When daylight came, and the crime scene unit sealed off the area to search for evidence, two bullets would be dug out of the sodden earth just behind where the old man had been kneeling.
I could have killed him. I squeezed the trigger with intent. But at the last moment I raised the muzzle over his head. If I hadn’t done that, God knows what might have happened. That old rage that had been building was looking for a release. I had given it what it demanded. But refused to give in completely.
The old man would lose his hearing for two days, but given everything he had done, that seemed lenient.
Susan arrested him, gave him the full speech about his rights, even though he barely responded. She cuffed him. Called for backup.
Mary remained silent throughout.
After loosing the shots, I dropped the weapon, collapsed on to the grass. My chest constricted. My arms and legs turned numb. Pins and needles. The rain seemed gentler somehow. The cool drops numbed my face like dental anaesthetic. The inside of my skull quietened. I felt at peace.
I woke up in hospital. Under observation. Susan was there. When I looked at her, she reached over and squeezed my hand.
I slept for a long time.
‘You want to talk?’
DS Kellen. Sitting beside the bed, waiting for me to wake up. God only knew how long she’d been doing that.
‘Depends.’
‘On?’
‘Whether you think I’m the bad guy.’
‘Death follows you, McNee. I know that much.’
‘I try not to make a habit of it.’
‘Try harder.’
‘Do I need a solicitor?’
‘Do you think you need one?’
She produced a tape recorder. ‘Just tell me everything. From the beginning.’
‘That could take a while.’
‘Then let’s start with your name, shall we?’ She hit record. ‘Interview number one. Twenty-fifth November. Present in the room are DI Helen Kellen and the subject, Ja—’
The newspapers went wild. Local. National. International. The arrest of a man like David Burns was headline news. A triumph for the forces of law and order. It was the kind of narrative that sold papers, that garnered clicks, got people talking on and off-line.
I was confined to a private room in the hospital. Three reporters managed to get in. None of them got a quote. They called me the Silent Detective.
I was happy with that.
Mitchell came to see me a few times. I gave her an edited version of what happened to Griggs. She listened, made notes and nodded a lot. She didn’t believe me. That much was obvious, but there was little she could do or say. Griggs’s death put a kibosh on her investigation. All she could do was clean up the pieces and try to make a narrative out of what happened.
The last time she came to see me, when she was done, her notebook closed, she looked at me and said, ‘It’s a neat story.’
‘Too neat?’
She shook her head. ‘Neat enough.’
Three days after the bloodbath at the observatory, the news broke that Mary Burns was filing for divorce. She had told me that she knew what her husband was, that she had always accepted it. But seeing it first hand was something she had never expected to happen. She had watched him mutilate a man and kill a woman without a word. Even though his actions could be argued to have been in self-defence, the look in his eyes and the lack of remorse must have rattled her.
Meaning she finally saw him as other people did.
I should have reached out to her, tried to show some kind of empathy.
But I never did.
What could I say to her, after all?
The trial was long and drawn-out. The defence tried to show that I had been involved in an illegal investigation and entrapment. But the man himself had admitted to his crimes. Despite the best efforts of his legal team, Burns allowed himself to be sent down. He did so in spectacular style, and I suspect he saw the trial and its fallout as part of his own punishment. If his empire was to burn, then he would be the one to light the match.
The woman who had been Zsomobor Bako’s fiancée was interred as a Jane Doe. Like her intended, she had become a ghost. No one knew her real name. The man who had acted as her front refused to speak, referring to her only as ‘the boss’. Her dental records and fingerprints had no known match. She died the same way she had lived; unknown, mysterious and deadly.
But rumours of the Zombie refused to die. Some people claimed that the operation continued even without someone in charge.
Cut the head off a snake, and sometimes it just keeps going.
Over the course of the trial, I admitted to my mistakes. All except one.
Three years earlier, a young girl had killed a man in a fit of rage. The man had been a psychotic killer. I had attempted to take the blame for his death, but Susan claimed to have killed him in the line of duty. And I had accepted that lie. The girl had been too traumatized to speak about the incident. I could never be sure if she really knew what had happened.
My voice shook when I spoke about the incident and how it involved David Burns, who was the Godfather of the girl. But I kept the truth to myself, all the while focussing my gaze at the back of the court, where Susan sat watching, her eyes always on me.