The Walking Dead

'You reckon it, definite, we're going down?'

'- and, I promise you, we're taking bodies with us,' Ozzie Curtis growled, savage and feral. His face twisted as his tongue rolled on the words. 'Plenty of bodies — Nat bloody Wilson's body, and the Nobbler's, and that bloody bastard's. He's going first, and that's my promise.'

'Yes, Ozzie, if you say so.'

'I say so.'

Ozzie Curtis gazed over the shoulders of Nat bloody Wilson, past the robed back of the bloody barrister, to focus hard on the bloody bastard…but the eyes didn't meet his. He had that gaze, cold and threatening, that would empty a bloody bar in bloody Bermondsey when he used it, but the bastard never looked at him. Looked instead at the drowned rat in the public gallery. He vowed it then — didn't matter how much of what he had was taken by the Assets Recovery crowd — he would use his last penny to take that bastard, above all others, down with him…his last penny. What made his anger more acute, the bastard seemed so calm, and kept eye contact with his shadow.

* * *

A wan smile was returned to him. He listened to the barrister and wondered how much longer the peroration could last, scratched hard in his beard and tried to think of Hannah. Tried, but not with success, and tried again.

Jools did not have Vicky, close up and pressuring his hip and knees, to fall back on for thinking of. He'd been late into court, the back-marker as they'd filed into their seats with their escort pressed round them. Vicky had Corenza on one side of her and Fanny on the other — he didn't know whether purposely or by accident. As the last one in, he'd had the choice of sitting between Rob and Peter, or between Baz and Dwayne…Some damn choice. He had ended up with Baz and Dwayne.

He missed the press of Vicky against him. A silent chuckle rumbled in his throat. Babs and his daughter, they were never there. The weekend and Hannah, Jools decided, was about building bricks: like they did in a nursery. Bricks were put together. Bottom of the pile was the protection officer, Mr Banks, the starting point. Hannah and his weekend would be built on the leverage he had on the armed detective, and confidences given. Big enough confidences. With such confidences having been turfed out at him, he couldn't see that a weekend liaison with Hannah would be too difficult to achieve…Jools felt good.

The brothers' barrister was obliterated from his mind — and why his protection officer had been out in the rain for a half-hour, had had a soaking and looked so damn mournful, and useless — and he was between Hannah's thighs and she squeezed on him, and…He was there.

The cottage lay empty abandoned. So clean. The beds were stripped of sheets and blankets, and had been loaded into black bin bags. Every surface was wiped down, had been scrubbed, and the smell of bleach, toxic and sweet, permeated each room. Carpets and rugs had been vacuum-cleaned three times, and the mess of dirt and hairs had been extracted and dumped in the bags with the bedding. Piping-hot water had been run from the kitchen and bathroom taps, and from the shower, to flush down the pipes leading to the cesspit. Gone from Oakdene Cottage were all traces of a 'family' gathering. Not just their fingerprints, but also the body hairs and body fluids that carried traces of the cell's individual deoxyribonucleic acids — the DNA samples that could have identified them. It had been done painstakingly and with rigour. Windows had been left open, not to allow rain to spatter inside the rooms but to let out the trapped air contaminated with explosives molecules. Quiet hung in the cottage, and its new-found cleanness.

Across two fields, an upstairs window opened.

On any morning, when it was not raining, the farmer's wife would have shaken her sheets from it, as her mother had.

The window was opened because the old mullioned glass, set in leaded diamond shapes, distorted decent vision.

The farmer's wife had at her eyes the binoculars most often used for following the flight of birds over their land.

She called down, stentorian, 'Just my imagination, I'm sure, but it's not right at Oakdene. The car's gone, the lights are off, but the windows are all open. Am I being silly?'

'Probably gone out for the day,' was the answering bellow. 'You fuss too much, love.'

'Maybe — but there are too many of them for one car.' She frowned, then lifted the binoculars again. 'There's a fire burning by the Wilsons' barn — you know, the one past our Twenty-Five-Acre.'

'Can't be, they're away. Aren't they on a cruise? Where is it, Madeira, Tenerife?'

'Come and see for yourself.'

She heard his grumble, then the tramp of his feet up the stairs. He stood beside her, took the binoculars from her.

'Haven't they hay in the barn?'

'I'll take a look at it,' he said. 'And I'll take a look at Oakdene as well — when I've had my lunch.'

* * *

The screams were past, long gone.

The prisoner whimpered without sound.

'I don't like it when they're so quiet.'

'Means we're not getting through to them.'