By a Narrow Majority (12 page)

Hillary shouted helplessly ‘
No
!’ and took a step forward, then stopped herself and grabbed Mel’s arm as he moved to sweep past her.

‘Mel, have some sense!’ she screamed, almost getting her arm torn out of her socket before her friend caught her words and saw the sense behind them. He came to a halt and glanced back at her, his face conflicted, then looked back to the
farmhouse
. Hillary followed his gaze and yelled, ‘
Tommy, stop
!’ as the detective constable ran on ahead. He turned his head to look back at her, and with her free hand she frantically waved at him to get to one side. He was stood in a direct line with the open door, right in the highest concentration of light. ‘Take cover!’ she yelled frantically.

To her enormous relief, Tommy quickly nodded and moved forward, but angled off to one side, flattening himself against the outer wall of the farmhouse.

Mel began to angrily shrug her hand off his arm. ‘I don’t need—’ he began, then abruptly stopped, for the horrified look on Hillary’s face had him turning around to glance once more at the farmhouse.

Coming through the door was a man with a gun. He was a tall man, over six feet, with dark brown hair and what looked like a thick moustache. But he was not dressed in Kevlar.

Hillary’s breath caught in her lungs and stayed there. Her thoughts seemed to move into hyper-speed. He was not dressed in Kevlar, so he was not a cop – he had to be either one of Fletcher’s gang, or one of the Liverpool drug dealers. Somehow, he’d survived the initial TFI sweep and had just gunned his way out of the house.

He was now looking around, like a cornered rat seeking a drainpipe. And Hillary instantly thought about the cars. The cars in the barn were too far away for him to get to quickly. The jeep was parked in the corner and hemmed in. And then, even as the gunman’s eyes turned their way, Hillary thought about the only other two cars around that could give him any hope of an easy getaway. The two cars they’d come in. Parked right behind them outside the gate.

Even as the gunman ran forward, even as he raised his hand, even as she saw the darkness of the gun, glinting like the carapace of a beetle in the artificial light spilling into the courtyard, she knew what was going to happen.

Tommy was safe, being out of sight with his back to the wall, but she and Mel were in plain sight.
And standing right in front of his only means of a getaway.

‘Mel, down!’ Hillary screamed, but even as she spoke she was launching herself sideways, using all of her solid frame to deliberately cannon into her old friend.

Beyond the man running towards them, appearing in the doorway, she saw the blonde head of Janine. Saw her mouth open into a silly ‘O’ of shocked horror. A millisecond later, she thought she saw someone looming up behind Janine, pushing her out of the way.

Then she was crashing into Mel, her hands dragging at the tops of his arms, desperate to get him out of the line of fire. She knew from statistics that men with guns tended to shoot at other men first. Women afterwards. It made sense in a way – they perceived men as the far greater threat.

She felt her feet slither out from under her, and her knees folded as she finally succeeded in pulling him down. The
gunman, who was now running right at them with his arm fully extended, didn’t pause. He simply pulled the trigger.

Hillary heard it as a loud, huge noise, detonating the night and turning, as if by magic, into pain.

Pain in her side, low down. Pain that burned and made her scream in fright. Pain that turned liquid, hot liquid, pouring down her side, down her leg, as she hit the ground, Mel underneath her.

She felt herself roll, and knew she had no strength to do anything about it. It was as if she’d been zapped by a Taser. Her limbs felt weak and useless, her brain giving them messages they simply couldn’t obey. Something was
dreadfully
wrong.

She opened her eyes, but saw the world at an odd angle. Dirty cobbles, and weeds, right in front of her. Then she could see pounding feet – a pair of incongruously well-cleaned boots. Suddenly, she understood.

They belonged to the gunman, still running towards her. Towards
them.
She was helpless – nothing about her body seemed to work anymore. Mel was moving, swearing, trying to get to his feet, so he was OK, but he had no gun. There was nothing to stop the perp from shooting them both, unless all he could think about was getting away; of leaping over them and getting to the car.

But no. They weren’t that lucky. She heard that sound again – the ear-piercing, head-bursting sound of another bullet being fired from a gun. She wanted to yell in fury, to shout at the universe that it wasn’t fair.

But she hadn’t enough breath left to even whimper.

So this was it. This was what it all came down to, just before you died.

Hillary heard Tommy Lynch shout, but the sound seemed to come from very far away. Had he moved from his position by the wall, legged it for the outer fields? No, that didn’t make sense, because his face was right in front of her.

‘Guv, stay still,’ he said, his voice wavering slightly. ‘I’ve called the ambulance up; they’ll be here in a flash. I’m going to put some pressure on your wound. It’ll hurt.’

Hillary nodded – or thought she did. It was hard to tell when she had one side of her face pressed into hard and dirty cobbles. As if he was a mind reader, she felt Mel lift her face to put his jacket under it. ‘Bloody hell, Hill,’ he muttered, his voice as shaky as Tommy’s had been. His hands, as he placed his jacket under her head, were visibly shaking. It was hard to imagine the supercool and immaculate ‘Mellow’ Mallow coming this unglued. Even his trademark nifty suit looked crumpled and stained.

Her throat felt dry, as did the inside of her mouth. She wanted to lick her lips, but couldn’t seem to unglue her tongue from the top of her mouth.

When Tommy moved to one side, she saw a man lying on the ground a few yards away, with one of the Tactical Firearms Unit personnel stood over him, holding a gun to him. Hillary gave a mental nod. OK, the gunman was down. She wasn’t dead. OK, that was all good. She was hurt, because Tommy was talking about a wound, but she was still
conscious, and apart from a fire in her hip and side, she wasn’t in too much pain. That had to be good, too, right?

She’d been wounded in the line of duty before, of course; the worst time, when she’d been sliced with a knife when a drunk who’d been brought in as quiet as a mouse had suddenly gone berserk. It had taken her, the desk sergeant and the two arresting constables to restrain him. She’d remembered a sharp, flickering pain in her arm, and realized she’d been cut only when the dark blue of her uniform sleeve had turned darker and wet. Twenty stitches that had earned her, and a life-long scar, faded now to nothing more than a thin pale line that refused to suntan in the summer.

So, she could get through this as well. Piece of cake, really. She closed her eyes a moment, and heard Mike Regis shouting her name. He sounded desperate, but she couldn’t be
bothered
to open her eyes again. They felt glued shut. What was it with this gluing thing? Hillary frowned. First her tongue, now her eyes. Perhaps she should just go to sleep.

The pain in her hip suddenly worsened as she felt Tommy pressing down on it, and she heard herself moan. She bit her lip, but couldn’t stop another yelp of pain from getting past her clenched teeth. Yes, sleep was probably a good idea right about now.

Mike Regis called her name again, but this time, Hillary didn’t hear him.

Janine Tyler didn’t know what to do. It was a new feeling for her, and one she didn’t appreciate. When the firing had started, she’d headed inside the farmhouse along with everyone else, but two TFI men prevented her from going further into the house than the first empty room – a sort of makeshift living room. There had been shouts from somewhere deeper in the house, and Janine could clearly make out one of them as being the super’s voice. A moment or two later, she’d noticed movement in the corner of her eye, as if someone was slipping into the hall out of the room opposite.
She’d shouted a warning instinctively and headed towards it, only to bump into one of the TFI in Kevlar just as she got to the front door, where she was just in time to see a man shoot her boss.

It wasn’t something Janine had been prepared for. Oh, she knew the risks, and could quote the statistics along with the rest of them. Coppers sometimes got shot. But the ones who were most in the firing line were people like the TFI or the uniforms out on the street. DIs in plain clothes should, in theory, be the safest of the lot.

She’d felt herself being catapulted out of the door by the TFI guy behind her, and had fallen on to her hands and knees on the cobbles, feeling sharp pains lance through her knees and hands. When she looked up, one of the TFI team was levelling a gun and firing it and another body hit the ground. She heard Mel swearing, and felt her body go suddenly cold. Hillary had been standing right in front of Mel. What if the bullet had gone right through?

She got up and staggered forward, her hands and knees bleeding and wondering where Tommy had suddenly come from, because there he was, running towards Hillary Greene, shouting her name, sounding as if he was on the verge of losing it.

Then Mike Regis was suddenly beside her.

‘What’s going on?’ he said. ‘Who fired the other shots?’ He could see a gaggle of people crouched on the ground further out in the courtyard, and felt a coldness invade his gut.

‘The boss has been shot,’ Janine heard herself say.

‘DCI Mallow?’ Regis said sharply.

Janine felt her head shake. ‘No, my boss. DI Greene.’

Now, they were all grouped around the figure lying so still on the ground, and Janine didn’t know what to do. Tommy seemed to be coping with the first aid – he’d been the last to do a refresher course, so she left him to it. Mel was knelt down at Hillary’s head, talking to her, but she didn’t seem to be responding. Her eyes were closed. Was she dead?

Janine tried to see where the wound was, but Tommy was blocking her view. His hands seemed to be pressing down on her lower stomach. A gut wound? Janine began to shiver. Those were bad. Really bad. She didn’t want to think how bad those could be.

She looked around and saw DI Regis, standing stiff and white, staring at the woman on the floor. His eerily silent sergeant, Tanner, stood beside him. Members of the TFI were standing around, guns ready, waiting and watching everything and everyone. Suddenly, the flashing blue lights of the ambulance came around the corner, and Regis raced off towards it, no doubt to direct them to Hillary as quickly as possible.

Janine sat down. She didn’t care that the cobbles were hard and cold and dirty. She just needed to sit down.

Hillary became aware of movement, of different voices, of being lifted. She suddenly felt warmer. Her whole world began to shift – faster, smoother, and it took her a while to realize she was in the back of an ambulance.

OK. That was probably good too.

She went back to sleep.

When she woke up, her mother’s face appeared above her, and she jumped. ‘Mum?’ she mumbled, wondering what she was doing waking up in her bed back in her old childhood home. It wasn’t Mother’s Day, was it? She often spent the weekend at her mum’s then.

‘How’s the wounded hero then?’ a gruff masculine voice said, and suddenly her favourite uncle was there too.

‘Uncle Max?’ she said, frowning. What was going on? ‘Nothing’s happened to the boat, has it?’ It was the first thing she could think of. Technically, the
Mollern
still belonged to Max, although she’d come to think of it as her own.

‘The
Mollern
’s fine. I’ve kept an eye on it, made sure it was all battened down,’ he said. He was a small man, neat and
tidy, who looked as if he should have been a retired military man. In fact, he’d worked for the Post Office for most of his adult life.  

‘How are you feeling, love?’ her mother asked, reaching out and taking her hand. It was then that Hillary noticed all the white – white walls, white ceiling, white sheets. Other beds – three of them. Nurses in white. Oh God. She was in hospital.  

Then it came back – the gunfire. The man rushing out in the night, lifting the gun. She and Mel in direct line of fire. The sudden pain.  

‘Bugger, I got shot,’ she said flatly.  

Max Granger gave a sudden grin, and hugged his younger sister. ‘See, told you, June,’ he said, giving her grey curls a quick kiss. ‘Nothing wrong with your girl a few days’ rest won’t cure.’  

Hillary reached for her mother’s hand. She looked older than she remembered, greyer, smaller. ‘Oh, Mum,’ Hillary said helplessly. ‘Please, don’t worry.’ But her daughter had been shot. Of course she was worried. Hillary felt a great wave of guilt wash over her for all that her mother must have gone through. In her mind’s eye, she could see it all, how it must have been.  

Mel would have been the one to tell her, of course. He’d have driven, not phoned. The moment she’d seen her daughter’s superior officer on the doorstep, June Greene would have known that it was bad. Had she had nightmares about this very scenario? Mel would have told her quickly and calmly what had happened. Had he driven her back to the hospital? Had she stayed all night?  

Again, guilt nibbled at her. She shouldn’t be putting her mother through this. She was in her mid-seventies now, too old to take such traumas in her stride. And somewhere at the back of her head a little voice piped up, telling her that if she took early retirement, June Greene would never have to worry again. Hastily, she thrust it back, and glanced at the pale grey
blinds lining the window. It was broad daylight. She was assuming it was the next day – but what if it was the day after that? Suddenly she felt utterly disorientated.

‘Did I have to have surgery?’ she asked, and her mother sighed and slowly sank back on to the chair. It was wonderful to hear her girl speak again. To sound so like her old self – calm and in charge. That was her Hillary. Always the sensible one. Always the one who knew what she wanted and how to get it.

‘Yes, they had to remove the bullet.’ Her words quavered a bit on the last word. ‘But there was no real damage. It came close to a major artery though,’ June carried on quickly, as if needing to gloss over that bit, ‘but there was no real muscle or bone damage. Apparently the bullet lodged in the fatty tissue.’

Hillary began to shift to her side, the better to see her mother’s face and tell her that she didn’t have to worry, the shooting had been a one-in-one-thousand glitch, then bit the words off as a sudden pain shot through her backside.

Her backside! Lodged in the fatty tissue? ‘Oh no,’ she wailed. ‘Don’t tell me I was shot in the bum!’

‘Ssshh,’ June Greene said, casting an anxious glance at the other three women in the beds around her. ‘No, you were shot just above the hip – through the waist, more or less.’

Hillary closed her eyes and grinned in sheer relief. She would never have lived it down if she’d been shot in the
backside
. She could already imagine the jokes the desk sergeant would have had lined up. Not to mention what that sneering git Frank Ross would have said. To have Ross, of all people, laughing at her, would have been simply too much.

Hillary wasn’t quite awake later on that evening, when Mel arrived. They’d served tea – or what had passed for it – and she’d taken so many pills she was almost sure she could hear herself rattle. The drone of the television sets that her fellow patients were watching acted as a soporific, but a stealthy
screech had her eyes popping opening. Mel was positioning a chair beside the bed, and had caught the chair leg against the tiled floor.

He looked up and winced as he saw Hillary’s big brown eyes looking at him. ‘Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you.’

Hillary smiled. ‘No problems. So what the hell happened?’

Mel sat down and grimaced. ‘Hell, Hill, you’ve been shot. The least you can do is moan and gripe a bit before giving me the third degree.’

He was once more the immaculate ‘Mellow’ Mallow, well dressed, and looking like something out of a Brooks Brothers catalogue. His first marriage had quickly faded because they’d both been too young, and his second marriage to a very wealthy woman had also ended amicably enough. It wasn’t hard to see how Mel would never have any trouble attracting the ladies. He’d also earned his ‘Mellow’ tag with a soft voice and apparently easy-going personality that hid a will of steel.

‘Fine,’ Hillary sighed. ‘The dinner was so bad, it made me feel as if I was a cordon bleu chef in comparison. My hip hurts, they keep making me take drugs that bring on the DTs and the bed is as hard as iron. Happy now?’

Mel grinned. ‘Much better.’

‘OK, now what the hell happened? Did Raleigh jump the gun?’

Mel shook his head. His face looked more gaunt than she remembered it, and for the first time ever, she thought he could do with a shave. Hell, he must be having a rough day. ‘I’ll say,’ he confirmed wryly. ‘We should never have been in that courtyard. Shit, Hill, when I saw you go down, when I realized you were hit … hell, I’ve never felt so sick in all my life.’

Hillary went hot, then cold. She hadn’t really thought about that yet. She grunted, and said, ‘Give us a hand sitting upright, would you? There’s a lever thingy under the bed – push it in. Or out. It makes the back of the bed come forward.’

Mel, successfully distracted, fiddled with it, the bed first going down, then up. Wincing with pain, Hillary finally got herself sitting more or less upright and comfortable. Her hip throbbed. ‘Bung us another pillow behind my head. Thanks. Right, now tell me. What’s the state of play? Were there drugs? Was Fletcher there? Did we nail the bastard at last?’

‘Fletcher’s dead,’ Mel said flatly, and Hillary blinked. So that was it. Just like that, the big bad bogeyman had been dispensed with. Somehow, it didn’t seem real.

‘Was the shooting righteous?’ she asked automatically, although why she asked, she couldn’t say. Any shooting by the TFI was almost always righteous.

To her astonishment, however, Mel shrugged and spread his hands. ‘We don’t know. As far as we can tell, he was shot by one of his own men.’

Hillary blinked again. She felt her chest tighten – not, she was sure, due to anything medical, but with a tension she’d felt before. A tension she always felt when anything was somehow off. ‘Come again?’ she said slowly, and listened as Mel told her what they had worked out from the evidence gathered and the witness statements taken during the day.

‘It started off great. The outer perimeter sweep went without a hitch,’ Mel began. ‘Then they raided the house. So far, so good. The TFI went through, room by room, in a classic sweep, but in the first bedroom encountered resistance.’

‘The first bout of gunfire we heard, when we were driving to Checkpoint Charlie?’