by Adam Croft
‘Sir. We’ve just had a call from the station.’
53
‘Put the knife down, sir. You’re in a police station,’ Liz Shipton called from behind the front desk. She’d been trained to know how to deal with a situation like this, but it wasn’t something she’d expected to see.
In the case of someone kicking off in reception, there was a button which would alert officers around the station, summoning them for assistance. This wasn’t an option Liz wanted to take in this instance. Any sign of a commotion and the man could plunge the knife into DS Knight’s neck within a millisecond.
Officers were often reminded how to deal with situations such as these. The current terrorism threat level meant they were always hyper-aware of what to do should someone enter a police station or public area and take a hostage or threaten to blow themselves up. Going in all guns blazing just wouldn’t do.
But if Liz pushed the panic button there would be the best part of a dozen officers in the room within a couple of seconds, and she had no way of knowing how the man would react to that. She decided, within a fraction of a second, that gentle negotiation might be the only way to save DS Knight’s life.
‘I know where I am,’ the man replied. ‘And I know who this bitch is, too.’
‘John, you don’t need to do anything silly,’ Wendy said, her voice sounding strained and nervous.
‘Yeah? Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t shove this knife right through your fucking neck,’ he sneered, alcohol fumes making Wendy blink and retch.
‘Because you don’t need to,’ she said, struggling to stay calm and not get Lucas any more agitated than he already was. ‘Is this because we interviewed you over Freddie Galloway’s death?’
‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ Lucas said, unconvincingly. ‘All my life I’ve been shat on. Everywhere I turn, every time something is going well in my life, you lot turn up and piss on my fucking bonfire. And I’m sick of it!’
Lucas’s voice raised to a shout, and Wendy felt a small trickle of blood start to run down the side of her neck as the increased pressure from the blade pierced the skin.
‘Do you have any idea what that’s like? That fucking idiot turning up at Trenton-Lowe. You lot have never forgiven me for that. You never will. I didn’t ask him to come, did I? That was his own bloody fault. Then Galloway fucked us all over and swanned off to his bloody mansion while I rotted in jail. And then what happens? Someone does what we’ve all wanted to do and burns his house to the ground, on the day I get out of fucking prison! Well, what do you know? Your lot are round at my door again. I was a free man for not even twenty-four hours, and you’ve got me back in a cell. ‘Cos you just can’t get over it, can you? You can’t get over the fact that your mate was stupid enough to turn up on his own that night. So at every chance you get, you’re going to try to make sure I suffer.’
‘That’s not true, John,’ Wendy said.
‘How’d all that shit get in my garage, hmm? Who put it there? Was it you or the fat one?’
‘John, we know you didn’t kill Freddie Galloway. We know you didn’t set fire to his house.’
‘Oh yeah? Don’t give me that bollocks. I know you’ve been sniffing around still. The bloody cleaner told me you’d been round again, so don’t give me that.’
‘It’s true,’ Wendy said, her voice shaking as she started to feel the pain of the blade inside her raw flesh. ‘We know you’ve been set up, John. And we know who by.’
Lucas stayed silent for a moment, seeming to consider this. ‘Go on then,’ he said, eventually. ‘Who?’
‘Put the knife down and I’ll tell you, John. It’s something we need to discuss properly.’
Lucas snorted and used his left hand to yank Wendy’s hair back.
‘Wrong answer,’ he said, as he shoved the knife into her neck.
54
Liz Shipton pushed the panic button the second she realised the situation had escalated, and within seconds the Station Duty Office was full of police officers who’d streamed out of the rooms behind at the sound of the alarm.
She watched on helplessly as ‘Panic alarm SDO! Panic alarm SDO!’ rang out over the tannoy system at an ear-piercing volume as half a dozen officers tackled John Lucas to the ground and disarmed him. Two officers were attending to DS Knight, one of them attempting to stem the bleeding with his hands whilst another grabbed the police-issue bandages from the pouch on his belt.
‘Lima Alfa one four six. Officer with a stab wound to the neck in SDO. Ambo needed, over.’
‘Get off! Get the fuck off me!’
‘Nick, we’ll need more bandages. It’s not stopping.’
‘Claire, take his legs. Get him immobilised.’
‘Fucking hell, this is bad.’
‘Get off me!’
The officers manhandled John Lucas out through the front entrance and round towards the custody suite, where Liz knew he’d be arrested and booked into a cell.
Control would have called an ambulance already, which’d be on its way. Judging by the amount of blood that was now on the floor of the duty office, Liz wondered whether it could get here quickly enough. There was an ambulance station less than half a mile away, but sometimes that didn’t mean a thing. A neck wound could be almost instantly fatal.
She could swear she heard a faint gurgling sound coming from DS Knight, but it was difficult to hear anything over the commotion. She could only watch on in horror, stunned into motionless silence as she watched DCI Culverhouse and two other CID officers rush in through the front doors of the building.
55
‘Don’t move,’ were the first words Wendy heard. ‘It’s okay. You’re in safe hands.’
She blinked as the bright lights seared her eyeballs. She tried to speak, but the pain was unbearable.
‘It’s okay. Don’t try to speak. You’re in Mildenheath General Hospital, Wendy. My name’s Rosie Ashton, I’m one of the nurses here. You’ve had a bit of a battle on your hands but you’re through the worst of it.’
Wendy tried to recall what had happened. Her mind was hazy in many ways and she couldn’t seem to keep hold of any thought for long. She guessed she was probably on some form of medication. She remembered the smell of alcohol, an arm around her neck, the slight trickle of blood.
She heard footsteps growing louder as someone approached the bed from the corridor outside.
‘Fuck’s sake. Two days I’ve spent sitting here watching you lie there dribbling. I nip out for a quick piss and now you choose to bloody wake up.’
That voice sounded familiar, Wendy thought. It certainly wasn’t a nurse.
She looked at Culverhouse and tried to express a message with her eyes, but wasn’t getting anywhere.
‘Get this,’ the DCI said, walking over to her bed. ‘I think I’ve got it memorised now. An incision between the posterior and middle scalene muscles with damage to the sternocleidomastoid and abrasion of the common carotid. What do you make of that, matron?’
‘I’m a nurse,’ Rosie said. ‘And very good.’
‘Basically, it’ll hurt like fuck and you’ve lost a lot of blood but we won’t need to pay for a funeral, so that’s a bonus.’
Rosie smiled. ‘Personally I’d word it a little differently. You’ve been very lucky, Wendy. You’re not totally out of the woods yet, but you’re a good ninety-five percent of the way there. They managed to repair the artery and stop the bleeding, which was substantial. They’ve had to give a partial transfusion, so you’re not going to be feeling great for some time. The muscles in your neck are going to need you to rest and relax. You’ve got a brace on so you can’t do them any major damage, but if I were you I wouldn’t try.’
‘Pretty drastic way of trying to get out of your inspector’s exams, though.’
Wendy closed her eyes. She was still struggling to come to terms with what had happened to her, and was a long way from being able to cope with the thought that her chances of taking the exams were over for anot
her year. There’d be time off work, a recovery period, sick leave, a return-to-work medical...
As if being stabbed in the neck wasn’t enough, she’d now have to jump through any number of hoops before she was able to even sit down and do her job again.
She lifted her hand and made a writing motion.
‘You want a pen and paper?’ the nurse asked.
Wendy did a long blink to indicate that was exactly what she wanted.
‘Okay, but you’ll have to be careful. You need to keep your head and neck still. Here we go,’ she said, positioning the raised, slanted surface in front of Wendy.
Wendy lifted the pen and started to write on the paper. It took far more effort than she expected.
How long will I be here?
The nurse smiled. ‘Until the doctors are satisfied you’re safe to go home. You’ve sustained quite a serious injury.’
Where’s Lucas?
Rosie signalled to Culverhouse that this was one for him to answer.
‘In a cell. Crown Prosecution Service have recommended a charge of attempted murder. He’ll be off to a remand prison within the next day or so. I can’t see him getting anything other than the maximum sentence. He’s attempted to kill two police officers now. I hope the bastard rots.’
Op Mandible?
‘Don’t you worry about that. There’ve been developments and we’re about ready to close the case, but there’s plenty of time for you to catch up on all that. You just worry about getting better, alright?’
Wendy did another two-second blink, and forced a small, painful smile.
‘Oh, and don’t switch the telly on,’ Culverhouse added. ‘Not unless you want any more swelling around your head area. You’re all over the news channels. Half of them are reporting it as a “suspected terrorist incident”. Bloody idiots. Can hardly see John Lucas as an Al-Qaeda suicide bomber, can you?’
Wendy tried not to laugh, knowing it would hurt.
A thought crossed her mind. She reached for the pen and paper again.
Cookie?
‘I think you need to worry about yourself more than a sodding cat, but yes, it’s being taken care of. Next time you might want to leave a spare key with a friend or neighbour. You owe me eighty quid for a new lock on your front door.’
You kicked it in?
‘Didn’t have much choice,’ Culverhouse said. ‘Bloody thing needed feeding, didn’t it? I got my own back, though. I fed him the fillet steak I found in your fridge.’
Again, Wendy tried not to laugh. A large part of her hoped she’d be in hospital for quite some time to come. At least it’d keep her away from the baying press pack until all the fuss had died down.
After that, a desk-bound inspector’s job was starting to look quite appealing.
56
Back at the station, Culverhouse entered the custody suite and asked the custody sergeant if he could see John Lucas.
He was taken through to Lucas’s cell, the officer lifting the metal privacy flap down to check inside before unlocking the door and letting Culverhouse inside.
He stepped into the cell and waited as the door was closed and locked behind him.
John Lucas was sitting on the thin blue plastic mattress he could call his bed, feet up on the bed and knees in the air as he rested his back and head against the cold brick wall.
Culverhouse stood and looked at him for almost a minute, neither of them saying a word, both of them knowing what the other was thinking. Although there was silence, a thousand words were said.
It was Culverhouse who eventually broke the deadlock.
‘Forensics found traces of accelerant on Galloway’s hands. Both the police and the fire service are happy that Galloway set fire to his own house.’
Lucas looked at him for a few moments.
‘Why?’
‘We did some computer-modelled reconstructions on the house and pool area,’ Culverhouse said, ignoring him. ‘He could have easily reached the pool from that balcony. He was in decent enough health to make the jump. There were no marks on the balcony or on his legs that indicated that he’d slipped when jumping. He deliberately aimed to miss the pool and hit the patio, knowing he’d die instantly rather than burn to a slow death in the house.’
‘But why?’ Lucas asked again, shaking his head slowly.
‘He was riddled with cancer. He wanted to be in charge of his own destiny. And he wanted to take you down at the same time.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘That’s for you to live with. That’s a question I hope you ask yourself every day. I hope it troubles you for the rest of your life. But maybe, just maybe he couldn’t quite forgive you for fucking up that night eleven years ago.’
‘Me? He was the one who gave us duff information and ran off with all the money!’
Culverhouse shook his head. ‘I don’t think he did. We don’t know where that money went, but we’re pretty sure it didn’t go to him. It’s not easy to hide half a million quid in cash. We reckon Galloway’s inside man at Trenton-Lowe was the managing director. The company had been doing alright before the gypsy camp deal. Not great, but okay. He must’ve been shitting himself at what might happen if he got too heavily involved with those people. He’d probably heard all the stories. I presume you didn’t know he’d been living out his retirement in a lovely little villa in Portugal, did you? No, us neither. Bought for not far off half a million quid, four years after the robbery.’
Lucas swallowed. ‘So they did us all over. Galloway and the Trenton-Lowe guy.’
‘Galloway got away with as little from that job as the rest of you did. He can’t have known the bloke had hidden the money then run off to Portugal with it. Until his dying day, he believed the failure of that job was down to you. As far as he was concerned, you cost him half a million quid.’
‘But why? I’ve not got a pot to piss in!’
‘We don’t know. We never will. But there are a few things we do know. We know you drew police attention to Galloway like flies to shit when you pulled that trigger. As far as I’m concerned, you should be banged up permanently for that. We know Galloway was an old school criminal, a man who didn’t touch women, children or police officers. We know you very publicly swore that you were going to get your revenge on Galloway when you got out. And it looks to me like he got there before you did. Call it a pre-emptive strike, if you will. He was dying anyway, so why not take control over when and how, and ensure you go back inside for another decade or two just to top things off? And the most beautiful part of all of it is that you could’ve walked free. You were an innocent man on that front, about to be vindicated. But then you went and did something really fucking stupid and bollocksed it all up. That’s your legacy. That’s the story of your life. And you know what? I feel sorry for you.’
Culverhouse turned and knocked on the door to indicate that he wanted to be let out.
‘How long am I going down for?’ Lucas said, his voice barely a whisper and cracking with tears.
Culverhouse spoke without turning as he waited for the officer to open the door.
‘Right now, I really couldn’t give a shit.’
57
Tyrone unlocked the main door to the block of flats and headed off down the road in the direction of the boxing club.
He was still nowhere near fully recovered, but he wasn’t the sort of guy who could go long without getting back to action. He figured a few light rounds with a punchbag couldn’t do him any harm. Anyway, he’d stop if the pain got too much.
He’d barely covered thirty yards when he remembered he’d forgotten his phone. Fishing into his pocket for his keys again, he turned and headed back, and saw Elijah — his sister’s boyfriend — letting himself in through the main door.
There was nothing strange in that itself — Elijah had a key of his own — but something didn’t feel right. Rather than call out, he waited for Elijah to enter the building, then jogged up the front steps, waited a few seconds and let
himself in. Elijah, like Tyrone, always took the stairs, so Tyrone made sure to hang back a bit to ensure he wasn’t seen on the way up.
Once Elijah was out of view on their floor, Tyrone jogged up the last few stairs and rounded the corner, giving himself a full view of the front door to their flat. He’d expected to see Elijah letting himself in with his key, but what he saw was something completely different.
Elijah was crouched down on one knee, and appeared to be pushing something under the door to the flat.
‘What’s going on?’ Tyrone said, before immediately realising the implication.
Before he could stop himself, he’d launched himself at Elijah the moment he’d spun around and pinned him against the front door, his forearm pressed across Elijah’s throat.
‘It was you, wasn’t it? That message through the door. The texts. It was all you.’
Elijah made a gurgling noise that told Tyrone he was pressing too hard for him to be able to speak. Tyrone loosened his grip.
‘I dunno what you’re talking about, man. I just came back to get some stuff.’
‘Bullshit. I saw you just now, kneeling down.’
‘I dropped my key.’
‘What, so if I open that door right now there’s not gonna be another bit of paper with a threat on it? That what you’re saying? ‘Cos I just left this place not two minutes ago. You know I did, ‘cos you was watching me, weren’t you? You waited til I went out, then snuck up here. That’s how you got out so quick last time, too. You know the place as well as I do.’
Elijah said nothing in response, but Tyrone could see his suspicions were right.
‘Who told you? How’d you find out?’ Tyrone asked.
‘People talk, bruv. You know what it’s like around here.’
