Peter Robinson - Final Account

He ran his finger down the list of stolen cars. No, not there. He wouldn’t remember any of those numbers; there were always too many of them. It had to be something more important: a vehicle used in a robbery, perhaps? Then he found it: M437 TZD, gray Granada.

Suddenly, he felt cold. The owner was wanted in connection with a murder in North Yorkshire. Possibly armed and dangerous. Shit. All of a sudden, Barry seemed to be taking a hell of a long time out there.

A number of thoughts passed quickly through Grant’s mind, the first of which was regret that they didn’t do things the American way. Get the guy out of the vehicle, hands stretched on the roof, legs apart, pat him down. “Assume the position, asshole!” Why pretend they were still living in a peaceful society where the local bobby was your best friend? Christ, how Grant wished he had a gun.

Should he go out and try to get Barry to the car, use some excuse? He could say they’d been called to an emergency. Could he trust himself to walk without stumbling, to speak without stuttering? His legs felt like jelly and his throat was tight. But he felt so impotent, just watching. All he could hope was that the radio operator would understand Barry’s predicament and give the guy a clean bill of health. According to the information on the sheet, the man, Arthur Jameson, didn’t even know he was wanted.

The radio crackled back into life.

“Control to 465.”

“Go ahead, over.”

“Er… Mike four, three, seven, Tango Zulu Delta… No reports stolen. Er… Do you require keeper details over?”

“Affirmative.”

More static. Grant tensed in his seat, hand on the door-handle. Too many pauses.

“Keeper is Arthur Jameson, 47 Bridgeport Avenue, Leeds. Er… is keeper with you over?”

“Affirmative. Any problem?”

She was blowing it, Grant sensed. Someone, probably the super, was standing over her trying to help her calmly get Barry back to the car and the driver on his way, but she was nervous, halting. It was all taking far too long, and if the suspect couldn’t sense there was something wrong over the radio, then he was an idiot.

“No reports stolen.”

“You already told me that, love,” said Barry. “Is something wrong?”

“Sorry… er… 465… Stand by.”

Grant tightened his grip on the door-handle. This was it. He wasn’t going to stand around and let his partner, who had probably dozed off at the briefing and to whom the number obviously meant bugger-all, just stand there and take it.

But before he got the door half open, he saw Barry, all sixteen stone and six foot two of him, drop to the wet road clutching the side of his neck, from which a dark spray of blood fountained high and arced to the ground. Then he heard the shots, two dull cracks echoing through the dark countryside.

Left foot still in the car, right foot on the road, Grant hesitated. Mistake. His last thought was that it was so bloody unfair and pointless and miserable to die like this by a roadside outside High Wycombe. Then a bullet shattered the windscreen and took him full in the face, scattering blood, teeth and bone fragments all over the car. After its echo had faded, the Granada revved up and sped off into the night, and the nightingale sang again into the vacuum of silence the car left behind.

The sky was a sheet of gray shale, smeared here and there by dirty rags of cloud fluttering over the wooded hillsides on a cool wind. Rooks and crows gathered noisily in the roadside trees like shards of darkness refusing to dispel. Even the green of the dense beech forests looked black.

Banks and Sergeant Hatchley, who had driven through the night at breakneck speed from Eastvale, stood and looked in silence at the patrol car with the shattered windscreen and at the outline of the body on the tarmac about six or seven feet ahead, near which dark blood had coagulated in shallow puddles on the road surface. Close by, Detective Superintendent Jarrell from the Thames Valley Police paced up and down, shabby beige raincoat flapping around his legs.

The road had been cordoned off, and several patrol cars, lights circling like demented lighthouses, guarded the edges of the scene, where the SOCOs still worked. Local traffic had been diverted.

“It was a cock-up,” Superintendent Jarrell growled, glaring at the two men from Yorkshire the minute they got out of Banks’s Cortina and walked over to him. “A monumental cock-up.”

Jarrell was clearly looking for somewhere to place the blame, and it irritated the hell out of him that no matter how hard he tried, it fell squarely on his own shoulders. The two PCs might have made a mistake in not tattooing the Granada ’s number on their memories, and the radio operator had certainly screwed up royally, but in the police force, as in other hierarchical structures, when an underling screws up, the responsibility goes to the top. You don’t blame the foot-soldiers, you blame the general, and everybody gets a good bollocking, from the top down.

Banks knew that Ken Blackstone at West Yorkshire had followed correct procedure in getting a photograph, description and details about Arthur Jameson out to all divisions. And the point he had most emphasized was, “May be armed. Observe only. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES ATTEMPT TO APPREHEND.”

Jarrell’s was one of those unfortunate faces in which the individual features fail to harmonize: long nose, small, beady eyes, bushy brows, a thin slit of a mouth, prominent cheekbones, receding chin, mottled complexion. Somehow, though, it didn’t dissolve into total chaos; there was an underlying unity about the man himself that, like a magnetic field, drew it all together.

“Any update on the injured officer, sir?” Banks asked.

“What? Oh.” Jarrell stopped pacing for a moment and faced Banks. He had an erect, military bearing. Suddenly the fury seemed to bleed out of him like air from a tire. “Miller was killed outright, as you know.” He gestured at the outline and the surrounding, stained tarmac with his whole arm, as if indicating a cornucopia. “There’s about seven pints of his blood here. Everett ’s still hanging on. Just. The bullet went in through his upper lip, just under the nose, and it seems to have been slowed down or deflected by cartilage and bone. Anyway, it didn’t get a chance to do serious brain damage, so the doc says he’s got a good chance. Bloody fool.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, sir,” Banks said, “it looks like they got into a situation they couldn’t get out of. We had no reason to think Jameson knew we were onto him. Nor had we any reason to think he was a likely spree killer. We want him for a job he was hired to do coldbloodedly. He must have panicked. I know it doesn’t help the situation, sir, but the men were inexperienced. I doubt they’d handled much but traffic duty, had they?”

Jarrell ran his hand through his hair. “You’re right, of course. They pulled him over on a routine traffic check. When Miller called in the vehicle number, the radio operator called the senior officer on the shift. He tried to talk her through it calmly, but… Hell, she was new to the job. She was scared to death. It wasn’t her fault.”

Banks nodded and rubbed his eyes. Beside him, Hatchley’s gaze seemed fixed on the bloody tarmac. When Banks had got the call close to two A.M. – his first night at home in days – he had first thought of taking Susan Gay, then, not without malice entirely, though affectionate malice, he had decided that it was time Sergeant Hatchley got his feet wet. He knew how Hatchley loved his sleep. Consequently, they hadn’t said much on the way down. Banks had played Mitsuko Uchida’s live versions of the Mozart piano sonatas, and Hatchley had seemed content to doze in the passenger seat, snoring occasionally.