London Large: Blood on the Streets (4 page)

What the fuck is she on?

H swung the car past the last
roundabout before Westminster Bridge, blistering hot wheels smoking and
screeching like a banshee on a bender, and put the pedal to the metal. Beneath
the bridge a sewage boat chugged past on its way to a sewage dump near Pitsea
in Essex, but the shit on board was as nothing compared to the shit that was
about to hit the fan when he entered St. James’ Park.

‘One minute away’, he shouted
‘tell me what the fuck’s happening, and tell me now.’

H and Amisha sped on.
Past The Houses of Parliament (
bunch of fucking nonces
), right down
Whitehall and past Downing Street, home of the Prime Minister.

Amisha said, ‘six million
hits. India, Russia, America - millions upon millions.’

‘Oh for fuck’s sake’, said H.
‘I don’t give a fuck about Twitter hits or early birds in America. What are all
these fucking pictures telling
you
?’

‘Right guv, I think I have
it. Two women walk into St. James’ Park, one blonde one brunette. There’s a
blurred picture of them in the background of someone’s selfie before the
killing starts. From their clothes, or what I can see of them, I’d say late
forties or early fifties. They look, shall we say, well bred. I’d speculate
they’re not the type of women you might usually associate with gangsters.’

‘In the selfie they are in
the process of sitting down so they must have just got to the benches. It’s now
10.20 and based on the Twitter comments I’d say this was 20 minutes ago. They
are now both dead - here’s a pic of what they look like.’

She quickly flashed the
picture of the unrecognisable dead bodies of Tara and Jemima, slumped over the
bench.

‘Fuck me. Then what?’ said H.

‘I think they were killed
within a few minutes of sitting down. There’s a clip of some crazed nutter
throwing a knife into the skull of the brunette. The clip reveals the blonde
already dead, so assume the same guy killed her first. Weird thing is after the
second killing the psycho is bowing like a busker at a street show.’

Amisha showed the clip of
Aliyev shaping up like a professional street entertainer as H turned left off
of Trafalgar Square and headed down The Mall. Alerted by the Twitterstorm,
flocks of tourists were descending on St James’ Park and H had to slow down to
navigate the growing crowd.

‘Know him?’, Amisha asked.

H had performed surveillance
on most of the murderous villains now frequenting London’s underworld. He’d
looked at enough mug shots in the last few months to last him a lifetime. But
this was a new face.

‘Never seen the sick bastard
before. Look at his fucking boat race. Looks as happy as a nonce who’s been
given the keys to a nursery. What’s next?’

‘Your man Mike then turns up
with what looks like another plain clothes officer. The psycho busker shoots
the other officer. There’s a picture of his slumped body. I’m guessing he’s
dead but that’s not certain, and there is no clear shot of his face. Mike then
takes out the psycho.’

Amisha showed him another few
clips as H pulled to a halt as close as he was now likely to get to the murder
scene, given the throngs of people heading in the same direction. He watched
with satisfaction as Mike filled the murderer with enough lead to contain a
nuclear reaction.

At least that’s one less
murderous bastard on the streets
.

Amisha was about to see H at
his best, in his element; taking control of and reading a murder scene. When
murder or violence was in the air H went into overdrive. He was made for
moments like this. The switch had flipped and H was in the zone.

‘Right, let’s get this crime
scene under control before it gets completely fucked up.’

H hit the ground
running - almost literally. Amisha had never seen anything like it. His door
was open and he was halfway out of it before he switched off the ignition.

This is getting to him.

He headed for the scene, barrelling
and barking through the rain like a turbo-charged Mussolini. But there was
nothing comic-operatic about his next moves - he was all Anglo Saxon bluntness
and deadly earnest.

‘Get these people back!
Straighten the tape! What is this, open day at Buckingham fucking Palace? Get
that lot with the cameras further back. There’s dead people here…Jesus wept!’

‘Ames’, he continued, barking
back at her, ‘I need to get to work. Get this sorted out; we’ve got the
Keystone Cops in charge here. Straighten this lot out, for fuck’s sake, get
this park cleared now.’

‘Right you are guv’, said
Amisha.

But H had already moved on.
Putting the fear of God into all and sundry was one thing. What he needed to do
now was merge with the scene, put his senses and his copper’s intuition to
work. He calmed himself and focused in.

He did not like what he saw.

On the ground, in front of
the bench containing the broken bodies of the two women, was the body of the
copper, face down, blood still oozing from his head. The texture and colour of
the grass around the head reminded him of a cake Olivia had made him a few days
before. H moved in, low and slow, and squatted beside the body. He craned his
head to try and get a look at the face. The muscles in his stomach and throat
responded to what he saw before his conscious awareness did. Clunk. Ugh.

Jesus, fuck…it’s Jack
Thornton. Jack T. This bastard’s killed Jack.

Here? On a day like this?

H’s senses were reeling. The
smell of blood was in his nostrils and working its way towards his mouth. The
muscles in his face were quivering and he couldn’t control them. He stayed put,
down low and quiet, and tried to regulate his breathing. Time passed. He didn’t
know how much.

Another fallen comrade.

‘Everything’s under control
guv, the park is almost cleared…guv?’ Amisha’s voice snapped him out of it.

‘Are you alright down there?
Is there anything I can do?’

No response.

‘Guv, you need to see this.’

H reared up, inhaling hard
and brushing down his trousers.

‘See what?’

Amisha pointed towards the
body of the assassin. With gestures of hand and arm she motioned him towards
the mortal remains of what would now be, for a time at least, the world’s most
famous murderer.

Aliyev was lying on his back,
splayed out like a six year old boy playing war games. The forehead had
collapsed inward and what was left of his brain had splattered upwards, out of
the head, into a flume of what looked like vomit.

‘Now that’s what I call
putting one in the nut’, said H to no one in particular. ‘Good man, Mike. Good
man. He always was.’

But it was the lower part of
the face that Amisha wanted him to see. The frozen rictus. Of joy. Of warped
glee. Of pleasure at having done what he’d done. This was straight out of some
insane-circus clown-on-a-killing-spree nightmare.

‘This one looks like a proper
nutter, guv.’

But H was already looking
back, over his shoulder. Worse was coming, and he knew it: it was time to have
a look at the women. No way around it. H hated doing this more than anything.
Dead men didn’t bother him much on the whole; he’d seen scores of them in his
time. Many had died in the line of duty and a good proportion of the rest had
deserved what they’d got. Good riddance to bad rubbish. But women…all the
gender workshops and cultural sensitivity courses he’d been forced to attend
over the last few years couldn’t prevent his guts churning when it came to
this. Swallowing hard, and with his eyes beginning to smart, he moved back
towards the bench.

‘Well bred. Mature.’
That had been Amisha’s social assessment of the women in question on the basis
of the images that flickered on her screens. While they were women. Now they
were a tangled mess of flesh and blood, thrown together and washed up onto the
bench as if by a massive crimson wave.

At twenty yards out from the
bench, H was steadying himself for the worst. He noted, despite the mess, that
Amisha had been right: what could still be made out of clothes, shoes and bags
looked high-end and designer. These were not the kind of pumped up and bejewelled
molls so loved of his new found Slavic and Balkan acquaintances.

Ten yards out, all of his
senses were kicking in again. He struggled to retain what composure he’d
managed to put together while standing over Agani.

What was happening to him?
Was he finally losing it? At five yards out the mess in front of him began to
resolve itself. But while he was still unable to make out human facial
features, it looked and stank like a bad night at the abattoir.

Amisha would have to be kept
away from this.

She’s not ready.

H came to a halt,
straightened himself up and focused in. He snapped on a fresh pair of gloves.
He was going to have to have a poke about in this. One of the women’s heads had
been all but hacked off and was just about hanging by a combination of backrest
and tendon over the back of the bench. And then it happened. Abruptly, without
warning, for the first time in years. Just when he didn’t need them the
Falklands flashbacks returned; torn bodies, blood, guts and splatter all around
him, stinking mud, senses reeling. He was not sure now exactly where he was.
His heart was trying to burst out of its cage; his ears were throbbing and his
eyes were stinging.

His experience kicked in.
Sort
yourself out H.
He moved in, again crouching down low.

Look at the other woman
first. At least her head’s still in one fucking piece.

He put his fingers under her
chin and raised her head, gently. Very gently. He felt the knife before he saw
it, as it brushed his thigh on the way up. Fuck. With effort he brought her
face level with his. The forehead was a dog’s dinner, but the knife had done
little damage to the face. It was the face of a beautiful woman, strangely
calm. H began to choke and struggled to fight back a wave of anguish and pity
the like of which he’d not felt since the aftermath of Goose Green, when things
had first started to go wobbly. He had a strange feeling he knew her, but his
famous speed of thought under pressure was, for once, letting him down. A
wedding, a funeral, a photograph of a summer’s day half a lifetime ago?

He let the head down as
slowly as he’d raised it and set himself back on his haunches.

So pretty. What could she
have done to deserve this? What is going on in this fucking city?

He rocked on his haunches;
images from old documentaries about mental hospitals flashed across his mind.
He was feeling heavy gravity. His body was telling him to lie down. To get down
on the ground. To stay there until…

Amisha’s voice again snapped
him out of it. He stood up and saw that she was bearing down on him fast, about
twenty yards out, jabbering big decibels into one of her gadgets. He sent her two
hand signals in quick succession: stop; turn around and go back. These he
accompanied with the look: no buts.

Now for the lady in waiting.

He moved gingerly around to
the back of the bench, taking in the vista of the park, the stalled traffic on
the Mall, the throngs of Londoners and tourists flocking to the gates of the
park to take a closer look at the reality of what they’d seen in cyber space. He
stood for a moment and closed his eyes. Calming himself, he was trying to
visualize his approach to the body. Positioned as she was, he’d have to back
up, perhaps sit on, the top of the backrest in order to get a proper look at
whatever was left above the neck.

H opened his eyes and positioned
himself. He looked. And he saw. He saw a face that he knew, and knew well. He
couldn’t put a name to it, but it was a face from deep in his past that didn’t
need to be named. His mind stopped, and the world began to spin around him; his
body convulsed and he emptied the contents of his stomach onto the bloodsoaked
grass.

He slumped to the ground. He
had seen a face, or what was left of a face. And now it came to him. The face
belonged to Tara Ruddock.
Had
belonged to Tara Ruddock. But where was
she now, Tara herself, lovely Tara - surely not here, amid these butchered
remnants?

And where was he?

In St James’ Park, in broad
daylight, slumped against a park bench, eyes closed. He heard sounds, but they
seemed far away - not part of his world.

‘Guv?’ he heard. He said
nothing. He thought nothing.

Amisha had studied long
and hard to get where she was. Her parents demanded it, and she’d driven
herself with zeal. But who knew that psychology module she’d suffered through
as an undergraduate would turn out to be so important?

H had been under pressure,
enormous pressure. That was for sure. But she knew him well enough to think it
was unlikely that he’d lost it and gone to bits completely. He had not passed
over into psychosis; he was probably in a dissociative state, which, in
laymen’s terms, meant he really wasn’t handling the situation very well. He’d
had to put the shutters up for a while. She might be able to bring him out of
himself. That was her hunch, and her hope.

The first slap across the
face he didn’t respond to. The second one was harder. A big open-handed bitch
slap. He stirred a little and opened his eyes.

‘Guv!, Guv!...it’s
me, Amisha. Look at me. Are you with me
H?’

H looked like he was trying
to pull it together. To focus.

‘Tara…it’s Tara. Tara Ruddock’, he mumbled. He was slurring his words.
Amisha prayed he hadn’t stroked out.

‘What’s Tara? Who’s Tara?
Speak to me H’, she said.

‘Tara. Ronnie’s Tara. Lovely
Tara. Tara Ruddock. Tara
Fortescue-Smythe. Tara…’

‘H!’, said Amisha, shaking
his shoulders, ‘look at me. Focus. Let’s get back to Tara later. Do you know
where you are? Do you know my name?’