John Eider - Not a Very Nice Woman

Accompanied by gasps from the crowd, like a public concert where the signer had just fallen from the stage, above the area of wall bearing the Community Tree mural appeared the bobbing heads of a man Grey saw to be Mars and of a shopkeeper many of the crowd would have known. Suddenly the heads were gone again, behind what was evidently a chest-high rim of brick running around the edge of the roof.

Just as suddenly the men appeared again, the shopkeeper appearing to lunge at Mars, and then run along the edge of the roof behind the wall, before disappearing into the doorway just visible from the ground. He did this to whoops and cheers; which turned to shrieks and moans as there was suddenly a loud bang, the glass door shattering as he closed behind the fleeing man. Mars, like the hunter in his beloved painting, then turned his gaze and the barrel of what suddenly revealed itself as a shotgun at what he saw as his enemy. However, where the painted gunman had been aiming his gun upwards into the body of the bear about to shred him with his foreclaws, here Mars ranged it downward over the parapet formed by the wall.

The fact of having a gun pointed at them did the job of a hundred officer’s calls to move back, as all at once the gathered throng turned to flee from the building like charged filings from a upturned magnet. What they found though was street furniture and police cars in their way, as they fell over these, scrambled past them and into spaces that weren’t there. Others to the sides of the crowd had clearer escape routes, or found cover around corners.

The uniformed division had been arriving by the minute, some of them on shift forty-eight hours of the last seventy-two guarding murder scenes, searching for Ludmila Mars, watching Mansard Lane and then this morning employed on the scene at the Mars house. Now they quickly gathered the crowd, easing panic and moving them to what all hoped was a safe distance back.

‘Where’d he get that?’ asked one of them of Mars’ gun; which like the man holding it had now thankfully (though worryingly) disappeared from view.

‘Probably something his security “boys” keep back for an emergency,’ said Glass, striding through the carnage like a military General.

But a Town Host, one of the staff who kept things civil in the vicinity though without the authority of an actual police officer, gave the lie to that; running over to the cordon from the shops that had already begun to board their windows and shut up. (The gunman being on their own roof left the shopkeepers with a dilemma, some running out to be with the crowd, other locking themselves into their own spaces, despite him being within the greater building.)

The Town Host had her purple-jacketed arm around the shoulders of a crying woman.

‘This is the man on the roof’s wife,’ the Town Host said when reaching the line of squad cars.

‘The man came into our shop,’ said the wife shakily. ‘He said hello and asked for cigarettes, and then when my husband turned his back he reached under the counter and took the gun.’

‘It’s your gun?’ asked Glass.

‘We need it, for protection. I heard the shot. Is he..?’

‘I’m sure he’s fine. We’ll have people up there in a flash to get him down.’

Though not sure he had any authority here Grey spoke the woman,

‘Hello, I’m a Detective Inspector,’ he began conscious of his plain clothes among uniforms. ‘It sounds as if Patrick Mars knew the gun was there?’

‘Yes, he’d seen it before.’

The Town Host took over, ‘Mars Protection ran a pilot scheme here two years ago, taking over security of the precinct.’

‘How did it go?’

‘It was abandoned,’ remembered Glass, ‘after a lad got badly beaten up.’

‘But he knows the building?’

‘Inside out. They used one of the upstairs offices.’

At that point a glass door snug between shopfronts opened and a group of office workers ran out, running wildly for the nearest cover.

‘Hey, hey! Over here!’ called Glass, they casting their eyes warily roofward as they changed direction.

‘You were working upstairs?’ he asked them once crouched behind parked cars.

They nodded.

‘Did you see the man shot?’

Again they could only nod.

‘Well?’ asked Glass.

They were in shock, Grey observed watching the conversation. They weren’t built to see this kind of thing at work.

One spoke, as unsteadily as the shopkeeper’s wife currently being comforted further back from the line, he saying,

‘The one with the gun led the other one up there, right past our office.’

‘You saw him shot?’

‘He’s up there bleeding, he’s all right though, he’s pulled himself through a doorframe into one of the rooms. We couldn’t get close enough to get him down.’

‘And did you see Mars’ face? How does he look?’

‘He’s the security guy, isn’t he?’ asked the office worker.

‘Yes he worked here a while back. Could you see him?’

‘Yes, along the corridor and through the smashed door. He was lying flat out on the roof. He’d thrown the gun to his side, which was why we risked clearing out.’

‘Was he injured?’

‘Maybe, but not badly. It looked like he was just lying in the sun up there.’

‘He’s mad,’ said Glass as he turned to Grey; before throwing him with his next question, ‘So what would you do if you were me?’

Grey took it at face value,

‘Call in Armed Response…’

‘Except we’re thirty minutes’ drive from the nearest unit.’

‘…or decide the public need is too urgent, and go in now.’

‘Then on my head be it. Right then,’ said Glass turning back to the just-arrived office workers. ‘Which of you is brave enough to don a bulletproof vest and take us back up there?’

Grey was given a vest too, it going over his shirt and tie to replace his suit jacket and leaving him looking, he thought, like one of those urban teachers or social workers he had seen in a terrifying televised documentary about US crime. The reason for his being included in the party was obvious and unspoken: that he had been the last of them to speak to Mars.

Quickly, the six of them moved across the now-empty courtyard to the door to the upstairs offices. They did this to cheers from the nervous audience, Grey hoping this wouldn’t rouse Mars; who he was hoping from the description of him lying on his back in the sun was either injured from the Waldron attack at his home earlier, or in some kind of post-violence fugue state.

Guided by the terrified worker, who would fall back as soon as possible, there was Grey, Glass and three of the latter’s best people, all five of the officers with pistols issued from the station armoury. Grey had had the firearms training too, but accepted the offer of a gun for himself only grudgingly. To not have done so would’ve been cowardice, for were the need to arise he would want Mars shot as much as the next man, and wouldn’t want this duty to have to be borne by one the others up there.

Through clean though ageing passageways and doors they were soon on the first floor, and surrounded by open space, light and lots of glass in white wooden frames. By now every one of the little offices had been emptied of life, the doors flapping in the breeze from the windows opened on such a bright day. In one room a coffee mug still sat on a table beside posters for public events, in another monitor screens buzzed or had switched onto screensavers. Another staircase led them to the top floor, the office worker holding them back at the top,

‘You turn here and you’re in the corridor.’

‘Mars will see us from there?’ whispered Glass.

He nodded.

‘Where’s the injured man?’