Ratty Man looked to his men, then back to the man who had sparked them all out, managing through his shock to find some words. “I had her driven home whilst she got some stuff together to leave town for a bit.”
Harry slammed shut the door and was already speeding up to thirty miles per hour before his seatbelt had even finished doing its clickety-click. He'd gotten the address from the ratty-man whose name he now knew to be Thompson. He'd thrown it into the sat-nav and reckoned if he stuck to the speed limit he would get there in about twenty minutes, so he ignored the law and gunned it. Thompson had given him both Alice's and the driver's mobile phone numbers. He tried both, splitting his concentration three ways, the road, the sat-nav and the phone in his hand. Both of the phones rung out, Harry knew that was a bad, bad sign and put his foot down a little harder on the go pedal.
It was shy on eight full minutes when he screeched to a halt outside of the three-storey townhouse that had been converted into flats. Alice lived in flat 2; he thumbed the button and counted to ten. At the count of ten he had received no answer so he ran his hand over all six buttons and told the first person that answered through the intercom that he was the police and without being asked anything else he was buzzed in. The door to flat 2 was wide open. He looked up the stairs to see some curious faces peering over the bannisters, all of them rubber-necking. Harry pulled out his wallet, flipped it open and shut it just as quick and hoped that action was enough. He ventured over the threshold and heard a groan coming from a room at the end of the hallway. It sounded weak, but masculine. Harry stopped at the first door and peeked around the doorjamb to see a tidy and unoccupied lounge. He continued on, straining to shut out the man's moans so he could hear anything else from the flat. Harry dipped his head into the next room. It was small, neat and empty; he also noticed there wasn't a single toothbrush in the holder above the basin. The next room turned out to be the bedroom, there was nothing neat about it. A suitcase lay open on the bed, it's contents of clothes looking half consumed and half puked out at the same time. She must have been throwing together whatever belongings she cared about as quickly as she could. Harry mused that it hadn't been quick enough. He backed out of the bedroom and walked the rest of the hallway knowing what he would find in the kitchen The groaning was coming from the driver who was slumped on the floor in the far corner, a trail of slick blood telling tales of where he had been shot to where he had crawled to. The driver had been over at the counter pouring a scotch, more than likely whilst Alice was gathering up her stuff. The bottle now lay on its side having bled out just like the driver was doing. Noolan, or one of his cronies must have been hiding out, caught the driver off-guard and plugged him. The gun had to have had a silencer, reckoned Harry, seeing as there wasn't anything other than nosiness from the rest of the tenants. The driver's eyes were closed; he was holding his stomach like he had a bellyache. It was only his mouth that moved, the machine within broken and only offering up moans and groans, his dying body's audio reflex, nothing more, or less. The man had clown-mouth where the blood had bubbled up and over the dam of his lips. Harry grabbed a fresh dishtowel from the rail and went down on his haunches before the man who was working through the Cheyne-Stokes' pattern. He pulled the man's non-responsive hands away, slipped the towel to his gut and then replaced the hands back. It was a pathetic gesture, but one that Harry couldn't help but make. He stood up, he had things to do. He looked at his hands that were now slick with crimson and decided to head to the sink to rinse the stains away. Three steps from the sink, he turned to the sound of silence. The uneven exhales and inhales had frozen, death had come and silenced the driver's world. Harry was about to embark on the final step to the sink when the quiet was broken by, “Hey, officer, someone's slashing the fuck outta your tyres!”
Harry abandoned his ablutions and left the kitchen at full pelt. He hadn't expected the bastards to still have been about, otherwise he wouldn't have taken his time. Leaving her flat he felt the eyes of the rubberneckers still there, gandering away. He ran out the cruddy foyer and down the garden path. He was too late; all he saw was a white transit van spinning its wheels. Sense told him he had no chance of catching it, his personal self-esteem told him he had a good chance if he started getting his legs on the go right that moment and not a second later. He passed by his car, it was going nowhere, two flat tyres and a cheap knife sticking out of a third, the fourth would have been too no doubt if one of those nosy fucker's hadn't done the only decent thing of the night. He managed to catch it up, but only as much as to grab at the handle of the back door before it got away from him. The door had been locked, stayed locked and grew small very quickly as the van powered on to the end of the road. He spun around, the other tenants of the flats had emptied out on to the road and were watching, no doubt the best thing they'd seen since Jeremy Kyle that morning. He heard a put-put-put, turned and saw a pizza scooter pulling up on the other side of the road. He made towards the lad who was busy trying to free a dustbin-lid sized pizza from the warm-satchel on the back of his pretend-hog when a more throaty, proper engine made a racket that wrecked the quiet of the night. The car made a noisy halt at the kerb. The door burst open and a figure got out with movements that announced urgency. Harry took in the man and took a step back, blinking, not understanding what sort of practical joke his brain was playing on him. The man that was heading up the path towards Alice's building was the spitting image, a proper carbon copy of the man that was dead inside from lead poisoning.
The doppelgänger saw the blood on Harry's hands and knew instinctively that he was somehow a part of the night's tragic comedy of errors. “My brother?” was all the man said as he made to move past Harry.
Harry placed a hand on the man's chest, letting amazement disperse and the severity of the drama take hold. “He's dead.” The brutal truth was what was needed, Harry knew it, though it didn't help much.
The man grabbed Harry's hand and pushed it to one-side, his only purpose now seemed to be entering the property and finding it all to be true. Harry called after the man. “He's dead, and the men that did it, the cowards, they're getting away. Right as we speak, they are drifting through post-codes.” That made the man stop, stare up at the house; he was but three steps away from being inside and closer to his dead twin. He turned around; there was wetness in his stare and ferocity in the set of his mouth. “Are you sure he's dead?”
“I've seen enough of it to know it.”