City of Dreadful Night (2 page)

‘This is a one-night-only offer, ladies and gentlemen,' Foster said. ‘We miss him tonight and he's gone. Any questions?'

Geoff ‘Harry' Potter, one of the more phlegmatic of the team, raised a hand.

‘If he's being sheltered by one of the families, he's unlikely to be alone.'

‘The intelligence we have indicates there's no link with any of the families. I'm confident it's one hundred per cent accurate. We've had the house under surveillance for the past two hours.'

Gilchrist shifted in her crouch to ease her legs. She'd been in the back garden about three minutes but it seemed ten times longer. She strained at the static in her ears, willing Charlie Foster's voice to come through.

She was vaguely aware of muffled music from the pub on the corner. It became louder when the pub doors opened and a raucous din spilled out.

‘We're going on a count of three,' Foster said quietly, his voice unexpectedly intimate inside her ear.

A car horn blared.

‘Damn!' The voice in her ear was strained. ‘All units: go!'

As Gilchrist hurled herself towards the rear of the house, the two officers stationed against the back wall swung the ram and hit the door just above the lock. The door flew open, splinters flying. The two men took up positions either side of the door.

Lights came on in the house. Her three colleagues with Heckler & Koch machine pistols went into the kitchen first. She scanned left to right as she came through the door. Unwashed crockery piled in the sink. Harsh fluorescent lighting set crookedly in the ceiling.

The passage was ahead, a turn, then the staircase. She was aware of the unit that had come through the front door pounding up the stairs.

Her unit fanned into the dining room. Prints of seaside landscapes in cheap frames on the walls.

They looked behind the door, under the table. Nobody.

Down the hall to the living room. Widescreen TV and DVD player in the corner. Magazines and redtop newspapers strewn on the sofa. Toffee wrappers and cigarette stubs overflowing an ashtray.

They looked behind the sofa and the single armchair. Nobody.

From upstairs she heard shouted commands. Then, the sharp crack of a gunshot. And another. Her three colleagues looked at each other. Ignored her. Jostled into the hall. Started up the stairs. More shots, too close together to say how many.

When Gilchrist moved to follow, the last one on the stairs waved her back. She remained in the living-room doorway, tilting her head to try to see up to the first floor. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a door under the staircase open.

None of them had spotted it when they'd come down the corridor. It opened towards her, obscuring her view of who was on the other side of it. She heard the sound of someone hoofing it towards the kitchen.

Gilchrist took two steps and barged the cupboard door closed. A skinny guy in white T-shirt, jeans and trainers headed through the kitchen to the open doorway. He was holding something away from his body in his left hand.

The thought that there was only supposed to be one person in the house flitted through her brain. Was this skinny man Grimes? If so, then what was the shooting upstairs about?

She aimed at the man's back.

‘Halt, armed police officer!' she called, relieved that her voice was steady and clear. ‘Drop your weapon and halt!'

The man kept moving. Adrenaline surged in her. She knew she couldn't – wouldn't – shoot him. If she did, she'd kill him. She'd been trained to take no chances, trained to aim for the biggest target with the most body mass. Don't try tricky leg, head or arm shots.

She'd been trained like that but even so she aimed at his left leg just above the knee. She aimed but she didn't fire. The man went through the doorway into the garden.

And almost immediately re-entered the kitchen, flung backwards, arms wide. He landed with a heavy thud flat on his back, blood spreading across his chest. As he hit the floor, whatever was in his left hand skidded away into the corner of the room.

Fuck. Gilchrist edged cautiously towards the prone man, nervous of presenting a target to the trigger-happy police marksman outside.

The man wasn't moving. Blood spread across the kitchen floor. Gilchrist swallowed. There was little doubt the man had died a split-second before he'd come flying back through the door.

She frowned when she realized she had stepped in his blood. Frowned again when she couldn't immediately see what had fallen from his hand anywhere on the floor.

Whatever it was, it could have slithered under one of the cupboards that lined the walls to her left. She was trying to puzzle out how to check without contaminating the crime scene or getting herself shot when she heard heavy boots clumping down the stairs.

Then, in her ear, intimate again despite its agitation, Foster's voice.

‘Stand down. Everybody stand down.'

Finch and two officers Gilchrist didn't recognize filled the passage. Finch was white-faced, his eyes panicked. The three men crowded into the kitchen. Finch looked at the body at Gilchrist's feet.

‘Shit, Gilchrist – you do that?'

His voice trembled. One of the men with him pushed forward. Gestured to her.

‘You're needed upstairs. We'll take care of this.'

Gilchrist bridled at his tone.

‘And you are?'

The man was about six inches taller than her and broad enough to fill up most of the kitchen doorway. He smiled, revealing two missing front teeth. It made him look like a big kid.

‘Just a messenger. You're needed upstairs.'

He stepped to one side, extending his hand in an invitation for her to go past. Finch was still gawping at the body on the floor. The second man was smirking at Gilchrist.

She pushed past them and headed for the first floor. There was a bedroom at the top of the stairs. Harry Potter was standing against the wall looking blankly along the landing.

Gilchrist edged past him. A second door was open to her right. A bathroom. The toilet faced the door. A man was sitting on it, hunched forward, his head over his bony knees, his trousers and a widening pool of blood eddying around his ankles.

Most of the policemen were crowded in the doorway of the front bedroom, looking in, guns dangling. She could hear a television blaring somewhere in the room.

She was tall enough to see over the shoulders of the two who were blocking her way. She saw the double bed, saw the man sitting up in it. He was bare-chested, tilted to one side. There was a spray of blood and other material on the wall behind him and a red jagged hole in the centre of his forehead. Someone hadn't been aiming at body mass.

The naked woman sitting dead beside him had no face left to speak of.

Gilchrist seemed to have a heightened sense of smell. The man and woman had been having sex, she could tell. But there was also the smell of cordite, sweat, blood and shit.

She could hear the heavy breathing of the policemen all around her. Ragged, snorting. Animal.

‘I was told I was needed upstairs,' she said to the first policeman to notice her presence. He looked at her coldly. Slowly, they all turned to her. She shivered.

‘Chief Superintendent Foster?' she said.

The first man she'd addressed tilted his head as if to get a better look at her. He frowned.

‘Outside.'

She went back down the stairs. She glanced down the corridor to the kitchen as if she could picture tomorrow's headline there, printed in large letters on the fridge. Neatly alliterative: Massacre in Milldean.

Finch and the other two policemen had gone. The body of the skinny man was still there. The pool of blood had spread wider across the floor, thick and syrupy, though other footprints had now joined her own. Finch and the others she assumed.

She walked to the door of the kitchen and, crouching, peered under the cupboards. She was thinking about what had fallen from the man's hand. But she could see nothing.

TWO

I
was at an official dinner in the banqueting room of the Royal Pavilion when the roof fell in on my career. My beeper vibrated in my belt just as Bernard Rafferty was beginning to grate.

Rafferty was the director of the Pavilion, a pompous little man who also wrote political biographies. I saw him all the time in Brighton – for though it might be a city, it is still a small town – but I also regularly encountered him in national radio and TV studios. We were both used as pundits, although his favourite topic of conversation was himself. Tonight he was launching a fund-raising initiative to turn a rundown part of the city near the station into a cultural quarter.

I was sitting at one of a number of round tables in the ornately decorated room. They were ordered around the long central table set for a Victorian banquet. A huge dragon chandelier hung over it from the canopied ceiling decorated with fantastic animals. Around the perimeter of the room were Spode blue lampstands and rosewood sideboards and the walls were hung with large canvases of Chinese domestic scenes. The room was an incredible confection. As was this gathering.

The top table was filled with local politicians and wealthy businessmen. Both the city's MPs were there with the Leader of the Council, Rupert Colley, sandwiched between them. All three looked to be texting on their phones. Winston Hart, the head of the Southern Police Authority, was gazing up at the ceiling.

I was hoping the Prince Regent had more fun when he stayed here than I'd ever had at these dinners. A young woman from the council's tourism department had been mildly flirting. She'd pressed her business card into my hand and insisted I call her if I ever wanted a private tour of the Pavilion. I'd enjoyed the attention but had not taken it seriously. I loved my wife, Molly, who was at home in the grip of another migraine.

Events like this were enough to induce migraine in anyone. Molly, however, was particularly unsuited to her role as company wife. She suffered from depression. It had come on after the birth of our second child, Tom, and had never really gone away.

Medication lifted her moods but, in common with many depressives, when her mood was lifted she chose not to take the medication, thus prompting a new bout of despair.

I whispered an excuse to the tourism officer and left the banqueting room unobtrusively, looking at the number on the beeper only when I was in the corridor.

My deputy, Philip Macklin. I frowned. I'm an obsessive by nature. I've always found it difficult to delegate. Once I made Chief Constable – the youngest in the country – I recognized that was neither practicable nor good management practice. I resolved that my management style would be as liberal as my policing policies – well, all but one of my policing policies.

Delegation was key, I knew, and because I was reluctant I overcompensated. I delegated too much. The difficulty I had with delegation was compounded in my deputy's case by the fact that I wasn't sure he was up to the job.

I speed-dialled him.

‘Philip, it's Bob.'

‘Sorry to disturb you, sir, but we have a major situation.' Macklin sounded panicked. No change there, then. ‘A dynamic entry by the tactical firearms unit. Home arrest. The information was sound . . . Seemed sound.'

‘Terrorists?'

‘No, sir.'

‘You were the gold commander?'

My force operated the standard gold/silver/bronze system of command and control for firearms operations and incidents. Gold commanders, who were at least chief inspectors or superintendents, could take responsibility for authorizing firearms issue for specific operations. They took strategic command with the help of a tactical adviser.

One of the things I intended to address was that we had far too many officers qualified to be gold commanders. There were around seventy, which meant that none of them got an opportunity to gain much experience of this most sensitive of duties.

For dynamic entry, the gold commander needed to be one of my four assistant chief constables. Macklin, as my deputy, was the most senior, though not the best.

‘I'm gold commander, yes, sir.'

‘Pre-planned or spontaneous?'

We divided firearms operations into those two categories.

‘It falls somewhere between the two. We had about two hours' notice.'

I could hear muffled applause in the banqueting room. Rafferty had finally stopped preening.

‘Any of our people hurt?'

‘None, sir.'

‘Good. What happened?'

‘Information was received from an impeccable source. A violent criminal, wanted for two shootings and suspicion of involvement in three others, was holed up in a house in Milldean before crossing to France tomorrow. He was known to be armed and dangerous.' Macklin cleared his throat. ‘I approved an operation to enter the premises forcibly and arrest him.'

‘And did we arrest him?'

‘No, sir.'

‘He resisted arrest?'

Macklin hesitated. I could hear his strained breathing on the other end of the phone. I felt my stomach knot.

‘Philip, just tell me what happened.'

Macklin reverted to formality.

‘Four people have been killed in a house in Milldean.'

‘Jesus Christ. What was this – the
Gunfight at the OK Corral
?' I looked around to see if anyone could overhear but the nearest security guard was a good thirty yards down the long corridor. ‘I take it he wasn't alone, then.'

Macklin was silent. My mind racing, I continued:

‘Kratos?'

There were regular rules for firearm incidents – officers should shoot to incapacitate suspects and aim at the upper body because it provided the largest target and offered the best chance of knocking out the central nervous system. Then there were Operation Kratos tactics.