The Birdwatcher (37 page)

‘What are you talking about?’ shouted Sleight, still at the door, trying to look out.

‘I need to put a bandage on him. He’s still bleeding.’

‘No talking.’ Sleight shouted. ‘I can’t see them. What are they doing?’

‘They’ll be getting in position around the house,’ said South. ‘I expect they’ll be at the back by now.’

And then the phone finally rang.

‘Pick it up,’ said Sleight. ‘Bring it here.’

It was a modern phone, all black, on a silver stand, a red light pulsing as it rang.

Standing, South picked up the phone, still ringing, and walked towards Sleight, holding it out. If he took it, South might have a chance to grab the shotgun, but Sleight seemed to have made that calculation already. ‘Answer it,’ he said, raising the shotgun and pointing it at South’s head. ‘Tell them who you are. Then give me the phone.’

He did exactly as Sleight said. ‘This is Sergeant William South. Kent Police.’

‘Now give it to me. Slowly.’

He passed the phone to Sleight, who took it with his left hand, gun still aimed at South.

‘Stand here, Bill. Don’t budge.’

‘If I stand between you and the police, you don’t have to keep looking round at me.’

Sleight squinted. ‘What are you trying to pull, Bill?’

‘Nothing, Vinnie. I just want things to go OK.’

Sleight shouted into the phone, ‘I’ve got a gun pointed at your copper’s head. Come near and I’ll fucking kill him, OK? And then the rest.’

And he ended the call.

‘That it?’ said South.

‘For now,’ said Sleight.

And the phone started ringing again, but Sleight ignored it.

The phone kept ringing and ringing. South stood with his back to the half-open kitchen door. He had made himself a human shield. This way Sleight didn’t have to turn his back to keep an eye on him, and the police would be able to see him; that way, at least, the gun was not pointing at the two boys. The barrels of the gun were pressed against South’s forehead. He felt oddly calm for someone about to die.

Overhead he heard a helicopter. Light blared suddenly through the blinded windows.

‘Why are you fucking smiling?’

‘Know what? I just remembered something from when I was a boy,’ said South. A scared little boy up on a mountain. He was not scared any more, though.

‘Well, don’t.’

‘You killed Judy Farouk too, didn’t you?’

A whisper. ‘Fuck off.’

‘Why? Because she’d seen your wife with Bob? That’s what happened, wasn’t it? She was walking her dogs at Dungeness and she saw your wife going into Bob’s house.’

Sleight said nothing.

‘How did she know you? I don’t understand. Was she trying to blackmail you?’

‘Judy wasn’t a blackmailer.’

‘So you did know her, then?’

‘You don’t understand anything.’

‘But when she told you, you killed her and you dumped her body at sea. You seemed to know how to do it. Have you done it before?’

‘Fuck off.’

‘You know what? I bet you have.’

Inside South’s pocket, his phone started vibrating. They would be trying to call him on that, too. ‘And poor Donny Fraser too.’

‘Who?’ Sleight was staring straight at him down the grey metal barrels of the gun.

‘The homeless man. You framed him for Bob’s killing.’

‘Oh. Him. They know that, do they?’

‘I do. They’ll figure it out soon. It’s over.’

‘Fuck off.’

Afterwards the reports in the papers would have Vincent Sleight’s picture. They would have quotes from colleagues and friends that would say, ‘He was always so friendly to us. He invited us round for dinner. A lovely wife and son. We never had any idea.’

‘You don’t have to do any of this,’ said South.

‘Oh shut your dull stupid mouth,’ said Sleight and with a vicious dig stabbed the barrels upwards into the skin they were resting on, knocking South backwards so his head hit the door jamb and he slid, dazed, onto the floor. He had a memory of his father’s shiny boots.

‘Get back up,’ said Sleight.

The sound of a megaphone’s feedback outside. South felt blood on his cheek from where the barrels had cut his skin.

‘Hello. This is the police. My name is Michael. Tell us what you want in there. I’m going to call you now. Pick up the phone and we’ll talk.’

Sleight started laughing.

Struggling back upright, South started laughing too. Michael would try and empathise. Those were the techniques. They would try and build a rapport. Fat chance.

The phone rang and Sleight didn’t move to answer it. It kept ringing for a couple of minutes, then stopped.

‘This is Michael. Please answer the phone. Then I can find out what you want.’

‘I’ and ‘you’. Personal words and first names. These were the techniques they used to try and build empathy, but they would have no effect on Sleight. He had gone too far. He had done too much. There was no going back. This is what these men did. It would not be long before he did the calculation. There was no way out; he could never get away. He might as well kill them all.

While Sleight looked out of the door, South had a view of the kitchen behind him. Sitting with his back against the kitchen island, Axel was crying quietly. The fear had made him wet his pants, the poor boy.

‘Bob was my friend,’ said South.

‘You chose shit friends then.’

‘He got your son into Cambridge. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?’

‘I didn’t ask him to fuck my wife. She had everything she bloody wanted. I gave her that.’

‘That must have hurt a lot when Judy told you what she’d seen. They must have been very frightened of you to keep it quiet for so long.’

‘So long?’ Sleight’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘Did he talk to you about it? Did he boast?’

‘No. He never told me.’

Sleight chewed on his lip. ‘Your mother,’ he said to Cameron, ‘was a lying bitch. Every fortnight she said she was going to see her poor bedridden sister. All that charade about looking after her since the stroke.’

‘That’s what she told you she was doing? Looking after her sister?’

‘Like she actually cared. She made a big fuss about buying medicines for her. Bandages. Everything. And all the time she was fucking that useless old . . . old . . .’

South remembered the package of unused bandages in Bob’s bin. It had been part of her decoy.

‘So why did you kill Judy?’ said South, as much to himself as to Sleight. He was trying to figure it out when the megaphone started again.

‘Is anyone wounded in there. Do you need medical attention?’

That’s when South noticed that Cameron was moving. He had a look on his face, half determination, half fury. Using the distraction of the megaphone’s blare, he was forcing himself upright. The first time he slid back down again.

‘Please let us help, Vincent.’ First names. They had figured out who the man with the gun was.

The second time Cameron tried to lift himself, he caught hold of a drawer handle and started to pull himself upwards.

Converse. Keep him distracted. If he sees Cameron moving, he will kill him.

‘You were watching me all along, weren’t you?’ he said to Sleight. ‘You came to my house.’

‘Wasn’t sure how much you knew.’

‘It was you, wasn’t it? In my house?’

‘I could have killed you then,’ he said. ‘Should have.’

With Sleight facing him, South kept his face as expressionless as he could. He had made that mistake once already tonight. His first thought was how he could tell Cameron to get back down. Stop him doing anything that would make his father even angrier. But he could say nothing, do nothing, as the boy pulled open the drawer he had lifted himself up on, then closed it again.

‘Do you need medical attention?’ repeated the megaphone.

The helicopter approached overhead again, adding to the noise.

Sleight was looking anxious for the first time; he shook his head quickly as if trying to clear his thoughts. They did not have long. He would be figuring out that he had no options. There was nothing left. He would kill them soon. With a growing sense of anxiety, South watched as Cameron found what he needed in the next drawer. If Sleight became any more restless he would look around. Any second now he would turn and see his own son, propping himself upright against the kitchen units. Keep your face straight. Show no emotion. Don’t look at Cameron. Don’t give him away. How could he keep Sleight focused on him?

‘I killed a man once,’ said South quietly.

For the first time in a few minutes, Sleight looked him in the eyes.

‘With a pistol. He was as close to me as you are now. I just shot him in the head. Once.’

‘You? You’re shitting me,’ said Sleight. ‘You couldn’t hurt a fly.’

‘It was pretty terrible. But at the time, I thought there was no other way out.’

‘You killed a man?’

‘And you know what? They never found out.’

‘You’re making this up.’

‘No.’

‘Who was it?’

Empathy of a kind at last; one killer to another. Cameron was already halfway across the room now, leaving a smear of red behind him on the brown stone, the knife held at head height. Don’t look. Don’t even let your eyes flicker to the side.

‘My own father,’ said South. The first time he ever said it out loud.

‘You killed your father?’

‘I did.’ Behind Sleight, he could sense Cameron’s hesitation. He was holding the knife up, but would he have the guts to bring it down?

‘Why?’ asked Sleight.

‘He was a bad man. He killed other people. At the time, I felt I had no choice. The only way I could be safe from him in the end was to kill him. And you know what? It was easy to do it.’ The knife was still there, harmless in the air. The boy was hesitating. ‘Do it,’ he urged this time, louder.

By the time Sleight heard the movement behind him and went to turn, it was already too late. It was that slight stirring to the left that saved South’s life. As he swivelled to see what was happening behind him, the gun moved off South’s head, just as the long kitchen knife stabbed into Sleight’s collar, travelling down into the soft skin, slicing muscle and tissue and blood vessel. And though pellets tore at South’s ear, the full blast of the gun smashed harmlessly into the plaster wall, and South just watched as Cameron yanked the knife back upwards, out of his father’s wound, and the blood began to fountain outwards over them both.

Sleight lay quivering on the ground, dying, as the red spread out across the perfect kitchen floor.

South looked up and saw the boy’s tears rolling down his cheeks, and he wanted to reach out and tell him that it would all be all right, but before he could say a word, the room was full of noise and smoke.

The stun grenades blinded them. Someone pushed South to the floor. He fell hard again, this time onto Sleight’s trembling body and his spreading blood; and when he looked up, the room was full of men dressed all in black, holding automatic weapons, pointing them at Cameron and screaming, ‘Drop it. Drop it. Drop it.’

And South was trying to scream back at them to leave the boy alone, but the air had been knocked out of him and he seemed to be making no sound at all. Beside him, Sleight’s body stilled and his wide-open eyes, just inches from South’s own, slowly dulled.

They took him to the hospital and fussed over him a while. Mum came and squeezed him and cried. She was dressed in the same clothes as she had been wearing yesterday; a yellow blouse with red flowers on it.

‘I was so worried,’ she said. ‘Fergie dropped me here.’

‘Is he here?’ asked Billy, anxious.

‘No. He left. He said he had something important to do.’

In borrowed pyjamas that were much too big for him, he lay in a small iron bed painted white, a locker next to it with a jug of Robinsons Barley Water and a glass on it. They had curtains all around him. The nurses had taken his temperature and a doctor, who had called him a brave little soldier, had listened to his heart. They said he would be fine.