Not a Very Nice Woman Read online

At the centre of the Hills was a shopping and services precinct built at the same time as the houses and flats around it, and intended as a focal hub. Like many an environment created one-off from a plan (rather than grown up organically like most town centres before the Twentieth Century) there were parts that didn’t work, corners shunned by shoppers, other areas a haven for kids and not easily policeable; there were paved paths unused and grass spaces with diagonal dirt tracks running across them.

  At the centre of the area was ‘the Shops’, as the locals could only bring themselves to call it: a large square building, the bottom layer of which were storefronts, and above these two further floors windowless from the front and which displayed instead murals of the sort designed by Left-leaning community visionaries in the Seventies and Eighties – here a diverse mix of smiling faces; beside it a huge tree acting as metaphor for – simultaneously – the roots of history and the branches of society.

  Behind these large pictures were the first-floor storerooms for the shops below them, as well as half-hidden offices for local firms and the cooperative that managed the centre. From past visits to the interior, Grey remembered the open centre of the building on the upper floors and how it brought in more light than you’d imagine, the varying uses that the different spaces above the shops were put to, and the stairs and corridors which linked these spaces; and which if you knew your way, could bring you out onto the roof above the artwork the equivalent of three floors up.

  Inspector Glass was already there of course, approaching Grey as he stepped out of the car,

  ‘You know, when they painted that picture of the faces they missed a lot of people out.’

  ‘Who do you mean?’ said Grey, scanning the huge mural afresh for something he had missed. He checked the beaming visages, ‘Every nationality imaginable is represented.’

  ‘But look, every one of them is smiling – what about all the bloody miserable people who have to shop here?’

  Grey imagined this was intended as a joke, and so meant Glass was trying to build bridges. Maybe not, but either way Grey was allowed to stay at a scene that, as a purely public-safety episode, was uniform’s domain.

  Facing the building’s front was an area of paving, benches and knee-high concrete bowls containing seasonally-replenished flowerbeds. In the ten minutes or so since the alert was raised, within this space had formed a crowd. From his position by the hastily parked squad cars lined behind this open space, Grey scanned the people. He imagine most of them were those already nearby shopping, socialising, drinking coffee or doing whatever among the cluster of shops; or else on their way to or back from the various public amenities nearby: Citizen’s Advice Bureau, Connexions youth unemployment service, the Safe & Sound elderly housing maintenance office, SureStart’s nursery service for working mothers, or the town’s two-storey JobCentre Plus next door. These numbers were quickly swelled as word got to those living nearby – for houses and flats directly overlooked the precinct.

  Even as the officers stood there more people arrived, and soon there were upwards of two-hundred in that unevenly paved area with the wafting trees either side. To half-hearted efforts at calling the crowd back there was little attention given, the people eager to see what was happening. There was a general sense of no one actually knowing what was going on, only an excitement that something might be occurring, as those who had seen what had actually happened were lost in the crowd. ­This expectation and uncertainty were shared by the officers, who sometimes paused from issuing orders to look up at the large building themselves.

  Grey shared this sense of being witness to something. The day was sunny and this lent the area’s brickwork a joyous redness, the slabs a dusty, careworn feel. This, along with the animation of the people’s faces brought Grey some residual cheer even as he contemplated the nightmare now unfolding on the roof; for it was up there, to the roofline above the murals, that people’s eyes were now training on, though none quite sure what they were seeing… and then they saw it clear.

  Accompanied by gasps from the crowd, like a public concert where the singer had just fallen from the stage, above the area of wall bearing the Community Tree mural appeared the bobbing heads of a man Grey saw to be Mars and of a shopkeeper many of the crowd would have known. Suddenly the heads were gone again, behind what was evidently a chest-high rim of brick running around the edge of the roof.

  Just as suddenly the men appeared again, the shopkeeper appearing to lunge at Mars, and then run along the edge of the roof behind the wall, before disappearing into the doorway just visible from the ground. He did this to whoops and cheers; which turned to shrieks and moans as there was suddenly a loud bang, the glass door shattering as it closed behind the fleeing man. Mars, like the hunter in his beloved painting, then turned his gaze and the barrel of what suddenly revealed itself as a shotgun at what he saw as his enemy. However, where the painted gunman had been aiming his gun upwards into the body of the bear about to shred him with his foreclaws, here Mars ranged it downward over the parapet formed by the wall.

  The fact of having a gun pointed at them did the job of a hundred officer’s calls to move back, as all at once the gathered throng turned to flee from the building like charged filings from a upturned magnet. What they found though was street furniture and police cars in their way, as they fell over these, scrambled past them and into spaces that weren’t there. Others to the sides of the crowd had clearer escape routes, or found cover around corners.

  The uniformed division had been arriving by the minute, some of them on shift forty-eight hours of the last seventy-two guarding murder scenes, searching for Ludmila Mars, watching Mansard Lane and then this morning employed on the scene at the Mars house. Now they quickly gathered the crowd, easing panic and moving them to what all hoped was a safe distance back.

  ‘Where’d he get that?’ asked one of them of Mars’s gun; which like the man holding it had now thankfully (though worryingly) disappeared from view.

  ‘Probably something his security “boys” keep back for an emergency,’ said Glass, striding through the carnage like a military General.

  But a Town Host, one of the staff who kept things civil in the vicinity though without the authority of an actual police officer, gave the lie to that; running over to the cordon from the shops that had already begun to board their windows and shut up. (The gunman being on their own roof left the shopkeepers with a dilemma, some running out to be with the crowd, other locking themselves into their own spaces, despite him being within the greater building.)

  The Town Host had her purple-jacketed arm around the shoulders of a crying woman.

  ‘This is the man on the roof’s wife,’ the Town Host said when reaching the line of squad cars.

  ‘The man came into our shop,’ said the wife shakily. ‘He said hello and asked for cigarettes, and then when my husband turned his back he reached under the counter and took the gun.’

  ‘It’s your gun?’ asked Glass.

  ‘We need it, for protection. I heard the shot. Is he..?’

  ‘I’m sure he’s fine. We’ll have people up there in a flash to get him down.’

  Though not sure he had any authority here Grey spoke the woman,

  ‘Hello, I’m a Detective Inspector,’ he began conscious of his plain clothes among uniforms. ‘It sounds as if Patrick Mars knew the gun was there?’

  ‘Yes, he’d seen it before.’

  The Town Host took over, ‘Mars Protection ran a pilot scheme here two years ago, taking over security of the precinct.’

  ‘How did it go?’

  ‘It was abandoned,’ remembered Glass, ‘after a lad got badly beaten up.’

  ‘But he knows the building?’

  ‘Inside out. They used one of the upstairs offices.’

  At that point a glass door snug between shopfronts opened and a group of office workers ran out, running wildly for the nearest cover.

  ‘Hey, hey! Over here!’ called Glass, they casting their eyes warily roo
fward as they changed direction.

  ‘You were working upstairs?’ he asked them once crouched behind parked cars.

  They nodded.

  ‘Did you see the man shot?’

  Again they could only nod.

  ‘Well?’ asked Glass.

  They were in shock, Grey observed watching the conversation. They weren’t built to see this kind of thing at work.

  One spoke, as unsteadily as the shopkeeper’s wife currently being comforted further back from the line, he saying,

  ‘The one with the gun led the other one up there, right past our office.’

  ‘You saw him shot?’

  ‘He’s up there bleeding, he’s all right though, he’s pulled himself through a doorframe into one of the rooms. We couldn’t get close enough to get him down.’

  ‘And did you see Mars’s face? How does he look?’

  ‘He’s the security guy, isn’t he?’ asked the office worker.

  ‘Yes he worked here a while back. Could you see him?’

  ‘Yes, along the corridor and through the smashed door. He was lying flat out on the roof. He’d thrown the gun to his side, which was why we risked clearing out.’

  ‘Was he injured?’

  ‘Maybe, but not badly. It looked like he was just lying in the sun up there.’

  ‘He’s mad,’ said Glass as he turned to Grey; before throwing him with his next question, ‘So what would you do if you were me?’

  Grey took it at face value,

  ‘Call in Armed Response…’

  ‘Except we’re thirty minutes’ drive from the nearest unit.’

  ‘…or decide the public need is too urgent, and go in now.’

  ‘Then on my head be it. Right then,’ said Glass turning back to the just-arrived office workers. ‘Which of you is brave enough to don a bulletproof vest and take us back up there?’

  Grey was given a vest too, it going over his shirt and tie to replace his suit jacket and leaving him looking, he thought, like one of those urban teachers or social workers he had seen in a terrifying televised documentary about US crime. The reason for his being included in the party was obvious and unspoken: that he had been the last of them to speak to Mars.

  Quickly, the six of them moved across the now-empty courtyard to the door to the upstairs offices. They did this to cheers from the nervous audience, Grey hoping this wouldn’t rouse Mars; who he was hoping from the description of him lying on his back in the sun was either injured from the Waldron attack at his home earlier, or in some kind of post-violence fugue state.

  Guided by the terrified worker, who would fall back as soon as possible, there was Grey, Glass and three of the latter’s best people, all five of the officers with pistols issued from the station armoury. Grey had had the firearms training too, but accepted the offer of a gun for himself only grudgingly. To not have done so would’ve been cowardice, for were the need to arise he would want Mars shot as much as the next man, and wouldn’t want this duty to have to be borne by one of the others up there.

  Through clean though ageing passageways and doors they were soon on the first floor, and surrounded by open space, light and lots of glass in white wooden frames. By now every one of the little offices had been emptied of life, the doors flapping in the breeze from the windows opened on such a bright day. In one room a coffee mug still sat on a table beside posters for public events, in another monitor screens buzzed or had switched onto screensavers. Another staircase led them to the top floor, the office worker holding them back at the top,

  ‘You turn here and you’re in the corridor.’

  ‘Mars will see us from there?’ whispered Glass.

  He nodded.

  ‘Where’s the injured man?’

  ‘Two… no, three doors along on your left.’

  Glass gestured for one of his staff, the Sergeant who Grey had been in the car with and who had driven him and Ludmila to the Cedars the night before, to poke his nose around the corner,

  ‘I can see Mars, sir,’ he reported, ‘through the smashed door at the end.’

  ‘What’s he doing?’ asked Glass.

  ‘Flat out on his back. He’s about twenty yards away, direct line of sight.’

  ‘Where’s his gun?’

  ‘Can’t see.’

  ‘Can you see the injured man?’

  ‘No, but I can see the blood on the doorframe nearest the end.’

  ‘Damn, if only he’d been able to drag himself closer…’

  ‘How many doors?’ he asked the Sergeant now safely returned.

  ‘Three on the left, one on the right.’

  ‘Are all the doors along here unlocked?’ Glass asked the lone civilian.

  ‘Yes, this corridor’s all ours, none of them would be locked.’

  ‘Good, then you get downstairs now, keep yourself hidden; but don’t go outside as you’ll be back in his line of fire.’

  ‘Plus, the crowd will get agitated if they see movement,’ added Grey.

  To pats on the back, the man was free to scuttle down the corridor to find a hidden corner of a first-floor room. The remaining five were all within a few feet of each other, crouched at the top of the stairs and talking in whispers thus far; but after Glass gave them simple instructions of which room to each head for, he whispered finally into his radio, ‘Moving into position to engage,’ before putting his finger to his mouth and gesturing them to rise.

  As one they bolted around the corner, there was only momentary confusion as Glass and one other ran to the only door on the right-hand side, Grey and the other two to the second door along the left. Having gotten this far unseen, the Sergeant – a first aider and keen to find the wounded shopkeeper – risked running to the furthest door on the left, the one with the bloodstains, broken glass from the smashed end-door kicking up underfoot as he darted in and lodged himself inside the doorframe.

  Seeing him do this, Natasha, with whom Grey had spent an hour in the unmarked car at the end of Mansard Lane the night before, and who was another charged with a first aid kit, risked the same; yet from his vantage point peeking around his doorframe Grey saw in gruesome slow motion as Mars, alerted to their presence by the sound of glass beneath the Sergeant’s boots, in one movement pulled himself half-up from his somnambulant state and swung the shotgun that had been resting hidden along his right side up and over himself to fire a second round through the already shattered end-door. Distracted by his movement, Natasha slipped on the blood and glass on the floor and fell into the room catching the doorframe in her midriff, leaving her legs hopelessly exposed in the corridor.

  Unable to shoot with her blocking the corridor ahead of him, from across the corridor Grey had seen the pain in Glass’s expression as he first yelled at her impotently to get down; then to everyone to get back as a roar of shotgun pellets ripped the walls of the narrow passageway and splintered the doorframes they were each hiding inches behind.

  Again Grey heard the wails from the crowd some distance away, even as the glass from the door and inner-windows above him continued to fall and smash all over and around. Moving carefully between shards and razor-sharp fallen metal blinds, Grey got himself back in position to see the damage done to the corridor.

  The youngest of the group had already burst back out into the corridor and fired off three wild rounds in Mars’s direction.

  ‘Hold your fire, hold your fire!’ called Glass. ‘You want to kill us all?’

  ‘Permission to go out there and finish him, sir,’ asked the lad aquiver with anger and adrenalin.

  ‘Not if he’s down, son.’

  And he was, the energy of rousing himself for that impossibly effective second blast seeming to leave Mars knocked out even colder.

  The Sergeant in the room at the corridor’s far end had pulled Natasha in with him,

  ‘Shotgun wounds to the legs, sir. Flesh wounds.’

  ‘The shopkeeper?’

  ‘Looks like glass in his back and legs, sir. Both need ambulances.�
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  ‘This has gone on long enough,’ said Glass, as Grey saw him stand up and march right out past the damage and through the smashed end-door to approach Mars, pistol in hand and pointed at the prone man’s face,

  ‘One move from you and you’re dead. Now throw the shotgun away.’

  But there was nothing more to come, Grey already standing openly in the corridor with the agitated young Constable,

  ‘You’re hit, sir.’

  ‘What?’ Grey felt his collar was wet, and drawing his hand back saw it thick with blood. But there was no pain, at least not yet,

  ‘Must be a cut from the glass. Don’t worry.’

  ‘All clear, call the ambulances.’ Shouted Glass coming back inside. ‘And get a third, he’s bad out there. You, cuff him,’ he said to the Constable, who instantly dashed out to oblige. ‘And if you wanted your confession,’ he said to Grey, ‘then get it while you can. You injured?’

  But Grey didn’t need to answer, passing him in the doorway just in time to see Glass enter the bloodied end-room and hear his words to his fallen colleague,

  ‘You hold in there, love. You’ll get a medal for this.’

  Chapter 27 – Rooftop Soliloquy