A Fistful of Knuckles (9 page)

I’ll never let you end up like that girl, Annie. Nobody will lay a finger on you. I’ll die first. If that’s what it takes, I’ll die to save you.

CID, A-division. The strip lights were glaring, and the air was already thick with the heady aroma of Embassy No. 6 and
Brut.

Gene Hunt had marshalled his troops. Chewing on a slim panatella, he planted himself squarely in front of Sam and Annie, Chris and Ray, appraising them sceptically with narrowed eyes. He carefully removed the cigar from his lips, shamelessly adjusted the lay of his testicles, and began to speak.

‘Right, playmates. The case of the Black Widow appears, at last, to be making progress. Thanks to the razor-sharp intellect of Sam Tyler we have a lead!’

‘Actually, Guv,’ put in Sam, ‘it was something Annie said that suggested the-’

‘Patsy O’Riordan,’ said Gene, cutting across him. ‘That’s our suspect. The delightful and fragrant Stella from
Stella’s Gym
mentioned his name in passing, and it seems that he’s currently on our books for knocking the living daylights out of his bird. He’s a boxer – just like Denzil. He’s involved in the world of illegal bare knuckle fights – just like Denzil. He works for Barnard’s Fairground – which, by a staggering coincidence, rolled into town two days before Denzil Obi got fatally thwacked. There’s a strong possibility that he is a character from Denzil’s past with a score to settle. So, summing it all up – we have a victim, a possible suspect, a hint of a motive, and the beginnings of a case. Put ‘em all together and what do you get?’

Silence. Gene scowled.

‘
Policework
! That’s what you get!’ he barked, gusting cigar smoke from his nostrils. ‘I know it’s first thing in the morning but we can at least
pretend
to be awake, can’t we?’

As one, his team replied: ‘Yes, Guv.’

‘Yes, Guv,’ Gene echoed back to them. ‘Right then. Policework. Let’s start fitting all the bits and pieces together until they make some sort of sense, shall we? Let’s get the ball rolling with something we know for sure: Denzil Obi was punched to death by a single assailant – an assailant with unusually small fists.’

‘No bigger than this!’ put in Chris, proudly holding up his finger to demonstrate.

‘No bigger than that,’ continued Gene. ‘Three inches across the knuckles. We know this from the wounds on Obi’s body. If we can match the size of Patsy O’Riordan’s fists to the size of them wounds, we’re a big step closer to establishing him as the killer.’

‘More than a big step, I reckon,’ said Ray. ‘We’d have him by the short ‘n’ curlies.’

Sam shook his head. ‘Not necessarily. Matching the size of O’Riordan’s hands to the wounds on Denzil Obi’s body is a good link, but it’s not something we can guarantee will stand up in court. There’s lawyers who’ll blow evidence like that out of the water.’

‘Balls to the lawyers!’ scoffed Ray.

‘No, Ray, not
balls to the lawyers,
’ Sam protested. ‘It’s going into court with an attitude like that that leads to cases falling apart. We need a solid motive, we need as much hard evidence as we can get, we need witness statements, we need …’

Ray was making yackety-yack gestures with his hand.

Sam hardened his voice: ‘Ray, this isn’t the bloody playground. We’re police officers. And a man is
dead.
If we want to nail Obi’s killer, we need to play this by the book, build up a real case, cover all our bases.’

‘Hate to say it but Tyler’s right,’ said Gene. ‘We’ve all seen cases chucked out on a poxy technicality. It’s not a nice feeling. And I want a nice feeling, you hear what I’m saying? I want that nice, warm feeling in the pit of my bollocks that comes with a rock solid conviction and a right brutal bastard going away for life. And
this
is why.’

He held up the photograph from Annie’s file that showed Tracy Porter’s battered face. Chris winced. Ray slowly shook his head in disgust.

‘That’s how he treats his missus,’ said Gene. ‘
She’s
too frightened to speak up – so we’ll be speaking up on her behalf. We’re going to nail this he-man – we’re going to nail him right to the flamin’ wall. We are going to put a case together tighter than a tadpole’s fanny.’

‘Right behind you in this, Guv,’ said Chris.

Ray glanced at Sam, then at Gene, and at last said: ‘Me too, Guv.’

‘One big ‘appy family, then,’ intoned Gene. ‘Right. First up, we need to pin down O’Riordan’s location.’

‘That’s not too difficult,’ said Annie. ‘He’s at Terry Barnard’s Fairground. The fair won’t move on until after the weekend.’

‘Okay, so he’s at the fair – but
where
at the fair?’ said Gene. ‘Selling tickets? Driving the ghost train? Cleaning the puke out of the waltzers? We need to track him down, so tonight we’ll go out there and find him. And once we’ve found him, we’ll get a good look at his fists to make sure they fit.’

‘Get a look at his fists?’ asked Chris. ‘How?’

‘I don’t give a penguin’s frozen pecker
how,
Christopher – be creative – use your bloody initiative – just find a way of making damn sure that his fists ain’t no bigger than three inches, understand?’

‘No, Guv, I don’t,’ Chris frowned. ‘Why don’t we just pull Patsy in and measure his fists here at the station?’

‘Because Patsy O’Riordan is a gyppo,’ Gene said, leaning forward and spelling it out for him. ‘A Pikey. A rambling ne’er-do-well.’

‘What the guv’s saying is he’s a traveller, Chris,’ clarified Sam, but nobody was listening.

‘If Patsy gets wind we’re looking to collar him, he’s free to disappear back into the wild blue yonder,’ Gene went on. ‘So I don’t want him nicked, collared, or so much as spooked until we’ve got evidence enough to charge him. Do you understand
now,
Christopher?’

‘Yes, Guv.’

‘Super-duper. We all understand what we’ve got to do then? Locate the suspect, establish a link to the victim, and bit by bit put together a case so watertight Ironside would shit his chair trying to contest it.’

‘How are we going to do that, Guv?’ asked Sam. ‘How are we going to shore up this case? Any ideas?’

Gene raised himself to his full height, exhaled a plume of panatella smoke, and narrowed his eyes: ‘I’ve
always
got ideas, Samuel.’

‘Such as?’

‘Though the wheels of the Gene Jeanie might grind slowly they grind exceeding chuffin’ small.’

After a bemused pause, Ray said: ‘Do what, Guv?’

‘I think that was the guv’s way of saying he’s working on it,’ said Sam. ‘First things first, then. Let’s identify and locate Patsy O’Riordan and see if we can somehow get a chance to measure his fists. Should be interesting.’

‘If this O’Riordan feller works at the fair,’ piped up Chris, ‘then does that mean we all get to go? You know, to the fair and that?’

‘It does indeed, Chris,’ said Gene.

Chris’s face lit up.

Gene went on: ‘When it gets dark, we’ll mingle with the regular punters. Keep a low profile. Act natural. Don’t draw attention to yourselves.’

‘Guv,’ Chris asked eagerly, ‘can we, like, go on the rides and that? I mean, you know, to look natural.’

‘You can take a slash in the hall of bleedin’ mirrors for all I care, Christopher, just as long as we pin down O’Riordan and get a the measure of his fists.’

Gene slammed down the photograph of Tracy Porter’s lumpen, brutalized face. Next to it, he slapped a forensic photo of what remained of Denzil Obi.

‘Keep these images in mind,’ he growled. ‘
That’s
what we’re doing this for.
That’s
what this case is all about. We’re putting a stop to
this.
’

Everybody looked silently at the ghastly photographs – even Chris, who was getting desperately excited at the prospect of going to the fair.

‘We know the victims, Guv, but what about O’Riordan himself?’ said Ray. ‘How will we recognize him? What’s he look like?’

‘Therein lies the fun and games,’ said Gene. ‘We don’t have a picture or even a description, so we’ll have to use our innate animal cunning to track him down. That’s what we get paid our pennies for. One way or another, he’ll be around that fairground, and that means, gentlemen and lady,
we – will – find him.
Understood?’

‘Yes, Guv.’

‘I didn’t catch that.’

‘
Yes, Guv!
’

‘Splendid! Right then. I’ll see you all tonight at Terry Barnard’s. Dress warmly. Treat yourselves to a toffee apple. And don’t buy the donuts – I’ve seen how they make the holes.’

It was night, and Terry Barnard’s Fairground appeared as a crazy chaos of lights and music whirling frantically in the darkness. Sam and Annie arrived together, meeting up on the edge of the open ground where the fair had established itself.

‘When was the last time you went to the fair?’ Annie asked.

‘When I was so-high,’ said Sam.

‘Brings back memories, doesn’t it.’

Sam shrugged. He should have felt nostalgia, but the swirling, coloured lights and the blaring music unsettled him. The screams of excited youngsters on the rollercoaster made him think of hell. He shook his head to free it from such stupid thoughts.

‘Come on,’ he said, taking Annie’s hand. ‘I know we’re supposed to be working, but let’s think of this as a sort of ‘second date’ – what do you say?’

Her answer was to plant a kiss on Sam’s cheek. Nothing spectacular, almost sisterly – but it worked wonders. Once again, for all his fears and nameless terrors, Annie had it in her to bring the warmth and sunshine back into Sam’s soul. He tightened his grip on her hand and together they trudged across the muddy ground towards the fair.

The place was alive with colour and music and people and noise. Kids bundled up in duffel coats and snorkel parkas where cramming onto the ghost train, whooshing down the helter-skelter, getting pinned to the walls of the spinning centrifuge cage. A precarious rollercoaster rattled unsteadily overhead. Beneath a sagging tarpaulin, Sam spotted rows of arcade games – old style one-armed bandits, metal claws that gripped but then dropped cheap toys, table football, glass cases containing masses of moving ten-pence pieces that forever threatened to tumble out for the player to gather up but which defied gravity and refused to fall.

Further on, the waltzer was hurtling round and around, carrying its cargo of screamers and shriekers.

‘Any sign of Chris on that thing?’ asked Sam, peering at the faces as they flashed by. ‘I bet you a tenner he’s a waltzer man.’

‘Then that’s a tenner you owe me,’ said Annie, and she pointed. Chris was sitting astride a painted horse on a sedate and slow-moving carousel, swinging his legs gleefully and shoving his face into a huge cloud of pink candyfloss.

‘Macho man!’ Annie called out to him as he went by.

Shocked at being discovered, Chris looked up sharply, candyfloss sticking to his nose and eyebrows.

‘I’m on reconnaissance!’ he protested as his painted horse carried him away.

Sam laughed – and then his laughter froze as he caught sight of the Test Card Girl riding along the carousel just behind Chris. She turned her pale face towards him as she bobbed gracefully by.

‘Come on,’ said Sam, tugging Annie’s hand and leading her away. ‘Let’s find this thug O’Riordan.’

They threaded their way through the bustling crowds. Sam expected to see the Test Card Girl again at any moment – taking money at the ticket office for the ghost train, selling toffee apples, going round and round on the centrifuge, perhaps skipping by with a cluster of jet black helium balloons in her hand – but he saw no sign of her now. Perhaps he had just imagined her riding on the carousel.

No. I didn’t imagine her. She was there – popping up like a recurring nightmare yet again … Damn it, will I never be rid of her?

Sparks flashed and crackled overhead. Sam flinched – then relaxed. It was just the electric current feeding the dodgems.

‘Hey,’ smiled Annie, nudging Sam’s arm. ‘No prizes for guessing who’s on the bumper cars.’

Gene was cramming himself into one of the cars. Across from him, Ray was doing the same.

‘In their heads, they’re about twelve,’ said Annie.

‘That’s being generous,’ said Sam.

Dads were settling into the cars with their kids, and granddads were settling in with their grandkids.

‘I hope Ray and the guv don’t get too aggressive,’ said Annie. ‘It’s for families.’

‘It’s only the dodgems, Annie. How aggressive can they possibly get?’

The ride’s compere hollered over the speaker system: ‘
Three! Two! One! And awaaaaaay they goooo!
’ Instantly, Gene’s car sprang forward, broadsiding a young couple with surprising force. Ray slammed his car into the back of one carrying an old man and his nervous grandson, barking abuse when the old man told him to
take it easy, son.

‘I think the guv’s taking it a bit serious,’ said Annie, as they watched Gene swerve and ram, utilizing his police driving skills to devastating effect. A child screamed, a father raised his voice in angry protest, and Gene silenced them both with a succession of ferocious head-on collisions. A kid in a bobble hat lost his nerve, leapt from his car and fled the ride altogether, weeping openly.

‘I feel I should intervene,’ said Sam. And at that moment, on the other side of the dodgems, he glimpsed a spider tattoo moving past in the coloured lights. ‘Annie! Look!’

‘What? Where?’

‘I saw him, Annie – it was Spider, the fella from the gym. What’s he doing here?’

‘Maybe he likes fairgrounds.’

‘Or maybe he’s more interested in finding Patsy O’Riordan.’

‘And what would Spider want with him?’

‘Only one way to find out.’

They were pushing their way through the crowds, trying to find Spider. Sam barged his way through a mob of teenagers –
‘Oi! Watch it mate!’
– and glared frantically about. Suddenly, he saw Spider – and Spider saw him. They made eye contact, stared at each other for a moment – and then Spider bolted. Sam raced after him, shoving and shouldering his way through the crush. Spider ducked and weaved a few yards ahead of him.