Thrown Down

by Menon, David

  ‘Oh my God but look, I thought that Maria Holmes’ house was supposed to be being watched?’

  ‘The body of the uniformed officer on duty this morning has been found in the back garden of the house. He’d been shot in the back of the head’.

  ‘Christ, we left him out there exposed like a shag on a bloody rock’.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘It’s just an expression’ Collette explained. ‘Has he made any demands, sir?’

  ‘Oh yes’ said Ollie. ‘That’s why we need to talk to Patricia Knight’.

  ‘What do you think they’re talking about?’ Dennis wondered.

  ‘I don’t know but it looks like they’re being pretty intense about something’ said Patricia.

  Dennis looked at his watch. ‘Isn’t the service supposed to start at ten-thirty?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well its gone twenty-five past’ said Dennis. ‘And there’s no sign of anybody. Talk about cutting it fine’.

  DI Ollie Wright and DC Ryan got back into the car and turned to Patricia.

  ‘What’s happened?’ asked Dennis as he held his wife’s hand tightly. ‘Something’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s about as wrong as you could get I’m afraid’ said DI Ollie Wright who then went on to tell Dennis and Patricia everything about what had happened. Patricia burst into tears and Dennis held her tight.

  ‘He’s asking for you, Mrs. Knight’ said Collette.

  ‘He’s asking for Patty? Why would that be?’

  ‘He won’t say, Mr. Knight’ said Ollie. ‘All he will say is that Mrs. Knight will know why he wants to see her’.

  Dennis turned to his wife. ‘Patty?’

  Patricia lifted her tear stained face and said ‘Take me there. I’ll go’.

  ‘Patty? You don’t have to do this!’

  ‘Yes I do, Dennis!’ she wailed.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he’s my son!’

  DSI Jeff Barton drove himself and Chief Superintendent Geraldine Chambers down to the house in Holmes Chapel that was classed as being part of Stockport but geographically was part of Greater Manchester. The house was at the end of a long street of semis but, luckily for Carson, it gave an exposed side to the end of the street where a roundabout that slowed down and managed the local traffic completed the suburban picture. The whole place had been cordoned off and Carson was believed to be in the main part of the house with his captives locked in the garage which was at the end of the drive and parallel to the back of the house.

  ‘One policeman down already, Jeff’ said Chambers as they pulled up outside. ‘This doesn’t look good. A whole family being held prisoner in their garage and the house surrounded by armed police and now the revelation that Patricia Knight is David Carson’s mother. This is not going to end easily’.

  Jeff switched off the engine. ‘Ma’am, a lot will depend on what Patricia Knight can do when she gets here’.

  ‘Hardly the best circumstances for a mother and son reunion’ said Chambers. ‘And I’m uncomfortable about using her. But if he won’t proceed without her being here then I don’t see as we have any choice. Do you think that the fact that Patricia Knight is his mother is what he found in his father’s file and that was the shock that sent him down this path?’

  ‘Who can say at this stage, ma’am’ said Jeff. ‘But I think there has to be more to it than that and maybe we’re about to find out what that might be’.

  The officer in charge of the armed response unit briefed DSI Barton and Chief Superintendent Chambers on the basic logistics of what they were up against. He told them that he was in contact with Carson by mobile phone and that Carson was in the kitchen of the house and depending on where he stood within the kitchen they could get a shot at him if the order came. He also pointed out the garage where Carson had locked inside twelve members of the O’Connell family who’d Bgathered for the funeral. Carson claimed to have booby trapped the garage with a bomb that would go off if any of them tried to escape or if the police tried to free them. Barton could hear them crying inside and the officer said the group had screamed and yelled when Carson set Padraig O’Connell’s coffin on fire and pushed it down the street. There was now a tent over where it had stopped and June Hawkins and her forensic team were analyzing it right now although they didn’t expect the body to be that of anyone but Padraig O’Connell. It was just a precaution. Another half a dozen family members who’d arrived at the house after Carson had taken over were all huddled in the back of a police van and being kept well away from neighbours and other members of the public.

  ‘Has he said where Jade Matheson is?’ asked Barton.

  ‘Yes, sir’ said the officer. ‘She’s in the boot of his car just over there. He says that’s booby trapped with a bomb as well. We can’t take the risk of whether or not he’s lying, sir’.

  ‘No, of course not’ said Barton. ‘Well let me speak to him. This may have started on his terms but it isn’t going to end on his terms’.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dennis’ said Patricia. She was sobbing as DI Ollie Wright and DC Ryan drove her and Dennis across south Manchester to the house of her sister Maria where all Hell had broken loose.

  ‘You’re sorry? I thought there was nothing else that could piss all over the life we’ve had. And now you’re expecting me to accept that this murdering maniac is your son?’

  ‘It was all part of the deal’ Patricia reasoned. ‘I wanted to leave for Australia straight away but they had other ideas’.

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘The British security services’ said Patricia. ‘I was in their hands, Dennis. I was utterly powerless. I was pregnant with James’s baby. James and his wife Joan had not been able to have kids. They said that if I had the baby and gave it to Joan to bring up then my past, as they called it, would be erased. I knew that my only means of survival was to go along with their demands’.

  ‘So where did you have him?’

  ‘I was taken over to England after James died’ Patricia revealed. ‘I never even had the chance to say good bye to my family and that’s why they hate me because they think I just stuck two fingers up at them. I was placed in a hospital somewhere in London, I don’t know where, and after my son was born I was picked up the very next day and driven out to Heathrow to catch the flight to Australia’.

  ‘Mrs. Knight?’ Collette ventured.

  ‘Shut up!’ Dennis roared. ‘Just shut up!’

  ‘Mr. Knight, will you calm down?’ Collette demanded.

  ‘Dennis, this all happened before we met and I love you!’

  Dennis paused. ‘And in the end, Patty, that might just be the only thing that saves us’.

  DSI Jeff Barton didn’t like the idea of Patricia Knight going into the house. Apart from the weight of meeting the son she gave away to the wife of her dead lover, it was an almighty risk giving in to the demands of a clearly unstable David Carson. He’d spoken to him at length. His mood seemed agitated and unpredictable. He was calm one minute and reasonably spoken and then the next he switched to being belligerent and almost aggressive. The switch seemed to come when the mention of Patricia was made. The very sound of her name seemed to make his blood start to boil. He said he had absolutely no compassion for the O’Connell family as he held them in the garage. They were nothing to him and had been part of the side of the Northern Ireland community with which his side had been at war. If they ended up being casualties then he really didn’t care. He admitted to the murder of Padraig O’Connell who he said had been slain in an eye for an eye for his father. Barry Murphy had it coming to him for assisting dissident republican groups with laundering their money. Jeff tried to negotiate the release of the hostages in the usual way but Carson wouldn’t hear a bar of it. But the third confession Carson made was to the murder of Guy Matheson who he said had simply ‘got in the way’. Jeff pressured him further on the bombs he’d claimed he’d connected to the garage and to the car where Jade Matheson was tied up in the boot but Carson wouldn’t
give. He just said that he would detonate them if the police went anywhere near.

  ‘There can’t be a happy ending to this, Carson’ said Jeff on the mobile. ‘You must know that. You’re wanted for three murders. You’re surrounded by armed police who know exactly what they’re doing. Give yourself up now and we’ll talk’.

  ‘Talk about what?’

  ‘Talk about what’s in the special branch file on your father that made you so mad?’

  ‘I’m not talking about that to you’.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Look, just get Patricia in here. She’s the only one I’m interested in talking to and if she’s not in here in fifteen minutes then I’ll detonate the car bomb and Jade Matheson will be dead’.

  ‘What was in that special branch file on your father, Carson?’

  ‘Fifteen minutes or Jade Matheson will be dead’.

  DI Ollie Wright and DC Collette Ryan stood at the bottom of the narrow driveway that led up the side of the house to the back door where Carson had agreed to let her in. Dennis Knight was waiting anxiously by Ollie Wright’s car and he was being looked after by DS Adrian Bradshaw and DC Joe Alexander. Patricia looked sideways at the sizeable and growing crowd that was being kept at bay behind the police barricade.

  ‘There’s still time to change your mind, Patricia’ said Jeff. He was still reeling from his last exchange with Carson. The bastard was calling all the shots.

  ‘No there isn’t’ said Patricia. She was determined to see this through. She was suddenly terrified as the reality of what she was attempting to do swept over her. It had been a long time since she’d held her baby in her arms. Now she was going to have to negotiate with him for the lives of her whole family. And what was she going to negotiate with? Some might say it was ironic considering she’d once been involved in terrorist activities that had claimed the lives of people who’d never been given the chance to negotiate.

  ‘You can still pull out if you want to?’

  ‘That is not an option’ Patricia insisted. ‘If this is the only way to save my family then it has to be. I owe them. I owe my son’.

  THROWN DOWN SEVENTEEN

  She remembered the smell of him the last time he was with her. He had that fresh newborn baby smell that every mother breathes in and thanks God for. She’d done it with all her other three. They’d all had that smell when they were still in the hospital and that’s one of the ways she always remembered David with his clean skin and clean clothes, the look of total dependence when he looked up at her and his little smile and the waving of those arms and legs. As his mother she’d given him a way into the world but her caring of him was to be short lived. She held baby David for barely thirty-six hours before he was taken from her. It was swift. It was cold. It was heartless. The baby whose father she’d loved so deeply had been in the cot one minute and then he was gone the next. She was in some military type of hospital somewhere in London. That’s as much as they allowed her to know. There’d been no friendly faces around and no smiles of support. Later that same day they drove her out to Heathrow airport. She was escorted through passport control and put on the Qantas V-jet bound for Melbourne. All the way through the journey she’d thought about that little baby, her son, but there was to be no looking back. She put it out of her mind that she’d ever see him again and got on with her life in Australia with Dennis and their three children, but now her first born was standing there with an automatic rifle in his hands that he was pointing straight at her.

  ‘Close the door behind you’ said David.

  Patricia did as she was told. ‘Hello, David. I’ve come to bring an end to all this. You’ve already made quite a show here’.

  ‘I haven’t even started yet’.

  ‘What you did to my brother’s coffin was unforgivable’.

  ‘He murdered my father’ said David. ‘But you must be used to putting on a show. You never stayed around to see the results of your handiwork though, did you? You were always long gone before any of it was discovered’.

  ‘Let my family go, David’ said Patricia who was finding it hard to keep her eyes on him because he was the image of his father James. He had the same black hair and dark eyes. He was tall like James too. This wasn’t how his life should be. He should’ve been sewing his wild oats and then settling down with a pretty girl and starting a family. She thought about her two little grandkids back in Melbourne. She ached to be with them now.

  ‘Make me’.

  ‘I said let them go, David’.

  ‘You don’t call the shots here’.

  ‘I said let them go! They’ve done nothing to you. It’s me you wanted and I’m here now so let the rest of them go’.

  ‘You’re remarkably brave considering what’s at stake here’ said David who didn’t quite know how to feel about his birth mother standing there in her black jacket, black skirt, black shoes and white shirt, all ready for a funeral. His mother Joan, the woman who’d brought him up, was the kindest and most attentive mother he could ever have wished for but he still wondered what it would have been like to have been brought up by Patricia. What would it have been like to be part of this typically extended Fenian family? The O’Connell’s would have probably had much less trouble accepting him than he would’ve had about accepting them. But that was the trouble with all these nationalists and republicans. They think that everyone who lives on the island of Ireland is Irish by definition and should be happy to live in one so-called Free State. But David had never considered himself to be Irish even though he’d grown up in Northern Ireland. He was a loyalist to the British province of six counties. He was loyal to his Scottish Presbyterian heritage. He didn’t feel anything Irish at all.

  ‘Well I’m guessing you wouldn’t actually kill your own mother in cold blood’

  ‘That’s the risk you took when you came in here’ said David, calmly. ‘But then you know all about killing in cold blood because you’re a murdering whore’.

  ‘Say that without a loaded gun pointing at me and I might respect you for your directness’.

  ‘I’m not after your respect’ David sneered.

  ‘Then what are you after?’

  ‘You mean you really don’t know?’ said David.

  Patricia decided to play along with him for a while. He clearly wasn’t prepared to release her family any time soon and certainly not as an answer to her request. She felt anxious about how this was all going to end up. It had been a long time since she’d had to deal with anything like this. The last time she’d had to negotiate anything was when her kids were young and one of them fell out with their friend next door or across the street. She always got it sorted out though. That was probably why the neighbours always left such disputes to her to sort out. But none of those kids had been killers. Not like her own kid who stood before her now and she wanted to drag it out for as long as she could before he was minded to do something drastic once again. She didn’t know if she could manage it. She could feel herself sweating. This was her son and yet he’d turned into this. Was it her fault? Was it in the genes? Had she passed on her own anger and resentment to her eldest son?

  ‘Why don’t we just sit down and talk, David?’

  ‘I think we’ve gone way past that, don’t you? In fact as mother and son we’ve gone past so many of the normal turns in the road that we’re now speeding towards a dead end. Do you like that? A dead end? Quite poetic, don’t you think? But who is going to end up dead from this?’

  ‘If I told you I’m sorry would it help?’

  ‘Not if I don’t believe you’.

  ‘Well I am sorry, David’ said Patricia who began to slowly step towards him. ‘I’m sorry that it was another woman who brought you up but you see, they didn’t give me much choice. It was either give you up to Joan Carson or be charged with everything they had on me’.

  ‘So you gave me up to avoid a prison sentence? You sold me out for that?’

  ‘They’d have still taken you away from me even if I�
�d said no! Don’t you see that? At least by letting Joan Carson bring you up I was giving her back something of what I’d taken from her. I’d had an affair with her husband. You were the result of it. She couldn’t have children but if she had you then she’d not only have a child but she’d have something of James too. I did what I did to try and put something right and I’m not going to let you make me feel bad about it! Yes, I was in a corner, yes my back was up against the wall and yes I was thinking of my own survival. But I was also thinking of you and of Joan and of James who’d lost his life and been taken away from Joan because of me. I just wanted to give her something back’.

  David hadn’t been counting on such an emotional response from Patricia. It all sounded so very plausible. If it wasn’t for the situation it was all wrapped in he may believe it all without reservation. But none of this was normal. None of this made any sense compared to how he’d been feeling since he opened that special branch file.

  ‘Where is he?

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Where is my father’s body? And don’t tell me you don’t know’.

  ‘Why would I know, David?’

  ‘The only part of the file that remains classified is the part that deals with where his body went. I want you to tell me. I want you to tell me because you were there and you must know what happened to the body after your brother murdered him?’

  ‘Why should that matter to you now?’

  ‘It was bad enough finding out in that file that you were my mother! I’d had no idea that all my life I’d been fed a lie. My mother never told me that she didn’t actually give birth to me. She never told me about the deal cooked up between you, her and the authorities. And worse still, I had to grow up without a father because of what you did and what your brother did’.

  Patricia was silently crying. ‘I’m sorry, David’.

  ‘Sorry? You’re sorry? I was told that my father was killed in active service and that a body was never found. He was in active service. He was in active service to you and you betrayed him with your IRA murdering scumbags’.