After the Fire (43 page)

‘I’ll go. You’ll never see me again. I promise.’ Swain looked at me. ‘I’ll leave you alone. I swear it.’

‘Bit late for that, to be honest.’ Derwent took out his handcuffs. ‘Give me your right hand.’

‘Are you arresting me?’

‘Did I say I was arresting you? Give me your right hand.’

Swain held it out, shaking as if he had a fever. Derwent snapped the first cuff on.

‘Turn around.’

‘I can’t put my other arm back.’

‘You can, you know. It’ll hurt, but you can do it.’

‘I can’t. I really can’t.’

‘Let me help,’ Derwent said, and pulled it back so he could cuff Swain’s wrists together. Swain yelled at the top of his voice, a horrible bubbling sound.

‘Now, now. You told me not to bother screaming, remember?’ I moved across to let Derwent cut the cable ties off my hands. I stayed out of range of Swain’s feet although I didn’t think he had any fight in him. He was a wreck, pale and sweaty, his eyes darting around the room in pure desperation.

‘What are you going to do with me?’ he whimpered.

‘Well, first of all, I’m going to enjoy this moment.’ I smiled. ‘Do you remember what happened to Aktaion in the myth? Artemis turned him into a stag. He was a hunter but then he became prey, and his own hounds tore him apart.’ I reached behind me to unstick the Chameleon from the hollow of my spine, wincing a little as the tape pulled my skin. I showed it to him. ‘I’ve been wearing this for days. I got this from one of your most devoted disciples. You taught him everything he knows about encryption software and how to get around it. You showed him how to follow people like a shadow in real life and on the internet. He followed you for us. He knew where you went and what you did.’ I leaned in. ‘How does it feel, Chris? How do you like being watched? What does it feel like to be my prey?’

‘Fuck you,’ he said, his voice low and venomous, and Derwent smacked him on the back of the head.

‘Language.’

‘You can’t hit me.’

‘I can do whatever I like.’

‘You’re a police officer.’

‘Did I say you were under arrest?’ Derwent looked at me and laughed. ‘He thinks this is official business.’

‘You’re the one who hates playing by the rules, Chris,’ I pointed out. ‘We should be free to do what we like to you, shouldn’t we? We’re not going to be restrained by society’s expectations.’

‘You’ll get in trouble.’

‘I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure we can lie our way out of it.’

‘If anyone finds out,’ Derwent said.

‘We can forget all this now.’ Swain looked from Derwent to me. ‘I won’t tell anyone. I won’t complain. I’ll go.’

‘I wish you’d stop talking,’ Derwent said. Then he looked at me and raised his eyebrows. ‘Well?’

I stood and thought. I allowed myself to think about what Swain had done to me. I allowed myself to feel all the anger, all the fear, all the hatred that had soured in me over the years that he’d been my stalker. I turned my back on my training. I needed to speak a language that he would understand.

‘Go and look in the bedroom,’ I said to Derwent. ‘See what he’d planned for me.’

He went. He stood in the doorway where I had stood, and he looked, and he understood and it shook him. A muscle flickered in his cheek but he sounded eerily calm when he spoke.

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘I want you to kill him.’

Derwent looked at me and his face was completely blank. His eyes, though – his eyes burned like fire.

‘It’s the only way,’ I said. ‘It’ll never stop otherwise.’

And Derwent nodded. ‘All right.’ He shrugged off his coat and jacket, and started rolling up his sleeves.

‘What? No!’ Swain was sobbing. ‘You can’t.’

‘I can’t do it myself. I’m not strong enough,’ I said. ‘You are.’

Derwent nodded again. He went across to where Swain was trying to curl himself up into a ball, weeping and pleading.

‘Have some dignity,’ Derwent said, his voice low and almost sympathetic. ‘Die like a man.’

‘You can’t …’

Derwent’s mouth tightened and he dragged Swain to his feet. ‘Come on. Outside.’

‘I won’t go. I won’t.’

Derwent had plenty of experience with manhandling reluctant prisoners. He’d said Swain was going through the door and through the door Swain went, although both the door and Swain sustained some serious damage in the process. Swain staggered into the yard, Derwent right behind him, and the security light came on. Their shadows stretched across the ground as Swain fell, got to his feet, tried to run and was caught. It was almost too easy.

I stood in the doorway, watching. I felt nothing. Nothing at all. Not satisfaction. Not pleasure. Not horror.

I was numb.

Derwent dragged Swain across to a stone trough in the corner of the yard. I hadn’t noticed it before, but it was full of rainwater. The water was green with algae and an unhealthy yellow scum covered the surface. Derwent pushed Swain to his knees, then looked at me, a gladiator awaiting the thumbs up or down from a fickle empress.

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure.’ My voice didn’t shake.

Derwent twisted his hand in the back of Swain’s hair, and Swain was crying now, great racking sobs. That was despair, I thought, and I felt no pity for him.

The muscles flickered in Derwent’s arms as he plunged Swain’s head under the surface of the filthy water and held him down. Swain bucked and fought but he didn’t have a chance, not against Derwent. The water slopped around, sliding down the sides of the trough as Swain twisted, his feet drumming on the ground, and Derwent turned his head and stared at me, never taking his eyes off me, until I nodded. He lifted Swain’s head and the air rushed back into his lungs with a loud whoop. Swain was trembling, his eyes wide with terror, as he panted for oxygen. There was a stain spreading on the back of his jeans. Derwent looked down, breathing hard himself from the effort of keeping Swain under the water. His face twisted in disgust. He threw Swain away from him to sprawl across the dirty cobbles.

‘Now you know the meaning of shit-scared, you little prick.’

Swain grovelled, weeping, unmanned quite completely. Derwent stepped over him, standing with one foot on either side of his body.

‘You don’t tell anyone about what you’ve been doing to Kerrigan. Do you hear me? Not now, not in interview, not in court. You weren’t stalking her. You weren’t following her. You weren’t obsessed with her. You wanted to get revenge on her because she set the cops on you, but it was no more than that, do you hear me? And it ends. Now.’ He lifted his foot and very deliberately pressed the sole of his boot into the side of Swain’s head, leaning more and more weight on him as Swain screamed. Derwent held him down against the cobbles for a little longer than I might have, then stepped away from him. He took a second before he turned to me.

‘Are you all right?’

I nodded. ‘Nicely done.’

Derwent sketched a salute. He looked drawn, utterly exhausted but more in spirit than physically. Swain hadn’t put up much of a fight, even in what could have been his death throes.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

He was about to tell me when a car cut down the lane beyond the farm, moving fast. Blue lights bounced off the farmhouse.

‘The cops. Good timing,’ Derwent said casually. He bent down and picked up Swain by the scruff of the neck. ‘Nothing happened here except that I arrested you. Whatever else you say, no one will believe you.’

Swain closed his eyes and nodded, and Derwent prepared to face the police officers who were picking their way through the gate, their faces taut with tension.

‘It’s all right. We’ve got him.’

‘What happened?’ The officers were Thames Valley police, which answered one question of mine: we weren’t in Hertfordshire.

‘It’s a long story, but this is very much a wanted man,’ Derwent said, pointing at Swain.

The superintendent stared at him, appalled. ‘What happened to him?’

‘I think he tripped,’ I said.

‘It was more of a stumble.’ Derwent blinked at the superintendent, all innocence, and the superintendent nodded, understanding enough to know that he shouldn’t ask any more questions.

‘That was unlucky. We’ll get him cleaned up at the nick.’

‘No hurry,’ Derwent said, and smiled.

It was a long time before we got back to London – a long night of giving statements and having my injuries photographed and talking: talking to the officers who’d taken Swain to the police station, talking to Una Burt, talking to the doctor on duty who had been very interested in how Swain broke his arm and had asked a lot of questions to see if I had concussion after the car crash. The one person I didn’t get to speak to was Derwent. Not after he pulled me to one side when they were still loading Swain into the van to transport him to custody.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yeah,’ I said with a lopsided smile. ‘You know how it is. I’m not sure how I feel about what we did.’

‘What I did.’

‘What I asked you to do,’ I said. ‘It’s not on you.’

He shook his head very slightly. ‘It wasn’t hard. The only thing that worried me was whether I’d be able to stop myself in time.’

I blinked, surprised. ‘You wouldn’t have killed him for me.’

‘No.’ His face was bleak. ‘Maeve, when he crashed into you – he killed Mal. Mal’s dead.’

I stared at him. ‘He can’t be. The airbag deployed. He was right beside me and I’m not even scratched. You must be wrong.’

‘No, I’m not. He broke his neck.’

‘No,’ I said, angry with him now. ‘You’ve made a mistake. The airbag went off.’

‘He’s dead.’

‘Stop
saying
that. It’s not true. It’s not.’ Because if he was dead, it was my fault. If he was dead, it was because I had put him in Swain’s path.

If Mal was dead, I had as good as killed him myself.

THEY BURY YOU
quickly, in most cultures, or burn you, or conduct whatever ritual it is that sets your spirit free. There are good, practical reasons for that, but the main one, it seemed to me, was to get it over with. It was ten endless days before they laid poor Mal to rest, halfway through December, too close to Christmas. We tried, all of us, not to take up too much room in the little church but the whole team wanted to be there, and so did most people who’d worked with him, and somehow Mal’s family almost disappeared among the police officers. His other family, I thought, and ached for him, and for them, and for everyone who was going to miss him. I was going to miss him and I was only starting to realise how little I’d known of him.

I hadn’t known he was a Catholic.

I hadn’t known he had always wanted to be a police officer. I hadn’t known he wore a police costume all weekend, every weekend the year he was six.

I hadn’t known he had worked as a lifeguard for three summers when he was a teenager and saved two people from drowning.

I hadn’t known that he received a commendation for bravery when he was a probationer, for tackling a man who was waving an axe around Kilburn and shouting about Jesus.

I hadn’t known he had five devoted friends from school who had each made him be their best man because he was so good at it.

I hadn’t known he was on such good terms with his ex-girlfriends that all of them came to his funeral, occupying a pew together and weeping uninhibitedly for a decent man they had loved, once upon a time.

I hadn’t known he had two sisters and a dog that adored him, that was so devoted that the priest had allowed the family to bring it to the funeral service. The dog was a spaniel with curly ears and wistful eyes. It looked up at everyone who passed, hoping. Needing Mal to be alive, somehow.

Not understanding.

And to be honest, we all felt that way. There was no understanding it. No accepting it. I sat in a pew with Derwent on one side of me and a grim-faced Chris Pettifer on the other and every part of me ached with sheer misery. I wasn’t the only one there who felt a sense of loss, but I was the only one who felt responsible.

The familiar words of the funeral service comforted me a little. I had been to many funerals in my time, for work and with my parents, who saw it as a point of pride to attend as many funerals as possible, and it was a well-worn ritual. I concentrated on that (
eternal rest, grant unto him O Lord
) and not on the look on Mal’s mother’s face (
let perpetual light shine upon him
) or the way his sister broke down during the reading she attempted (
may he rest in peace
). Derwent was silent beside me. He didn’t join in with the ragged singing or the responses. I had to resist the urge to lean against him, to collapse on him and let him support me.

Anyway, I wasn’t sure he’d hold me up.

It wasn’t that he blamed me, necessarily. Not as much as I blamed myself, at least. But we still hadn’t really talked about what had happened, because of logistics as much as anything. I hadn’t been at work and he hadn’t been in my flat. He had moved out as soon as he got back to London, packing his things in a businesslike way. There had been no discussion about it. There had been no question of him staying. The need for him to be in my home was at an end. Wanting him there was illogical. He couldn’t have comforted me.

No one could.

But I was very much aware of being alone.

The burial was to be in a cemetery near the church. The family had asked if the other mourners would stay away from the graveside. When the service was over, the police officers gathered outside. There was a guard of honour as Mal’s friends and his father carried the heavy coffin out of the church, staggering a little under its weight, their faces anguished. I stood alone in the crowd, near the back, holding in the tears.

I didn’t deserve to cry.

Once the coffin was in the hearse and the family had taken their leave, the police officers broke up into groups to talk. Liv cut through the crowd and fetched up beside me.

‘There you are. Are you all right?’

I nodded. ‘As well as I can be.’

She squeezed my hand, all sympathy. ‘No one blames you.’

‘They all know what happened,’ I said in a low voice. I was aware of the looks I was getting. My ear was attuned to the sudden silence that fell on people’s conversations when they noticed I was nearby.