Hot Blooded (19 page)

I punched him again and he finally shut up, groaning as I dragged him into Gazza's office and shut the door.

Croydon. The storage depot. It wasn't very far away.

Maybe I should have called the police. Maybe I should have given it more than two seconds of thought. All I knew was that Gazza had Lily and that time was of the essence. I sprinted back to my flat and jumped into my car, nearly driving straight into another car as I drove out of the parking lot. Out of the corner of my eye I caught the other driver flicking the V-sign at me as I screeched past him, bellowing insults I couldn't hear behind the car's windows.

The drive to Croydon was a blur of red lights and near-misses - I was just thankful it was night and the streets were relatively empty. I don't quite know how I even made it without being pulled over. Maybe I had luck on my side. When I got to the depot, I pulled up away from the main gate and left the car on the road, aware that whoever was inside was going to be jumpy as hell.

The place looked deserted. No cars parked in the lot, no one in the little kiosk at the front gate. I slipped behind a small building close to the entrance and willed my breathing to quiet down so I could listen - and look. Nothing. Had Ian lied? I felt the muscles in my jaw clenching at the thought. If he had lied, if Lily wasn't at the depot and she got hurt due to that lie, I was going to kill him. He must have been aware of that.

Adrenaline pumped through my veins, screaming at me to do something, but all I could hear was my own breathing and my own pulse pounding in my head. Where the fuck was she? I walked out from behind the building, shifting my eyes, anticipating a shout, shots, anything. There was nothing. I started to jog down the rows of storage garages, one hand on the gun tucked in my waistband and the sour taste of desperation in my mouth. Lily was somewhere else, and she was with people who wanted to hurt her. It felt like my head was going to explode with the knowledge of it.

Then I saw it. A faint glow of light emanating from under the pull-down metal door of one of the garages that hadn't quite been closed properly. I approached silently, my ears straining to hear any sound from within. Instead of hauling the door open - there could have been any number of people inside, if there was anyone - I lay down on the asphalt, very carefully, and peered through the crack between the ground and the bottom of the door.

Someone's ankles, bound with duct tape. Lily. I recognized her leather boots. When I saw one of her feet move slightly I almost wept with relief. She was alive. Thank God. But I had to get her out of there before I could feel any real relief. Another person - someone sitting cross-legged on the ground with their back against the wall. No one else. I stood up and took the gun out, shaking out my hand one more time and making sure it was firmly within my grip. Then I used my free hand to haul the door up.

Dave. They had fucking Dave guarding her. That was a mistake. There was a gun on the floor beside him and he went for it, but he wasn't even close to fast enough.

"No," I said, pointing my gun right at his head. "Don't move."

Lily had some kind of fabric bag or hood placed over her head, and her ankles and wrists were bound. As soon as she heard my voice she started struggling, but I couldn't take my eyes off Dave. I kicked the gun away from him and stepped into the garage, backing up against one of the walls so no one could come up behind me.

"Aw, shit. Fuck. Fuck!"

Dave was hitting himself in the head, berating himself.

"Shut the fuck up," I hissed, edging towards Lily and keeping the gun on Dave. When I got to her, I knelt down.

"Lily, it's me. I'm alone - is this guy the only one? Is anyone else here? I'm holding a gun on him so I only have one hand. I'm going to try and take the bag off, OK?"

She made a muffled sound. Without taking my eyes off Dave I reached out and pulled the bag off Lily's head. There was a strip of duct tape over her mouth. I started to pull it off as gently as I could but she yanked her head away from me, ripping it off.

"Callum," she panted. "They're coming back. There's three of them, they're coming back, I don't know when. We have to get out of here right now."

She rolled over onto her stomach so I could pull the duct tape off her wrists, which were bound behind her back, and it took a lot longer than it should have. As soon as she was free she started working on her ankles, leaving me to concentrate fully on Dave, who was watching us and looking like he might be about to burst into tears.

"When are they coming back?" I asked Lily, who was sweating with the effort it was taking to free her ankles. I turned to help her and she shook her head, indicating for me to keep the gun on Dave.

"Soon, Callum. We have to get the fuck out of here right - wait. Do you have your phone?"

I did have my phone. I nodded at her.

"Give it to me."

I knew what she was going to do, who she was going to call. She knew that I knew, as well. She said it again, her voice more urgent this time:

"Give it to me, Callum! They're coming back!"

I tossed her my phone and she immediately started dialing. There was no other choice. She had to live - at any cost, she had to be safe.

"Where are we, Callum? I need an address. Tell me exactly where we are."

I told her where we were. I didn't know the address but I knew the street and the name of the storage depot. My voice sounded flat and hollow in the confines of the garage. I listened to Lily tell the person on the phone where she was. I listened to her tell them she was being held at gunpoint. I listened to her request an armed response team. She didn't take her eyes off me once. When she was done, she handed me back my phone and looked at me for a few seconds with tears in her eyes.

"Callum, go. Give me the gun and go. You probably have about five minutes but you have to go now."

Her voice was wobbling but she was refusing to let the tears fall. She was letting me go.

"Lily, I-" I started, torn almost in two between the burning desire to escape before the police arrived and the even stronger need to stay with her.

I knew if I left I was never going to see her again. I knew if I stayed I was going to get arrested, maybe even shot. I also knew she was risking her job letting me go.

"Go!" She yelled, her cheeks flushed red with emotion.

The sound of sirens could suddenly be heard in the distance.

"GO!" She screamed again, shoving me towards the door to the storage garage and pulling the door open herself. I went. I passed her the gun and took her face in my hands and we looked into each other's eyes for a second, two. Then I kissed her and turned away as that feeling of slow-motion that had overtaken me in Paris came over me again and I started to run.

As soon as Callum's footsteps had faded into the night, I let out a single, strangled sob and forced myself to swallow the rest. I couldn't curl up into a ball because I had to keep the gun on the dumb fucker who'd been left to guard me, so I just stood there blinking and taking deep breaths as the sound of Callum's footsteps faded into the night and the sound of approaching sirens got louder and louder. At some point, the man in front of me also started to cry. He looked young and he knew he'd fucked up. I didn't have a single ounce of sympathy for him.

"Morgan!"

It was Akin's voice. Thank God.

"I'm in here!" I called out. "There's a man here, and I have a gun on him. There's another gun on the ground beside me."

As soon as Akin and two uniformed, armed officers stepped into the garage, weapons drawn, I carefully put the gun in my hand down on the ground and collapsed with relief. Akin helped me up and led me to one of the squad cars.

"Where are they, Lily? Was Gazza with them? How did they find out? Did you tell Callum?"

"No, Gazza wasn't with them. And I don't know," I replied, shaking and not yet coherent enough to be offended by Akin's assumption that I had told Callum who I was. "I don't know how they found out - I did not tell anyone. Including Callum Cross. They broke into my house during the night. They knew I was police."

Akin leaned back in the car seat, thinking.

"You didn't tell
anyone
?"

The word
no
was on the tip of my tongue when I remembered Pandora.

"Pandora knows. She caught me taking the glasses - for the DNA testing. She knew, I had to admit it. I don't think it would have been her, though, not with her father being ex-police."

Akin was tense, leaned over the steering wheel wracking his brain. I should have felt the same way. I'd just been kidnapped, possibly almost killed, but all I could feel was a strange, anticlimactic sense of disappointment. We had the low-level moron who'd been assigned to guard me, but we didn't have anyone else. So why couldn't I bring myself to care? These were the people responsible for Linda Trout's death. I should have been right there with Akin, going over everything, examining all the snippets of conversation I could remember. But I wasn't. I sat in the passenger seat of the squad car almost entirely silent, giving Akin brief yes or no answers.

There was no mystery. Callum was gone. Callum was gone and I'd let him go. Would I feel bad about it at some point? Maybe, but I didn't yet. He'd saved me. Also, I loved him. I loved him and I didn't believe he had killed Linda Trout.

"Akin?" I finally said, turning to my boss. "Callum Cross saved me. I was tied up in there, they were going to kill me when they got back. He must have found out where I was. He saved me, and then I let him go."

Akin stared at me for a long time, saying nothing.

"Callum Cross was here - he saved you?"

"Yes," I replied. "And then I let him go. After I called the armed response team."

My superintendent turned away, shaking his head in a gesture of disappointment that I knew was directed entirely at me and my actions.

"I'm going to have to take you off the team, Morgan. You know that. I could arrest you right now, but I'm not going to. Let's give this a few days to settle down and see how it plays out."

"Yes sir," I replied flatly, waiting to feel something. It was like watching myself from the outside. My career, everything I'd worked for, the thing I was most proud of in life, the only thing I had ever been good at - all of it was dissolving right there in front of me and I couldn't even bring myself to react.

"We'll put you in a safe house until this is sorted out. I'll have one of the other officers drive you to your flat to get your things."

"OK."

"Morgan," he asked finally, turning towards me with a faintly baffled look on his face, "why? Why did you let him go?"

I made a lame attempt to defend myself. "Well we didn't have enough to arrest him yet, did we? I mean, for Linda Trout?"

"Morgan, you know damn well we could have taken him in for questioning if we'd caught him. I know I don't have to tell you how useful that could have been - the kind of information he may have been able to provide for-"

"I know!" I said, before Akin had even finished. "I know. And I know what you're thinking, too. I know you think I've fallen in love and hell, maybe I have, but I'm telling you, he didn't do it. There's an explanation here that we have to find. You have to trust me, Akin. Please. You know me, you know my instincts are good."

Akin stared at me for a few seconds before shrugging and sighing. "What do you want me to say, Morgan? You're right about your instincts - the fact that they're so good means you must know how this looks from my perspective."

He was right. I did know how it must have looked from his side. Nothing I could say without proof or evidence was going to make a difference and nor should it have. If there wasn't proof, there was nothing. I sat silently as Akin got out of the car and went to speak to one of the other officers on the scene. That caused a little twinge of regret. Just a little one. Maybe I was in shock? Whatever it was, I appeared to be taking the probable end of my career remarkably calmly.

I'd always been one of those people who thinks too much, all the time, even when I shouldn't. My mind just goes and goes, questions leading to questions, tangents being followed and spinning off multiples of themselves whenever I have a moment to myself. But during the drive to my flat with a female officer I didn't know, my mind was, for once, still. Was it relief? It must have been at least partly that. It was a curious thing, though. After packing a small bag of clothes and personal effects I observed myself on the ride to the safe house. Why wasn't anything coming? Why wasn't I emotional? It felt like, at some point during the night, between being dragged out of my bed by two men and manhandled into the trunk of a car and screaming at Callum to get away before my police colleagues arrived, I'd shut down.

"Do you need anything else?"

I was standing in the hallway outside a small, sparsely furnished flat in a nondescript block of flats somewhere in West London. The officer who'd driven me was talking to me and I had to make a conscious effort to reply.

"No, I'm fine, thank you."

She pointed towards the end of the hallway.

"There's someone there at all hours. If you need anything or you need to leave for any reason, you need to check in."

I nodded. "OK."

"They're going to need you at the station at some point, probably later tonight or tomorrow. We'll call you and let you know we're on our way to pick you up."

"Yes, OK."

She gave me a slightly perplexed look and, after apparently deciding I wasn't insane, left me alone in the flat. I walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge. Bottled water, pots of yoghurt and a stack of ready-meals. Ah, just like home. Then I had a shower, put on some clean clothes and lay down on the sofa to try and sort out what was going on in my mind.

Three hours later Jenny Holmes, the young sergeant on the Linda Trout case, called me. Her voice sounded apologetic. "Akin wants to see you tonight, Lily. I hope you don't mind. I know you're probably tired."

I was tired, but I was also inexplicably bored. How can you be bored after getting kidnapped and dramatically rescued by probably the best man you've ever known? Who is also very possibly a murderer? I had no idea. Nothing was making sense.

"No, Jenny, it's fine," I told her, still in that same flat, disinterested tone that I didn't quite recognize as my own.

"Well the car is on its way - it might even be there right now, so we'll see you shortly."

"Yes."

I hung up and went down to the little booth at the end of the hallway to let them know I was being picked up.

At the station, the whole team was there - Akin, Jenny Holmes and DI John Larkin. When I walked into the meeting room all three of them averted their eyes, embarrassed for me but very Britishly not trying to let their feelings show. I wondered how much Akin had told them and sat down, relaxed, completely prepared to tell them the entire truth. There wasn't anything left to lose. Callum was gone and my career was probably over. Why
not
tell them everything? Whether they believed me or not, I still wanted Linda Trout's murder solved just as much as any of them.

"Morgan, are you alright?” Akin asked.“Everyone is up to speed here, they know you've been taken off the investigation. We just need to ask you some questions about what happened last night. I hate to ask you this, but are you prepared to talk about it? All of it, I mean?"

I looked around the room, suddenly aware I was no longer a member of this group of people. I was something else now, someone to be questioned, rather than someone who helped them question others.

"You say they broke into your house. About what time would you say that was?" DI Larkin asked, leaning over the table towards me but still refusing to actually look at me.

"I don't know, I was asleep. It was late, though."

"And they - Morgan, how did they take you? Were they violent?"

I cast my mind back to the previous night. They hadn't been violent, probably only due to the fact that I'd been fast asleep and didn’t put up much of a struggle until they'd already tied my wrists and ankles.

"No, they weren't violent. There was two of them. I mean, they weren't gentle, but they didn't, they didn't punch me or kick me or anything." I recalled how I'd almost been convinced I was dreaming up until the point I'd felt the cold air against my face when they carried me out into the back garden. "They gagged me and took me out the back - into the alley - and put me in the boot of a car. Then they drove me - well, it must have been to Croydon, to that storage depot. There were no stops and I couldn't hear them talking."

The questioning went on for a long time, over two hours. I gave them all the details I could remember. Finally, DI Larkin brought Callum up.

"Callum Cross. You say he arrived after you'd been in the storage garage for an hour?"

"I don't know. It could have been an hour. It could have been twenty minutes. I'm sorry, I know I'm not being helpful but I really can't remember how long I was there. My eyes were covered."

Sergeant Holmes, young and just getting started in her career, leaned forward. Akin had to give her a slight nod before she could speak up and I wanted to say something, to tell her to just go ahead. I held back, aware that it was probably no longer my place to encourage the younger officers.

"Did you call Callum Cross? Before you called us?"

It was a dumb question. Of course I hadn't called him, my hands were literally tied, but I didn't have it in me to make a sarcastic remark.

"No, I didn't call him. They took my phone. I think he found out what was happening - that I'd been outed - and probably forced someone to tell him where I was."

Before Jenny could say anything else, Akin cut in.

"We found a man named Ian Jones at the Streatham Club, tied up and beaten. He's not talking, but I'll eat my hat if it wasn't him who let it slip."

"Why would he have saved me?" I looked up to see who had asked the question and then realized it was me. No one said anything so I asked again.

"Why would Callum Cross have saved me? He obviously knew I was a cop at that point. Why would he have saved me? Why not just let them kill me?"

Akin gave me a concerned look and turned to the other two officers."Holmes, Larkin, would you two mind waiting outside? Take a break, go get a coffee in the canteen or something. I'll call you if you're needed here."

We sat in silence until Holmes and Larkin had cleared out and then Akin turned to me, sharply."Morgan, are you alright? Do I need to call a doctor?"

I sat back, bemused. "A doctor? Why? I'm fine, they didn't hurt me. Well, someone kicked me in the stomach at the depot, but he kind of missed."

Akin suddenly slammed both his palms down on the table top, shouting. "I'm not asking if your stomach is fine, Morgan! I'm asking if your fucking head is fine!"

Damn. I'd never seen my Superintendent that angry before. He was so angry his face was red and the vein on his left temple was visibly standing out. I shrank back, scared of this sudden emotion from a man I knew to be in almost complete control of himself at all times.

"I'm sorry," he said, almost immediately. "Morgan, I apologize. I'm extremely frustrated right now. We can't find Gazza - and even if we could we don't have enough to arrest him on yet. We've got Dave, the man who was guarding you, who is apparently Gazza's son - and we've got Ian from the Streatham Club. The rest of them, including Callum Cross, seem to have disappeared into thin fucking air. We had a helicopter up within ten minutes of your call and nothing. We found Callum's car abandoned next to West Croydon station."

That perked me up for some reason. The fact that they hadn't caught Callum. That was surprising.

"Are you pleased?" Akin asked.

"I'm sorry," I said, lost in pondering where Callum might have gotten to. "What?"