Life on Mars: Get Cartwright. Tom Graham

and make sense of them. And as I did, I recalled who I used to be … and who I still am.’

      ‘But what are we?’ Sam asked, leaning forward intently. ‘I once thought we were dead men, and that everyone else here was dead too. But that can’t be. My mother. I met her. I met her here, but I know she’s alive! Right now this very minute she’s alive somewhere.’

      ‘Time, Space, Life, Death, and all the grey bits in between,’ said McClintock. ‘It’s too big a matter for the mere likes of us to fathom it. But I will say this, Detective Inspector – I have come to think that being dead overlaps with being alive. One state somehow blends with the other, and affects it, influences it. Maybe we all have a foot in both camps. Maybe the living are partly in the world of the dead, and the boundaries of death overlap with those of life. Your mother’s presence here suggests this is so, as do these burned hands of mine. See these scars. They were inflicted in life … and yet here they still are, in this place beyond life. And that trinket also – the watch – the fob watch.’

      Sam reached into his pocket and drew out the fob watch, holding it by its chain so that it hung suspended between him and McClintock.

      ‘Why is it here, Detective Inspector? It has no right to be. It’s a relic from the life I had before this one. And yet here it is, just as real and as solid in this afterlife we find ourselves in as it was before. Ticking away. Still keeping perfect time.’

      Sam watched the watch turning slowly on the end of its delicate chain, and again he felt that strange conviction come over him that this little fob watch was important, that it was freighted with a significance that was very real but somehow elusive.

      ‘The police files dealing with Tony Cartwright’s death have been tampered with,’ Sam said. ‘The facts of his murder have been concealed. And your name has been erased completely. There’s no mention of you. Like you never existed.’

      ‘Like I never existed …’ McClintock repeated thoughtfully. ‘It’s strange. Perhaps … Perhaps here, in this simulacrum of 1973, I never died in that fire. Perhaps only PC Cartwright died. Perhaps he has moved on to a better place, while I am retained here to complete the task I failed at before. Perhaps … perhaps …’ He shrugged, and fixed Sam with his narrow, pale eyes and added, ‘We’re just coppers, Detective Inspector, we’re nae philosophers. Or priests. Or poets. Or whatever it takes to make sense of ourselves.’

      ‘Then let’s leave sense to the poets and get back to what we can do,’ said Sam. ‘There’s work to be done. Unfinished business from the lives we’ve left behind.’

      McClintock nodded slowly: ‘Yes. I think so. Unfinished business.’

      ‘Clive Gould,’ said Sam. ‘We’re here to destroy him.’

      ‘It looks that way to me.’

      ‘Can we do it? Is it possible?’

      ‘One must presume so, Detective Inspector, otherwise what point is there in our being here?’ McClintock narrowed his eyes, drew a slow, deep breath, and said: ‘I’ll take any opportunity I can to break Clive Gould. He was always a filthy, rotten creature. It will be a pleasure to destroy him. Back in the sixties, he used his clubs and casinos as a front for all his criminal activities. He tried his hand at all the usual rackets – extortion, robbery, prostitution – and paid out massive bribes to keep the police off his back. And those he didn’t pay off he bumped off – business rivals, debtors, upstarts, traitors, those who crossed him, those who irritated, those whom he decided to make an example of … He chalked up quite a body count, though nobody can put an exact figure to it. Every canal and waterway in this city must have a sludge of his old victims at the bottom.’

      Sam wondered if it was one of these anonymous bodies that was dredged up and passed off as Anthony Cartwright. No wonder Carroll refused to let the widow see the corpse.

      ‘I want to see Gould destroyed as much as you do,’ Sam said. ‘But what happens if we manage it? If we finish this business with Gould once and for all, what then? What becomes of us?’

      ‘Now you’re asking the big question, Detective Inspector,’ answered McClintock. ‘Very big. I’ve thought about it, turned it around in my mind, considered possibilities. When our work here is done, will we happen? Will we remain in this place? Or will our tenancy here be terminated? Will we be obliged to move on elsewhere? And if so, where? And then again, what if we fail in our enterprise? What if it is not us who defeat Gould, but him who defeats us? What is the price of failure here? If we were to perish, Detective Inspector, what then? Where do the dead go who die a second time?’

      Sam thought of all those he had seen die here in 1973. He recalled Mr Fellowes, the governor at Friar’s Brook, lying in the corridor with his windpipe hacked out, and Andy Coren, the escaped borstal boy who had perished so horribly in the scrap yard. He thought of Patsy O’Riordan, the tattooed brawler from the fairground, burning to death in the ghost train – and the suicidal boxer Spider dying right on top of him. He thought of the fanatics from the Red Hand Faction – Peter Verden, with his Jason King moustache, and baby-faced Carol Waye with her innocent-looking Heidi plaits, who blew Verden’s brains out before turning the gun on herself. He thought of Brett Cowper with the John Lennon glasses, who slashed his wrists and bled to death in his police cell – and he thought of all the others who had died since his arrival here, and he wondered what now had become of them? Was death here permanent? Was it the end of the road? Was this strange, unworldly 1973 the Last Chance Saloon?

      McClintock shrugged heavily, said, ‘Very big questions. And I can’t answer them any more than you can, Detective Inspector Tyler. I have my thoughts … and my fears … but I prefer to keep these to myself. All I can say is this: we are here for a purpose, and we had best not fail in that purpose.’

      Sam and McClintock looked wordlessly at each other. The only sound was the sizzling of eggs in the pan, and Joe’s radio burbling away.

      ‘This watch is a trump card of some kind,’ Sam said at last.

      ‘You feel that too?’ asked McClintock.

      Sam nodded: ‘I can’t say why. I just sense it. It’s a weapon, Mr McClintock. A means of attacking Gould. He once possessed it, held it in his hands … It links him to the murder of Philip Noyes, his old rival. It’s the evidence you were going to use to convict him – and somehow, you can still use it! I know it! I feel it!’

      ‘Yes, I think you’re right. But how to make use of it?’

      ‘Maybe it’s … Perhaps it could …’ Sam racked his brain and his imagination for inspiration. But he found nothing. The watch was just a watch. There was no way it could hurt anyone, least of all Gould. He shrugged. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea how to use it.’

      ‘Maybe that’s because it’s my job to use it,’ said McClintock. ‘I failed before. Now, I’ve been given a second chance. And perhaps, it’s my final chance.’

      ‘We’re in this together,’ said Sam. ‘You and me against Clive Gould. You’re not alone.’

      ‘I don’t think you’re right there, young Detective Inspector. I think … I sense that I am very alone, that your task was to remind me of what I must do, and that you have now fulfilled your purpose so that I can fulfil mine.’

      ‘Rubbish. We stand shoulder-to-shoulder in this.’

      ‘Not if a higher power decrees otherwise,’ said McClintock, and his clipped Scottish accent made these words sound like a sermon from the pulpit. ‘I do not think that Mr Gould will be defeated by strength of arms, or by superior numbers. Something tells me that this is not to be a fight of that sort. Do not think I fail to appreciate your courage in offering to face this foe alongside me. I am moved by it … deeply. But something within me speaks louder than your offer of support. It tells me that I am here to stand against Clive Gould and this time to defeat him. And that I am to stand alone. But more than that, Detective Inspector, I simply cannot say.’