He waited to let his eyes adjust to the darkness and took another step. Then he froze. Something. He stopped dead, ears sharply focused for the slightest sound. Silence. Silence that screamed in the blackness. But there was something someone up there. ‘Burton?’ If it was Burton, why the hell didn’t he answer?
He rammed the useless torch in his pocket and fished out his matches. Up the stairs to the landing. The match burnt his fingers. Swearing softly, he shook it out and struck another. A door, slightly ajar, to his right. He nudged it open with his foot, then poked the hand with the match inside. He nearly dropped the match. On the floor, in the flicker of the flame, a face. Another match. God, it was Burton, his face a sweat-soaked dirty white, his lips mumbling incoherently.
Frost dropped to his knees on to a puddle of something wet which soaked his trousers. Another match. He was kneeling in a pool of blood. Burton’s hands were clasped round his stomach. A red trickle oozed from between slippery, red fingers. He was trying to say something. Frost brought his head down to Burton’s lips. ‘Gauld. The bastard stabbed me.’ His eyelids flickered and closed.
‘Up here!’ yelled Frost at the top of his voice. He tugged out his radio. ‘Control. Burton’s been stabbed. Get an ambulance over to Wedgewood Street… now!’
The ambulance men adjusted the strap around the red-blanketed Burton, then wheeled the trolley up into the ambulance. One of the uniformed men hopped in the back with it.
‘Got a stack of your chaps in Casualty,’ the ambulance driver told Frost cheerfully as he climbed into his seat. ‘Blood and broken noses everywhere. A bunch of yobbos breaking up a pub or something.’
Oh, sod! thought Frost. I’d forgotten all about that. He radioed through to the station.
‘We’re being massacred,’ Wells told him. ‘Things are getting out of control and bloody Mullett’s not answering his phone in case he should have to make a decision.’
Gilmore tugged at Frost’s sleeve. ‘Gauld’s been spotted. He’s got into that building site.’ He pointed in the direction of the giant crane.
‘Damn,’ said Frost. There were a hundred places Gauld could hide in in the sprawl of the building site. Back to the radio. ‘We know where Gauld is. Without more men we’ll lose him. Pull more people out from the pub.’
‘I can’t,’ insisted Wells.
‘Just bloody do it. Then phone County and get reinforcements from other divisions,’ said Frost.
‘Mullett won’t like that. He’ll do his nut.’
‘Sod Mullett. Just do it.’
Wells hesitated. ‘If it blows up in our face, will you take the can back, Jack?’
‘Don’t I always?’ said Frost.
The building site covered almost twenty acres and would eventually house a hypermarket, shops, and two tower office blocks which, at the moment, were skeletons of scaffolding and girders. The car picked its way along a muddy, temporary road to the main gates.
Chain link fencing encircled the area. A notice in red warned Keep Out. Guard Dogs Loose On This Site. The main gates were locked and chained, but there was a smaller gate to one side which sagged where it had been kicked in. Beyond the gate a brown and white shape twitched and whimpered in the mud. The knife-ripped guard dog.
Gilmore’s radio reported the arrival of reinforcements. Three pub-battle-scarred warriors were in position at the back entrance of the site, ready to move in from there. ‘It’s not enough,’ said Gilmore.
‘As the bishop said to the actress, son, it may not be much, but it’s all I’ve got.’ He took the radio and warned the newcomers to be careful. Gauld had a knife and was prepared to use it. ‘Right. Let’s go in.’
Near the entrance stood a green-coloured Portakabin. Frost tried the handle. Locked. He flashed a torch through a window. Desks, phones and drawing boards.
Other torches bobbed in the distance as the rest of his thinly stretched team carried out the search. The site was littered with hills and mountains of building materials; earthenware drainage pipes, concrete blocks, bricks on pallets covered with polythene sheeting, bag after bag of cement. And then there was machinery. Bulldozers, earth-moving equipment, cranes, and overshadowing everything, a giant skyscraper of a crane on its tower of scaffolding. The muddy ground had been churned into a Somme battlefield by the wheels of countless lorries.
It was a slow, laboured search. Heavy items had to be man-handled out of the way, planking covering drainage trenches removed, builders’ huts forced open and searched, canvas and polythene sheeting stripped away. They squeezed between stacks of splintery timber shuttering, crawled under wooden sheds and, finally, mud-caked, dishevelled and disheartened, there was nowhere else to look and Gilmore was wearing his ‘I told you so’ smirk
They gathered round Frost who was dishing out cigarettes, forming a tight circle as he struck a match to stop the rising wind from blowing it out. ‘Now what?’ asked Gilmore.
‘We go back and search again, son.’
‘He could be miles away.’
Frost’s chin poked out stubbornly. ‘No. He’s here. Laughing at us. I know it.’ He held up a hand. ‘I thought I heard something.’ Someone’s radio was burbling away about casualties and ambulances and shortage of manpower. ‘Turn that thing off.’ The offending radio was silenced. ‘Now listen.’
They listened. The wind, working itself up into a paddy, rattled chain link fencing, flapped polythene sheeting, and made the temporary overhead telephone wires sing and hum. Almost 200 feet above them, the jib arm of the giant crane, with its warning light on the far end, creaked and groaned and shrieked as if in pain.
A sudden clatter. All heads turned. Jordan grinned sheepishly. He had knocked over a stack of empty lubricating oil drums.
Frost shook his head. Whatever he thought he’d heard wasn’t going to repeat itself. Then he clicked his fingers. ‘The crane. We haven’t looked up there!’ Heads turned up and up and up. The distant warning light, a pin-prick of bright against the night sky, seemed almost another star.
‘It’s bloody high,’ croaked Jordan.
‘Yes,’ agreed Frost, now wishing he hadn’t suggested it. The damn thing seemed to go up and up and up for ever.
A yell from Gilmore. ‘Someone’s up there!’ And as the moon elbowed through black clouds, there was Gauld, on the ladder, nearly 100 feet up, clinging for dear life and looking down at them.
Making a megaphone with his hands, Frost yelled up into the night sky. ‘You can’t get away now, Gauld. We’ve got you. Come on down.'
The wind fielded Gauld’s defiant reply and hurled it away
‘He’s coming down,’ exclaimed Jordan.
‘He’s not,’ said Frost. ‘He’s going higher.’
Necks craned, they watched until he was swallowed by blackness. ‘Let’s have some lights,’ Frost ordered.
With much difficulty an area car zigzagged, bumped and slid its way towards the crane, and then a powerful spotlight sliced upwards, cutting a steamy white swathe in the night sky and picking out the doll-man as he climbed up and up.
Gauld was nearly at the top of the ladder and could see the platform of the driver’s cab just above his head. He gripped the rungs tightly with hands that the wind was trying to tear loose. Above him the jib groaned and whined and shuddered. He heaved himself up on to the small platform outside the cab. The protective metal handrail seemed flimsy and inadequate and he kept well back as he looked down, eyes squinting against the blinding spotlight beam. The police were still staring up at him, the one in the dirty mac yelling something which any fool should realize couldn’t be heard at this height. One of the uniformed men was running from a car with something in his hand. A loud-hailer.
‘Be sensible, Gauld. You can’t go anywhere. Come on down.’