Macbeth

‘How many?’ his father asked calmly and swerved hard to the right, down a cobbled side street. Fleance turned. The roar of the bikes behind them rose in volume like an enraged dragon.

‘Five or six,’ Fleance shouted. ‘Give me your gun!’

‘It wanted to stay at home tonight,’ Banquo said. ‘Hold tight.’ He twisted the steering wheel; the wheels hit the kerb, and the Volvo jumped and cut the corner in front of a posh clothes shop as they turned left down an even narrower street. Fleance understood the strategy: in these one-way alleys at least the bikers couldn’t come alongside and finish them off. But they were getting unremittingly close. Another bang behind them. Fleance hadn’t as yet learned to differentiate between all types of firearm, which he knew his father could, but even he knew that was a shotgun. Which after all was better than –

A hail of bullets hammered against the car body.

— an automatic weapon.

His father executed another sudden turn with authority, as though he knew where he was going. They were well into the shopping area now, but the shops were closed and the streets almost deserted in the rain. Did his father know a way out of this labyrinth? In response Banquo suddenly steered the car to the right, past a sign bearing bad news.

‘Dad, this is a cul-de-sac!’

Banquo didn’t react.

‘Dad!’

Still no reaction, only his eyes staring ahead in deep concentration, his hands clutching the wheel. Fleance only discovered now that blood was running down his father’s face and inside the neck of his shirt, where its white collar, like blotting paper, had assumed a pink colour from the welling blood. And there was something missing from where the blood was seeping out of his father’s head. Fleance shifted his gaze to the steering wheel. That was why he wasn’t answering. His ear. It lay stuck to the dashboard, a small, pale scrap of skin, shreds of flesh and blood.

Fleance raised his eyes to the windscreen. And there he saw, quite literally, the end. The blind alley culminated in a solid-looking timber house. The ground floor was a large partially illuminated shop window. It was approaching fast, and they showed no signs of stopping.

‘Belt on, Fleance.’

‘Dad!’

‘Now.’

Fleance grabbed his seat belt, pulled it across his chest and just managed to buckle it before the front wheels hit the kerb and they reared up. The bonnet hit the shop window in the middle, and Fleance had the feeling it had opened and they were flying through a curtain of white glass into whatever was inside. Then, as he looked around in amazement, knowing something was dislocated, there was a break in the course of events and he knew he must have passed out. There was an infernal ringing in his ears. His father lay motionless with his head on the wheel.

‘Dad!’

Fleance shook him.

‘Dad!’

No reaction. The windscreen was gone, and something on the bonnet was shining. Fleance had to blink before he realised it was what it looked like. Rings. Necklaces. Bracelets. And in front of him on the wall was written in gold letters: JACOBS & SONS. JEWELLERS. They had driven into a bloody jewellery shop. And the ringing he could hear wasn’t coming from his head, it was the burglar alarm. Now it dawned on him. The burglar alarm. All the town’s banks, the casinos and larger jewellery shops were connected to the central switchboard at police HQ. Who immediately contacted patrol cars in the district. Dad had known where he was going after all.

Fleance tried to undo his seat belt, but couldn’t. He yanked and tugged, but the buckle refused to move.

The sergeant sat on his bike, counted the seconds and looked at the car protruding from the shop in front of them. The alarm drowned most sounds, but he could see from the smoke coming out of the exhaust pipe that the engine was running.

‘Whad are we waidin’ for, eh?’ asked the guy on the Electra Glide. There was something irritating about the way he spoke. ‘Led’s go ged ’em.’

‘We’ll wait a while longer,’ the sergeant said and counted. ‘Twenty-one, twenty-two.’

‘How long, eh?’

‘Until we know the guy who ordered this job has kept his promise,’ said the sergeant. Twenty-five, twenty-six.

‘Doh. I wanna finish this head-choppin’ stuff and leave this shide down.’

‘Wait.’ The sergeant quietly observed him. The guy looked like a grown man. Two grown men. The guy was as broad as a barn door and had muscles everywhere, even in his face. Yet he wore a brace on his teeth, like a boy. The sergeant had seen it before, in prison, where the inmates who pumped iron and took anabolic steroids grew such powerful jawbones that their teeth curled. Twenty-nine, thirty. Thirty seconds and no sirens. ‘Away you go,’ the sergeant said.