Blood Guilt (7 page)

Harlan dropped like a
stone onto his bed, but despite his exhaustion it took him hours to get to
sleep. And when he did eventually manage to drop off, his sleep was one long
sweaty nightmare in which he was chasing a silver VW Golf through the city. A
child’s terrified face was pressed against the car’s rear windscreen, but that
child wasn’t Ethan it was Thomas. On and on the chase went, but Harlan never
got any closer to the car. He awoke choking on tears of frustration and rage.
“It’s not fucking over!” he gasped, shaking his head. With or without hope, he
had to continue searching.

Harlan yanked on his
clothes and checked the news to see if there’d been any developments – there
was one, the identity of Susan Reed’s companion had finally come out. His name
was Neil Price. He was thirty-one years old and worked as a night-porter at the
Northern General Hospital – which explained his airtight alibi. He was referred
to as ‘Mrs Reed’s media-shy boyfriend’. The way the news reader said it, as if
there was something intrinsically dubious in being media-shy, made Harlan’s
toast stick in his craw. There was no suggestion that Price was under any kind
of official suspicion, but a criminologist in the studio insidiously invited
viewers to regard him with narrowed eyes by describing the classic profile of a
potential abductor – white male, early thirties, unskilled worker. Harlan found
himself wanting to speak up in Price’s defence – not because he thought there
was no possibility the guy was involved, but because he despised the media’s
tactics. He’d seen too many lives indelibly marked by shit-flinging
journalists.

Over the next few days,
Harlan spent every waking moment searching for Ethan. He trawled the suburbs,
peering over fences and into garages. He drove around supermarket car parks,
and multi-storey car parks, and industrial estate car parks, constantly moving,
constantly looking.

Nothing. It was as
though the VW didn’t exist. Harlan began to wonder whether the milkman had got
the car’s make wrong. If so, he might as well be out hunting for a ghost.
Whenever he returned to the flat, bone-weary though he was, he lay awake with
doubts swirling inside him.

Days stretched into
weeks. Harlan hardly slept, ate or washed. Telephone calls from his parole
officer – he’d failed to report for a meeting – went unanswered. Mail piled up
unopened. He was searching further and further afield. Villages and towns he’d
never been to before. Sometimes he didn’t return home for days. He stayed in
cheap hotels and B&Bs, and when he ran low on cash, he slept in his car.

With every passing day,
the media and the public’s interest in the case waned. News reports got shorter
and less frequent. Newspaper articles were relegated from the front pages.
Volunteers pasting up posters and handing out leaflets disappeared from the
streets. Ethan’s sun-and-rain faded face was gradually blotted out by
fly-posters, defaced by graffiti, even torn down – some people, it seemed,
objected to being constantly reminded that something so terrible had happened
in the place they lived.

There was no longer a
plainclothes on Harlan’s tail wherever he went. The police’s search – at least
on a street level – was winding down. In the Northwest, whatever leads they’d
been following had apparently led to nothing. Locally, they’d searched hundreds
of addresses, spoken to thousands of people, pried into every corner of Ethan
and his family’s life, but all their efforts had failed. The jigsaw remained
incomplete.

Exactly a month after
Ethan’s abduction a local Baptist preacher named Lewis Gunn whipped up interest
in the case by appearing on the news to urge church members nationwide to
continue the search. He announced that an all-night prayer vigil was to be held
at tabernacles across the city at which he would be collecting donations for a
reward fund. Harlan had previously stayed away from all such gatherings, partly
out of fear of being recognised, but mainly because he knew Garrett would use
his presence as an excuse to haul him in for further questioning, maybe even
try to get his parole revoked. But now that he was no longer being followed he
saw no reason not to go along. And there was little chance of him being
recognised – he barely recognised himself with several weeks’ growth of beard
on his sleep and food deprived face.

Harlan went first to
Lewis Gunn’s tabernacle – an ugly brick building with a huge concrete crucifix
over its entrance. Its car park was crammed with cars. People, many of whom
held lighted candles, were filing inside it. There was a solemn hush over the
gathering and, indeed, over the surrounding streets, as if the whole city held
its breath in silent prayer.

Harlan parked on the
road. He was about to get out of the car when he saw Susan flanked by Neil and
the preacher – a vigorous looking middle-aged man with a bushy head of
grey-black hair. It hurt Harlan like a knife to see Susan, her face devoid of
colour, her eyes devoid of expression, like something dead but alive. Walking
slowly, like an old woman crippled with arthritis, she headed into the church.
Harlan left the car and made his way around the car park, checking number
plates. His heart gave a double thump when he saw the silver VW Golf with
tinted windows. His eyes darted down to the number plate. KY09 SGE. An exact
match! But why the hell, he wondered, would the kidnapper – if that was who the
car belonged to – risk coming here? Several possibilities occurred to him.
Maybe the kidnapper was somehow connected to the church, and it would look odd
for him not to be here. Or maybe he was someone from the local community who
was trying to distance himself from the crime by staying close to it – there
were plenty of cases where murderers had gotten involved in the search for
their victims. Or maybe he was simply the kind of guy who got a kick out of
seeing first-hand the pain he’d inflicted.

Harlan snatched out his
phone to call Jim. The dial tone rang and rang. He pressed his forehead to the
car’s rear-window, cupping his hand against the glass to cut out the reflection
of the streetlamps. He could vaguely make out some kind of shape on the
backseat, a rucksack perhaps, or possibly a bin liner stuffed with something.
It crossed his mind that maybe this sick fuck was crazy or arrogant enough to
bring Ethan – or rather, Ethan’s body – here. Maybe it gave him some kind of
twisted thrill. Whatever it was in there, Harlan felt compelled to get a proper
look. He ran to fetch the wheel-nut wrench from his car. As he returned to the
VW, Jim finally answered. “Jesus, Harlan, what do you want?”

“I found the silver
Volkswagen.”

“Holy Christ! Where?”

“The Baptist tabernacle
on the Attercliffe Road.”

“Stay where you are.
Someone will be there as soon as possible. And for God’s sake, don’t do
anything. Do you hear?”

“Uh-huh.”

Harlan hung up and
raised the nut wrench overhead to smash a passenger-door window. Before he
could do so an angry shout rang out, “Hey you! What the fuck you doing?”

A heavily built man
dressed in jeans and a leather jacket was approaching fast. He was about
Harlan’s height and age, but his close-cropped hair was ginger, not dark.

 His hands were up
in a fighting position, and Harlan noticed that the backs of them and his
wrists were greenish-black with spidery jailhouse tattoos – tattoos which in a
semi-dark room to a terrified twelve-year old’s eyes might conceivably be
mistaken for hair. One look at the man’s face told him there was going to be
serious trouble if he didn’t act fast. He shoved the wrench in his jacket
pocket. “Police. Is this your car?”

The man stopped a few
feet away from Harlan, uncertainty puckering his forehead. He took in Harlan’s
unkempt hair and creased clothes. “You’re police? Let’s see your ID.”

“Is this your car?”
Harlan repeated more forcefully. The key to these situations, he knew from
experience, was to take control, and to do so quickly with a calm
aggressiveness.

“You’re not police. You
look like a fuckin’ scag-head to me.”

“Sir, this vehicle is
suspected to have been used in a crime. I need you to accompany me to the station
for questioning.”

The lines of doubt on
the man’s face deepened at Harlan’s official sounding language. For an instant,
he looked as if he was going to accept Harlan’s claim to be a police officer,
but then the pinpricks of his pupils flared. “Either you show me some fuckin’
ID, pal, or I’m gonna fuck you up so bad you’ll wish you were dead. You get
me?”

The two men stared
silently at each other. Adrenaline poured into Harlan’s bloodstream. He knew
what he had to do – he had to put this fucker on the ground and kneel on his
back until the uniforms showed up – but he couldn’t do it. His body was rooted,
paralysed, while his mind looped back to the image of Robert Reed going over
like a skittle. Yet again he heard the sickening crunch, yet again he saw the
blood diffusing like wine through the snow.

The man swung at
Harlan. Automatically, he jerked his arms up to block the punch. The man swung
again. Harlan swayed out of his reach. “Motherfucker!” roared the man, throwing
a flurry of punches, all of which either deflected off Harlan’s arms or missed
their target. The man backed away, breathing heavily, a new wariness in his
eyes.

Again, they faced each
other silently for a moment. Then the man pulled out a key and unlocked the
car. “Stop. I can’t let you leave,” said Harlan, but he made no attempt to
prevent the man from ducking into the car. It wasn’t until the engine revved
into life that he darted forward and tried to yank open the driver’s side door.
He was dragged along, stumbled to his knees, and as the car turned sharply,
narrowly avoided getting pulled under its wheels.

As the car accelerated
onto the road, Harlan sprinted to his own car. He slammed it into gear and
pushed his foot down hard. He’d been trained in pursuit driving, and he knew
the area well, so he was confident the VW wouldn’t get away from him.
Accelerating smoothly through the gears, he quickly caught up with it. Its
driver put on a sudden burst of speed at a junction, narrowly avoiding clipping
another car. Harlan was forced to briefly mount the pavement in order to swerve
around the same car. Zigzagging through traffic, careening wildly around bends,
they roared through the streets at blurring speeds. Horns blared, tyres
squealed, and brakes screeched, as the VW’s driver attempted to shake off his
pursuer by going the wrong way around a busy roundabout. There was the sound of
grinding metal as Harlan’s car scraped along the side of an oncoming bus. For
an instant, he thought he was boxed in, then the traffic parted like the Red
Sea, and he was charging after the VW again. Its driver was going like a mad
thing, overtaking and undertaking, cutting across streams of traffic, forcing
Harlan to take crazy risks just to keep him in view.
This is going to end badly
,
thought Harlan, and a second later it did. The silver VW took a corner too
fast, skidded out of control, hit a curb and flipped. Once, twice, three times
it rolled across a grass verge, tearing up huge chunks of turf, before coming
to rest on its roof against a wall.

Harlan sprang out of
his car and ran to the VW. He tried to open the driver’s side door, but it was
wedged shut by the car’s buckled roof. He kicked in the window, already
shattered by the impact. Ducking down, he saw the man lying in an unconscious
heap, his face crushed and bloody. Scattered all around him were clothes, which
seemed to have come from a holdall that’d burst open during the crash. Harlan
felt for a pulse, and to his relief, found one, although it was weak and
thready. The man groaned as Harlan hooked his hands under his armpits, and
gently as possible, pulled him from the wreckage. His breath gurgled and grated
as if something was broken inside his chest. Blood welled from a deep gash on
the palm of one of his hands. Harlan took off his jacket and covered him with
it, before ducking back into the overturned car to grab an item of clothing to
staunch the bleeding. It was then that he saw the gun. It was an Olympic .380
BBM revolver – a starter pistol favoured by criminals because it could easily
be purchased and just as easily be converted to fire live ammo. Careful not to
touch the gun with his hands, he wrapped it in a t-shirt and pocketed it. Then
he tore another t-shirt in two and bandaged the man’s hand as best he could with
the strips. The man’s eyes flickered open, showing white for a second before
the pupils rolled down. He tried to sit up.

“Lie still,” said
Harlan, holding him down.

“I can’t breathe.” The
man’s voice came in a strangled gasp.

“Where is he?”

“I need an ambulance.”

“I’ll call one as soon
as you tell me where Ethan Reed is.”

“How would I know
that?” The man groaned. Spittle muddied with blood dribbled from the edges of
his mouth.

“Listen to me, you’ve
probably got serious internal injuries. You might not have long left to live.
This could be your last chance to make amends, to save your soul. So why don’t
you tell me where Ethan Reed is?”

“Oh God,” whimpered the
man. “Oh God. I didn’t want to hurt anybody…I didn’t…I…” His voice faded out
and his eyes rolled again.

“Stay with me,” urged
Harlan, but he couldn’t keep the man from slipping back into unconsciousness.
He checked through the man’s pockets and found a wallet. Inside it there was
some loose change, a baggie containing a small amount of white powder, and six
credit cards, each with a different name. In the distance, he heard the wail of
approaching sirens.