Death Row - Mark Pearson [111]
Sally turned to Delaney, who was still gripping the steering wheel as if it might come off the column into his hands. ‘Sir—’ she said but that was all as Delaney snapped back at her.
‘Not now, Sally.’
She nodded and took out her mobile, hitting the speed dial. ‘Hello, sergeant,’ she said as the phone was answered and then she frowned, covering for Delaney. ‘I’m not sure where we are and the inspector’s a bit busy right now. He just asked me to see if you could chase up Crimint. Did we get any results back on Maureen Gallagher? Has she been in the system at any time?’ Sally nodded again. ‘Just text back if the signal’s out of range,’ she said as Delaney entered a tunnel and the phone, true to her prediction, cut straight out.
Sally closed her eyes as the blinding flash of another pair of headlamps swept over them, a screaming horn held down for long seconds as they passed. And she kept her eyes pretty much closed for the rest of the journey, which thankfully wasn’t for long. It was probably the quickest journey in terms of speed that she had ever made in a car, but it absolutely felt like the longest.
She whispered a little prayer silently in her head, over and over again. ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; should I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.’
*
Voices were singing in Bill Thompson’s head.
The man on the radio walking in a rainstorm, trying to wash the pain and hurt away. Failing. He was remembering the smell of the shickle, ripe in his throat, the sharp cuts in his knees as he was forced to kneel on the slivers of lobster and crab shell.
His uncle singing along to the music. Grunting. Drowning out the sound of Bill’s own screams, the tears running down his face, marking him. He looked across at the small window again, fifty-six years later, stained so green with algae that hardly any light filtered through and the bottom of the ocean that he was in was now as dark and as cold as the deepest sea on earth.
He looked down at his twitching right hand, arching it so that the sinews stood out like cord and made the blood vessels move below the translucent skin like thin blue slugs. His fingers curled inward, making his hand a crab once more.
The year of Our Lord 2010.
He moved his head weakly to one side, looking up at the figure above him, his right eye wet with tears, his left blind, unfocused. He tried to work the muscles in his lips and managed a ‘please’. Or what passed for it. But he couldn’t manage the words don’t shoot.
But Jack Delaney was perfectly capable of speech.
‘He’s right, Gloria,’ said Delaney. ‘Put down the gun.’
And the girl in the boot spun round to point the shaking gun that she held in her small, perfectly formed hand at her rescuer from thirteen years earlier.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said.
*
Bennett had parked his car further up the beach. He walked across the sand carefully. The sky overhead was dark with rain and the visibility was poor. He was dressed in a black overcoat with a Black Watch cap on his head. If somebody had been standing twenty yards away they probably wouldn’t have seen him coming. Which was just as Bennett liked it. Moving unseen. Coming up on people unexpectedly. It was what he was trained for after all. It was what he was good at.
That, and killing people.
*
Delaney held his hand up, placating, putting himself between Sally and Gloria. Gloria’s eyes were dancing. Wild with anger. With pain.
‘I remembered, Jack. I remembered what he did to me. Peter Garnier appearing on television was like a key turning. Stuff that I had been holding back for so very long