36

Sarah was parked up out of view of Lizzie’s flat. She listened with the phone to her ear. Everything relied on Brannon not realizing the police were coming. She remembered the street well from the warrant they’d executed there in the early days of the investigation into Farah and Hadley’s deaths. She remembered the cupboards and drawers, the intimacies of PC Lizzie Griffiths’ life exposed to the cold investigating gaze. She remembered smoking and chatting outside with Steve Bradshaw.

The sound of the fabric in Lizzie’s pocket rustled and crackled painfully in her ear. The firearms team were approaching. She relayed to them over the radio what she understood from the open call. They were putting together tactics even as they screamed across London on blues and twos. They considered negotiating but decided against. Brannon was too volatile, his proximity to Lizzie and Skye too close. He should be given no opportunity to kill again. They’d do a rapid entry with weapons drawn. But it was all taking too long! She cut into their transmissions, requesting an estimated time of arrival.

Seven minutes.

On the phone, the little girl’s voice cried out. ‘Don’t hurt her!’

Sarah got out of the car and put her stab vest on, slipped her harness over her shoulder. Then an unmistakable sound: a female yelp of pain came from the phone.

A shimmer like electricity passed over Sarah.

The street was unnaturally calm, the leaves on the young trees fluttering in the summer breeze. She felt very alone.

She transmitted. ‘Threat to life. Officer believed injured. I can’t wait for the entry team. I’m going in.’

She could hear them telling her how close they were, but she couldn’t risk the sound of the radio either. She turned the speaker to mute and transmitted using her emergency button that would override other officers.

‘Threat to life, repeat, threat to life. PC Griffiths believed injured. I am attempting entry through the front of the property.’

Brannon was rattling manically down the phone, like a tinpot dictator captured in a metal box.

. . . trying to send me to jail, trying to break up my family . . .

Sarah ran silently past the bend of the street and had a clear view of the flat. The front door, she saw, was slightly ajar. Her heart was thumping. She pulled out her baton and grasped it tightly in her clenched fist. There would be no room to swing it inside the house.

She heard the voice from the phone, the angry staccato of a man who would not be gainsaid.

I warned you.

She slipped the phone into her pocket, ran quietly up the pathway. Her hands were sweating with fear. She pushed the door quietly forward and stepped into the flat. She could hear what she thought was the sound of a door handle and movement just beyond her in the hallway. Brannon’s voice was unnaturally close.

Pull the door shut.

She bit the tip of her tongue hard to steady herself, raised her closed baton to shoulder height. Almost immediately there was an angry cry of pain. An explosion of rage.

‘You fucking bitch.’

Sarah stepped left into the hallway. Brannon had his back to her, the knife raised in his right hand. She punched her asp hard into the back of his skull and he fell forward with a sudden heavy exhalation. Almost immediately he was struggling to all fours, still clutching the knife. She hit him again, against the curve of the back of his head. He fell forward, but the knife remained in his outstretched hand. Lizzie was sliding down the wall. Sarah stamped on Brannon’s knife hand. A stifled grunt of pain that sounded almost like exhaustion came from him. The hand relaxed. She stood over him with the asp.

‘Lizzie, can you help me, handcuff him.’

But Lizzie’s face was ashen, her lips blue. Her shirt was wet with blood. She shook her head.

From the living room beyond the hallway, the sound of a child crying. ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy.’

Then, crashes of entry, shouts of ‘Armed police!’ Sarah dropped her asp and put her hands in plain view. An officer was standing in front of her, firearm drawn.

She said, ‘Detective Inspector Sarah Collins.’

A tall, lean man who had entered behind her pushed her away from Brannon into the bedroom. He verified her ID without apparent emotion. ‘You OK?’

‘Yes. The adult female, she’s Detective Constable Lizzie Griffiths. She’s been stabbed.’

The officer turned away from her and went back into the hall. He was transmitting, updating.

‘Officer injured. Stab wounds. Conscious, breathing. Urgent medical aid required.’

She followed him into the hallway. Brannon was in the recovery position. A firearms officer was standing over him. Behind them, leaning her side against the wall, was a white-faced Lizzie Griffiths, barely conscious. Her shirt had been ripped off her and an officer was taping a plastic cover over a wound in her back. Sarah could see it sucking in and fluttering open. She stepped towards her. ‘Lizzie.’

Lizzie opened her eyes. ‘The dog, Sarah. For Skye. Save the dog.’

Sarah looked at the dog. It was completely collapsed but still breathing in short pants. She took her radio out of its harness. ‘Any uniformed officers outside, come in and get an injured dog out of here immediately. Take it to a vet.’

Two paramedics arrived and began working on Lizzie. She had an oxygen mask over her face. Sarah moved into the living room seeing the world as if through a filter. Somewhere above was the beating roar of a helicopter. The door to the garden had been smashed open. Skye, her face streaming with tears, was in the arms of one of the firearms officers, crying out, ‘I want to see my daddy.’ Sarah turned to the window and saw the medical helicopter descending into the park like a big red dragonfly. Doctors and more paramedics ran in through the garden. She followed them back into the hall. Lizzie was unconscious and the doctors immediately turned their attention to her. Brannon was on the floor in the bedroom. Grey, pasty-faced. The paramedics, a busy team of green bees shut into their own world, were getting ready to move him out. Sarah moved towards one of them, a tough-looking woman with cornrows and the pip on her shoulder of a duty station officer.

‘Is he conscious?’

‘Partially. He’s got a possible skull fracture.’

‘OK for me to arrest him?’

The DSO glanced at her with clear impatience. ‘It’s hardly my priority.’

‘He’s killed his wife and tried to kill a police officer.’

The DSO nodded, more sympathetic now. ‘Be quick then.’

Sarah sat down next to him. ‘Mark, it’s Detective Inspector Sarah Collins.’

He groaned, looked at her. Mumbled something.

‘I’m arresting you for the murder of Georgina Teel, the kidnapping of Skye Brannon and the attempted murder of Police Constable Lizzie Griffiths.’

She was distracted from the arrest by a raised voice in the hallway.

She stepped back into the hall. Lizzie was now horizontal and still unconscious, her upper body completely naked, her light blue cotton bra – snipped in half at the middle – discarded on the floor beside her. Sarah looked at that for a moment, the delicate, vulnerable femininity of it brutalized, irrelevant. Unconsciously Sarah’s hand was covering her mouth with anxiety. She stared. There was something bewildering about the nakedness of Lizzie, her floppy indifference to the urgency of the medics moving around her. She had the passive, grey look of the dying. Blood was smeared on her skin and on the blue plastic gloves of the medics. A cannula was in the left-hand side of her ribs and the doctor was applying the defibrillator pads to her chest and back. Sarah’s own lips felt cold and numb. She heard the words: Shocking! Stand clear! But she couldn’t really take them in. A shudder of electricity passed through the inert young body in front of her, and what was happening came to her in a sentence.

Lizzie’s heart has stopped. I should have gone in sooner.