Alex Howard - Time to Die

Ignoring the shotgun, Hanlon picked up the rifle and called out as she exited the room, ‘I’m going after the woman. The boy’s upstairs. Go and find him. Get backup.’ Enver nodded. He was sitting on Ludgate’s chest now, his knees pinning the DCS’s arms to the floor. He drew back his fist. Demirel’s face was maddened with bloodlust. Even in the ring he had never felt anything like this level of visceral hatred. Ludgate had meant to kill him and Hanlon. Enver’s dark brown eyes were sleepy no more. All Ludgate could do was lie there helplessly, trapped under Enver’s weight, and await the blow. Enver’s fist was huge.

Clarissa had run into the hall while Enver and Ludgate were struggling over the shotgun on the desk. Her tight dress made movement hard and her high heels were impossible to run in. She kicked her shoes off and looked around desperately. The house suddenly seemed like one huge cage. Upstairs were the two bodies and she didn’t want to join them. The ground floor had Hanlon. Downstairs, she feared being caught like a rat in a trap. She had seen what Hanlon had done to Conquest, God knows what the woman would do to her if she got her hands on her. Then, suddenly, like some hideous vision of an avenging angel of death, as if reading her mind, Hanlon herself appeared in the doorway. She was coated in blood, both hers and Conquest’s, and under her arm was his rifle. Clarissa moaned and backed away from Hanlon in terror, then ran for the front door and outside into the night.

Clarissa hurried down the steps and stood irresolutely looking around her. Her heart was thudding wildly. It was like a dreadful nightmare. What to do? What to do? She looked one way, then another. Her mind couldn’t think, she was panicking so much. It was like some horrible dream, hyper-real yet insane. The house’s bright security lights bathed everywhere within thirty metres in a harsh, white radiance. She could see the boat Ludgate had arrived in pulled up on the shingle next to the jetty, but she could never get it into the water in time. She sobbed in panic. Hanlon was coming. On the other side of the house were the rocks and she knew they’d tear her bare feet to pieces. The door of the house crashed open, and there stood the terrible, blood-spattered figure of Hanlon. Behind the house was the sheer slope of the hill. She had a sudden vision of climbing it on her hands and knees, then a sudden jerk on her ankles in the darkness as Hanlon seized her and pulled her down into the terrible strength of her arms. She ran for the paddock, forgetting momentarily about the pigs.

Enver finished tying Ludgate’s arms behind his back with duct tape. His ankles were tied with the same material. He sat him upright and ran more tape around him, securing him to the leg of a heavy, mahogany table in the room. He tugged experimentally at the tape and nodded in satisfaction. The DCS wasn’t going anywhere. He picked up the shotgun and wondered as he did so, what the aftermath of all this would be. Enver’s mind usually ran very much on procedural lines. Tonight was unparalleled as far as he knew in police history. He laughed, slightly hysterically. He’d have to write a report. He laughed again, so hard that tears welled from his eyes. Where would he begin?

The assistant commissioner had wanted Enver to make sure Hanlon caused nothing untoward to happen without him knowing about it. Look around you, sir, thought Enver. Welcome to normality, courtesy of DI Hanlon. Conquest pinned with the spear like a butterfly, the DCS bound and gagged, he himself naked apart from his boxer shorts, with a bullet hole in his foot. Perhaps he should give Corrigan a ring, he thought, put him in the picture. Better still, he could take a photo on someone’s phone and send it to him. This idea precipitated another gale of laughter, he was sobbing now as he laughed, tears rolling down his cheeks. His stomach muscles were starting to ache. He wiped his eyes and tried to relax.

Conquest’s TV was still flickering through its selection of fixed camera images from the house. The Bridal Suite came on, with clear images of the two bodies: Robbo’s and the judge’s. Hanlon’s handiwork, he assumed. Enver guessed there would be a control unit somewhere, probably in the cellar. Shotgun in hand, just in case, he limped across the study, wincing with pain, then crossed the hall and hobbled down the staircase through the door he’d noticed earlier.

At the bottom of the broad, stone stairs was a corridor running under the house with several doors, all open except one. The one that was closed had a prison cell style door. Enver looked through the viewing glass. The room was empty except for a small brown and white dog. He recognized it as a spaniel. His colleagues in the drug and bomb squad often used them. It was one of the few breeds he could identify; dogs used by the police were breeds he knew — Labradors, German shepherds, spaniels — and dogs he thought of as criminal were pit bulls and Rottweilers. He wasn’t a dog person.

In the cell, he could also see a school blazer and a couple of books. This must have been where they’d kept the boy. He tried the handle experimentally. The door was unlocked and as it opened the dog ran out and stared up at Enver expectantly. It wagged its tail hopefully. It seemed happy to be out of the cell. The man and animal looked at each other and Enver shrugged. He guessed the dog might as well come too. One of his colleagues would look after it later. He limped on down the corridor, slowly and painfully, the dog at his heels.

He found a bedroom where he guessed the dead man upstairs had slept. Its walls were decorated with violent, pornographic images and there was a table with drugs paraphernalia and stacks of porn DVDs, bodybuilding manuals, bike magazines and some books on Nazi Germany. Some of the drugs were prescription and he looked at the bottle labels for painkillers. He found some diazepam that looked promising and swallowed three. The adjacent room was a bathroom, leading to a kind of utility room which contained computer equipment, a couple of professional-looking servers, filing cabinets, film equipment neatly labelled and stacked on racking, and a table with a bank of monitors and the CCTV camera system’s controls.

Enver knew a lot about CCTV systems and this one was simplicity itself. It was old-fashioned, it still had actual tape, and it took him only a couple of minutes to rewind and wipe it clean. There was now no visual record of whatever Hanlon had done upstairs, or the death of Conquest come to that. That’ll make the IPCC’s job a bit harder, he thought. They can rely on Hanlon’s version of events. He nodded in satisfaction and patted the dog on the head. He switched the system off and, accompanied by the spaniel, headed upstairs. Time to try and find the boy.

Hanlon followed the retreating figure of Clarissa at a brisk walk. Her arm was still agonizingly painful but the adrenaline coursing through her more than compensated. The relief at still being alive was incredible. She had never felt so euphoric. Even the shrill pain from the break in her arm reminded her she was still alive, the boy was still alive, Enver was still alive. And her enemies were dead. Conquest, dead. Robbo, dead. The judge, dying. The sight of the moon and the clouds in the night sky, the occasional glimpses of stars, the scent of the earth underfoot and the smell of the sea, the noise of it breaking on the shore in a series of whooshing audible dips and troughs was amazing. Everything was hallucinatory real. She put her head back and laughed with the pleasure of it all. Clarissa heard the laugh, carried by the wind. She was crying now and almost blinded by tears as she ran and ran, pursued by the grim figure behind her.

Hanlon saw Clarissa in the distance in front of her reach a barred fence and hesitate briefly, looking into the field and then back at Hanlon. Scylla and Charybdis, a rock and a hard place. The DI behind, the pigs in front. The moon was momentarily revealed from behind a cloud and light glinted off the rifle. Clarissa remembered the way Hanlon had looked at her. She thought of what Hanlon had done to Conquest. She saw again in her mind’s eye the body of Robbo on the floor, and the judge, dying, tied to the bed. She knew Hanlon would have no mercy. She looked over into the field at the pigs and climbed over the fence, into their field. She was more frightened of Hanlon than of the Large Whites.