With Courage With Fear

by AD Davies

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Alicia struggled into the garishly decorated space, unable to tiptoe down the steps, instead clomping like a horse with a limp. Faces turned to her, tear-streaked and desperate, with the occasional sob. The tripod-mounted camera brought in by the team Paulson appointed rolled as Holly talked.

  “I think it’s all about fairness,” she said, keeping the bomb’s trigger in frame. “We shouldn’t have all this. We are seventeen years old, at a prom with an ice sculpture that cost two grand. I drive a hybrid, but it’s a hybrid that costs a hundred-and-fifty percent more than the average yearly wage in this country, and my father slapped it on his credit card without breaking a sweat. And I don’t care that people are rich. It’s that people get rich by destroying others, by keeping people poor, and through unethical means. If we didn’t dodge tax so much, there would be more police, more money for the NHS, more community centres, better education, and this country might finally narrow the gap between the super rich and the poverty stricken, and—”

  She spotted Alicia beyond the camera.

  “Hey, you stop right there.”

  Alicia halted and held both palms forward. “Hi, I’m Detective Sergeant Alicia Friend.”

  “I said no police.”

  “I’m not really police. Officially on maternity leave. My boss, she didn’t want me in here, but I pointed out if you blow me up she won’t have to go through any sort of paperwork in trying to have me fired. Which gets really complicated, because if I come back from maternity leave and they immediately start disciplinary proceedings against me, that can look really bad.”

  Stevenson didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, jiggling them as if hoping for divine inspiration. “Alicia…?”

  “You know each other?” Holly said.

  Alicia shot him two thumbs up. “Way to go, genius.”

  Holly rushed forwards, brandishing the dead man’s switch like a club ready to bring it down upon Alicia’s head. “You tricked me. I’m gonna blow this place—”

  The camera woman drew her gun. “Freeze, armed police.”

  Holly halted three feet from Alicia. Hung her head. Laughed. “You think a bullet can stop what I am trying to achieve?”

  “Nothing,” Alicia said. “You’re not achieving anything. You’re a girl who believes strongly in principle, in fairness. But you’re not going to change anything by killing your friends.”

  “They’re not my friends. They’re people I share a school with. People who leech off the misery of others, who—”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “Alicia!” Stevenson cried.

  “What is wrong with you?” Holly said. “Don’t you see this?” She waved handle again.

  “Go ahead.” Alicia reached for the switch.

  Holly pulled away. “You crazy?”

  “You were told by someone that this chemical both explodes and its gas kills within seconds.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Remember the Iraq enquiry? You’re a politically in-tune girl, so I imagine you looked into it.”

  “Of course. More people getting rich off the misery of—”

  “Yeah yeah. My point is, remember the description of Saddam’s nerve agents? Of weapons that were described by that supposed mole? What was wrong with it?”

  “It…” She had to think for a moment, lowering the switch as her brain drained her strength. “The spy said the nerve gas was kept in small glass balls, but that’s not how you store nerve gas. He was describing some really old movie. The Rock, right? With Nicholas Cage and Sean Connery.”

  Really old? Damn.

  “Have you seen Die Hard?”

  “Die Hard?”

  “Yes. Die Hard. Christmas movie. Hostages. Bruce Willis in a vest crawling through strangely huge air vents.”

  “Of course. Everyone’s seen it.”

  “Have you seen the third one?”

  “I love that movie. I love them all, you know, apart from when they went all crap.”

  “The third one.” Alicia gestured towards the tubes on Holly’s body. “Think about it for a second.”

  Holly looked down. Breathed slowly. When she returned her attention to Alicia, a tear rolled down her cheek.

  “Let go of it,” Alicia said.

  “No.” Stevenson marched forward and reached for the switch.

  “It’s okay.” Alicia waved him back. “There’s nothing to worry about. It’s a movie prop. Nothing more.”

  “You don’t know that. You can’t—”

  Alicia was closer to Holly. She closed the gap between them in two steps, and slapped Holly’s wrist. The handle popped loose, and sprang open.

  Stevenson dived to the floor.

  The two armed officers raised their guns to the ceiling to make them safe.

  And Alicia stood calmly beside Holly, holding her hand as the water from the central tube flowed out onto the floor.

  Nothing exploded.

  And nobody died.

  The bright part of Alicia’s day so far was noticing Backfill Bobby had clearly pissed himself, but she would allow him to write that off as having fallen into a puddle that was already there.

  “Okay,” Alicia said, pulling Holly into the best hug that she could manage as the female officer pulled handcuffs from the same place as her gun. “Now to close this investigation once and for all.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  After the Catterick Garrison unit and the West Yorkshire Police specialists all confirmed the bomb was a dud, Alicia instructed Paulson not to allow anyone out of the school. The danger was not yet over, and with Holly secured and being held in the headmaster’s office, the safest place for everyone was inside the huge brick mansion.

  “I was right about Holly,” Alicia said. “And I’m right about this. I need a lift to the annex.”

  While the armed police received new orders, namely to ensure any injured pupils received treatment, and that paramedics be allowed through to take the worst of those suffering from shock under armed escort to an ambulance, Alicia and Murphy made their way to the car park, where Murphy sat her in his BMW’s passenger seat. Alicia updated him along the way, explaining her theory as to what was going down next, and why.

  “Is that feasible?” he asked.

  “Can you think of anything else?”

  They listened in on the radio as Paulson issued clear instructions as to what should be passed on to those in the annex, that the children were now safe, but they needed to secure the building before exposing the remaining hostages to the open-air, which might turn them into more available targets.

  As Murphy pulled his car onto the drive, it was clear from where they stood that the news had filtered through to the parents. They spread out anxiously where both armed and unarmed officers all urged them to stay back.

  Alicia Murphy pulled up, parked on the grass verge next to a “keep off the grass” sign, and crossed to the ostentatious house. They swam through the sea of expensive couture and jewellery, their gaze held away from the doe eyes and fretting hands, arrowing right for the front door.

  Into the anteroom, which was thick with voices both deep and shrill. It wasn’t outright arguments, not aggressive, but certainly testy. While the commissioner listened in on an earphone, he relayed what he thought was happening against what they said was happening, and the gaggle of parents exhaled as one. It only took a few seconds for one of them to demand to see their children, which dominoed to the others, but Alicia and Murphy were already in the next room.

  Likewise, in this area—the dining room that would accommodate dozens—Nigel Swank and Chief Superintendent Nixon tended to mothers and fathers and offered alcohol and nibbles.

  Even in crisis, the rich need their comforts.

  “Tolya!” Alicia called. “Is he here? Is somebody representing him?”

  Nixon and Swank proceeded to espouse the usual demands to know what the hell was going on, a recurrent theme that was beginning to truly bore A
licia. She turned and headed back into the initial reception room. Called the name again.

  Outside, she scanned the men and women milling around. Murphy joined her.

  He said, “Maybe he isn’t here.”

  Nigel Swank joined them. “You are scaring my guests.”

  “Guests,” Alicia said. “And there’s me thinking they were worried for their children. But if you want to entertain with gourmet food and expensive brandy, then ‘guests’ it is. In the meantime, why don’t you help me work out how long this house was unattended for.”

  “Unattended? I’m not sure I follow.”

  “I mean, between Holly threatening to blow the hall up, and when the parents started arriving, was this house empty?”

  “Of course.” Swank shook his head as if Alicia was the stupidest person on the planet. “We attended to the bomb and hostage situation in my school. There was no one here.”

  “Not even a guard?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  Alicia pushed her way back inside, stood at the bottom of the staircase which still bore a velvet rope. “QUIET PLEASE!” she yelled.

  The gathering murmured to a close. All eyes upon her.

  She called up the stairs, “Norman Faulkner! Vernon Slater! Are you there?”

  “Nobody is upstairs,” Nigel Swank said.

  “Why? Because of the velvet rope? Tolya!”

  Murphy said, “Why would they be here?”

  Loud enough for anyone upstairs to hear, anyone close to the staircase anyway, Alicia said, “Because Tolya is the fiction. The Russian spy is nonsense. Come on, I know you’re up there. We know the bomb was fake, we know this house is the real target. You don’t believe in the criminal seed. The children aren’t the people who you want to die. It’s the criminals themselves. Norman Faulkner is—”

  A gunshot cut her off, the report so loud in this space that it physically pounded her ears. Glass shattered somewhere. A couple of screams, but then three men appeared at the top of the stairs, all brandishing semi-automatic machine guns, one being Vernon Slater, another Lamar Reynolds. At the head of the pack, Norman Faulkner stared down, the stock of an AK47 in his shoulder, aiming at the doorway.

  He said, “Nobody tries to leave.”

  “So we finally meet,” Alicia said. “The real Norman Faulkner, I mean. Why don’t we have a chat?”

  “A chat?”

  A stabbing sensation gripped both sides of her stomach. “Oh no not now.”

  “Not now? When would be convenient?”

  “Let’s make it now,” Alicia said. “But I warn you, I may have to leave quickly.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  The gasps outside turned to whimpers, stifled screams, and half-hearted demands to know—yep, as usual—what the hell is going on. Through the wide doorway and massive windows, Alicia saw the outdoor stragglers who had been hoping for a glimpse of their loved ones steaming from the school being herded onto the front porch, a space large enough for fifty or sixty people easily accommodating the twenty-to-twenty-five now congregating under the barrels of the quieter members of the Institute: Henry Black, Julian Vincent, and Tony Potter.

  Ignoring what she dearly hoped was another bout of Braxton Hicks, Alicia snapped to attention to find Norman Faulkner halfway down the stairs, with Vernon Slater pushing past him and through the terrified crowd to round up the people in the adjoining dining room. Lamar Reynolds pointed what looked like an older model MP5K submachine-gun, the sort the British Police sometimes used. Faulkner posed with a swagger, the AK-47 on his shoulder pointed at the ceiling. In the shadows cast by this old house, his stubbly head and cocksure grin made him look like a mo-capped special effect, somewhere between the BFG and Gollum from Lord of the Rings.

  Alicia said, “Do you want me to tell everyone your secret or will you do that?”

  “My secret?” Faulkner answered. “Smart girl. Not quite as clever me, though, eh?”

  “The mine tunnels.” She showed him the smile she thought he needed. The deference to his brilliance. “You planned this for a long time. Built a tunnel to one of the disused shafts?”

  “A year. But it was worth it.”

  “Was the hatch under the computer station by any chance?”

  “Like I said, smart girl.”

  “Brought you out somewhere in that woodland? Or close to it. And you hiked?”

  He smiled.

  As Vernon returned having cleaned out the diners, Graham Rhapshaw and Daniel Nixon remained as close to him as they could without spooking him into opening fire. Their hands stayed on their heads and their chests puffed out, and Rhapshaw urged people to “stay calm.”

  “This is why you told Holly to stall,” Alicia said. “To get these people up here. You knew they’d rush in from every corner of the country, those not already in hotels that is. A fake bomb…”

  “Yeah, I’m kinda proud of that. Got Lamar here to meet her at a service station, y’know, where all them deals go down on the telly. Had to be a thing the sniffers wouldn’t pick up, a’ course, and I knew she liked movies and stuff. She mentioned Die Hard. The bullshit had to convince her or it wouldn’t convince you. Gotta admit, I was touch an’ go as to whether you’d swallow it. Wouldn’t have worked back in the day. But ’cause of the modern world’s ’elf ’n’ safety I knew there was no way they’d chance it. Reckon losing a single one of these posh nob’s kids would bankrupt the Force. What do you reckon, Vernon? How many kids from your neck o’ the woods’re equal to one of these cherubs?”

  “Can’t really calculate that,” Vernon said, not wavering an inch. “Fifty shits, a hundred, a million curly steamers … they’re all still a pile of shit. And that’s how they see us poor folks. One diamond is gonna be worth a lot more.”

  “That’s not true!” one of the taller men said. His polo shirt and chinos screamed “rich guy on a day off.”

  “Shut up!” The barrel of Slater’s gun switched to the guy who just spoke.

  The guy, for only a second, allowed his lip to quiver. But one swallow and a glance at his wife, and he responded. “My company funds dozens of inner city projects to give kids the best start in life. And anywhere we operate, five percent of our gross income—that’s gross, not net—goes to local causes. Fresh water, malaria, malnutrition, schools—”

  “Don’t listen,” Faulkner said. “It’s all about the tax breaks.”

  The polo shirted dude shook his head. “We could dodge tax all day long even without the need for philanthropy.”

  Vernon said, “What’s philan … phil … what?”

  “Means he rapes the countries he works in,” Faulkner said. “Bit of charity work eases his conscience.”

  The man said, “That’s—”

  Faulkner took aim directly at him. “Wanna go on?”

  The man set his jaw. His wife touched his arm, shook her head. The man said nothing.

  Faulkner relaxed. “Good. So. Where were we?”

  Alicia winced as more tightness spiked in her gut. Murphy caught the change in expression, but she waved off his concern. She said, “You were monologuing like a James Bond baddie.”

  “You want to live? Because when these arseholes’re bleeding all over the headmaster’s floor, you’re gonna be our witnesses.”

  “Okay, let’s—” She cut off as the cramp shot into her very centre. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Someone film it.”

  A woman in skinny jeans and a silk blouse thrust her space grey iPhone forward. “Hit it, you bastard.”

  Alicia noticed she was using Facebook Live, which would transmit in real time, with little the authorities could do to censor it, or confiscate the material. So, with Henry Black, Julian Vincent, and Tony Potter within earshot through the main door, Norman Faulkner commenced his confession.

  “I am Kireyev Anatoliy Ilyich, an agent for the Russian government. These people, who are about to die, are the architects of the West’s downfall. Pigs. Wallowing in the trough. Yes, w
e Russians have the oligarchs, but they are a necessary evil to allow us to fight back against this level of corruption. We need to even our playing field. But when the revolution hits with its full force, those oil barons will be the first in prison for their greed and corruption.

  “We, the men of our generation, demand that all wealth is redistributed throughout the country. Lamar up there, as a young man from a black neighbourhood, suffered oppression from the moment he commenced making friends, hanging out on the streets … an easy target for the police. And what happens when young men, black and white, are victimised by society? They rebel. Lamar joined a gang, dealing drugs, fighting their rivals. Vernon and his friends took whatever they could get hold of, and often felt compelled to use violence to achieve it.

  “Victims. Both victims of a capitalist society, one ruled by consumerism. If not for the abundance of material possessions, available only to the super rich, and sometimes—if credit is allowed—to the moderately well off. But people like Lamar and Vernon are forbidden from such privilege. Because of a twist of fate. Because of the circumstance of their birth, they were doomed.”

  “Nonsense!” someone interrupted. Another dude in a polo shirt. Jeans instead of chinos. “I grew up in Moss Side. That’s the roughest place in Manchester. If I can do it—”

  Faulkner aimed at him, shutting him up. “This isn’t a debate. One lucky freak doesn’t stop the facts being true for the majority.”

  When the bad-kid-done-good firmly shut his mouth, Faulkner picked up on what was plainly a well-rehearsed speech.

  “Henry out there, his one mistake was stealing a couple of items from his employer. He lost his job. No one willing to help him get back on the tree of life. A minor offence—even without jail time—gives him a criminal record, and no employer will touch him. His wife took the kids, stole his self-respect along with them. And what did this sick society send him? Alcohol. Drugs. Anything to dull the pain of his new position in the pecking order.