by Ben Jeapes
A weeping woman crouched down beside her child’s pushchair.
“I’m sorry, darling, but Mummy’s got to go to the King now; I’ll leave you here and you’ll be safe–”
She pushed the chair into a corner between some railings and a litter bin, out of the way of the stream of people, and ran off, still weeping.
Barry’s face was full of rage.
“Well, sod that.” He darted around the car and knelt down by the pushchair. The child was beginning to wail, sensing its abandonment. Barry picked up the teddy that was strapped to the chair and jiggled it in front of the child’s face as a distraction, but then he looked up at the growing chaos in the rest of the market place and hope slowly drained from his face. Malcolm guessed what he was thinking: I can’t help them all …
Malcolm hurried over.
“I’m going to see what’s happening. The keys are still in the car – if it gets nasty, get in and lock it.”
“What do you mean, ‘if’?”
Malcolm ignored the question. “I shouldn’t be long. I just want to find out.”
He followed the crowd across the square before Barry could think of any objections.
The crowd seemed to be streaming towards the south east corner of the square, down the pedestrianised Queen Street, past the small municipal palace that was the Guildhall. It wasn’t hard to let them carry him along, though he kept his neck craned to peer over heads and see what lay ahead.
They were headed for the crossroads with Brown Street, New Canal and Milford Street. More royal subjects were streaming east, from Malcolm’s right to left, down to Milford Street and the growing riot noise. Then he got to the crossroads himself and turned the corner.
Somewhere in the mass of people was a row of police vehicles. Through the seething mob of bodies, Malcolm could see the flash of their lights, and catch glimpses of the fluorescent yellow jackets of their occupants. It looked like the police had tried to make a cordon to stop a mob heading in one direction, but then they had been attacked from the rear by the crowd that Malcolm was a part of.
Someone slammed into Malcolm’s back and he staggered forward with the breath knocked out of him, almost head-butting the wall of a shop. He pulled himself back to vertical and hugged the brickwork so that other people could get past.
He had seen enough. No wonder the traffic had ground to a halt. The action at the crossroads was a solid clot in the sclerotic arteries of Salisbury’s one-way system and nothing would be getting past for a very long time.
A new message blazed into his head, stronger than ever: People of Salisbury, help the King reach the market place.
Malcolm couldn’t see the police here holding out much longer. But they had radios and they could pull in reinforcements, from all around the county if necessary. This riot would spread to the square, and anyone who was still there – people trapped in vehicles, for instance – would get caught up in it.
Two more policemen were running through the crowd towards the fighting. He wondered: what were the chances of getting these two to help? But their eyes met, and all of them recognised each other as royal subjects.
“Come and help the King!” one of them shouted as they ran on past. Malcolm’s heart sank further. If even the police were turning on each other then the ones holding out against the King had no hope.
A bottle smashed against the wall by his head. Just a few feet away from him a small knot of royal subjects and foreigners had come to blows, and they weren’t even at the heart of the fighting.
This riot wasn’t growing outwards from a central point. It was crystallising out of the air all around him. Just a minute ago he had been at its edges; now he was near the centre and he hadn’t even moved.
Something was growing out of the air: a groan, a growl; Malcolm couldn’t even swear he could actually hear it. It was an animal, senseless thing; it was the sound of the mob, hate and fear, the basic desire to hurt other people. This riot no longer had any cause or meaning to it. It had a life of its own. It began to dawn on Malcolm that people could very easily die here, this day, this minute, here in the heart of respectable middle-England tourist-trap Salisbury on the last weekend before Christmas. One of those people could be him.
His one advantage was that as a royal subject, no one was going to attack him. It was the royal subjects who were launching the attacks on the foreigners, and the foreigners were just getting the hell out. Mostly. But there were always some bloody minded individuals who wanted to fight back …
He turned to head back the way he had come and a royal subject barged straight into him. The man at least had time for an automatic “sorry, mate” before moving on.
Right. Malcolm pushed himself vertical and took some deep breaths. Getting back to the car, with its comfortingly mobile cage of steel and tough laminated windows, was now the priority.
He staggered back down Queen Street and across the market place. The square itself was still relatively clear – the fighting was confined to the streets off it. The call to help the King was weakening, which Malcolm assumed meant the King was winning. But people were still streaming into the wide open space, in response to the original call, and it was getting crowded. Malcolm with his long legs hated crowds at the best of times.
More frantic sirens filled the air of the market place, growing from a distant wail to the insistent let-me-through hammering on the senses that made anyone just want to get out of the way. As usual it was impossible to get a sense of direction – echoes off the buildings gave a strange stereo effect that made them seem to be closing in from two directions simultaneously.
Then Malcolm realised, and he groaned.
“Oh no–”
They really were coming from two directions: they echoed out of the entrance to Castle Road, in the opposite corner of the market place, and from the entrance to Endless Street, which he had been planning to use as an escape route out of the square.
“Idiots!”
He could already see what would happen and he redoubled his efforts to get back to the car first.
A convoy of police vans burst out of Castle Street with lights flashing and grills pulled down over the windscreens. They were already prepared for action. A single van poked its nose out of Endless Street, just enough to block that way out. The Castle Street group lurched to a halt in front of the immobile mass of people and cars that filled the road ahead, unable to get through, just as Malcolm had predicted. Through the windscreen of the lead van he could see a couple of men in helmets and visors, having a heated debate with each other and with a radio. After a moment they came to a decision and the vehicles disgorged a mass of officers with helmets and shields, fully tooled up for trouble.
Malcolm looked round. A cordon of policeman had lined up across Endless Street as well.
One of the Castle Street gang had a megaphone.
“This is an illegal gathering. All members of the public must leave this area at once in an orderly fashion.”
The mass of the King’s royal subjects did not take kindly to being so ordered. The police thought they were dealing with an ordinary mob and had no way of knowing that the usual rules had been suspended. Malcolm looked despairingly around him. These people were so normal: everyone wrapped up for a damp December afternoon, everyone prepared to go about their usual innocent business without a care in the world … but for the loyalty to the King burning inside them, which they couldn’t even question because it was so much a part of their nature. Murmurs of discontent were starting up; expressions were ranging from bafflement to anger at being ordered about like that. And people were moving, without even thinking about it, towards the police. Because, Malcolm thought, what do you do when you disagree with someone? You try to reason with them, and when you do that, you probably take a couple of steps in that direction.
A crowd of several hundred people doing that was a frightening sight. In a moment, the police had adopted a more defensive position, shields locked, batons gripped firmly.
When the officer with the megaphone spoke again he had unmistakably ratcheted the tension up a couple of notches.
“This – is – an – illegal – gathering …”
Within the next minute, Malcolm sensed, the riot would break out all over again around him.
He had reached the car and he stopped in his tracks, staring in disbelief. Sarah still sat catatonic in the back but there was no sign of Barry.
“Over here!”
Before he could turn round Barry hurried past with a howling two-year-old toddler in his arms. He hurried up to the shop next to where the Jaguar was parked and handed the child into the arms of a woman waiting there. Now Malcolm looked more closely he saw a small crowd of children lurking in the shop porch and further back into the store itself.
A couple more men, one of them in security guard uniform, hurried past. One of them was also carrying a child, the other leading two slightly older children by their hands. They all got passed into the safety of other adults who were waiting for them.
Barry’s and Malcolm’s eyes met and Barry immediately went on the defensive.
“Well, what else could I do? Their parents were just dumping them! Well, some of them. I mean, other kids just went with their mums and dads–”
“So you organised your own Operation Lifeline?”
Barry glanced nervously at the police and the crowd squaring up to each other.
“Yeah, well … maybe I’m a disaster with my own kids but I can look after other people’s … Hang on.”
His phone was ringing inside his coat. Malcolm didn’t say anything while he took it out and answered it, because with a riot about to break out behind them, and another closing in on them from the front, there wasn’t the time to argue about Barry’s self-perception of his parenting skills.
But, Malcolm did remember that summer when Ted had brought Sarah to the shop at three in the morning, very much against his will, but the alternative had been to leave her alone at home; and he thought that if Ted did have a habit of getting out of his depth it was only because he dived in after other people.
It was possible, just possible, that Barry had taught Ted more than either of them realised.
“You what?” he heard Barry say. “Sweetie, no! No! You can’t … no, wait … There’s a riot going on here, you got that? A bloody riot–”
Barry ended the call with an angry jab at the keys.
“Heather and Robert are on the way in! ‘The King wants us’! Christ!” He looked despairingly out over the gathering mob. “I’ve got to go and get them. See if I can head them off somewhere. But … Sarah–”
“I’ll get her out,” Malcolm promised. “I’ll take her back to mine.”
“You’re blocked in,” Barry reminded him.
“Well–” Malcolm gazed across the market place. “Not necessarily.”
Barry followed his gaze and thoughts.
“You’re kidding!”
It would involve driving through the crowd and over pedestrian walkways, but Malcolm was pretty certain the car could get through the gap between the shops at the far end, into Silver Street (against the one-way system) and then Bridge Street and Fisherton Street and then out of town.
If Sarah was a severe medical case, a dying child who had to get to a hospital now, would he hesitate? Of course not.
“No,” he said, turning to the car and pulling the driver’s door open. “I’m not. Go and get your family, and I’ll call you when we’re in the clear.”
*
The King’s call erupted inside Amanda’s head like a burning beacon.
“Damn it!” she exploded. The Hunter raged inside her. How was she expected to coordinate the hunt for the Gorse boy if the King wanted her down in the market place? You couldn’t interrupt a manhunt by calling all personnel away and still expect it to work.
Silence had fallen on the incident room. A moment before, the place had been buzzing with ringing phones, clicking keyboards, human voices, coordinating the work of the Wiltshire police force in the area around Salisbury. With a bit of juggling she had got it entirely full of the King’s men and women, and the place had been alive with the search for Ted Gorse.
But now everyone was looking at her.
“You heard it too?” Nods all around the room.
“He wouldn’t want us all if it wasn’t important, ma’am,” an officer pointed out.
“No. No, he wouldn’t,” she sighed.
He is the King. The silent reminder came from the Hunter, who like their mutual master still wasn’t entirely up to speed with the twenty-first century, and while she silently told him in return to butt out, she couldn’t argue. Hopefully she would get the chance to explain to the King personally how things worked in this day and age, and then they could get back here.
“Very well,” she said with extreme reluctance. “Shut it all down and clear out. He needs us. See you all in the market place.”
For a split second the room burst back into activity again, and then a man’s voice grated behind her and everything went still again.
“And about time too!”
Amanda turned slowly round to face Superintendent Wallace.
Her nominal boss was in riot wear, helmet tucked under one arm; all tooled up for tackling civil disorder, she noted, except that damn it he was here. The head of the station came slowly into the room as if he couldn’t quite believe it existed. He picked his way between the desks and his gaze flitted from what was on the screens to the faces of his officers and finally, as he came up to her, to the face of Amanda.
“What the hell is going on here, Inspector? What the … hell? The call went out ages ago. There’s a full blown riot going on in the town centre and you lot are up here, still in your regular uniform, doing … what? What, exactly?”
With those last words he turned on the nearest officer, a petite woman officer who looked uncertainly from him to Amanda.
“All of you,” Amanda said quietly, “get to the market place now.”
Chairs were pushed back in a scuffle as everyone eagerly got ready to clear out.
“No one goes anywhere,” Wallace barked, “until I have had words with the inspector. I will want to know exactly what orders she has been giving you lot.”
Kill him, the Hunter said dismissively, and she actually felt her fingers twitch, closing over the hilt of a non-existent sword.
Not how we do it … “I thought everyone was wanted in the market place, sir?” Amanda said innocently, and Wallace span back round to face her.
“Don’t you get lippy with me, young lady! I don’t know what’s going on here but it barely scratches the surface of some of the things I’ve been hearing. Apparently we have a full-scale manhunt going on across the county? Hmm? Headed by you? A small detail that you forgot to mention when we bumped into each other at the coffee machine, perhaps?”
“Sir–” Amanda thought, and fast. “Can I respectfully suggest you allow these officers to attend the call to the market place. We can both agree that’s where they’re needed. And as for what I’ve been doing … well, there’s a perfectly simple explanation.”
Wallace held her gaze without blinking and Amanda found herself remembering that for all his bluster and ‘young lady’s, he was a senior, experienced police officer, not easily overawed or fooled.
“Very well,” he agreed, as if making a move in a game he couldn’t quite see the way out of, but was playing confident of victory. “All of you lot, out.”
If he noticed that still no one moved until they got a small nod from Amanda, he didn’t say.
They waited with their gazes locked until the scuffles had died away and the door had swung shut behind the last officer. Then he cocked his head and raised an eyebrow in an unspoken “Well?”
Even the Hunter seemed expectant, waiting to see what game she was playing.
“Sealed orders, sir,” she said quietly.
“Eh?”
“I didn’t just transfer here from Swin
don to further my career, sir. I was transferred with a specific purpose in mind that you weren’t informed of.”
“What? You expect me to believe that?”
His laugh was part derisive, part something else. They both knew her story was preposterous, but there again … There were always rumours of interdepartment politics; of one hand not talking to the other; of shadowy, secretive agencies that may or may not have existed but which a certain type of police officer badly wanted to belong to. The tiniest crack had opened and she jammed her story into it.
“I came to Salisbury looking for a specific individual, sir. Someone we’ve had our eyes on for a very long time. Edward Jonathan Gorse.”
“And who is ‘we’?”
She answered the question with a reproachful look that said he should know better than to ask, and she could see she was getting through. Maybe he didn’t quite believe her, yet, but the scales were tilting away from full-blown scepticism.
“Very well. So this manhunt across Salisbury was to catch this … Gorse?”
She let herself look innocently surprised.
“Oh no, sir. We’ve got him. The hunt was for his accomplices.”
“You’ve got him? Then what … why … where is–”
“Right here in the station, sir. We have him in the cells. Would you like to meet him?” She stepped back and indicated he should precede her out of the room.
“Oh, I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” he murmured as he pushed through the swing doors.
The Hunter had caught on, and she sensed warm approval. He hadn’t always just pursued his pray with spears and arrows. He too had set traps …
Their boots clattered on the stairs down to the ground floor, and on the linoleum tiles of the corridor from the front desk through to the back of the station. With only a skeleton staff and the civilian workers between shifts, the building was almost deserted. There were no warm, soft bodies to absorb the echoes.
There was an officer on the front desk, who they nodded to in passing, and another on duty at the cells. Amanda spoke first before the man could open his mouth. Behind him on the wall was a chart showing which cells were occupied. She chose the one that was furthest from the entrance.
