Luke Delaney - The Rule of Fear

‘It wasn’t a test,’ she corrected him. ‘They were just trying to find out if you needed help.’

‘And they found out I didn’t,’ he reminded her.

‘So long as you were truthful with them.’

‘Course I was,’ he assured her.

‘I doubt it,’ she accused him. ‘I know what you blokes are like – especially cops. You’d admit to anything before you admitted to struggling emotionally. You’re such a bunch of macho losers.’

‘If I was struggling I’d tell you,’ he lied. ‘But I’m not, so that’s the end of it.’ He dug his fingers deep into his aching shoulder, trying to ease the pain.

‘I’m sorry,’ she apologized. ‘I wasn’t trying to—’

‘I know,’ he cut her off, making her turn away. ‘Look,’ he softened. ‘It’s just my parents. They have a knack of pissing me off. But I’m fine,’ he insisted. ‘I’m absolutely fine.’

They shuffled through the front door of their small flat together feeling deflated and tired. They both kicked off their shoes and Sara threw herself into the inexpensive but comfortable sofa, before immediately jumping up again.

‘I’m exhausted,’ she told him. ‘I need to go to bed. If I fall asleep on that sofa you’ll never get me out of it. You coming?’

‘In a minute,’ he answered. ‘I need some painkillers and a drink first.’

‘I bet you do,’ she said without smiling. ‘Don’t be too long.’

‘I won’t be,’ he assured her, although in truth he had no idea how long he’d be.

‘See you in a minute then.’ She headed towards their bedroom while he went to the kitchen, turning on the under-cabinet lighting that only dimly illuminated the room. He pulled a beer from the fridge and popped the top off the bottle, placing it carefully on the small kitchen table before crossing the room and beginning to search for painkillers. Even in the poor light he found the buprenorphine easily enough. He pressed two tablets from the tinfoil and headed back to the table where he slumped in a chair, quickly throwing the pills in his mouth and washing them down with a long drink. The racing thoughts about his parents, his brother and Sara slowed to a flickering procession of still pictures in his mind, until finally they were pushed aside by the memories of the day he’d accepted a seemingly innocuous call to deal with a domestic dispute.

He shook his head, trying to expel the images from his mind, but they remained strong and vivid – the young girl walking like a ghost from the house, the crimson spreading slow and steady through her pristine white dress, collapsing into his arms as her father, her would-be killer, burst through the door. He winced as he once again felt the knife bury deep into his back and shoulder – his memory fast-forwarding to the point where he was beating the father unconscious and then he was inside the house and moving up the stairs to the room where he found the twelve-year-old girl lying face-down on her bed. He saw himself in the room standing over her, but not touching her as he had in reality – just standing there looking down at her dead body before walking backwards out of the room.

And then he entered the other room – the scene of bloody slaughter – the mother lying stabbed over and over on the bed with her brave teenage son on the floor next to her, his failed attempts to save his mother costing him his own young life. Only now, in his conscious nightmare, there was even more blood than there had really been. So much more that it pooled around the soles of his shoes as he walked slowly into the room – his feet sinking into the blood-saturated carpet as thick maroon liquid still poured from every wound on the mother’s body, yet more pouring from her son’s mouth, ears, nose and eyes.

King fled from the room in a panic, stumbling into the hallway and somehow becoming lost and disorientated in the small house, leaving bloody fingerprints on the walls as he used them to try and steady himself before he finally fell through a door and into another bedroom – the bedroom where he’d found the youngest girl lying peacefully on her back, pale and lifeless. Only in the terror of his waking dream she wasn’t lying, but sitting on the bed, her dead eyes staring at him, now wide and crystal blue – not closed as her father – her killer had left them. He inched towards her, his hand rising slowly and reaching out to her as her pale lips parted, her tongue garishly red in contrast. Words formed in her mouth before finally escaping, although they took an age to reach him, as if he was watching a badly lip-synched film. But eventually he could hear what she was saying – her voice soft and broken, but more terrifying than the loudest screams. Why didn’t you save me? Why didn’t you save me?

‘Fuck!’ He jumped to his feet, grabbing his shoulder as he instantly became aware of the pain in his body. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he pleaded as he shook the last remnants of the day-terror away. He drained the rest of his beer in one and took several deep breaths to steady himself, his pulse rate slowing as he recognized his surroundings and realized the girl wasn’t real – not any more.

He headed for the fridge, pulling the door open before immediately closing it and resting his head on the cold metal. ‘There was nothing I could do,’ he whispered to the ghost of the little girl. ‘You were gone before I got there. There was nothing I could do. Fuck,’ he said a little louder and yanked the fridge open, taking another beer from inside. ‘You were gone before I got there.’

King and Brown were tucked away in a large shed-like building used to store some of the estate’s many giant communal bins, keeping watch on the comings and goings from Micky Astill’s flat in a particularly bleak part of the estate known as The Meadows, despite the fact it contained not a single blade of grass.

‘Fucking stinks in here,’ Brown complained in his sour Glaswegian accent, his face screwed up against the stench from the over-full bins. ‘How much longer we gonna waste our time in this hole?’

‘You wanna be a rat-catcher, you have to be prepared to go into the sewer,’ King told him.

‘What?’ Brown pretended not to understand. ‘Don’t see why we don’t just get a warrant and do the door.’

‘Firstly,’ King explained, ‘by the time we got through the grids anything and everything would have been flushed. Secondly, what’s the point? We take out Astill, it’s only a matter of days before another dealer replaces him. Where there’s a demand there’ll always be someone to provide the supply and there’s plenty of demand on this estate.’

‘Fucking crack-heads and heroin addicts,’ Brown grumbled. ‘Let them kill themselves on it if that’s what they want. Why should we care?’

‘Because they steal to buy their shit with,’ King reminded him, ‘and that is our problem.’

‘Well,’ Brown still argued, ‘at least if we put his fucking door in he’ll get the message we’re after him. Put the pressure on him, eh?’

‘No,’ King insisted. ‘We leave him alone for now – pick off his customers on slow days to keep our arrest figures ticking over. If we can turn the odd informant, all the better.’

‘Informants,’ Brown scoffed at the idea. ‘Nothing but trouble. Dangerous bastards. If they’re happy to sell out their own friends and family then what d’you think they’d do to you given half a chance?’

‘Quiet,’ King suddenly told him, holding up his hand for emphasis. ‘Looks like we’ve got a customer.’

Brown peeked through a spyhole in the rotting wood. ‘Aye,’ he admitted. ‘We do indeed.’

‘You know him?’ King whispered.

‘Aye,’ Brown smiled as he looked at the tall, skinny figure loping towards the flat. Even from a distance his drug-induced acne and sickly, deathly pallor was clear to see, his hair badly shaven by his own hand to save money that could be better spent on hard drugs. ‘That there’s Dougie O’Neil. Well-known lowlife, thief and scaggy crack-head of this parish. Dougie doesn’t care what drugs he’s pumping into his system, just so long as they’re class A.’