A Fistful of Knuckles

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: A FALLEN IDOL

It was gone ten o’clock when Sam at last tracked down Gene to an open ward that reeked of carbolic soap and floor polish. A prim, hatchet-faced nurse — who seemed also to reek of carbolic soap and floor polish — emerged from her station and blocked his way like it was Checkpoint Charlie. Sam’s police ID only made her primmer and more hatchet-faced, but eventually she relented and escorted Sam between the identical rows of beds, ssh-ing him if he stepped too noisily on the gleaming floor. As he tip-toed along in the nurse’s wake, Sam glanced at the faces in the beds that stared back at him; young men with heavy sideburns-middle-aged men with trimmed, bank manager-ish moustaches — elderly men with toothless mouths and sad white wisps scraped across their pates. Strangers every one of them, they sat sadly in their beds with their bowls of manky grapes and folded copies of The Mirror, looking for all the world like extras in Carry On Doctor.

And then he saw him — Gene Hunt, the guv’nor — propped up against a heap of starched pillows, his eyes closed, his face half black from bruising. His coat, clothes and patent leather loafers were neatly stacked in an open cupboard beside his bed, upon which stood a jug of water and a single plastic cup. The guv himself had been put into regulation NHS pyjamas with white and blue stripes that made him look unbearably frail and vulnerable. Sam felt his stomach lurch to see him like this, a fallen warrior, crushed and defeated, the fastest gun in the west outgunned — or worse, just another extra in Carry On Doctor. It was not the man he knew.

‘Guv …?’ Sam asked softly. But Gene did not respond. ‘Sister, how is he?’

The nurse checked the chart that hung on the foot of his bed.

‘Stable,’ she said without warmth or emotion. ‘I’m assuming you want some time with him?’

‘I know it’s out of hours but this is important.’

‘You can have five minutes.’

And with that, she was gone.

Sam edged closer to the bed.

‘Guv …? Are you …?’

‘Wide awake,’ Gene suddenly growled, and his eyelids snapped open. He fixed Sam with a hard stare. ‘Now pull that bloody curtain round, Tyler you twonk. There’s too many nosy parkers in this joint.’

The eyes of the whole ward were on them. Sam tugged at a set of orange curtains and sealed himself and Gene off from the public gaze. He was surprised at how much relief he was feeling — to have the guv back, glaring at him and mouthing off and treating him like shit. Normality had been restored. The world was back on its axis once again. The Gene Genie had not been reduced to a non-speaking extra in a bad sex farce.

‘Gene, you’ve had me worried this evening.’

Gene pulled an unimpressed face: ‘Got a smoke on you, Tyler? I’m gasping!’

‘I’ll pour you a glass of water.’

‘I need fags and booze, you womble, I can’t survive on that lukewarm piss-in-a-pot. Christ, who’d you think I am — you?’

‘This isn’t the Railway Arms, Guv. You’ve got to rest up and eat lots of grapes and be a very good boy for the next few days.’

‘I’m always a very a good boy, Tyler, every day. Top of the bleedin’ class, me.’

He was already starting to clamber out of bed — and as he did, he looked down at his striped jim-jams and grimaced.

‘Jackie H. Charlton! You’d think I had enough to put up with without this.’

He thrust a leg out from under his blankets.

‘Guv, what the hell are you doing?’

‘Discharging myself.’

‘Oh no you’re not,’ said Sam. ‘Gene, your face is right out here like a pumpkin. You’ve been unconscious for hours!’

‘I have not been unconscious for hours, Tyler, so you take that right back!’ Gene glowered at him, struggling to keep his voice down. ‘You take that right back, my son! I have been mildly stunned. Very mildly stunned. It’s on me chart so that’s official.’

Sam glanced at the chart, said: ‘I tell you what is on here, Guv. Your date of birth. Well, well, well …’

‘You look away, Tyler, that’s classified information.’

‘You should be looking after yourself at your age.’

‘That date’s wrong. I’m twenty-one and three quarters, give or take.’

He broke off, silenced by a sudden burst of nauseating pain exploding through his skull.

‘Take it easy, Guv,’ said Sam. ‘You’ve been in the wars tonight.’

‘Don’t talk to me like that, Tyler, next thing you’ll be calling me a brave little soldier.’

‘You got clobbered, guv. Properly clobbered. You were out for the count. I thought you were dying from a brain hemorrhage.’

‘I was playing possum, keeping my ears open. I was fully aware of what was happening at all times … except for when them nurses managed to slip these bloody pyjamas on me. If I’d caught them at it you’d seen some bloody fists flying then, believe me.’

He ripped off his striped top and reached for his nylon shirt — and then stopped. He swayed. He put one hand gingerly to his battered face.

‘Guv? What is it? Shall I get the nurse?’

Gene said nothing. For once, with an open goal to come straight back at Sam with a smart-arse comment, he said nothing. Instead, he sank back slowly against his mountain of pillows and sighed.

‘I’m not gonna be sick,’ he muttered, as much to himself as much as to Sam.

‘You sure, Guv? Shall a get a … a pot or whatever?’

‘I said I am not gonna be sick!’

Sam pulled the blankets back over him, tucking him in like Gene was a little boy.

‘You took a pasting tonight, Guv,’ said Sam, sitting beside him.

‘You’re telling me,’ muttered Gene, taking a few steady breaths. ‘I didn’t even see it coming. God, Tyler, it’s been a few years since a fella’s put me down like that.’

‘We’re none of us getting any younger.’

‘Speak for yourself. Eternal bloom of youth, that’s me. Twenty-one and three quar- Jeeesus …!’ He waited for the waves of pain in his head to subside. As Sam watched, Gene’s whole manner seemed to change. The fire went out of his eyes. His posture deflated. DCI Gene Hunt, the guv’nor, shrank down to just a battered, middle-aged man lying forlornly in a starched hospital bed.

‘You get some rest, Gene,’ said Sam. ‘Don’t worry, I’m taking care of everything.’

‘Taking care of what, Sam?’

‘The case. Remember? The Denzil Obi case.’

For a moment, Gene seemed not to comprehend. Then he caught Sam’s expression and hissed: ‘Don’t you look at me like that, Tyler, I do not have bloody amnesia!’

‘I’ve set up an illegal bare-knuckle fight. Spider against Patsy O’Riordan. I know you put the kibosh on that plan, Gene, but I had to think fast back there. I’m winning Patsy’s trust. I’m going to lure him on, let him incriminate himself, and then put him away for good.’

Gene said nothing. He had closed his eyes and was breathing deeply and slowly in an attempt to ameliorate the pain.

‘I’ve also found the connection between Patsy and Denzil,’ Sam went on. ‘It was Tracy. He used her as a sort of honey trap. That’s how he got into Denzil’s flat. The whole case is coming together, Guv — what matters is that we don’t lose track of Patsy, that he doesn’t go to ground and disappear. We need to keep him close and make him trust us. Now, I’ve persuaded him to fight Spider. I’ve led him to believe it’s all a stitch-up to pin the Obi killing on Spider, and …’

‘Tyler.’

‘Guv?’

‘Enough.’

Gene lay still, his eyes closed, silent but for his deep, regular breathing. Sam looked unhappily down at him, at his disfigured face with its grotesque purple bruise, and found he could stand it no more. He turned away, ducked through the curtains that surrounded the bed, and strode back along the ward, his boots tap-tap-tapping on the polished floor.

‘Ssh!’ hissed the staff nurse.

But this time, Sam just marched straight past her. He just wanted to get the hell out of that awful place.

Primitive-looking ambulances were congregated outside the hospital, their lights flickering and flashing as they set off through the night.

Sam found himself marching out into the darkness, his head spinning, feeling a deep need to just walk and walk. It had brought him no pleasure to see Gene lain low like that. There was no joke in it. It was a brutal, crashing reminder of the hard, violent world they were all struggling to survive in, where not even the mighty Hunt was invulnerable. Until tonight, Sam had not realized just how lost, how utterly bereft, he would feel without the guv. Gene drove him mad most days, infuriated him — at times appalled and repelled him — and yet, beneath all the prejudice and banter and bullshit there was a powerful strength, an innate decency, that he had come to rely on. He was the burning spirit at the heart of 1973. He was 1973. The only thing that would crush Sam more than losing the guv’nor would be losing Annie.

Bang on cue, a small, round, pale face appeared, complete with a teardrop painted on each cheek. The Test Card Girl was standing motionless ahead of him, her hands clasped gently in front of her, a single black helium balloon bobbing in the air three feet above her head.

Sam stopped.

‘You heard me thinking about Annie,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you.’

He stared at the girl, and she — smiling ever so slightly — stared back. On their right, the lights of the hospital burned brightly in the deep dark of the night; far away to their left, barely visible but most certainly there, the coloured lights of the fairground whirled and span and flashed; in the dark space between the two stood Sam and the girl, face to face.

‘You saw the horrid man,’ the Test Card Girl said softly.

‘My guv’nor’s not so horrid,’ Sam replied.

‘No, not him, Sam. Him. The other man. The painted man.’

‘Patsy O’Riordan? Yes, I saw him. And I’ve seen him before. In nightmares. Haven’t I.’

The Girl nodded, said: ‘And he’s seen you. He watches you.’

‘Not here he doesn’t.’

‘Oh yes he does. He watches from the dark. And it’s dark now … dark all around …’

Sam felt his stomach tighten as if in anticipation of a blow. He silently cursed this ghastly, wan-faced creature for always stepping from the shadows and spooking the hell out of him — but for once, he decided to keep her talking. She had something to say, and this time he was resolved to hear it in full.

‘I’ve seen Patsy in dreams,’ he said. ‘I thought it was some sort of devil. Now I know it was just a bunch of tattoos. Nothing but a painted devil.’

‘And it is the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil,’ smirked the girl. ‘So now you’re not frightened? Now you think that devil in the dark was just a horrid fat man who lives at the fair? Is that what you’re thinking, Sam?’

‘Of course. And you won’t change my mind on that. There’s nothing in the dark out there. The only demons are in here.’ And he tapped the side of his head. ‘Don’t bother trying to scare me anymore. I know that’s all you’re doing.’

‘But no no no it’s not,’ the girl said in a childish, whining voice. ‘Sam, I’m trying to help you. Don’t shake your head, it’s true. I want to save you the pain.’

‘What pain?’

‘That devil in the dark … it’s out there, Sam … it really is. And it’s getting closer. All the time, closer and closer.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Sam felt a strong urge to start walking, to push past that revolting little brat and march away into the night — but for some reason, his legs wouldn’t obey him.

The Test Card Girl tilted her head to the side, looking quizzically at him, and said: ‘Have a think, Sam. There’s you … and Annie … and that thing in the darkness … Have a think about it. Like a proper policeman. Have a think about the clues — see if you can make them make sense …’

An ambulance roared by, its lights raking the pavement as it went, and in that suddenly dazzling moment the Test Card Girl was gone. Sam glanced upwards and saw a jet black balloon sailing away into the jet black sky — until, seconds later, that too vanished.

The devil in the dark.

Sam strode through the city, his head down, his face set. He passed beneath the orange glow of one sodium street light after another, oblivious to them as he was oblivious to everything else except his own thoughts.

Patsy O’Riordan is the devil-thing that I saw in my nightmares. God knows how and why I had premonitions about him, but I did. And it means something. Something important.

His feet guided him — across a silent road, down a gloomy back alley, behind a row of shut-up shops.

There’s a threat against Annie. That little brat with the balloon keeps on and on telling me that. There’s a threat against Annie, and it’s going to reach her through me. So … what do I do? How do I identify that threat? And how do I stop it?

A cat hissed and darted under a parked car. From behind a boarded-up fence a dog barked.

Whatever is it, this ‘devil’ is just a front. A mask. It represents something dangerous, something very real, but it presents itself in a disguise. It hides behind the mask of a monster to frighten me … to frighten me like I’m just some little kid. Well that ain’t gonna work, buster.

‘I don’t scare so easily, you creep!’ he said out loud into the darkness. Then he sank back into his thoughts once again.

Whatever the danger is, it’s somehow realized in the form of Patsy O’Riordan. Why else would I dream of him, see his ghastly tattoos grinning at me out of the darkness? I don’t understand what, or how, or why, but it’s Patsy that’s the threat. It’s Patsy that’s the devil in the dark. It’s Patsy that needs to be put away — forever.

Sam felt his heart quicken at the thought. If the Test Card Girl’s threats and insinuations had any truth to them, they found their embodiment in the brutish, ugly, dehumanized form of Patsy O’Riordan. Strange and unfathomable as these threats might be, they at least now had a face. A face, and a name.

A face, a name, and a body made of flesh and blood. A man. Just a man. Not a monster, not a devil.

He had seen tonight that even a goliath like Gene Hunt could be brought low. Just as the Test Card Girl had intimated, there was a clue there — a clue for Sam …

‘All men are mortal,’ he told the night. ‘That goes for me, Gene, and even Patsy O’Riordan. And what’s mortal can be defeated. Destroyed. What’s mortal can be brought down. And that goes for me … Gene … and even Patsy O’Riordan.’

Quite suddenly, Sam found he had reached the entrance to his flat. He stopped, looked up and down the quiet, deserted street. The Test Card Girl did not smile at him from the shadows. A devil did not leer at him from the darkness.

‘You’re going down, O’Riordan,’ Sam vowed. ‘You’re going down.’

There was half a bottle of whisky in his flat. Sam finished it off that night with a toast to Gene’s health, another to his future with Annie, and a third to the destruction of whatever it was out there in the blackness that wished to do them such terrible harm.

That night, he dreamt of nothing.