Stark Contrasts (An Adam Stark novel Book 1) (16 page)

The AR team leader only took a second or two to respond, he'd spent the journey working through scenarios.

“I'll take my team in quietly. We'll do as quick and thorough a recce as we can, ensure the vehicles are secured, then I'll send four in the front and two in the back. Have the rest of your lot ready to follow as soon as we give the signal, ok?”

“Right, understood. Good luck, Don.”

Pierce nodded, got back in his car and the AR team drove down to the front of the house.

When the team got to the entranceway, Pierce noticed the security lighting on the outside of the building. If they were to proceed any further the place would light up and they would lose any chance of taking the kidnappers by surprise. He took out a small, lightweight air pistol and shot out the bulb. It popped rather more loudly than he'd have liked and a few seconds later he realised he was holding his breath while he waited for a reaction. Nothing and no-one stirred. He exhaled.

Pierce gathered the team, indicating that four of them, including himself and Garry, would assault the front, while the other two officers would go around the back of the building. With a couple of gestures, they crept forward across the driveway towards the parked cars: all three vehicles were locked and unoccupied.

Garry made his way to the window, crouched down below it. He held up a small mirror, tried to get some sort of view inside. The curtains were fully shut and he could not make anything out. This would put them at a disadvantage. They had no schematic of the building and no guarantee the layout would be sympathetic to them storming in.

Pierce's radio suddenly erupted in his earpiece, making him start, even though the officer was whispering.

“Sir, this is McGowan. We have two hostiles down outside the back door. Over.”

“Ok, McGowan. We're going in the front. Proceed with due caution on my command. Over.”

The front door had no handle, which meant the lock engaged when it was pulled to. One of the team took a small battering ram and smashed it against the door as Pierce shouted, “Go! Go! Go!”

The door gave way easily and the four officers moved in with weapons raised and adrenaline surging. At the back, the other two team members also made their way inside. On the road outside, Stark and his team set off with sirens blaring and lights flashing.

“Armed police! Lay down your weapons!” shouted Pierce as they walked through the hallway.

The first room on their left was a small drawing room with bookshelves, a heavy, oak desk and a couple of leather easy chairs. No kidnappers.

In the first room on the right, they walked into a scene of utter devastation. It was a much larger lounge with a smattering of appropriate furniture.

A woman, presumably Abby Hester, sat tied to a dining chair; unconscious or dead. A burly man lay on the floor with a  pool of blood framing his head. In an armchair, sat Leo Corantelli, his head lolling backwards and his throat cut from ear to ear like some kind of gruesome, exaggerated smile. In the middle of the floor stood Steve Welch, blood dripping down his hand and arm and a strange, faraway look in his eyes.

“Drop your weapon!” shouted Pierce.

Steve let the flick-knife drop to the ground and just looked at them blankly as Stark and Katz burst into the room.

“I, I....” was all he could muster before he was cuffed and taken out to a car.

Stark looked around him in shock.

“Holy crap, Batman! This is going to take a bit of explaining away don't you think?” The rhetorical nature of the question being observed by all present.

“How's the girl?”

One of the AR team looked back at him and said, “Weak pulse, but breathing and alive, sir.”

“Good, get the paramedics in here now and let's clear the place for SOCO. They are going to be
very
busy boys and girls tonight!”

26. A Hard Case

The thought of interrogating Steve Welch troubled Stark. He was one of their own, with an exemplary record - even a couple of commendations for bravery in the line of duty. What the hell was the guy thinking about with all this vigilante nonsense? Stupid and nonsensical as that was though, it wasn't the worst of it. To follow all that up with the slaughter (and there was no other word for it) of those guys at the farm...that took a certain kind of mindset. There had been talk of getting a shrink in but Stark managed to persuade the DCI to let him talk to Welch first. Katz would sit in with him for the experience, under strict instruction not to contribute.

The interview room looked no different than normal but, at the same time, nothing like normal. His chair scraped the floor as he pulled it back to sit down and the noise nearly cut Stark in half. He'd been less nervous doing his first interview all those years ago.

Welch, sitting forward in his chair, with hands clasped together on the table top, rolled his thumbs round each other incessantly and chewed on his bottom lip. His clothes were articles of evidence now and, as a result, his outfit consisted of a rather unflattering set of white overalls. He looked tired and overwrought; his eyes wet and bloodshot, his skin blotchy and dry. As Stark prepared his papers it struck him that Steve Welch was a big man - brawny. The kind of guy you'd want at your side in a serious situation. The kind of guy to be careful not to cross.

Once again, he fired up the tape and completed the formalities.

“Steve, I have to tell you that this is a first for me in more ways than one.”

The big firearms officer didn't engage Stark with eye contact.

“I've interviewed a couple of coppers for things before but nothing on this scale and no-one as senior as you.” Stark paused but there was still no response or acknowledgement.

“I understand you've had nothing to say for yourself since we brought you in. Well, now's the time for that to change. I need you to try and explain what the hell happened in the farm house first, then maybe, once we've shed some light on that débâcle, we can move onto the Citizen V stuff?”

Welch shuffled uneasily in his seat, sat back, looked up at the ceiling and sighed.

“What is it, big man? Boring you, am I?” snapped Stark.

The other cop slowly lowered his head to look directly at Stark and smiled wearily.

“Look, DI Stark, it's quite simple, I don't remember anything about the farmhouse. One minute I was being coshed in the back of a car, the next I was standing in the middle of a room full of dead bodies and cops. I have absolutely no idea what happened in between.”

Stark snorted. “Come on, Steve, you'll need to try harder than that. Jesus man, you were covered in the blood of the victims and holding a knife. It's not plausible that you have no recollection of murdering the four men in that house.”

Welch shook his head, “That's all I've got. I don't know what happened.
If
I killed those  guys, it was in self defence, and calling them victims is stretching the meaning of the word more than a little don't you think?”

“Whether they were fine upstanding citizens or gangland scum, it makes no difference to the law. You murdered them and you'll be going down for it.”

“I don't think I did murder them!” shouted Welch, “I would need to have been compos mentis to take down four men don't you think? Four, big, well-trained men at that.”

“I don't know, Steve, I'm no psychiatrist but I think it's much more likely you're lying to me and you are perfectly aware of what you did.”

This time Welch slumped back into his initial pose and started twirling his thumbs around each other again.

“Ok, let's forget about them for a minute and move onto your alter ego.”

The big cop looked up quizzically.

“Citizen V, Steve, Citizen V. Then again maybe it should be Citizen W? What do you think, Welchy?” taunted Stark.

“I think you're off your head, mate. I had nothing to do with all that shit.”

Stark looked at Katz, who had been remarkably well behaved so far, but she remained impassive. Impressive and delicious.

“Steve, I'm going to call a halt to this nonsense for a wee while. I'd like you to go away and have a think about how you're going to continue with this interview. I'll be back in a bit.”

With that, Stark closed down the interview and headed off to the incident room. Katz tailed along after him.

***

I didn't really know what the hell was going on here. I wasn't lying to Stark when I said I had no recollection of how I got from unconscious in the car to standing amongst corpses in the farmhouse. It was a total fucking mystery. If I was tooled up for the job and alert enough, I probably could have taken those dudes down and I would have; if it was the only way to stop them from killing Abby or me. But slitting Leo's throat...with his own knife...that was something else.

I couldn't think straight. Things had spiralled way out of my control now. Garry did what he thought was right but it landed me deep in the brown stuff. The Leo situation was going to make it look like a dead certainty I was Citizen V. I didn't have a plausible alibi for the farm and when I sat and tried to work out where I'd been when the escalations of my revenge pranks took place, I had nothing concrete, nothing that would seem anything other than flimsy. Nothing that could be corroborated by a credible witness.

I was in deep trouble and I knew it.

***

Stark and Katz were back in front of the evidence board again.

“This is getting crazier by the second!”

Katz shrugged and nodded in agreement.

“He must be lying. There's no way he knows nothing about all of this. According to Garry Black, he shoved a phone up Corantelli's jacksie, for which he deserves a medal by the way, and that led to Leo kidnapping his mistress, and then abducting Welch himself. I reckon Leo had revenge on his mind but, somehow, Steve managed to free himself and take out the entire crew using a knife and some fancy kung fu shit. Afterwards, he's claiming some form of amnesia?”

“No doubt some clever shrink will diagnose a form of post-traumatic stress - probably get him off with manslaughter,” Katz added.

Stark continued to state what they knew. “He's also starring in that video featuring Luke Pritchard, who was also mutilated by Citizen V.”

Katz's brow furrowed.

“Sir, do you think he might be Dwayne's nemesis as well? He did say the guy who attacked him was a big, white dude.”

Stark ran his hand over his jaw.

“Aye, I reckon you're onto something there, Katz. Let's get a line-up organised. If Dwayne id's Welch as his attacker, then we've nailed the bastard! That will link him directly with attacks on two of the victims. Coincidences can happen but that would be taking the fucking piss!”

“I'll get right onto it, sir.”

27. Identity Parade Blues

Stark sat opposite Welch again. Both Luke Pritchard and Dwayne Clements picked him out in their respective identity parades and Stark had no more doubts that the man sitting across the table from him was Citizen V. He just had to get him to admit it.

The tension in the room throbbed like a bruised cheekbone. All those concerned knew the enormity of a serving police officer being unmasked as a vigilante murderer. DCI Hargreaves did his usual charming job of indicating how he felt about this to Stark. He watched from behind the one-way glass that made up one wall of the interview room. He wasn't the only high profile guest. The Chief Superintendent was also observing proceedings. This was Stark's big moment; he hoped Welch would crumble quickly. He didn't.

The questioning was pretty straightforward. Did Welch kill Ernie Martin? Did he mutilate Luke Pritchard? Where was he when Dwayne Clements was abducted? Did he have any witnesses to corroborate his flimsy alibi? The answers were all short and to the point whenever he deigned to give one.

There were some indisputable facts Welch could not avoid. CCTV showed him in the shopping centre on the day of the attack on Dwayne Clement's, and the victim identified him as the assailant. Private video footage showed him taking Luke Pritchard's mobile phone from him. Once again, positively identified by the victim, as well as the person who filmed him. Subsequent interviews with Pritchard revealed the boy needed to attend Accident and Emergency to have his earphones removed after they were super-glued in place. Welch was found in the middle of the room in the aftermath of the murder of Leo Corantelli and his entourage. Additionally, his telephonic, anal insertion was confirmed by Garry Black, the restaurant manager and a couple of (admiring) staff. His rather unsympathetic answer-phone message was also retrieved.

However, Welch remained adamant he had nothing to do with either of the deaths. He also denied being responsible for any mutilations subsequent to the incidents captured for posterity by cameras or seen by eye-witnesses. This puzzled and disappointed Stark. It was making him look bad in front of his superiors; interviews had gone on with Welch for two days solid, he should have folded by now. Then again, it wasn't unusual for blatantly guilty parties to flatly deny the truth. Faced with the prospect of many years behind bars, and all that might entail, it was common for the guilty to retreat into denial - some of them actually seemed to convince themselves of their own innocence, despite their intimate knowledge of the facts. Additionally, Welch was a highly trained officer, well acquainted with any technique Stark might employ to get him to open up. However, something nagged at Stark as he made his way to Hargreaves' office.

The office was a neat freak's delight. Nothing out of place, nothing untidy. No pens out of containers, no scattered papers, no office detritus of any form really. A coaster with a picture of a cupcake on it sat waiting for a coffee mug to adorn it. The room always put Stark on edge - much like it's uniformed denizen.

Some people can only really do pissed-off well. All their other attempts at interaction fall flat or seem forced, hollow even. Hargreaves was the consummate, irritated curmudgeon.

“Right, Stark, let's stop farting about here and get a confession out of this poor excuse for a policeman!”