“All right, I can walk, let go!” Ben said, but the policeman didn’t loosen his hold as they went outside.
The ambulances had gone, but discarded pieces of equipment and uniforms still littered the road like the detritus from a bloody street party. An armoured vest lay in the gutter like a run-over dog. A solitary boot stood upright, its leather glistening and wet. Here and there dark patches that weren’t oil stained the frosted tarmac. Ben wondered how finding some old cuttings in a brass box could have led to this. He was shivering more than ever as they reached the white trailer.
“I’m going to be sick,” he said.
The policeman stood back as Ben leaned against a lamppost. His radio gave a hiss and a tinny voice squawked out. The policeman spoke into it, briskly, then put his hand on Ben’s shoulder. “You going to be all right?”
“Just give me a few minutes.”
“Go in there when you’ve got yourself sorted. Someone’ll get you a cup of tea.”
Ben nodded thanks without looking up. The policeman left him outside the trailer and jogged back towards the scrapyard.
Still bent over, Ben watched him disappear inside.
He straightened and looked around.
The activity of the police outside the scrapyard had subsided to a tense expectancy. They faced the gates from behind the protection of their cars and vans, waiting to see what Kale would do next. No one looked back as Ben approached them.
He tried not to think of what he was doing as he headed for an empty gap between two police cars, as if even the noise of his thoughts might attract attention. Greene’s voice was blaring from the loudspeaker again, but he barely heard it. When he reached the gap he hesitated. The nearest police were only yards away. Doubt immediately began to batter at him. Just do it.
He carried on walking.
He was past the cars, moving out into the open space in front of the gates. He could see through them to the Land Rover, the tangle of wrecks. He was in plain view now. He quickened his pace praying for a few extra seconds of confusion, shoulders tensing with the expectation of the sudden challenge.
He had gone less than half a dozen steps when it came. It released him like a starting pistol. He sprinted for the gates as shouts and footsteps raced after him. Up ahead he saw O’Donnell and Greene turn, and veered around the other side of the Land Rover as the sergeant started moving to cut him off. His throat and chest hurt as he swerved away from another policeman, and then the tumbled barricade rose up in front of him.
He’d planned to go across where the fallen cars were lowest, but now there was no time to do anything but leap at the first wreck he came to. His foot skidded off an icy wing, but he grabbed on to something cold and sharp and hauled himself upward. There were yells from behind and below him now.
A hand seized his ankle. He jerked his foot and kicked back.
Someone said, “Bastard!” and his foot was released.
The car bodies were icy and rough. He clawed his way up on to the roof of one and jumped from it on to the next as it shifted beneath him. He closed his mind to their seesawing instability as he scrambled over them, hearing the clamour at his back as the police followed. He reached the top, shouting, ‘It’s Ben Murray, I’m coming over!’, and as he slipped and scrabbled down the other side there was a boom and a flash of light from the scrapyard office.
Oh, Jesus, the bastard! he thought as he slipped and fell. He tried to turn it into a jump, pushing himself clear, and landed heavily on the broken concrete of the drive. He curled himself into a ball and wrapped his arms around his head as the shotgun crashed twice more, but the expected shock of pellets ripping into him didn’t come. Above him it sounded as though handfuls of pebbles were being thrown against the cars.
Someone screamed, ‘Back! Back! Get down!’, and for a few seconds he thought the entire barricade was coming over on top of him as it rocked and clattered under the policemen’s retreat.
Then it went quiet.
He slowly uncurled. He was lying at the foot of a car canted over on its side. He looked up at it rearing above him and hurriedly moved from underneath. He felt bruised and scraped in any number of places, and his ankle protested when he put his weight on it, but other than that he was unhurt.
He rubbed his arms to try to stop shaking, but he couldn’t keep his teeth from chattering. “Oh fuck,” he breathed. “Oh fuck.” The memory of the shotgun explosions was still reverberating in his head. But they had been to drive the policemen back, not aimed at him.
Kale wanted him inside.
Greene’s voice, unamplified, came from the other side of the barricade. “Murray! Murray! Can you hear me?”
“I’m all right.” The words were an inaudible croak. He put more force into them. “I’m all right!”
He could hear the negotiator’s relief in his pause. “Okay, just stay where you are. Get behind some cover if there’s anything nearby, but don’t move away from the cars. Just stay put.”
Ben didn’t answer. He looked down the drive to the darkened building. Slices of light from the police Land Rover shone through the barricade in fractured patterns, but none reached that far. It waited for him, impassive and silent. Ben started towards it.
“Murray? Mr Murray!” Greene’s voice fell away. “Look, don’t be a bloody idiot...!”
He kept walking. There was frost underfoot. It gave a minute, frictionless crunch with every step. The towers of lifeless cars on either side of him were coated with it. As the shattered patches of light from the Land Rover were left behind and his eyes adjusted, he could see the wrecks shining with a pale luminescence in the moonlight.
His hands were sore and frozen from his scramble over the barricade. The armed police already seemed a long way away.
Greene began calling him through the loudhailer, telling him to go back, but even that seemed distant and unimportant, far less real than his footsteps on the icy concrete. It was between him and Kale now. As it always had been, he realised.
He remembered when he and Colin had come along this same drive. The scrapyard had figured in his thoughts so often since that he could hardly believe he’d only been there once.
He wondered if he’d made a single right decision since then.
He wondered if he was making one now.
He felt exposed and alone as he approached the unlit building. He glanced uneasily at the square black hole of the first-floor window. That was where the shots had come from.
It was wide open, but he couldn’t see inside. He knew Kale would be watching, though. Sighting down the barrel.
He shivered under his bulky coat. He had no plan, no idea of what he would do when he reached the office. There was no chance of him overpowering the ex-soldier, and he didn’t believe for a second that Kale might want to talk, that he could be persuaded to give himself up and let Jacob go.
There was only one reason why he wanted Ben to go inside, and for a second Ben felt a heady disbelief as the nearness of his own death confronted him.
But there was nothing else to do.
God, I’m frightened.
He was almost at the building now. Its shadow lay across his path like a hole in the ground. He walked into it, more conscious than ever of the open window above, resisting the impulse to hurry from beneath it.
Don’t give him the satisfaction.
He could see the ground-floor room where he and Colin had met the fat scrap dealer. Next to it was the open maw of the passageway. It was a solid block of darkness. Ben halted at its edge. At its far end, invisible, were the steps leading up to the first floor where Kale would be waiting.
And Jacob, please God.
There was a smell of damp brick. He felt in his pockets for matches. He hadn’t any. He looked around him, putting off the moment when he would have to go into the blackness. There was a lightening in the sky to the east, and he realised with surprise that dawn couldn’t be very far off. He stared at it for a long moment, then turned and entered the passageway.