God’s Fist. Paul Finch

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      “Well I don’t want to hear yours. So if that’s it, I’ll go.”

      “That’s it,” he said.

      Empty airwaves buzzed in his ear. She hadn’t bothered to say goodbye.

      Later that evening, Skelton walked across town to the ten-screen multiplex, where the latest Hollywood blockbuster was showing. From the very outset it was a blood-streaked ballet. Men were mowed down like watermelons, shot spectacularly to pieces, dying in elaborate patterns of slo-mo carnage. At every instant of course, the hero scowled and frowned through his commando face-paint, and shook off his bumps and bruises, and pumped his trigger finger, and threw in the odd quip, and stamped on heads and punched guys out and slashed and hacked and kicked them to oblivion, and left trails of exploding cars and buildings in his wake. The whole thing was a dazzling display of pyrotechnics, the endlessly expanding fireballs glaring red and orange on the mesmerised audience, the quadraphonic sound system thundering above, beside, below, the gunfire rattling from cinema wall to cinema wall, the very seats vibrating …

      It might have been impressive, Skelton thought as he left the cinema, if he hadn’t seen it all so often before. He felt numb to that kind of thing now. He supposed it would be the same on the world’s most death-defying roller coaster. If you tested it twenty times a day, the adrenalin would soon stop pumping. Of course, if you rode it twenty times a day, you would also increase your chances of being involved in a terrible accident, as well. That was worth thinking about.

      By the time he got back to his neighbourhood, the girls had started to appear: haggard scarecrow shapes on the dingy street-corners. The dealers were abroad too: dark outlines in graffiti-covered doorways. It was only ten o’clock, but drunks were in evidence, slumped against the grilled shop fronts or lying senseless on the litter-strewn pavements. There were raucous sounds from the pubs. From one of them – The Mechanics, a scummy little drinking-hole squashed under a railway bridge – a stool came hurtling through the window, curses and screams accompanying it.

      Skelton ignored it all. He let himself into his flat without a backward glance. No-one in this district really knew him, but his look alone was enough to dissuade the opportunist muggers and addicts, while the crumbling block in which he lived hadn’t seen a decent burglary in several years because, let’s face it, what was in there to pinch? Of course, there were certain other creatures, in more distant parts of the city, who might well give Ray Skelton hassle, and worse. As a copper he’d never knocked on the custody office door if he could smash his latest prisoner’s face into it instead, while all his arrests – even those for minor offences – had been made with the maximum use of thumb-in-the-eye and knee-in-the-groin, because he’d always believed in leaving the toe-rags no illusion about what breaking the law on his manor meant. Yes, there were many individuals who’d be interested to know where he now lived, though the British police didn’t willingly issue such information, not even when it concerned an officer they’d eventually, angrily, dismissed from service.

      Back indoors, Skelton made himself a mug of tea, set his alarm clock for six, and then, as was his habit, turned in early. For once though, he didn’t settle down in bed with a Jack Higgins or Robert Ludlum; he settled down with three glossy black-and-white photographs. He looked at them again, hard, letting his mind wander. There were so many injustices in the world that just putting a tiny proportion of them right seemed beyond the combined powers of all the human agencies set up to serve the cause of good. There were so many instances in his own personal experience. More than once, he’d dragged the bloated, rot-riddled corpses of OD victims out from foul, flooded storm-drains, knowing full well that nobody would ever be blamed let alone prosecuted. One freezing winter, he’d broken into an old lady’s home to find the occupant on the kitchen floor, encased in ice; it was anyone’s guess how long she’d been there – only her failure to return library books had finally aroused interest. Then there’d been the turf war where several teen hoodlums had hauled a rival gangbanger up to the top floor of an eight-storey block, thrown him off, and when they’d come out at the bottom and found him still alive, had dragged him back up and done it again. That last incident had occurred in this very neighbourhood, Bagley End. Not surprisingly, no-one had ever been arrested for it, because nobody round Bagley End ever saw or heard anything.

      Skelton went to sleep still staring at the photographs.

      *

      The transfer of The Catholic Echo from the outskirts of town to a new, more central location was completed within five days. Over the years, it had outgrown its former premises – a purpose-built but relatively small editorial centre on a suburban industrial estate – and was now relocating to the third and fourth floors of a palatial Victorian building on the city centre’s main trunk road, quite close to the railway station and, more importantly, to the borough’s impressive Catholic cathedral. There was much lugging of furniture and machinery from the backs of wagons, then up and down stairs, and into and out of lifts. It was a chaotic and physically draining business, but by the end of the week the bulk of the heavy work had been done, and come Friday afternoon the journalists and telesales girls were back at their desks, and Jervis and his removals crew were relaxing in the nearest pub.