Shatter the Bones

Chapter 51

Rennie stopped beside the open front door to the abandoned Cambertools industrial unit. ‘I still say we should shoot him in the balls, you know, by accident?’

Logan glanced back towards Foxtrot Tango Two, where the firearms team were all thumping out into the drizzle. ‘We go in on three.’

‘How did someone like Green get promoted to superintendent?’

‘Maybe they had a raffle. Two, one…’ Logan gave the nod and Rennie ducked through the open door, MP5 held at half-mast.

‘Clear.’

Logan followed him into a boxy corridor covered with graffiti. Four doors off it, all closed.

‘What do you think?’

Logan nodded towards the nearest door, raised his borrowed gun, and took up a firing stance.

Rennie tried the handle. ‘Locked.’ So was the next one, and the one after that.

Last door.

Rennie hauled open the door and charged in, bent double, Logan behind him, swinging his Glock above the constable’s back. It was the room from the video; the room in Davina Pearce’s self portrait — a graffiti-scrawled office with a single, wrought-iron bed against one wall, a low table in the middle of the room. One door on the opposite wall.

Blood made a scuffed track across the wooden floorboards.

Superintendent Green was slumped against the bed, both hands clutching his right thigh — a dark red stain spread out across his trouser leg. His Glock lay on the floor by his knee. The silly sod hadn’t even got off a single shot. ‘Oh God, oh Christ, oh fuck…’

Alison McGregor was standing, very still and silent, in front of the boarded-up window, arms by her sides. Trembling. There was someone behind her, dressed in full SOC gear and a plastic mask. He had a six-inch knife pressed to Alison’s throat, the shiny blade speckled with crimson. The other hand was wrapped in Jenny McGregor’s blonde curly hair, holding her close.

Logan inched to the side. ‘Armed police officers: drop the knife.’

The man in the SOC suit shrugged, his speech distorted by some sort of filter in the mask into an electronic pseudo-robot: ‘Now why would I do something like that?’

‘Oh God,’ Green’s voice had jumped an octave, ‘he cut me!’

Logan kept his eyes on the knife. ‘Well what the hell did you expect, charging in here like an idiot?’

‘You have to get me to a hospital!’

‘Drop — the — knife.’

‘No.’ The man in the SOC suit tilted his head to one side. ‘Here’s how it’s going to work: you’re going to take your moron and fuck off. You’re going to clear the road north. You’re going to get me a car and you’re not going to follow it. If you do that Alison and Jenny will live. If you don’t they will die.’

‘I’m bleeding…’

‘It’s over.’ Logan shifted his grip on the gun. ‘The building’s surrounded by armed police. You’re not going anywhere.’

‘Then they’re both going to die.’

‘No they’re not.’

‘Oh God, I need an ambulance…’

‘WILL YOU SHUT UP?’ Logan nodded and Rennie shuffled the other way, MP5 up to his shoulder like a sniper. ‘Now put the knife down and no one else needs to get hurt.’

‘You’re familiar with the concept of IEDs, aren’t you, Sergeant? Well, I’m wearing an improvised explosive device right now, and all it takes is one little twitch and we all end up spread across the fucking walls, ceiling, floor… You get the picture. Now be good little officers and do what you’re told.’

Sergeant: the man in the SOC suit recognized him. He’d been right, it was Peterson.

‘Can’t do that, Craig. Put the knife down.’

‘Ah…’ He stared at the floor for a moment. ‘I’m not “Craig”, my name’s Roger. And if you don’t do what I tell you, every-one’s going to die.’ He rocked the bloody knife back and forth, leaving a red line across Alison’s throat. ‘Starting with Goldilocks here.’

She bared her teeth. ‘He’s lying.’

‘Shut up.’

‘He doesn’t have a bomb.’

Craig/ROGER laughed. ‘Believe me, you can’t trust a single word she says.’

‘Shoot him. He wasn’t going to let us go, he was always going to kill us both!’

‘I really, really need an ambulance…’

‘Guv?’ Rennie shifted right another pace. ‘Got a firing solution.’

‘Come on Craig, give it up. No one has to die.’

The white SOC suit rustled. ‘You spoke to Vicious Vikki, right? She tell you the squirrel story? When she was ten, Alison here made some squirrel traps, caught about six of them in the woods behind her house. Know what she did with them?’

‘Just put the knife down and we can all walk out of here.’

‘She drowned them in a bucket. One by one. Lined the traps up so they could watch their mates dying. That’s the kind of person she is — a complete fucking psycho.’

‘He’s lying.’

‘Think that’s bad? Ask her what happened to Doddy’s parents. They hated her: who wants a gold-digging sociopath marrying their son?’

‘It was an accident!’

‘Sure it was. Come on, Sergeant, who do you think told David to torch your flat.’

Logan stared at him. ‘What?’

‘You heard.’ ROGER tilted his head to one side. ‘Now back — the fuck — up, both of you, and get me that car, or I slit her throat and we go through the whole thing again with the brat.’

He jiggled the knife again and blood seeped down Alison’s neck.

‘Aaagh…’

‘Don’t hurt my mummy!’ Jenny grabbed the hand wrapped in her hair and yanked. Then sank her teeth into ROGER’s leg.

‘Fucking bitch!’

He must have loosened his grip, because Alison twisted to the side, driving her elbow into his stomach. A grunt.

Roger slashed the knife at her, but she was out of reach. Rennie lunged forward, going for Jenny, but ROGER hauled her back — off her feet, the two of them thumping back into the boarded-up window. Now the SOC suited figure was cornered, the knife glinting in a slice of golden sunlight.

Logan pushed Alison behind him, keeping the gun pointing straight at ROGER’s face. ‘On your knees, now.’

Roger cleared his throat, then lowered the blade. ‘It was her idea. All of it. She-’

A loud boom reverberated around the room. Logan flinched. Jenny screamed. Rennie swore.

Red blossomed in the middle of Roger’s chest.