James Craig - Acts of Violence

Great, Carlyle thought gloomily, I love surprises. His analysis of Popp as a harmless nutter was now looking rather cavalier. Even the intervention of the local plod would have been welcome at this point. Some robust ribbing at the hands of a provincial flatfoot would be a price worth paying if they could get him out of this alive.

‘Hurry up.’

‘OK, OK.’ Carlyle fiddled ineffectually with the chain. ‘Locks were never really my strong point.’ Simpson would have a fit when she heard about this, no matter that this whole fiasco had been her bloody idea in the first place. He knew that everything would get twisted, so that it ended up as his fault.

Feeling rather sorry for himself, he stared out into the darkness, wondering if Elmhirst had already set off on her mission to find Gapper. If nothing else, Carlyle was confident that he could rely on the up-and-coming young sergeant to follow his instructions. Whether those instructions would prove enough to save him, however, was another matter entirely.

‘That’s one of the things I was wondering about,’ Popp chuckled. ‘What exactly is your strong point, Inspector?’

You’ll find out when I’m giving you a good hiding, you little wanker. Leaving the chain as loose as possible, he snapped the padlock shut and tossed the key back to his captor, deliberately sending it high and wide so that it flew past Popp’s right shoulder. The gunman made a half-hearted attempt to catch it, but in the event seemed happy enough to let it bounce off the concrete, landing somewhere in the shadows.

Stepping forward, Popp inspected the chain from a safe distance. ‘OK,’ he said finally. ‘You two sit tight, I won’t be long.’

Watching Popp disappear through the doorway, Carlyle shifted on the concrete. His left buttock ached and the pain in his foot had returned. After a few moments of ineffectually rattling his chain, he lay down flat.

‘It’s no good,’ Kortmann said bossily. ‘You’re not going to get comfortable.’

‘Thanks for pointing that out.’

‘I’ve been here for the last two days.’ Kortmann scooped up his blanket and wrapped it tightly around his shoulders. ‘I feel as if I’ve been run over by a truck’

Carlyle looked over at the dishevelled figure. ‘You’ve been taken for a ride here, haven’t you?’

Kortmann frowned. ‘Taken for a ride?’

‘Conned.’ He gestured towards the darkness. ‘This guy Popp has taken you for a right fool.’

‘You don’t say,’ Kortmann responded drily, apparently no longer particularly interested in his captor’s true identity. ‘Thank God you managed to see through him and rescue me from this rather unfortunate situation.’

‘Is that an attempt at irony?’ Sticking his hands behind his head, Carlyle stared up at the rusting metal rods sticking out of the ceiling. ‘It’s hardly my fault you ended up in this mess, is it?’

For several moments, they glared at each other.

Finally, the inspector asked: ‘How did you end up on this wild-goose chase?’

Hawking up a gob of phlegm, Kortmann energetically spat it across the room into the gloom. Most of his anger seemed to go with it. When he spoke again, his tone was quieter, more reflective. ‘We have been looking for Sylvia Tosches for decades. Well, I say “we” but I really mean “I”. The rest of the family gave up long ago. After a few years, they wanted to forget all about what happened to Uli.’

‘So why did you keep going?’

Kortmann allowed himself a grim chuckle. ‘You know, that is the funny thing. I have been sitting here asking myself that very question.’

‘And?’

‘And I can’t really remember.’ Extending his leg, he listlessly pawed at the concrete with his boot. ‘After all these years, it’s just become a habit, I suppose.’ He turned and looked at Carlyle. ‘I don’t expect you found her, did you?’

‘Barbara Hutton? Er, no. She hasn’t turned up yet. When she does though, how do you expect to prove if she is Tosches or not?’ For a moment, he thought about his own question. ‘Assuming that she won’t confess, or voluntarily let us take a DNA sample.’

Kortmann simply grunted and stared off into space.

‘God knows, if it was me, I wouldn’t.’

Still the old man said nothing.

‘Glad we sorted that out,’ Carlyle mumbled. Closing his eyes, he tried to imagine he was somewhere – anywhere – other than lying on a slab of cold concrete in the middle of a field. ‘Now I can get back to my beauty sleep.’

Running, running, running. He was being chased down a dimly lit city street. Who was chasing him? All he knew was that he couldn’t stop or something terrible would happen. Slowly, he became aware of shouting in the distance. A moment later, someone kicked his leg. Carlyle tried to shuffle away from his assailant – but all he got for his trouble was another kick, harder this time.

‘Hey,’ Kortmann grunted, ‘policeman, wake up.’

‘Fuck off,’ Carlyle scowled. ‘I was asleep.’

Waving away his protests, the German pointed towards the window. ‘Listen . . .’

Shaking himself awake, the inspector realized that the voices were real, albeit indistinct as they ebbed and flowed on the wind. The rapid succession of gunshots that followed – one, two, three – were clear enough, however. In the subsequent silence, he glanced at Kortmann, who looked every inch a man who was resigned to his fate, before struggling to his feet. Still chained to the floor, he could make it almost to the doorway. Hands on hips, he stood and waited.

Behind him, Kortmann also pulled himself up on his feet. ‘I hope that the little shit only has one bullet left,’ he snorted, ‘and that he shoots you with it.’

Just as long as he leaves you here to endure a slow, painful, lonely death, the inspector thought. A shadow appeared out of the darkness. He felt his heart get ready for take-off as the shadow moved towards them.

This is it.

‘Inspector?’

Blinking, he slowly realized that the figure in front of him was not the psychotic Popp but, rather, the amused Elmhirst.

‘What happened to you?’ the sergeant grinned.

Carlyle simply stared at the semi-automatic hanging from her left hand.

‘Just because you haven’t been on the firearms course,’ she explained, ‘doesn’t mean I haven’t. I came third in my year in Hendon when it came to shooting.’

‘Good for you,’ the inspector responded tersely. Lifting his leg, he gave his chain a little jangle and pointed towards the corner of the room with his foot. ‘Now, just get me the fucking key for this thing.’

Carlyle gazed at the framed film poster on the kitchen wall as he tentatively sipped his oily coffee. Under the headline Leisure Rules a youthful Matthew Broderick grinned back at him. The inspector vaguely remembered seeing the movie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off , decades earlier; an eighties comedy about a slacker school kid bunking off.

Quite appropriate for our Mr Umar Sligo, he thought.

Moments later, the sergeant himself shuffled through the doorway, pulling a Green Day T-shirt over his head.

‘Good morning,’ said Carlyle cheerily.

‘I hear that things went tits up again with that crazy German,’ Umar yawned. ‘Again.’ Reaching for the kettle, he dumped some hot water into a mug. Adding a heaped teaspoon of Nescafé, he gave it a stir. ‘Where’s Christina?’

‘She took Ella to the park.’

‘Fair enough. This place is very small if we’re all here all the time.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘One and a half bedrooms, £825 a month.’ He shook his head. ‘Shocking.’