Sacrifice of Fools Read Online Free PDF Page B

uniforms are pushing back bystanders and stringing up Police Incident: Do Not Cross tape.
    Andy Gillespie starts to run. It all goes very slow. It all goes very smooth, very soft, very pure and distant. As he crosses University Street he notices how a policewoman has the traffic stopped, and that every bedroom window in the Holiday Inn is open and a salaryman is leaning out into the rain. He’s under the tape and past the uniforms. The coat and suit cops turn — they’re shouting something — but they’re too slow. They’ll never catch him. There’s a Shian leaning against the side of an ambulance, a blanket around his shoulders. A woman in a beige raincoat is offering him a foam styrene cup of something. The Shian is shivering.
    Up the steps. Into the hall. Into the office. He’s still got the bag of Guinness cans in his left hand, the aspirins in his right. The room is full of suits in coats and baggy white bodies with rubber gloves. They turn with a communal squeak.
    ‘Get him out of here!’ a voice shouts.
    ‘I fucking work here!’ he shouts. ‘These are my friends!’
    Uniforms lunge like monsters in a cheap Hammer Horror, tackle him, wrestle him back to the door. A camera flashes. By its brief light, he sees it all.
    There’s one body in the middle of the room. It’s lying on its back, its hands are balled into fists, folded on its chest. He can’t tell whose body it is. It has no face. It has no head. Blood fans out from the severed neck across the carpet. Shian blood is dark as venison; it smells very strongly. There is more blood around the groin, a mess of it. The second body is against the far wall, by the fireplace, underneath the year planner. It lies in the same position as the first, it has no head. Its groin has been mutilated. The third is to the left, in the short corridor beside Gillespie’s office, lying on its back, fists on its chest, cut open below. Beyond, in the back room, are two smaller headless bodies, curled around each other.
    All this he sees with absolute clarity and precision in the white lightning of the camera flash.
    Detective Sergeant Roisin and Mr Michael Dunbar of Cotswold Close, Dunmurry, are celebrating the arrival of a new dining room suite. It was delivered at seventeen thirty-five by Gribben Weir Reproductions of Dunmurry Lane. It is reproduction Victorian, six fiddle-back chairs and a circular pedestal table in real, but sustainably forested, mahogany veneer, seating four, extendable to six. While manoeuvring it into the cramped dining recess of the Dunbars’ Frazer Homes C5 ‘Sittingbourne’, the delivery men contrived to put a six-inch scratch on the table top. Detective Sergeant and Mr Michael Dunbar are considerably fucked off about this. Gribben Weir have admitted liability and will send a French polisher, but the problem is whether the job will be done by the weekend when the Dunbars plan to host a dinner to baptize their new table. At present, they are sitting on their fiddle-back chairs around the scratch, which is shaped like a tick on Nike sportswear, playing Fantasy Dinner Guest League.
    ‘Thing is, if it’s one police, it has to be all police,’ Michael is saying.
    ‘No it doesn’t,’ Roisin Dunbar says. ‘You just think that my friends aren’t compatible with your friends.’
    ‘I thought we were talking police, not friends.’
    ‘There’s Darren Healey.’
    ‘You can’t stand him.’
    ‘He’s all right. He’s good crack, when he loosens up a bit. His wife’s nice.’
    ‘His wife’s about to give birth. Anyway, I remember you saying that he cooled off towards you when you made sergeant over him.’
    ‘Well then, who do you think we should have?’
    ‘There’re a couple of clients I’d like to invite. Potential clients.’
    ‘I thought we were talking friends, not clients.’
    ‘My clients are my friends.’
    ‘Who then?’
    ‘John and Kylie, for a start.’
    ‘Jesus, not them, they’ll sit around and talk about that