Persons of Interest

by Peter Grainger

  Smith opened the door six inches. There were curtains drawn over the window and it took his eyes time to adjust to the gloom. As they did so, he began to make out a face, the pale, frightened, bespectacled face of a girl looking back at him, the face of Tina Fellowes.

  Further back in the little room he saw movement and pushed the door open another twelve inches. Cameron Routh was struggling to stand because he had been handcuffed and because he had been beaten – his face was swollen and bruised, there was dried blood on his chin. Once on his feet, he pulled the girl backwards and tried to put himself between her and Smith; he said something to her that Smith could not make out and then he realized that the boy probably had a broken jaw. He allowed himself the luxury of feeling just a little angry at that, as he took out his warrant card and held it towards them.

  ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Smith from Kings Lake Central police station. There are other officers in the building. We’ll have you out of here in a few minutes.’

  Cameron Routh tried to smile at her, even though it was lopsided and hurt him, but the girl’s expression had not changed – she continued to stare at Smith as if she was unconvinced by anything that he had said, and he thought, when you’re seventeen and not much has happened to you before, three weeks of this is an eternity. She’s going to need all sorts of help.

  He said, ‘Your mum’s worried sick. Why didn’t you call?’

  After a moment, and in a small voice, she said, ‘Is she OK?’, and he nodded, opening the door the rest of the way.

  Upstairs he could hear more shouts and more hammering – fists or boots on wood. It’s always provocative, that locked door, but in some situations, like this one, it’s best just to leave them in there – they’re not going anywhere and the priority is to get these two out into the sunshine. Help is on its way, and those people will have equipment that can get through a castle’s keep.

  He had led them into the room, blinking at the light and at the sight of the woman handcuffed on the sofa, when the first shot was fired. For a split second he fought the impulse to throw himself forward, to get as low as possible and then roll to the side, reaching for the pistol that had not been tucked into his belt for the last thirty years, and then he turned and began pushing them back into the room that had been their cell. A second shot, shouts upstairs and a loud crashing, the sound of splintering wood.

  He told them to keep calm, to keep quiet, and then he closed and locked the door, putting the key into his pocket. A delay of a few seconds might make the difference to whoever was now coming down the stairs towards them. He was still calculating as the door to the room began to open – three officers had gone upstairs, two shots had been fired, at least one of them was still alive, unless...

  It was Mike Dunn. He looked at the woman and then at Smith with his back pressed against the second door. He seemed almost embarrassed, as if he didn’t quite know what to say under the circumstances, but eventually he found some words.

  He said, ‘It’s John.’

  ‘Which one, Mike?’

  ‘Murray.’

  Chapter Twenty One

  The emergency admissions unit of Kings Lake General is housed in the new wing. The corridors are long and wide, wide enough to race trolley beds along them without fear of creating new emergencies along the way. At the other end of the forty yards of corridor, Smith could see Maggie Henderson and an older, larger version of herself, a woman that could only be the sister than John Murray had told him about. They were in conversation with Detective Inspector Alison Reeve, who had left Smith here, outside the Serious Injuries Treatment Centre ten minutes ago. The women talked and then embraced each other, and he wondered what Reeve was saying. The registrar had only just gone back inside after speaking to Smith, and that meant that the detective inspector had not had the latest news herself. As he made the decision to walk down towards them, all three women turned and Maggie caught sight of him for the first time.

  She had not been crying, and that was no more than he would have expected. In the ten years that he had worked with her, since she had joined Lake Central as a twenty seven year-old rookie, he had never seen her cry. She stopped a few feet short of him, ahead of the other two women and looked him full in the face before she spoke.

  ‘DC – what’s the latest?’

  It was a small number, the number of people in the world that he could not lie to, whatever the circumstances, and he guessed that Maggie Henderson knew that she was amongst that elite minority.

  ‘The registrar was out here less than a minute ago...’

  Over Maggie’s shoulder, he caught Alison Reeve’s expression – it read something like, should you have told me this first?

  ‘...and he says that John will be OK.’

  She kept her eyes on his to make absolutely sure of that but her hands went involuntarily down to the bulge that preceded her wherever she went these days. Her sister had stepped forward and put an arm around her shoulders, and behind them he saw Reeve’s eyes close.

  ‘The bullet nicked his left side, up under the arm. He’s got a nasty gash of about five inches and a broken rib where it deflected off. They were probably aiming at a normal-sized bloke – if it had been me standing there, it would have taken my head off.’

  The sister looked horrified but Maggie managed a brief smile – hopefully because if Smith was making a joke then Murray must be alright rather than at the idea of Smith having his head taken off.

  Reeve said to him, ‘Mike tells me that they fired through the door.’

  ‘Twice. It was the second one that hit him.’

  ‘How did they get inside after that?’

  Dunn had told him the story as they followed the ambulance in but the women didn’t need all the detail, not now; even Reeve looked more shaken by it than he might have expected.

  ‘I was downstairs but according to Mike, after they shot him, John got annoyed. He charged the door and it came off its hinges. When Mike and Wilson followed him in, one of the blokes was on the floor already out cold and he had the other one in a headlock. We don’t know which of them pulled the trigger yet but it doesn’t really matter.’

  Even that amount of detail had been too much. Maggie’s breathing had changed and her sister was manoeuvring her towards a nearby row of seats. Reeve joined them and fussed ineffectually for a few seconds, before heading for Smith and moving him a few feet further along the corridor.

  ‘God, DC. Shooting a copper. That’s attempted murder. The charge sheet for this lot is going to be longer than my Sunday paper.’

  ‘And probably better value. Ma’am.’

  She gave him the stare but he nodded across at the two sisters, one of whom was still their junior officer, despite her rapidly changing outline. Reeve said that she needed the facts, now that they knew Murray was out of danger, because very soon much more senior officers would be asking her exactly what had taken place out at Honeyhill Cottage earlier that afternoon. First, Smith professed himself mystified by the complete absence of a hill anywhere in it, and then he proceeded to give her the facts, step by step, just as he would be writing them down later that evening, in the quiet of Lake Central with Mike Dunn and perhaps even John Wilson for company.

  But the facts, though they are what we deal in, can convey only fragments of what has been experienced. In the agonizing seconds it took to give Dunn the key and the instructions to get the boy and the girl out of the room again and away from the building, Smith had assumed that Murray was dying. There’s a lot of blood, Dunn had said, and that usually means that an artery has been hit – if it’s a major one, death occurs in minutes. He could not recall going up the stairs, only the scene that met his eyes as he went into the room. The two Albanians were cuffed on the floor, their arms behind their backs; the one with the bloody face said something to Smith in a language that he did not understand or care about, and the other was still coming round after being knocked down by Murray’s fist. On the single bed, Murray lay on his right s
ide, presumably as he had been told to do by Wilson rather than just taking it easy, and Wilson himself was half-astride Murray, his hands together and pressing down on the wound with what looked like a pillow case. It was already sodden, but Murray was conscious, the blood was bright red, and Smith said a silent thank you.

  Murray had begun to apologise and Smith told him to shut up. Then he asked Wilson to lay off for a moment so that he could see the wound, just to be sure. The deep gash filled rapidly with blood but this was not an entry with no exit, and somewhere on the landing forensics would find the bullet. Wilson’s face was pale and intense as he watched the bleeding, as if every drop was his own, and Smith nodded, suggesting that putting pressure on the bleed again might be useful. In those situations, most men prefer having something to do.

  Smith had picked up the gun from the bed where Wilson must have placed it, using the cover to avoid contamination, put it into his pocket, and then walked to the window. He stepped over the man who had said something to him, and looked out at the afternoon. It was peaceful now, tranquil almost to the point of absurdity. There was a wooden bench in the tiny front garden, and Dunn had the boy and the girl sitting on it in the sunshine, waiting. Dunn was on the phone, talking to heaven knows whom but it didn’t matter. Then Dunn looked up at the window, and Smith smiled and put up his thumb. Tina Fellowes followed Dunn’s gaze and saw the face looking down at her, the same face that she had seen just minutes before as the door had opened and light had flooded into their darkness. It was a face that she would never forget – one that would never grow any older in her memory.

  Reeve said, ‘What about you, DC. Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes, fine, nobody shot me. But this has buggered up operation whatever-it-is good and proper, hasn’t it? With those two arrested, the others will be disappearing over the horizon at a rate of knots.’

  ‘No, not completely. I’ve not had an update in the past half an hour but they went in as soon as you confirmed you had found the car. This contingency has been planned for since Friday. Raids in London, raids in Lake, and they even have Sergeant Christopher flying over the scene in The Wash in a helicopter.’

  ‘Will he be jumping in or climbing down a rope? I’d pay good money to see that. Planned for since Friday?’

  ‘Yes. I told them it was fifty fifty that you’d find the hostages before Tuesday.’

  He made a show of thinking it over, while he watched the registrar reappear and speak to Maggie in the corridor.

  ‘Fifty fifty? That wasn’t exactly a show of confidence in your officers, was it?’

  ‘It seemed a reasonable bet at the time. What odds would you have given yourself?’

  ‘Oh...twenty to one.’

  ‘Really? I don’t think that you-’

  ‘Against.’

  He left Reeve there. They had seen Maggie following the registrar into the unit, happy and waving at them because she was going to see him now. Reeve said she had to wait to get some official medical status information, and no doubt that would involve having to see Murray for herself at some point – he respected her for that. She asked whether he had a message that she could pass on, and he told her to tell him that some men would go to any lengths to get a bit more paternity leave and that no, Murray still had not done enough to get a recommendation for the Queen’s Police Medal.

  On the way out, he detoured left into A and E but discovered that Tina Fellowes and Cameron Routh had already been moved on into yet another unit – there seemed to be a remarkable proliferation of such units these days. He asked the sister in charge if this one was called the Rescued Hostages Unit but she didn’t seem to understand – or perhaps she did and simply didn’t think it amusing. Nevertheless, he found it straight away; it was just another couple of rooms in the adjacent corridor, separated from it by a waist-high wall and a glass panel. Through the glass he could see into a cubicle, and there was Cameron, sitting on a bed and having his face examined by a coloured girl who looked young enough to be his kid sister; when she turned to speak to a nurse, Smith could see the ID on a lanyard that told him she was a qualified doctor. So, Cameron was in good hands and he would leave him to it; they would be spending a few hours in each other’s company soon enough.

  Smith moved along the corridor, surprised that anyone had managed to separate the two of them, and then he saw Sandra Fellowes approaching from the opposite direction, accompanied by another nurse. Before she noticed him, they had turned left into another room, and he walked slowly towards it. Through the open door he could see them – the daughter standing with her back to him, clasped tightly by the mother, whose face was towards him, eyes closed.

  When she opened them, she saw Smith looking in through the glass. She didn’t smile or say anything but gratitude can be conveyed without words or gestures. She held her daughter away from herself and said something to her, but when Tina Fellowes turned around to look, he had gone.

  He went home first, telling himself that he deserved it and that it was going to be a long evening – before the end of tomorrow he had to have the initial paperwork in place for the kidnapping, for the shooting of Murray, and, it now turned out, for the other business as well. Assistant Commissioner Devine himself would be in the building at three o’clock on Tuesday afternoon.

  He made a pot of tea, Assam with proper leaves, and when it was ready he poured some into the cup and saucer because it tastes better in china, and carried it out into the garden. The seats at the patio table were in the shade now but still warm from the sunshine that had been on them for most of the afternoon. He leaned back and stared down the garden. Long experience had taught him that it was futile to try not to think about things – instead, it was better simply to let go and allow the things to come, to be the station through which the things pass like little toy trains, to watch them go by.

  He looked at the lawn, at how good it was in the flattening light of the early evening, and remembered Waters cutting it as part of his penance. The same Waters who might well have been standing side by side with John Murray in front of the locked door, and who would probably have taken the other bullet because the boy had a way of attracting trouble or at least of getting in the way of the unexpected. Sending him off the pitch had worked out alright then, even though there would be complaints when Waters heard the whole story.

  Had Stuart Routh been arrested in the Kings Lake raids? That would complicate things because he had given Smith good information in the end, out on the jetty at The Saltings, and from what he had told Smith, Routh had got out early enough to dodge a conspiracy charge. No doubt there was a way of implicating him but if they, the management, wanted to root out the bad apple – and please God there was only the one – they had to consider dealing with Routh more circumspectly. It was a point he would need to make on Tuesday afternoon if no-one else was saying it.

  Cameron Routh had taken a beating in those three weeks, no doubt trying to protect the girl. Smith felt his own jaw clenching at the thought and made himself relax again; they were both young, and they would both get over it. As far as he could tell, the girl had not been abused – she had looked afraid of course but not with the haunted eyes of those who have suffered the ultimate horrors. He had seen enough of those in his time. A shame about her exams, though, and about the boy’s apprenticeship... There are appeals, aren’t there, for special circumstances? He would ask, it would be no trouble to speak on their behalf, write a few lines or sign something.

  He looked at the watch that was never wrong, and it told him that he could take another twenty minutes. His mobile lay on the table and finally he had time to make the call.

  Jo Evison said, ‘Oh, hello. Are you having a nice lazy Sunday?’

  ‘Yes, that’s it, just sitting in the garden.’

  It would have been easy to tell it all, and she would have been interested, but it was too soon. It was good to have a space, a place in which these things did not intrude – to have another life for a while. He wondered whether sh
e was at home, her big house in Cockfosters, and whether she was alone.

  She said, ‘It’s a lovely garden. Did I tell you that when I stayed over?’

  ‘Yes, I think you did.’

  All sorts of things can be said in these conversations between a man and a woman – one can make suggestions without being too suggestive, one can be funny and a little flirtatious at the same time, but he could not remember how it was done. She had mentioned that weekend, when they had been aware of each other, and he did not know what to say, and so in the end he remained almost business-like and he almost hated himself for it.

  ‘You said in your text you had something you wanted to tell me.’

  ‘Oh, right. Yes, I did... I do.’

  Had he sounded curt, as if this call was just one more thing that he needed to get done?

  She said then, ‘This came to me in a very roundabout way but someone knew that I had been looking at your old case,’ – as if there had only ever been the one – ‘and so when they heard it, they got back to me. It’s about Andretti. Maybe you already know this, but he has been talking to lawyers, having meetings.’

  No, he said, he wasn’t aware of that. Today of all days? Today, when there had been so much happening that he had almost made it through to the end without thinking about the man? Then comes my fit again, he said to himself.

  ‘So you’ve no idea what it might be about, David?’

  It was interesting when she said his name, though, and he really ought to try using hers – but not now because she would think he was mocking her. No, he said, no idea.

  ‘I wondered whether it was anything to do with the last girl, how her body got into the dunes. He had an alibi for that, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you obviously checked that from every possible angle. Sorry – I don’t mean to sound like your boss or anything but... So his alibi held up?’