Life on Mars: Get Cartwright. Tom Graham

‘But she’s gone a bit crackers.’

      Gene had a look inside the car and was confronted by Mrs Walsh’s face, contorted and mascara-streaked, a bubble of mucus burgeoning in her left nostril as she blubbered and howled.

      ‘Holy Moly, somebody call an exorcist,’ Gene growled out of the corner of his mouth.

      ‘What happened here?’ Sam asked the WPC.

      ‘Mrs Walsh had been away for a few days, visiting her poorly Auntie Janet in London. She came back this morning on the Intercity and found the bungalow wrecked and no sign of her husband. And now she’s panicked and gone mental.’

      Mrs Walsh suddenly banged on the inside of the car window and howled. There was lipstick smeared chaotically over her wrinkled mouth and a stalactite of thick snot wobbling from the tip of her long nose.

      ‘Sprinkle her with holy water,’ suggested Gene. ‘It’ll buck her up or melt her – either way, it can only be an improvement.’

      Hunt marched up the little garden path towards the bungalow, Sam striding along beside him.

      ‘Anything to report?’ he asked the PC at the door, flashing his ID.

      ‘Bit of a mystery, Sir,’ the copper said. He indicated the front door, which was lying flat in the hallway. It had been ripped clear from its hinges. ‘Somebody came in here full wallop. And it’s no better inside. The place has been trashed.’

      ‘And what about Pat Walsh?’ Sam asked. ‘No clue what’s happened to him?’

      ‘Not that I can find,’ shrugged the PC. ‘His missus ain’t being much help, squawking away like that, but to be honest I don’t think she knows nowt anyway.’

      Sam stepped inside the bungalow, walking across the wrecked door to reach the hall. Broken glass crunched under his feet. Pictures had been flung from the walls, windows had been smashed, lampshades hung in shreds about shattered bulbs.

      ‘It’s like a feckin’ whirlwind tore through this gaff,’ muttered Gene, peering about at the wrecked furniture and scattered debris. ‘Or else it was the boys from forensics on one of their piss-ups.’ With the toe of his loafer, he nudged at a carriage clock that lay amid the ruin, its face smashed, its hands twisted. ‘Whoever turned this place over must have been desperate.’

      ‘Yes, Guv – but desperate for what?’ Sam said, pointing into the bedroom. Mrs Walsh’s earrings and necklaces lay discarded all over the bed and floor. ‘Since when did burglars leave the jewellery behind?’

      ‘And what about these?’ Gene said, bending down to scoop up the playing cards scattered about all over the floor. ‘What sort of bloke would break in and leave treasure like this lying about?’

      ‘Playing cards, Guv?’

      ‘Not just any playing cards, Tyler.’

      Gene presented them for Sam to inspect. They were porno cards, each one graced with its very own topless, spread-legged angel. It was all hitched-up denim skirts, brown suede boots, and glossily pouting lips.

      ‘Well I don’t think they belong to Mrs Walsh,’ observed Sam.

      ‘I can’t see that crabby mare putting up with these charmin’ lovelies,’ said Gene, perusing the cards one by one. ‘Gotta be Pat’s contraband, eh. His private stash. Fodder for a crafty J Arthur when the missus is off down the Wavy Line. Can’t blame him for that, a fella needs to stay sane. I mean, be honest, there’s no way he’s going to get the horn looking at her dried-up Boris Karloff boat race every night.’

      ‘Guv, you give whole new depth to the term ‘ungentlemanly’, did you know that?’

      Gene suddenly thrust one of the cards towards Sam’s face. It was the four of clubs, depicting a young woman with straight blonde hair sucking her finger whilst unbuttoning a very tight pair of orange corduroy hotpants.

      ‘Here’s a question, Tyler – and tell me straight: if this bird were your sister … would you be tempted?’

      Sam looked flatly at him for a moment and then said: ‘Guv – have you ever thought about being psychoanalyzed?’

      Gene perused the card: ‘Got a better set of lungs on her than your Flatty Cartwright. Just think what you’re missing.’

      ‘Do you think there’s any chance we could conduct this investigation like professional police officers?’

      ‘Perhaps it’s you what needs his head shrinking,’ Gene said under his breath as he pocketed the cards. ‘A real fella would show at least a scrap of interest.’

      Sam picked his way through yet more debris, finding broken tumblers lying about, and a discarded bottle of Scotch on its side, its contents leaking onto the carpet.

      ‘Let’s try and make sense of all this,’ he said. ‘Scotch bottle – glasses – porno playing cards. And the wife safely out of the way. That tells me Pat had a mate over – a bloke.’

      Gene shrugged: ‘Most like. But that don’t get us too far, does it.’

      ‘It does if that bloke was Pat’s old DCI, Mickey Carroll.’

      Sam was piecing things together in his imagination. He imagined Pat Walsh here on his own, his wife out of the house for a few days. Pat calls Mickey Carroll over, or perhaps Carroll just turns up. They need to talk, to spend time together. They have things on their minds.

       What? What do they have on their minds?

      Was it something to do with Clive Gould? If Annie was right, they had both been in Gould’s pocket back in the sixties. Was something about Gould troubling them? Is that what the two of them wanted to discuss?

      He recalled what Carroll had howled at him in the church: ‘I’m not going to end up like Pat! I’m not going to end up that way!’

      Did they see Gould, just like I saw Gould? Sam thought. He felt a deep sense of conviction that he was thinking along the right lines – a conviction that came from the fact that Carroll and Walsh, like Sam, were caught up in the machinations of the Devil in the Dark.

      Sam took a slow breath, relaxed, and allowed a picture to form in his mind’s eye. Where there was a lack of hard evidence, maybe his imagination, his intuition, his copper’s nose would point the way.

       Walsh had the place to himself. He had things on his mind … things to do with Gould. Carroll came over, because he had worries too. Gould was haunting them both in some way. They were disturbed, frightened. So the two of them sat down here, Walsh and Carroll together, playing cards, drinking. It comforted them. They started talking things through, trying to make sense of whatever it was that was disturbing them, and then …

      Sam turned, looking back into the hallway at the smashed front door, then glanced about at the shattered furniture, the broken windows, the scattered wreckage. Something came crashing in here, roaring through that front door like an express train and turning the whole place upside down. And then what?

      His intuition could not fill in the blank. Whatever happened was beyond his experience to imagine. All he could tell for sure was that Carroll had escaped, but not before he witnessed something happening to Pat Walsh – something awful – something that sent him haring off into that church with a gun in his hand.

      ‘Looky-here, Tyler,’ Gene said. There was a bullet hole in the wall. Gene peered at it for a moment, then hunted about amid the wreckage at his feet. Bending down suddenly, he straightened up again with something held between his thumb and forefinger.

      Sam drew closer and examined it: ‘A spent cartridge.’

      ‘From a pistol. The same pistol Carroll’s got with him in the church, you reckon?’

      ‘It’s possible, Guv. We’d need an official ID from ballistics.’