Each Man Kills

by David Barry

  Ellis swung open the car door. ‘I think I’ll join you.’

  Wallace turned the ignition on and complained about the cold.

  Lambert walked to the edge of the picnic area, and stood at the top of a hill, gazing at the breathtaking sunrise. Ellis arrived quietly at his side.

  ‘Makes you feel almost religious,’ he said.

  Lambert was non-committal. ‘I suppose.’

  ‘You know, once Evans broke into that shop, and we had an idea which way he was heading, I thought we had him. I thought there’s just no way he can avoid being seen by someone. You think we’ve lost him? I mean, really lost him?’

  Lambert shrugged. ‘It’s a test. Like he’s deliberately pitting his wits against ours. And so far he’s ahead of the game. He’s winning. We’ve done everything he wanted us to do from day one. From the moment we found the body. It’s a trail. He’s leading and we’re following.’

  ‘But where?’

  ‘If we knew that...’ Lambert shivered and turned the collar of his jacket up. ‘I feel like we’re acting out some sort of scenario for Evans’s benefit.’

  ‘I know what you mean. We have to guess his next move.’

  Lambert turned to face Ellis. ‘No, what we have to do is find the motive for his crime. Christ. I’m losing my grip, Tony. Ever since Helen and I split up, I’ve been...floundering. I’ve overlooked so many obvious things.’

  ‘For instance?’

  ‘I ought to hand in my notice right now. Right. Let’s get back to Swansea.’

  Lambert turned and walked purposefully towards the car. Wallace was leaning on the bonnet, deeply inhaling on a cigarette.

  ‘It’s a bit drastic, isn’t it?’ said Ellis, hurrying to catch up with his boss.

  Lambert stopped. Puzzled. ‘What is?’

  ‘Giving in your notice.’

  It was said with a poker face and he wondered if Ellis was joking or not. Then he caught the twinkle in his sergeant’s eye. He ignored it and began counting off points on his fingers.

  ‘Right. I want to know the blood groups of Evans’s mother, his stepfather and Ted Wilson. Check their hospital records or their doctors. And check Evans’s bank transactions prior to his arrest. He only had a balance of three hundred quid in his account. Not much for a soldier of fortune.’

  His hand on the car door, Lambert turned and glanced towards the spectacular sunrise. ‘I think there are ghosts in the machine,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Ellis. ‘You’ve lost me.’

  Lambert, after savouring a dramatic pause, explained, ‘It’s a distinction between the material body and the immaterial soul. Evans is one hell of a fighting machine. And I just wonder what ghosts are controlling him.’

  ***

  After his meal, cooked over a small fire of pine cones, Evans felt a new surge of energy and managed another twelve miles before it began to get light. Arriving close to a village east of Lampeter, he concealed himself in a small thicket surrounded by a barbed wire fence and prepared himself for the long and tedious wait for nightfall again, lying curled up in a ball, his knees against his chest. Within minutes he drifted into a deep dreamless sleep.

  Hours later, he was woken by the sound of children’s voices close by. Just the other side of the fence was a large oak tree overlooking a muddy hollow that looked as if it might once have been a pond. There were two of them, boys of about twelve or thirteen, standing on the ridge overlooking the hollow. One of them had a gun and fired at his friend. Instinctively, Evans counted the rounds. Eight caps cracked in rapid succession. The boy without the gun, clutched his stomach and dived out of sight into the hollow. The one with the gun continued clicking the trigger.

  ‘Bugger it! I’ve run out of caps.’

  The other boy reappeared over the ridge and spat at the oak tree. He pointed towards the highest branches. ‘Oy, big bollocks. Bet I can climb fucking higher than you can.’

  This was answered with a tough guy, ‘Fuck off. No you fucking can’t,’ followed by a well-practised footballer’s gob as an aside.

  ‘Fucking prove it then.’

  The boy with the gun didn’t want to admit to his fear of heights. He gestured towards the thicket. ‘Hey! How ’bout goin’ in there.’

  ‘You fucking scared?’

  ‘Course not. I just thought as we’re not s’posed to go in there...’

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘’S got barbed wire round. There’s prob’ly traps in there. To catch rabbits.’

  ‘We’ll go in there afterwards. Let’s climb the fucking tree first.’

  Evans peered through a small opening in the undergrowth and saw the boys starting to climb. He knew he had to abandon his hiding place now, get out of the copse without being seen. But what if they spotted him? He had to decide quickly, before the boy who had the gun persuaded his friend to explore the wood.

  He got into a crouching position and waited until the boys were out of sight, masked by the leaves of the oak. Then he stepped on each rung of the barbed wire fence and heaved himself over, catching his hand on one of the barbs.

  ‘Come on,’ cried one of the voices from the tree. ‘I’m nearly at the top.’

  Evans felt the wire tearing across the palm of his hand and the bushes shook behind him as the fence sprang back into place. He cursed his luck. Now he was at his most vulnerable, on the run in broad daylight. The only thing he could do was head south-west then double back once he was way out of sight. As he sprinted past the oak, he spotted the abandoned cap gun lying beneath the tree. He grabbed it and shoved it into his pocket.

  Halfway up the tree, the owner of the gun, clinging for dear life to the main trunk, spotted Evans’s retreating form. He stared uncertainly, wondering why the man was running. Then he alerted his friend much higher up.

  ‘Gareth.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look at that man. Over there.’

  ‘Where? I can’t see no one.’

  Evans bobbed out of sight. Seconds later he came into view again as he ran up the next hill.

  ‘There. There he is,’ insisted the boy who had spotted him.

  In the high branches, Gareth pushed the leaves aside and glimpsed Evans just as he disappeared over the top of another hill. ‘Blimey, Trevor. You’re fucking right.’ There was a short pause while he tried to absorb what he’d seen, and marry it to the recent events of the news. News that had given him and Trevor endless pleasure as they fantasised about escaped lunatics. They both made the connection at the same moment.

  ‘It might be the killer what’s escaped from the loony bin.’

  ‘I know. Shall we go home?’

  ‘I don’t wanna get down, Gar. I’m scared.’

  ‘Yeah. Me too.’

  Chapter 21

  Lambert’s car screeched to a halt outside the council house. A sad net curtain was tugged aside and a face peered out, round and wearing heavy make-up, peroxide hair like yellow straw. The curtain fell back into place with an angry movement. Lambert got out of the car and took in the neglected house at a glance. Grey pebble dash, paint peeling, no visible pride showing in any part of the property. The front garden was a patch of earth and a depository for old household appliances. As he walked up the uneven front path, neighbours standing in the doorway of the house next door stopped speaking and stared at him, unashamedly curious and a shade hostile.

  He was about to knock when the door was thrown open aggressively by the blonde woman. She looked as if she was dressed to go out. Her figure was top heavy, but she had slim, firm dancer’s legs and was wearing black tights and a short skirt, deliberately showing off her best feature. She clutched a packet of Marlboro Lights and a disposable gas lighter as if they’d been grafted onto her hand.

  ‘About bloody time,’ she snapped
.

  Lambert flipped open his ID. ‘Mrs Powell? Can I have a word with your son?’

  ‘I hope it’s not going to take long. Only we’ve got to go out.’

  ‘It’s important, Mrs Powell. Life and death.’

  ‘That’s why it’s taken you nearly an hour to get here.’

  ‘I had to come from Swansea. Foot down all the way.’

  She stared at him for a moment, deciding whether to relent or not, enjoying her brief moment of power.

  ‘Sorry,’ Lambert added. ‘Traffic. It was unavoidable.’

  Appeased, she inclined her head towards her front room. ‘All right. But I’ve got to leave in ten minutes.’

  Lambert stepped inside and the door slammed shut behind him. One of the next door neighbours shouted at the closed door, ‘I wouldn’t go in there, mister. She’ll have the trousers off you.’

  She and her friend laughed raucously.

  ***

  Although he couldn’t hear anything other than the wind sweeping across the hills, and the occasional bleating of sheep, Evans’s instinct for self-preservation made him stop and listen, every fibre of his being alert. A feeling of imminent danger enveloped him. He remained frozen, tense and straining for every sound. But still he couldn’t hear anything. Perhaps it was a sixth sense. He felt something was getting closer, and any minute now...

  The only cover was a clump of gorse bushes. He dropped onto his stomach and crawled quickly into the thickest bush. He lay rigid, shutting his eyes tight against the pain he had to endure as dozens of sharp thorns pricked his flesh. Then he heard them approaching. His ear close to the ground, he listened to the heavy thud of their boots. Hardly daring to breathe, he tried to count the footsteps. At least a dozen and heading his way. As they neared his hiding place, their footsteps getting louder and louder, he began to shiver and broke out in a feverish sweat. And he felt angry. Angry that he might be caught in this dishonourable way, like a cowering animal, unable to defend himself. He could hear the boots up close, almost upon him. Then one of them brushed past his hiding place and the bush crackled and swished. He heard a female voice and a laugh. Then the footsteps carried on by, and he heard the last of them receding into the distance. Curiosity got the better of him, and he risked peering from a gap in the bush. He saw a group of ramblers disappearing over the brow of a hill. Once again thanked his luck. Had it been a police search party, he’d have stood no chance.

  He waited a good ten minutes before emerging from his hiding place and continuing his journey northwards. Once over the next hillock he found what he was looking for. A giant stone, standing about ten feet high, holding court over a small circle of stones in a dip in the mountainside, indiscernible from a distance. The large stone had strange designs cut into the side of it, and it was believed that this spot was once the site of human sacrifice. He knew he was heading in the right direction now. Just beyond the rocky promontory to the north were some caves going deep into the mountainside. He could hide there until nightfall.

  Taking a final look at the monolith, he squinted up at it, paying homage to his ancestors, imagining how these pre-Christian Celts killed their sacrificial victims. Without thinking, he took the cap gun from his pocket and examined it. Not a bad replica for a toy. A small automatic, like a Glock.

  Even though it was fake, he felt like a soldier again. A warrior.

  ***

  Lambert had to compete with a Tom and Jerry cartoon blaring from the widescreen TV set that dominated the chaotic room. Two boys sat on a sofa, eating chips and battered sausages from a mess of paper strewn across a coffee table.

  ‘Hello,’ Lambert greeted them. ‘Which one of you is Trevor?’

  ‘He is,’ said the youngest of the boys disappointedly, wishing he had been the one to spot the escaped lunatic.

  Lambert pulled up a chair next to the oldest boy, who stared disconsolately at his bag of chips, clearly worried about something. Lambert glanced at his watch and spoke to him gently.

  ‘Trevor, why didn’t you tell your mother about this man earlier?’

  Trevor’s shifty eyes darted to his mother, then to Lambert. ‘I didn’t wanna get in no trouble.’

  ‘Why would you have got into trouble, Trevor?’

  His mother loomed over the coffee table and stabbed a finger at him accusingly. ‘Cos he knows he ain’t s’posed to go down that side of the village, that’s why. Cos of them pikeys.’

  ‘What made you tell your mum when you did, then?

  Trevor stared at his brother contemptuously before answering. ‘Cos John grassed me up.’

  ‘He saw the man on the telly,’ the youngest boy told Lambert, as if this explanation squared it with his brother.

  Lambert leaned forward towards Trevor. ‘Listen, Trevor,’ he began, allowing just the right amount of urgency to creep into his voice. ‘Think you can remember the direction the man took? If I were to take you to the spot where you saw him...’

  Their mother interrupted. ‘But we’re going out. It’s my boyfriend’s birthday. We gorra leave in ten minutes.’

  She snatched a chip off the table and rammed it into her mouth.

  ‘Mrs Powell, I can’t begin to stress the importance of finding this man before he...’

  ‘All right,’ Mrs Powell barked through a mouthful of chip. She rounded on her son. ‘You little sod. Why couldn’t you say something earlier?’

  Lambert rose. ‘Come on then, Trevor. If you’d like to come with us, Mrs Powell.’

  Mrs Powell gave him a dismissive wave, like brushing a fly away, and lit up a cigarette. ‘No thanks. I’d better phone Wayne. He don’t like to be kept waiting.’

  ‘Can I come?’ asked John, his voice suddenly bright.

  Lambert looked towards his mother. ‘I’ve no objections, Mrs Powell.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. Don’t be long then.’

  The boys shot to their feet. Trevor grabbed a handful of chips and said, ‘I hope my cap gun’s still there.’

  They left the house, the boys feeling important and swaggering, pleased the gossiping neighbours were witnesses to their moment of glory. The neighbours watched with suspicion and envy, itching with curiosity. The boys argued over who should sit in the front and Lambert told them both to sit in the back. They drove through the silent village, turned into a steep hill, on which stood a forbidding grey chapel that was like an old warship frozen in time, and climbed the winding, narrow road for about a quarter of a mile until they reached a farm.

  ‘This is as far as we can go by car,’ Trevor said.

  Lambert parked where the road was wide enough for another car to pass and they continued across the fields on foot. As soon as he spotted the oak tree, Trevor and his brother ran excitedly towards it, Trevor shouting, ‘There it is. That’s the tree. That’s where we saw him.’ As soon as Lambert caught up with the boys at the bottom of the tree, he asked Trevor which way the man was running. Trevor pointed south-west. Lambert frowned thoughtfully.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yeah. Me an’ Gareth spotted him from up there. He was running that way.’

  John gave his brother a friendly shove and started to climb the tree. ‘Bet I can get higher than you.’

  Trevor grabbed him by the collar and pulled him back.

  ‘Hey!’ he protested.

  ‘Not now. We’ve gorra get back or Mum’ll kill us.’ Trevor scanned the ground hastily. ‘It’s gone. Some fucker’s nicked my gun.’

  Angered by his brother’s roughness, John rubbed his neck and said, ‘And I’m going to tell her you’ve been swearing.’

  Trevor grabbed his wrist and started to give him a Chinese burn.

  ‘No, I won’t tell her. Honest I won’t.’

  Lambert, lost in thought, stared in the direction in which Evans had ru
n off. ‘What’s your game, soldier boy?’ he muttered. ‘What makes you tick?’

  The boys studied him curiously, then looked at each other and giggled.

  ‘By the way, Trevor,’ Lambert said. ‘What did this man look like?’

  Trevor stopped giggling and looked guilty, as if he’d been told off.

  ‘I couldn’t see him up close. He was runnin’ away. But I’m sure it was the man off the telly.’

  ‘What was he wearing?’

  ‘Um. One of those coats. Anorak, like.’

  ‘What colour?’

  ‘Dark. Couldn’t really see the colour. But he had soldier’s trousers.’

  ‘Camouflaged?’

  Trevor nodded. ‘I’m sure it’s him,’ he said, fervently.

  ‘You’ve been a great help, Trevor. Thanks.’

  Feeling left out, Trevor’s young brother asked, ‘D’you think you’ll catch him, mister?’

  ‘Oh yes, we’ll catch him all right.’

  ‘You going to take him alive or shoot him?’

  This was something Lambert hadn’t really considered. ‘Alive, of course,’ he answered without conviction.

  The boy’s face crumpled with disappointment. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Right,’ said Lambert. ‘I’ll run you both home.’

  As they walked back towards the car, Lambert felt his sleeve being tugged.

  ‘Will I get a reward if you catch him?’ Trevor looked up at the detective, his dark eyes wide and appealing, begging like a puppy dog.

  ‘If it’s him what helps catch him,’ said the younger brother, smacking his fist into his palm, ‘he ought to get at least five quid.’

  Lambert stopped and rummaged through his pockets. ‘I can’t argue with that,’ he said.

  A greedy glint surfaced in Trevor’s eyes and his brother got over-excited and circled whirring round the two of them, arms spread out like the wings of an aeroplane.

  Lambert gave Trevor a crumpled five-pound note and gave his brother two pound coins. ‘That’s for coming along to assist us,’ he told him.

  The money vanished into their pockets and neither of them thanked him. As he drove them home, he cast his mind back to when Natasha had been about three years old. Helen had become pregnant again and he had hoped they might have a boy this time. The perfect family. Then came the miscarriage. And Helen had never been able to conceive again. Was this when things started to go wrong? He had always been faithful to her up until this time. Then, after the miscarriage, she lost interest in sex; and it seemed as if she was merely obliging him by going through the motions once a month when she felt up to it. Now, tired of always shouldering the burden of guilt, he projected some of the blame of their broken marriage onto Helen. But the truth was, he had turned to other women because Helen had provided him with an excuse, like an alcoholic hitting the bottle big time on receiving bad news.