Chapter Thirty #2
Duncan whipped him hard in the face with the Webley butt.
Strangled yelp. Vague, grabbed glimpse of a police uniform tunic, unbuttoned down to the waist, gray vest beneath stretched across a burly chest. The man reeled backward, clutching at a nose spurting blood.
Big guy—a handful, if he got himself together.
Duncan followed him in, stomped him hard in the knee, so he went down grunting against the iron bars of the inner gate.
Arthur and Crammond boiled in after him, through the gate and into the corridor beyond.
Duncan pointed the Webley at the man’s face.
“Look at me!” Snapping the words out—seize the advantage, seize command, and keep it. “Get that fucking hand off your face and look at me if you want to live!”
Groggily, the man lowered his hand. Blood ran out of his nose as if from a poorly closed tap, clogged in a bushy mustache below, and trickled down a chin bristly with a week’s beard.
Middle-aged copper, no rank, and wearing it badly.
Broken-veined cheeks. Fearful eyes. Duncan thumbed back the hammer on the Webley and the man flinched.
“How many of you?”
“Five! Five!” The man lifted trembling hands, palms outward. Voice dried up, shaking, eyes taking in the balaclavas, the weapons. “In—in the cots, downstairs. Two in a room. Don’t shoot me! I—I got nothing against the Micks. It’s just orders.”
“Get up!” Grabbing the man’s flapping tunic at the collar as he tried. “Get the fuck up! You’re going to show me where.”
“All right, all right, I’m not—”
“Shut the fuck up! You don’t talk unless I tell you to!
” As the man floundered to his feet, Duncan brandished the revolver in his bloodied face.
Kept his voice low and venomous. “This is going to be in the back of your neck all the way. Dumdum load—you know what that means. Anything goes wrong, I paint your face and brains all over the wall. Got it?”
The man swallowed hard, nodded. Duncan redoubled his grip on his tunic collar, got up close, pushed the barrel of the Webley into his nape, steered him past the gate like a shield.
Up ahead, caged bulbs gleamed off cream-colored tiling on walls that had seen better days.
Arthur held the corridor with his carbine at hip height.
Closed doors on both sides, all bar one on the left where light spilled out on the passageway floor.
Crammond slipped past Arthur, ducked into the room, came right back out.
“All clear in there,” he murmured. “Desk, cot. Looks like we woke big man here up.”
“Then let’s go downstairs.” Duncan shoved his captive ahead to where the stairs wound down behind another iron bar gate. “We going to need keys for this?”
The man shook his head.
“Right. Carbine, with me. Get the gate for us. Colt, you check these other doors, just in case our friend here isn’t as Boy Scout truthful as he looks.”
Crammond chuckled grimly, let them past. Duncan heard him start trying door handles along the corridor.
Arthur eased the iron gate back—it groaned and grated with disuse, a lot more than Duncan would have liked—and Duncan steered his captive down the stairs beyond, one careful step at a time. He felt Arthur swing in behind him.
Almost at the bottom, almost—
“That you, Bennett?” Hoarse attempt at a whisper from the corridor below. “What you fuckin’ creepin’ around for, it’s not even—”
Duncan shoved Bennett hard and the two of them cannoned down the remaining three stairs into the corridor, hit the wall opposite.
Gleam of more caged bulbs off tiles. In the light they threw, he saw another man, in a nightshirt, bleary eyed, grizzled hair stuck up in clumps, three feet away.
He pointed the Webley past Bennett’s shoulder, hissed, “Not a fucking w—”
And it all came apart.
Bennett shoved sideways at his arm, grabbed for the revolver.
The copper in the nightshirt tried to yell—it came out a strangled yelp instead.
He charged forward. Nothing for it. Duncan pulled the trigger.
Sharp crack as the Webley went off and the man spun with the impact, went down, nightshirt drenched in sudden blood at the shoulder.
Bennett bellowed and shoved again, smashed Duncan into the wall.
Duncan shoved back, got the Webley between them and fired again.
He felt the shot jolt the other man off him.
Bennett screamed, staggered about clutching himself and spouting blood from somewhere in his midsection.
Finally, he fell down. Someone darted into the corridor from an open door farther up, had a pistol of some sort, leveled it at Duncan—
Signature whip-crack of rifle fire, faster than Duncan could get his own weapon up.
The new arrival jerked and folded over himself, the pistol clattered on the cement floor.
Arthur—in the corridor at the foot of the stairs, Lee-Enfield up at his eye.
The man he’d shot made a plaintive sound like a smacked child, slid forward a little, then stopped.
Arthur had already worked the bolt on the carbine, nodded tightly at Duncan.
Clatter of boots on the stair—Crammond crashed into the corridor, Colt raised. Duncan flapped an arm at him.
“Whoa there! We’re good, we’re good! Ease up!”
Bennett was on the floor, still screaming. Duncan stepped back, pointed the Webley, and shut him up. Sudden splotch of blood and brain tissue across the cement by his head, and abruptly all was quiet along the corridor.
“We’re good,” Duncan repeated.
Crammond snorted, gestured at the mess. “Ye call this good?”
The man Duncan had snapped a shot at past Bennett looked to have either passed out or died from blood loss.
His nightshirt was soaked through with rich crimson on the right side, gleaming slick in the low light from the corridor lamps, creeping from his body across the floor like slow floodwaters.
Duncan’s shot had gone in well below the right shoulder; there was no telling the damage the dumdum round had done in the chest cavity.
Quite possibly it tore through the aorta, or other arteries, or both.
Duncan fought off a wartime reflex to bend and attend to the man, made the count instead.
Three men down, only two more remaining if Bennett was to be believed.
And three shots left in the Webley. He patted the second pistol in his belt, backed up beside Arthur and Crammond, called out loud along the corridor.
“Listen to me! We outnumber you, we have you pinned down. But we’re here for the prisoner, not you. Drop your weapons, get out here with your hands up; you don’t have to die!”
Someone snapped a shot at him from an open door. Splintered tile jumped out of the wall over his head. Arthur put a carbine round into the doorframe the shot had come from, chased the shooter back into cover.
“Stop that!” Duncan yelled furiously. “Just stop it! Surrender, and we will not kill you! You have my word!”
In the silence that followed, suddenly he heard Niamh calling his name. Muffled behind a closed cell door down the corridor, voice cracked, desperate.
“Duncan, I’m here. Duncan—” She choked on his name, started coughing.
Fresh fury, storming in his blood like the churn of a dreadnought’s screws.
“I’m not fucking joking,” he bawled. “Count of five! Throw out your arms or we will butcher every last one of you! This is your last fucking chance!”
Whatever was in his blood came through in his voice. He barely made it to the count of two before the pistols came clattering out onto the corridor floor.
—
“Duncan! Duncan, get me out of here!”
Easier said than done. The cells were all locked up, apart from the two the Maunston altar boys had bunked in.
Arthur held his carbine trained on the two men who’d surrendered, made them sit on their hands cross-legged against the corridor wall, while Crammond and Duncan turned over their sleeping quarters at speed, found a set of keys.
Duncan cracked the door on Niamh’s cell and she fell out into his arms. He gathered her to him.
I thought you were dead, she kept saying into his neck, Duncan, I thought you were dead.
She smelled of cheap carbolic soap, her skirt and blouse were grubby with her time in the cell, her hair was down, matted, tangled. She was hot and feverish to the touch. Bare, dirty feet under her skirts, and her face…
Duncan felt something like a vise wrap cold around his head.
They’d stripped her of any trace of makeup, left her pale and gaunt as if from some sudden famine.
Her left eye was blacked, swollen and crusted.
Cuts and scrapes across her cheek and forehead; it looked like damage from a ring or knuckle-dusters.
Her lips were bruised in one corner of her mouth, split in two separate places.
Duncan breathed deep to get a handle on his rage.
“Who the fuck did this?” he gritted. “Did they—?”
Bitten off. He watched as tears welled up in her good eye, leaked through the crusted slit over her left. He led her toward the two cross-legged men, indicated them with the barrel of the Webley.
“Was it either of them?”
The men looked away. Niamh peered. Shook her head.
“Are you sure?”
A press-lipped nod. Her gaze strayed on down the corridor, over the bodies on the floor. She drew a sharp breath. It caught in her throat, set her coughing violently again.
“Him,” she finally managed, pointing at Bennett. “That big fucker. Him and one of the Branch men.”
“Duncan…” Crammond’s voice, warning.
Duncan went back to the prisoners, breathing hard. They tried not to meet his eye. He crouched down, dug the barrel of the Webley under the first man’s chin.
“Look at her,” he said very, very softly.
The man’s eyes rolled in their sockets. He didn’t move his head at all. His lower lip trembled. “It wasn’t—it wasn’t us.” Desperately now. “You heard her, man, you heard her. It wasn’t us!”
“I know that. Now if you want to survive the next few minutes, you’re going to tell me who it was. This Special Branch cunt? What’s his name?”
“You said you wouldn’t kill us!”
“I’m not going to.” Duncan lifted the man’s chin another inch on the barrel of the Webley.
He leaned in, stared into eyes clamped wide with terror.
Stordalen’s blood came walking in his veins.
“But I am going to batter you until you tell me what I want to know. And I’m not going to be all that careful about it.
You might survive, you might not. If you don’t, I can always start again on your pal here. So—what’s it going to be?”
Crammond tried again. “Duncan, we have tae g—”
“Give me a fucking minute!”
“Boyle!” It was the man he hadn’t touched yet, yelping from dry lips he kept licking. “Douglas Boyle. He’s a—he’s a…detective inspector. Out of Belfast.”
Duncan nodded. Lowered the Webley and rocked back on his heels. “Got a number for him?”
The man he’d threatened nodded brokenly. The one who’d spoken looked aghast.
“Well, but—it’s only for emergency use.”
Duncan gestured around at the carnage they’d made. “You don’t think this counts?”
From the man’s face, he judged his point made. He nodded again. “Right. So you’re going to call him for me. Tell him there’s trouble and he’d better get down here sharpish. Then we cuff you and your pal here to a water pipe, and you both live to tell the tale. How does that sound?”
The moment held, stretched like hot taffy before it cools and snaps—
Harsh banging on the locked cell next to Niamh’s, like an ogre clamoring to be let in.
Duncan and Crammond looked at each other. Duncan put the Webley barrel back in the broken man’s throat.
“Who the fuck have you got in there?” he asked.
The man flinched. “It’s—dunno, some old guy. They brought him in before the girl. He was supposed to—”
“It’s bloody me, Duncan!” Gruff, Lancastrian voice shouting through the plated steel of the door. “Thy bloody messenger of choice to that bastard Hardy! Are tha gonner bloody let me out of here or what?”