Authors: Tom Graham
Get Cartwright
by Tom Graham
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Shadow of the Past
Chapter Three: One Spent Cartridge
Chapter Seven: This is Diplomacy
Chapter Eleven: Lost and Found in Lost & Found
Chapter Twelve: Gene, God and the Meaning of the Western
Chapter Thirteen: A Quiet Drink
Chapter Fifteen: Dreams of Life
Chapter Seventeen: Duke of Earles
Chapter Eighteen: It’s Complicated
Chapter Nineteen: Death of a Cortina
Chapter Twenty-One: Clive Gould
Chapter Twenty-Three: Siege at Trencher’s Farm
Chapter Twenty-Five: Yellow Brick Road
Chapter Twenty-Six: Into The Emerald City
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Life on Mars?
It was Sunday morning. Manchester was drowsy and still. And DI Sam Tyler was staring death in the face.
My God …! It’s him …
His blood had frozen in his veins.
Don’t run. Stand your ground.
Sam’s heart was hammering in his chest.
This is it. This is the showdown. Don’t run – be a man – it’s time to finish this thing here and now!
The silent confrontation between him and death had been as sudden as it was unexpected. Sam had been walking through the city on a typically dead Sunday morning. Manchester was lying in, its curtains still drawn, its head under the covers, refusing to budge. Here in 1973, Sunday trading was still just a promise – or a threat – that lay in the future. Apart from a few corner shops and wayside cafes, all the shutters were down. Hardly a car moved in the streets. An elderly man walked his elderly dog. A solitary council worker gathered up discarded cans of Tennent’s and stinking chip papers. And through this, Sam had made his way, lost in his own thoughts.
Hurrying past the Roxy cinema, a sudden movement had caught his eye. He glanced up – and at once he gasped and stumbled to a halt. Stepping out noiselessly from the dark façade of the cinema came a shadowy figure, blank-faced and featureless. It positioned itself in Sam’s path, standing motionless in front of a gaudy poster for
Westworld
,
which remained visible through its hazy, insubstantial body. Grotesquely, Yul Brynner’s face – falling away like a mask to reveal robot mechanics underneath – could be seen where the shadow’s own face should have been.
Sam knew at once what – or rather
who
– that phantom was. He knew the aura of horror that hung about it, had experienced before the primal terror that surrounded this dreadful apparition.
Running a dry tongue over dry lips, Sam said as calmly as he could: ‘So. Looks like you’ve found me, Mr Gould.’
There was no sign of response. Yul Brynner glared back at him through the blank mask of the Devil in the Dark.
Sam tried to pluck up the courage to take a challenging step towards this thing of darkness. But his feet would not obey him. He remained rooted to the spot. Acting tougher than he felt, he said: ‘How are we going to do this? Do we fight? Or do you just zap me with a death ray? Whatever it is, let’s do it. Right now. Let’s finish this.’
Brave words. But he felt anything but brave. A bead of sweat rolled down Sam's face.
The shadow shifted its position, and now, through its hazy form, Sam could see the
Westworld
poster’s tag-line, perfectly readable through Gould’s chest:
‘Don’t just stand there,’ Sam said, lifting his head and refusing to be cowed. ‘You want Annie? Forget it. You’re not getting her. She’s with
me
now, you filthy, bullying, murdering bastard. You’re never going to lay so much as finger on her ever again. You and her are history, done with. But you and
me
,
Mr Gould, we have business to finish.’ He raised his fists. They felt puny and weak, like the fists of a child. ‘So let’s get on with it.’
Clive Gould, the Devil in the Dark, remained still and silent, an insubstantial shadow, a dark, hazy stain upon the air. But Sam could still recall the broad-nosed, snaggle-toothed face of Clive Gould from that awful night he had witnessed the murder of Annie’s father, PC Tony Cartwright. In dreams and waking visions, the Test Card Girl had shown him more of Gould’s cruelty, the sickening treatment Annie had suffered in life from this brute, the beatings, the assaults, the psychological torture. And although he had not seen it for himself (thank God), he knew that it was at Gould’s hands that Annie had died. She had died, just as Sam had died, and Gene Hunt and all the rest of them, and wound up here in this strange simulacrum of 1973 that lay somewhere between Life and the Life Beyond.
And at some point Clive Gould died too,
Sam thought.
But unlike Annie, he shouldn’t have come here. His place was elsewhere. But that hasn’t stopped him. He’s forcing his way into 1973, strengthening his presence here, becoming more and more real. At first, he was a dream, a glimpse of something awful in the dark recesses of my mind. Then I saw him personified in the monstrous body tattoos of bare-knuckle boxer Patsy O’Riordan. Then, in Friar’s Brook borstal, I saw his face, and I saw how he murdered Annie’s father.
And now – right now – I’m seeing him again. A shadow – a ghost.
Sam frowned, tilted his head, thought to himself.
‘You’re not saying very much, Mr Gould. What’s the matter? Don’t you want to kill me here and now? Or is it … is it that you
want
to, but you’re not strong enough yet?’
The shadow stirred at last. It seemed to push back its shoulders, as if about to attack. But Sam sensed it was all for show.
‘I’m right,’ said Sam, and he felt emboldened. ‘You’re not strong enough to beat me yet. You’re just trying to psych me out before the showdown. You sad, pathetic bully. Well …
you
might not be ready for this fight, but
me
…’
Sam lunged forward, hurling a blow at Gould, putting all the weight of his body behind it. He lost his balance and staggered forward, righting himself at once and throwing up his left arm to deflect a counter-attack. But no attack came. The street outside the cinema was empty. Sam stared at Yul Brynner, and Yul Brynner stared back, but of Clive Gould there was no sign.
‘Run if you want to!’ Sam shouted into the empty street. ‘
I’m
not running anymore! I’m done with running. I’m coming for
you
, Gould! I’ll find you, and I’ll beat you, and I’ll send you back to the hell you came from!’
His blood was up, he was ready for battle – but his enemy had quit the field. Sam brought his breathing under control and unclenched his fists. He wiped the sleeve of his leather jacket across his glistening forehead. His knees were shaking.
Despite the fear that Gould’s ghost-like appearance had instilled him, Sam felt a strange surge of hope and defiance rising up from deep within him. Gould was getting stronger, but he still didn’t have what it took for the final duel. He would delay the final confrontation until he was more powerful – unless Sam could track him down before then and finish him once and for all.
And I can do it! If I can draw him into a fight before he’s ready for it, if I can provoke him into attacking me too soon … I can do it! I can WIN!
The sense that things were moving towards an endgame between these two implacable enemies renewed Sam’s energies, even revived his spirits. Victory – or at the very least, the
possibility
of victory – was at hand. The chance was coming for Sam to dispel Gould forever. He had no choice – he
had
to win this fight; the price of failure was too high. And when he at last defeated Gould, his and Annie’s future together would be wide open, like a shining plain beneath a golden sun, just as Nelson had shown him in the Railway Arms.
‘I’m not here to carry your burden for you,’
Nelson had told him.
‘That’s for you and you alone. Be strong! It’s the future that matters, Sam. Your future. Yours and Annie’s. Because you two have a future, if you can reach it. You can be happy together. It’s possible. It’s all very possible.’
Possible – but not guaranteed.
‘“Possible” is the best odds I’m going to get,’ Sam told himself. ‘Perhaps I can improve those odds with a little help. But who can I turn to?’
At that moment, he stopped, glancing across at a grimy, gone-to-seed, urban church, out of which slow, wheezing music could just be heard. The organist was limbering up before the service. It took a few moments for Sam to place the tune – he hunted through his memory like a man rifling through a cluttered attic – and then, quite suddenly, he found what he was after.
‘Rock Of Ages,’ he muttered to himself. And from somewhere at the back of his brain, words emerged to join with the tune:
While I draw this fleeting breath,
when mine eyes shall close in death,
when I soar to worlds unknown …
‘Something something dum-dee-dum, rock of ages, cleft for me.’
Like photographs in an album, old hymns had a potency that no amount of rationalism and scepticism could entirely stifle. Deep emotions were stirred – part nostalgia, partly unease, part regret, part hope. Sam thought of his life, and of his death – and of Clive Gould emerging from the darkness – and of Nelson, breaking cover to reveal that he was far more than just a grinning barman in a fag-stained pub – and he thought of Annie, whose memory, as always, stirred his heart and gave his strange, precarious existence all the focus and meaning he could ask for.
Despite everything – the threats, the danger, the approaching horror of the Devil in the Dark – Sam felt
happy
.
He knew it wouldn’t last, but as long as it did, he let the feeling warm him, like a man in the wilderness holding his palms over a campfire.
Sam turned away from the church, strolled across an empty street devoid of traffic, and ducked into Joe’s Caff, a greasy spoon which served coffee like sump oil and bacon butties cooked in what seemed to be Brylcreem. There were red-and-white checkered plastic covers on all the tables, bottles of vinegar with hairs gummed to the tops, and ketchup served in squeezy plastic tomatoes. Joe himself was a miserable, bolshy bugger who covered his fat belly in a splattered apron and never cleaned his fingernails. He let ash from his roll-up fall into his cooking, and checked to see if food was ready by sticking his thumb into it.