A Fistful of Knuckles (20 page)

Princess snarled and slavered.

‘Well,’ said Sam, folding the towel neatly, just the way Patsy liked it, ‘seeing as I’m all freshened up …’ – he passed the towel to Patsy – ‘I take it we can declare our business satisfactorily concluded for the evening?’

‘Looks like it.’ Patsy refolded the towel. Sam’s folding just wasn’t up to snuff. ‘Now – if you don’t mind, I’ve had a busy day. I could do with a nice early night.’

Those words, and what they might entail for Tracy, brought a fierce burst of anger boiling through Sam’s veins. He clenched his teeth and did his best to act casual.

‘You’ve earned it,’ he said. ‘I’ll see that Spider gets the message about the fight. Where’d you want to do it? Back at the old factory?’

‘No. Here.’

‘At the fairground? It’s way too public.’

‘Four caravans, parked to make a square,’ said Patsy. ‘We’ve done it before. No one can see. All very cosy. Believe me.’

‘Very well then. We’ll do it here.’

‘Sunday night. We’re off Monday morning, movin’ on. So it’s gotta be Sunday. Eight o’clock.
Sharp
.’

‘I can’t guarantee that,’ said Sam. He could, of course, but it sounded more realistic to say otherwise. ‘If there’s a problem, I’ll get word to you. Otherwise – eight o’clock, Sunday.’

Patsy nodded curtly, then, without a word, lumbered past Sam and disappeared back inside the caravan. With care – daintily, even – he pulled the doors shut behind him.

Princess growled, telling Sam to clear off.

Sam glanced back at the caravan, its homely lights and neat net curtains so at odds with the violence and pain contained within. He silently repeated his promise to Tracy:
I’ll help you … I’ll save you … I promise …

Turning his back on the fearsome Rottweiler, Sam began to trudge across the boggy ground, the lights of the fair spinning and popping away to his left. He turned over in his mind images of Tracy appearing at Denzil’s flat … Denzil throwing back the bolts … Patsy bursting in … Tracy screaming
stop it, Patsy, please, please, don’t kill him! …
Patsy’s fists pounding Denzil to a pulp … and then those same murderous fists turning on Tracy.

Gene had better appreciate just how much progress I’ve made with this case tonight,
he thought.
Single-handed, too! Still, perhaps it was better he wasn’t around. He’d only have made trouble. Perhaps it was better I was on my own and …

He stopped dead in his tracks. He looked to his right. Then to his left. Then both left and right. Then he turned a full 360, like an anxious parent suddenly finding their child was missing.

From between a rumbling power generator and lopsided caravan, two ominous figures emerged from the shadows. Sam knew them at once. Moustache-man hooked his thumbs into his belt; Ponytail cracked his knuckles.

Sam squared up to them, dead macho, and said: ‘Me and Patsy are best mates now. That means you boys and me are all on the same side. So – if you’ll just give me my guv’nor back, we’ll be on our way.’

Ponytail exchanged a look with his equally bone-headed companion, then turned to Sam and said: ‘We ain’t got ‘im no more.’

‘What do you mean you haven’t got him? What the hell have you done with him?’

‘It’s not
my
fault he’s a pansy,’ Ponytail said. ‘If he can’t take a punch he shouldn’t’ve come steaming after us like that.’

Sam felt a cold shiver run down his spine. This all sounded horribly ominous.

‘What’s happened?’ he asked. ‘Hasn’t he woken up yet?’

Ponytail shrugged. Moustache-man lit a cigarette and said nothing. The only sound was the cacophony of the fairground filling the cold night air.

‘I won’t ask you bozos another time,’ Sam snapped. ‘I want my DCI and I want him now. Where is he?’

With the lighted tip of cigarette, Moustache-man indicated vaguely in a direction behind Sam. Turning, Sam saw the lights of a St John’s ambulance trundling across the open ground away from the fair.

‘We don’t want a dead copper on our hands,’ Ponytail said. ‘If he snuffs it, better it’s in the back of a wagon. Nuffing to do with us, that way.’

The cold shiver along Sam’s spine solidified into a column of ice.

Brain hemorrhage,
he thought.
Those two brainless hulks have smashed his skull like it was a glass vase! My God, they’ve killed him … They’ve bloody gone and killed him … They’ve killed Gene Hunt!

Sam turned and ran, racing across the churned-up ground in the direction of the clanging ambulance. He forgot Moustache-man and Ponytail, he forgot Patsy and Princess and the clamorous fairground – he even forgot Tracy and Annie and the boys at CID. All he could think of was the guv, lying there in the back of that meat wagon, the blood filling up inside his cracked skull, the life fading out of him.

As he ran through the night, he glimpsed the pale, wan face of the Test Card Girl as she stepped from the shadows, clutching a black helium balloon.

‘You’ll be so lost without him,’ she said gently.

But Sam just tore straight past her and kept on running.

It was gone ten o’clock when Sam at last tracked down Gene to an open ward that reeked of carbolic soap and floor polish. A prim, hatchet-faced nurse – who seemed also to reek of carbolic soap and floor polish – emerged from her station and blocked his way like it was Checkpoint Charlie. Sam’s police ID only made her primmer and more hatchet-faced, but eventually she relented and escorted Sam between the identical rows of beds, ssh-ing him if he stepped too noisily on the gleaming floor. As he tip-toed along in the nurse’s wake, Sam glanced at the faces in the beds that stared back at him; young men with heavy sideburns–middle-aged men with trimmed, bank manager-ish moustaches – elderly men with toothless mouths and sad white wisps scraped across their pates. Strangers every one of them, they sat sadly in their beds with their bowls of manky grapes and folded copies of
The Mirror,
looking for all the world like extras in
Carry On Doctor
.

And then he saw him – Gene Hunt, the guv’nor – propped up against a heap of starched pillows, his eyes closed, his face half black from bruising. His coat, clothes and patent leather loafers were neatly stacked in an open cupboard beside his bed, upon which stood a jug of water and a single plastic cup. The guv himself had been put into regulation NHS pyjamas with white and blue stripes that made him look unbearably frail and vulnerable. Sam felt his stomach lurch to see him like this, a fallen warrior, crushed and defeated, the fastest gun in the west outgunned – or worse, just another extra in
Carry On Doctor
. It was not the man he knew.

‘Guv …?’ Sam asked softly. But Gene did not respond. ‘Sister, how is he?’

The nurse checked the chart that hung on the foot of his bed.

‘Stable,’ she said without warmth or emotion. ‘I’m assuming you want some time with him?’

‘I know it’s out of hours but this is important.’

‘You can have five minutes.’

And with that, she was gone.

Sam edged closer to the bed.

‘Guv …? Are you …?’

‘
Wide
awake,’ Gene suddenly growled, and his eyelids snapped open. He fixed Sam with a hard stare. ‘Now pull that bloody curtain round, Tyler you twonk. There’s too many nosy parkers in this joint.’

The eyes of the whole ward were on them. Sam tugged at a set of orange curtains and sealed himself and Gene off from the public gaze. He was surprised at how much relief he was feeling – to have the guv back, glaring at him and mouthing off and treating him like shit. Normality had been restored. The world was back on its axis once again. The Gene Genie had not been reduced to a non-speaking extra in a bad sex farce.

‘Gene, you’ve had me worried this evening.’

Gene pulled an unimpressed face: ‘Got a smoke on you, Tyler? I’m gasping!’

‘I’ll pour you a glass of water.’

‘I need fags and booze, you womble, I can’t survive on that lukewarm piss-in-a-pot. Christ, who’d you think I am –
you
?’

‘This isn’t the Railway Arms, Guv. You’ve got to rest up and eat lots of grapes and be a very good boy for the next few days.’

‘I’m
always
a very a good boy, Tyler,
every
day. Top of the bleedin’ class, me.’

He was already starting to clamber out of bed – and as he did, he looked down at his striped jim-jams and grimaced.

‘Jackie H. Charlton! You’d think I had enough to put up with without
this
.’

He thrust a leg out from under his blankets.

‘Guv, what the hell are you doing?’

‘Discharging myself.’

‘Oh no you’re not,’ said Sam. ‘Gene, your face is right out here like a pumpkin. You’ve been unconscious for hours!’

‘I have
not
been unconscious for hours, Tyler, so you take that right back!’ Gene glowered at him, struggling to keep his voice down. ‘You take that
right
back, my son! I have been
mildly stunned. Very
mildly stunned. It’s on me chart so that’s official.’

Sam glanced at the chart, said: ‘I tell you what
is
on here, Guv. Your date of birth. Well, well, well …’

‘You look away, Tyler, that’s classified information.’

‘You should be looking after yourself at your age.’

‘That date’s wrong. I’m twenty-one and three quarters, give or take.’

He broke off, silenced by a sudden burst of nauseating pain exploding through his skull.

‘Take it easy, Guv,’ said Sam. ‘You’ve been in the wars tonight.’

‘Don’t talk to me like that, Tyler, next thing you’ll be calling me a brave little soldier.’

‘You got clobbered, guv. Properly clobbered. You were out for the count. I thought you were dying from a brain hemorrhage.’

‘I was playing possum, keeping my ears open. I was fully aware of what was happening at all times … except for when them nurses managed to slip these bloody pyjamas on me. If I’d caught them at it you’d seen some bloody fists flying then, believe me.’

He ripped off his striped top and reached for his nylon shirt – and then stopped. He swayed. He put one hand gingerly to his battered face.

‘Guv? What is it? Shall I get the nurse?’

Gene said nothing. For once, with an open goal to come straight back at Sam with a smart-arse comment, he said nothing. Instead, he sank back slowly against his mountain of pillows and sighed.

‘I’m not gonna be sick,’ he muttered, as much to himself as much as to Sam.

‘You sure, Guv? Shall a get a … a pot or whatever?’

‘I said I am
not
gonna be sick!’

Sam pulled the blankets back over him, tucking him in like Gene was a little boy.

‘You took a pasting tonight, Guv,’ said Sam, sitting beside him.

‘You’re telling me,’ muttered Gene, taking a few steady breaths. ‘I didn’t even see it coming. God, Tyler, it’s been a few years since a fella’s put me down like that.’

‘We’re none of us getting any younger.’

‘Speak for yourself. Eternal bloom of youth, that’s me. Twenty-one and three quar-
Jeee
sus …!’ He waited for the waves of pain in his head to subside. As Sam watched, Gene’s whole manner seemed to change. The fire went out of his eyes. His posture deflated. DCI Gene Hunt, the guv’nor, shrank down to just a battered, middle-aged man lying forlornly in a starched hospital bed.

‘You get some rest, Gene,’ said Sam. ‘Don’t worry, I’m taking care of everything.’

‘Taking care of what, Sam?’

‘The case. Remember? The Denzil Obi case.’

For a moment, Gene seemed not to comprehend. Then he caught Sam’s expression and hissed: ‘Don’t you look at me like that, Tyler, I do
not
have bloody amnesia!’

‘I’ve set up an illegal bare-knuckle fight. Spider against Patsy O’Riordan. I know you put the kibosh on that plan, Gene, but I had to think fast back there. I’m winning Patsy’s trust. I’m going to lure him on, let him incriminate himself, and then put him away for good.’

Gene said nothing. He had closed his eyes and was breathing deeply and slowly in an attempt to ameliorate the pain.

‘I’ve also found the connection between Patsy and Denzil,’ Sam went on. ‘It was Tracy. He used her as a sort of honey trap. That’s how he got into Denzil’s flat. The whole case is coming together, Guv – what matters is that we don’t lose track of Patsy, that he doesn’t go to ground and disappear. We need to keep him close and make him trust us. Now, I’ve persuaded him to fight Spider. I’ve led him to believe it’s all a stitch-up to pin the Obi killing on Spider, and …’

‘Tyler.’

‘Guv?’

‘Enough.’

Gene lay still, his eyes closed, silent but for his deep, regular breathing. Sam looked unhappily down at him, at his disfigured face with its grotesque purple bruise, and found he could stand it no more. He turned away, ducked through the curtains that surrounded the bed, and strode back along the ward, his boots tap-tap-tapping on the polished floor.

‘Ssh!’ hissed the staff nurse.

But this time, Sam just marched straight past her. He just wanted to get the hell out of that awful place.

Primitive-looking ambulances were congregated outside the hospital, their lights flickering and flashing as they set off through the night.

Sam found himself marching out into the darkness, his head spinning, feeling a deep need to just walk and walk. It had brought him no pleasure to see Gene lain low like that. There was no joke in it. It was a brutal, crashing reminder of the hard, violent world they were all struggling to survive in, where not even the mighty Hunt was invulnerable. Until tonight, Sam had not realized just how lost, how utterly bereft, he would feel without the guv. Gene drove him mad most days, infuriated him – at times appalled and repelled him – and yet, beneath all the prejudice and banter and bullshit there was a powerful strength, an innate decency, that he had come to rely on. He was the burning spirit at the heart of 1973. He
was
1973. The only thing that would crush Sam more than losing the guv’nor would be losing Annie.

Bang on cue, a small, round, pale face appeared, complete with a teardrop painted on each cheek. The Test Card Girl was standing motionless ahead of him, her hands clasped gently in front of her, a single black helium balloon bobbing in the air three feet above her head.