by Alex Walters
She looked around her for something she might use as a weapon. There was the screwdriver, which might do as a last resort, but the pile of old tools might yield something better. There were a couple of spanners, an old hammer, and, lying beyond the next joist, a rusting Stanley knife. That looked the most promising.
Her body was pressed flat against the planking, her left ear still resting on the ceiling. She reached out carefully to pick up the knife, which was just at the limit of her reach. Gently now, she thought, gently.
But as she stretched out for the knife, her body shifted slightly, her foot brushing softly against one of the joists behind her. She looked back but it was already too late. An old yoghurt pot, filled with rusting screws and nails, tottered momentarily on the edge of the joist and then tipped sideways, scattering its contents noisily across the ceiling.
Marie held her breath, realizing that the men below had fallen silent. A moment later, she heard Welsby’s voice moving beneath her as he made his way into the hall.
‘What the fuck . . .?’ he was shouting eloquently. ‘What the fuck was that?’
Chapter 29
Marie could hear Welsby stomping through the hallway, his voice echoing around the small building. ‘The lying bastard. She’s here. She’s fucking here.’
Following the sound of his voice, she shuffled on the planks, finding the tiny hole she’d drilled in the ceiling. She could see Welsby’s figure framed below, his red face staring up at the ceiling. ‘Donovan,’ he said, his voice lower than before. ‘You up there, girl? No point in hiding yourself away now. Why don’t you come down and make it easy for both of us?’
Why did everyone want her to make it easy? She held her breath, perfectly motionless, but knew that it was too late. Welsby had no doubt now that she was up here. She couldn’t imagine him dragging his own hefty bulk through the trap-door, but he’d find a way. It was only a matter of time.
‘Don’t be smart,’ he said, as if reading her mind. ‘I’ll tear this fucking place apart brick by brick if I have to. You can’t get out.’
She was barely even thinking. She’d had enough of all this, that was the truth. Enough of the lying, the game-playing, the deceit. Enough of not knowing who were her friends and who were her enemies. Enough of being out here, on her own, too far from anyone who might care for her and anything that she might still count as home. Whatever happened, she didn’t want to carry on this way. And she didn’t want to end up caught like a rat in a trap.
Almost without knowing what she was doing, she lifted herself on to her haunches, hearing Welsby’s footsteps beneath her. She waited until she was sure he was directly below her. Then she threw herself as hard as she could at the flimsy plasterboard ceiling, the rusting Stanley knife clutched firmly in her hand.
She didn’t know quite what she expected to happen, or what the impact would be. In the event, it was better than she could have hoped.
She fell through the ceiling with an ear-splitting crash and a shattering of wood and plaster and dust. She saw Welsby’s startled face staring up at her, heard his chopped-off expletive, and then she was on top of him, his bulk perfectly breaking her fall as he collapsed underneath her. She was winded, but, as far as she could tell, otherwise unhurt. She sprawled across Welsby’s body, then rolled to her left, trying to regain her equilibrium.
Welsby lay motionless, stunned or worse. She pulled herself round on the floor as he uttered a groan, his eyes flickering.
She didn’t, just at that moment, feel too inclined to worry about Welsby’s state of health. She was more concerned for her own, conscious that at any moment Kerridge would emerge from the sitting room. She pulled herself forwards and jabbed the blade of the Stanley knife hard against Welsby’s neck.
‘Your turn, Keith. You try anything smart, and I’ll slit your fucking throat. You think I wouldn’t?’
Welsby grunted, his eyes still screwed shut. He’d winced slightly as she pressed the blade against his flesh, but otherwise gave no acknowledgement. He looked more than winded. The stark whiteness of his face, the beads of sweat on his brow, the sharp gasping of his breath, all suggested something more serious. Unless it was just play-acting.
She eased herself round, still holding the knife against Welsby’s throat, until she was sitting upright. What now? She was still waiting for Kerridge to appear. Her only tactic was to use Welsby as a hostage, hope to keep Kerridge at bay long enough for her to – well, what? Try to get out through the now unlocked front door? How far would she get if Kerridge was determined to stop her? And in any case would Kerridge give a fuck about what happened to Welsby? As far as Kerridge was concerned, Welsby might be little more than another witness, better disposed of.
But she knew she had nothing else.
She was struggling to position herself ready for Kerridge when she heard a scuffling and a mutter of voices from beyond the sitting room door.
Then there was the sound of a gunshot, startlingly loud in the narrow confines of the bungalow. She was facing the doorway, still pressing the blade to Welsby’s skin, as ready as she could be for whatever was happening, whatever was about to happen.
The door opened slowly. It was Salter standing there, his white face bruised and bloody, one arm hanging limp. He leaned against the doorframe, barely able to stay upright.
‘Jesus, sis,’ he said, his voice hardly more than a whisper. ‘That was some entrance.’
‘What happened?’
‘Kerridge’s dead.’ He said the words matter-of-factly, but there was a blank look in his eyes. ‘He had a gun on me. I was on the ground. Think he thought I was unconscious. But your floorshow created enough of a distraction for me to grab his foot and drag him over. He was trying to shoot me, but I forced the gun back. Don’t know what happened then, but it went off. Thank Christ it’s his brains all over the wallpaper and not mine. Jesus.’
He sounds in shock, she thought. Not quite in touch with reality. Or was she projecting her own feelings? ‘Are you OK?’
‘Not really. That bastard gave me one hell of a kicking. But I’m not dead yet. How’re you?’
‘I’m OK, I think. Just getting my breath back.’ She looked at the figure next to her. ‘I don’t know about Welsby, though.‘
‘I’ll try to contain my grief. Just make sure the bastard isn’t trying it on. I don’t trust him any more than I could throw him. Which, given what a fat bugger he is, would be no distance at all.’ Salter pushed himself away from the doorpost. ‘Hang on.’
He disappeared back into the sitting room and emerged, a moment later, with a pistol in his hand. ‘I’ll keep the bastard covered. Here . . .’ He tossed his mobile across to her. ‘Call the police and an ambulance. Better call back to the ranch, too. They’ll want some warning before this all breaks.’
She climbed slowly to her feet and looked at the phone. There was barely any signal. ‘I’ll have to phone from outside,’ she said.
‘Be quick. I don’t want to give this fat bugger even a ghost of a chance.’
She pulled open the front door and stepped outside. It wasn’t a bad day. The sun was peering between a scattering of white clouds. The air felt warmer than for some days. She could taste the sea salt in the air, even fancy she could hear the distant washing of the waves.
She dialled 999, identifying herself as an Agency officer and saying she had urgent need for police backup, an ambulance. Without going into details, she explained she’d been engaged on an operation, that another agent had been hurt and they needed help. The call handler might assume the call was a hoax, even though Marie had tried to give enough detail to authenticate it. But they’d come anyway, eventually.
Her mind was still churning. Something was nagging at her. The gun. Had Kerridge really been carrying a gun? It wasn’t his style, she thought. From what she’d heard, he usually left that kind of thing to the juniors, though these were hardly normal circumstances. Maybe the gun had been Welsby’s? If so, who’d trained it on Salter? She’d
heard Salter being beaten, but no mention of a gun.
An uncomfortable thought had wormed its way into her brain and was refusing to leave. Was it possible that the gun was Salter’s? That he’d had it concealed about his person and had used the commotion as an opportunity to shoot Kerridge? That his story about the gun going off accidentally was just bollocks.
Did it matter? However it had happened, if Salter hadn’t acted, they’d both be toast by now. Why the hell should she care what might or might not have happened to Kerridge?
She dialled the number for Agency HQ and asked for the Director-General’s office. She spoke briefly to his PA, a woman she’d met a few times and been impressed by. She was warm but efficient, with a remarkable capacity for taking everything in her stride. Now, she took in the gist of Marie’s incoherent account and said she’d ensure the DG was informed immediately.
‘We’ll get someone straight on to it,’ she said, in the tone of one dealing with a minor domestic crisis. Marie had no doubt that she would. Quite what that would mean was harder to predict.
She stepped back into the house, feeling a momentary anxiety that something might have happened in her brief absence. That Welsby had been feigning. Or – and with a mild shock, she realized that this felt more likely – that Salter would have found a reason, real or concocted, to shoot Welsby as well.
But everything was as she’d left it. Salter was hanging on to the doorpost, the gun barrel trained unwaveringly on Welsby. Welsby himself was lying motionless, eyes still screwed shut. His leg was bent awkwardly. She found herself hoping that the bastard was suffering.
‘Police and ambulance on their way. Spoke to the DG’s secretary. She’ll make sure the right people are informed.’
‘Bet she will,’ Salter said. He looked in nearly as much pain as Welsby. Marie held out her hand for the gun. He hesitated, as if unsure why she wanted it, then handed it over. She pointed it at Welsby, still fearing that this was not yet over.
‘Sit down,’ she said to Salter. ‘You look all in.’
Gratefully, he lowered himself to the floor. He sat, his back propped against the doorpost, watching Welsby’s motionless body.
‘We need to get our stories straight, sis.’
‘Do we?’
‘Yeah. Wasn’t quite true what I said about Professional Standards.’
‘Really?’
He shook his head, wincing as if the movement caused him some pain. ‘Been chasing this one on my own. Didn’t know who to trust. Knew it went high, thought even Standards might have been compromised.’
‘They’re the incorruptibles,’ she said. ‘You know that.’
‘Yeah, aren’t we all? Still don’t know who to trust. Don’t know if Welsby was acting on his own, or if others were on the Kerridge payroll. But we’ve got enough now to convict Welsby, even if some of the surveillance stuff here’s inadmissible.’
‘You set this place up? I saw the wires upstairs.’
‘Multi-talented, me. Last couple of days, I let Welsby know I’d sussed his relationship with Kerridge. I tried to persuade them that I was onside. Not exactly on the payroll, but prepared to help them deal with Boyle. Do them a few favours if they’d do a few for me. Thought I had them fooled. Seems I didn’t.’ His white face looked momentarily rueful, as if he’d been caught out in some technical error. ‘This was Kerridge’s place. Kerridge likes this neck of the woods. Bit more upmarket than the places he sells his shit to, convenient for the sea, inconspicuous. His people used to deal from up here. But lately they’ve just used it as an occasional hideaway or stash. Welsby suggested it when I said I was going after you yesterday. He gave me the keys so I could prepare the place – just had time to get the recorder up there. I thought I could get them to come here with you as bait.’
‘Nice to be in people’s thoughts,’ she said.
‘Yeah, well. It nearly worked.’
‘And even more nearly got us both killed. So what story do we need to get straight? I was planning just to tell the truth. Thought it might make a change.’
‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘Just don’t want them to know I was following you. That I let you get away from Blackwell’s clutches. Or that I knew where you were all the time the police were searching for you. That might be seen as bending the rules too far. Young Hodder helped me as well. Want to keep him out of it.’
‘You’re all heart. So what do I say?’
There was a moment’s pause. ‘I think you should say you’d called me yesterday to give yourself up. You wanted to do it discreetly, rather than just stepping into Blackwell’s clutches, so you asked me to meet you at the hotel. I got there just as Morrissey was taking you away – against your will. Once I’d dealt with Morrissey, we decided between us to try to lure Kerridge and Welsby out here, put this thing to bed once and for all. How does that sound?’
‘Convoluted as hell, but then so’s the truth. Your story puts me more on the side of the angels, too. Panicked and went on the run, but then was going to give myself up. Do the right thing.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ Salter said. He was smiling, now, as if he’d just pulled some confidence trick that no one else had seen.
She looked away from him, uneasy. She had the sense that she’d just taken her own first step into the unknown, had walked over that line. Trivial enough in its own right. But impossible to step back from.
In the far distance, she could hear the sound of approaching sirens.
Chapter 30
‘How are you feeling?’
He was staring up at her, a look in his eyes she hadn’t seen before. Something she couldn’t quite read. ‘Is that a real question? How do you think? I’m feeling like – what is it? – like shit.’
He was lying back in the hospital bed and, for the moment at least, he looked like a shadow of his old self. His left hand was shaking more than ever, she noticed.
‘So what happened exactly?’
Liam shook his head. ‘Don’t know. I was in the studio. I’d been working a bit late. One of the new paintings. Couldn’t get it quite right. Kept tweaking. Then realized – probably about nine – that I was feeling pretty awful. Went straight to bed.’
‘I’d tried to phone you,’ she said, conscious that it sounded as if she were trying to justify herself. ‘Couldn’t get an answer. Home or mobile.’
‘I’d forgotten to charge the mobile. You didn’t leave a message.’ It wasn’t a question.
‘I didn’t think. I just assumed I’d call you later.’
‘Or I’d call you.’ Which, they both knew, was more likely to be the truth.
‘Yes. So what happened?’
‘I didn’t wake up, basically. Just slept round the clock. Woke up – I don’t know – maybe thirty-six hours later. Feeling like death. They reckon I was badly dehydrated on top of everything else. Could barely move. In the end, I managed to phone Jean.’ This was the old lady who lived in the house opposite. They’d given her a spare key some months before so she could water Liam’s plants when the two of them were away. ‘She came in, took one look at me and called an ambulance.’
‘And here you are,’ she said, looking around the small hospital ward. Most of the other patients were elderly, she noticed. Much older than Liam, certainly. ‘So what do they reckon?’
‘They reckon it’s the illness,’ he said. ‘It’s just one of the things it can do. The way they talk about it, there doesn’t seem much that it can’t do. But apparently it can just knock you out like that, especially if you’ve picked up some other bug alongside it.’
‘But if you can shake off whatever that is, you can get back to normal?’
There was a moment’s silence. ‘That’s the thing. They seem to think that it’s probably knocked me down a step or two. Increased the decline.’
‘But that can’t happen overnight?’
‘It can, apparently. Maybe not quite literally. But sometimes it happens unexpectedly quickly. It can go for years with nothing o
r not much, and then – wham.’
‘What kind of wham?’ she said. ‘In your case, I mean.’
‘Shit, I don’t even know exactly. It’s partly my mobility. I can still walk, but it’s getting worse. I walk more than a few steps, I’m knackered. I try to walk too fast, I feel like I’m going to fall over. Christ, I do fall over . . .’
She could tell from his expression that this wasn’t all of it, or even perhaps the worst of it. ‘What else?’
‘It’s my brain,’ he said. ‘My mind. I feel like I’m in a fog. I can’t think straight. Things that used to make sense don’t any more.’ He paused, frowning, as if he was trying to get his description exactly right. ‘I don’t remember things,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean big things, important things. It’s the small stuff. Things people said, things I did only a few minutes ago. I can be in the middle of something and not know why I’m doing it.’
‘We’re all like that,’ she said. ‘It’s called getting older. You’re just imagining it. I’ve see no signs of anything like that.’
‘You’ve not been here,’ he pointed out, and for once it sounded like something more than his usual reproach.
‘But it doesn’t affect your mind – your mental abilities. That’s not the way it works.’ She thought back to all the material they’d pored through when he’d first been diagnosed.
‘It can,’ he said. ‘It does. In around 10 per cent of cases, it does exactly that.’
‘Yes, but that’s minor stuff,’ she said. ‘I remember reading about all that. Stumbling over your words. Being a bit forgetful. Jesus, like I say, that’s me already.’
‘That’s usually the way it works,’ he said. ‘But they reckon that sometimes – rarely, but sometimes – it can be more. Sometimes it can be much more serious. It all depends on which parts of the brain have been affected. It’s the luck of the draw. Fucking Russian roulette. But they’re concerned about it. They’re going to do tests. You know – what do they call them? Psychometrics.’
