Get Cartwright (26 page)

‘What, Guv?’

‘I think he’s bloody luvvin’ it.’

Upstairs, there was a resounding crash, and Chris let out a terrified cry. A door was flung open and then slammed shut, and moments later Chris came pounding downstairs.

‘Chris, what happened?!’ Sam cried.

‘They’re getting in!’ Chris gabbled in terror. ‘They’re getting in!’

From the living room came the smash and crunch of breaking wood.

‘They’re attacking on every side!’ Sam hissed.

‘Ray!’ Raymond! Gene bellowed up the stairs. No answer. He turned on Chris. ‘What’s happened to ’im?’

‘There was blood!’ Chris whimpered.

Gene grabbed Chris by the throat. ‘You left a man behind!’

‘There was blood, I was frit!’

‘Get back up them stairs.’

‘No way, Guv!’

‘Get back up them bloody stairs Skelton, you sickly shit – you do
not
leave a man behind!’

‘I ain’t going back up there!’

Chris struggled free of Gene’s grasp and fell back like a frightened animal.

‘God dammit!’ Gene spat, glaring. ‘What the hell’s happened to my department? The whole lot of you’s gone to crock!’

‘
I’ll
go!’ said Sam, pushing past Chris. ‘Just make sure they don’t get in down here!’

As Gene strode back into the living room, Sam leapt up the dark staircase, only realising he was unarmed when he reached the landing.

‘Ray? You okay?’

As he moved towards the closed bedroom door, he smelt it – smoke.

Sam took hold of the door handle, turned it.

‘Ray …?’

As he opened the door, he saw a flickering orange glow. It played across the turmoil of the room – the bed with its sheets all pulled off and lying rumpled on the floor, the overturned furniture, the broken glass, the scattered books.

And there, crumpled against a wall, his face hidden from sight, was Ray. As Sam looked, he saw a slow trickle of blood finger its way across the bare floorboards.

Sam threw open the door. At once, he saw flames dancing around the windows. The curtains were ablaze, throwing their shifting light on Ray’s unmoving body.

As Sam moved forward to get to him, he was stopped by a black figure that seemed to come out of nowhere. His saw the twin barrels of a shotgun, black gloved hands clutching the stock and trigger, then a face flattened by a stocking mask. Only, it
wasn’t
a mask. The face was distorted because the flesh was ripped and tattered, the gaps in it revealing the blood-stained skull beneath.

It’s Carroll …
Sam thought, numb with shock.
Or Walsh, or Darby …

Three gunmen. Three bent coppers, all dead, all in the pay of Clive Gould who even now continued to demand their service.

The flames leapt behind the skull-faced horror as it stood over Ray’s prone body and jammed the barrels of the shotgun against his head.

Instantly, Sam threw himself forward, landing heavily on the gunman. His hands locked themselves around wasted, bony limbs with chunks of flesh still clinging to them. As he fell against the gunman’s body, Sam felt the exposed ribs jutting out beneath the fabric of his black sweater.

Down they went, the two of them, clamped together, wrestling for possession of the shotgun. They fell against the burning curtains, bringing them down on top of them. Sam rolled clear and sprang to his feet, saw the shotgun lying amid the widening pool of Ray’s blood. In front of him, the gunman was slowly rising up, burning now, fire flashing all over his back and arms and head. The strips of fat still sticking to his skull began to crisp and bubble like meat on a barbeque.

Sam grabbed the gun. It was slippery and wet with blood. He raised it and fired. The blast caught the ghastly dead thing square in the face, obliterating it and sending the headless body hurling back through the window in a great flurry of sparks.

Chucking the gun out into the hallway, Sam dived across at Ray, grabbing hold of his ankles and dragging him clear of the flames. As the bed caught alight and went up like a bonfire, Sam saw in the sudden flare of light that Ray’s eyes were open and unfocused, that there was blood all over his neck and chest, that there was no sign of life in him at all.

The room was now a furnace, painfully hot and full of smoke. Coughing and choking, Sam dragged Ray across the floor, gritting his teeth at the effort. He slipped in the blood and went down hard, hauling himself up at once and grabbing hold of Ray’s body again.

‘You’re not dead yet, you shitter!’ he bellowed furiously at his DS. ‘You’re not dead yet you fat, ton-and-a-half, bloody great bag of lead
shitter
! Now, you’re coming with me!’

With a yell, he got Ray as far as the open door that led onto the hallway, the bedroom blazing all about him, burning debris raining down on him. It was then that Sam heard the screaming – and this time, it wasn’t Annie.

Smoke was starting to pour into the landing from downstairs as well as from the bedroom. The whole farmhouse must have been ablaze. Down in the hallway, Chris was crying out frantically, ‘We gotta get out! Oh my God, we gotta get out!’

‘Chris, I need you up here!’ Sam shouted down to him. ‘Ray’s in a bad way! I can’t drag him around on my own!’

But Chris was clawing desperately at the sofa wedged against the front door, trying to haul it aside. Great black billows of smoke rolled over him, illuminated by the deep red and orange of angry flames. He screamed, choked, and screamed again.

‘Chris! We’re supposed to be a
team,
for God’s sake!’

Sam propped Ray up against a wall. A thick finger of congealed blood oozed slowly from his mouth and nose. There was a bullet hole as round as a saucer in his chest. Sam called to him, but Ray stared blankly past him, unmoving, unblinking.

Fire burst from the bedroom, sending Sam tumbling chaotically down the stairs. The shotgun clattered away and was swallowed up by the suffocating smoke. Pulling his shirt over his nose and mouth in a desperate attempt to filter out the fumes, Sam fought his way blindly down the last few steps into the hall. He encountered an insane mishmash of broken furniture, splintered furniture, and lethal glass shards.

‘Chris! Where are you!’

Holding his shirt over his face with his left hand, Sam groped about with his right. He felt his way along the upended sofa until his fingers reached what was surely the hem of a jacket. Then he felt an arm, a motionless body, an unresponsive face.

‘Chris! Wake up, for God’s sake!’

He shook him, but Chris slithered away, falling amid the wreckage, completely lost to the impenetrable smoke.

Now Sam found himself fighting his way along the hall. He could see nothing except thick black fumes and flashes of hellish orange light.

The furniture – it’s all seventies stuff, packed with synthetics that give off toxins when burnt. This place must be filling up with carbon monoxide and cyanide … It’s a death trap!

He reached the doorway to the living room. It was an inferno. If Gene was still in there, he was dead. Nothing could survive that blistering, poisonous hell.

His head spinning, lungs burning, eyes streaming, Sam tried to get to the kitchen, but his legs gave way beneath him and down he went, sprawling blindly in the thick, black, choking soup of smoke. He could just make out flames shooting up all around him, long tongues of fire that licked and lashed at the ceiling and went spreading away along the walls.

They’re all dead …
Sam thought, drawing poison and scorching smoke into his lungs.
The team’s gone … And Annie, I’ve lost Annie. I failed her …

Or had he? Maybe Annie had escaped out through the back door. Maybe even now she was tearing away into the night, racing across open ground, making for safety while Gould was distracted; wasted his time killing Gene and Ray and Chris and Sam himself. Even here, amid this hellfire, on the brink of destruction, there was hope!

With every scrap of strength left to him, Sam struggled to get back on his feet, but he could do no more than raise his head from the floor. Fire was blazing on every side, but as it burned through the walls and ceiling, daylight began filtering in through the opening cracks. As sections of wall gave way and collapsed, they started to reveal not the night sky and the black fields surrounding Trencher’s Farm, but drab grey clouds, a washed out afternoon light, glimpses of a colourless, broken landscape.

The farmhouse burned away. The smoke was released up into what was now open sky. Sam dragged himself to his feet and stared about.

I know this place … I’ve been here before … In dreams, I’ve been here before …

It was a bleak terrain of broken buildings and burnt-out cars. From where Sam found himself, at the top of a low hill that was all smashed rubble and pulverized concrete, he glanced for a moment at the pale disc of the sun, then tripped and stumbled his way down into a dead valley where overturned lorries smoked and smouldered. Brick dust kicked up and clogged his nostrils. An icy, acrid wind gusted along the valley, stinging his eyes. Half-blind and choking, Sam sought shelter in the skeletal remains of a building that rose ominously from the wreckage.

I’ve dreamt all this before …

He found himself inside a roofless ruin, all broken walls and empty, gaping windows. And yet, something in the layout of this place stirred up memories. This building had once been familiar to him. It had buzzed and thrived with life. He recalled uniforms … and desks … mountains of paperwork … banter, and bullying, and a rough camaraderie. Had it once been his school?

‘No, not a school,’ he said out loud. ‘Not a school in the regular sense – but I learnt a lot here anyway.’

He pointed, though he knew nobody was watching him.

‘My desk was here. And Chris’s was here. Ray sat somewhere over there, and the Guv’s office was along that wall. And right here –’ he stood on the spot ‘– right here was Annie. Desk, typewriter, filing cabinet, lamp.’

Was that it? Was that all that now remained of her – a set of disjointed memories? An empty space where once she had sat, with her desk and her typewriter, her filing cabinet and her lamp?

Sam sank to his knees.

‘So, I’m dead again, am I?’ he called out. His voice was swallowed up by the ruined shell of CID. ‘Is this where the dead souls come? Is this their little corner of hell?’

And what corner of hell was Annie in? Had she died in the fire, along with the rest of them? Had Gould found her and dragged her back across time and space with him? Or had she escaped?

I have to believe she got away. I have to. I couldn’t bear to think otherwise …

‘She didn’t make it, Sam,’ said the Test Card Girl gently, her voice coming from behind him. The sound of it did not surprise him in the slightest. This, after all, was her manor.

‘He got her?’ he asked, his voice husky and dry.

‘Just like I said he would, Sam.’

‘You’re trying to make me despair again. It’s what you always do.’

‘I told you it was hopeless, Sam. I told you it would all end very badly.’

‘Yes. Yes, you did.’

Sam sank forward until his face pressed against the hard ground. He could smell and taste dry brick dust. He waited for the tears, but they did not come. His heart was so broken that crying was beyond him. He did not know he could feel this desolate, this broken inside. His mind was like the blasted terrain that surrounded him. Empty, shattered, lifeless.

Dimly, through the numbness of devastating grief, he felt the Test Card Girl’s ice-cold hand rest against the back of his neck.

‘No arguments this time, Sam,’ she said gently. ‘No discussions. None of that. You just come with me like a good boy, and I’ll take you somewhere where the pain will go away. You’ll forget. You’ll forget everything. You’ll forget Annie, and your friend Mr Hunt, and all your other little friends. Ray. Chris. Maya. Your mother. Your life. You’ll forget all of it. And you’ll forget yourself. It will be like you never existed. Like you never existed, Sam … wouldn’t that be nice?’

Sam could not move a muscle. His body seemed to be devoid of life, though his heart was still beating, his brain still working. Every limb felt cold and dead.

‘Oblivion, Sam. It’s all you have left. It’s your only escape from how you feel now.’

What was Annie enduring, right at this moment? Where was she? What was Gould doing to her? Sam’s imagination began to torture him with terrible suggestions, and he fought to blot them out.

‘No …’ he murmured. ‘No, no, don’t do it to yourself, Sam. Don’t think. Don’t even imagine!’

‘But you
will
imagine, Sam,’ the Test Card Girl corrected him softly. ‘You can’t stop yourself. It will drive you mad. You’ll imagine, and you’ll go on imagining, Sam, over and over again, for ever. Because you’re dead now. Properly dead – not like last time. This is the real thing. No going back. You’re
dead
dead – and to prove it, you get one of these.’

He felt her icy hand brush against his own, gently closing his fingers around something. Opening his eyes, Sam turned his head, and saw that he was holding a piece of string that stretched upwards. It swayed slightly from side to side.

‘Come on, Sam. Let’s get this over and done with. Up you get.’

Sam sat up. The string in his hand was attached to a black helium balloon bobbing three feet above his head. His new badge. His passport to oblivion. The mark of a dead soul.

On his feet now, Sam stood and looked down at the upturned face of the Test Card Girl. Her cheeks were paler than ever, but her eyes were darker and deeper than he had ever seen them, as if each one was a pit that plunged down into cold infinity. The Girl tilted her head to one side. The corner of her mouth curled into a slow, sly smile.

‘All roads led to this point,’ she said. ‘Right from the start, this was where you were headed. I told you. This was always your fate. Annie has gone to her allotted place, and now you must go to yours. It’s all very sad, but that’s the way it is.’

Her smile widened for a moment, and her eyes glittered. There was a dull green light visible in the depths of those eyes that brought to mind the inscrutable stare of a cat.