A Fistful of Knuckles (21 page)

Sam stopped.

‘You heard me thinking about Annie,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you.’

He stared at the girl, and she – smiling ever so slightly – stared back. On their right, the lights of the hospital burned brightly in the deep dark of the night; far away to their left, barely visible but most certainly there, the coloured lights of the fairground whirled and span and flashed; in the dark space between the two stood Sam and the girl, face to face.

‘You saw the horrid man,’ the Test Card Girl said softly.

‘My guv’nor’s not so horrid,’ Sam replied.

‘No, not him, Sam.
Him.
The other man. The painted man.’

‘Patsy O’Riordan? Yes, I saw him. And I’ve seen him before. In nightmares. Haven’t I.’

The Girl nodded, said: ‘And he’s seen you. He watches you.’

‘Not here he doesn’t.’

‘Oh yes he does. He watches from the dark. And it’s dark now … dark all around …’

Sam felt his stomach tighten as if in anticipation of a blow. He silently cursed this ghastly, wan-faced creature for always stepping from the shadows and spooking the hell out of him – but for once, he decided to keep her talking. She had something to say, and this time he was resolved to hear it in full.

‘I’ve seen Patsy in dreams,’ he said. ‘I thought it was some sort of devil. Now I know it was just a bunch of tattoos. Nothing but a painted devil.’

‘And it is the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil,’ smirked the girl. ‘So now you’re not frightened? Now you think that devil in the dark was just a horrid fat man who lives at the fair? Is that what you’re thinking, Sam?’

‘Of course. And you won’t change my mind on that. There’s nothing in the dark out there. The only demons are
in here.
’ And he tapped the side of his head. ‘Don’t bother trying to scare me anymore. I know that’s all you’re doing.’

‘But no no no it’s
not,
’ the girl said in a childish, whining voice. ‘Sam, I’m trying to
help
you. Don’t shake your head, it’s true. I want to save you the pain.’

‘What pain?’

‘That devil in the dark … it’s out there, Sam … it really is. And it’s getting closer. All the time, closer and closer.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Sam felt a strong urge to start walking, to push past that revolting little brat and march away into the night – but for some reason, his legs wouldn’t obey him.

The Test Card Girl tilted her head to the side, looking quizzically at him, and said: ‘Have a think, Sam. There’s you … and Annie … and that thing in the darkness … Have a think about it. Like a proper policeman. Have a think about the
clues –
see if you can make them make sense …’

An ambulance roared by, its lights raking the pavement as it went, and in that suddenly dazzling moment the Test Card Girl was gone. Sam glanced upwards and saw a jet black balloon sailing away into the jet black sky – until, seconds later, that too vanished.

The devil in the dark.

Sam strode through the city, his head down, his face set. He passed beneath the orange glow of one sodium street light after another, oblivious to them as he was oblivious to everything else except his own thoughts.

Patsy O’Riordan is the devil-thing that I saw in my nightmares. God knows how and why I had premonitions about him, but I did. And it means something. Something important.

His feet guided him – across a silent road, down a gloomy back alley, behind a row of shut-up shops.

There’s a threat against Annie. That little brat with the balloon keeps on and on telling me that. There’s a threat against Annie, and it’s going to reach her through
me.
So … what do I do? How do I identify that threat? And how do I stop it?

A cat hissed and darted under a parked car. From behind a boarded-up fence a dog barked.

Whatever is it, this ‘devil’ is just a front. A mask. It represents something dangerous, something very real, but it presents itself in a disguise. It hides behind the mask of a monster to frighten me … to frighten me like I’m just some little kid. Well that ain’t gonna work, buster.

‘I don’t scare so easily, you creep!’ he said out loud into the darkness. Then he sank back into his thoughts once again.

Whatever the danger is, it’s somehow realized in the form of Patsy O’Riordan. Why else would I dream of him, see his ghastly tattoos grinning at me out of the darkness? I don’t understand what, or how, or why, but it’s Patsy that’s the threat. It’s Patsy that’s the devil in the dark. It’s Patsy that needs to be put away – forever.

Sam felt his heart quicken at the thought. If the Test Card Girl’s threats and insinuations had any truth to them, they found their embodiment in the brutish, ugly, dehumanized form of Patsy O’Riordan. Strange and unfathomable as these threats might be, they at least now had a face. A face, and a name.

A face, a name, and a body made of flesh and blood. A man. Just a man. Not a monster, not a devil.

He had seen tonight that even a goliath like Gene Hunt could be brought low. Just as the Test Card Girl had intimated, there was a clue there – a clue for Sam …

‘All men are mortal,’ he told the night. ‘That goes for me, Gene, and even Patsy O’Riordan. And what’s mortal can be defeated. Destroyed. What’s mortal can be brought
down.
And that goes for me … Gene … and even Patsy O’Riordan.’

Quite suddenly, Sam found he had reached the entrance to his flat. He stopped, looked up and down the quiet, deserted street. The Test Card Girl did not smile at him from the shadows. A devil did not leer at him from the darkness.

‘You’re going down, O’Riordan,’ Sam vowed. ‘You’re going
down
.’

There was half a bottle of whisky in his flat. Sam finished it off that night with a toast to Gene’s health, another to his future with Annie, and a third to the destruction of whatever it was out there in the blackness that wished to do them such terrible harm.

That night, he dreamt of nothing.

Sam stepped up to the frosted glass doors of Gene’s office, went to push them open, then paused.

He’s not on the other side of those doors. Just go straight in.

It didn’t seem right, barging in without knocking. Although, in his head, he knew he’d find nothing but an empty desk, an empty chair, a few empty bottles of scotch, his heart still braced itself for a relentless Gene Hunt earful.

‘Make a habit of bursting in on a lady when she’s about to do her ablutions do you, Tyler? That might be how they carry on in Hyde, but in
my
manor you treat your guv’nor like you treat your old chap – with respect, consideration, a mind for his privacy. Comprendezvous?’

Sam pushed through the doors.

Gary Cooper stared grimly from the poster for
High Noon.
Three darts with cross of St George flights jutted from the bullseye of the battered dartboard. An array of trophies and engraved pewter trinkets gleamed dimly from the top of a rickety filing cabinet. An opened packet of fags lay invitingly on the desktop, and the stale smell of panatellas hung in the air.

The familiar props that Gene surrounded himself with now looked unbearably forlorn, like the pipe and the slippers and the half-finished book Sam remembered seeing the day his grandfather died.

‘The old bugger’s not dead yet,’ Sam said out loud. But even so, he found it painful to look at Gene’s empty chair, its backrest and seat molded to the contours of the guv’s now absent torso and arse.

The doors clattered open, making Sam jump, and there stood Ray, chewing his gum and appraising Sam coldly with his pale blue eyes.

‘Measurin’ up?’ he asked curtly.

‘Ray, what are you talking about?’

‘Working out your new colour scheme for when you move in? What’ll it be – pooftah pink? Or back-stabbing yellow?’

‘Don’t be an idiot,’ Sam countered. He grabbed a file from Gene’s desk. ‘I only came in here to get this.’

‘Oh aye?’

‘Yes, aye. This is the guv’nor’s office and it’s
staying
the guv’nor’s office, so don’t you go round this department spreading rumours that I’ve got ambitions. You hear me?’

Ray shrugged: ‘I can’t stop the rumours.’

‘Well, don’t add to them.’

‘There’s plenty flyin’ about already.’

‘Oh yes?’ said Sam, planting himself firmly in front of Ray. ‘Thrill me.’

‘They’re saying he won’t be coming back.’

‘And who’s
they
?’

‘Who’d you think? Folk.’

‘And you listen to what ‘folk’ have to say? Coz these are the same ‘folk’ who’ll tell you that black people have a natural sense of rhythm, and cheese gives you nightmares, and the Americans are doing autopsies on aliens out at Roswell. Grow up, Ray. The guv’s on sick leave, he’s not been pensioned off and he’s not in the morgue.’

‘
I
know that,’ said Ray. ‘Just so long as
you
remember that too. Boss.’

‘For God’s sake. I came in to get the file on Denzil Obi. We’ve got a murder investigation in full swing, guv or no guv – and CID don’t grind to a halt just because Gene’s laid up with a bandage round his head.’

Clutching the file, Sam pushed past Ray – but Ray blocked him. They glared at each other, nose to nose, eyeball to eyeball.

‘Loyalty,’ Ray intoned, under his breath. Sam tried to shoulder past him but Ray wouldn’t budge. ‘Loyalty before ambition.’

‘What do you take me for?’

‘Do you really want me to say it? Eh?
Boss
?’

Indignant, offended, Sam shoved Ray hard enough to send him falling backwards through the swing doors. All eyes in CID were instantly on them as Ray stumbled against a desk, spilling a full ashtray onto the floor. In the next moment, Ray was coming back at him, throwing a punch. Sam ducked it and drove his fist into Ray’s stomach, angling the blow upwards into the underside of his ribcage. It was enough to knock the breath clear out of him. Ray doubled up, gasping, helpless, a sitting duck for a fist in the face or a boot right up his jacksie. Sam felt his blood hot in his veins, his temper boiling within him. He clenched his fist … then relaxed it.

Step back,
he thought.
Step back from the brink.

He looked up at Chris’s worried face peering at him from behind a mountain of piled papers, and Annie staring shocked and wide-eyed from behind her typewriter. It was only then that he realized that his face was pulled into a snarl, and he was breathing hard through his nose like a baited bull.

Who do I look like, I wonder …
he thought.

Without a word, he offered his hand to Ray. Red-faced and still struggling to breathe, Ray glared up at him.

‘Shake my hand, Ray.’

Ray made no move. Did he see Sam self-consciously mirroring the guv’nor’s behaviour? The argie-bargie, the shove through the doors, the blow to the guts – it was all such classic Gene Hunt. Would all this just strengthen his conviction that Sam was trying to step into the guv’s off-white tasseled loafers?

‘All I want is to keep the Obi case on track in Gene’s absence,’ Sam said. ‘Let’s fight the bad guys, eh, Ray? Not each other.’

Reluctantly, Ray took Sam’s hand and grasped it.

‘You okay, Ray?’

‘… I’m okay, Boss.’

‘Good man.’

‘Little boys,’ Annie muttered to herself, shaking her head.

‘Can I have everyone’s attention, please,’ said Sam, addressing the team.

‘You’ve already got it, Boss,’ put in Chris, still looking nervous. He edged round from behind his desk and shuffled anxiously towards Sam, ready to run at the first sign of trouble. Ray heaved himself painfully into a wheelie chair, and Annie perched herself on the corner of a desk.

Sam looked round at them, very seriously, and held up the Denzil Obi file. ‘As you all know, the guv’s out of action for a few days. So, until he’s back in the saddle, I’m assuming temporary –
temporary,
Ray – responsibility for the Obi case. We’re at a crucial point. We can’t afford to be delayed by being a man down – even if that man
is
the guv.’

‘It feels like the guv’s still here, they way you’re carrying on, Boss,’ piped up Chris.

‘Leave it, Chris,’ Ray wheezed. He looked hard at Sam, then seemed to soften. ‘Every ship needs a skipper.’

‘And every skipper needs a deputy,’ added Sam. ‘Which is what I am. A stop-gap. A caretaker in the guv’s absence. So let’s have no more of this rubbish about me gunning for the top job and get back to nicking villains, okay?’

Ray, Chris and Annie answered as one: ‘Yes, Boss.’

‘Right. Now, as you know, we’re looking after Spider down in the cells. His life’s in danger, and that’s the safest place for him. But we’re not a hotel, and the poor bugger can’t stay there indefinitely. So, he’s agreed to act as bait to lure Patsy O’Riordan into a trap. I’ve set up a fight between them – a bare-knuckle fight, a nasty one, a grudge match between the two of them to settle their feud once and for all. They both want the other one dead, and we’re going to use that to our advantage.’

‘I don’t see how this fight is going to incriminate O’Riordan,’ said Annie. ‘It still doesn’t prove a link between him and Denzil.’

‘You’re right,’ said Sam. ‘The fight itself won’t prove anything at all. But how we use that fight could nail this case once and for all.’

Everybody seemed to be paying him attention. Even Ray.

Excellent. They’ve got their minds back on the job, not on Gene, not on me and Ray coming to blows. They’re concentrating … and they’re accepting me as the guv’nor, at least for the time being.

‘The fight is nothing but a means to an end, a distraction,’ Sam explained. ‘It gets me close to Patsy, and the closer I get to him, the more likely he is to talk. Now, if I’m wearing a wire, we can record everything he says. The man’s got a certain degree of cunning, but he’s not Magnus Magnusson. If I get him talking – and I play it right – I’ll get him to say something to incriminate himself. It might just be a tiny detail, something he lets slip without even realizing it. If he thinks he’s getting his chance to get his revenge on Spider, he’ll be pumped and excited … just the frame of mind where I’ll be able to nudge him into a boast or a threat or
something
that betrays his guilt.