‘I’m on my way,’ said Mark.
Throughout the call Joyce had been at her son’s side, trying to hear what Janet was saying. She had grasped enough to have the gist of it. But she stepped back and allowed Mark to break the news as gently as he could to Felicity and Molly.
Felicity already seemed to know. It was she who had screamed. Not Joyce.
Molly wasn’t taking anything in. Felicity had turned a ghostly white and collapsed into a chair with her hand over her mouth.
‘It’ll be all right, Mum,’ Joyce said, running to her side and putting an arm around her. ‘Dad is tough as old boots, he’ll be all right. He has to be. What would any of us do without him...’
She realized she was babbling. She couldn’t stop herself.
‘But who would shoot Granddad?’ asked Molly, her face full of bewilderment.
‘I don’t know, darling,’ said her mother.
‘First Fred disappears and then Granddad is shot.’ Molly was frowning now, trying to make sense of it. ‘There must be a connection, mustn’t there? I mean, things like this don’t happen. Now we have Fred missing and Grandpa shot. Is that a coincidence? I mean, it can’t be, can it?’
‘I don’t know, darling,’ said Joyce again.
She too was beginning to think. Her last words to her father had been to tell him to fuck off. The family seemed to specialize in making unpleasant remarks to each other, only for something terrible to happen to the family member they’d made the remark to. Molly had told her brother she was going to kill him. And that was the last time any of them had seen him. Molly might have been joking, but that hadn’t stopped her from feeling dreadful about what she had said, and it had made her brother’s disappearance even worse for her.
Joyce had not been joking. She had meant every word that she’d said to her father over the last day or two. And she had told him to fuck off because she held him responsible for Fred’s disappearance. Charlie’s letter had led her down that path. She had built up a dossier of doubts about her father inside her head and thrown them at him. Culminating in telling him he was no longer welcome in her home and that he could fuck off.
Now she was in turmoil.
Her father had been shot. She only hoped the words she’d said to her mother would turn out to be true, that he’d pull through, that he wasn’t at this moment lying dead in Traders’ Court. The fact that he had been shot surely meant that he was innocent of any involvement in Fred’s disappearance. Most likely he’d been shot by whoever abducted Fred. Because Joyce now had no doubt that Fred had been abducted. As Molly had said, it would be too much of a coincidence to think that Henry had been shot and Fred taken by anyone other than the same perpetrator.
‘I’m going down there,’ said Mark, interrupting her train of thought. ‘One of us should be there. One of us should be with Granddad.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Joyce.
‘No, Mum, you stay here,’ said Mark. ‘We don’t know what’s going on yet, it could still be dangerous, and you have to stay here in case there’s any news of Fred.’
Joyce found herself nodding her agreement. She was used to deferring to the men in her life. But she had never heard her eldest son assert himself like this. It was as if the Tanner gene was kicking in and he was instinctively stepping in as head of the family. It occurred to her that he might well be the last man standing. Her brother William was dead, her husband was dead, her father might be dead... and Fred, not yet a man, might never have the chance to grow into one.
It was a terrifying scenario. Joyce felt the tears rising. She hadn’t thought she could be any more shocked, but every day seemed to bring some new horror. Molly was right: coincidence was out of the question. Joyce supposed she had always suspected there was some form of conspiracy surrounding her family. Now it seemed to her that they were under attack. And she wanted to know why. If Henry survived, nobody would keep her from his side. She was going to make him tell her what he knew, she was damned sure of that. But for the moment there was little she could do except wait.
Beside her, Felicity had rallied and was rising unsteadily to her feet.
‘You’re right about your mother staying here, Mark,’ said Felicity. ‘But I am coming with you and please don’t try to stop me. Henry is my husband and my place is by his side.’
Mark did not try to stop her. Instead, her son, her suddenly strong son, put his arm around his grandmother and walked with her to the door, where he turned to speak to his mother.
‘I’ll call you as soon as I know anything,’ he said. ‘I promise.’
Joyce nodded. As the door closed behind him, she wrapped an arm around her daughter and pulled her close. Neither of them could stop the tears.
An ambulance, it transpired, had arrived moments before Vogel, Clarke and Bolton. Paramedics were attending to the fallen man, who lay in a pool of blood. A second man, his clothes also covered in blood, was standing alongside.
Clarke led the way across the car park to join them.
‘How bad is it?’ she asked one of the paramedics.
‘He should live,’ the man replied. ‘It’s a shoulder wound. Right shoulder, well away from the vital organs. But the bones are shattered.’
Henry lay prone on the ground, unconscious. There was no sign of movement.
‘Would a shoulder wound cause him to lose consciousness?’ Clarke asked. ‘The pain must be excruciating, I suppose.’
‘Doubt he’s felt any yet,’ said the paramedic. ‘He will when he comes round though... assuming he comes round.’
‘So what are his chances?’
‘He must have fallen heavily when the shot hit him. See that patch of matted blood in his hair? Cracked his head when he hit the ground — that’s what knocked him out. And you never know with head wounds.’
Clarke turned her attention to the uniformed police officers on the scene. One was PC Tompkins, the officer who had called in the shooting. The other two, an older man who had introduced himself as PC Hawkins, and his younger female partner, PC Phillips, had got to Traders’ Court soon after Tompkins.
‘Have you checked the place out?’ Clarke asked. ‘Any sign of our gunman?’
Constable Phillips answered: ‘Checked it best we can, ma’am. There was no one suspicious about the place when we arrived. Just one shot fired, and it seemed to come from above.’ She waved a hand towards the rooftops. ‘We haven’t been able to get up there yet, but we’ve been keeping an eye, and we’ve had a team checking out the surrounding streets. I reckon the bastard took off straight away, ma’am.’
Clarke nodded. She thought that probably nobody should be in Traders’ Court. Neither she nor the rest of the police officers or the paramedics. But it was too late to worry about that. They were there. And as there had been no further shots, PC Phillips was probably right in her assessment of the situation.
The DCI looked enquiringly at the man with the bloodstained clothes.
‘I’m Geoff Brooking, Henry Tanner’s driver,’ he told her.
‘Are you hurt?’ asked Clarke, indicating the blood on his jacket.
Geoff Brooking shook his head. ‘It’s Mr Tanner’s blood.’
‘And how did you get it all over you?’ the DCI asked.
‘I was trying to protect him, ma’am,’ said Brooking. ‘Only I was too slow.’
Clarke registered his reaction to the shooting and the way he had immediately begun to address her as ma’am.
‘Are you ex-job?’ she asked.
Brooking nodded. ‘Sort of.’
‘What did you do, throw yourself across Mr Tanner?’ Clarke enquired.
Geoff Brooking nodded again. He didn’t appear to want to say any more.
‘Are you Mr Tanner’s bodyguard then, as well as a driver?’ Clarke persisted.