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“We can’t keep him here!” Mags exclaimed.
“It’s a police station,” Charlie said. “Therefore there are cells. Therefore we can keep him overnight.”
“They’re unusable,” Mags said.
“Show me,” Charlie replied. Because how bad could they be?
The answer was that the cells were horrible. For some reason, although the cell building was attached to one side of the police station, it had a separate entrance, like a granny annex on a private house. Charlie could imagine only that it had been added later, though why it hadn’t been properly integrated, he didn’t understand. Through the door was a short corridor with stairs to the upper floor at the end. To the right were the two cells. Each was an eight foot by six-foot grey concrete box, with a narrow concrete bench down one side. The doors were painted green, made of thick metal with a single peephole. At the far end of each, a stainless-steel toilet was bolted to the wall. The window was an eighteen-inch square of heavily barred glass. The whole lot stank of damp and black mould. Even if they cleaned the mould from the walls, it would still be freezing cold. There was electricity for lights, but no form of heating. Uninhabitable was an understatement.
Charlie sighed. They were going to have to send Kaylan back to his hall of residence and try again in the morning.
“Send the twerp home. He can walk. We know where to find him,” Charlie told Mags.
“That’s the old staff accommodation?” Charlie asked, pointing to the stairs. Mags nodded, but Patsy was already halfway up.
“I’ve never been in here,” she called over her shoulder. Charlie followed. The stairs were barely illuminated, though a doorway at the top was lit, with Patsy blocking it like a statue. Arriving behind her on a tiny landing, Charlie looked over her shoulder at what appeared to be a makeshift office. Patsy didn’t move. She held her hands out to stop Charlie going into the room.
“Someone’s been living here,” she said.
He looked over her shoulder and could see the signs of recent occupation. A plug-in electric heater stood next to a cheap folding bed with a sleeping bag, pillows and a tangle of blankets. An open duffel bag spilled clothes onto the floor. A phone charging cable hung from another socket, next to a camping chair of dubious looking comfort. Takeaway containers and beer cans were about to overflow from a cardboard box obviously serving as a bin. The room smelled of stale beer, the remains of the takeaways, and underlying it all the sharp odour of petrol
“He must have spilled some petrol when he was making his firebomb,” Patsy said, sniffing hard.
“Gwilym. Hiding right here under our noses,” Charlie said. “No wonder we couldn’t find him. Harrington-Bowen must have told him about the place.”
Charlie thought about the big show home where Harrington-Bowen lived, and wondered how he could have allowed his nephew to squat in an almost derelict building.
Patsy grasped his arm. “Is that rats?” she said, pointing to the corner of the room where there was a doorway. Charlie could hear something, some kind of rustling, scratching noise. He hoped it wasn’t rats, or if it was, they would stay where they were. He and Patsy stayed very still, listening. The air in the cold, damp, flat was silent, bar the noise of the occasional car on the road outside. The sounds started again, and Charlie knew what it was.
“Gwilym,” he called, “we know you’re in there. I can hear you sniffing. Come out and show yourself. Let’s get you somewhere warm and talk about this.”
There was no reply. Charlie pointed at Patsy and opened and closed his hand in a talking sign, then pointed at himself and made tiptoeing motions with his fingers. Patsy nodded.
“Gwilym,” she called. “We’ve been looking for you. There’s hot drinks and plenty of food downstairs. You must be freezing your nuts off up here. It’s damp, and there are probably rats.” She managed to keep up the talk as Charlie crept across the room to the doorway. He could hear the sniffing getting louder. With a shout, he threw the door open to reveal a tiny kitchen, as filthy as the rest of the flat, and Gwilym on the floor, his back pushed into the corner of the room, with an enormous knife held out in front of him, in a trembling hand. Tears and snot ran down his face and into his beard. He was shaking with cold. Charlie felt Patsy materialise beside him.
“Put the knife down, Gwilym,” Charlie said. “We can’t leave you here, and I don’t want to have to call in armed police. So put the knife down.”
Gwilym shook his head, and gripped the knife harder, though he was still shivering. “Go away,” he said in a watery voice.
“We can’t do that Gwilym. You know that, don’t you? Put the knife down and all this will be over.”
“I’ll kill myself,” Gwilym said, voice high and trembling, body still shaking. “Don’t come any closer, or I will.”
“You’ve done nothing worth killing yourself over, really you haven’t. We just want to talk to you, that’s all.” It was Charlie’s turn to keep talking, keep Gwilym’s attention on him as Patsy edged closer. He hoped to God she knew what she was doing.
“Killing yourself isn’t as easy as it looks,” Charlie said. “It hurts like hell, and there’s lots of blood. Mostly it doesn’t work. And do you want to die here, with all these spiders and in this cold? Come and have a cup of tea at least, downstairs in the warm. There are cakes too, if our colleagues haven’t eaten them all. We could send for fish and chips. Do you like fish and chips?”
There was a sudden blur of movement, and the knife went flying across the room, slithering to a stop against a cupboard. Gwilym screamed and moved as if to go after it, but it was too late. Patsy had grabbed the hand that had held the knife, and Charlie was across the room in a single stride, handcuffs ready. As he clicked them into place, he felt Gwilym’s freezing skin as his shivering intensified. Between the two of them, they helped Gwilym to his feet, his body obviously stiff from cowering in the corner for so long. He smelled of sweat and damp clothes, with a hint of petrol. They left the knife where it was, on the dirty floor. There would be time to collect it later.
19
Gwilym
Tuesday 8pm
“What was that?” Charlie gasped as they led Gwilym down the stairs and out into the car park.
“Kickboxing,” Patsy said. “I’m getting quite good at it, don’t you think?”
