There had been nothing more than a qualified
confession. Firth had known Harkness’s game and declined to take to the pitch.
The defence had succeeded at court and a broken man more in control of his own
mind than he pretended to be was freed to re-enact the lethal, scorching
catastrophe that had formed and branded him. More to the point, he was less
then half Harkness’s weight and might just be about to outrun him again, even
if he was half-lame.
In one seamless movement, Firth broke eye contact,
turned and sprinted away from Harkness, trainers slapping the tarmac hard, limp
forgotten but for an involuntary groan on every out-breath. Harkness vaulted
over the van’s bonnet, leaving a size-13 scuff on the paintwork as he propelled
himself headlong after Firth. He heard Wenban’s voice crackle urgently from the
radio clipped to the PCSO, who had already begun to scribble furiously in his
book.
In seconds, Firth was rounding the corner where
Marne Close joined Somme Avenue, his left leg almost buckling as he leaned into
the turn. Harkness hoped the asthmatic gasps heaving from his mouth were some
kind of incantation that would conjure forth the athlete he used to be before
he hid himself in this middle-aged patchwork of fat, sprains and nicotine
stains. He willed his knees to rise and his stride to lengthen, and soon his
panting was drowned out by the slapping of his thin-soled leather shoes.
“Stop, you bastard,” he gasped.
He took a wide line around the
corner, had to use both hands to spare his teeth from an impact with a
post-box, span, stumbled to his knees, scuffed a patch from his trousers,
surged back to his feet and ran harder. Looking over his shoulder, Firth
frowned, yelled his frustration and redoubled his efforts, ribs flexing and
arms pumping as his lungs bellowed, a deathly mechanical process beneath
stretched, pale flesh.
Somewhere far out of sight, sirens howled. Curtains
twitched and a cat settled on a garden gate to watch the commotion. A passing
car missed a gear with a grinding of cogs as its driver gawped at the
emaciated, half-naked ghoul being pursued by the ruddy, sweat-sodden giant.
Harkness hadn’t the breath to shout another warning
but couldn’t stifle a bark of pain and rage as his body toiled and Firth
extended his lead and darted down a cut-through towards Burton Road. Firth
couldn’t be allowed to escape again.
Harkness staggered onto the footpath, registered a
flash of pain as his knee clipped the metal-clad concrete pillar intended to
deter teenage dirt-bikers, and saw Firth near the end of the path, sprinting
with his head down. Lungs straining against his ribs and heat radiating from
every pore, he willed himself on, seeing only his once pristine brogues
pounding into yellowing grass, desiccated dog turds, shards of glass and
parched earth.
Somewhere beyond the thumping in his temples, he
heard for the second time that day the brief but unmistakeable squeal of brakes
being stamped hard, of gravel burning rubber as a locked wheel was dragged
inevitably onwards. Then, a heartbeat later, came the dull, metallic percussion
of a bonnet or a windscreen deforming under the inertia of softer matter,
followed by the tinkling of glass shards on tarmac and a blaring horn, a clumsy
afterthought, quickly silenced.
He slowed his aching limbs to a quick walk, knowing
the pursuit was over and not sure he wanted to see how it had ended. He should
be using his radio but he’d left it with Wenban. Closer now, a siren howled,
its high note coarser than usual, persisting by itself even when the siren
alternated to the blaring pulse used to bully a path through traffic.
As Harkness exited the
cut-through, he knew that Firth had taken up the siren’s refrain with the
keening of a stricken animal. A hatch-back had slewed to a halt, its bonnet
bowed and its windscreen shattered. Spread-eagled across the centre-line in
front of it, at the centre of a circle of onlookers desperate to help but
frightened to touch, Firth lay like a broken toy. Gravel and glass stippled his
naked torso, his tracksuit bottoms had been twisted out of shape and a trainer
was missing. Harkness looked again. The bottoms only appeared twisted; the
exposed shin must have been fractured by the impact and now curved slightly
inwards at an incongruous angle.
The siren ceased and the
keening continued. A car door slammed as a response car parked at the end of
the queue of traffic. Harkness produced his warrant card, tucked in his shirt
and dragged a cuff across his dripping brow.
“Police, stand back please,” he
proclaimed, neither feeling nor looking the part. “If you’re a witness, don’t
go anywhere.”
The circle widened to let him
through, voices falling to a murmur. A teenage girl chewing gum had produced a
camera-phone.
“Use that and I’ll take it as
evidence,” shouted Harkness, jabbing a finger. Firth became aware of Harkness,
eyes fluttering, craning his neck fractionally over his shoulder, desperate to
avoid any movement that might quicken the tempo of his pain. He shifted his
right hand from its instinctive grip on his cuffs. He wouldn’t be running for a
while.
“No,” Firth screamed, his
anguish finding a sobbing, ragged voice. “Don’t you fucking touch me again.
You. All of you. Trying to kill me.”
“Nigel,” Harkness stooped, reached out with an open
palm, unsure if he was warding or reassuring, “just calm down….”
“You wanna kill me it’s all just fucking pain all
just burning don’t you touch me you fucking fucking….” Firth squirmed away from
Harkness, sobbing and spitting blood and phlegm onto his chin. In a fusillade
of digitised clicks, Harkness heard this tableau of barely veiled police
brutality being immortalised for legal files and news websites.
All just burning? What on earth was running through
Firth’s mind? Did burning erase pain or bring it to a shattering crescendo?
Harkness drew his shoulders back and took a deep breath, enjoying the second or
two left to him at the still centre of the hurricane.
“Nigel. Look at me. Almost forgot the formalities
in all this excitement.” He stooped to cast his long shadow over Firth. “You’re
under arrest for the murder of Suzanne Murphy, Brittany Murphy and Justin
Murphy. You know all this but you do not have to say anything. It may however
harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you
later rely on in court. As you’ll no doubt recall, anything you do say may be
given in evidence. I know you understand.
“Now,” he said, standing, “assuming you’ve all seen
enough, has someone actually used their phone to call an ambulance?” Making eye
contact with every wielder of a mobile phone, he received a few meek nods.
Dusting off his hands, he beckoned to the two uniforms striding his way wearing
fluorescent tabards and weary expressions. They were about to have a long but
lucrative shift handcuffed to a live wire in A&E. He needed another change
of clothes.
A
wondrous expanse of conifers speckled the tundra beneath the gleaming wing-tip
of the jet, which fluttered and twitched as it descended through denser,
turbulent air. Rory was squeezing her hand and nuzzling against her throat as
he craned to see through the crystallised haze of the window. The excitement
tingled through them both, an electrical circuit completed, as pristine and
exhilarating as virgin snow beneath your skis. Toiling in the darkness made
sense when the light could be this bright, the contentment so complete.
That
was a long time ago. It had seemed like a dream even then. She had known her
delusion for what it was and had passionately embraced it. The simple facts of
the affair had been plain enough. She had desired Rory viscerally, without
needing or wanting to think too hard about why she’d allowed an older, married
man to breach her defences, or whether his own desire would outlast the
intoxicating novelty of lust and escape.
They
had taken their tryst to Lapland on a triumphal whim. Every moment of that affair
was burnished with a luminous clarity undimmed by its tawdry beginning and end.
The great and famous victory at Nottingham Crown Court, a painful and plodding
year of work resolved in their favour one damp Thursday morning by an impetuous
jury bored with legal bickering. An evening of lavish food and drink in an
over-priced restaurant. A night of frantic and unabashed love-making in a cheap
hotel room.
A
Friday morning booking for a lunchtime flight. Bags packed in fifteen minutes
flat. Rory careening along the A46 at ludicrous speed in driving sleet, both of
them clad in scarves, gloves and ski-suits to save on baggage, skis fluttering
madly as they jutted from the back seat of the Boxster, its roof folded away.
Whooping and screaming with the soaking slipstream as Rory dodged tractors, cut
up pensioners, straight-lined corners and gambled with life as if desperate to
win more of it.
The
workaday world receded into the murk in their slipstream, taking with it the
mud-spattered burglars, bulging files, insomnia, endless pettifogging
paperwork, and poky rooms seething with hatred quelled only by boredom. The car
was dumped at Humberside Airport, its roof unfolded and locked in place at the
suggestion of a passing policeman. Had he known their trade, he’d have
gleefully ignored them. Soaring away from fens and fields across the Humber and
out into the North Sea, she’d been giddy with a fugitive thrill, having stolen
happiness from the working world and crossed the border into some bright new
realm.
A
four-hour stopover at Schipol had prompted Rory to book an over-priced hotel
room which nevertheless felt cheap and sleazy enough for a return bout of
love-making. Soberness only piqued their ardour and they boarded at the last
minute ruffled and bleary-eyed.
The
week flitted by. As one moment of freedom blended seamlessly into another, it
became clear that every second of the truncated arctic day was far briefer than
its equivalent in her workaday world. Carving arcs of speed across frozen
slopes with skis she hadn’t used for far too long; shattering ancient silence
and ploughing pell-mell through pine-scented tunnels of snow on a rented
snowmobile; tipsy and drowsy love-making in the sweet and resinous air of their
dark log cabin as the firewood crackled with white heat then faded gently to
grey: all of it as exquisite and ephemeral as a snowflake.
The
homecoming was a muted affair, affection masking resignation. Professional
masks slid back into place as the world found its true form and time its old,
dragging tempo. She took her memories of bliss and locked them away. He
inevitably grew distant and, after a week or two of awkward and apologetic
dinners, returned to his wife and kids and miniature mansion once more.
Sharon
Jennings dragged herself back to the present. When she was lonely, she thought
of Rory and cursed herself for it. When she roasted alive, welded to her chair
in her ancient, south-facing office with its jammed sash windows, she thought
of freezing air, skiing and Rory, and cursed herself for it. When her mother
called that morning with another family crisis, she knew she was tired of being
everybody’s fixer, thought of Rory, and hated herself for all of it.
She
felt compelled to seek a day’s compassionate leave to contain the family crisis.
It was only as she started to make her case to the only other soul in the
offices of Fitch, Brown & Snelling that she remembered that today was a
bank holiday. Rory Snelling assented with a smirk; of course she could take
the rest of her public holiday off. Besides, he’d heard about the fire on the
drive to work and remembered that Sharon’s parents lived on Marne Close. Should
she need his support in any way, she had only to ask. Her mask had trembled but
hadn’t slipped.
With
a vague curiosity, she wondered why voluntarily cooping herself up at work on a
blazing public holiday didn’t strike her as unnatural. She had no children, no
significant other and no time-wasting hobbies, but she did have plenty of work
to do and no reason not to take advantage of an empty building and muted
phones. Rory, she knew, had children, a demanding spouse and more hobbies than
socks, and used his authority to keep his caseload manageable; he nevertheless
seemed to confine himself to his office at all manner of times supposedly
sacred to family life. A supple way with logic, she accepted, will take you
anywhere your neuroses need to go.
Her
first instinct had been to remain rooted to her desk and caseload. Her mother
had a key, the fridge was adequately stocked, and nobody would starve, freeze
or burn to death if she finished her work. Yet the weight of social expectation
implicit in Rory’s response – “yes, but of course you must go” - told her where
her duties lay, and reproached her for actually preferring the wranglings of
society’s dregs to the demands of her own damaged family.
She
had postponed her appointments by plastering her secretary’s VDU with post-it
notes then crammed the boot of her Mini Cooper with the pink-ribboned files she
would have to work on whenever a spare minute presented itself. A committal
hearing loomed for one of three inept convenience store robbers, each of whom
had turned on their fellows to make their lawyers earn their legal aid fees. An
irascible but effective barrister would be grilling her with scatological
vigour on the defence of provocation she wanted him to use for the
heroin-addict single mother who’d smothered her own baby in a drooling stupor.
She also had to prepare for another bout with the Prison Officers’ Association
in the case of Firth v Murphy.
Now
her mother, ailing father and very special brother would be camping out at her
bijou waterside maisonette because some lunatic had burned out their next door
neighbours. Slamming shut the boot of the Mini, she forced herself to spell it
out, mentally rehearsing the plea for guidance she would have to make to Rory
and Christ knows how many other, more august or hostile figures.
Firth
v Murphy was no longer routine and impersonal. Her parents lived next to the
murdered family of missing prisoner officer Dale Murphy, against whom she was
litigating on behalf of Nigel Firth, a convicted arsonist. She hadn’t known
where Murphy lived until she happened to glimpse him over the fence during a
family visit. She didn’t think he’d connected her with her parents and he’d
said nothing in conference to suggest he knew or cared.
Firth
had been as calm and polite a client as she could have hoped for. He had
doggedly sought recourse to the law because he could think of no better remedy
for the beating he’d received from Murphy. The police had dismissed his
complaint after mulling it over for six months; whether this was because of
solidarity with another uniformed service or the squeamishness of a prosecutor
remained moot.
But
why would he take his own brand of revenge now, after badgering her into taking
out a civil action and nagging her through a dozen case conferences and many
more phone calls? Admittedly, he hadn’t replied to the last few letters she’d
sent him but that didn’t mean he’d turned into a homicidal maniac. Whatever the
truth of it, the police would have their own view and she needed to be ready
for them.
A
fifteen-point turn eventually got her out of the cramped patch of cracked
tarmac rented for the firm’s biggest earners from the nearby Edwardian theatre.
The dim prospect of clampers working a public holiday hadn’t deterred the
shopping public from blocking her in so that they could save a few of the
pounds they wanted to waste on tat they didn’t need and probably hadn’t worked
that hard for anyway. With a pang of distaste, she realised that once again,
and despite her age, politics and job, her inner monologue had turned into a
Daily Mail editorial. She and the Mini were both breathing hard by the time she
got onto Clasketgate, the car’s cooling system whirring away while its vents
pumped out moist, luke-warm air.
She
drove past the police station voicing a silent prayer of thanks that at least
she wouldn’t be spending the next eight hours breathing in stale sweat, cheap
coffee, institutional hostility and lies. At the end of West Parade, she toyed
with the idea of turning right onto Yarborough Road and taking the long,
time-consuming route through the village of Burton, an idyllic sprawl of the
kind of exclusive and over-priced Victorian cottages she knew she deserved to
live in. But the traffic climbing the hill seemed to be static and there was a
faint whoop of sirens from that direction.
Turning
left, she let the car roll to a gentle stop well before the next set of lights
turned red, earning another thirty seconds of her own company and a flurry of
exasperation from the supermarket delivery driver attempting to park in her
boot. Eyes fixed on the dim red glare above the sun visor, she felt her pulse
fluttering at her throat as images of what might have happened looped through
her mind with the kind of cloying earnestness she’d deplored in the firm’s own
personal injury ads. The van might have shunted the Mini. The Mini might have
been badly damaged. She might have been injured in a second of histrionic,
stop-motion anguish. Wrangling with insurers would precede protracted
litigation with harassment, bailiffs and unrecovered costs thrown in.
She
might have escaped injury, only to have been involved in a roadside fracas with
some misogynistic psycho who’d managed to conceal his record from his
employers. Her scalp tingled as she imagined her hair being bunched in a
calloused fist and her head being pounded into her own windscreen. Knowing what
to expect, she might have the presence of mind to spray anti-freeze into the
rascal’s eyes and kick him in the nuts in the manner she’d been taught at the
gym – drive the shin bone through the scrotum and all the way up to the
sternum.
Something
had changed. A horn blared and red had become green. Leaving her imaginary
assailant doubled-up and spluttering in the gutter, she moved off, making brief
eye contact with the van driver in the rear-view mirror. An impression of acne
and spindly arms left her in no doubt that a lot of insight, a little imagination
and more nervous tension than she knew what to do with were turning her into a
morbid fantasist.
With
this in mind, she wasn’t in the least concerned when the van followed her onto Carholme Road, shrugged when the van scraped through on amber to follow her into the Mead
Bank estate, and permitted herself a frown when it followed her into Glebe Mews
and waited patiently for her to reverse onto her driveway. With an ugly
grinding that screamed incompetence to everyone in earshot, the Mini refused to
accept reverse gear until she’d obeyed the manual to the letter and waited a
full second for the driveshaft to cease spinning. A glimpse of a smirk and a
shaken head over folded arms in the van sent hot blood to her face.
Halfway
up the driveway, she caught sight of the front of her house and stalled the car
with a jolt. Both door and windows were wide open and the curtains were
missing. Raising a hand to mute the sun’s glare, she could make out the
metronomic flickering of the warning light in the alarm box below the bedroom
window.
She
killed the engine, jammed on the handbrake and raised both hands to her face as
if to steady her thoughts. Her parents must be in the house, but her mother’s
car was nowhere to be seen and she hadn’t said exactly when she’d get back from
hospital. It could be a burglary. If it was, the thieves would probably have
finished and gone. She should just go inside and find out. But what if she
disturbed a burglar? Shouldn’t she call the police? Better to be wrong and
embarrassed than maimed by a potential client.
Thoughts
still reeling but driven by instinct, she exited the car having armed herself
with the can of anti-freeze that should have been left in the garage months
ago. With her left hand, she flipped open her phone and left her thumb hovering
over the number ‘9’. An orange shape loomed over her right shoulder. She span,
nearly snapping a ludicrous heel, brandished the aerosol, found she’d pointed
it at herself and yelped in confusion.
“Back,
get back,” she shouted, regaining her balance and rotating the can so that at
least she wouldn’t blind herself.
“Sorry,”
said the gangling, teenage supermarket van driver, flinching. “You Marjorie
Jennings? Shopping. On t’internet. Order for you, duck.”