Blood Substitute (27 page)

I stood up, knowing that I ought to get them both as far away from this area of the roof as possible. Starting with Patrick I got him under the armpits and began to drag him backwards. I could only manage a few feet at a time before stopping for a rest: he was a dead weight. I counted as I went, hoping to judge it correctly so that I did not walk myself right over the edge. I had paused for my third rest, coughing fit to turn my lungs inside out, when I heard crashes and bangs coming from roughly in the same direction as where Robert Kennedy still lay. I left Patrick and went back slowly, bent double so that I could see the floor in front of me, expecting to find that that part of the roof had fallen in, taking him with it.

I could find neither holes nor Kennedy.

I suppose I was mentally confused, still stunned from twice hitting my head when the explosions had occurred, retching for breath, and when I saw a weird figure emerge through the smoke and come straight at me, masked, the eyes just holes in the head, I shrieked. No, I scolded myself, it was not the ‘alien' projector that had fallen though the floor restored back to life and coming to get me, merely a fireman wearing breathing apparatus. I never knew exactly how he, they, found the two men, because right then I collapsed.

I was definitely in the mood to shoot off more locks and dealt with the ones on Sydney Hellier's front door with relish. It was broad daylight and I did not care. People saw me; I did not care. I did not care if the entire Metropolitan Police descended on my neck, the prospect of prison positively cheering if it meant I could wring Hellier's scraggy neck. All I wanted to do right then was nail this little shit who had lit a large fire under us and tried to kill my husband. I did not know yet whether he had been successful or not. Ambulances had taken both him and Kennedy away and after giving me oxygen the paramedics had wanted me to go to hospital for a check-up but I had refused. I had pressing business.

The door hammered back into the wall in a most delightful Patrick-style fashion as I detonated in. I raged through all the downstairs rooms without locating him and then tackled the stairs at a run. Front bedroom, bathroom, back bedroom, box room. The last was where I found him; in a small space almost filled with junk, crouching like a cornered rat, grey with fear.

I yanked him out by his shirt collar, one-handed, amazed at my own strength, and slammed him into a wall on the landing. And again. He uttered a high-pitched shriek and his dentures fell out. I put the gun in my pocket to have both hands free to resoundingly box his ears.

‘You rang him, didn't you?' I yelled. ‘Lazlo Ivers. The preservation society's all a front, isn't it? You rang and told him people were sniffing around the cinema and he ordered you to start the fire. Answer me!'

He gobbled at me wordlessly.

I rammed the gun into his ribs. ‘Tell me the truth or I'll blow your guts out through the back of your spine!'

He carried on opening and shutting his toothless mouth like a half dead fish, all the while puffing bad breath in my face.

God alone knows what prevented me from pulling the trigger.

‘Are you up there, Ingrid?' called a familiar voice.

I got a firm hold on the knot on Hellier's stained tie and dragged him to the top of the stairs, banging his head on the wall when he started making choking noises. I was in time to see James Carrick shove a couple of people out of the front door while shouting, ‘Police! Sod off!'

He came on up the stairs, gazing at me soberly. ‘Do we want him alive?' he asked, even more soberly.

Right then the irony was lost on me. ‘I would like you to arrest this man,' I said, trying to stop my voice from quavering. ‘For attempted murder, I
think.
' I let go of Hellier and he went down in an untidy heap and stayed there. I stopped myself from kicking him, just.

‘Let's hope and pray it's attempted murder,' James said.

‘Have you heard anything?' I whispered.

He shook his head. ‘No, not yet. Greenway sent me because he was worried you'd come to harm. The man's obviously clueless.' He surveyed me wonderingly. ‘Ingrid,
mo ghaoil,
have you looked at yourself in a mirror lately?'

Well, of course I bloody well hadn't.

‘Get this dreadful woman away from me and I'll tell you everything you want to know,' Hellier glugged from the floor.

I bent down to be on his level. ‘Just confirm that it was Lazlo Ivers who told you to set the place alight.'

‘Yes, it was.'

I handed him back his teeth.

The worst thing was not being able to remember how Patrick had looked. Had his clothes been alight? Did he look as though he had been burned? I could remember nothing, not even the clothes he had been wearing. How far had he and Kennedy fallen? Had he, in fact, actually started down the fire escape with the unconscious man before the flames belched out of the door?

James Carrick had called Greenway before handing over Sydney Hellier to the crew of an area car with instructions to take him to Walthamsden Police Station and there await orders. He had then escorted me, nay virtually frog-marched me, to his car and taken me back to the hotel where I had been staying. There, I was firmly delivered to my room and he too came in and shut the door.

‘I must find out how he is,' I insisted. ‘How they both are,' I corrected.

‘I'll do that. Meanwhile, you go and scrub the soot and stuff off yourself and we'll get some food and a hot drink inside you.'

‘I don't want anything to eat,' I snapped. I could still taste smoke.

‘Fine, but you can't go wandering around looking like that or someone's going to suggest I take you to the nearest mental hospital.'

The man had a point, I had to concede when I saw my reflection in the en-suite mirror. Privacy brought tears and it was a real covered-in-dust, sooty mess who, sobbing, stared disbelievingly at herself. The only thing that was the right colour was my hair: black. Well, I supposed my eyes were still green but they were surrounded by red instead of white.

He's dead
, the inner voice insisted.
You're a widow. Get used to the idea, you silly cow.

But what had he once joked in similar circumstances?

‘I never have a pulse on Wednesdays.'

It was Wednesday.

It was a measure of my tattered and exhausted condition when I happily said, ‘That's all right then,' stripped off my filthy clothes and got into the shower. I ended up by having two, such was the dire state of affairs, and when I returned to the room, wrapped only in towels – what the hell, Carrick was a married man, wasn't he? – there was a tray waiting for me loaded with things like a mug of hot chocolate, buttered crumpets and fruit cake. All of which, smoke-flavoured mouth or no, I fell upon, needless to say.

‘You're just like Patrick,' James said, from a chair over by the window. ‘In the event of trauma, feed.'

‘Did you ring?' I asked, cradling the hot chocolate in both hands and, despite the showers, shivering.

‘Yes, but there's total chaos at that particular A and E department. They know both of them are in casualty, are being attended to and neither has died. But there's been a major traffic accident on the motorway and people are being ferried in like there's a war on so some of those have to be given priority. And Greenway rang me. He's going to carry on with your project of taking Hellier to bits later. You can be present if you want to, but you'll have to promise me that you'll' – surprisingly, a big smile lit up his face – ‘be good.'

I promised.

Greenway gazed at me severely. ‘I'm sure you should be in hospital being treated for smoke inhalation,' he said.

‘I'm quite all right, thank you,' I told him. I had an idea my lungs were still a bit kippered and had a tendency to cough but did not want to join a queue of seriously injured people who needed help far more than I did, then wait hours only to be told to go home and rest. Carrick had not really wanted to bring me back to SOCA HQ with him but other than by chaining me to the bed there was not a lot he could have done to prevent me tagging along. I was ignoring my sore head.

‘I did as Patrick suggested and asked Miss Dean to have a proper look at what's on the discs. She's here now as a matter of fact – it's got her out of the safe house for a while. I'm not too sure if she'll achieve anything though.' The SOCA man shuffled papers around on his desk. ‘I've decided to question Hellier personally. I take it you'd like to be present?'

‘Yes, please. I can stand in for Patrick.'

‘Do we know any more about how badly he's hurt?'

‘No.'

More shuffling. ‘I have to ask you this, Ingrid. Last time I spoke to him I distinctly got the impression he wasn't happy.'

I felt I owed it to everyone to tell the truth. ‘No, he's not. He was of a mind to tell you he didn't want to go on with SOCA any more but would honour his promise to James Carrick to do everything he could to find his father. It was my idea to investigate the old cinema – Miss Dean had said Ballinger had discussed it in her hearing.'

‘I see. Is this mind-set of Patrick's due to private reasons?'

‘Yes, but not secret ones. He feels it's about time he gave more time to his family. Today has demonstrated how four children are at serious risk of losing their father.'

‘And mother,' he added.

‘Justin is being a bit of a problem; he needs his dad around a lot more.'

‘Thank you for telling me,' Greenway said, and rose from his seat. ‘I've had Hellier brought here too.' He gave me my second bright smile of the day. ‘It's great when you get to be commander – you don't necessarily have to slog through traffic jams to God-awful nicks in the course of a day's work.'

H
aving got the formalities out of the way Greenway opened the questioning roughly with, ‘So who is this Lazlo Ivers?'

Sydney Hellier's gaze darted from one to another of us. ‘I said I'd only talk if she wasn't around,' he said.

‘Is that right?' Greenway said with a nasty grin. ‘Well, if you don't start spilling the beans right now I reckon I might just leave you alone with her.'

Ye gods, what had Carrick told him?

It was quite late in the afternoon and we were in a room in a secure – very secure – area in the basement.

‘He's just a member of the preservation society,' Hellier muttered.

‘Don't give me that load of old baloney,' Greenway said. ‘You admitted in DCI Carrick's hearing that he told you to set the place alight. It was all ready to go up with incendaries stacked beneath the stage.'

Hellier gave me another wary look. ‘He was just a member
to start with
,' he amended. ‘Then all these heavies turned up with him at one of the meetings and he sort of took over.'

‘But you must have still kept an eye on the place. Didn't you question all this wildly inflammable stuff being stored there?'

‘Yes, I … I did. He just told me to shut up and mind my own business.'

‘How long had it all been there?'

‘A few weeks.'

‘These people are the ones who want to knock the place down,' Greenway informed him heavily.

‘Well, I wasn't to know that, was I?'

‘But did your tiny mind work it out eventually?'

Hellier nodded miserably. ‘One of the stupid ones opened his mouth one day when I was there. Ivers threatened me not to tell anyone.'

‘That whole area's due for redevelopment and it was highly likely that a building in such poor condition would have been demolished anyway. Why did they have to go to such lengths to take over some piddling preservation society instead of just biding their time?'

Hellier shrugged.

Greenway thumped the table. ‘There's something you're not telling me. These people are big-time crooks.'

‘They wanted to stifle resistance to a redevelopment scheme. I think they've bought up most of the area,' said Hellier.

‘And they stifled your resistance with threats?'

‘That's right.'

‘No money was involved? They didn't grease your grubby little mitts with silver?'

‘No. And I want you to know that nothing they've done is anything to do with me.'

‘No, you just tried to burn three people to death.'

‘Two!' the man shot back with.

‘You admit it then?'

‘He made me do it,' the other responded dully. ‘As soon as I said I'd mentioned his name to people who wanted to have a look round he went half off his head and said he'd kill me personally.'

‘But you must have phoned him or he wouldn't have known.'

‘I just thought I ought to get an OK from him. He'd always said he wanted to know if anyone was taking an interest in the place.'

‘What's his number?'

‘I – I can't remember. No, honest,' he shrilled when he perceived that Greenway was coming to the boil. ‘I mean, you put them in the phone's memory, don't you? You can't possibly remember them all.'

‘We'll find it in your mobile then.'

‘No, I … er … dropped and accidentally trod on it before you lot arrived. It's bust.'

In the exasperation-loaded silence that followed this statement I caught Greenway's eye and he nodded.

‘You knew nothing about the policeman trapped in a room off the projection box?' I asked Hellier.

‘No!'

‘You've just told us that all the boxes and papers had been there for a few weeks. Did you put it all there yourself?'

There was a silence and then Hellier said, ‘Yes. He said he'd set some of his boys on me if I didn't.'

‘How long did it take you?'

‘I did it over three or four days. I pinched most of the stuff from the recycling dump.'

‘So how come some of the newspapers were only a couple of days old?'