Tom Graham - Life on Mars - Get Cartwright

Sam picked his way through yet more debris, finding broken tumblers lying about, and a discarded bottle of Scotch on its side, its contents leaking onto the carpet.

‘Let’s try and make sense of all this,’ he said. ‘Scotch bottle – glasses – porno playing cards. And the wife safely out of the way. That tells me Pat had a mate over – a bloke.’

Gene shrugged: ‘Most like. But that don’t get us too far, does it.’

‘It does if that bloke was Pat’s old DCI, Mickey Carroll.’

Sam was piecing things together in his imagination. He imagined Pat Walsh here on his own, his wife out of the house for a few days. Pat calls Mickey Carroll over, or perhaps Carroll just turns up. They need to talk, to spend time together. They have things on their minds.

What? What do they have on their minds?

Was it something to do with Clive Gould? If Annie was right, they had both been in Gould’s pocket back in the sixties. Was something about Gould troubling them? Is that what the two of them wanted to discuss?

He recalled what Carroll had howled at him in the church : ‘I’m not going to end up like Pat! I’m not going to end up that way!’

Did they see Gould, just like I saw Gould? Sam thought. He felt a deep sense of conviction that he was thinking along the right lines – a conviction that came from the fact that Carroll and Walsh, like Sam, were caught up in the machinations of the Devil in the Dark.

Sam took a slow breath, relaxed, and allowed a picture to form in his mind’s eye. Where there was a lack of hard evidence, maybe his imagination, his intuition, his copper’s nose would point the way.

Walsh had the place to himself. He had things on his mind … things to do with Gould. Carroll came over, because he had worries too. Gould was haunting them both in some way. They were disturbed, frightened. So the two of them sat down here, Walsh and Carroll together, playing cards, drinking. It comforted them. They started talking things through, trying to make sense of whatever it was that was disturbing them, and then …

Sam turned, looking back into the hallway at the smashed front door, then glanced about at the shattered furniture, the broken windows, the scattered wreckage. Something came crashing in here, roaring through that front door like an express train and turning the whole place upside down. And then what?

His intuition could not fill in the blank. Whatever happened was beyond his experience to imagine. All he could tell for sure was that Carroll had escaped, but not before he witnessed something happening to Pat Walsh – something awful – something that sent him haring off into that church with a gun in his hand.

‘Looky-here, Tyler,’ Gene said. There was a bullet hole in the wall. Gene peered at it for a moment, then hunted about amid the wreckage at his feet. Bending down suddenly, he straightened up again with something held between his thumb and forefinger.

Sam drew closer and examined it: ‘A spent cartridge.’

‘From a pistol. The same pistol Carroll’s got with him in the church, you reckon?’

‘It’s possible, Guv. We’d need an official ID from ballistics.’

‘Let’s assume for the time being it is from that same gun,’ said Gene, his face pulled into a pinched, pensive expression as he examined the shell. ‘What does this tell us? Did Carroll whack Walsh, is that what happened?’

‘I don’t see any blood,’ said Sam.

‘No. Neither do I …’ muttered Gene, almost to himself. ‘So – he either fired at Pat Walsh and missed. Or else he fired at somebody else entirely.’

Sam imagined the bullet passing straight through Gould’s shadowy form. The image made his stomach tighten.

What weapon will stop Gould? What have I got that can hurt the Devil in the Dark?

Instinctively, he reached the gold-plated fob watch nestling in his pocket. As his fingers felt across the dented surface of the casing, he willed himself to sense some sort of magic power surging out of it, something that intimated that this simple little pocket watch was in reality a talisman, a weapon, salvation.

But he felt nothing. Nothing at all.

Monday morning. The overhead strip lights of CID were burning and flickering, bathing A-Division in their unhealthy, cheesy glow. Typewriters clacked, telephones rang, great mounds of paperwork leaned precariously on desks thick with fag ash, unwashed coffee cups and crumpled betting slips.

Sam strode into the department, and was confronted by the sight of DC Ray Carling lolling about at his desk. Ray was already on his fourth or fifth fag of the morning. He had draped his corduroy jacket on the back of his chair to fully show off his sweat-stained, eggshell-blue nylon shirt in all its unironed glory. His brown kipper tie hung loosely from his collar, and his top buttons were undone enough to reveal a flash of wiry chest hair.

‘Morning, Boss,’ Ray intoned without looking up. The remains of an egg butty were still visible, clinging to the bristles of his moustache.

‘Ray – seriously – is that any way to turn up for work?’

Ray stared blankly, then glanced down at himself uncomprehendingly.

‘I’m a bloke,’ he said. ‘How the hell else do blokes turn up for work?’

‘Some of them wash, Ray, and change their clothes, and at the very least do their bloody tie up. You look borderline homeless.’

‘I had a wash Saturday,’ Ray rebuked him, lifting his stubbly chin in a display of dignity. ‘And this shirt’s clean on from last week.’ He sniffed his armpit, then looked past Sam and called out: ‘Hey, Chris! I don’t whiff, do I?’

DS Chris Skelton emerged from behind a filing cabinet, dressed in a diamond-pattern tank top and beige slacks. But instead of answering Ray, he came swaggering slowly across the room, his face impassive, his hands held strangely at his sides. Fixing Sam with a dead-eyed stare, he gruffly intoned the single syllable: ‘Draw.’

Sam stared blankly back at him: ‘… What?! ’

In the same gravelly voice, Chris grunted: ‘I said draw.’

‘He went to see that flick the other night,’ Ray put in, picking at crusty bits on his shirt. ‘The cowboy one with Yul Brynner where his face falls off at the end.’

‘ Westworld ?’ Sam asked.

But the moment he spoke, Chris suddenly drew an imaginary revolver and pow-pow-powed it straight at Sam. Despite Sam’s total lack of reaction, a grin spread across Chris’s face. He blew the gun smoke from his finger tip and said: ‘Oh, Boss, you got more holes in you now than a ruddy sieve. I am Yul Brynner!’

‘I see the movie’s fired your imagination, Chris,’ Sam replied. ‘And yes, I admit it’s a bit of a sci-fi classic. But can we leave the gunslinger routine for the pub?’

‘The saloon ,’ Chris corrected him. And then, turning to Ray, he added: ‘And in answer to your question – no, you don’t whiff. Not at all. If you do, the fags and farts cover it.’

Sam held up his hands in a gesture of surrender: ‘Hey, fellas, I’m not up to intellectual debate of this calibre so early on a Monday morning. Ray – forget I said anything.’

‘I already ’ave, Boss,’ muttered Ray.

‘Anybody got any news on the siege at the church?’ Sam asked.

‘Last I heard, it were still dragging on,’ said Chris, heading over to his desk. ‘There’s coppers all round the place, but nowt’s happening.’

‘If there are any developments at all – anything – I want to be informed at once. Understood, cowboy?’

‘Yee hah, Boss,’ winked Chris, giving a jaunty Yankee Doodle salute.