Mark Pearson - The Killing Season

His weight was crushing me and he raised his forearm to ram it across my throat.

I pushed up against him, trying to dislodge him. It was useless. I might as well have been trying to move a Mercedes truck. I couldn’t breathe. I felt the pressure building in my head. Images flashing into it. My wife being killed at the petrol station. Flashes of shotgun fire in the sulphurous night. My daughter Siobhan sitting up in bed wide-eyed as I told her another stupid fairy tale I had half made up. Jade, our baby, a thing of wonder that Kate and I had made together. Pink, innocent, in so much need of love and protection. I thought of Kate. Beautiful Kate, with her laughing eyes and her long curly hair. And I pushed again.

Nothing.

The blood was pounding in my ears now, louder than the wind that howled and cried and wrapped itself around me like a shroud of pure energy. Then, suddenly, the blackness seemed to lift and a light bloomed in my head and I felt as though I was floating.

And then, with a rush, sweet oxygen came back into my lungs and I realised that the weight had been lifted from me. I stumbled to my knees and gasped ragged breaths deep into my lungs. I looked across. Harry Coker was standing face to face with Solly, exchanging blows. His shotgun was on the ground. I half crawled, half stumbled over to it and picked it up as Solly smashed a fist into the side of Sergeant Coker’s head and knocked him down.

I stood up and levelled the shotgun at Solly as he stood at the cliff’s edge. His hair fanning wild around his cragged face, his massive frame blocking my view of the sea behind him, the moon illuminating him like a biblical prophet in the throes of divine revelation.

‘It’s over, Solly,’ I said, gasping the words, each utterance a painful rasp in my near-fractured throat. He shook his head and pointed at me.

‘No, it is not over. For just as the Lord is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, he will by no means clear the guilty. Visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, to the third and the fourth generation!’

‘Yeah, I went to Sunday school too, you mad fucker,’ I shouted back at him. ‘But this is a shotgun I am holding, not a fucking prayer book!’

‘They had me skivvy and serve and grovel. All of them growing rich on the murder of the father I never knew. My mother kept in ignorance and poverty. She will burn in hell!’ Solly shouted at me, his lips frothing with rage. He raised his massive hands over his head. I tightened my finger on the trigger of the shotgun but as he raised his hands his coat swirled open, the wind gusted into it, turning it into a sail and forcing him to take a step back. He tried to steady himself but he was at the cliff’s edge.

His face looked startled as he comprehended what was happening.

He panicked but had to keep his arms spread to balance himself. The wind ballooned his coat once more and his foot slipped on the loose soil, the ground gave way beneath him and he went backwards over the edge.

‘Burn in hell!’ he shouted again, his words whipped away by the howling gale and cut short as his body hit the stony beach, eighty feet below.

I breathed out slowly and eased my finger from the trigger of the shotgun. I laid it on the ground and ran over to Kate.

I untied the scarf round her mouth first and like me she took a moment or two to gulp in some air.

‘Don’t worry, Kate,’ I said with a feeble attempt at a smile. ‘You won’t burn in hell.’

‘It wasn’t me he was talking about, Jack,’ she said finally when she was able to speak. ‘He took Susan Dean, too.’

Sergeant Coker got to his feet and looked out over the cliff’s edge.

‘You better let me take that pistol, Jack,’ he said. ‘I presume it’s not registered to you?’

‘No. It’s not.’

‘I saw the fight. I have the bruises to prove it. How you managed to wrest that gun from him I’ll never know. But it was just as well you did, Jack. It was very brave of you — he might have killed us both.’

I nodded. Getting his gist. ‘Thanks, Harry.’

‘Let’s get his prints on the gun and call it in. Then we can go someplace where they have an open fire and a large selection of whiskies.’

I was in bed and it wasn’t a small brandy and soda on my bedside cabinet. It was a large single malt. No ice. No soda. No spittle.

The tide had been coming in when we had reached the beach and wrapped Solly’s huge and lifeless hand around the gun. And the sea was encroaching fast by the time we had called the incident in.

We were clear of the beach and up on the promenade when the army of blues and twos arrived. But the tide had beaten them to it and Solly had been dragged from his resting place by the long cold fingers of the restless sea god.

Detective Inspector Walsh had taken our statements one by one and, by the time we were clear, The Lobster and all the other pubs in the town were locked tight for the night. Sergeant Coker had stayed back to help in the search for Superintendent Susan Dean but I had taken Kate home for a long hot shower and, for myself, a glass of the water of life.

I took another sip of it, felt the warming ease of it as I swallowed. My throat had just about recovered and this was the very best of malts. As smooth as silk.

Kate came in from the shower room, slipped out of her dressing gown and snuggled up beside me. She was pretty smooth herself. The heat from her naked body was like medicine. Like light.

‘Do you think they will find her?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know, darling — sounded to me like he had already killed her.’

‘Poor woman. OK, you can tell me all of it now.’

I had given a full report in my statement. But Kate hadn’t wanted to talk about it until she had got home, had a long hot shower and large glass of chilled wine. I didn’t blame her.

When I had finished telling her Solly’s story, Kate took a sip of her wine and let out a big sigh.

‘Cheated out of his inheritance, cheated out of knowing his father, not knowing who his mother was all these years. I guess he had a right to be angry.’

‘I think this went a bit beyond angry.’

‘And all because his mother couldn’t read.’

‘Not uncommon in 1941, if you were from a poor family. Ruth was put out to work at a young age. Meets a teacher at the place where she worked as a cleaner. They fell in love. Star-crossed lovers, as the bald man put it.’

‘What was the deal with the U-boats? I heard you saying something about them to Harry.’

‘On Beeston Bump they had a Y-station. One of a series of listening posts along the coast here. They intercepted enemy signals which they sent to Bletchley Park. By taking three readings from different posts they could also triangulate the position of enemy craft in the North Sea.’

‘Go on.’

‘A group of friends — all public-school chums — had formed a business syndicate. They were all important in some way or other in the community. A banker, council members, et cetera. Well, in 1941 it really looked as if Britain was going to lose the war. The country was going to be invaded and the most likely place was on the coast here. The least defendable coastline in the United Kingdom.’

‘I know. I was born here, remember.’

‘I do. You’re a Shannock. I know all about that now.’

‘I guess you do.’

‘So they are businessmen. Upper middle-class in the main. The world belongs to them. They are used to having their own way and having it with jam on, and champagne to wash it down with.’

‘And. .’

‘And Herr Hitler was getting in the way. You have to remember that a lot of upper-class English people didn’t want to go to war with Germany in the first place. They had connections with Germany. Business connections, family connections.’