The Slaughter Man (22 page)

‘Maybe she loved him. Maybe she hated them. Look at the name of his other visitor.’

Another faded name.
S. Nawkins
, it said, the letters blurred by the years, although these entries were less frequent than for Carolyn Burns and then stopped completely a few years before he was released. I flipped through the yellowed pages.

‘The brother,’ I said.

‘Look again, Detective.’

S. Nawkins (Mrs)

‘Not the brother – the brother’s wife,’ Wren said. ‘Didn’t she die?’

I nodded.

‘Somebody burned her alive,’ I said.

Carolyn Burns stared at us through the metal grille, her face twisted with contempt. Her gaze drifted from Whitestone to Wren to me but she addressed Sergeant Sallis.

‘Not again,’ she told him. ‘I don’t have to talk to them if I don’t want to.’

‘It’s easier if you do, Carolyn,’ the big sergeant said mildly. ‘There are a few points they need to clear up.’

She stared at him, still thinking about it.

Whitestone stepped forward.

‘Miss Burns? DCI Whitestone. We know you were a regular visitor when Peter Nawkins was in Belmarsh.’

‘I know my rights.’

Less certain now.

‘As Senior Investigating Officer, I can designate you a significant witness in our investigation,’ Whitestone said. ‘If I do that, you’ll be compelled to provide a visually recorded interview. And if you lie to one my officers during a visually recorded interview, you will find that all your rights will not save you from more trouble than you can handle. So why don’t you open this gate and we can talk to each other like civilised human beings?’

Burns opened the gate and went back upstairs without waiting for us. Sergeant Sallis stood back, smiling pleasantly, as we filed inside.

The front door to the flat was open.

Carolyn Burns and her son were sitting on the sofa, waiting for us, the young man glancing uncertainly at his mother as she kept her eyes fixed on Whitestone. The flat still stank of cannabis and cat.

‘It must be tough for a country girl like you,’ Whitestone said, smiling for the first time. ‘Living in the city, I mean, after spending your childhood on a farm.’

Carolyn Burns laughed.

‘Is this the bit where you pretend you’re my best friend? You never met my father. You never met my brothers. Vicious bastards, the lot of them. It was growing up on the farm with them that was tough for me. Are we done bonding? Shall we get on with it?’

‘Fine,’ Whitestone said, taking an armchair opposite Burns and her son. ‘The bonding’s all done now. Why did you lie to DC Wolfe about visiting Nawkins in prison?’

Burns shrugged, no longer thrown by her lie.

‘No reason I should do your job for you,’ she said. ‘It’s all there in the records, right?’

‘So you didn’t hate Peter Nawkins?’ Wren said.

Burns looked at her. She snorted with contempt.

‘Why should I hate him?’

‘For what he did. For killing your family.’

‘Who says he ever killed anyone?’

‘The court. The jury. The judge. Are you suggesting he was wrongly convicted?’

‘I’m suggesting they don’t know him. They never knew him. Not like I do.’ She ran a shaking hand across her thin mouth. ‘Like I did,’ she said.

I drifted to the window and stared down at the street. The traffic was crawling down Tottenham High Road. A traffic warden was moving along the pavement as if in slow motion. I watched him write a ticket and slip it under the windscreen wipers of a Nissan Micra.

And I saw that the car had a wing mirror missing.

And as I kept staring down at the car while the traffic warden moved slowly away, I felt my next breath stick in my throat.

I remembered black-and-white CCTV footage of a man having his face repeatedly bounced off the side of a car on a garage forecourt, his head banging against the car so hard that in the end the man was unconscious and a wing mirror lay smashed beside him, the broken glass glinting in the lights of the garage forecourt.

And I saw the Nissan Micra with the wing mirror missing.

And I knew we had to get out of this place.

Now.

I turned to look at the room.

Carolyn Burns and Eddie on the sofa and Whitestone opposite them, so close in the tiny flat their knees were almost touching, with Wren perched on the edge of the armchair.

Sergeant Sallis stood to one side, smiling benignly, as if goodwill on all sides would get us through any unpleasantness.

He looked at me and smiled, nodding briefly, and I looked desperately at the closed doors behind him.

All three were closed. Two bedrooms and a bathroom.

Carolyn Burns and her son were looking at me.

‘Boss,’ I said. ‘We should do this at West End Central.
Now
.’

Carolyn Burns stood up, her arms stiff with tension by her side. She seemed to be having trouble breathing too. There was suddenly less air in the little flat.

‘Mum?’ her son said.

I heard a sound in one of the rooms and then the door opened and Peter Nawkins came out with a twelve-bore shotgun in his hands.

Somebody screamed and Wren was on her feet but Whitestone did not have time to get out of the chair and if I moved I wasn’t aware of it as Nawkins pulled the stock tight against his shoulder and pointed the shotgun at the head of Sergeant Sallis and pulled the trigger.

It was like a bomb exploded in the tiny room, the sound so loud that when it was over I heard nothing at all, just the aftershock of that single shot ringing somewhere behind my eardrums.

Sergeant Sallis was on the ground.

I looked down at him, fully expecting to see half of his head a smashed and bloody pulp, brains and hair and bone sprayed all over the cheap wallpaper behind him.

But Sergeant Sallis was staring at me with his mouth open. Blinking with confusion. Alive.

Behind him there was a hole in the wall the size of a fist.

Nawkins had missed. But how had he missed?

Sound came back. But not my hearing. Not fully. The deafening shot in that confined space made everything sound as though it was coming from underwater.

Mouths were moving. People were screaming. I staggered forward, my balance gone with my hearing. With a stricken look on his face. Peter Nawkins was staring at the uniformed policemen sitting on the floor.

The shotgun was still pressed hard against his shoulder.

Only seconds had passed.

I looked at Sergeant Sallis again, struggling to understand how he was alive, then I took a step towards Nawkins on legs made of water.

He turned towards me, as if noticing me for the first time and I watched him as he aimed the double-barrelled shotgun at my chest, a good place to aim because there was less chance of missing the target.

Everything froze.

I stopped, staring at the business end of the shotgun, aware of a boy cursing, the noise somehow penetrating the deafness. Wren and Whitestone were on their feet, staring at Sergeant Sallis sitting on the ground, dumbfounded that he had survived being shot at point-blank range. Nothing made any sense.

My legs moved. My fists clenched. A short left hook, I thought. Break his jaw. One chance. Don’t miss.

But I stopped as Nawkins took half a step back, lifting the stock of the shotgun to his shoulder again, the barrel levelled at my eyes now, as if he couldn’t decide the best place to shoot me.

We stared at each other. Nothing was moving. Everybody was screaming. My ears hurt. Then he jerked the shotgun away with his right hand and swung it at my face, the old wooden stock connecting high on my left cheekbone.

It was like being hit with a hammer.

I went down and stayed down, dizzy and sick, waiting for the sound of the second shot.

I lay there waiting and still it never came.

All I heard were screams and tears and cries for help.

All I heard was a front door crash open.

All I heard was the sound of a man running when there was nowhere left to run.

I got up off my knees, slowed down by sickness more than pain, that deep and debilitating nausea that comes from being struck in the face, very hard.

I wanted to sleep, or at least to slip into the blackness, but I leaned against a chair, staring down at Sergeant Sallis.

He was still sitting on the floor, his face paralysed with shock. There was still a black hole the size of a fist in the wall behind him. And he still wasn’t dead.

‘You’re OK,’ I told him, as I struggled to stop myself from falling.

He blinked at me. ‘I can’t hear you,’ he said. ‘I see your mouth move, but – nothing.’

I got down on my knees and placed my hands on his arms. Everywhere there should have been the stink of blood and ruin. It felt like a miracle that he was suffering from nothing worse than shock. But I knew that there were no miracles.

‘What happened?’ Sergeant Sallis said.

‘He missed,’ I said.

‘What? Missed? How could he miss?’

‘Because he had no reason to kill you.’

I got back up. Getting up was easier this time.

Carolyn Burns and Eddie were standing inches away from me, pointing at the hole in the wall and screaming at each other. My hearing was coming back but I could not register one word of it.

I looked around the small room. There was nobody else here. Then I heard Whitestone and Wren shouting down on the street. I patted Sergeant Sallis on the back of his head, just to let him know he was still breathing, and I stumbled from the flat.

Through the metal grille of the open gate I saw Whitestone and Wren inexplicably getting into the back of a response car, as if it had been waiting for them. But then I saw the two young uniforms in the front, both women, eyes wide with alarm, and I knew they must have flagged it down.

It pulled away with a shriek of burning rubber, the back door still open, Whitestone shouting instructions as the blues and twos came on, the lights and sirens swirling and screaming.

I stood on the pavement cursing. I could feel my cheekbone swelling to the size of a boiled egg.

Then I saw Peter Nawkins.

He was jogging down the pavement, maybe one hundred yards away, heading south towards Tottenham Hale, nothing but gridlocked traffic between him and the response car, looking back at the sound of the sirens.

I could not see the weapon.

Then suddenly it was in his hands.

There were motorbikes and cyclists edging their way through the stalled traffic and Nawkins stepped into the middle of them and pointed the shotgun at a motorbike messenger.

The biker bumped onto the pavement and tore away, his bike flying up onto the back wheel. Nawkins tried again.

Still standing among the traffic, terrified faces at the windows, pointing his shotgun at the next biker. And this time the biker raised his hands and fell backwards from his bike. Nawkins got on the bike, glanced back once and took off, turning into the one-way system that feeds in and out of Tottenham. I heard the horns and curses and I knew that he was going the opposite way to everyone else.

The stagnant traffic on the High Road was getting out of the way of the response vehicle, pulling onto the pavement, crashing into each other with the soft crunch of metal, and I saw Edie Wren leaning out the window, trying to get a fix on Nawkins.

She ducked back inside and they picked up speed as they went after him, following the bike into the one-way system, against the tide of the traffic.

And I began to run.

They soon lost me.

And the traffic that parted for the blues and twos had continued on its journey by the time I ran into the Tottenham Hale Gyratory. I ran between the oncoming cars, the curses and horns and faces twisted with rage, the traffic always faster here, the drivers swerving to get out of my way, the palm of my hand touching the cold metal as I ran on, my body tensed, waiting the crunch of steel and glass and rubber into flesh and blood and bone.

It didn’t happen. Not to me.

Instead I stopped when I came upon the crashed response vehicle, its front crumpled against the metal pole of a speed camera, the pole bent at a sickening angle and resting across the smashed glass of the windscreen.

Whitestone was still in the back seat, holding her forehead. Wren was standing by the wrecked car, apparently unharmed but dazed, her phone in her hands. And beyond the inflated air bags in the front of the vehicle I could see the bruised and scuffed faces of the two young uniforms.

‘Max!’ Wren shouted. ‘He’s heading for the reservoir!’

I went off after him.

Nawkins had had his own crash. The stolen motorbike was bent and mangled under the front wheels of a large lorry. Nawkins had not done a lot of damage to the lorry but the driver was standing on the road, bent double as he vomited.

The traffic had ground to a halt here, other vehicles concertinaed into each other, drivers getting out, voices shouting, fingers pointing, and I saw the great expanse of the Walthamstow reservoir system off to my left, ten interlinked reservoirs that go on for miles.

I climbed the fence and dropped inside. The reservoirs looked like a sea, dead calm, and the city seemed to slip away. It was curiously still and silent in here, the roar of Tottenham’s chaos coming from another planet.

Then I saw two men running towards me, awkward in their Wellington boots. Two fishermen, their rods abandoned by a pair of green tents.

‘Over there!’ they said, pointing towards a rough clump of bushes fifty yards away. ‘He’s got a fucking shotgun!’

They didn’t stop running.

I heard sirens. More sirens. And when I looked back there were response vehicles everywhere. I wondered if CO19 were here yet, Scotland Yard’s specialist firearms unit, and then I saw them – the big BMW X5s, the Armed Response Vehicles of CO19, and the black gleam of the weapons, the HK G3ks of the snipers and the MP5 sub-machine guns. There are around 550 Specialist Firearms Officers in CO19 and it looked like every last one of them was here.

I hesitated, looking back at them as they took up their positions, wondering how far these reservoirs stretched and if CO19 had all the exits covered, and most of all wondering if I should keep after Nawkins or bail out now. And then there was no choice to make because Peter Nawkins came out the bushes, still holding his shotgun.