A Fistful of Knuckles (27 page)

‘
Off
the camelhair, Tyler!’

‘We’ve got to get to Patsy’s caravan. Annie’s there. If Patsy turns up there … Jesus, Guv, let’s
go!
’

He clambered from the arena and began to run across the open ground, telling himself that Patsy had scarpered, that he’d clear off, disappear, that Annie was safe. Labouring through the soft, sticky mud, he became aware of Gene loping along beside him.

‘Tell me, Guv,’ he panted as they ran. ‘What the hell happened back there?’

‘What you
think
happened? Uncle Genie rode in with the cavalry.’

‘Cavalry? You mean naughty Stella and her dodgy boxers? Guv, you’re a DCI, you’ve got
proper
cavalry. We’ve got trained officers for this sort of thing.’

Gene snorted contemptuously as he jogged along: ‘I crawled straight from my sickbed to save your scrawny arse, Sam. I was pushed for time. You know how chuffin’ long it takes rustling up enough boys for a shout like this. You get ‘em together and they all start squabbling over the truncheons. You pile ‘em in the van and it don’t bloody start. Then when you
do
finally get there, half of ‘em turn out to be pink-bollocked pansies.’

‘So you swung by Stella’s Gym instead. That was crazy, Gene, even for you.’

‘Any port in a storm, Sammy-boy,’ Gene gasped back. All this running about was starting to take its toll on his nicotine-encrusted lungs. ‘Stella was most obliging.’

‘I’ll bet she was.’

‘Meaning?’

Sam didn’t have the breath or the inclination to answer. Whatever chemistry there was between Gene and Stella, he wanted no part of it. Spider’s life had been saved, Patsy’s mob of heavies had been neutralized, and Sam and Gene were now free to concentrate on nailing Patsy. That, when all said and done, would have to count as
a result
– at least in this particular case it would. With Sam at the helm, the operation had proceeded to go monumentally awry. He had to admit that Gene had indeed saved the day.

Struggling for breath, Sam asked: ‘How
did
you know to come here, Gene?’

‘Tip off.’

‘From who? It was Ray, wasn’t it! I bloody knew it. He wasn’t happy you being away, Guv – he was like a dog without its master.’

‘I
am
the master, Tyler, but you’re thinking of the wrong dog. It weren’t Ray. It were DI Bristols.’

‘Annie? It was
Annie
who spoke to you?!’

‘Discussion for another time, Sammy-baby,’ growled Gene, hawking up and gobbing out a huge pellet of discoloured phlegm.

Up ahead they could see the caravan. There were lights in the windows.

Panting and streaming with sweat, Sam and Gene lumbered up – and as they did, they were met with frenzied barking. Princess dashed at them, slobber frothing around her muzzle, her teeth bared and snapping, her eyes wild. She reached the limit of her chain and was brought to a sudden, clanking stop. Straining, she clawed at the ground and howled furiously. Sam noticed that the C-90 cassette was still dangling from her collar.

With Princess holding ground between them and the caravan, Sam and Gene hung back, keeping clear of the wild jaws.

‘Annie!’ Sam cried. ‘Annie, are you okay in there?!’

‘Nobody in there, you bastards …’

It was Patsy. He appeared like a huge, blank patch of darkness, stepping out from behind the caravan and standing by the post to which Princess’s chain was clamped. Blood flowed down his face. He wiped it away slowly with the back of hand.

‘You still standing?’ intoned Gene. ‘You’re like one of them elephants too thick to know when it’s dead.’

‘
I
don’t go down so easy,’ Patsy growled back.

Gene bristled. But Sam was in no mood for macho exchanges.

‘Patsy, it’s over,’ he said. ‘You’re nicked. No point running. And no point hurting anyone else.’

Patsy eyes glinted in the darkness.

He’s not complying,
Sam thought.
He’s going to fight it out to the bitter end.

‘You said there’s nobody in that caravan,’ he said. ‘Where’s Tracy? Patsy, where is she?’

‘She’s supposed to be ‘ere,’ Patsy breathed, his voice barely human now. He sounded like an ogre speaking from the shadows. ‘She’s supposed to be ‘
ERE
!’

Sam glanced about frantically.

Annie’s got more sense than to stay put here. She’s taken Tracy and cleared out. But where?

The fairground was flashing and roaring just beyond the parked trailers and caravans, brimming with the sound of people.

She’s gone where it’s crowded. Safer there. Easier to hide. More chance of help if Patsy turns up getting heavy.

Patsy bellowed wordlessly, the rage crackling about him like an electrical charge. He grabbed hold of the stake to which Princess was chain and wrenched it from the ground. As it became free, so did Princess.

‘Look out, Guv!’

The Rottweiler sprang, dragging the chain and post with it. As Sam dived away, Gene threw a punch at the hound, catching it on the jaw and cracking its head to the side. Princess yelped, landed awkwardly, and then scrambled back up, more furious than before.

‘Patsy, you bastard!’ Sam yelled, but Patsy was already loping away towards the lights of the fairground, towards Tracy – and Annie. ‘If you touch her …!
If you damn well touch her
!’

He lunged forward, meaning to run after Patsy, but all at once Princess was on him, sinking her teeth into his arm. Sam screamed and battered at the beast’s muzzle with his fist, wildly hollering
bastard, bastard!
as if it were Patsy himself he was fighting.

A white tasselled loafer – soiled, but operational – connected hard with Princess’s arse, but the pain and rage just made her clamp her jaws all the tighter. Sam clawed at her frothy snout, but it was solid and implacable as a sprung bear-trap.

‘Gene! It’s chewing my bloody arm off! Gene!’

The pain was extraordinary. Blood was starting to run down the leather of his jacket. It felt as if the dog’s fangs had pierced all the way down to the bone.

Gene loomed up out of nowhere. In his hands he held the post to which Princess was tethered. For a moment, Sam thought he would skewer the beast with the sharp end, transfixing it like it was a vampire – but instead, he thrust the point between Princess’s jaws, working it in like it was a crowbar, and then, in a single movement, wrenched that terrible muzzle open.

Sam felt the fangs sliding out of his flash and scrambled backwards, clutching his arm to staunch the blood. He saw Gene advancing, jabbing at Princess with the pointed end of the post like it was a spear. Snarling and snapping, the beast retreated, backing up the steps that led into the caravan. Here it chose to stand its ground, its hackles bristling, its muzzle frothing, surrounded by the spotless furniture and immaculately arranged knick-knacks of its master. Without warning, the hound sprang forward, but Gene booted the caravan doors shut straight in its face. He plunged the spiked-end of the metal stake into the ground and thrust the top of it against the door, wedging it firmly shut. Still chained to the stake, Princess went crazy, slavering and clawing to get out, muzzle appearing frantically at the edge of the door, but she was well and truly trapped.

Gene glared and said: ‘Sit. Stay.’ Then he turned to Sam and, without sympathy, growled: ‘If you’ve gone and lost a bloody arm, Tyler …’

‘I’m okay,’ grunted Sam, his teeth gritted against the pain. ‘Never felt better. Now let’s not waste any more bloody time!’

Together, they made off after Patsy O’Riordan, whilst behind them Patsy’s neat, prim little caravan rocked and howled.

Sam and Gene went blundering into the crowds milling around at the fair. Heaving and shoving, they fought their way between shooting ranges and candyfloss stalls and fun houses.

‘Where the hell is he?!’ hissed Sam, glaring about him.

‘Hey! Anyone seen a bastard?!’ Gene cried out.

‘Bald bastard?’ a kid in a woolly hat piped up, chomping on his toffee apple. ‘Looks like a monster?’

‘Aye, that’s him.’

‘Went that way, mate.’

Gene flicked him a fifty pence piece and launched off in the direction the lad was pointing. Sam shoved past him and took the lead.

They saw Annie. She was looking about anxiously. Then they saw Tracy, clinging tightly to Annie’s hand like a frightened child. They were standing together outside the ghost train; above them, a huge painted steam locomotive was tearing through a deserted station, ghosts and ghouls and living skeletons pouring from its funnel, scaring the crap out of the poor station master and sending him running for his life.

Sam called out to Annie, but she didn’t hear him. He roughly heaved a young family out of the way and struggled towards her.

Patsy’s bald and ink-stained head gleamed amid the crowd. With both arms he was cleaving his way through the punters at the fair, recklessly, making straight for the ghost train.

He’s after Tracy. And Annie too. He knows I set him up, that this whole thing was a sting – and all he can think of is revenge. He knows Tracy can testify against him, so he’ll rip her limb from limb. And when Annie tries to stop him, he’ll kill her too. He doesn’t care about consequences or repercussions. All he wants is to kill them. Kill them both!

Was it this that the Test Card Girl had been hinting at all along? Was this the moment she had forecast, the unhappy ending to the Sam and Annie story? Would the Devil in the Dark lay its murderous hands on her, and throttle her, before Sam got anywhere close enough to stop it? Was tonight about to become the worst, the most evil, the most tragic night of his life?

‘Gene!’ Sam cried. ‘Get to them! Get to Annie and Tracy before
it
does!’

He didn’t notice that he had referred to Patsy O’Riordan as
it.
In his exhaustion and pain and fear, he was thinking of that lumbering, painted monstrosity not as a man, but as the Devil in the Dark.

At that moment, there was a shriek and a commotion. Princess burst into the crowd, gnashing and snapping crazily left and right, froth flying from her wild muzzle. People screamed. The crowd rushed chaotically outwards in every direction, like waves radiating across violently disturbed water. Princess bounded about, insane in her fury, the chain clanking and clanging behind her, the stake she was tethered to gouging furrows in the mud.

A terrified surge of people threw Sam off balance and hurled him down into the mud. At the same time, it drove Gene backwards, slamming him against the wooden wall of an amusement arcade that bore the huge, lascivious face of an airbrushed babe in heart-shaped sunglasses. Sam struggled to right himself, but the panicking crowd buffeted and battered him.

And then, without warning, he glimpsed a flash of white between the running legs and flying mud. It was the glimmer of a patent leather stiletto. Above it swung a hem of fake fur, and a flash of leopard print.

Like a cheap and slaggy Angel of Mercy, Stella stood motionless and serene amid the confusion. Princess went raging past her, and as the beast bounded by, Stella crouched down and took hold of something. In the next moment, Sam saw Princess racing towards him, her jaws savaging the air, her eyes rolling insanely – and then, as if hit by a magic spell, the hound shot backwards, her paws lifted off the ground, and away she sailed into the night sky.

Stella smiled a slow, sly, lipsticked smile as she gazed up at her handiwork. She had wedged the post into one of the struts of the Ferris wheel. As the wheel went up, so did Princess, dangling from the chain around her neck that had suddenly tightened like a garrotte. Princess gave a wild, pitiful, strangled cry, twitched, then went limp. The C-90 cassette at her throat snapped under the pressure and the magnetic tape spooled away on the breeze, like the hound’s black soul leaving its body.

The crowd had formed a clearing, with Stella in the middle of it. She turned and observed Gene, her eyes glittering.

‘Set a bitch to catch a bitch,’ she observed.

‘Remind me to punch your lights out later for that, luv,’ said Gene, straightening his collar. ‘I owe you one.’

Stella’s cheeks flushed and her eyes glistened. She ran her tongue across her upper lip like she was licking off cream.

But Sam had no inclination – no inclination and no time – to witness this mating ritual. He was already racing towards the ghost train, hollering at Gene to move it, move it,
move his arse
.

Annie had pulled Tracy up the steps that led to the ghost train. The little carts were bumping and rolling along on the tracks, through the swing doors and into the ride. At the sight of Patsy, Annie yanked Tracy by the hand, dragging her between two of the carts and then through the swing doors. They vanished inside the ghost train.

Moments later, Patsy bounded up the steps, hurled two carts aside, and disappeared inside after them.

Now it was Sam and Gene’s turn. They raced up the steps, shoving the last few frightened punters aside, and made for the swing doors. The painted Mouth of Hell greeted them – and together, they barged through it into the pitch blackness beyond.

Sirens howled, klaxons blared. A flash of light revealed a mummy in ragged bandages. An axe swung. Spiders dangled from above. A coffin lid creaked open and, bathed in sickly green light, a rotting hand emerged.

‘Annie!’ Sam yelled.

‘Don’t be a prat, Tyler!’ Gene hissed in his ear. ‘She’s bloody hiding!’

In the eerie, ever changing lights of the ghost train, Sam saw him – saw
it
. Perhaps the pain from his mangled arm had clouded his brain; perhaps all this running and fighting and shouting had stressed him into a state of hallucination; perhaps he was mad … or perhaps he was seeing more clearly than he ever had before, seeing past the veils and illusions of daily life and glimpsing something deeper, something darker, some terrible vision of ultimate reality. Whatever the hell was happening, what he saw was not Patsy O’Riordan, but a man in a black Nehru suit.

At the sight of that familiar apparition, Sam’s heart froze. A sense of mindless panic threatened to overtake him and send him running crazily out of the ghost train and away through the fairground. The terror was irrational, instinctive, overpowering.