Silently
counting off the room numbers, the two detectives hurried along a long corridor
that described two sides of a square around a meditation garden complete with
Japanese maple trees, a wrought-iron heron and raked gravel. Every door stood
open apart from Tony Jennings’ room.
“Marjorie,
are you still there,” said the balding cop, knocking faintly.
Harkness
beckoned him over with a finger raised to his lip and ushered him into another
room.
“What’s
going on, matey?” said Harkness
“I
wish I knew,” said the cop, drawing a hand across a forehead slick with sweat.
“Five minutes ago, she told me she was a trained nurse, that she’d got three big
oxygen cylinders in there, that she’d closed the windows, opened up the valve
and would light a match if anyone came in. That’s it. She hasn’t said a peep
since then, but I can hear something, like a whisper, a bit of crying maybe.”
Harkness
and Slowey exchanged a glance, a weary acknowledgement that this endgame might
produce no victory, no resolution, just a failure to prevent a few more deaths.
“What’s
the plan, Sarge?”
“You
only call me that when you want me to carry the can.”
“You
get paid more than me.”
“Both
of you turn off your phones and radios right now,” said Harkness, shutting off
his own phone. “Good. Right, if she’s managed to make the air in there
oxygen-rich, we absolutely, positively do not want to flick a switch or do
anything that might cause a spark. So here’s my thinking. Ken, you raid the
nurse’s station or grab a member of staff and get the master key to this room.
Then bring it back to me and take up station at that fire escape thirty feet
away at the end of this corridor. What’s your name, mate?”
“Rory,”
said the bald policeman, grappling with his radio with slippery fingers.
“Rory,
grab your mate from outside. Get someone, anyone to keep everyone else out but
bring your mate here. The two of you will go out through that fire door. One of
you, the shortest one, will find a vantage point and take a very careful peek
through that window from the outside. You might want to pace it out from the
inside first to make sure you get the right room.
“The
other one should stand on that corner so that Slowey here can see you from the
fire door. Here’s what I’m thinking. If the guy at the window gets a glimpse of
Marjorie without matches or a lighter, he gives the thumbs up and the next guy
passes it along by line of sight. When I get that signal, I’ll go in and
overpower her. Nobody should come near until I say it’s safe to do so. Clear?”
“Shouldn’t
we wait for the hostage negotiator?” asked Rory.
“That
had crossed my mind,” added Slowey.
“Rory,
you asked for a DS and here I bloody well am. Let’s crack on, shall we?”
Rory
shrugged and plodded away. Slowey stood his ground and glared, demanding a
better answer.
“What
if you fuck up? What if you kill them? And yourself? What if she’s got that
door barricaded? Think about it. Everything you’ve touched on this enquiry had
turned to effluent. I say this with enormous love and respect.”
“I’m
the boss now, Slowey. And yes, it hasn’t been my finest hour. That’s why I’ve
got to end it. Personally and quickly. Just me, to make sure it’s my fault and
mine alone, whatever happens. That’s why the rest of you are going outside. Do
you really think we’ve got time for the hostage negotiator to drive here from
wherever the hell in the wolds or the fens they live, have a brew, fill in
their risk assessment forms and think about talking to someone?”
“Well,
when you put it like that.” Slowey clapped him on the arm and strode away.
Then
Harkness knew he stood alone in this life. Only a few inches of plasterboard
separated him from Tony and Marjorie Jennings, but as soon as Marjorie entered
that room and locked the door behind her, she had determined to intertwine her
fate with her husband’s, to join him in the limbo of dying, straddling this
life and whatever followed. If his fatalism happened to be accurate, nothing
anyone said could matter. If he hadn’t been bound by his job title to
intervene, he’d have applauded her courage and stood aside.
“Marjorie,”
he said, pressing his head to the door and knocking. Wood squeaked across
linoleum, perhaps someone standing from a chair.
“Marjorie,
it’s Sergeant Harkness from the police station. Ken Slowey’s boss. I know you
and he have met but I’m afraid we haven’t had the pleasure. I’m not going to
barge in or shout and stamp my feet. I need to have a chat with you. About Jeremy.
About Sharon. How does that sound?”
“We
just need to be left alone, officer,” proclaimed Marjorie. “We’re doing no harm
to anyone.”
“No,
you’re not,” he said, sitting on the floor and reclining against the door. “But
one or two of those people in the car park look a bit poorly. You’re a nurse,
aren’t you?”
Slowey
crept past him, dropping a key into his open palm.
“You
don’t know anything about me,” she said, with exaggerated care as if she were
drunk or drugged. “Now, I’m trying to have a conversation with my husband and
I’ve said what I’ll do if anyone disturbs us. I promise I shan’t be long.”
“Marjorie,”
he said. Slowey had opened the fire exit door and was peering to his right,
watching for a signal. Harkness slid the key into the door’s lock as he spoke.
“I owe you an apology. It might take me a few minutes. Face to face would be
better but I do need to say it before I go outside and explain things to my
boss.”
“Say
what you want, officer,” she said, drawling now, “but you’ll have to say it to
that door.”
“I’ve
read the logs of all your calls to the police. I know what Murphy was. I’ve met
Jeremy. I know about Tony’s long fight. I know about Sharon, what she’s
achieved and how proud you are. I know we should have helped you with your
neighbours. I know we should have got to Murphy before we did. We could have
stopped all this, but we didn’t and I can’t unwind the clock; but the world
should know this wasn’t your fault. Don’t let them turn your story into just
another crude headline. If you have to answer for anything, answer with your
own voice and I’ll help you do it. I owe you that much.”
“Are
you him?” she asked.
“Him?”
He
stood quietly in response to an urgent gesture from Slowey and pressed his ear
to the door, straining to hear Marjorie’s faltering voice.
“You…know…just
look after....won’t understand.”
Slowey
showed him a raised thumb and Harkness twisted the key, wrenched the handle
down and flung the door aside to find that his prime suspect had claimed her
final victim and eluded his crude justice forever.
The
shrivelled figure buoyed up by white linen on a hydraulic bed must have been
Tony. His wide open and unblinking eyes stared at the green lines on the ECG
flowing straight and true.
Marjorie
lay against a wall, eyelids flickering, a drained hypodermic dancing in the
hollow of her clenching and unclenching hand. Thick white spittle ran from the
sides of her mouth and her chest heaved out a sound like distant laughter.
“Get
one of those paramedics in here, now!” he shouted as Slowey rushed through the
door.
Needing
to do the right thing and to be seen doing it, and conscious of the various
feet pelting down the corridor towards him, he lay Marjorie flat on the floor,
adjusted her sagging limbs, found only the fluttering echo of a heartbeat,
scooped the sickly-sweet bile from her mouth, sealed his lips around hers in an
appalling act of intimacy, blew in two breaths then began to compress her
chest, pummelling at the delicate mesh of her rib cage. Within seconds, he was
wholly absorbed by his task, drunk on the rapture of finally doing something
simple and necessary and redemptive.
If
he pumped harder, sweated, suffered and breathed a little of his own life into
the woman, perhaps that clock would be unwound, perhaps they would all understand,
Sharon, Ken, Hayley, maybe even Marjorie herself. Perhaps he could go back even
further; thirty years or so.
Then
he was driving away from the wolds and fens scoured by winter and death,
pushing the RS hard along the A57, taking every slender overtaking opportunity
for the taste of life and the blaring outrage it yielded, drowning in the
electronic tumult pouring from his speakers. Paperwork done, dice cast,
consequences accepted, he wasted his leave allowance on mere absence from work,
driving back to Manchester en route to anywhere else, with a passport and a
couple of credit cards to hand just in case he passed an airport. The ties
couldn’t be severed that easily but the scars could be cauterised and numbed.
In
a northern cemetery where the population abided in the same terraced, back to
back style they’d endured in life, Harkness visited the simple monument he’d
seen only once before, thirty years earlier. That time he’d been compelled and
couldn’t have read the inscription through his tear-smeared eyes, even if he’d
dared to look.
Now
he needed to look, for a thing had to be seen and remembered before it could
ever be forgotten. So he made himself stare for as long as he needed to
memorise its every chiselled, moss-stained featured. Then he made himself
acknowledge that a child had died and he had caused that death and no amount of
superstition or self-flagellation or fortune-cookie blather would ever alter
that simple fact.
He
said nothing for he had nothing to say and no-one to say it to. Instead, he
took out his key ring, unclipped two different house keys, knelt and pushed
them vertically into the sod until they disappeared from view. Then he turned
and walked briskly away, a little older and a little taller.