Bleed for Me (46 page)

El is is only feet away from the door of the van.

‘It’s not the one.’

I can hear Cray grinding her teeth. She presses her radio. ‘Hold your positions. Nobody move.’

El is has reached the door. He motions to put a key in the lock and then turns, skipping across the narrow tarmac road, disappearing from view.

Safari Roy: ‘Mobile One, I’ve lost visual contact.’

‘Mobile Two, I can’t see target.’

‘Does anyone have a visual?’ asks Cray, growing agitated.

The answers come back negative. Cursing, she makes a decision. She wants the park sealed off, locked down, nobody in or out.

Running in a low crouch, I return to the car and ask Kieran to bring up the satel ite image again. Studying the layout, I run my finger in a rough circle around the screen.

‘Where are you going?’ asks Kieran.

‘For a walk.’

My left leg is jerking and my arms don’t swing in unison, but it’s good to be outside, moving. Fol owing the main road, I walk past Brean Leisure Park and then vault a low brick wal , heading in the direction of the beach. There are caravans on either side of the narrow road and more down cross-streets. Occasional y, I turn and look for the canopy of the merry-go-round.

I take out my mobile and punch Cray’s number. Almost in the same heartbeat, I see Gordon El is emerge from a row of trees about forty yards away. In a half-run he disappears behind a shower block and emerges again, stopping at the last caravan.

Without waiting, he unscrews the lid from the petrol can and begins dousing the wal s and windows, swinging the plastic container in long arcs that send liquid as high as the roof.

‘Hel o, Gordon.’

He turns, holding the petrol can at arm’s length. His other hand reaches behind his back and produces a pistol from beneath his sweatshirt. It must have been tucked into his belt, nestled against his spine.

‘I assume you’re not alone,’ he says.

‘No.’

‘So you brought the police.’

‘You did that al by yourself.’

I can see him calculating the odds, pondering an escape route. There is a movement in the scrubby hedge behind him. Safari Roy is hunkered down, talking on his radio, summoning back-up.

‘You’re different from the others,’ says El is.

‘What others?’

‘The police. They want to know how, but you want to know why. You’re desperate to know. You want to know if I was abused as a child; if I was buggered by some uncle or the Parish priest. Did I lose my mother? Did I wet the bed? Did she make me sleep in soiled sheets? You think there has to be cause and effect - and that’s your weakness. There’s nothing to understand. I’m a hunter. It’s how we al started. It’s how we al survived. It’s how we evolved.’

‘Some of us have evolved a bit further than others.’ I want to keep moving to stop my legs from locking up. ‘Tel me something, Gordon. Were you grooming Charlie?’

He gives me a crocodile smile. ‘What did you do to that poor girl? She’s a timid little kitten.’

‘She’s had a rough few years.’

He nods. ‘I can tel . I thought somebody had got to her first.’

That same smile again. He’s goading me.

Almost in the same breath, I hear Cray’s voice over a megaphone, demanding that he put the gun down and raise his hands above his head. El is swings around and hurls the petrol container in my direction, where it bounces end over end.

He turns and puts a key into the lock. Behind him I can see Safari Roy emerge from cover, running hard, his gun drawn. Cray is yel ing, ‘Move! Move!’

The van door swings open and the air seems to wobble like God is shaking the camera. I see a puff of dirty smoke, grey like the sea, and then feel the pressure wave created by the bomb. Gordon El is is blown backwards, like the scene is playing in reverse, speeded up.

The caravan disintegrates from within - windows shooting outwards, the roof lifting off, wal s splintering into a jigsaw of flying debris - a sink, a toilet, cupboard doors, plastic, stainless steel, reels, spindles - blasting across the park, tumbling to earth.

A hail of metal fragments, nails or bal bearings that must have been packed around the explosives, are sent hurtling outwards, punching holes through fibreglass and flesh.

Knocked from her feet, Ronnie Cray picks herself up. Running. Her hair wet with blood. A nail embedded in her shoulder. She yel s into her radio, deafened by the blast and unable to moderate her voice. She wants paramedics.

El is had a darkroom. The explosion has ignited the chemicals on the inside and the petrol on the outside creating an orange bal that boils up and evaporates in a wave of smoke and debris. Scraps of photographs, torn paper, twisted negatives and scorched contact sheets are carried by the breeze, clinging to branches and shrubs, skipping across the grass.

Two caravans are burning - one on its side and the other pocked like a Swiss cheese. Roy is lying between them. Monk gets to him first. He signals to me. The front of Roy’s shirt is soaked in blood. I rip it off and see half a dozen puncture wounds. Two of the nails are stil embedded in his chest.

Someone hands me a first-aid kit. I pul out bandages and dressing, instructing Monk what to do. Roy is conscious and cracking jokes to Ronnie Cray.

‘Hey, boss, I’m taking a few weeks off. I’m going to buy ten boxes of condoms and work my way through them.’

‘You’d be better off buying ten lottery tickets,’ she replies.

‘You think I’m that lucky?’

‘I think you’re that
unlucky
.’

Crouching next to me, she pul s the nail from her shoulder and squeezes a bandage beneath her bra strap.

‘He should be OK,’ I say, looking around for more wounded. The nearest caravan has had its side ripped away. Gordon El is is lying in the wreckage. One arm is reaching out for something while the other is only a spike of bone jammed into a wal .

The skin on his face has been peeled away and one eye is a bloody hole. I look at his chest, which has been crushed by the blast. He’s dying. He can go in seconds or a few hours, but he’s going.

I tel him to hold on, the paramedics are coming, a helicopter . . .

His one good eye is staring at me and words bubble in his throat. ‘You have a fatal curiosity.’

‘I’m not the one who’s dying.’

His tongue appears, licking at the blood on his lips. Can he taste death?

‘Who did this?’

He sucks in a ragged breath and coughs.

‘I wasn’t useful any more.’

He’s talking about Novak Brennan.

‘Why were you helping him?’

‘Novak col ects people.’

‘He blackmails them?’

‘He’s a hard man to refuse.’

El is grimaces. His teeth are like pieces of broken ceramic sticking from his gums.

‘What about Ray Hegarty?’

‘The girl must have kil ed him.’

‘No. There was someone else in the house that night waiting for Sienna. You wanted to silence her.’

‘Why would I bother? I
owned
her.’

I can hear sirens in the distance, getting closer. His blood is running between my fingers, over my hands. Ebbing away.

Something brushes my shoulder - a scorched photograph, blown by the breeze from the roof of the caravan. A black-and-white image of a naked girl, snap-frozen, my daughter’s best friend, with her arms bound to her ankles and her body, arched backwards. Exposed. Obscene. Unconscious.

I look at El is.

I look at my hands.

I walk away.

Rotors flash in the sunshine, beating the air, pushing it aside. Faces appear at the windows of the air ambulance. A door slides open and paramedics sprint across the swirling sand, their hair flattened by the downdraught.

Ronnie Cray is yel ing orders and barking into her mobile. Scotland Yard is sending a team from Counter Terrorism Command and the Bomb Squad, while Louis Preston has also been summoned.

The blades of the chopper are spinning more slowly. Safari Roy and Gordon El is are strapped to litters and I watch them being carried to the helicopter. There’s room for one more.

Cray looks nervously at the rumbling chopper. ‘You go with them. I hate those things.’

‘What about your shoulder?’

‘I’m fine. I’m needed here.’

The last of the litters is lifted into the chopper.

‘Why booby-trap the van?’ she asks.

‘El is had become a liability. He was attracting too much unwanted attention.’

‘So Brennan ordered this?’

‘He’s tying up loose ends.’

‘Did El is say anything about Ray Hegarty?’

‘He says he didn’t kil him.’

Cray doesn’t look at me, but I know what she’s thinking.

‘What about the trial? Are you going to stop it?’

‘That’s not your concern.’

‘Ruiz says it could cost you your career.’

‘It might not come to that.’

She pauses and gazes past me along the beach to where a wooden lighthouse on stilts seems to be trapped between the waves and the shore. The daylight is behind her.

‘Do you have a lot of friends, Professor?’

‘Not too many. How about you?’

‘Same. Why do you think that is?’

‘I know too much about people.’

‘And you don’t like what you see?’

‘Not a lot.’

She nods judiciously. ‘Decency is badly undersold.’ Her eyes are jittering with light and her lips move uncertainly. ‘I went to see Judge Spencer last night. I showed him a photograph of Sienna. I was sure he was going to deny it. I thought that underneath the robes and wig he’d prove to be just another lawyer who knows how to play the game - deny, deny, deny or say nothing at al .’

Cray runs a hand through her bristled hair. Dust and debris cling to her palm.

‘What did he say?’

‘He said he didn’t know she was only fourteen. He uses an escort agency occasional y when his wife is away. Same old story - lust, desire and the lure of forbidden fruit.’

‘What’s he going to do?’

She shakes her head. ‘Hopeful y, the right thing.’

She points towards the chopper. The engines are revving and the rotors accelerating. A helmeted co-pilot gives a thumbs-up.

‘You’d better go.’

Fine sand blasts against my trousers and my face as I run in a crouch and hoist myself on board. Seconds later my stomach lurches and the tail of the helicopter lifts. We leave the earth and swiftly rise, watching caravans shrink to the size of toy building blocks and the roads become black ribbons.

Higher stil , we’re above the whitecaps and rocky shore, higher than the Mendip Hil s and the patchwork fields, where everything is bathed in lustrous sunshine that makes a mockery of al that is dark about the day.

51

Frenchay Hospital on the northern outskirts of Bristol was built in the grounds of a former Georgian mansion, a sanatorium for children with TB back in the 1920s, when lung diseases were as Welsh as male voice choirs.

Little of the old seems to remain. The A&E is decorated in primary colours with modular furniture, cushions and even bean-bags. The Intensive Care Unit is on the ground floor, along a wide corridor that squeaks beneath the rubber-soled shoes of the nurses.

There have been too many hospitals lately and the smel seems to stick to the inside of my nostrils, reminding me of my childhood. I grew up around places like this, one of a long line of surgeons until I broke the mould and quit medicine in my third year. My father, God’s-personal-physician-in-waiting, has only just forgiven me.

The metal doors swing open and a smal Asian woman appears. Dressed in green surgical scrubs, she has a short hair, a round face and teeth as white as brand-new. Her name is Dr Chou and she has a Birmingham accent and honey-coloured eyes.

‘The detective is out of any danger. We removed fragments from his bowel, but his other major organs seem to have escaped serious damage. We’re going to X-ray him again to make sure we haven’t missed any shrapnel.’

She consults a clipboard. ‘I can’t give you similar news about Gordon El is.’

She begins listing the extent of his injuries, but most of the details wash over me except for her final statement: ‘Basical y we can’t stop the bleeding. X-rays also show there is a nail embedded in his spine and he has no sensation below the neck.’

She pauses, wanting to be sure that I understand what she’s saying.

‘Right now he’s on life support and receiving constant blood transfusions. We’re going to wait for his wife to get here before we turn off the machines.’

A rotund priest with a shining dome emerges from the ICU, searching for someone to comfort. He spies a T-shirted teenager in the corner who holds up a magazine as if he wishes it were a force field. Elsewhere, a waif-like couple huddle together as if conserving body heat. The boy has a ring through his eyebrow and the girl has a dozen studs in her ears.

‘I’d like to see him,’ I say.

‘Mr El is won’t be able to speak to you.’

‘I know.’

After scrubbing my hands, I fol ow Dr Chou through a heavy noiseless door. My eyes take a moment to adjust to the semi-darkness. Only the beds are brightly lit, as though under interrogation by the machines. Gordon El is lies on a trol ey bed with metal sides. His eyes are bandaged over and his mouth and nose are hidden beneath a mask. Blood is leaking through the bandages on his chest and arms.

For a moment I think he might already be dead, but I see his chest move and the mask fog with condensation and then clear again.

Dr Chou lays a cool finger on my wrist. She has to leave. I stand away from the bed, not wanting to move any closer. Machines hum. Blood circulates. Tubes, wires and probes snake across the sheets and twist above his body leading to plastic pouches or monitors.

An intensive care nurse is perched on a padded stool amid the machines. She regards me with genial acquiescence, wondering why I’m standing in the half-darkness. She doesn’t understand what I’ve witnessed or comprehend the questions I stil have.

Novak Brennan must have known about Gordon’s fondness for underage girls and his ability to groom them. He also may have known about the caravan - El is’s perverted chamber of secrets.

Blackmailing El is was the easy part. Corrupting a County Court judge was more chal enging. Court appointments are published in advance of a trial, which gave Novak time to investigate Judge David Spencer and discover his penchant for prostitutes, particularly young, innocent-looking, fresh-faced girls. Sienna Hegarty fitted the bil - she was underage, a schoolgirl. Gordon could provide her.