A Reason to Kill (4 page)

The buzzer sounded again, like an irate wasp in a bottle. He could have answered the intercom on the wall and pressed the button to disengage the lock on the outer door, but elected to go down to let her in. It seemed more mannerly.

The Clozapine was kicking in. He felt relaxed, and the hallucinatory episode of butchering the nurse had helped him to internalise his anger. He was now mellow, primed to play her pathetic mind games.

“And how are we today?” Marion asked, almost pushing past him as he opened the door to greet her with what he felt to be an amiable smile.

Always the royal
we
. As if that somehow inferred they were Team Noon. “I’m feeling well, Marion. How are you?” he replied, not caring how she was.

“I’m fine, Gary. Thank you for asking,” she said, heading for the stairs. He followed, marvelling at how her massive buttocks were somehow contained within the too-tight skirt she wore.

She entered the flat as though she owned it, and lowered herself into one of the armchairs, testing the creaking frame to its limit.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” he asked.

“That would be nice, Gary,” she said, opening a buff document wallet to withdraw his personal notes and care plan details.

He went into the kitchen, a smile on his face as he filled the kettle and switched it on. She was so transparent. Her eyes had flitted over the front of his shorts, feasting on the bulge at his crotch that was enhanced by the wearing of a cock ring that tightly encompassed his genitals. And no doubt as he turned away, she had also eyeballed his tight buns. Should he incite her to seduce him? Screwing her was something he had deliberated over for months. She would be a worthwhile ally, who he could manipulate even more if she was infatuated with him. He determined to set up his old video camera in the bedroom to record their antics through a gap he would leave between two doors of the wall-length wardrobe. That would put the shoe firmly on the other foot. With the control shifted, he would dictate all future aspects of their relationship.

“There you go, Marion,” he said, placing the freshly brewed cup of Earl Grey on the glass-topped coffee table in front of her, before sitting down on the settee with his legs open to allow her to make what she would of the provocative pose. He was surprised to feel aroused to the point of discomfort beneath the stretched denim.

THERE
were eight beds in the main area of the ICU, all in sight of the nurses from the semicircular station at the rear of the unit. Matt was one of the patients, attached to a cardiac monitor, intravenous drips that provided him with antibiotics and glucose, and a bifurcated oxygen tube clipped to his septum. He was unconscious. His skin was slate grey, eyes sunken and underlined by puce, crescent smudges. He looked dead.

The young male nurse brought a plastic contour chair for Linda. Tom accompanied her to the bedside and looked Matt over. Didn’t like what he saw.

“I need a smoke,” Tom said. “I’ll see you back in the waiting room.”

Outside, well away from the main doors of the hospital, Tom fired up, dragged deeply on the cigarette, and stared out from under the concrete overhang at the summer rain that still sheeted down from a sullen sky.

He was shaky, and felt weak and tired to the bone. Stunned disbelief was still the strongest emotion he felt. This wasn’t America, where cops met violent ends with sickening regularity. The shooting of police officers was still an extremely rare occurrence in Britain. That five of his men had been gunned down that morning was almost inconceivable. Donny Campbell had been married for less than a year, for Christ’s sake. And his wife, Kath, was pregnant. The kid would be born fatherless. Bernie Mellors was divorced, but had been very close to his two daughters. Keith Collins and Tony Pybus were single, though that was of little solace. How many lives had been affected by their deaths? How many hearts broken? Wives, children, parents, significant others and friends would have to face a wall of grief and find a way to accommodate it. It was a fucking catastrophe. And knowing that Frank Santini would be laughing at them made it even worse. Tom’s brain burned with a white-hot wire of anger. Even a young couple next door to the supposed safe house had been shot. The man was dead, but his wife had survived, though was in a critical condition. The bullet had struck her at an angle, glanced off her skull, fracturing it, but had been deflected enough to travel around the outside of her cranium, under the skin and hair, to almost tear her right ear off as it exited. There had also been a baby boy in the house, found unharmed. If the mother lived, then at least she still had her son. Tom supposed that his survival would be some measure of consolation. The kid wouldn’t be an orphan.

Dropping the cigarette end and grinding it out with the sole of his shoe, Tom promised himself that Santini would get what was coming to him, and sooner rather than later. Even the mighty fall eventually, and Frank Santini would be no exception. His days were numbered.

Back inside, grimacing at the antiseptic smell that hit him as the automatic doors slid back, Tom determined to stay at the hospital until Linda’s mother arrived. She was on her way in from Oxford, and should be there within the hour. He would then head back to the Yard, write up his report and steel himself against the bollocking that the brass would subject him to. He just hoped he could grit his teeth and not tell the dickheads into what dark and unwholesome places they could shove their slings and arrows.

Linda put her hand over Matt’s. It was clammy, not the marble cold she had expected. “You’re going to be fine, Matt,” she said. “I’ll be here with you until you wake up.” Could he hear her?, she wondered. Maybe not, but she talked to him anyway, about everything in general and nothing in particular. She had read somewhere that even people in comas sometimes responded to the outside stimulation of voices or music. And Matt was not comatose. Every so often, she went back to the waiting room. Her mother arrived and fussed too much, as usual. Tom left, promising to return as soon as he could. Linda didn’t care whether he did or not. Bartlett meant well, but was part of the problem that had led to this.

It was two-thirty the following morning when Matt’s fingers twitched and then tightened round her hand. She gasped, shocked by the unexpected movement. And her stomach cramped as his eyelids slowly opened. Would he still be Matt? What if his brain had been damaged and he had no awareness of his surroundings, or of anything?

“Matt, are you all right?” she asked.

His eyes found hers. He blinked and frowned as he fought to focus. Swallowed hard, and felt nauseous from the residue of the meds.

A male nurse appeared at the bedside with what looked to be a kiddies’ plastic beaker, complete with lid and spout. “Just take a couple of sips,” he said, slipping one hand gently beneath Matt’s head to elevate it slightly, as he placed the spout to his lips.

“Donny? The others?” Matt whispered, after the cool water had moistened his mouth and throat.

Linda could not summon the words, but her expression answered for her.

Matt closed his eyes again, but was unable to hold back the tears that forced their way out onto his cheeks.

“I’m so sorry,” Linda said, her fingers smoothing his hair back from where it lay damp on his brow.

Matt’s teeth were clenched, his cheek muscles bunched. He let the horror sink in. The facts were simple. Professionals had walked in like some bloody terrorist group on a mission, and coldly blown away everyone in the house, bar him. More by luck than good judgement, he had survived. Going for a piss had saved his life. Had he gone before Donny, then it would have been him that ended up wasted with the others. He pushed all the pointless ifs to the back of his mind. One thing was
not
an if, it was a definite. He would get past what had happened to his team by nurturing the anger and finding those responsible. Nothing could put things right. Dead was dead. But retribution would go a long way to even things up and bring about some measure of closure.

First things first. “How am I doing?” he asked Linda.

“It was touch and go for a while,” she answered. “They had you in surgery for hours. You’d lost a lot of blood.”

“And?”

“You...you lost a kidney.”

“You make it sound as if I misplaced it. What else have I lost?”

“That’s it. You get to joust at windmills again another day, when you’ve healed up,” she said with a sharper edge to her voice than intended.

There was something distant about her. He sensed a farrago of emotions, and one approximated that of a woman sickened by her partner’s constant philandering. She was acting the way a wife might, having found lipstick on one collar too many. He had the premonition that, not at this time while he was in an intensive care unit, but soon, when he was fitter, she would deliver an ultimatum. Her eyes and body language said that he was in the last chance saloon.

“Are we in trouble?” he asked.

“Yes, Matt. Think of this as time out. You need to know that I couldn’t go through it again. I love you too much to spend my life waiting for another knock at the door. Maybe I just haven’t got the strength of character to sit on the sidelines of a copper’s life.”

“You’re asking me to quit the force?”

“No, I didn’t say that. I’m suggesting that you look at your priorities. If playing cops and robbers is something that you can’t walk away from, then I don’t think we have what it takes to be a couple.”

As if on cue, to leave the subject hanging like the sword of Damocles over them, the Badger, Dr. Lawson, swept into the unit with the air of James Robertson Justice in the old ‘Doctor’ movies.

Linda bobbed her head and kissed Matt on the forehead, not his lips. “I’ll be out in the waiting room,” she said. “My mother came, and Tom Bartlett is back. He stayed with me for hours. They’ll both want to know that you’re back in the land of the living.”

“How’re you doing, Inspector? I’m Dr. Lawson. I patched up your bullet-ridden body.”

“You tell me how I’m doing, Doc. I’m a cop, not a medical student. And call me Matt.”

“You got away with it, Matt. One bullet nicked your femoral artery and fractured your femur. The other pulverised your left kidney. The resulting shock and blood loss nearly killed you. And there was a chance you might have suffered brain damage, due to oxygen loss to the brain. We still need to do a few tests, but I think you beat the odds this time. The belt around your thigh was a lifesaver”

“What about the kidney?”

Sam Lawson grinned. “It was delicious. I had it lightly sautéed with fava beans, and washed it down with a glass of Chianti.”

Matt couldn’t suppress a tight smile. “Very funny, Lecter. I meant
¯”

“I know what you meant. The answer is, you can function quite normally with one kidney. You just haven’t got a backup now, so you’ll have to take care of it.”

“How long will I be in here?”

“I should think we’ll be able to throw you back out on the street in about a week, maybe less. But you’ll be convalescing for a couple of months. Initially, just lay back and let the healing process do its job. No getting out of bed for a few days, until I give the okay. I’m sure the indignity of nurses bearing bedpans will encourage you to get well with all due haste.”

“Thanks, Doc, you’re a prince.”

“I try to please,” Sam said, nodding, and then moving off to another bed, where a woman on a ventilator was passing blood into a colostomy bag that was suspended below the level of the sheet covering her. Matt looked away and thanked God for small mercies.

A few minutes later, Tom came in, by himself. Matt thought he looked ill, more like a patient than a visitor.

“You look how I feel, Matt,” Tom said, parking himself in a chair.

“You don’t look too hot yourself, Tom. Did you get the shooters?”

“To the best of our knowledge, there was only one.”

“
One
?”

“Yeah. And he spent some time in the house next door. Left the couple for dead, but the woman is still hanging in. If she makes it, we might learn some more. Did you see the perp?”

“For an instant. He was young, in his late twenties at a guess. Maybe five-eight or nine. And he was thin. He had weird eyes, black like a fucking white shark’s. Wore a baseball cap and a red top, a fleece, I think.”

“Did he say anything?”

“No, Tom. He came to kill not chitchat. What’s been recovered from the scene to make you think he was alone?”

“Just slugs. Ballistics is working on them, and Ray Baxter over there says preliminary tests point to them all coming from the same silenced 9 millimetre. He thinks the shooter used home-made baffles of steel wool to suppress the sound. The striations bear that out.”

“So Santini sent a pro?”

“Looks that way. The hitter had some balls. He walked up to Keith and Tony in the van and took them out with head shots. Their weapons were still holstered, so they didn’t see it coming. And then he entered the bungalow through the garage and offed everyone but you. He had all the intel.”

“Which means we’ve got a leak. One of our own sold out.”

Tom looked pained, but nodded.

“When I’m back on my feet, I’ll
¯”

“You’ll do nothing, Matt. You’re off this. You know the score. This is up front and personal to you and that gets in the way and clouds judgement.”

“You really believe I’m going to sit back and let Santini, his hired gun, and whoever served us up on a plate walk away from this?”

“Nobody is going to walk away from anything, Matt. And you’ll be kept up to speed. Whatever I get to know, you’ll know. But you aren’t going to work it, and that’s set in fucking stone. Just concentrate on getting back on your feet. You’re going to be laid up for awhile.”

“Okay, Tom. Will you ask Linda to come in?”

“You telling me to go?”

“Yeah. I think we’ve covered it. And I’m hurting. I lost four men that I was close to.”

“You couldn’t have stopped it, Matt. We were set up. So don’t waste time on a guilt trip. How do you think I feel, for Christ’s sake? It was my case.”

The DCI’s words hit home. He realised that Tom was also suffering. “Next time you drop by, bring a bottle of Scotch, huh?”

“In your dreams, Barnes,” Tom said, standing up and heading for the door.

Linda came back in and they talked for a long time. When she left, he knew that it was the beginning of the end for them, as a couple. It was sad, but not really a surprise to him. He’d seen it coming. Even understood her feelings of insecurity and frustration. But the bottom line was, that neither of them could, would, or even should change their personality to try and suit the other. He was too long in the tooth to fool himself that he would be happy to walk away from his chosen profession. You can’t be what you’re not. Being a murder cop was not just what he did for a living, it was who he was and somehow defined him. As she went out through the door of the unit, he felt an emptiness. It was the beginning of a new chapter for both of them. To all intents and purposes he was back on his own again. It was bittersweet. Not having the heavy responsibility for someone else’s happiness was, in a way, liberating. He was an individual, and not the easiest of men to be around. Linda needed more than he could give. She would be far happier with a nine-to-five homebody; some guy who could share her interests and aspirations. That didn’t stop him feeling a deep sense of failure, though. And yet another part of him reviled her for not being able to adjust. Christ, she’d known what he did from the word go. He hadn’t tried to be anything but what he was.

After being moved from the ICU to a private room with an armed officer outside the door, Matt determined to be out of the joint in less than a week. He felt driven, and every second seemed a small eternity. He was channelled, with only one goal. He would not sit idle for long. Santini and his paid assassin had unwittingly thrown down the gauntlet to a man who would not be averse to stepping outside the law if necessary to exact justice by any means, fair or foul.