Blood Substitute (14 page)

‘I'm warning you …' Carrick began but was silenced by the sound of a series of blows.

The hand grasping my sleeve released it and disappeared. I took this to mean that war had been declared and there was no need for me to stay where I was a moment longer. Patrick was first on his feet, the Glock drawn.

‘Just stay right where you are!' he barked. ‘And I kid you not, I used to be in Special Services and a bloodbath of gutter rats is no bother at all.'

I had an idea they would go for the bloodbath option and they did, no doubt of the opinion that they could out-gun their opponent as four against one was good odds. I went rapidly to ground again when the shooting started, bullets ricochetting off just about everything, and, when there was a lull – I was fairly sure that Patrick had not yet fired a shot – he called, ‘So how much high explosive is actually stored in this place then?'

Silence.

‘It's quite safe as long as you make sure you hit the target,' he went on in his best army instructor's tones and commenced to shoot the lights out, one by one, right above their heads, showering them with hot glass, judging by the language that followed.

‘Let's play murder in the dark,' he taunted them from a different position.

I risked peeping around the pile of containers behind which I was hiding and was in time to see one of them for the first time. He was masked, definitely in panic-mode and making a dash for the door. As he ran, jinking, he still wildly waved a gun around and when it was smashed from his grasp he screamed in pure terror and then bent over, hugging the injured digits.

Further lights disappeared in clouds of bits, leaving just two still functioning. Then some packages flew off a shelf near me and they risked firing in that direction, sending me scuttling around the other side of the boxes and then down an ‘alley' created by the goods stacked there. I have undergone training in mock-ups along these lines but then, dammit, I had had a weapon of my own.

Amazingly, I got one, running pell-mell into my husband who thrust the Glock at me with the flying whisper, ‘Try not to kill any of them,' and then he had gone, shinning up the side nearest the wall of a piled up row of wooden containers that formed one side of the ‘alley'.

With huge caution I headed for where I thought at least two of the remaining three were concealing themselves. Patrick must have thought so too for he began to bob up and bombard them with anything he could lay his hands on, forcing them to keep their heads down. Saucepans whistled overhead, a small, and probably iron, casserole landing with a crash on the face of an old-fashioned clock on the wall sending glass and springs yards into the air. The casserole plunged down to dislodge what must have been a badly stacked pile of something which fell over, caused a dominoes effect and the resultant roar as a whole lot more toppled, slithered and plumetted down sounded like a liner hitting a jetty. Clouds of dust swirled up, creating a murky fog effect in the half-light.

Hopefully now the opposition would think the one firing had run out of ammunition.

In the medium distance a figure reversed cautiously into my line of view. You cannot be too ethical in such situations. He still had his back to me when I fired, the shot hitting the floor, as I had intended, and embedding his backside and the calves of his legs
with small pieces of concrete. He fell over, howling, howled more when the pain kicked in and was in no position to offer resistance when I ran up to him and booted his dropped weapon out of reach.

I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye, spun round and saw Carrick groggily trying to get to his feet in a small space between boxes nearby. There was no time for sympathy.

‘Handcuffs?' I asked urgently and quietly in his ear.

‘No,' he muttered.

All I could do then was to grab the gun from the floor and take it back to the DCI who was recovering sufficiently quickly for me not to have to worry about him accidentally shooting himself.

OK, kill another light then, just to keep my hand in and the opposition's nerves on the frizzle.

Someone almost killed me then, a dark shape jumping from behind a large crate, a gun in both hands, aiming. But he did not, disappearing before I could react other than by throwing myself to one side. Moments later the last light exploded in a burst of glass fragments.

‘Out!' someone yelled.

I stayed where I was. In the blackness there were scuffling noises followed by a loud thud as though someone had tripped and fallen over. Then, footsteps faded into the distance. They were getting away. I decided at this point that it was a good time to keep my promise and refrain from going after them. The van drove off at speed.

For another jittery few minutes not one of the three of us moved in case it was a ruse. But nothing happened and, finally, I saw the tiny beam of Patrick's torch as he made his way towards me.

‘Is James all right?' he enquired.

Before I could say anything I became aware that Carrick was standing at my elbow.

‘I whispered to you that I intended being taken!' he shouted.

‘You
were
taken,' Patrick replied. ‘And they promptly voiced their intentions to take you away and make you talk. They would have tortured and killed you.'

It was obvious the DCI was really angry. ‘Before I came out here I contacted Lynn Outhwaite, my sergeant, and told her what was going on. I said that in case suspicions about the store were realized I would carry a homing bug and that if I did not contact her within a certain time she would put agreed procedures into place. We could have grabbed the whole lot inside their little empire if it had not been for your interference!'

There was a short silence before Patrick said, ‘My main point in reply is that you could have mentioned that to Ingrid on the way over, or to me when we met up. At no time did you intimate that this was, for you, an official, or semi-official mission. The other thing is that these people are not amateurs and would have searched you before you had been taken very far. Even if they had found something they would have gone on to search you
everywhere.
And when they had finished searching you everywhere you would have been half dead already from serious internal injuries. They mutilated Morley. For God's sake, James, where's your judgement?'

Carrick, still not recovered, blundered off in the direction of the exit.

‘It was him,' he said in a choked undertone when we caught up with him outside. ‘Robert Kennedy. My bloody father.'

‘But how could you know? They were masked!' Patrick exclaimed.

‘It was him!' Carrick insisted.

I will never be able to forget the way he stood there, sobbing on Patrick's shoulder.

‘I
didn't shoot out the last light,' I said. ‘He did.'

‘He being the man who changed his mind about shooting you, you mean?' Patrick queried.

‘Yes.'

‘Are you still sure he didn't fire at you and miss before aiming for the light?'

‘Quite sure.'

‘Could it have been the man James thought was his father?'

‘Impossible to say in the poor light.'

‘If your theory's correct …'

‘It would tie in neatly. He wouldn't want to kill allies.'

‘But what the hell would he have really done with Carrick?'

‘In that respect the theory's rubbish,' I said. ‘And I'm constantly haunted by the fact that Morley was horribly murdered. How could another policeman have been party to that?'

It was the following morning and we were in the garden of the rectory: that little bit of heaven on earth in Somerset. The house is built of the same yellow limestone as the church and Elspeth has planted her garden accordingly; variegated spindle, which has green and white foliage and vivid orange berries in the autumn, on the walls and roses everywhere, peach, white, yellow and cream. The rectory is surrounded by large lawns upon which children are encouraged to play and which always host the church fête in June.

We had handed over the warehouse investigation to Paul Reece's department, and made short statements. They had not been delighted with us about the shoot-out until Patrick had pointed out that if they searched for the slugs from the gang's weapons they might have a match for those that had killed Morley, Jeffers and Ritter even though, so far, only the one that had killed the latter had been found, bizarrely still inside his head. Then we had come back to Hinton Littlemoor. Carrick, subdued but insisting that he was fit enough to drive himself home, had walked off into the darkness towards his car. Patrick had asked a constable to shadow him in case anyone was still lurking around.

‘We have, at least, established a link between Slaterfords and serious crime,' I said.

‘Yes, but any lawyer worth his salt would make a good case that the warehouse was being used by crooked staff with criminal contacts to store stolen goods and explosives without the management knowing. We don't know exactly what's there yet, of course – it'll take a while to go through that lot.'

‘With a bit of luck they'll be able to track down Bill Poundbury, who wisely had taken himself off.'

‘Yes, but I don't think he knows very much. He hadn't been on the job long enough.'

‘I've just remembered that Greenway told you to take a look at the warehouse without the management knowing.'

‘We couldn't have foreseen that anyone was going to turn up with a truck-load of booty, could we? I'd have given anything to have seen what was inside that van.' Patrick pulled a wry face. ‘Yes, thanks for reminding me. I'll phone Greenway now so he hears it from me first.'

‘Priorities after the slapped wristie, then?'

‘To find the location of the secure place that was mentioned. It could be where the three murder victims died.'

‘Somewhere in the head office in Walthamsden perhaps,' I mused. ‘Wherever it is that's where they've probably bolted to by now. And, please don't forget, they'll be waiting for somebody to follow them – us.'

‘I
was
thinking of casting an eye over the place.'

Although I was beginning to discount my theory it kept coming back to bother me. Had the ‘secure place' been mentioned deliberately?

As I had predicted Patrick was press-ganged into the choir for the main morning service. He has a pleasant, if fairly ordinary tenor voice, but is apt to chuck in counter-tenor descants for fun in the last verse, at which, a little embarrassed, he is a natural. Sitting towards the back of the church I could hear the high notes soaring and swooping around the chancel in the final hymn, ‘Thine be the Glory'
.

Still not too sure about such things I do nevertheless always say a little prayer for his safety.

Later that night Patrick said, ‘As you know Dad and I had our chat earlier. He told me that the diocese want to sell the rectory and re-home them in a new bungalow that's part of that development on the old station site. He hasn't broken the news to Mum yet.'

‘That's awful,' I gasped.

‘Apparently the rectory needs a new roof.'

‘But those bungalows are a horrible little enclave.'

‘I know. No one wants him to retire even though he's getting on for seventy. But I reckon he will and they'll go and live on Sark as they've always planned to do – not that I'm a hundred per cent sure they can actually afford to build a house on that plot they've bought there. I didn't like to ask.'

Occasionally, there is a strange formality between Patrick and his father, and reticence on the former's part, something I have put down to their strained relationship when Patrick was in his early teens. John, it appeared, had not been prepared for his children behaving like most other adolescents, quaintly supposing that the offspring of those called by God were spared rampaging hormones and explosions of bad temper. Once, and I did not imagine this, I had heard Patrick call him ‘sir'.

‘Everyone loses if your dad gives up,' I said. ‘They do, the parishioners do and so do our children. The first phase of that bungalow development is like tiny hutches.
And
that area has always tended to flood. When is he going to tell Elspeth?'

‘Tomorrow.'

‘This hoodlum with a manor in Walthamsden, Ernie O'Malley, can be described as a career criminal,' Michael Greenway said. Turning to Patrick he added, ‘You said over the phone that Superintendent Reece reckons he could be the brother-in-law of this guy who's responsible for serious crimes, and possibly Morley's murder, in the Bristol area.'

‘The Met thinks so,' Patrick corrected. ‘It's just about Reece's only piece of intelligence. Flimsy though, I agree.'

Greenway stared out of the window, unseeing, for a few moments. ‘According to the Criminal Record Office O'Malley doesn't have any sisters, married or otherwise. He did, however, have a wife – they're divorced – and she has a brother by the name of Lance Taylor or Naylor. He goes by both names apparently and has convictions for most things that you can think of.'

‘Do we have his description?' I asked. ‘Or a photo?'

Greenway switched on his laptop, pushed keys and spun it round on the table to enable us to see the screen. What could be described as a middle-aged, sullen, spotty punk with yellow hair striped faded pink glowered back at us.

‘How tall is he?' Patrick said.

Greenway repossessed the laptop and stabbed more buttons. ‘Five foot nine.'

‘Not our man then. What about O'Malley himself?'

‘I've gone into his details in some depth. He's on the run, again, having been busted out of a prison van taking him to court. But it can't be him; he's comparatively short as well.'

‘Damn.'

Back in London on a hot, sticky day when the traffic fumes seemed thick enough to cut into slices and parcel off to homesick expats we had met Greenway in the inevitable coffee bar. He had made no comment concerning the ‘1812 Overture'-style cannon and mortar effects conclusion of the warehouse operation, either now or when Patrick had first told him. But now he said, ‘You said Carrick was with you at the warehouse and thought he recognized his old man. I can understand that being pretty bloody for him. Do we go after this guy then, not to prolong Carrick's misery? I mean, he's a good copper and what the hell other leads do we have?'