Macbeth

Closed his eyes.

And he saw it again.

The raindrop hanging from the edge of his visor. The man kneeling in front of him. Not moving. The helmet with the horns. Duff wanted to say something to him, but he couldn’t. Instead he lifted the gun to his shoulder. Couldn’t the man at least move? The raindrop would soon fall.

‘Duff,’ Macbeth said behind him. ‘Duff, don’t...’

The drop fell.

Duff fired. Fired again. Fired again.

Three shots.

The man kneeling in front of him fell sideways.

The silence afterwards was deafening. He squatted down beside the dead man and removed his helmet. It was like having a bucket of ice-cold water thrown over him when he saw it wasn’t Sweno. The young man’s eyes were closed; he looked like he was sleeping peacefully where he lay.

Duff turned, glanced at Macbeth. Felt the tears filling his eyes, still unable to speak, just shook his head. Macbeth nodded in response and removed the other’s helmet. Also a young man. Duff felt something pushing up into his throat and wrapped his hands around his face. Over his sobs he heard the man’s pleas reverberate like gulls’ cries across the uninhabited plains. ‘No, don’t! I haven’t seen anything! I won’t tell anyone! Please, no jury will believe me anyway. I under—’

The voice was cut off. Duff heard a body smack against the tarmac, a low gurgle, then everything went quiet.

He turned. Only now did he notice the other man was wearing white clothes. They were soaking up the blood running from the hole in his neck.

Macbeth stood behind the man, a dagger in his hand. His chest was heaving. ‘Now,’ he said gruffly. Cleared his throat. ‘Now I’ve paid my debt to you, Duff.’

Duff pressed his fingertips against the place where he knew they didn’t soothe. He held his other hand over the man’s mouth to muffle his screams and forced him down onto the hospital bed. The man pulled desperately at the handcuffs shackling him to the bed head. From the daylight flooding in through the window Duff could clearly see the network of fine blood vessels around the big pupils, black with shock, in his wide-open eyes under the NORSE RIDER TILL I DIE tattoo on his forehead. Duff’s forefinger and index finger went red where they pressed under the bandage into the shoulder wound, making squelching noises.

Any job, Duff thought, as long as it serves the force and the town.

And repeated the question: ‘Who’s your police informant?’

He took his hand away from the wound. The man stopped screaming. Duff took his hand off his mouth. The man didn’t answer.

Duff ripped off the bandage and pressed all his fingers into the wound.

He knew he would get an answer, it was just a question of time. There is only so much a man can take before he gives in, before he breaks every tattooed oath and does everything — absolutely everything — he thought he would never do. For eternal loyalty is inhuman and betrayal is human.

4

It took twenty minutes.

Twenty minutes after Duff had walked into the hospital and poked his fingers into the shoulder wound of the man with the tattoo on his forehead, until he left, amazed, with enough information about whom, where and when for the relevant person to find it impossible to deny unless he was innocent. Amazed because — now things had got so bad that they had a mole in their midst — it was almost too good to be true.

It took thirty minutes.

Thirty minutes after Duff had got in his car, driven through the trickle of rain falling onto the town like an old man piddling, parked outside the main police station, received a gracious nod from the chief commissioner’s anteroom lady to let him know he could pass, until he was sitting in front of Duncan and articulated the one word. Cawdor. And the chief commissioner leaned across his desk, asked Duff if he was sure, after all this was the head of the Gang Unit they were talking about — sat back, drew a hand over his face and for the first time Duff heard Duncan swear.

It took forty minutes.

Forty minutes from when Duncan had announced that Cawdor had a day off, lifted the phone and ordered Macbeth to arrest him, until eight SWAT men surrounded Cawdor’s house, which lay on a big plot of land overlooking the sea so far to the west that refuse was still collected and the homeless removed, and Mayor Tourtell was his closest neighbour. The SWAT team parked some distance away and crept up to the house, two men from each direction.