‘A what?’ says Blunt.
‘A rope,’ Haynes echoes. ‘He’s holding a rope, and the other end is tied around Cody’s waist. If we bring down Davies now, we bring down both men.’
*
So here he is. Trying not to look down. Trying to hold back the dizziness. Trying to resist the wind wanting to pull him into its embrace so that it can fling him to the ground all that way below.
And he wonders whether in fact this is what he really wants. He wonders whether the reason he is following Chris’s instructions so readily is that he has already given up on life. He is to die now, but Webley is alive, and that’s all that matters. That is what is fair and just.
He risks a brief downward glance at the people-dots, and imagines that he can see the horror and anticipation on their faces. Perhaps it’s right that they are not cheated of what they now expect.
To his left, Chris holds on tightly to the rope. For good measure he has coiled it several times around his lower arm. His other hand still grasps the crossbow. He is not stupid, this man. He has thought everything through. He has left Cody no escape route.
Says Cody, ‘So you still think this is the right thing to do? This is what you want to be remembered for?’
Chris smiles serenely. He seems almost at peace up here.
‘It’s not about me. It’s about letting the world know what people like you and Dobson did, and are still doing. It’s about telling them it has to stop.’
‘You really think they’ll understand? You think they’ll be interested in that side of the story? Or do you think they’ll just put it down to a nutter who goes around killing coppers?’
‘Oh, they’ll understand. I made a video, explaining exactly what all this is about, and while we’ve been up here I’ve put it live on YouTube. I don’t trust your girlfriend to pass the message on. After all, she’s police, and we all know how much they lie, don’t we, Cody? Your lot can’t hide this one away, Cody. You can’t falsify it or pretend it didn’t happen. The world will hear the message and it will understand.’
Cody nods. ‘Okay. Then your point is made. You can stop now. Job done.’
Chris’s smile broadens. ‘Almost. One task remains.’
‘Which is?’
‘We fly. Like the birds.’
56
She runs. Faster than she has ever run in her life.
They wanted to take her down. Away from the roof. But first they needed to check her over. She was covered in blood. Dobson’s blood, but they didn’t know that.
When she got inside and collapsed, they hastened the paramedics through to check her over. She told them she was all right, but still they insisted on assessing her.
And it was while they were doing this that the thought came crashing in.
He’s going to kill Cody. Cody has given up his life for mine. He’s going to die.
She knew this with more certainty than she had ever known anything before.
Cody is going to die, she thought. Any second now.
And so when the medics had done their job and stepped away and allowed her to get up, she looked at the outstretched hands of all the uniformed officers ahead of her . . .
. . . and she chose to go back.
She did it quickly, before they could grab her and stop her. Ignoring the protests of her colleagues, she turned and she retraced her steps and she went back onto that roof. She had no idea what she would do when she got there; she knew only that she had to go back.
Which is when she saw that Cody and Chris were already on the other side of the rail separating life from certain death. Their backs were to her. They couldn’t see her.
So now she is running, straight across to them, praying she can get there before either can turn and spot her. She may have only seconds. Fractions of seconds.
I will kill him, she thinks. I have no choice. To save Cody, this man has to die.
So she runs.
This is it, this is it, this is it . . .
She doesn’t know about the rope.
*
It takes but a moment of time, but it also takes an age. So much compressed into so short a period.
It is Chris who unwittingly gives him the signal that something is wrong. It’s in the way he twists away from Cody. The way his mouth drops open and his body tightens in readiness for action.
And then Cody is aware of Webley. The last person he expected to see up here. She is flying in from left field. Entering his vision in a blur of motion that seems to be propelled from the paved roof and straight at Chris. He hears yells, both from Chris and from Webley. He starts to shout himself, but it is all happening so fast in front of him. He sees Webley’s arms stretch out in front of her, and Chris trying to dodge away from the speeding bullet into which she has turned herself. He thinks for a moment that Chris will be successful – that he will manage to evade this human missile, leaving her to soar past, jettisoning herself from the building.
But she connects.
She hits him. Hard. Chris has no chance. He goes sailing over the edge.
Cody spins. Manages to grab the rail with both hands before the rope goes taut and he is yanked backwards.
He feels like he’s been tied to two horses galloping in opposite directions. His whole upper body is suddenly stretched to breaking point. He is convinced his arms have left their sockets and that each of the vertebrae in his spine has parted company with its neighbours. The rope tightens to an impossibly tight circle around his waist and hitches on his pelvis. The pain is excruciating.
But it will not last, because his fingers are slipping. No matter how much his feet scramble on the wall for purchase, no matter how tightly Webley clutches his wrists, he cannot continue to support this weight while in this amount of pain.
When he looks down, all he sees is Chris’s face. The killer has lost the crossbow, and has both hands on the rope. He can hang there for as long as it takes. And that won’t be long now. Chris knows this, and he is smiling.
And then his head explodes.
A single shot, from the car park below. Chris loses his grip as he loses his life. And in spite of all his fine words about the birds and what they meant to him, his fall is nothing like flying. Instead, he bounces off a ledge and spins into the void. His descent has no grace, no beauty, no wondrousness, no control. It is the sad plummet of a man for whom all of those things were irretrievably lost, and the cries that well up from the onlookers below are not of mourning and sadness as they might be for a rare bird shot from the sky, but of horror and repulsion.
Grunting with the pain, Cody clambers back to safety. He slumps over the rail, next to Webley in a similar bent-over position.
‘That was a stupid thing to do,’ he tells her.
She manages to find a laugh. ‘Not as stupid as you swapping yourself for me. Why did you do that?’
‘I told you. I owed you one. You were the first person to listen to me.’
‘Guess I should have known better. I knew there was trouble brewing when I clapped eyes on you again. You were never good for my heart, Cody.’
She coughs. Spits onto the floor.
It’s bright red.
‘Megan? Megan?’
She pushes herself away from the rail then, turning to face Cody. As she does so, her legs buckle and she collapses onto the paving stones. And then Cody sees it.
The crossbow bolt. Buried deep in her chest.
After that, he doesn’t know what happens. Noises overwhelm his senses. The pounding of boot-clad feet behind him. Voices calling. Radios squawking. The vicious chopping of helicopter blades as they get nearer and nearer. His own voice crying into the wind that carries past the ears of the Liver Birds staring steadfastly across the city and its river.
57
Everyone wants a piece of him.
His superiors, his colleagues, the media – they all want to talk to Cody about exactly what happened up there.
All except Blunt. She takes one lo
ok at him and seems to understand something. As far as he knows, she is not aware of his past relationship with Webley, and she certainly has no idea he almost gave up his life for the young detective constable. And yet she seems to sense his need to be by Webley’s side.
‘Go,’ she tells him.
And so he does. He travels with Webley to the hospital, holding her hand and telling her it will be okay, and saying lots of things that he won’t even remember later, because he knows she needs a friendly, comforting voice at the moment, and that’s all he has to offer now to the woman who once believed she would become his wife.
And even as he tells her to be strong, he feels his own strength waning. He can’t hold back the tears, and he can’t keep his voice from breaking, and he can’t stop himself wishing that Webley hadn’t come back for him on that roof. He had already made his pact concerning who should live and who should die, and she had to go and mess it all up.
At the hospital the intimacy is ended abruptly. She is whisked out of his hands. Wheeled off to an operating theatre by a professional-looking team who have only the welfare of the patient on their minds. Cody is quizzed briefly but efficiently. The medics extract only the information they need about the background to Webley’s predicament. And when they have drained him of his data and he informs them that he is not family, he seems to be relegated in their estimation of his further usefulness. He becomes a mere bystander, peripheral to the whole situation.
He paces. He sits. He drinks coffee. Occasionally he asks for news. Time drags.
At some point he glances up and sees familiar faces at the desk. Webley’s parents. Accompanying them is a tall, handsome man in an expensive suit. Parker, presumably.
Cody decides it’s best to make himself scarce. He’s not sure how any of them will feel about him being there, and he doesn’t want to make a scene. Webley wouldn’t wish that.
He sneaks off. Finds a cafeteria. Drinks more coffee.
He returns to the ward when he feels it might be safe to do so. Standing at the desk, he looks along the corridor. There is no sign of Webley’s parents, but Parker is there, alone on a chair. He has his head in his hands, and he is shaking slightly. Cody thinks he might be crying, but he’s not sure. He wants to go over to him. Try to console him, or at least talk to him. But again he’s not sure that’s a good idea.
He turns to the woman behind the desk. ‘I, er, I came in with Megan Webley earlier.’
‘Oh. Yes.’
‘I . . . I was just wondering if you had any more information for me. About her condition.’
The woman looks to her left, as another woman strolls over. This one is wearing hospital scrubs.
‘Hello,’ she says. ‘I’ve just been talking to the family members. And you are?’
‘I’m Detective Sergeant Cody. Megan Webley is my colleague. I brought her in.’
She nods. Cody steels himself. There is news. If this doctor has been talking to the family, there is news.
His eyes flicker again to Parker. Look at him, he thinks. This can’t be good. This must be the worst news possible.
Says the doctor, ‘She’s a strong girl. Looks like she’ll be making a few more arrests yet.’
Cody feels tension flood out of him. He almost collapses on the spot.
‘She’s okay?’
‘We think so. The crossbow bolt didn’t hit her heart or any major blood vessels. It nicked her lung, but we’ve managed to patch that up. Right now she just needs rest. She can be seen later, but really we want to keep that to a minimum. Close family members only, for the moment. Perhaps tomorrow?’
He nods. ‘I understand. No problem. Could you just . . . maybe later, when the family have gone . . . could you just tell her I was here? And tell her I said thank you.’
The doctor smiles. ‘Thank you?’
He smiles back. ‘Long story. She’ll understand.’
The doctor disappears. Goes back to saving lives, fixing disabilities, mending bodies. Little things like that.
Cody takes one more look at Parker. He understands now that the man’s tears are there through sheer relief. And the intensity of his relief is due to his unbounded love for Webley.
And that’s all Cody needs to know.
*
She suspects.
Cody can see it going through Blunt’s head. She knows that more went on than Cody is telling her.
He spins her a story, of course. Tells her what her official head wants to hear. Says that he had to intervene when Chris decided to kill Dobson, and that’s when Chris got the drop on him.
He leaves out the bit about offering himself as a substitute for Webley. Doesn’t seem relevant, somehow.
Blunt doesn’t care. She wants to write this up as a success story, not as a suicide mission. She’s more than happy to polish this to a high gloss.
And so she tells Cody how brave he was, and how committed he was to stopping the killer. She congratulates him on discovering the truth about Dobson’s background and the link to Hillsborough that would surely have led to an arrest before long. She tells him that officers have already gone into Chris’s house – a simple semi-detached property near the old student residences in Mossley Hill – and found there a room full of birds of all shapes and sizes. When counted up and added to the four already left with the initial police victims, the birds total ninety-six – exactly the same as the number of Hillsborough victims. Cody’s efforts, she assures him, helped to prevent a much greater proportion of those creatures being found dead alongside police corpses.
Cody nods along. Feels the accolades hitting him, but not being absorbed. In his opinion this is not a time for triumph, for celebration. He knows only too well about trauma and the effects it can have on the mind. How much more devastating must those effects be on the mind of a young child? You have watched people die all around you. You have heard the screaming and seen the terror on the faces of those having the very breath squeezed out of them. And even when you get out of there, your ordeal is not over. Not by a long chalk. Because then you are told that it is all your fault. The responsibility for those ninety-six deaths is yours.
The trauma, the overwhelming sense of guilt, and then the deaths of both of your parents. How much worse can it get? Why is it surprising that a mind can snap under such strain?
And how many others are still suffering not only because of what happened at Hillsborough, but also because of the lies that were told about it so brazenly?
The self-questioning continues when Cody finally goes home. He experiences a whole cocktail of emotions. He is happy that Webley is alive, of course, even though she was so badly injured. There will be scars – physical and mental. But he is also reminded of how he felt when he was up there on that roof with her.
He was ready to die. It’s something that he could easily convince himself was an act of heroism to save others. But that would be kidding himself. The painful truth is that he wanted to die. Ending his own life to save Webley’s was just a matter of expediency. Killing two birds with one stone – ho, ho.
He doesn’t think he can carry on like this. Talking things over with Webley helped, but he knows it’s transitory. She can’t risk alienating her fiancé again. Cody can’t allow her to do that. And so the pain will return. The nightmares will start up again. At some point he will crash and burn.
He dwells on this for the next couple of hours. Tries to decide what to do about his future, and reaches no conclusions.
Later, he is almost surprised to find himself in bed, staring up at the ceiling. Eventually, he drifts into a sleep that, if not disturbed, is deep enough to keep him blessedly unaware of reality for much longer than usual.
Except that it is disturbed.
The phone on his bedside table. Calling to him so loudly and urgently that its ensuing silence will be disorienting. The usual thing.
But no. Not the usual. Not this time.
He thinks he is dreaming at first – that he hasn’t really a
nswered the phone, and is still living one of his many nightmares. That would make more sense. He could cope with that.
But this . . .
The screaming. Coming over the earpiece. Powerful and raw enough to stop his breathing and punch at his heart. What is this?
What it is, he realises, is himself. That’s his voice he can hear. His screaming. His pleading for the ordeal to end. He remembers it like it was yesterday, because it bursts into his mind every single day.
But this can’t be real. It has to be another hallucination. Like those in the building at the docks. It’s his mind toying with him again because he stubbornly refuses to get it fixed. Yes, that’s what this is.
And yet it seems so real.
And if it’s real . . .
Well, that means someone made an audio recording of what he was put through in that warehouse a year ago. It means they must have been there.
And it means that, for whatever unfathomable reason, they have finally decided to make themselves known to Cody.
That’s a link to past devilry that he thought had been severed for eternity.
That’s a beginning, just when he thought things were coming to an end.
What was it he told Webley about the men who had hurt him?
If I knew they were behind bars for the rest of their miserable lives, unable to hurt anyone else, then I really believe my problems would disappear.
Could this be the first step towards making that happen?
Nathan Cody has to hope so.
Acknowledgments
I would like to offer massive thanks to the following people for their part in making this book what it is:
My agent, Oli Munson, for believing in me, for letting me know when the words work and when they don’t, for getting me the fab deals, and for being a really nice guy.
Oli’s wonderful assistant, Becky Brown, for her perceptive editorial notes and all the other help she has given me since joining the agency.
Joel Richardson, my editor at Zaffre, for wanting the book, for being so passionate about it, and for doing such a fantastic job of whipping it into shape.
A Tapping at My Door: A gripping crime thriller (The DS Nathan Cody series) Page 32
