‘Colin, listen carefully. We have paramedics out here. If you’ve… done something to Richard, there’s a chance he may still be alive. The quicker you and I can sort this mess out, the better for everyone, okay?’

  Colin remained silent.

  ‘Look,’ Nigel tried again. ‘You answered the phone. Which says to me, you want a way out of this situation.’

  Colin sighed. ‘I do.’

  ‘That’s good, Colin. That’s… great. So, then…’

  ‘Do you want me to come out?’ Colin asked.

  ‘I do. Can you do that for me?’ Nigel asked.

  ‘Sure.’

  Boyd approached the negotiator as he lowered his phone. ‘He’s coming out?’

  He nodded.

  ‘And what about the hostage?’

  Boyd could see the negotiator was troubled. ‘Colin said he doesn’t need medical assistance.’

  ‘Which could mean the best case… or worst case?’ said Boyd.

  Fuller nodded. ‘He said he’d done what he came here to do. I’m afraid that doesn’t sound encouraging. Gimme a sec,’ he said to Boyd. ‘I need to quickly brief the tactical commander.’

  Fuller hurried over to crouch behind one of the vans and exchange words with the sergeant leading the armed response unit.

  ‘Shit,’ mumbled Boyd to himself. If Ledger was dead, he knew he’d be piling some of the blame at his own front door. Christ, Sutherland had called it yesterday evening. He’d voiced a concern for Ledger’s safety, and Boyd should have acted on that immediately.

  If he was dead, then Boyd knew what the price tag would be: another regret held in a sealed box in his head. Another ‘What if…’ to trouble him during a sleepless night. The ‘I got it wrong’s massively outweighed the ‘I got it right’s when it came to career retrospection. They were splinters that protruded and they snagged painfully.

  One of the armed officers called out, ‘MOVEMENT INSIDE!’

  The negotiator and the sergeant promptly ended their hushed exchange, and the sergeant started muttering instructions to his team across their radio channel.

  Boyd turned to look at the grey slab that was Ledger’s home: ugly to the point of being an eye sore. He thought he caught a glimpse of movement through the slats of a downstairs window. Then nothing.

  They waited.

  What the fuck’s he up to? Boyd had heard the negotiator’s side of the conversation: the clear instructions – front door, empty-handed, see you in a minute. And now five or more had passed. The tension was killing him. Even though Boyd was SIO, he was three rungs down the command ladder here: strategic – the DSI; tactical – the firearms sergeant and advisory; the negotiator. While this played out, Boyd was just a spectator.

  ‘GARAGE DOOR!’ one of the armed officers shouted.

  Boyd’s gaze switched from the front door and swept left to the driveway that ramped gently downwards towards the building’s basement. The garage door, the same slate-grey as the rest of the building, began to slowly rise.

  He stretched on tiptoes to get a better angle. The narrow space inside the garage had been revealed by the rising door. It was light and bright inside: a white-washed interior uncluttered with the usual dumping-ground detritus of a family home. There were spotlights in the ceiling, Boyd noticed. More car showroom than garage.

  He could see the rear end of Ledger’s Range Rover, its spare wheel perched on the back like a nautical fender.

  ‘WATCH THE CAR!’ barked the sergeant.

  You’ve got to be kidding me, thought Boyd. Surely he’s not going to have a go?

  The sergeant in command of the tactical team had a loudhailer in one hand. He raised it quickly. ‘DO NOT ATTEMPT TO USE THE VEHICLE!’

  Boyd noticed a number of the armed officers stepping back from the vehicles they were using as cover. If Colin decided to reverse up the ramp and ram the patrol cars, the Range Rover would probably have the horsepower and momentum to shunt them aside with ease.

  And he could see it in his mind’s eye, like a scene from a movie. Every one of those armed officers letting loose, peppering the vehicle with bullets, windows shattering, sparks flying and the Range Rover kangarooing down the cul-de-sac towards the exit before finally coming to a lurching halt as it smacked into one of the red-brick pillars flanking the gate.

  What a fucking mess that would be.

  ‘COLIN!’ The negotiator had the loudhailer now. ‘JUST GET OUT OF THE CAR. HANDS EMPTY AND RAISED… LIKE WE AGREED…’

  They waited for what seemed like another full minute before one of the armed officers barked out a sighting.

  “EYES ON GARAGE. BEHIND THE ROVER!’

  Boyd could see movement in the gap between the belly of the Range Rover and the floor of the garage. Legs. Only two of them, though.

  A figure emerged from behind the vehicle, darkly clad, wearing what looked like a balaclava over his head, his hands behind his back.

  ‘HANDS RAISED!’ shouted the sergeant.

  The figure slowly raised his arms out beside him as he stepped out of the garage and began to make his way up the gentle incline of the driveway. In his right hand was a bloodied kitchen knife and from the other hung a canvas shopping bag laden with something.

  ‘STAY WHERE YOU ARE AND DROP THE KNIFE!’ the sergeant shouted.

  He carried on up the ramp until he reached the top. His arms still spread like Lady Justice above the Old Bailey: scales of justice in one hand, sword of retribution in the other.

  ‘DROP THE KNIFE AND THE BAG!’

  Holmes kept walking, approaching the patrol cars and the ARU’s van, which were collectively blocking the driveway. He showed no sign of slowing down or lowering his arms as he stepped off the kerb and onto the road, now just five yards away from the nearest unit.

  ‘Take him down,’ commanded the sergeant.

  The quiet suburban mid-morning peace of Carlton Mews was momentarily shattered by the sound of a gunshot. The figure jerked and shuddered, his black hoodie puffing with exit discharge and a pink spray cloud of aerosolised blood as he collapsed onto the road.

  The nearest armed officer hurried over, kicked the kitchen knife well clear of the body before reaching down to check for a pulse. A few seconds passed before he announced he was dead.

  DSI Khan came up behind Boyd and nudged him out of his stupor. ‘Can you ID him, Boyd?’

  ‘Right.’ Boyd hurried forward and squatted down beside the body. He lifted the balaclava and instantly recognised the flattened profile of Holmes’s broken nose.

  ‘It’s Holmes,’ he confirmed.

  He got to his feet, his eyes drawn to the shopping bag, which was now lying on the pavement a couple of yards away. He could see the white plastic inner lining of a cooler-bag… with dark strands of something spilling out.

  A choking realisation jolted him into action. He hurried down the ramp towards the open garage, the sound of the paramedics’ footsteps behind him and DSI Khan’s voice calling out for him to stay put.

  Boyd crossed the garage floor, the cleanest garage floor he’d ever seen in his life, headed through a door at the back that led up a half flight of stairs and up to an open-plan living room of bleached pine, hard edges and dark granite, punctuated with ugly pieces of ‘object d’art’ sitting in up-lit display cases. He looked around and quickly spotted the stairs leading up to the first floor.

  He climbed the steps three at a time, in his haste misjudging the first few strides and stumbling clumsily upwards. He paused at a midway turn, bathed in diagonal shafts of sunlight from a vertical window that appeared to run from the ground all the way up to a flat roof in one interrupted six-foot wide band of thick double-plated glass. He paused for a moment as he stared down at a sequence of dark, almost black, spatters of blood along the steps.

  You really want to do this? Julia’s voice. Funny how she still lingered after all this time. You know what you’re going to see, Bill. He had a pretty good idea. But it wouldn’t be the worst thing he’d ever seen. Noah held that particular badge.

  He scrambled up the rest of the stairs onto a faux-marble mezzanine landing that overlooked the lounge below. His mental compass steered him right, as did the trail of dark droplets of blood, and he headed towards double doors that were swung half open. Through the doorway he could see ground-to-floor windows, striped horizontally by a ladder of slats. And the corner of a bed.

  He ground to a halt. He could also see a bare foot protruding over the edge of the bed, perfectly still.

  Lifeless.

  From down below he heard the paramedics entering the house the same way he had.

  ‘Up here!’ he called down to them – for what good it would do.

  He advanced slowly towards the room, each step revealing another few inches of the super-king-sized bed and a little more of Ledger’s bare leg.

  Finally, Boyd found himself standing in the doorway as the paramedics reached the top of the stairs and turned to hurry along the polished, shiny mezzanine floor towards him.

  He let out the ragged breath he’d been unintentionally holding onto for the last half a minute.

  The lead paramedic approached him. She was a short woman in her forties, shouldering a bag of equipment that looked almost as big as her. ‘Please tell me that’s not his head in the bag outside?’ she said sombrely.

  He stepped to one side to let her into the room.

  She went in, caught one glimpse of Ledger, bound, gagged and shuddering with sobs of relief, and hurried over to deal with him.

  ‘Luckily not…’ Boyd whispered under his breath. ‘Thank fuck.’

  58

  ‘How am I doing?’ Boyd stared down and swilled the dregs of his coffee around and around in its paper cup before finally chugging the last of it down. ‘I’m shit scared.’

  Charlotte reached across the picnic table, her index finger playing with his. ‘It’s going to be fine,’ she assured him. ‘Very “snippable”, I believe, was the word the consultant used.’

  He looked up from his lap and smiled at her. ‘I know.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’re going to have to put your feet up for a bit. You’ll have me and Emma waiting on you.’

  He turned to look across the decking of the Kitkat Café at the wide sandy ribbon of Camber Sands. Emma was down near the water’s edge with both the dogs, their leads slung over her shoulder, her sandals in one hand as she kicked sprays of seawater up from a tidal pool for Ozzie to snap at and Mia to flee from. Even from this distance, her bump was visible.

  ‘I feel old,’ he said.

  ‘You’re still on the right side of fifty.’ Charlotte laughed. ‘It’s all right for some.’

  ‘No, but cancer… it feels like an old-person disease, well this kind, anyway,’ he said.

  ‘It’s indiscriminate is what it is, Bill. You can make lifestyle choices that tinker with the odds, but at the end of the day it picks victims randomly… and unfairly,’ she said.

  He nodded as he watched Emma. His little Ems all grown up and having her very own rug rat. She’d stopped kicking up water for Ozzie and had stepped out of the tidal pool onto a low berm of wet sand.

  Charlotte followed his gaze. ‘You’re going to be around for years to come, Bill. You’re going to be able to teach Baby Boyd all sorts of deplorable habits.’ She squeezed his hand and lowered her chin so that she was doing interrogative Lady Di eyes at him. ‘Operation worries aside… how are you doing in there?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Fine,’ she mimicked his gruff voice.

  He smiled.

  ‘Are you still replaying the… you know?’

  He nodded. It was hard not to keep seeing Colin Holmes twitch and jerk like some piñata donkey as the shot rang out. It was clearly what he’d wanted to happen, armed as he was with the bloody knife – they discovered later that he’d cut his own hand – and what had looked like a head in a shopping bag (it had turned out to be the head from one of Ledger’s collection of tasteless ‘art’ – a grisly, wrinkled, faux Victorian taxidermic ‘mermaid’).

  Holmes knew he’d be taken down.

  Oddly, the nightmare Boyd was having was about what he hadn’t seen. What he’d been expecting to find inside Ledger’s bedroom. The man’s headless body sprawled across the bed; the sheets soaked in dark blood.

  Over the last fortnight, he’d had time to dwell on Colin Holmes’s mental state and the choices he’d made. Interviewing Ledger about it a few days afterwards, it had been confirmed that Colin had chosen to spare him because he believed Richard had played a lesser role in his horrific assault decades ago. But it had also been clear that he wasn’t hoping or expecting to leverage that mercy into a marginally more lenient sentence. Truth be told, having murdered three people, even with the mitigating circumstances and last-minute act of compassion, at his age, prison would almost certainly have been for life.

  He’d emerged from the basement garage determined to be gunned down.

  There was a tragic logic to his thinking. He’d been assaulted, abused and nearly murdered three decades ago – his whole world had been shattered by the incident. And from the pieces he’d picked up in the aftermath, he’d built a directionless, meandering life. The local police had made less than a token effort to find his assailant, the local press had moved on to other more interesting things, and the world had shrugged its shoulders at Colin’s misfortune.

  Dying dramatically like that… his arms stretched out Christ-like and walking fearlessly towards the guns was his final ‘screw you’. And the more Boyd thought about it, it had been a justified ‘screw you’. The police had let Colin down. Social services had let him down. The damaged young man who’d emerged from the hospital months after the attack had been left to deal with the post-trauma, his physical rehabilitation and trying to make sense of what had happened to him, all by himself. Presumably because, being a foster kid, he’d had no one advocating on his behalf. No one screaming at the authorities that ‘this lad needs help!’

  Were things any different today? He’d like to think so. But he wasn’t so sure that they were.

  ‘You all right there?’ asked Charlotte. ‘You look like you’re a million miles away.’

  He grasped her hand and squeezed it. ‘Wool gathering.’

  ‘Not worrying?’

  ‘Nope. Not worrying. I’m going to kick cancer’s arse.’

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ she replied. ‘We’ll do it together.’

  He got up from the bench. ‘Come on – let’s rescue Emma from the fur kids and grab an ice cream.’

  She laughed. ‘She is a rather handy babysitter.’

  He shrugged. ‘You wait… that’ll be us in the near future. Returning the favour.’

  She patted his hand. ‘Oh, stop it. You’ll love it… Gramps.’

  ‘Less of the Gramps.’ He scowled at her. ‘I’m not even fifty yet. Remember?’

  She narrowed her eyes. ‘Ooh, that’s below the belt, Mr Boyd.’

  ‘Just stating facts,’ he replied, ducking away as he did so.

  THE END

  EPILOGUE

  21 August, 1993

  Richard brought the tray of beers over to his friends. They were sitting outside in the pub garden around a rickety wooden picnic table, away from the other patrons. Being the eldest, even if only by a few months, he was the only one of them old enough to go to the bar, legally at least.

  ‘Here we go,’ he said, setting it down. A pint of Carlsberg for Mark and Andy, Woodpecker cider for Robin.

  He dealt out the packets of crisps, then sat down, grabbed his pint of bitter and raised it solemnly. ‘To the end of fucking A levels. To the end of fucking school…’

  The other clinked pint glasses willingly to that.

  ‘To the future,’ he added. They clinked again and gulped their drinks.

  Richard’s maths exam this morning had been the last of them. He was confident he was going to get his much-needed B when the results came out. The extra maths lessons his dad had paid for had probably helped cinch it.

  ‘What’s your summer looking like, Ricky?’ asked Mark.

  He stretched. ‘Gonna hit Glastonbury. Get pissed. Down some E’s. Ian Drury and the Blockheads are on the Pyramid stage. It’s gonna be fucking wicked.’

  ‘Lucky bastitch,’ muttered Andy. ‘It’s fifty-eight quid a ticket. All right if you’re a rich kid.’

  Richard shrugged. It wasn’t his fault his dad was loaded. ‘What about you grubby plebs, then?’

  Robin tore open his packet of cheese-and-onion crisps. ‘I’m going backpacking. Maybe get some holiday work abroad.’

  Richard suspected Mark and Andy had no real plans to speak of, other than watching Gaby Roslin on Big Breakfast every morning and wanking their way through the rest of the day. He had little time for either of them. Wasters. They probably were going to pull in useless grades in September and wind up working someplace where they’d be wearing plastic nametags for the rest of their working lives. Robin, on the other hand, might make something of himself one day, he mused.

  He let the chatter about plans going forward run on for a few minutes, then shut it down. They were here this afternoon to talk about the Thing that happened four years ago.

  ‘You know why we’re here,’ he said, lowering his voice. ‘What this is about, right?’

  The others nodded.

  Four years had passed, a lifetime almost, and apart from the manic exchanges between them all in the days following the Thing, and the pointing of fingers about who did what, it had settled down to become the Thing We Will Never Talk About.

  ‘We got away with it,’ he said. Andy shook his head. Richard turned to him. ‘Why the head-shaking, mate?’

  ‘You… got away with it.’

  Richard narrowed his eyes. Fucking moron. ‘We’ve been through this, shithead. You wimps may have just sat and watched… but who the fuck’s ever going to believe that?’ Richard smiled. ‘You were all there. You watched. You laughed. You cheered me on… that makes us all an equal part of it. And this stays between us.’ He leant forward on the creaking table. ‘We’re all going off to different places, doing different things.’