Bright Spark (6 page)

Slowey
felt the world cease to spin on its axis for a second as adrenaline surged
through him, pins and needles in his veins. He’d thrown his weight against the
door, heard something grunt and fall to the floor. There was more barking.
Already his shoulders were sliding on the black emulsion coating the door and
his worn shoes scrabbled for purchase in the gravel. He reached into his jacket
again, fumbled with a press stud as the door bucked against him and felt the
coarse grip of his baton.

Slowey
flicked the baton, felt a twinge in his wrist as it extended and locked, and
clenched his teeth.  A silent second stretched and plans jostled for attention
in his mind. Should he run for the car and his phone, shout for the landlord,
announce himself to those inside and demand they come quietly? Should he stand
aside from the door just as this villain reached their full momentum in the
hope that they might land stunned at his feet? Surely it couldn’t be Murphy?

He
was looking at his watch; it was always good to know the correct time of arrest
for statements. Then he was lifted from his feet and sitting on the gravel,
staring at blue eyes and gritted teeth in a red balaclava. The eyes were
moving, the thief getting up, moving more quickly than he was, tracksuit
bottoms ripped at the knee with a gloss of new blood, crow-bar in one hand.
There was barking somewhere, closer, in a different place. 

The
figure was standing now, one foot pointed at the street, eyes darting between
Slowey and a clean escape, crow-bar still raised. Slowey felt pain seeping into
his back where it connected with something blunt. He was too old and clapped
out for this nonsense.  A small voice wanted to reason with this person, to
conjure up logic of such beauty that anyone listening would declare that it was
a fair cop and handcuff themselves to his car. Slowey listened to a louder
voice.

He
flung out his legs, scissored them around the figure’s ankles and rolled
blindly. The crow-bar connected with some far off part of him; perhaps a spent
blow, perhaps he was just numb. He rolled upright, hurling phlegm and
fricatives and flailing with the baton. Pressure loomed behind his eyes as a
glorious anger burst its banks. The shock of the baton’s impacts registered but
weren’t felt. Weak blows to knees and elbows and ribs then, as he rose to his
knees and gained some space to swing, to the shoulders and the base of the
skull and the knuckles where they gripped matted hair, the man now shrunken,
foetal.

Someone
was imploring, a big man’s voice becoming smaller, an echo from the bottom of a
well; Slowey’s vision condensed until he could see only the stricken youth
hemmed by an oval of shadow. There was blood and hair plastered to the tip of
his baton and he couldn’t flick them off, no matter how hard he tried.

A
sound behind him might have been another footstep slewing on the gravel. A wail
began between his ears, slowly, like arthritic hands cranking an air raid siren
into life. He was the good cop, a talker, not a pummeller. What did his body
think it was doing? The back of his head was so wet. Had he fallen asleep in a
puddle? He couldn’t find his feet but he remembered squeezing them into the
shoes that had never fitted properly but he’d lost the receipt and shoes never
fitted him anyway. His teeth bit hard, a taste of metal, his head tried to jolt
itself from his neck, vision flaking into grey. Warm wet head then head hit
hard. Wasn’t that the wrong way round?

       One
side of Firth’s face bulged and ached, nerves electric with pain. Even the
timid caress of the sun as it cleared the cathedral and the tower blocks and
crept over his windowsill drew new sparks from it. He sank further into the
armchair and pulled the hood fully over his head.

       He was
wearing all his layers and had puffed his way through another twenty quid’s
worth of mediocre draw but he couldn’t stop shaking, couldn’t bring the roll-up
to his lips without it zigzagging like a bluebottle. The carpet was strewn with
lager tins, some half full and leaking, some crushed and brimming with fag
ends. He’d no idea how many he’d sunk tonight.

He’d
wanted to get so wrecked that all the memories piling up in his head would just
dissolve into fog. But where he’d wanted emptiness, he’d found fear and hatred
and longing without form. If he let himself get sober, they’d resolve
themselves into pictures and sounds to loop through his mind again and again.
He knew he couldn’t win, but he could make sure he didn’t care.

       He had
seen his face in the bathroom mirror and didn’t want to see it again. Knowing
what it looked like just made him feel the pain in all its hues. Purples,
blacks and greens stained and bloated the left side of his face around the eye,
its white stained red. If he closed his good eye, it was like looking out from
inside a cherry-red letterbox. 

       He was
glad the flat was empty. He knew it was somehow important to be alone today.
The place was in his name anyway.  Even though Ali Bongo brought in money and a
variety of pharmaceuticals, he had some very bad habits and would bring the
filth back with him sooner or later. He wasn’t magical enough to make handcuffs
disappear for long. With another year on probation, Firth didn’t need uniformed
visitors.

       He
didn’t even know if Ali Bongo had called in that week. The mail had been piled
against the radiator by the opening of the door, a paper snowdrift. There would
be the usual rubbish of interest to neither of them: junk mail and final
demands for the previous half dozen occupiers; new bills he never intended to
pay; other people’s pre-approved credit card applications begging to be abused
if only he had the energy or the nous.

There
would also be official looking missives from the probation service and the
benefits agency that he really should look at. By now, Tesco might have written
to enquire why he no longer saw fit to come and push trolleys for minimum wage.
His solicitor, fit bitch but way up herself, might have tried to tell him again
that he had to stand up in court against the screw if he wanted to see a penny
of compo.    

       His
hands had moved back to his face of their own accord, wanting to probe the
bruising but not daring to. He pursed his lips, tasting neither nicotine nor
heat. The roll-up lay on the arm of the sofa, its fire dead. The tartan fabric
boasted a dozen faded scars where butts that he’d dropped while sleepy or
stoned had failed to ignite the fire retardant material. The housing
association took such good care of their properties.

He’d
have to try harder if he wanted to go the way of his old mum, comatose on vodka
and stout, number thirty-eight of her forty a day habit dropping down the seam
of the charity shop sofa and burning her alive in the front room of that
two-up, two-down while she rolled and roared and puked. He’d been out,
prowling, not up to mischief for once, not on a school night in his first week
at the big school, just wanting to be away from her and swallowed up by the
cool, quiet darkness.

Blown
home by the breeze, he’d stood alongside the gawping neighbours for minutes,
beyond the cordon and the fire engines, expecting the silly, useless cow to
show herself. Then he was noticed and the neighbours put up a cordon of
whispering and shuffling around him. A female hand or two almost reached out
for him but were stung into retreat by hissing male whispers.

It
all made what his dad did to himself seem like pure, cold logic. It taught him
that what he’d done to other people, even before his parents went off the
rails, was a curse that would show him horror before it let him die. He’d tried
to grow out of this notion, an all too neat fantasy of childhood, his very own
macabre fairy tale. Yet everything he’d done since made it seem fair and
true.      

Most
people weren’t capable of understanding the way things really were. They went
to work and sweated on their treadmills and mowed their lawns, never knowing
that the nuclear furnace rolling through the sky above their heads and the
flames eating up their garden waste were glimpses of the chaos that would one
day burn the flimsy fabric of this world to ash. Then everything would be clean
and simple again.

He’d
once shared a cell with a gormless teenage smack-head who’d had an expensive
education, professional parents, skiing holidays and expectations before he
fell into another world. When he didn’t cry himself to sleep at night or wall
himself into catatonia, and provided nobody was around to smack him for
presuming to be different, he became an encyclopaedia. Trotting out facts as if
they were strange and wonderful jewels he couldn’t remember acquiring seemed to
soothe him, as if he’d aged sixty years in six months. ‘e=mc²’ lodged in
Firth’s mind, its mysteries repeatedly reeled off in a voice clever enough for
TV but a dangerous liability inside.

It
made so much sense to find that every ounce of this corrupt, breakable matter
was a store of unimaginable, destructive energy, compressed, caged and biding
its time. He liked late-night sc-fi films where the world had been cleansed by
nuclear war, leaving random people free to roam a purged world in safe
anonymity. Oddly, they always drifted together, to become known, to re-build
society, to bicker and fight.

He
wished it was him. He’d embrace the emptiness, treasure it. To be truly alone
with no use for your memories was a sweet dream. All the buff folders and
computer records and criminal justice professionals that kept those memories
alive would just be anonymous specks in the endless, irradiated dust.

The
TV was still blaring in the corner, a nice little flat-screen that Ali Bongo
had scored from somewhere. The blonde man in a suit had the studio bouncer at
his shoulder and a baying crowd at his back as he laid down the law to a pair
of seventeen year olds. A chair had been knocked over and a kid dripping with
nine-carat gold was screaming at a fat, pasty girl about drugs and shagging and
how he could bring up babby any fuckin’ way he liked, innit.

Firth
couldn’t see the remote so he pitched a full tin of lager at the off button,
missing it and hitting the centre of the screen. The braying persisted but the
image had gone, replaced by a jagged spider’s web, silver seared onto black
where crystals in the screen had memorised the moment of their destruction. One
flick of the wrist and chaos had found a way in. 

       He
held the dead roll-up between his lips and steadied his disposable lighter with
both hands. He squeezed the trigger, hearing the whisper of gas, and rolled the
flint, once, twice, three times. He couldn’t make it live, his thumbs like
rubber. If they could see him on the wing; Pyro, Fireman Firth, Crispy Duck,
couldn’t even strike a light in his own armchair now.

       He
squeezed it hard, trigger down, plastic cracking under his palms, squeezing the
ridges of the flint into his thumb, rolling it, and the flame lived, purring
and breathing again. He rolled both eyes inwards as he focussed on its tapering
dance, pushing his chin towards the flame, not daring to move his hands,
sucking on the roll-up as it flared back into life, tasting treacle and ash.

For
a second he was staring at the piled mail through the flame, thinking how
dangerous it was to leave it all near a letterbox and how greedily it would
burn, how badly it wanted to burn, how many problems it could solve. He shook
his head, killed the spark, dropped the lighter, let his eyes roll up and his
head sink into the top of the sofa as the draw slowed his heart to one beat an
hour and filled his head with beautiful, warm porridge.          

       Lights
sparkled and popped in blue and gold and red and the safety curtain went up,
hundreds of feet of greyness hoisted away into the gods. Slowey’s head dropped
again, still so heavy, and he was looking again at the floor of the stage,
oddly formed from gravel and glass. He rolled his neck and saw the curtain
proper, a thin fabric of purple paisley that didn’t quite reach the floor. The
roaring was fierce now but didn’t come from the auditorium, which in any case
seemed empty.

       “Come
on, wake up.”

       How
rude, he thought, about to take another bow. Had someone just slapped him? He
was so outraged it made him dizzy.

       “Come
on, mate. Ambulance is coming. For fuck’s sake, don’t you be properly hurt.”

       Slowey
was back in the pub car park, eyes wide open, feet lashing out, baton still
clenched in his right hand, nails digging hot furrows in his palm. The world
appeared still but his head and stomach told him he was plummeting.  A purple
paisley dressing gown failed to accommodate the testicles of the figure
crouching before him.

“I’m
police,” said Slowey. He took in the figure’s hairy arms, hefty jewellery and
bifocal glasses before he turned and vomited onto the tow bar of the caravan.

“Course
you are, petal.”

A
Staffy appeared and began lapping up Slowey’s vomit with growling gusto. The
man stood and dragged the dog backwards by its collar.

“Daphne,
don’t be so rude. Maureen,” he shouted. “Come and take Daphne. Did you phone
like I asked you?”

The
man disappeared through the fire doors, the dog straining against his grip and
licking its lips. Slowey braced himself against the caravan and willed himself
to stand. Sirens were howling somewhere. He did hope all that fuss wasn’t for
him. Then the man was propping him up, guiding him away from his car, his keys
left dangling from the door lock.

“Who
are you?” asked Slowey, now reclining on a wall seat inside the pub, a towel
packed with ice on his head and a glass of water in front of him.

“Not
much of a detective, are you? This is my pub and you’re the first cop to
actually appear while it’s being screwed. So cheers.” The man raised a tumbler
of whisky in Slowey’s direction. 

Opposite
the bar, both the one-armed bandit and the cigarette machine stood open, doors
levered off, change and fags taken. Slowey traced the tender eggs swelling on
his scalp, choked back bile and wandered if he’d sacrificed thousands of brain
cells for a few hundred quid’s worth of nicotine.

“That’s
not why I’m here,” he mumbled.

“Come
again?”

A
red light blinked from the ceiling above the optics, drawing Slowey’s gaze to
the dull lens of a camera lurking in the cobwebs and coving.

“Does
that camera work?”

“As
far as I know. Bought one of those hard disk recorder drive things for it an’
all. The cheeky bastards took it. And judging by the bits of it I found in the
car park, one of them brained you with it. Does that help?”

Blue
lights flickered through the frosted windows and a diesel engine rumbled into
the car park.

“Too
early to say. Any chance of a short or is it past last orders?”

       DI Ray
Newbould and DCI Dave Brennan believed in a clearly defined rank structure.
Brennan sat behind Newbould’s desk, jaw on steepled hands and double chin
almost masking the small, tight knot of his tie. Newbould perched on the edge
of his desk, one foot swinging, touching his tie pin or stroking an eyebrow
when he wasn’t writing names on the white board in slow and precise block
capitals.

Harkness
had been allocated a wall seat barely two feet off the ground. Having finished his
summing up, he gazed up at them from behind his knees, feeling like an
overgrown schoolboy due his first caning. Next to him, with the patched elbow
of his jacket occupying exactly half of the shared arm rest, sat DS Ron
Biddle.    

       “Thanks
for that summary, DS Harkness,” began Newbould at a brief nod from Brennan.
“And congratulations on the promotion. Sounds like you’ve done a fair job
tonight. I’ve got a few points to make. Do you want to start, sir?”

       Brennan
shook his head and shifted his gum from one side of his jaw to the other.

        “Right
then. As I said, Rob, great job tonight and we’d like you to stay at the sharp
end of this enquiry.” He paused to allow Harkness to bask in the radiance of
his smile. “Naturally, we’ll be setting up a HOLMES room ex post facto and
working to the letter of the manual to get the right result first time every
time. It’s only fair however to say that we do have one or two misgivings about
the conduct of the enquiry to date thus far.  Are we on the same page, Rob?”

       “I
think so, sir.” Harkness glanced at Biddle, who crossed his legs, sniffed and
continued to stare at the white board.