faced with a corridor and about ten to twenty apartment doors. Instead she found a cold, sharp wind and the sound of traffic on the main road nearby.
She was in a tiny little shaft with a large iron door in front of her. A sign on the wall said “Old Sedgwick Mill roof access. No access for unauthorised persons...”
Through the iron door was a starry night sky and a long rooftop covered with crisp, almost unbroken snow that twinkled. It wasn’t hard to find Dante’s footprints and follow his panicked tracks from one access door to another at the opposite end of the roof.
She saw him try the second door in vain, hoping to make his getaway and get back on street level. But the door wouldn’t budge.
‘Leave it, Dante,’ she shouted at him. ‘Let’s call it a day shall we?’
The man turned to face her, breathless, his face a mixture of panic and helplessness. ‘Roman told me about the bodies,’ he shouted towards her, his eyes roving around for an alternative escape route. ‘But they haven’t got anything to do with me.’
Shari was walking towards him calmly now, tentatively. ‘I just want to talk.’
‘I haven’t done anything,’ he shouted.
‘I found your texts to Malcolm Swan,’ she told him. ‘I know he hired you for something.’
Dante began to break down. ‘Who you talking about?’
‘How do you think I know your name?’ she asked him. ‘Did he hire you to start some fires?’
Dante shook his head, but he was starting to look like a cornered animal, so Shari stopped moving closer to him in the hope that he might breathe more easily.
‘I’m a cop, yes,’ Shari said, ‘but at the moment I just want to ask you some questions. Come with me, we’ll go to the police station and I’ll make you a brew.’
Dante was still looking around for an escape route, and in his panic he thought he found one with a nearby drainpipe. He stepped on the very edge of the rooftop, wobbled a bit and then crouched down to steady himself and carefully reach to take hold of it. The drainpipe was an ancient lead thing that was probably as old as the mill itself. It could probably sustain his weight as he shuffled down it to the ground, but the pipe wasn’t going to be his greatest foe – gravity was.
‘Don’t do it!’ Shari screamed, rushing towards him. ‘Dante, you’ll fall!’
‘Stay there!’ he shouted back, making her freeze in her steps. ‘Come closer and you’ll make me fall.’
He crouched down further, whipped his legs of the side of the rooftop, and grabbed hold of the drainpipe with all four limbs. He was still almost level with the roof when Shari came rushing over.
‘Get back up here!’ she shouted, grabbing his coat sleeve. ‘For fuckssake!’
‘I’m not going back to prison! Fuck you!’
Shari looked at him pleadingly. She knew if he decided to descend there was nothing she could do but prey for his safe deliverance. ‘I’ll be honest, Dante,’ she told him earnestly. ‘I’ve not got any evidence against you. Unless you outright confess to something, I can’t charge you. There’s no reason for you to put your life at risk like this!’
‘Bullshit!’ he yelled. ‘You know Swan paid me to torch that building!’
‘No...’ Shari pleaded with him. ‘I don’t want to know. Don’t tell me.’
‘He wanted me to torch two of them, but I only did the one,’ Dante said, trying to fight her hand off his. ‘The old mill off Oldham Road. The big one. I never did any of the others. There was no one inside it. I checked! I always check first!’
‘Come back up!’ Shari pleaded. ‘If you fall I can’t hold you.’
‘Only if you swear to believe me,’ he told her. ‘I didn’t kill anyone. I only torched one building.’
‘I believe you!’ she shouted, but then Dante’s feet lost their grip on the cold, wet surface of the drainpipe and he dropped.
At first he only dropped a few centimetres, his hands gripping the pipe for all they were worth, but he couldn’t get purchase with his trainers anymore and the strain on his hands was too much. He employed his legs and knees to squeeze the pipe, but he was slipping slowly downwards now. At last Shari could no longer keep her grip and Dante’s frozen hands were not strong enough to support him.
He fell. It took only a couple of seconds for him to hit the cobbled street below.
Thirteen
Roman Korczak was arrested. He explained that he had known Dante Young for a while and that D
ante had come to him for muscle. He wanted Korczak to help him bully more money out of Malcolm Swan for the two arson jobs he had paid for.
Korczak didn’t know how many fires Dante had actually done, but he got the impression that he was only responsible for the first – the one Shari and Ryder had been working on originally and was spooked by the death of “Gravy” Davy Mullgraw. He doubled his price on the second job, but Malcolm hadn’t paid up.
Malcolm Swan admitted to knowing Dante Young, but wouldn’t admit that he had paid him to set fire to two of his buildings so that he could claim the insurance and sell the valuable land. After a protracted back and forth between the Crown Prosecution Service and CID, it was decided that they simply didn’t have enough evidence to charge him.
DI Abbott called his team around for debriefing the following Monday afternoon. He was convinced that Dante had been responsible for both major fires at the mills, and had been present at the workshop the night Gravy Davy had been killed. Davy had caught him starting the fire and paid the price for that discovery. Irene and Doll were tragic accidents – victims that Dante had overlooked.
Overall, he extended enthusiastic congratulations to Shari.
‘It’s only through your dogged detective work that we found Swan and Young at all,’ he told her, in front of everyone. ‘I don’t know many officers who’d go through an entire contact list on an offenders phone in order to find someone a bit dodgy. And not many would go out night after night looking for witnesses and suspects in the snowy backstreets. A job well done, team, but I think Ansari here deserves a round of applause.’
Everyone gave a little clap, including Andy, who beamed with pride, and even Ryder, who smiled warmly as he did so.
Shari blushed.
She had done it! She had beaten Ryder to the win and found the killer before he had. And she had done it all with determination and hard work, nothing fancy, nothing clever.
Yet out there, between the fire and the snow, the real killer was stalking still. Their body count was growing quickly. Their confidence was growing even quicker.
How stupid these detectives were! It seemed like they could get away with murder forever and ever.
Which was good, because it was becoming quite fun.
Thanks
This is the third in the series of short stories about DC Shari Ansari, DS Steve Ryder and the rest. They are designed as quick, exciting little reads that you can download for practically nothing (well, a little something). If you liked this one then please check out the previous books:
1 – Locked Up (2016)
2 – The Reservoir (2016)
Shari’s job isn’t over – it is really only just beginning. She and her colleagues will have to work more grisly cases again in future, and overcome their own inner demons before justice can prevail.
Book 4 will be coming out shortly.
To keep up to date with the series check out my website:
www.oliverlewisthompson.com
Or keep up to date with me on Twitter: @olliet_uk
Where I’ll let you know of any free copies you can get your hands on.
The Fire In the Snow Page 6
