Blood Guilt Page 5

  “You thought wrong. Look, Jim, all I’m doing is searching the streets. I owe Susan Reed that much at least. Besides, the guy went on the national news with her. His name’s going to come out soon enough anyway.”

  “I’ll tell you this much. He’s clean, no warrants, no record, and he’s got an airtight alibi.”

  “He could have an accomplice.”

  Jim sighed and tried to change the subject. “Have you spoken to Eve?”

  “Yes. She asked if I wanted to meet up.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I said no.”

  “You want a piece of advice, Harlan. Call her back, tell her you’ve changed your mind.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Why? She still loves you, you know.”

  “I know. That’s why I can’t see her.”

  Jim huffed his breath into the receiver. “Christ, I’ve never heard such a load of bollocks. If you think you’re doing Eve a favour by staying away from her, you’re wrong. All you’re doing is making both of you miserable. But then again, maybe that’s what you want. Maybe prison’s turned you into the kind of guy who enjoys misery, wallows in it like a pig in muck.”

  “Maybe so.” Harlan’s eyes were drawn to the television by the sound of smashing glass. Someone had hurled a bottle at Jones’s house. The police quickly moved in to usher the crowd onwards. The camera homed in on Susan Reed, milking every ounce of agony and despair. Her boyfriend, or whatever he was, looked pale and uncomfortable, like he wanted to be somewhere else. “So what’s the guy’s alibi?”

  “Jesus, Harlan,” snapped Jim, and he hung up.

  Harlan switched off the television and headed for bed. He set the alarm clock for two hours hence and shut his eyes. As he drifted off to sleep, he thought about what Jim had said. Jim was wrong, prison hadn’t changed him – at least, not in the way he meant. He’d always needed a bit of misery in his life. As a detective, he’d needed it the way an oyster needs sand to form pearls. It’d provided him with the edge and insight required to do the job. The difference was that back then he’d used his misery, controlled it. Now it was the other way around.

  Chapter 5

  All that night and the following day and night, Harlan relentlessly scoured the streets. He saw dozens of silver VW Golfs, but none of their number plates came close to being a match. As the hands of time ticked mercilessly towards the four day mark, his searching became ever more frantic. One time, after glimpsing a silver car in his rearview mirror, he did a high-speed U-turn and gave chase. A mile or so later, leaving a trail of blaring horns in his wake, he caught up with the car only to find it wasn’t even a VW.

  There was little new to be heard on the news. For some undisclosed reason, a pond was dragged, but turned up nothing. William Jones was released without charge. The police issued warnings that vigilantism wouldn’t be tolerated. They also put up a ten thousand pound reward for information that would lead them to Ethan. Their search was building to a fever-pitch too – over a third of the regional force’s manpower was now involved. An army of volunteers wallpapered the city with Ethan’s face and handed out reams of leaflets. Susan Reed spoke to dozens of journalists, making a series of increasingly desperate appeals. But answers seemed non-existent and fear swelled like waves of fire, ready to consume the city. Parents kept their children indoors. Home security companies couldn’t keep up with demand. Police were inundated with reports of suspected prowlers.

  On the evening of the third day, Garrett gave another press conference at which he admitted that the police had few clues to go on and called on people not to lose hope. Don’t lose hope! In the past, Harlan had spoken those same words to the families of missing and kidnapped persons, and they’d rung as hollow on his lips as they did on Garrett’s. He glanced at the clock. Half-past seven. There were approximately eight or nine hours of hope left. After that, anyone who knew anything about child abductions knew that Ethan would almost certainly be dead.

  Time wore on. Ten PM, eleven…one AM, two… Harlan didn’t stop for food, didn’t stop for red lights, barely stopped to breathe, until the clock hit four AM. Then he pulled over and sat for a long moment with his head pressed against the steering-wheel, eyes closed. “It’s over,” he murmured to himself, and he turned the car to head back to his flat.

  Harlan dropped like a stone onto his bed, but despite his exhaustion it took him hours to get to sleep. And when he did eventually manage to drop off, his sleep was one long sweaty nightmare in which he was chasing a silver VW Golf through the city. A child’s terrified face was pressed against the car’s rear windscreen, but that child wasn’t Ethan it was Thomas. On and on the chase went, but Harlan never got any closer to the car. He awoke choking on tears of frustration and rage. “It’s not fucking over!” he gasped, shaking his head. With or without hope, he had to continue searching.

  Harlan yanked on his clothes and checked the news to see if there’d been any developments – there was one, the identity of Susan Reed’s companion had finally come out. His name was Neil Price. He was thirty-one years old and worked as a night-porter at the Northern General Hospital – which explained his airtight alibi. He was referred to as ‘Mrs Reed’s media-shy boyfriend’. The way the news reader said it, as if there was something intrinsically dubious in being media-shy, made Harlan’s toast stick in his craw. There was no suggestion that Price was under any kind of official suspicion, but a criminologist in the studio insidiously invited viewers to regard him with narrowed eyes by describing the classic profile of a potential abductor – white male, early thirties, unskilled worker. Harlan found himself wanting to speak up in Price’s defence – not because he thought there was no possibility the guy was involved, but because he despised the media’s tactics. He’d seen too many lives indelibly marked by shit-flinging journalists.

  Over the next few days, Harlan spent every waking moment searching for Ethan. He trawled the suburbs, peering over fences and into garages. He drove around supermarket car parks, and multi-storey car parks, and industrial estate car parks, constantly moving, constantly looking.

  Nothing. It was as though the VW didn’t exist. Harlan began to wonder whether the milkman had got the car’s make wrong. If so, he might as well be out hunting for a ghost. Whenever he returned to the flat, bone-weary though he was, he lay awake with doubts swirling inside him.

  Days stretched into weeks. Harlan hardly slept, ate or washed. Telephone calls from his parole officer – he’d failed to report for a meeting – went unanswered. Mail piled up unopened. He was searching further and further afield. Villages and towns he’d never been to before. Sometimes he didn’t return home for days. He stayed in cheap hotels and B&Bs, and when he ran low on cash, he slept in his car.

  With every passing day, the media and the public’s interest in the case waned. News reports got shorter and less frequent. Newspaper articles were relegated from the front pages. Volunteers pasting up posters and handing out leaflets disappeared from the streets. Ethan’s sun-and-rain faded face was gradually blotted out by fly-posters, defaced by graffiti, even torn down – some people, it seemed, objected to being constantly reminded that something so terrible had happened in the place they lived.

  There was no longer a plainclothes on Harlan’s tail wherever he went. The police’s search – at least on a street level – was winding down. In the Northwest, whatever leads they’d been following had apparently led to nothing. Locally, they’d searched hundreds of addresses, spoken to thousands of people, pried into every corner of Ethan and his family’s life, but all their efforts had failed. The jigsaw remained incomplete.

  Exactly a month after Ethan’s abduction a local Baptist preacher named Lewis Gunn whipped up interest in the case by appearing on the news to urge church members nationwide to continue the search. He announced that an all-night prayer vigil was to be held at tabernacles across the city at which he would be collecting donations for a reward fund. Harlan had previously stayed away from
all such gatherings, partly out of fear of being recognised, but mainly because he knew Garrett would use his presence as an excuse to haul him in for further questioning, maybe even try to get his parole revoked. But now that he was no longer being followed he saw no reason not to go along. And there was little chance of him being recognised – he barely recognised himself with several weeks’ growth of beard on his sleep and food deprived face.

  Harlan went first to Lewis Gunn’s tabernacle – an ugly brick building with a huge concrete crucifix over its entrance. Its car park was crammed with cars. People, many of whom held lighted candles, were filing inside it. There was a solemn hush over the gathering and, indeed, over the surrounding streets, as if the whole city held its breath in silent prayer.

  Harlan parked on the road. He was about to get out of the car when he saw Susan flanked by Neil and the preacher – a vigorous looking middle-aged man with a bushy head of grey-black hair. It hurt Harlan like a knife to see Susan, her face devoid of colour, her eyes devoid of expression, like something dead but alive. Walking slowly, like an old woman crippled with arthritis, she headed into the church. Harlan left the car and made his way around the car park, checking number plates. His heart gave a double thump when he saw the silver VW Golf with tinted windows. His eyes darted down to the number plate. KY09 SGE. An exact match! But why the hell, he wondered, would the kidnapper – if that was who the car belonged to – risk coming here? Several possibilities occurred to him. Maybe the kidnapper was somehow connected to the church, and it would look odd for him not to be here. Or maybe he was someone from the local community who was trying to distance himself from the crime by staying close to it – there were plenty of cases where murderers had gotten involved in the search for their victims. Or maybe he was simply the kind of guy who got a kick out of seeing first-hand the pain he’d inflicted.

  Harlan snatched out his phone to call Jim. The dial tone rang and rang. He pressed his forehead to the car’s rear-window, cupping his hand against the glass to cut out the reflection of the streetlamps. He could vaguely make out some kind of shape on the backseat, a rucksack perhaps, or possibly a bin liner stuffed with something. It crossed his mind that maybe this sick fuck was crazy or arrogant enough to bring Ethan – or rather, Ethan’s body – here. Maybe it gave him some kind of twisted thrill. Whatever it was in there, Harlan felt compelled to get a proper look. He ran to fetch the wheel-nut wrench from his car. As he returned to the VW, Jim finally answered. “Jesus, Harlan, what do you want?”

  “I found the silver Volkswagen.”

  “Holy Christ! Where?”

  “The Baptist tabernacle on the Attercliffe Road.”

  “Stay where you are. Someone will be there as soon as possible. And for God’s sake, don’t do anything. Do you hear?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Harlan hung up and raised the nut wrench overhead to smash a passenger-door window. Before he could do so an angry shout rang out, “Hey you! What the fuck you doing?”

  A heavily built man dressed in jeans and a leather jacket was approaching fast. He was about Harlan’s height and age, but his close-cropped hair was ginger, not dark.

  His hands were up in a fighting position, and Harlan noticed that the backs of them and his wrists were greenish-black with spidery jailhouse tattoos – tattoos which in a semi-dark room to a terrified twelve-year old’s eyes might conceivably be mistaken for hair. One look at the man’s face told him there was going to be serious trouble if he didn’t act fast. He shoved the wrench in his jacket pocket. “Police. Is this your car?”

  The man stopped a few feet away from Harlan, uncertainty puckering his forehead. He took in Harlan’s unkempt hair and creased clothes. “You’re police? Let’s see your ID.”

  “Is this your car?” Harlan repeated more forcefully. The key to these situations, he knew from experience, was to take control, and to do so quickly with a calm aggressiveness.

  “You’re not police. You look like a fuckin’ scag-head to me.”

  “Sir, this vehicle is suspected to have been used in a crime. I need you to accompany me to the station for questioning.”

  The lines of doubt on the man’s face deepened at Harlan’s official sounding language. For an instant, he looked as if he was going to accept Harlan’s claim to be a police officer, but then the pinpricks of his pupils flared. “Either you show me some fuckin’ ID, pal, or I’m gonna fuck you up so bad you’ll wish you were dead. You get me?”

  The two men stared silently at each other. Adrenaline poured into Harlan’s bloodstream. He knew what he had to do – he had to put this fucker on the ground and kneel on his back until the uniforms showed up – but he couldn’t do it. His body was rooted, paralysed, while his mind looped back to the image of Robert Reed going over like a skittle. Yet again he heard the sickening crunch, yet again he saw the blood diffusing like wine through the snow.

  The man swung at Harlan. Automatically, he jerked his arms up to block the punch. The man swung again. Harlan swayed out of his reach. “Motherfucker!” roared the man, throwing a flurry of punches, all of which either deflected off Harlan’s arms or missed their target. The man backed away, breathing heavily, a new wariness in his eyes.

  Again, they faced each other silently for a moment. Then the man pulled out a key and unlocked the car. “Stop. I can’t let you leave,” said Harlan, but he made no attempt to prevent the man from ducking into the car. It wasn’t until the engine revved into life that he darted forward and tried to yank open the driver’s side door. He was dragged along, stumbled to his knees, and as the car turned sharply, narrowly avoided getting pulled under its wheels.

  As the car accelerated onto the road, Harlan sprinted to his own car. He slammed it into gear and pushed his foot down hard. He’d been trained in pursuit driving, and he knew the area well, so he was confident the VW wouldn’t get away from him. Accelerating smoothly through the gears, he quickly caught up with it. Its driver put on a sudden burst of speed at a junction, narrowly avoiding clipping another car. Harlan was forced to briefly mount the pavement in order to swerve around the same car. Zigzagging through traffic, careening wildly around bends, they roared through the streets at blurring speeds. Horns blared, tyres squealed, and brakes screeched, as the VW’s driver attempted to shake off his pursuer by going the wrong way around a busy roundabout. There was the sound of grinding metal as Harlan’s car scraped along the side of an oncoming bus. For an instant, he thought he was boxed in, then the traffic parted like the Red Sea, and he was charging after the VW again. Its driver was going like a mad thing, overtaking and undertaking, cutting across streams of traffic, forcing Harlan to take crazy risks just to keep him in view. This is going to end badly, thought Harlan, and a second later it did. The silver VW took a corner too fast, skidded out of control, hit a curb and flipped. Once, twice, three times it rolled across a grass verge, tearing up huge chunks of turf, before coming to rest on its roof against a wall.

  Harlan sprang out of his car and ran to the VW. He tried to open the driver’s side door, but it was wedged shut by the car’s buckled roof. He kicked in the window, already shattered by the impact. Ducking down, he saw the man lying in an unconscious heap, his face crushed and bloody. Scattered all around him were clothes, which seemed to have come from a holdall that’d burst open during the crash. Harlan felt for a pulse, and to his relief, found one, although it was weak and thready. The man groaned as Harlan hooked his hands under his armpits, and gently as possible, pulled him from the wreckage. His breath gurgled and grated as if something was broken inside his chest. Blood welled from a deep gash on the palm of one of his hands. Harlan took off his jacket and covered him with it, before ducking back into the overturned car to grab an item of clothing to staunch the bleeding. It was then that he saw the gun. It was an Olympic .380 BBM revolver – a starter pistol favoured by criminals because it could easily be purchased and just as easily be converted to fire live ammo. Careful not to touch the gun with his hands, he wrapped it
in a t-shirt and pocketed it. Then he tore another t-shirt in two and bandaged the man’s hand as best he could with the strips. The man’s eyes flickered open, showing white for a second before the pupils rolled down. He tried to sit up.

  “Lie still,” said Harlan, holding him down.

  “I can’t breathe.” The man’s voice came in a strangled gasp.

  “Where is he?”

  “I need an ambulance.”

  “I’ll call one as soon as you tell me where Ethan Reed is.”

  “How would I know that?” The man groaned. Spittle muddied with blood dribbled from the edges of his mouth.

  “Listen to me, you’ve probably got serious internal injuries. You might not have long left to live. This could be your last chance to make amends, to save your soul. So why don’t you tell me where Ethan Reed is?”

  “Oh God,” whimpered the man. “Oh God. I didn’t want to hurt anybody…I didn’t…I…” His voice faded out and his eyes rolled again.

  “Stay with me,” urged Harlan, but he couldn’t keep the man from slipping back into unconsciousness. He checked through the man’s pockets and found a wallet. Inside it there was some loose change, a baggie containing a small amount of white powder, and six credit cards, each with a different name. In the distance, he heard the wail of approaching sirens.

  Chapter 6

  Harlan examined his arms. Bruises were already beginning to flower where the punches had landed. He folded his hands – which were trembling from the fading rush of adrenaline – together on the table in front of him. He looked at the uniform standing by the door of the interview room. “Don’t suppose you could get me a coffee and some painkillers?”

  The uniform nodded and turned to leave. A short while later, Jim entered the room and put a polystyrene cup and a couple of tablets on the table. “How you doing?” he asked.

  In answer, Harlan held up his shaky hands. “What about our man?”