and already clotted. Her hands cover her face, and gasping sobs escape between her fingers.
McAvoy stands immobile. The scene feels unreal, somehow. As though it is happening to somebody else. He feels suddenly cold and clammy, as if he has woken from a nightmarish sleep to find himself bathed in sweat.
‘In … in there …’
Angie Martindale is raising a blood-soaked finger, ghoulish and spectral, pointing at the door to the nearest cubicle.
Instinctively, McAvoy bends to lean forward, to put his ear closer to her mouth, to hear her words and make sense of them.
A figure leaps over the cubicle door, black-clad and balaclava’d, body ducked low, leg protruding, like a steeplechaser clearing a hurdle. McAvoy looks up. Feels his world slow down, minimise and become this moment. This now. This boot, with its caterpillar tread, crashing towards his face.
At the last possible moment he jerks his head back. The boot whistles past his jaw, but the figure that comes behind the kick is too bulky to avoid and McAvoy feels all the air leave his body as the man crashes into his chest and slams him back into the wall.
The impact with the brick is sickening and for a moment McAvoy feels himself beginning to slip and sink into a black treacle of unconsciousness. The glass falls from his hand. Smashes on the tiles. His head is ringing. He can smell blood. Exploding lights dance on his vision.
And then he realises there is a figure in his arms. That in his arms a black-clad man is struggling and kicking, ramming elbows in his ribs and aiming kicks at his shins, trying to extricate himself from a bear hug McAvoy did not know he had applied.
The moment of realisation, the returning to his skin, causes him briefly to relax his grip, and in an instant he feels a strong forearm against his jaw, pushing head back against the wall as a fist slams into his ribs.
McAvoy drops his hands, pain shooting up his spine to explode in a concussive headache, and he barely gets his hands up in time to stop the next right hand that impacts with his cheekbone and forces him back against the wall.
There is no room to fight. He cannot draw his hands back to swing a punch. Cannot step forward for fear of treading on Angie Martindale.
He takes another punch to the chest.
Lashes out with a boot. Misses. Lashes out a right hand and slaps the place where his attacker’s head had been a moment before.
He’s angry, suddenly. Fucking furious. Feels himself galvanised by a rage terrible and raw.
He puts one of his boots against the wall to his rear and pushes himself forward, managing to grab his attacker’s flailing arms. He propels them both across the tiled floor, slick with blood, cluttered with entangled limbs, and feels a satisfying thud as the man’s spine slams back into the cubicle door. McAvoy grunts and slams him again into the hard wood. Feels his opponent weaken. Takes the man’s head in his hands. Feels the wool of the balaclava. Slams his head into the door. Takes him by the throat in his left hand and slams a right into his guts. Feels him double over. Brings back his right hand to drop a haymaker from on high.
The door bursts open.
Helen Tremberg stands in the doorway. Her extendable baton is clutched in her left hand. She is holding her right up as if she is directing traffic.
She opens her mouth to speak. To tell the black-clad man that this over? To tell Angie Martindale that she will live? The words never make it to the air.
In one fluid motion, the man in black produces a blade. Whether it be from a pocket or a sleeve, McAvoy cannot later say, but one moment the man is doubled over, falling to the ground, fingers in fists, and the next he is swinging a blooddrenched blade in a great sweeping backhand arc that slices across Helen Tremberg’s arm.
McAvoy’s shout of anguish comes before Tremberg’s scream, but in an instant the tiny space is ringing with roars of pain and despair.
The man in black lunges forward and grabs Tremberg by the neck. Spins and hurls her into McAvoy’s path as he slithers and tries to find purchase on the slick floor. She hits him hard in the middle and both officers fall, landing heavily on Angie Martindale’s legs.
By the time McAvoy has yanked himself back to his feet, the door is swinging closed. He staggers forward and yanks it open, running into the bar, only for a forest of arms and legs to grab him at knee, waist and shoulder height. He clatters down hard on the wooden floor and spins onto his back, lashing out with angry kicks and bitter yells at the men standing above him, trying to pin him back to the floor.
He tries to find his feet but an arm fastens around his throat and he pushes himself backwards against the brass rail, feeling the man on his back gasp as the air shoots from his lungs.
‘Police …’ gasps McAvoy. ‘I’m police.’
The pressure on his neck eases in a second. McAvoy looks at the people around him. Half a dozen assorted drinkers. The regulars from the Bear. Two short, fat men, a middle-aged guy in shorts, a petite woman with too many earrings, an old man with greying Elvis hair and a tall, skeletally thin man in a white shirt who looks to be missing an arm.
‘We thought …,’ says one.
McAvoy pushes past them. Clambers over the wreckage of the broken front door and emerges, gasping, in the street.
Frantically, he looks both ways. Left. Right. Back into the belly of the bar.
Then up to the sky, as he realises he’s gone. That he had him in his hands, and let him go.
He opens his eyes wide and stares deep into the snow-filled swirling black clouds, and screams the only word that does the situation justice.
‘
CHAPTER 17
‘Don’t say a word,’ says Pharaoh. ‘Don’t fucking breathe.’
She walks behind the bar and reaches up to the top shelf for a half-pint glass. She holds the glass under the optic and pours herself a double vodka, which she downs in one.
The investigation team is assembled in the front bar of Wilson’s. Colin Ray is lounging in a hardbacked chair, his tie unfastened almost to his navel. He’s chewing nicotine gum and looking pleased with himself. Sharon Archer, as ever, is at his side. She’s got a packet of crisps open on the table in front of her, and is eating them as quietly as she can.
Sophie Kirkland and Ben Nielsen are standing at the bar, watching Pharaoh. They arrived together a few minutes ago, grumbling about the parking and shaking snow from their hair onto a floor thick with muddy bootprints.
McAvoy is resting against the fruit machine by the side entrance. Through the frosted glass he can see the fluorescent yellow jacket of the officer guarding the entrance. Two other constables are stationed at the front doors. The road has been cordoned off, but the crowd outside is still close enough to be a cause for concern. Some of the faces in the crowd had been snarling the last time McAvoy had poked his head out of the front door. He wonders whether it’s even worth trying to tell them that he feels worse about Angie Martindale than they do. And he’s the one who saved her life.
Pharaoh stands behind the bar. She closes her eyes. Breathes in and out for a full thirty seconds. Slowly, without saying a word, she pulls a thin cigar from a pocket of her coat, lights it, and draws the smoke deep into her lungs. She exhales precious little of it.
‘She’s not dead,’ says Pharaoh eventually. ‘This is a good thing.’
She stops. Takes another drag of the cigar.
‘Helen Tremberg will be OK too. That’s another good thing.’
Another drag. Another puff of smoke.
