Get Cartwright (30 page)

Sam limped heavily towards the collapsed remains of Trencher’s Farm. Flames were still leaping, and great bursts of sparks momentarily erupted from the thickly billowing smoke. Peering in through a gaping hole that had once been a window, Sam saw a figure lying face down, covered in fire. It was Chris. He was part buried by burning debris. The staircase and most of the upstairs landing had given way and come crashing down on him. Slumped next to him, and blackened almost beyond recognition, was Ray. He had been flung down when the staircase collapsed, but Sam knew in his heart he had already been dead when he dragged him out of the upstairs bedroom.

As he watched, the flames roared across the two bodies, consuming them hungrily. Thick smoke drew across them, like the final curtain, obscuring them from sight.

‘Guv?’ Sam called out, limping round the outside of the farm. ‘Guv, are you there?’

It was conceivable that Gene had made it out. He had been in the front living room, armed with an axe, when the fire took hold. He might well have smashed his way through what was left of the windows and jumped clear.

And if he did, what then? Did Gould’s lackeys shoot him down? Is he dead, like the others?

‘Gene! Gene, answer me! Where are you?!’

He’s dead. Surely he must be dead. That’s how managed to turn up in the casino along with Chris and Ray. They all died together – they carried out their final duty as police officers by saving Annie – and now they have moved on. They’ve moved on to …

To where? Oblivion? Had they each been handed their own black helium balloon and directed towards the all-consuming darkness?

‘No …’ Sam muttered, shaking his head. ‘No, it’s not possible. We’re CID. We’re A-Division. It can’t end like this …’

Sam had worked his way right around the back of the farmhouse and was approaching the front of it again when he saw Gene’s camel hair lying bunched on the grass, smouldering and ruined. It was only when it moved that Sam realised the Guv was still inside it.

‘Gene! Gene, oh thank God!’ He rushed forward. ‘Thank God, Gene, I thought you were …’

Sam glimpsed the side of Gene's face, the skin charred and peeling and running with blood.

‘Guv ...?’

All at once, Sam felt useless, afraid and utterly alone. He didn't know what to do. He looked around as if he might suddenly spot a first-aid kit sitting handily nearby, but all he saw was the ruin of Trencher’s Farm. It looked almost like a ruined chapel, with a broken chancel and cross consumed with flames. Above it, the stars glittered coldly, and the moon was full.

Sam knelt down beside the Guv, reached out to touch him, then hesitated. If he started manhandling him, all he would do is make Gene’s appalling injuries even worse. Gene’s face was unrecognizable. Most of his hair had been burned away, leaving his exposed scalp red and blistered.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ Sam said in a flat, stupid voice. His mind was a blank. He was in shock. ‘Burns. I … I never know what to do with burns.’

‘Put butter on ’em …’ croaked Gene.

‘Yes, that’s what my mother always told me,’ said Sam. Insanely, he patted his pockets as if he might just come across a handy pack of Stork SB. In the next moment, he dropped his hands to his sides and stared straight ahead. ‘I can’t think, Guv. I don’t know what I’m doing. I … I don’t know what to …’

‘Business as usual then …’ Gene coughed feebly. Smoke came out of his mouth. Painfully, he muttered, ‘That watch … The one you showed me …’

Sam pulled the fob watch from his pocket.

‘Chuck it,’ Gene struggled to say. He swallowed hard and painfully. ‘Chuck it, Tyler.’

‘I can’t do that, Guv. You don’t understand.’

‘Oh, I do, Tyler. I do.’

Did he? Perhaps he did. Sam recalled how the Guv had reacted when they were hiding out together in the ruined mill. The watch had affected him, stirred dormant memories within him. Maybe his past had started to come back to him. Maybe he was fully aware of the confrontation Sam had just had with Gould on the very edge of the abyss. Maybe Gene Hunt knew. Maybe he knew everything.

‘Chuck it,’ he breathed again.

Sam got up and headed back to the farmhouse. Feeling an overwhelming sense of misery, he held the watch up before him
.
It was meaningless.

In a sudden moment of despair, Sam hurled the watch. It sailed through the night air, its chain streaming out behind it like the glittering tail of a comet. It struck a blackened wall of Trencher’s Farm, bounced off at an angle, and fell amid the flames. As it did, another upstairs room gave way, and a mass of blazing timbers crashed down on the little fob watch.

Slowly, Sam returned to where Gene lay.

‘It’s gone,’ he said. ‘Chucked.’

‘Tyler …’

‘Yes, Guv?’

‘Just tell me one thing.’

‘Yes, Guv.’

‘Am I bad?’

‘Bad, Guv? No. No, no, no, you’re one of the good ones, Guv. You’re one of the best. You’re the best bloody DCI I’ve ever had, better than I was …’

‘No, you prat,’ Gene croaked. ‘What I’m askin’ is – am I
bad
?’

Sam looked down at him, and the burnt and bloodied remains of Gene’s body, and found he had to blink away tears to see.

‘Not so bad, Guv,’ he said, struggling to speak. ‘Nothing you won’t get over. Not so bad at all.’

‘Lying git, I’m bollocksed and you know it.’ The Guv’s voice was dry as ashes. His eyes were closed; perhaps there was nothing beneath those burned and peeling lids but empty, ruined sockets. ‘Game’s up for me, Tyler. Final whistle on extra time.’

Gene pawed feebly at the breast of his coat.

‘What is it, Guv? What do you need?’

Sam groped in his inside pocket and pulled out Gene’s charred ID badge. Gene pushed it away. Sam tried again, and this time his fingers closed around the hard, smooth surface of the guv’s hip flask. The metal was hot.

‘Here, Guv – let me.’

He unscrewed the cap and placed the flask against Gene’s blackened lips. But for the first time in Gene Hunt’s life, he could not take his drink. His face screwed up in agony as the Scotch burned his blistered lips and tongue.

‘It’s going to be okay, help’s coming,’ Sam said. His words were wretched, empty, pathetic, and he knew they sounded like that to Gene too. But still he had to say them. He looked up at the night sky, and said, ‘Annie’s gone for help. She took Gould’s car. She’ll be back in no time, and she’ll bring doctors and ambulances and … and it’s going to be okay. You’re going be back at your desk before you know it. You’re going to be back on the front line, where you belong. Manchester needs you. We all need you. I need you.’

Sam turned away from looking at the stars and glanced down instead.

‘Guv?’

But it wasn’t the Guv anymore. It was just a blackened piece of meat bundled up in a ruined coat. Before the last threads of his life had slipped from his grasp, Gene Hunt had managed to pull from his pocket the pack of pornographic playing cards he had picked up at Pat Walsh’s bungalow. Blindly, and for reasons he could now never divulge, he had fumbled three from the deck. Charred at the edges, they were still intact enough to be legible. Three queens – clubs, diamonds, hearts. The posturing, bare-chested girls depicted on the cards had been the only witnesses to the Guv’s passing. Perhaps they had escorted his spirit on its journey; Gene would certainly not have objected to such a trinity of chaperones.

Gene was gone. Sam looked at him in silence, the flames from the burning farmhouse throwing wild shadows all around.

‘Be lucky, Guv,’ Sam said.

At the very end of his strength, and sick to his heart, Sam fell upon the grass next to the body of his fallen captain. He lay on his back and looked up at the night sky. What planets and constellations rolled silently by up there? That clear, bright stab of light directly overhead – was it Mars? And those diamond lights sparkling about it, were those the lonely Pleiades?

God knows. I’m just a copper.

Sam lay motionless. Exhaustion tugged at his eyelids and closed them. The last thing he saw before consciousness slipped away was a bird wheeling overhead. It cried out mournfully, again and again, until it became one black dot against the verge of dawn. Moments later, its wailing died away.

She was right
, Sam thought to himself, in the last moments before sleep overtook him.
The Test Card Girl was right. To forget ... to throw oneself into total oblivion … it’s the only way to stop the pain.

He dreamt, but only briefly. In the dream, he saw the gold-plated watch crushed beneath burning debris, its mechanism smashed, the Roman numerals on the white-faced dial being eaten away by fire, as if Time itself was being destroyed. Then the darkness swept over Sam again, and the dream faded rapidly to black.

‘What’s that you’re doing?’’ the man asked.

‘Dreaming,’ said Sam.

‘Oh aye? What about?’

‘Something I once had. A watch. With a chain. I thought it was important once.’

‘But you don’t think that now?’

Sam shook his head. He found that he had a pint in front of him. He must be in a pub. And since he had no recollection of how or why he was there, he supposed he must still be dreaming. He sipped his pint.

‘So this watch of yours,’ the man said, sipping his own pint. (Sam realised at this point that the two of them were standing side by side at the bar.) ‘What happened to it? Lose it, did you?’

‘Yes. No. Sort of. I destroyed it.’

‘Did you, now? And why’s that?’

‘Somebody told me to. A man I knew.’

‘And who might that have been?’

‘Oh, you wouldn’t know him,’ said Sam. ‘He was a copper. He’s dead now, anyway.’

‘
I
was a copper,’ the man said. ‘What was his name, this fella? I might have come across him.’

Sam turned, and for the first time he looked properly at the man in his dream. He was tall and thin with a kind, honest face – the sort of face you’d most want to see on a copper, especially if you were in dire need. Instantly, Sam liked the man, and regretted that he was nothing but a wisp of smoke in a dream that would soon be broken and forgotten.

‘His name was Hunt,’ said Sam.

‘Gene Hunt,’ replied the man. ‘DCI Gene Hunt.’

‘You knew him?’

‘A very clever fella,’ the man said, nodding seriously. He raised his pint as if in silent toast of Gene’s memory, drank deep, and said, ‘He did the right thing, telling you to chuck that watch.’

‘Why?’

The man smiled and shrugged: ‘You’ll see. Inspiration, that’s what your old DCI had. It was inspiration to throw that fob watch into the fire.’

‘Hang on, I never told you I threw it into a fire,’ said Sam. ‘And I never said it was a
fob
watch, just a … Oh well. You’re not real. You’re in my head, so …’

‘Not real?’

Sam smiled. ‘Much to my regret, you’re just a figment of my imagination. I meet a lot of those, but I don’t normally get on as well with them as I do with you, Mr, um … Mr ...?’

‘Cartwright. Tony Cartwright. Didn’t you recognise me, Sam?’

Sam looked him over, wide-eyed, amazed at himself for having missed it.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Cartwright,’ he said, ‘things have been quite … quite fraught recently.’

‘But all’s well that ends well, eh, Sam?’

Sam thought for a moment and said, ‘Maybe. But not all that ends well ends
entirely
well.’

Tony shrugged and drained his pint to the dregs, then slammed the empty glass down on the bar.

‘Nectar of the gods!’ he declared. ‘Well, time for me to hit the road.’ He turned and gave Sam an intense look. ‘Thank you, Sam,’ he said very seriously. ‘You know what for.’

‘It was my pleasure,’ said Sam in a quiet voice.

‘Be good to her.’

‘I will.’

Tony held his look for a moment, nodded as if to himself, and then made his way towards the door. He casually began whistling as he walked. The theme tune to
Dixon of Dock Green.

At the door, he paused, and over his shoulder called across: ‘’Night, Nelson.’

‘You have yourself one big ol’ prince of an evening, Mr Cartwright, sir!’ Nelson grinned back warmly from behind the bar, and all at once Sam suddenly realised where he was. Or rather, where his dream had put him. ‘And when you see her, give my regards to that
bee-ootiful
missus of yours!’

‘I will do, Nelson. I will do.’

Tony Cartwright disappeared, out into the night, a contented man.

‘And how are
you
farin’ tonight, mm, Sam?’ Nelson asked, drifting over, his manner casual, but a certain perceptive gleam in his eye. ‘Beer to your likin’?’

‘I’m dreaming,’ said Sam.

‘Oh? Really?’

‘I think so.’

‘Maybe
I’m
dreamin’
you,’
smiled Nelson. ‘Coz I feel real to me, you know? So
you
must be the fella in
my
head!’

‘No, no,
I’m
the one who feels real.’

Nelson laughed. ‘Getting’ complicated! But I know de solution. What say this, Sam? What so
you
ain’t dreamin’, and
I
ain’t dreamin’, mmm? What if this is
real
?’

‘It can’t be real,’ said Sam. ‘If it’s real, how did I get here? You see, I’m not in the Railway Arms. Right now, at this moment, I’m lying on the grass outside the burning remains of a farmhouse – my guv’nor lying dead beside me – Chris and Ray lying dead in the ruin.’

‘Oh?’ said Nelson, raising his eyebrows mockingly. ‘And did you not listen to what mah very good friend Mistah Cartwright just told you?
All’s well dat ends well.
And Ah tink it all ended
veeeerry
well.’

‘You’ve really turned your accent up this evening, Nelson.’

‘Forget de accent, mahn. Listen to de
words
.’

Sam frowned. The pint in his hand felt solid. The beer in his mouth felt solid. The wooden bar on which he was leaning felt sticky and splintery. The air in his nostrils smelt of fag smoke. It was all as real, as immediate, as solid as ever. It
was
the Railway Arms.