by Faith Martin
‘Understood. Now get out, Hillary, that’s an order. Understand?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Hillary said and hung up. She put the mobile back in her bag.
And stood.
And thought.
But didn’t move.
Rollo Sale was thinking and acting like the senior police officer that he was, and he knew the rules and protocols as well as she did. His police officers didn’t run willy-nilly into danger. Especially unspecified, unknown and ongoing danger. To do so would be reckless, hardly ever effective, and often resulted in others getting hurt. Usually innocent bystanders.
So what you did was back off, assess the situation, wait for backup and try to control the damage.
Hillary looked around. Nobody else had come to their doors to investigate the loud bang, which meant that the other flats were probably unoccupied, as she’d surmised. Either that, or they simply weren’t curious enough to investigate the source of the noise. And the woman who had responded was now safely locked behind her door.
She couldn’t hear any sounds coming from the floors below, or in the stairwell, and suspected that anybody at home down there would be unlikely to come looking for the source of the noise, since it hadn’t yet been repeated.
So — unless whoever had fired that shot had gone berserk and come out looking for other victims to shoot, then everybody was safe, for a while.
And, though she might be wrong, this didn’t have a lone, mad gunman vibe about it to her.
The UK, like so many other countries in the world, had suffered its fair share of such incidents and they usually followed a similar pattern. A man (and it usually was a man) finally flipped his lid and decided to go on a killing spree. He was usually a loner and a gun-fanatic. They often (but not always) started with the gunman shooting family members or those in the same residence as himself, before taking his weapons out onto the street, just randomly killing any poor soul who happened to cross his path.
But so far, nobody had emerged from Jason Morley’s flat.
So — as far as damage limitation went, Hillary couldn’t see that she could do anything to make the inhabitants of the building any safer than they were at this moment. And once the armed response team arrived, civilian safety would be their pigeon.
She felt slightly sick and shaky, and leant against the wall for support, taking deep breaths. Her legs felt a little numb, and she knew she was going to have to be very careful now. She was frightened, and frightened people didn’t always make the best decisions. Logically, she knew that Rollo Sale was right. She was getting too damned old for this sort of thing, and there was no shame in looking after your own skin. She should just get out and wait for the armed response team to arrive.
They were the experts in situations like this, after all.
But how long until they got here? They were a rapid-response unit, but even so . . . ten minutes? Probably more? And when they arrived, they wouldn’t just rush in. They would need to assess the situation thoroughly, and all that took more time. Would they evacuate the building first, going door to door and getting anybody at home out to safety before tackling the prospect of a gunman holed up in a good defensive position? By now, they’d have the details of Jason Morley’s flat in respect of the general layout, and she thought it highly likely that they would. A top-floor corner flat — if you were going to have a shoot-out — was the ideal place to have it from a containment point of view.
And in the meantime, for all she, Rollo, or they knew, Gareth Proctor could be dead, or — in some ways, even worse — seriously injured and bleeding to death right now.
This minute.
If he was dead, then logically there was nothing that could be done to help him, and she would be risking her life for nothing. But if he wasn’t dead . . . She had to do something to help him. When it came down to it, it was as plain and simple as that.
A long time ago she’d gone on a course about how to talk down the hostile party in a hostage situation. How much of it could she now remember?
She took a few more slow, deep breaths. Her mind was jumping about like a flea on a hotplate, and she needed to remain calm and think clearly.
OK, Hillary, she thought. First things first — was she going to follow orders, do the ‘correct’ thing, and leave?
No.
She wasn’t.
She knew it, almost before she’d formed the words in her head. She knew that if she left and it later turned out that Gareth had been injured by that shot, and then subsequently died when he might have been saved if he’d been extracted and been taken to a hospital in time, she’d never forgive herself.
Saving her own skin might feel like a mighty good idea right now — and she wasn’t fooling herself, her instincts were screaming at her to do just that. But she would then have to live with herself afterwards.
OK, so standing here doing nothing wasn’t helping Gareth either. She needed more facts. What’s more, the armed response team would need them too, when they arrived.
OK, so gather more facts, she told herself.
And to do that she had to stop clinging to the wall like a wilting terrified violet and get closer to the scene of the action.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Forcing herself to approach the end door took her a little more effort than her self-esteem would have liked, but slowly, patiently, and most importantly of all, silently, she persuaded her limbs to move and tentatively edged closer.
As she got nearer, she began to see that the door to Jason Morley’s flat wasn’t latched properly, and that a wafer-thin strip of daylight was visible, coming through it in a straight, vertical line. Which meant that gaining access wasn’t going to be a problem. That was a definitive plus. If the door had been closed and locked, her options would have been severely limited.
A definite minus, however, was that sound travelled further and easier through an ajar door than a firmly shut one. So she couldn’t afford to make even the tiniest of sounds, and alert whoever was in that room that she was out here.
She swallowed hard again and kept edging forward, then abruptly stopped. A small voice was screaming some kind of a warning at her from the back of her mind. But through all the tension, fear, anxiety and stress, it wasn’t getting through. She forced herself to try and calm down. What? What was it she hadn’t done? Or needed to do? What . . . Her phone!
She quickly scrambled in her bag and turned it off. The last thing she wanted was for Rollo to call her for an update and have the bloody thing ring! She might just as well draw a set of crosshairs on her back and write ‘shoot here’ on it.
She realized she was grinning like a loon, and knew she had to fight back imminent hysteria. She also felt as if she wanted to be thoroughly sick.
After a few more deep breaths she had control of herself again. The nausea caused by fright passed.
And now came the next hurdle.
At the moment, she was pressed flat against the wall, with the door beside her, hinges closest to her. In order to be able to push it open a little further in order to see inside, she needed to cross in front of it and gain access to the door-handle side.
Of course, she could reach her arm out and try and push the door open that way — but she would be doing that blind. What if someone was stood right in front of the door, watching it opening? No, she’d rather try to get a tiny peep at what was happening inside first, before she committed herself to any course of action.
And now she wished she hadn’t watched all those thrillers, where the hero of the piece did exactly that, and the villain inside opened up, missing the hero by a whisker.
Telling herself that things like that only happened on the television, Hillary forced herself to take three swift steps across the door, a cold shiver crawling up her spine every step of the way.
There was no hail of gunfire, but now she stopped and listened hard.
Although the door was almost in the frame, she thought that she should be able to hear something — especia
lly if someone inside was moving about, or maybe even having a whispered conversation.
But she could hear exactly nothing.
She reached out and slowly, very slowly, nudged the door open a fraction of an inch.
Nothing.
Her mouth bone dry, her knees feeling decidedly wobbly, she nudged it open another fraction of an inch.
Nothing.
Of course, as she’d already speculated, whoever had fired that shot could be just standing there, watching the door slowly move with a big ugly smile on their face, just waiting for some idiot to give them a target.
Or the gunshot might have come from another room in the flat altogether.
Hillary, with one bent knuckle, nudged the door just wide enough to take the width of a human eye, and put her eye in the now wider crack and looked inside.
And in that tiny vertical line of vision she saw the end of a sofa, and a pair of boots, lying on the floor, sticking out from one side of the piece of furniture. They were not lying flat, with the soles to the ground, as they would have been placed if they were empty and waiting to be worn, but were instead lying with the toes downwards to the floor.
And inside them, just disappearing behind the sofa, were unmistakably a pair of black socks. Which meant that someone was lying flat on the floor, face downwards; somebody who was wearing a sturdy pair of boots.
And try as she might, she could not remember what footwear Gareth Proctor had worn to work that morning.
Hillary stared blankly at the footwear, and then, very slowly, nudged the door open further. And as the rest of the sofa slowly came into her vision, so too did the shape of the head of the man who was sitting on it.
Gareth Proctor’s head. She recognized his short fair hairstyle at once.
She let out a wavering breath of relief and gratitude, and cautiously pushed the door open a little more. She remained careful to make no sound though, for until she could be positive of just what had gone on here, she had to acknowledge that Gareth must still be regarded as a possible suspect in a shooting. She didn’t really believe that her colleague was guilty of such a thing, but in a situation such as this, she knew that she could take no risks.
She could smell the cordite in the air, that unmistakable scent of recent gunfire, and quickly surveyed the rest of the room.
The living room was compact, with a small single window that was firmly shut. The carpet was of the grey hard-wearing type, and the walls painted blank off-white. And it was empty of any other human being, save her colleague, sitting on the sofa.
Slowly, her heart rate began to return to normal. She was wondering how best to go about announcing her arrival without giving him too much of a jolt, when she heard a slight sound coming from the sofa. She recognized it for what it was — a stifled sob.
She began to move forward, and as she did so, got a better look at the man on the ground.
She didn’t look for long. It was not a sight that she wanted to burn into her retinas. When you put a gun in your mouth and pulled the trigger it left one hell of a mess behind. Most of that mess had been hidden by the presence of the sofa, and Hillary quickly turned her gaze to the gun, which was still clasped in the dead man’s right hand. It looked old, and she didn’t recognize the make — but then she was no expert on firearms.
A soft rustling sound had her eye swinging back to the sofa — and as she drew ever closer, and thus got a better view of him, she could see that Gareth Proctor was hunched over and reading something.
A suicide note was her instant thought, and a rather long and detailed one at that. She felt instantly relieved. Once SOCO got here, she was fairly sure they would confirm that they were dealing with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, but the presence of a suicide note written in the deceased’s handwriting confirming that conclusion was always a welcome bonus. Coroner’s juries usually liked having more than one indicator as to the cause of death.
She was just about to softly call his name, but something about the intensity with which Gareth was looking through the pages suddenly changed her mind.
Her colleague, who was still totally unaware of her presence, looked from one page to the other, holding one in his left hand and the other in the right, and then made a small sound. Not quite a word, not quite a sob, not quite a sigh, it defied interpretation.
But what Gareth Proctor did next most definitely didn’t, and it made her freeze on the spot. He took one of the pieces of paper and carefully folded it, and reaching behind him, shoved it into the back pocket of his trousers.
Hillary swore silently to herself and began to back away. Once at the now open door behind her, she withdrew, then tiptoed down the corridor and out onto the top of the stairs. There she put on her mobile phone, careful to switch it to vibrate, not ring, and saw that she’d missed a number of (probably frantic) calls from Rollo Sale.
Of course he’d have called her back for an update more or less at once, and on discovering that her phone had been switched off, it wouldn’t have taken him long to figure out why. After all, who would turn off their mobile in a crisis, when lines of communication meant everything, unless they had a good reason for wanting to go silent?
And the only reason she’d want to go silent is because she’d put herself in a position where a giveaway noise could be very costly indeed.
It was only then, as she stood looking at the missed calls from her boss, that she realized that in disobeying his direct orders and breaking protocol, she might well lose her job over this.
But she couldn’t worry about that right now. It wasn’t her job that was uppermost in her mind. Gareth was trying to interfere in an investigation, and a really nasty prosecutor could argue that he was attempting to pervert the course of justice as well. Hillary had a pretty good idea what that page of the suicide note would contain, and why Gareth was trying to suppress it. But if Jason Morley had confessed to killing Francis Clyde-Brough, her colleagues in Reading needed to know it. And much as she admired Gareth’s loyalty to his dead friend, right now, it presented her with a massive problem.
For while she couldn’t let it pass or let him destroy the evidence, she didn’t want to see him lose his job over it, or even worse, get a criminal record. Who the hell would hire him then?
The problem was, she wasn’t entirely sure that if she marched in there and demanded he put it back where it belonged, that he would obey her. And if he didn’t, what then? He might try to destroy it and she would have to try and stop him. But could she? Yes, his left side was weaker than his right, but he was a trained soldier, male, fitter and younger than herself. Could she take him, if it came to it? She wasn’t sure.
But she sure as hell didn’t want it to come to that! Because if it came down to a physical struggle between them, then Gareth Proctor was finished in his new career before it had hardly even begun. Oh, she wouldn’t press charges, but how could they ever work together after something like that? He’d resign, and she’d have to let him go.
She thought desperately for an answer to her predicament, and as she did so, felt the phone vibrate in her hand. Checking it, she saw that it was yet another call from Superintendent Sale. Grimly, she ignored it.
Rollo Sale couldn’t help her right now. In fact, she realized, there was only one person who could.
Hillary Greene sighed heavily and began punching out the number that very few people at Thames Valley HQ had access to — the private number that would put her directly through to one Commander Marcus Donleavy.
Hillary knew that a lot of people at Kidlington HQ speculated gleefully over the exact nature of her relationship with Donleavy, which wasn’t surprising. Coppers were notoriously curious and total gossips. For a while, with human nature being what it was, she knew that they’d speculated on a possible affair between them, but that rumour, over the years, had slowly died a total death, with absolutely no corroborating evidence supporting it. Then it was conjectured that Hillary was Donleavy’s in-house spy, but that rumour too withered
on the vine as it became obvious that that wasn’t the case. Some said that she was Donleavy’s ‘golden girl’ because of her solve rate, but they’d clashed often enough for them to realize that she was no teacher’s pet either. In the end, they’d had to settle for simply not knowing why Donleavy and Hillary Greene were so close.
Sometimes Hillary wondered herself, but the fact was, Donleavy and the powers-that-be tended to regard her as a safe pair of hands when it came to sorting out certain problems that needed discretion.
And this, Hillary thought grimly, was definitely something that needed discretion. If it came out that a civilian consultant had been allowed to tamper in an ongoing murder investigation, then the odorous brown stuff would hit the fan in no uncertain terms.
In her ear, she heard the phone connect and ring, and then his voice. ‘Commander Donleavy.’
‘Sir, it’s Hillary Greene.’
‘Hillary. I’ve just had Rollo Sale on the line. He seems to think that you’re in imminent danger of getting yourself shot,’ the commander said, his voice sounding less alarmed than amused. ‘Do you, by any chance, have a loaded gun pointed at your head right now?’
‘No, sir. But we might,’ she didn’t need to clarify that by ‘we’ she meant the police force as a whole, ‘if something isn’t done PDQ.’
A long-suffering sigh came down the line. ‘What do you need?’
‘First, inform Rollo and the team he’s dispatched that we’re almost certainly dealing with a suicide here. We have one man dead at the scene, and two of us on site. And the likelihood of any more gunfire is minimal to none.’
‘The two on the scene, that’s you and this ex-soldier member of your team, right?’
‘Yes, sir. And I need you to send over Sergeant Nick Rawson right away.’
There was nothing wrong with the commander’s memory, as he knew who she meant right away. ‘The one who looks about eighteen and is always going undercover and infiltrating youth gangs?’
‘That’s the one, sir,’ she confirmed. ‘I need his pickpocketing skills.’ A year ago, she knew that a reformed pickpocket had taught Rawson all the tricks of the trade. This was so that Rawson could go in and successfully find out who was the mastermind behind a well-organized pickpocketing gang that was getting far too big for its boots.
