Poetic Justice

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Zack Wild’s eyes followed the ambulance that held Kieran Wright until it disappeared from view.

There was a patrol car with two uniformed officers escorting the ambulance, and a third officer in the ambulance with the handcuffed Kieran, yet Zack could not shake the feeling that the teen murderer, who had done so much damage to the village of Oakhurst, and whose arrest had been so costly, was not done causing trouble and hurting people.

The situation was not really anything to do with him, a detective inspector once, he was now retired from the police force and made his living as a writer, but old habits died hard. He couldn’t forget either what he had seen, or what he knew had been done by one of the worst killers he had ever encountered.

His sense of responsibility was not helped by the fact that it was he who had found the first of Kieran Wright’s victims. Nor was it diminished by the fact that until that morning he had been the one and only suspect under investigation by Sergeant Mitchell. Only Kieran Wright revealing himself as the murderer to his youngest sister had changed that.

With the ambulance now out of sight, Zack turned his gaze to survey the mess that had resulted from the ill-prepared attempt to arrest Kieran Wright by Detective Inspector Harrison, who had taken over the case from Sergeant Mitchell. His green eyes settled first on the Land Rover and the patrol car that stood enmeshed, bumper to bumper, blocking the road and preventing any other vehicles from getting past.

From the conjoined vehicles, his gaze moved up the road to the second of Oakhurst’s patrol cars. While the first had been used in a game of chicken that kept Kieran Wright from escaping the village, the second had crashed through the wall at the side of the road before burying itself, nose-first, in the ditch on the other side of it.

The panicked manoeuvre had kept the driver, who was now on his way to hospital in the same ambulance as Kieran Wright, safe from the two shotgun blasts the teen murderer had fired at him but had not protected his partner.

Zack could just make out the figure of Doctor Kelly, the village’s elderly GP, as he strove to keep Constable Black alive until the air ambulance could return to take him to hospital. Having seen the extent of the constable’s injuries when he went up the road to check on the party sent to arrest Kieran, Zack doubted the younger man would survive, no matter how hard the doctor worked. It was a doubt that had been shared by the paramedic from the air ambulance when he decided to take DI Harrison rather than Constable Black to the hospital in Branton first.

After leaving the crashed patrol car, Zack’s gaze continued up the road to the Wright farmhouse, though it didn’t remain there for long. The farmhouse, and the yard that surrounded it, were half a mile distant, too far away for him to make out details. He had already seen what was there, though, and he could picture Sergeant Mitchell’s lifeless body, a large hole where his stomach had been, on the ground a short distance from the front door simply by closing his eyes.

“What do you think’ll happen when the backup finally gets here?”

The question refocused Zack’s attention on his immediate surroundings, specifically on the young constable at his side, whom he had helped to arrest Kieran Wright.

“No idea,” he admitted. “They don’t need to arrest Kieran, we’ve already done that, but I’m sure they’ll find something to do. Most likely they’ll search the farm for evidence to connect Kieran to the murders — they’ll want proof to help close out the case — and they, or someone else, will want to look into his morning’s operation to work out what went wrong, and how it could have been avoided.”

“Someone’s gonna get the blame for all of this, aren’t they,” Melissa said unhappily.

“Someone,” Zack agreed with a nod. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it, though, if I were you. This is one occasion when you can be glad you’re only a constable. Sergeant Mitchell and DI Harrison are far more likely to take the blame, they’re more senior, and they made the decision to go in without waiting for armed backup.” He had enough experience of such circumstances to know that the higher-ups in the police force would want to find someone to blame for what had happened, and though Kieran Wright was the one with the shotgun, it was a police officer who would have to take responsibility for the failures that had occurred. “You might even come out of this with something positive on your record.”

“I’d rather have this morning back, so I can tell Mitchell and the DI to wait.”

That was a sentiment Zack could understand, though he realised it was not going to help anything. “Best not to think about that too much,” he advised. “You can’t change what’s happened. Come on, let’s go and check on Tara, I’m sure she’s pretty worried about everything.” Without waiting to see if Melissa was going to follow him, he pushed away from the boot of the patrol car and made his way down the road to his home, where Kieran’s fourteen-year-old sister was being looked after by his friend, after Kieran tried to run her down to keep her from telling anyone that he was the murderer who had terrorised Oakhurst’s daughters.