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  Harkness flinched, fell through the deckchair and found himself entangled in its burning limbs. Mrs Crowe was a writhing creature of flame now. She had stood, arms outstretched, cruciform, screaming, begging, damning, drilling anguish into Harkness’s ringing ears. The fire reduced her flesh layer by layer: skin, fat, muscle and bone blistered and peeled, rendered down and reduced to carbon; no quiet asphyxiation was being granted today.

  “Same time tomorrow?” she said, as she crumbled into charcoal.

  A horn blared and he was on his feet, in the basement garage, swaying above his indentation in the sofa, hand drifting up to shield his eyes from the glare of headlights. The lights faded, leaving the loops of their filaments scorched on his retinas.

  “DS Harkness, good morning, again! Delivery for you.” Morse slammed shut the door of Slowey’s Fiesta and lobbed the keys at Harkness. He almost caught them, instead deflecting them into a stack of lead cladding.

  “I can see you were thinking very deeply about your enquiries and I hate to impose but your batman said you’d look after his car for him.”

  “Why does his car need looking after? Why didn’t he ask me himself?” He tried to shake the sleep from his head and felt the weight of his phone in a pocket, laden with missed calls.

  “If you people listened to your radios now and again, you might know.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “I’m not sure I’m talking to you,” said Slowey, catching the bag of boiled sweets in the hand that wasn’t clasping an icepack to his pate. He was clenching his buttocks to give his tenderised back some relief from the kinked slab of plastic that passed for a seat. He was also clenching his teeth every time the regulation A&E drunk drew breath for another chorus of ‘Come On Eileen.’

  “They should’ve let him keep his White Lightning. Keep standing, an’ all,” he added, as Harkness stooped to sit, “that light’s a bit bright and you make a good lampshade.”

  Harkness shrugged and sat, sniffed, stared at his shoes then twisted his neck to look at Slowey over his shoulder. Slowey’s notebook lay at his side, pen marking a page, hand resting on its scuffed cover, finger tapping. Despite the ice pack, Slowey’s face was lop-sided, lips swollen into a sneer and crusted with blood, eye socket bulging and blotched. His jacket had been rolled into padding for his lumbar, and his shirt was torn and speckled with red.

  “Sorry, Ken. Didn’t plan to earn you a kicking tonight.”

  “I know. Not exactly your fault. You should see the other guy. In fact, so should I. Just a thought, though: It wouldn’t be a bad idea if you answered a phone or a radio now and again. Remind me to put it in your personal development plan.”

  “Have they told you how long?” Harkness gestured towards the reception desk, where a clerk kept an owlish vigil from a plexiglas cage adorned with ‘no smoking’ signs and the hospital’s policy on violence towards staff.

  “No. They seem busy though. Apparently, some victims of a house fire were brought in. Why is that woman waving at you?” The receptionist was mouthing something at Harkness and holding a pinkie and forefinger to her head.

  Harkness frowned then smiled, held an outspread hand and mouthed, ‘five minutes’ in reply. “She had a charger that fitted my phone. Bloody thing must have gone off again. Anyway, that’s what voicemail’s for.”

  “How would you know?”

  “People like you keep telling me. So, what did you find out at the pub?”

  “Don’t mollycoddle me, you soppy sod.” Slowey’s attempt at a grin split something and he tasted blood again, swallowed and sighed. “Well, I found out that I need a bigger stick and some new shoes. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I haven’t got a name for the guy Murphy had a pop at and the CCTV has been nicked.”

  “Nicked? How?”

  “Usual manner, with a crowbar and grubby, thieving mitts. Odd about the timing though. Ciggies and cash stolen, as per, but they’ve taken the CCTV hard drive from behind the bar.”

  “Balaclavas?”

  “The one I leathered, certainly.”

  “So CCTV by itself wouldn’t help us catch average guys in balaclavas unless they were dwarves, giants or had missing limbs.”

  “I counted a full complement of limbs on my suspect and they were all in good working order.”

  “Odd. So, the timing is fishy. Who wouldn’t want us to look at that footage? Did you turn out SOCO?”

  “I’ve got a couple of eggs on my head. Are you giving me another one to suck?”

  “That’s just my leadership style, Ken. Repeatedly tell you what you already know just to make sure I get the credit for it, unless it goes tits up, in which case you can’t say I didn’t tell you.”

  “You can take the credit for this then, and get it processed an’ all.” Slowey handed him an evidence bag, DNA swabs in plastic phials sealed inside, times, dates and description completed in Slowey’s intricate hand. “Borrowed some kit from the rape centre next door. Got some samples of blood and gore from my knuckles. Pretty sure it’s not all my own.”

  “You do thrive under pressure, Ken. I’ll bet you interviewed the landlord as well.”

  “Well I did have time to kill and a couple of shorts to take the edge off. Not that he knew much. Knows Murphy, remembers him laying into some scrote he doesn’t know. Might recognise the scrote again, might not. He can’t speak for the regulars so we might have to go back.”

  “Enquiries in the pub, like the good old days. We might need to tidy ourselves up. Sports jackets, stay-crease slacks, splash of Hai Karate. Bish bash bosh. What do you think?”

  “I’d settle for two minutes with a bar of soap. Mind you, I thought I smelled rank ‘til you turned up.”

  “Kenneth Slowey.” A nurse in powder blue scrubs announced his name over a clipboard, eyes scanning the unwashed heads cluttering up the waiting room.

  “Here,” said Harkness and Slowey together, both lurching painfully to their feet.

  “That was quick. Look Ken, ordinarily I’d tell you to go sick for a few days after something like this, but when you’ve finished messing about here, I could do with a leg up.”

  “Assuming my brain isn’t leaking out through my ears, I’ll think about it.”

  “Fair enough. If Biddle turns up, don’t tell him where I am.”

  “Biddle? What’s he got to do with anything? And how will I know where you are?”

  Harkness saw no need to tax Mrs Slowey’s nerves with news of her husband’s exertions. The drying crusts of vomit on her faded dressing gown and the squall of infant distress from upstairs convinced him she had all the responsibility she needed for now. She was quite happy for him to put together a bag of essentials for Slowey while she cajoled a bucking and shrieking infant onto its back on the rumpled bed and unfastened its nappy, laden with brown tar.

  Without a full search team, Harkness realised he wouldn’t find two matching halves of a suit in the wall to wall explosion of textiles that Mrs Slowey called “the wardrobe room”. Nor would he find a tie that didn’t feature the crest of some club for geriatric plane spotters, or cartoon characters whose face-splitting grins and slapstick poses might sit badly at a post mortem. He settled for a tie bearing the plan view of a Vulcan bomber, which wasn’t exactly chic but probably wouldn’t cause offence.

  When he returned to the hallway, Mrs Slowey had pacified, cleaned and dressed the infant that clung to her shoulder, and prepared a large lunchbox crammed with every food group that Slowey might reasonably need for a long ocean voyage or an average day in an office.

  “Banged his head, did he?” she said, eyebrows raised and mouth pursed, handing him the lunchbox which might well have equalled the infant in weight.

  “Checked in, did he?”

  “He always does, day or night. He makes time.”

  “Yes, he does. He’s good at that. Well, I didn’t……

  “Want to worry me. I know.” Her nostrils flared and her chin dipped, decision made. “Rob, just look after
him. He’s got a few more people to think about now, and he won’t say no to you even when he thinks you’re acting like a pillock.”

  Trying not to act like a pillock, he walked down the driveway, matching pace with the shambling scarecrow reflected in the gleaming paintwork of the Sloweys’ second vehicle, a new people-carrier. Slowey’s children travelled in far greater comfort and safety than their father.

  He installed himself again into the driver’s seat of the decrepit Mondeo, straddling the steering wheel as something had snapped when he’d tried to slide back the seat.

  He reviewed his phone again, prioritising his omissions. Slowey and Hayley had all made multiple calls, as had an unknown other likely to be Biddle. He’d ticked Slowey off his list for now, having left him in more competent and tender hands than his own. The longer Biddle waited the better. Hopefully he’d realised by now that Harkness had slipped the leash. As time wore on, his growing irritation would crowd out any capacity for rational thought, so the longer Harkness remained at large, the less likely he was to be caught. He found himself nodding and cackling like an extra at a chimp’s tea-party and couldn’t understand why. Nor could the milkman approaching the Sloweys’ driveway, whose eyes remained bolted to his feet even though the tune he was whistling had been whisked away.

  He slapped both cheeks and rubbed black grit from his eyes. He nodded and grinned at the returning milkman, getting a lop-sided grimace in reply and the certainty that the Mondeo’s registration number would be noted in his order book and reported to the police should anything unpleasant befall the Sloweys.

  He should go home. Peel off these sulphurous rags. Take a shower. Eat something. Make himself presentable. He wasn’t missing a great deal right now, but there was a lot of work coming his way. He needed to be fresher than he was now. He couldn’t brace witnesses and break the bad news smelling like a tannery. This shouldn’t be a complex decision, filling his head with bullet-points.

  He should go home, speak to Hayley, say whatever needed to be said and go back to work. Bite the bullet, even if it bit back. Hayley, gorgeous, glorious Hayley, had become another bullet-point. A shame his wasn’t a neat orderly chart but a machine-gun spray. No, today was not the day to seek truth and order; there was so much chaos to be grappled with. But then again, he heard her say, wasn’t that every day in his world?

  He walked through his front door and into another world. A silence, pine-scented and comfortable, rested in the just vacuumed carpet, the plumped pillows, the gleaming kitchen units. Last night’s charcoal, meat and booze had left neither sign nor scent. The second hand of the kitchen clock glided past 7am, nothing mechanical in its movement, a seamless circuit.

  An electric timepiece was his idea; ticking made him nervous, particularly when he slept downstairs with his guilt and his hangovers and his caseload. It was the sound of entropy, of life not waiting for you to catch up, of a line of gunpowder burning and fizzing towards the powder store. Upstairs, the hot water tank grumbled and water pattered on a shower curtain.

  She must have been up early to get the house this clean, assuming she’d slept at all. Rubbing the mobile phone against the stubble on his chin, it struck him that he’d registered her calls at 4am, 5am and 6am and filed the information for later use without wondering why she was awake or why she’d called at all. Only when he walked into their home, the scene of all their intimate joy and sadness, did he think of her as more than just another task.

  In the kitchen, he boiled water for coffee in the new, chrome kettle; it roared like a jet fighting to get airborne, a hot fuss for a quicker beverage. He dropped two hunks of organic, wholemeal bread into the new, chrome toaster, leaving crumbs all over its complex controls and what had been an immaculate work surface. As the kettle boiled and its engines spun down to idling speed, the howl of a new, chrome hairdryer with 2,000 watts of grooming power reached him from the back bedroom.

  His eyes traced the warpath Hayley would find in a few minutes, marked out in sooty, size-13 footprints across the quarry-tiled kitchen floor and the beige lounge carpet. He slurped black coffee, tacky with sugar, between bites of toast laden with marmite. Was he genetically programmed to be clumsy, messy and crass? Were his limbs so far from his brain that something was always lost in transmission? That didn’t explain the antics of his vocal chords. Perhaps there was a saboteur at work.

  She treaded so lightly that he barely heard her coming. Yet he imagined a tingling resistance in the air, as if they were both ionised with anger, repelling each other, the impossibility of touching now a simple matter of physics. Their polarities had been reversed and what once attracted now repelled.

  He kept chewing the toast, mouth closed, eyes inclined her way without staring, manners adequate. He’d heard what might have been a stifled sigh from the lounge before she entered the kitchen, but now she was putting the finishing touches to her hair and straightening her pin-striped jacket and skirt. His trail couldn’t have been missed but hadn’t provoked so much as a flushed cheek or a bitten fingernail. Their magnetic fields clashed midway between the toaster and the fridge and he knew they would get no closer than that as she checked that her earrings were still in place and studied the still gleaming sink.

  “Morning,” he said. “Sorry about the footprints. Messy night.”

  “Morning to you too. Long job or short job? Coming or going?” Her tone was neutral, businesslike.

  “Long job. Going, soonish.”

  “Find your phone?”

  “Didn’t lose it. Just busy.”

  “Fine. Just let me know you’re alive from time to time.”

  “Are you….are we ok?”

  “Make your mind up.”

  He sighed, his exhaled breath finding no words to bring with it.

  “Cat got your tongue? Well, I’m going to be out of the door on time for a change. You’re eating Marmite. Clinically speaking, I’d say you and I are functioning ok. Whether we are fine is a question we should leave for a calmer time.”

  “You are the sensible one.” He smiled, a few ounces shaved from the lead weight on his chest. Her lips remained pursed. If the floodgates opened even a crack, the deluge would follow.

  Kevin Braxton cared about appearances. His dad dressed the right way for his job, football top stretched over his gut, baggy-arsed jeans, steel-toecap boots, perfect for a labourer, beer-swiller, gobshite, fighter and all-round bastard. The rough diamond act also nicely obscured his nicest earner: dealing smack to the pitiful scum lacking the balls or the nous to go elsewhere.

  His dad was a marvel of practicality. Skinny, skulking smack-rats with their stench and their sunken eyes prompted righteous disgust from Braxton Senior, what with scum like them dragging this once great country etcetera etcetera forever and ever amen. Exploiting them for profit was almost a public service.

  Kevin didn’t mind taking the blows as long as the old man kept him in well-paid work. And he’d never be unemployed; who could be more trustworthy and loyal than family, particularly when family could be knocked about with impunity if they grumbled or skimmed? It didn’t hurt that the family business had a secure, hassle-free and high volume outlet; at least it had until last night. Kevin still reeled and burned from the blows of a long night of anxiety and panic that had tipped over into violence and rage with every new tremor.

  As he weaved his BMX through traffic, some old fart with a trilby and a tie waggled his walking stick and shouted some bullshit at him; he was dressed the right way for an old nonce with nothing better to do than stand in the road staring at kids and rummaging in his pockets. He stood on the pedals, dragged a thick gob-full of snot and nicotine from his lungs and spat it hard onto cracked pavement, making it his own. It tasted more coppery than usual, burned his split lips on the way past and plastered itself to the concrete in wet scarlet stripes.

  He bounced off the kerb again, carefully dropping himself into the path of a car just setting off, some little metallic hatchback; old, unscuffed, probably got
its own name, middle-aged bird at the wheel, face caked in polyfilla, stuffed toys on the parcel shelf, nodding and grinning like the occupants of the community bus that sometimes squeezed itself down his street to collect that spas Jeremy to take him out for a pretend life somewhere.

  The hatchback jolted to a halt, almost stalling. Middle-aged bird’s eyebrows drew together, something moved in her throat and she almost gulped, afraid to show him fear. He planted his feet on the tarmac, giving her a good look at his blackened and torn face, flayed knuckles, radiant gold chains, pristine white tracksuit. He stuck his hands down his tracky bottoms, gave his cock a squeeze, felt something harder and more reassuring, looked her in the eye, blew her a kiss, then pumped the pedals, sped away, grimacing through the shredding pain from his legs; wishing middle-aged bird had been some excuse for a bloke, someone willing to sound the horn, gesticulate, get righteous, then get stared or slapped down to show whose street he was on.

  Honour needed to be restored. Kevin had taken the second best hiding of his life, only to be robbed of the chance to return the compliment. Someone would need to help him get back on top. He’d had a little taste of retribution last night to wash down the hurt, but like fried chicken or a burger in a brown bag it had just left him hungry for much, much more. Someone would know what it was like to be in the dirt, drowning in fear, looking back up at his eyes, cold and business-like like a gangster’s; someone who had undermined the family business; someone who therefore owed him a debt and qualified in so many ways for a good beating.

  Just like school. There was a natural order. Some hit, some get hit. Some gave, some took. When he walked into a changing room or a corner of the playground, even before he learned the walk, wore the trainers, did some time, he was a wolf in a farmer’s field. And nature was amazing; there was always one still stammering away with a goofy grin while those who’d already been educated found fascinating new things to stare at on the floor or the ceiling; always one on the edge of the pack, too thick, too clever, too scruffy, too neat, too different to be wholly accepted by the rest of the sheep who just made it easier for him to pick them out.