Blackstone's pursuits

In which Hansel and Gretel are right up against it in the forest

He stood there, wrists limp no longer; instead he was tall, surprisingly wide-shouldered, narrow-waisted, and very trim in a beautifully cut jacket. There was no trace at all of the effete character we had met in the Lyceum rehearsal room. This Rawdon Brooks looked very dangerous, and I had no doubt at all that he was.

‘So you made it at last, little people,’ he said in a fruity, friendly voice, loud enough for Berner to hear through the open door. ‘Come on and I’ll tell you about the change of plan.’ He was dressed immaculately, grey slacks accompanying his jacket. Again I flashed back to our first meeting, and realised what a consummate actor the man was. ‘Which is the real him?’ I asked myself, until I saw the answer in his eyes.

His hands were clasped together in front of him, with an overcoat draped over them. He flicked the coat to one side, letting us see the silenced gun. After that we weren’t about to argue. Her jerked his head towards the door. Prim, white-faced, walked past him and opened it, and we stepped out into the street.

All that stuff about being safe in a crowd, God, what rubbish that is. Brooks stepped close behind us and dug the gun into my back. ‘Right,’ he said in a voice that, suddenly, wasn’t at all friendly. ‘Walk in front of me, Oz. Primavera, take his arm. Now young man, remember this. You do just one thing wrong, and she gets it first, then you. Now do as I say. Walk!’

I could tell he wasn’t in a negotiating mood. I walked, with Prim holding my arm, keeping the leisurely pace of a tourist, making certain that I didn’t do anything wrong. He walked in silence until we reached the end of Rue Berner. ‘Turn left,’ said Rawdon. We did as we were told. All of a sudden, the pavement was even more crowded, but narrower. Brooks moved up alongside me. ‘Right, Miss Phillips,’ he said. ‘Now it’s the other way around. You do anything wrong and Oz gets it first, then you.

‘Now we’re going down this road until the next traffic lights, then we cross.’

As we walked, I realised that something strange had happened. The hamster wasn’t running around in my stomach any more. Instead it felt as if it was encased in a block of ice. I had passed way beyond plain scared; now I knew what truly terrified felt like. I think I may have spoken to him to stop myself from passing out. ‘Tell us, Rawdon,’ I said. ‘What tale did you spin Berner?’

He laughed, but it was as cold as his voice. There was triumph in it, triumph over me, triumph over Prim. He had my girl and me in his power and suddenly I hated him for it. Truly, I’d never hated anyone in my life before. The ice began to melt. Something I had been told years before by a soldier pal came back to me. ‘Anger overcomes fear.’ It doesn’t, but it helps. I concentrated on my hatred as hard as I could.

‘That was so easy,’ he said, maddeningly self-confident. ‘One is an actor after all. It’s one’s job to make people believe. I told him that I was a policeman on an Interpol operation with two Special Branch colleagues. We were off to pay off an informer who’d helped us round up some terrorists. I told him that the money was in the account that poor little Kane used dear Dawn to set up.

‘I said that I’d travelled down first, and that you two would come down later with the banknote, pick up the cash and then rendezvous with me in a hotel in Lausanne. Only your car had broken down on the way, and I wasn’t sure when you’d arrive, so I’d cancelled the hotel in Lausanne and come to meet you at the bank.

‘I arranged with Berner to give you a little surprise. He’d allow me to wait in his anteroom until you two arrived, then when you’d done our business, he’d press his bell and I’d appear out of nowhere. It worked a treat, didn’t it! One of my better productions, I’d say. It certainly gave my audience a start.’

Suddenly it all came back to me, what Dawn had said about him, and the College of Cardinals. ‘Willie Kane cried it all out on your shoulder, didn’t he. At the theatre club. He told you what he’d done for Dawn, about the bank account, about the money he’d stolen, about the key. Gay men are such good listeners after all, aren’t you!’

We had reached the traffic lights, and the crossing indicator was flashing. ‘Go on,’ he said digging me in the ribs with the gun. ‘Right,’ he said, once we were on the other side of the street, ‘that’s where we’re going, to that park down there. So we can decide what to do with you.’ He added that as an afterthought, but we both knew that he’d made up his mind.

‘You really are a good detective, Oz,’ he said. He was rubbing his power into us now, the bastard. ‘That’s just what happened.’

‘But how did you get into Prim’s flat? When I phoned, it was a woman who answered.’

He laughed softly. ‘Did you really think so?’ I thought back. A high voice. An arch tone. But in hindsight, no, not feminine: effeminate.

‘Poor little Willie. When Dawn told him it couldn’t go on he was distraught. He had stolen the money by that time. Even if he had given it back, his career would have been over. If he’d gone back to that wife of his, she’d have torn out his fingernails as a punishment.’ He paused.

‘She was there, you know, on the night. Just as I parked my car she came out, looking furious, having given the errant husband one last piece of her mind.

‘The little chap asked me to come and see him, you know. He hadn’t a clue what he wanted any more. So I persuaded him that he needed something new, something different. I told him to get undressed, lie down, and close his eyes, and that I’d make everything all right.’ He laughed, an awful cold sound. ‘And didn’t I just.’

Geneva, they say, is famous for its parks, and the one towards which we were heading was probably its biggest, with a wide grassy area leading up to thick woodland. It was the middle of the afternoon, and for all its size it was uncomfortably empty. The forest seemed to go on for ever, and it looked very dark indeed. I suspected that on the other side there was nothing but the lake, since, above the tree-line, I could see the spume of the great Geneva fountain. All in all, it didn’t look like the sort of place where you’d want to go with a man with a gun. But we had no choice: Brooks shoved us roughly through the gates.

‘But you didn’t find the fiver, Rawdon, did you?’ I said, as we stumbled towards the woods.

‘No indeed. Hard as I looked. And I never would, but for the strangest piece of luck. The very next night, dear PC McArthur came to the club. He was actually smiling! Unusual for him. I asked him what the joke was, and he said that his inspector was in terrible trouble because he had allowed a witness to take a piece of evidence away from a murder scene. A five pound note he said. A young couple, he said.

‘And then, the morning after, you come barging into the Lyceum, all bright-eyed and full of investigative zeal. I had the whole picture then.’

We were more than halfway across the grass, nearing the woods. ‘That policeman who questioned you before us,’ said Prim. ‘He never existed, did he?’

Brooks laughed. ‘Of course not. Just a little something to set you off a-worrying about little sister.

‘Once I knew you had the note, I knew that eventually, you’d wind up here. With the company in recess, it was just a matter of coming down here and waiting. Although I did think you’d have got here sooner.’

‘So what happens now?’ asked Primavera, direct as always. It was a question I’d been avoiding.

‘Ferry crossings are really insecure things, you know,’ said Brooks. ‘You can take an unlicensed gun abroad in a car without worrying about being searched. You can even take really high quality heroin through, and a hypodermic.’

‘A bit of a junkie,’ Dawn had said. ‘So that’s it.’ I think I may have snarled at him. ‘We’re going to have an overdose.’ A picture flashed, unbidden into my mind: that poor dead lassie from years back, in that close, with me, in uniform, on guard at its mouth. I could see her, as clear as day.

‘Precisely. You’ll just be another couple of dead addicts. And when they find you, sooner or later, there’ll be nothing to identify you. I think there are foxes in there too.’

We had reached the woods. ‘Right, Hansel and Gretel, hold hands and go on ahead. But don’t forget the gun.’

He drove us on through the trees, like animals. It grew darker and darker in there, with no sign of the other side. The traffic noise was distant, too. No, this was no copse, this was an urban forest.

At last we saw an area up ahead, where the trees seemed to thin, and where more light was allowed in from above. ‘Enough,’ said Brooks. ‘This’ll do. Now: Oz, dear boy, drop the bag. Then, both of you, turn around.’

We did as we were told. The big bastard just stood there, smiling at us, almost laughing. It was the way he was enjoying it, that was what was working on me. He was going to kill Prim, and he was looking forward to it.

He threw his raincoat on the ground and reached into the side pocket of his blazer with his left hand, pulling out a thin metal box. He flicked up the lid with his thumb and held it out for us to see. There it was, right enough, a hypo, primed and ready. ‘I cooked it up in advance,’ he said. ‘There’s enough in there to see you both off, believe me. It’s a relic of a rogue consignment I confiscated from a member of the company in Edinburgh last year. The fool was going to take it. It’s quite pure, uncut.’

A slow, wicked, leering smile, spread across his face. ‘Right, to the performance. Oh, how I love live theatre!

‘Let’s see. Who goes first?’ He looked at us, from me, to Prim, and back again. ‘You, Oz, you’ve drawn the lucky bag. Primavera and I will be your audience. But worry not; it will be only a short time, before you are together again.

‘Come here, both of you.’ We stepped towards him. Fear was beginning to conquer anger, after all. Death is helluva final, when you look at it up close. He held the box out to Prim, keeping the gun on me.

‘Take it,’ he said, smoothly. ‘Dawn told me that you are a nurse, so find a vein and give him half of the barrel.’

Prim looked mesmerised as she took the syringe from its cottonwool bed. She stared at it as she held it up. She gave it a wee squeeze, like they do in the movies, sending some of the juice spraying upwards. She beckoned me. ‘Come here darling,’ she said, softly, hypnotically. I felt myself drawn to her. The ice was melted, the hamster had gone. I sensed rather than saw Brooks looking at me, anticipating.

And then, quick as a cat, she jammed the syringe into the fleshy base of his right hand, and started to depress the plunger.

He screamed in pain, and dropped the gun. He stared down in horror as the syringe began to empty. Suddenly he unfroze. He tore his wounded hand away from her and yanked the needle out, throwing it as far from him as he could.

I remember once reading an article by some journalist on the tender topic of male sterilisation. Arguing in favour, he wrote that the after-effects of the procedure were no longer-lasting and no worse than a sharp blow in the stones from a soccer ball. Clearly this was a man who had never played football.

I remember my Dad once saying of an infamous serial killer, ‘Hanging’s too good for that bastard. It’s a good kick in the balls he needs.’

And that, right there in the heart of the Geneva woods, was what I gave Rawdon Brooks, as he stood staring at his hand. Only it wasn’t; it was worse than that. I gave him, left, right and centre, the legendary Oz Blackstone toe-poke, which may not look elegant, but when perfectly delivered, as this one was, can send the ball, plural in this case, flying further, straighter and faster than the finest instep delivery. I’ll never know for sure, but I like to think that I tore them clean off.

He didn’t scream. He howled. It was a primal sound, like a bear with its paw caught in a man-trap. I saw Prim staring at him, her mouth wide open in awe at the depths of his agony.

For good measure, as he stood there, clutching his person, knees turned in in the classic manner, I stuck the head on him. I’m not as good at that as I am at the toe-poke, but this was a pretty fair example. My forehead caught him on the left cheekbone, stunning me slightly and rocking him backwards.

I waited for him to go down, as reason told me he must. I stood back and waited for him to crumple. I mean he was a man, and I’d just nailed him with a blow from which not even the strongest guy can recover.

Yet he was still on his feet, the great bastard. His eyes were rolling, his cheek was swelling, his chest was heaving, but he was still on his feet. He reminded me bizarrely of Charles Laughton after his flogging in Hunchback, only Esmeralda was nowhere in sight. As I stood there watching him, I became transfixed. When his hand shot out and caught me round the throat, I didn’t move. It wasn’t until he began to squeeze that I realised how strong he was. Within a second or two my eyes began to swim. My hands went to his wrist, but his grip was locked on tight.

I was thinking about nothing other than him, and dying. The two muffled plops from my left hardly registered. What did register was Brooks’ hand loosening its grip as he straightened up and fell backwards. His blazer had fallen open, and I saw the sudden bloom of red on his chest.

I looked behind me. Primavera stood there, as I had never seen her before. Her hands were locked together around the run in a markswoman’s grip. Her eyes were cold and hard. And then all at once, they softened, and she started to shake.

I grabbed the gun from her and jammed it into a side pocket of the satchel. On the ground, Brooks rolled over, scrambling around, trying to get to his feet. Christ, was there no stopping this guy!

‘Come on!’ I yelled at Primavera, dragging her back to the real world. ‘Let’s go!’ I grabbed the satchel, and realised for the first time that I still had that stupid duffel bag slung over my shoulder. I threw it away and grabbed her hand, pulling her behind me as we plunged out of the wood, back towards the green space of the park. For a while I thought we were lost, but at last we saw light ahead. As we cleared the woods, we looked at each other. Behind us we could hear the crashing of pursuit.

‘Come on!’ said Prim this time. ‘Let’s get back to the car. He doesn’t know where that is, or what it looks like.’

‘Can you remember the way?’

‘I think so. Come on. Run!’ We raced off across the grass, towards the gates. Handicapped as I was by the weight of the bag, I could still keep pace with Prim. Or maybe she was hanging back for me; I didn’t have the breath to ask her.

We had turned into the street and were racing along the pavement when I looked back over the fence into the park and saw our pursuer break out of the woods. It wasn’t a run as much as a shamble, more like Quasimodo than ever. His left eye was closed tight, and his shirt front was soaked in blood. He was loping along, almost doubled over, but he was loping helluva fast.

‘Leg it, for Christ’s sake,’ I gasped. ‘Here comes the Devil and he is pissed off!’

We sprinted through the pedestrians, knocking the wee ones aside, excusing ourselves around others. From the sounds of outrage behind us, I guessed that Brooks was clearing everyone out of his way. ‘Why isn’t the heroin stopping him, if it was meant to kill us?’ I gasped.

‘Because I just stuck it in his hand, not in a vein. Just shut up and run!’

When we reached the traffic lights, the pedestrian crossing was showing the red man sign, and the vehicles were flowing fast and freely. I grabbed Prim’s hand and tugged her along the pavement, off towards the next corner and Rue Berner, looking, searching as we ran, for a gap in the traffic. At last, a chance appeared. We darted out between two cars, did a frantic shimmy in the middle of the road and made it to the other side.

We stopped, and looked back. Brooks was glaring at us across the street. His good eye looked wild, and his chest was heaving, but his eyes were still dead set on us. ‘God, the heroin must be fuelling him,’ gasped Prim.

If it was, it made him start straight across the road after us, looking neither right nor left.

If you’ve ever heard a dog, a big dog, being hit by a vehicle, you never forget the sound. But if you’ve ever heard the noise of a human being run over by a big vehicle, that’s something that will give you nightmares for weeks afterwards.

There’s the squeal of brakes and the awful thump, but then there’s a tearing, dragging, cracking, crushing sound, and an awful last gasp. We were legging it up the pavement, when we heard it all. Gradually we slowed to a halt, like we were in a film and the camera was breaking down, until, reluctantly, we turned around.

It was a tourist bus, from Bathgate, of all places. When we saw him, Brooks was still moving under its wheels, his head and bloody chest sticking out. The rest of him was hidden, fortunately, under the bus, but around him, a crimson pool was starting to spread.

Instinctively, Primavera started towards him, but I took her hand, holding her back. ‘No, honey,’ I said, as gently as I could. ‘You’re not a nurse any more, remember. We’ve won. Now let’s just get ourselves out of here.

‘You and I are going home. I don’t know about you, but I am absolutely knackered.’