The Vacant Casualty Page 17

  ‘Slow down!’ shouted Sam. ‘I’m injured, for God’s sake. By you!’

  ‘Hurry,’ said Bradley, slowing to a jog.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I don’t know but I have to get back to the police station. Yes,’ he went on quietly. ‘It all ties in together. The spaceship had nothing to do with it. A ticking time bomb . . .’

  ‘That bomb was part of all this?’ Sam hobbled along as the soldier jogged happily beside him.

  ‘You can’t carry me, can you?’ he asked.

  ‘Nope,’ said the soldier.

  ‘Yes. It all fits together, but I can’t work out how. The rubbish had already started to appear. You remember the pile outside the library when we got there?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Sam, surprised.

  ‘Well, you know how all those explosions keep coming from within the grounds of the school and no one seems to think anything’s up? Like when my car exploded. No one took any notice, or came looking. They’re used to explosions. So a bomb was laid somewhere near the base of the Hill. The whole thing was triggered deliberately, ahead of time.’

  He came to a stop, and they stood in front of the blown-out police station offices. Sam bent over, wheezing, begging for them not to go on again for a moment. Straightening, he plucked the bottle of rum out of his inner pocket and had begun to swig when it was snatched by Bradley, who drank it like Lawrence of Arabia helping himself to his waterskin. Looking on askance, Sam instead lit a cigarette and immediately doubled up again, his throat rent by a horrible tearing cough.

  ‘When this is over I’ve got to sort out my act,’ he said. ‘I’m too old for this shit.’ He held the cigarette away and took a breath of clean air, coughed again and whimpered somewhat. ‘I sound like a werewolf.’

  Bradley took the bottle from his mouth and tossed it aside – Sam was lucky to catch it, and got a splash across his shirt for his efforts.

  ‘Werewolf . . .’ said Bradley, looking up at the morning sky. Sam and the soldier followed his gaze. With the sun still low near the horizon, it was a beautiful, clear pale blue, with nothing in it except the half moon, clearly visible.

  ‘You know what I feel?’ Bradley said to Sam.

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘The hairs on the back of my neck are standing on end. For real. Werewolf! That’s it!’ he said, and pointed to the soldier. ‘You, come here!’

  UPSTAIRS IN THE first-floor squad room, as Sam called it, all was quiet. It made for a desperately sad sight. The walls were scorched black, desks charred and chairs turned over. There were standing pools of water from the fire-engine hoses that had soaked the building to ensure the fire had gone out. There were flame patterns across the ceiling, interspersed with sections where the paint had mottled and melted, and where the plaster sagged in damp bulges, ready to collapse. Where the windows had been, remnants of the plastic blinds hung and moved gently in the breeze so that the early-morning sun slanted inwards, making a slow-motion strobing effect.

  A tall figure came in slowly through the door, treading with great caution. He squinted through the dimness, trying to make out a shape amid the mingling of the sunlight with the ashen air and last traces of smoke.

  Soon he saw what he expected in the centre of the room and stood stock still. But it was too late – he had been spotted. A crouching figure was feeling through the soggy embers and half-burned papers around Detective Brauti-gan’s desk, whispering to itself incessantly. But now it stopped and turned its head to the door.

  The tattered blinds shifted in the wind and light fell across the face.

  ‘Terry Fairbreath,’ said the tall figure, its face still in darkness.

  ‘You,’ whispered the crouching man. ‘You, of all people! The idiot detective! You were supposed to be dead.’

  ‘I know,’ said the tall figure. ‘You planned it all. You uncovered the secret of the Hill, and planted a bomb to explode it and destroy the town. But first you wanted to fake your own death so that it was recorded before the evidence was destroyed.’

  ‘Yes,’ uttered Fairbreath, hate narrowing his voice to a whisper. ‘I planned it perfectly. It took months! That reliably snooping old battleaxe Mrs Bottlescum was supposed to see me being convincingly massacred. How could I know the stupid old cow had the attention span of a gnat? The second I was out of sight, covered in fake blood, she just forgot the whole damn thing!’

  ‘That was your first mistake,’ said the figure.

  ‘Oh, don’t patronize me. You got lucky! It’s that bloody writer who’s been following you around, filling your head with ideas,’ said Terry Fairbreath scornfully. ‘I suppose he’s with you now.’

  ‘No, actually – he’s succumbed to his many injuries. And rum. He fell asleep outside.’

  ‘You know what I came here for?’

  ‘The one piece of evidence you left behind at the scene of one of the murders. You knew Brautigan had it, that it linked you to the prostitute murders in Fraxbridge. And you had to find a way to get in here and retrieve it.’

  ‘How did you solve all this?’

  ‘Just a hunch,’ said the tall figure. ‘About the Full Moon Murderer. The major told us you went away once a month to visit your mother and I guessed that was exactly when these killings were going on. You disappeared on the day of the full moon, when you committed your last murder. But the body was only found and the case handed on to Brautigan last night. It took me too long to put two and two together . . .’

  ‘And make five?’

  ‘Well . . . no. Four, surely?’

  ‘It’s a saying,’ said Fairbreath.

  ‘Right. But it doesn’t really work in this con— Well, let’s not quibble over that right now. After what happened to Mumford, the bomb going off here was too much of a coincidence. I decided you were coming back here to reclaim some evidence.’

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ said Fairbreath. ‘You! You never entered my calculations. You were nothing – just another casualty. A vacant casualty. Now you’re going to arrest me, I suppose?’

  ‘I was considering it,’ said the tall figure out of the corner of its mouth.

  Fairbreath bent over, looking distraught, cradling his head. Then one of his hands shot down into the water at his feet and came back up, holding the semi-automatic handgun in the evidence bag that had been hanging on the edge of Brautigan’s desk.

  ‘Fucking Brautigan!’ said the tall figure. ‘What is it with him and not doing paperwork? So there’s something to be said for filing things properly after all – Bradley was right!’

  ‘Bradley?’ repeated Fairbreath uncertainly.

  ‘Too right,’ said a voice from a dark corner at the other end of the room. ‘You put that gun down or I’m going to punch your stupid face into mashed potato, you toilet! And that’s not just hyperbollocks . . .’

  Fairbreath spun round, pulling the trigger, as startled as anyone else when the gun fired a stuttering burst, emptying half its clip into spattering explosions against the far wall, all the bullets save for one, which hit the detective in the chest. A nasty jet of dark substance jumped from his chest in the gloom and he fell over on his back.

  Fairbreath didn’t wait to see if he had killed him. He had clearly studied the building well and instead of running for the door blocked by Sam in Bradley’s coat, he turned towards the fire escape, gun in hand.

  A much louder noise boomed through the room, the sound not of a handgun, but an army-issue rifle. Fairbreath’s whole body was tilted towards the fire escape door as he saw it open and caught a glimpse of the firearm facing him. But the strength of the shot picked him up, spun him over in mid-air and finally dissipated, letting him splash into a dark puddle six feet behind.

  ‘Whoopsadaisy,’ said the soldier.

  Epilogue

  DETECTIVE INSPECTOR Bradley was aware of a great deal of pain pretty much all the time. It only quietened down when he could manage sleep, and for a while after the nurse visited to change his morphine
drip. Mostly he was kept awake, immobile and in a kind of quiet agony. And pissed off.

  He spent most of the first two days drugged beyond consciousness, but at lunchtime on the third day he woke to see Sam reading a Raymond Chandler novel in a chair nearby.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s the detective I know!’ said Sam happily, putting down his book. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘How would you feel if you had a lung with a bullet hole in it?’

  Sam thought about this for a moment.

  ‘Like shit,’ he said. ‘But in need of a drink.’

  Bradley grunted, not wanting to move, but trying to spot what Sam held in his other hand until he lifted it up so the detective could see. It was a bottle of ginger ale.

  ‘Oh great,’ said Bradley. ‘You are a fucking help.’

  ‘Hey!’ said Sam, outraged. ‘What am I, a damn rookie? Would I bring you bloody grapes and a copy of Grazia? There’s a slosh of ginger ale in there and no more. You know what the rest is. Or you will, soon after you have a slug. And here,’ Sam leant in conspiratorially. ‘Let’s get Stalag 17 about this. I’m not smuggling this in just for it to be confiscated. Here’s what you do. I don’t want the nurses doling out your ginger ale in case they catch a whiff of it, so I’m hiding it under your bag in your locker here, and here’s a little hip flask for your pillow – it’s full. Get trusted guests to pour it out for you, okay?’ He illustrated this point by slurping a fair measure into two paper cups and handing one to his friend.

  Bradley looked into his cup and sniffed the liquid. ‘I’ve never said this to someone younger than me before,’ he said, ‘but you’re probably going to die young.’

  ‘Up yours,’ said Sam, toasting him and taking a sip.

  ‘Cheers,’ grumbled Bradley, wincing at the pain of holding it up with the arm from his good side. ‘How are the townspeople, are they okay?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. Except for the vicar. It turns out that Mrs Trench was Terry Fairbreath all along, that’s how he knew what was going on.’

  ‘Bloody hell, no wonder he’s so surprised,’ Bradley said, taken aback.

  ‘That’s not the half of it. He’d been letting her suck him off for the past three months. Cheers to you, you old stinker!’ said Sam.

  ‘You’ve been drinking, you slag!’ Bradley said sharply.

  ‘Well, I couldn’t fit all the whisky in the ginger ale bottle, could I? What would you want me to do, throw it down the drain?’

  Bradley grunted. ‘Open the curtains, would you?’

  ‘A pleasure. Your wife been round?’

  ‘Three times. You can’t make them keep her out of here, can you?’

  ‘I don’t think I can. And think of her feelings, old man – she cares for you.’

  Bradley grunted yet again.

  ‘She didn’t realize what an absolute dishpot she’d married,’ Sam went on.

  ‘Okay, that’s enough. Give me another slug of that stuff and clear off. I can’t handle two pains at once!’

  Sam raised his eyebrows, did the service he was asked and shuffled to the door.

  ‘Hey,’ said Bradley, his bluff called. Sam turned round.

  ‘Why didn’t you help me crack it sooner?’

  ‘I didn’t realize we were doing a serial killer thriller. All the signs pointed the other way. How could I have guessed?’

  ‘We going to do another case together?’

  ‘I don’t think so. As your civilian sidekick, I think the routine is that I would normally clear off at the end and next time you’d get another sidekick.’

  ‘Well,’ said Bradley, clearly having some trouble with how to phrase the next sentence. ‘You were pretty useful,’ he admitted grudgingly. ‘Pretty annoying, but pretty useful.’

  ‘Nice of you to say so.’

  ‘That’s all you get. Oh – and thanks for the whisky.’

  ‘Any time, man. See you later.’

  Sam paused at the door and winked at Bradley, then left.

  A minute later he put his head back round the door.

  ‘Wanted to say – I don’t really care about these things, but for your own sake, next car you get, don’t make it a Prius.’

  ‘Wasn’t my intention to,’ said Bradley. ‘But thanks for your input. Any other suggestions, stick’em on a postcard!’

  Sam disappeared once more.

  Bradley let his mind wander for a while, hoping to persuade the pain away or in some way out-think it, and must have fallen into a light doze because he was suddenly awoken by a huge shape at the end of his bed. He was by no means yet over the shock of having been shot and the sight made him start – which provoked a nauseating wave of pain. He screwed up his face as he waited for it to pass and the man standing there came to the side of his bed.

  ‘Didn’t mean to surprise you,’ he said shortly.

  ‘That’s okay. Pain’s something I’ve got to live with now.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Brautigan, and there was no doubt that he did. There was a huge gauze over his right cheek, stitches along his jaw, a nasty black bruise above his right eye and his left arm was so firmly encased in plaster that it had been fixed to his waist with a splint so that it stuck out immovably.

  ‘It should have been me,’ said Brautigan in that deep voice, which was so rumbling it sounded like a heavy table being moved in the next room.

  Bradley shrugged. ‘I got lucky.’

  The other detective laughed. ‘I guess I was lucky to only be blown up!’

  ‘Listen,’ said Bradley. ‘I hope you don’t think I was stepping on your toes. I always wanted to crack cases like you.’

  ‘But you cracked the biggest one of all. I got to admit, I never thought you were a real dick, and now I know you were.’

  Bradley couldn’t meet his eye. ‘If you like,’ he said, ‘you solve one for me some time.’

  Brautigan put his hand, which was roughly the size and weight of a skillet, on Bradley’s shoulder and squeezed in what he might have thought was a friendly way, but which in reality would probably have snapped an elephant’s leg. It was all Bradley could do not to pass out from the pain.

  ‘Let’s get a hamburger some time,’ said Brautigan, and arranging the muscles and pulverized cartilage of his face into a curious arrangement that was even more grotesque than usual, he went out, banging the plaster-cast of his left arm against the side of the door as he went and swearing loudly. He was smiling, thought Bradley.

  Bradley’s gaze wandered to the window and he grumpily surveyed the view – a huge swathe of sky, bright and yellow in the afternoon sun, interrupted only by the rectangular block of another part of the hospital and a tall chimney in which Bradley had his suspicions they burned amputated body parts. He shivered.

  ‘Not even a bloody telly!’ he said, looking over at his bedside table and wincing from the movement. He hadn’t noticed before, but something had been left there for him, and he knew who by. Standing almost a foot tall, there was a pile of paperbacks, some announcing their titles in garish colours and fonts, others older and plainer. He leant over and picked one up – on the back it described itself as a classic of the crime genre. He leafed to the front and started to look through it, wondering whether this was where he would find out who his next sidekick would be.

  First published 2012 by Boxtree

  This electronic edition published 2012 by Boxtree

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  Copyright © Patty O’Furniture

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