Authors: Tom Graham
‘I plead guilty!’ he cried, his voice echoing hollowly about the church. ‘Guilty on all counts! But please –
please
– don’t let him take me! Not like that!
Not like that
!’
The doors flew open with a resounding crash, and in came Gene Hunt, his coat-tail billowing as he strode purposefully into the aisle flanked by Chris and Ray, the huge barrel of the Magnum glittering in his black gloved hand.
‘The choir boys are here!’ Hunt announced. ‘Who’s for a sing-a-long?’
Carroll grabbed hold of the vicar, clamping his arm tightly around the poor man’s neck. Crazily, recklessly, he raised the pistol and swung it about.
Chris dived behind one row of pews, Ray dived behind another – but the Guv himself stood his ground, levelling his firearm right back at Carroll.
‘Forget it, Mickey,’ the Guv intoned. ‘This siege is like my patience: well and truly over. Drop the gun then drop the padre – you’re nicked.’
Carroll fired, and at once the Magnum boomed right back. There were screams. Chunks of masonry flew from the walls.
Driven by panic, Carroll flung the vicar aside and leapt from the pulpit. He tore past Sam and raced off through a narrow wooden door. Sam bolted after him, slamming the door behind him to delay Gene and the rest of the goon squad. There was still a chance he could get through to Carroll, learn more about Gould from him; even get him onside to defeat Gould once and for all.
Sam found himself rushing blindly up a narrow spiral staircase, Carroll’s frantic footsteps echoing in the darkness ahead of him, until suddenly he burst out onto a narrow balcony high up in the spire with a view of the city all around. Carroll had run out of places to run to; there was nowhere to go but over the parapet.
Without hesitating, Sam grabbed at Carroll’s gun. To his amazement, Carroll gave it up without a struggle. The man just stood there, panting and sweating, looking utterly lost and forlorn.
‘We’re on the same side!’ Sam urged him. ‘Let’s team up! Let’s beat Gould – together!’
‘Shoot me,’ said Carroll. He placed a finger directly between his eyes. ‘Before
he
gets here. Quickly. Please.’
‘It was hope that brought you here, Michael! Don’t abandon that hope now! We can beat Gould! We can do it! But we have to work together!’
Carroll clambered onto the low wall surrounding the balcony, the city spread out behind him, the sky reeling vertiginously overhead. He glanced down into the churchyard far below. Sam looked too. And this time, they both saw it: hundreds of black balloons tethered to the gravestones, bobbing and whirling on their strings as if caught in a violent cross wind.
Carroll’s face contorted into a ghastly expression of abject terror. The sweat rolled down his ashen cheeks. His mouth worked silently, forming insane words he no longer had voice enough to utter. His bloodshot eyes bugged and stared, turning from Sam to the balloons in the graveyard and back again.
Slowly, Sam reached his hand towards him.
‘Stay,’ he said.
For a moment, Carroll seemed to be on the verge of breaking down in tears – but suddenly he let out a constricted, guttural cry, like a man who has just been dealt a blow to the solar plexus, and in the next moment he flung himself over the edge of the wall. He struck the side of the spire then slammed down onto the roof of the church, his broken body wedging on the ridge of the apex, his face angled upwards and twisted into a ghastly expression of agony and terror.
Moving as one, every black balloon in the churchyard suddenly broke its tether and went sailing up into the sky. And suddenly, bursting through them, sending them scattering in all directions, came a shadowy form, rushing through the air and landing silently on the roof slates of the church.
Sam felt his heart tighten in his chest. He had seen that awful shadow before, and felt the cold terror that radiated out from it.
Clive Gould leapt upon Carroll’s mangled corpse, smothering it with his ghostly arms and body. A misty light flickered between the two figures, moving up out of Carroll’s body and into Gould’s, and as it did Gould’s form seemed to solidify, to take on more weight and more reality.
Sam raised the gun, aiming straight at Gould’s head. Fire spat from the muzzle and the pistol bucked in his hand. The bullet passed straight through Gould as if he was smoke and smacked into Carroll, making the mangled corpse jump grotesquely.
The cloud of black balloons burst, all at the same time – and as they did, Gould slipped away down the sloped roof of the church and vanished from sight.
Sam stumbled back, shutting his eyes. He heard heavy pounding on the stairs, and sensed the heavy-footed, sweat-soaked arrival of Gene, panting like a bull. When he opened his eyes, the Guv was standing there, gun in hand, peering over the edge of the spire. He grimaced, then clicked on the Magnum’s safety catch.
Looking back over the wall, all Sam could see were some broken tiles, streaks of blood, and the smashed, doll-like remains of Michael Carroll down amid the gravestones. From this height, he could see the streets bordering the church, filled with patrol cars and men in uniform. They all looked like little toys arrayed in a model village. And there, just visible amid the throng that now surged towards Carroll’s body, was Annie – just as small and just as vulnerable-looking as all the rest.
The mangled remains of ex-DCI Michael Carroll were scooped up, boxed, and transported to the mortuary. Sam found himself in a cold, clinical corridor that stank of formaldehyde, filling in identification papers for the coroner’s office, Gene Hunt pacing non too happily behind him.
Sam signed off the last of the forms and handed them to the coroner’s assistant, then turned to Gene.
‘I’ve had Carroll’s gun sent to forensics, Guv. I don’t have any doubt that they’ll identify it as the same firearm that discharged the cartridge found at Pat Walsh’s bungalow.’
Silently, Gene kept on pacing.
‘And, of course, it will match the bullet in Carroll’s corpse. Which you’re clearly and understandably not very happy about.’
Gene gave him a narrow-eyed look.
‘Guv, it’s true I shot Carroll. But he was dead already. And I wasn’t aiming for him. I was aiming for …’
Sam threw up his hands. It was impossible to explain.
‘I know you’re blaming me for Carroll’s death,’ Sam went on. ‘But it was
you
,
Guv, who panicked him.
You
made him run. I had everything under control until you decided to go storming in there like the Ottomans into Constantinople.’
‘Fall of Constantinople, 1452; suck on that my lovely,’ Gene snapped at him. ‘Don’t try and mess with my head, Tyler, I’ve got more hot soup in my noggin’ than you could possibly imagine.’
‘I have to admit, Gene, I’m genuinely impressed by your grasp of history.’
‘And you’ll be doubly impressed by my grasp on your windpipe in a minute, you mincing tit. Why did you let that dopey prat take a sky-dive, eh? With the bloody
press
watching! Cameras an’ all! And to top it all, you suddenly get it into your tiny little peanut brain to start using his body for pot shots!’
‘I had my reasons!’ Sam snapped back at him.
‘Couldn’t you have at least
tried
not to let him jump?!’
‘I could hardly stop him.’
‘That’s boil-in-the-bag bollocks and you know it! You had his gun, he hadn’t slept for days, the fella was a wreck. You could have twatted him a corker right in the mush and he’d gone done on his back quicker than a blonde bird in a barracks. But oh no – you stood there gawping while he took a very heavy plummet like Superman with a ton of ruddy kryptonite shoved up his bung-hole. And you’re saying it’s
my
fault?!’
Sam slumped against a wall in exasperation. How the hell could he explain what happened, what he knew, what he had seen? It was sheer terror that had propelled Carroll to jump – terror of the fate that awaited him at Clive Gould’s clutches. He’d witnessed Walsh suffering that same fate, and what he saw had blown his mind.
Gene thrust his hands angrily into the pockets of his camel hair coat and scowled.
‘I tell you who’s the
real
culprit behind all this, Tyler. It’s that drippy bird of yours. She’s the one digging up old skeletons in them ruddy files. She’s the one stirring up trouble.’
‘Blame me for Carroll’s death if that’s what you really want, Guv. And blame me for putting a round in his body with all the local press watching. But for God’s sake don’t try and point the finger at Annie.’
‘I told you before, she don’t fit in with the department. And here’s the proof.’
‘What proof?’
‘Oh, you’ve got all the yakkety-yak when it comes to gobbing off about the Ottomans, ain’t you, Magnus flamin’ Magnusson, but you ain’t
half
the copper I am! Let me join up the dots for you. Your bird develops an unhealthy interested in the death of the copper called Cartwright – who you expect me to believe is no relative of hers. She digs into the files, she finds signs of a cover up. So she starts digging around elsewhere, asking questions, speaking to people – carrying on an investigation. A private one. A
personal
one – that’s the word you used to describe it, Tyler. A “personal investigation”. But because she’s a dough-brained divot, she don’t cover her tracks properly. She speaks to one bloke, and that bloke speaks to another bloke, and before you know it word’s got around that there’s a copper digging up the murky past.’
‘So what you’re saying is that because word got round that Annie was on the case of who covered up PC Cartwright’s murder, somebody’s silencing the key players?’
‘You told me yourself – it were Carroll, Walsh and Darby behind that cover up,’ said Gene. ‘Now Walsh is dead, and Carroll clearly thought he was up for the same treatment. And my fiver says that Darby’s right in line for the chop, if he hadn’t had it already. And all for what? So that somebody with a very guilty conscience can keep a lid on the past.’
Sam turned away, thinking hard. He was remembering his conversation with Nelson in the Railway Arms, that night he came away from Friar’s Brook borstal feeling he was having a breakdown. His head had been whirling insanely with the reality of his situation – that he was dead, that he was in some sort of limbo, that Clive Gould was reaching across the cosmic divide from some hellish place to grab hold of Annie and drag her down with him forever. And then, just when he thought he was going to go over the edge into madness, Nelson had suddenly revealed his true identity, that he was more – much more – than a comic relief barman with a line in extravagant Jamaican banter.
‘It’s all a metaphor!’
Nelson had told him.
‘The crimes you solve in this place, they mean something more than they seem.’
‘What do they mean, Nelson?’
Sam had asked him.
‘Just keep doing your job, Sam. Keep nicking them bad guys,
’ Nelson had replied with a laugh. And then his smile had faded, and he had said very seriously:
‘Just do your best, Sam. It’s important.’
He had a job to do. An important job. And here, in 1973, that job would always manifest itself in the form of a criminal investigation, a case for CID. So as Clive Gould’s spirit built itself up, feeding like a vampire on the corpses of the coppers who had once been on his payroll, all this would appear to the world of 1973 like an old villain was back in town, ensuring the silence of three retired detectives who could spill the beans on him. That’s how it would seem to everyone else, to CID, to Gene. But Sam knew the secret meaning behind the appearance. And Annie was starting to understand it too.
‘I got a name, Guv,’ Sam said, and he found he had instinctively dropped his voice.
‘Yeah, I know – Pansy-Bollocks Tyler, it’s written on your ID.’
‘A
suspect
name, Guv. A prime suspect.’
‘Is this another little bon-bon your crumpet’s picked out of the jamboree bag?’
‘If by that you’re referring to what Annie’s been unearthing in those corrupted files then yes, Guv.’
Gene fixed him with a look that was neither pleased nor friendly. But he said nothing, just waited.
‘Gould,’ Sam said, and he was whispering now, as if just uttering that name would summon the Devil in the Dark right there in the corridor. ‘Clive Gould.’
Gene’s expression did not change. He flickered not so much as an eyelid. But it was that very lack of reaction that told Sam the Guv knew that name – knew it, and did not like it.
After a long pause, Gene said slowly, ‘Do you remember what I said before, Tyler? About sleeping dogs?’
‘Yes, Guv. And it’s as much a pile of bullshit now as it was back then. You’ve heard of Gould, haven’t you?’
‘This isn’t the place to discuss this, Tyler.’
‘You’ve heard of him. You know what an influence he had on CID back in the sixties. You know how corrupt this department was back then.’
‘I said, this isn’t the place.’
‘Guv, he’s the one we need to find,’ Sam said, his voice tight and urgent. ‘Believe me. Don’t ask too many questions. Just take it on trust. Clive Gould’s our man. He’s our man, Guv!’
But at that moment, their privacy was broken by the sudden appearance of a man ambling towards them along the corridor. Tall, thin, dressed in a long raincoat and sporting a trilby worn at a cocky angle, the man reeked of neat spirits and Turkish cigarettes. He grinned; a shifty, gap-toothed grin like Terry-Thomas. Sam had no idea who he was – but judging from Gene’s suddenly defensive reaction it was clear that the Guv had crossed paths with this man before.
‘Jack Sargood,’ Gene sneered. ‘Saucy Jack, the perma-pissed hack. You ain’t still employed, are you?’
‘Most gainfully, as it happens,’ replied Jack Sargood. His well-modulated, educated accent was slurred, and his eyes were not quite fully focused. It was clear that although he had once perhaps been a man of some refinement, he had long since lost his way via the bottle. Dishevelled, inebriated, ragged but unbeaten, he maintained a degree of dignity through his permanent haze of lunchtime Scotches and pre-yardarm vodka and tonics. ‘I’m crime reporter at the
Evening Gazette,
filing hard-hitting stories about …’ He waved a hand airily, looking for the right expression. ‘… about bad men doing naughty things. All very exciting.’