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police; thete were times when you couldn't win and this was one of them.
And then he saw the house, a tumbledown ruin that the swamp was going to
destroy, the clearing waterlogged with this stinking slime. Jim Fillery got
his hunch again, more positive than before, almost like the scent the dogs
were supposedly searching for, a fox earth which the hounds knew was
inhabited.
'I'm going to check the house,' he called out to the man on his right who was
just visible in the gloom. Tell the others to form a cordon around it, just in
case.' His words sounded strangely muffled but the other raised a hand to show
that he had understood. Check the house, then we'll call it a day. But we will
anyway because the feeling's strong, very strong. Fillery slipped his hand in
his pocket, felt the comforting hard metallic coldness of his gun. He would
not hesitate to use it if he had to, maybe he would anyway. A policeman was
missing, probably dead, and that was one time when emotions ruled.
The door was open a foot or so, hanging by a single rusty hinge. He squeezed
through the gap, drew his pistol from his pocket, his keen eyes taking in the
hallway. That trap door was closed but thick muddy water was lifting it so
that it virtually floated. The cellar was flooded, overflowing. Foster
wouldn't be down there. If he was then the State had been spared a lot of
expense.
He glanced towards the stairs and that was when he knew, realisation hitting
him like the backhanders his mother used to lash out with when he was a boy.
He saw the footmarks, muddy imprints that were still wet, telling their own
story. Heavy criss-cross bars of rubber Wellington soles, smaller naked ones
following in their wake. A man and a woman.
Fillery's brain was already working on permutations:
(1) PC Lee and Thelma Brown.
(2) James Foster and Carol Embleton.
(3) Andy Dark and . . . ?
His keen brain was instantly processing the information it had been given. One
of the girls, certainly, because both had fled naked into Droy Wood. It was
impossible at a glance to tell which but at least one of them was still alive
(or had been a very short time ago). Lee and Foster had both left their
clothes behind in their respective Minis.
Fillery pulled a wry face, felt a surge of disappointment. That only left
Dark, Unless of course Foster had murdered either or both men, taken Dark's
boots. Or the constable had come upon the nature conservation officer's body,
helped himself to his footwear.
But the detective was wasting time surmising; there was only one way to find
out. He moved forward, gun at the ready. Somebody was upstairs and he was
going up after them.
The staircase creaked, threatened to collapse under his weight, boards rotted
and missing. A slow ascent, hating himself for the faint glimmering of fear
that smouldered in his stomach, threatened to knot his guts into a hard ball.
He remembered that time only a few weeks after he had been promoted to the
CID. Some crackpot with a grudge against society had held a 14-year-old girl
hostage in a high-rise block of flats. The guy had a shotgun, had fired at the
police down below, threatened to kill himself and the kid if his demands for
freedom and a pardon weren't met. The same kind of mentality as Foster, he had
a string
of convictions for assaulting young children. Time was running out. Fillery
and another detective had gone up in the elevator while those down below
attempted to distract the maniac's attention.
Fillery had been in the lead, his companion only too happy to follow behind.
They had both been scared as hell. Somebody was going to get killed in the
next few minutes, it might be all of them. Suddenly you faced death; it was
more of a certainty than a probability. You knew also that you had to kill
somebody.
Jim Fillery had wanted to vomit, to run back down those stairs, tell the super
he wasn't going to die for anybody. But something pushed him forward,
transcended his terror. He didn't know what it was, never really found out.
But he'd gone on, kicked the door down, and inside that tiny flat the man had
just been sitting propped up in the corner. The girl hadn't even gone
hysterical and that was when the anti-climax had struck him. In a way it was a
let-down because he had never had to push himself past that final barrier,
test himself.
Until now. He had to go through it all again.
Along the landing, up on to the second floor. And then he saw the balcony with
three people standing on it, a stone ledge that might decide to crumble at any
second. His stomach flipped, began to tighten, churning his bowels.
Dark and Carol Embleton. The former was holding a pistol in his hand, dangling
at arm's length as though he had forgotten that he had it, the girl clutching
his other arm, both of them staring transfixed at the man who faced them.
That was when Fillery's terror threatened to erupt inside him. That bloated
jowled face, the flesh resembling that of a fish that was beginning to
decompose, eyes receding so that the puffy sockets were closing over them.
Lips curled into an expression of hate and gloating, ragged clothing that
seemed to rot even as you ran your eye over it, a once colourful apparel that
moths and time had shredded.
Everything had stopped, a confrontation that had been frozen like a movie
still. The three of them might have been dead, rigor mortis somehow holding
them erect against a background of swirling mist and the roaring of an angry
sea that sounded a lot closer than it had when Fillery had heard it down
below.
He watched them closely, knew that they were alive, that he was witnessing
some dreadful final act in a drama that had gone on here for a very long time.
Noises; it sounded like distant gunfire, explosions, but it could have been
the waves pounding on the shoreline. Shouts, probably from the search party
down below but they were gone before you could be sure. And somehow you got
the feeling that that repulsive figure out there was the focal point of all
this, his bearing that of a master rather than a servant.
And then the actors began to move on their precarious stage, the huge man
shuffling towards the stone balustrade, pointing and waving a hand, laughing.
Andy Dark turned, watched, seemed to nod.
'The sea is reclaiming Droy Wood,' the man shrieked. 'See and hear it, the way
it swallows up the lands of my forefathers but we shall go with it, all of us
who have known it. A fitting end and we shall still have our pride. Our
enemies have not taken the wood from us,' his shrill tone rising to a
crescendo, 'for in the end we shall triumph over them.'
Fillery's mind flicked back to that day when he had burst into the fiat, had
primed himself to take human life but had been denied. The barrier he had
never had to breach, the anti-climax that had deflected his terror, hauled him
back from the brink, left a lot of doubts in his mind. And now he had been
pushed to that brink again.
His policeman's training screamed at him to stop, tried to jerk the gunhand
back. You're a police officer, you can't! I can and I will. I've got to, there
isn't any other way.
Firing, his target closer and easier than those life-sized dummies on the
practice range, the reports vibrating his whole body. Hearing the heavy slugs
finding their mark, cutting into that revolting body with a noise as if
ripping into thick soggy cardboard. Tearing, lacerating, mutilating.
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