Monday 14 July 2014

11.57 a.m.

After twenty solid minutes the alarms had ceased abruptly but survived as the ghosts of echoes reverberating endlessly around the Great Hall’s domed ceiling. As the ringing in Wolf’s ears slowly subsided, and the courtroom returned to an appropriate hush, a new sound grew out of the silence: a lone set of uneven footsteps approaching the courtroom doors. Wolf remained seated up in the gallery. He had to fight to keep his breathing steady, his knuckles blanching as he clenched his fists.

A hazy memory had chosen an inopportune moment to return: the glaring overhead lights illuminating a long corridor, the deafening ring of a phone, somebody answering. A patient? A nurse? He vaguely remembered them holding the receiver up to their ear. He wanted to call out to them, to warn them, despite himself, surrendering to the irrational, even if only for a moment.

It was the same fear that had taken him now.

He found himself straining to listen as the unhurried footsteps grew louder and jumped when a thunderous bang rattled the old doors violently against their frames.

There was a short pause in which Wolf did not dare breathe.

A worn hinge creaked somewhere below him and then he felt the vibration of a door swinging closed. Wolf watched the empty room with wide eyes as the footsteps returned and an imposing figure, dressed all in black, materialised from beneath the gallery. The deep hood of its long coat was pulled over its head. In his impressionable state, Wolf’s imagination ran rife: it was as if the Recording Angel herself had torn free of the building’s grand entranceway, amidst a shower of rubble and dust, to pass judgement upon him.

‘I must say,’ began Masse. Each syllable sounded as though it had to be ripped out of him. Spittle glistened in the artificial light as he spat his mutated words across the room. It was as if he had forgotten how to speak. ‘I am very impressed that you stayed.’

He passed between the benches, running his skeletal-white fingers along the polished surfaces and the assortment of items abandoned during the evacuation. Wolf found it deeply unsettling that Masse had not looked up at him, yet appeared to know precisely where he was. Wolf had chosen the courtrooms but began to worry that he was exactly where Masse wanted him.

‘“Any coward can fight a battle when he’s sure of winning; but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he’s sure of losing”,’ recited Masse as he ascended the steps up to the judge’s bench.

Wolf’s heart sank as the hooded man lifted the Sword of Justice off the wall. He wrapped his long fingers round the golden hilt and slowly unsheathed the weapon to the scrape of metal on metal. He paused to admire the long blade for a moment.

‘George Eliot said that,’ he continued thoughtfully as spots of reflected light flickered in and out of existence across the dark wood panels. ‘I believe that she would have liked you.’

Masse raised the priceless piece of history above his head and then swung it down into the desk in the centre. Although blunted, the weighty length of metal embedded itself deep into the wood, quivering gently as he took a seat.

Wolf’s nerve was wavering the longer he spent in Masse’s presence. He knew that, beneath the hood, Masse was just a man: a proficient, ruthless and ingenious killer, no doubt, but a man all the same, yet it was impossible to ignore the fact that he was the terrifying truth at the heart of whispered urban legends, to ignore the universal enthralment that his latest work had demanded from a chronically apathetic world.

Masse was no demon, but Wolf had no doubt that he was the closest thing to one he would ever encounter.

‘A real sword,’ Masse gestured to the weapon. ‘Hung above the judges’ heads in a room guaranteed to contain at least one suspected murderer at any given time.’ He raised a hand to his throat, suggesting that the monologue was taking its toll on him. ‘You have got to love the British. Even after what you yourself did within these very walls, they regard pomp and tradition far more highly than they do security and common sense.’

Masse broke into a fit of painful rattling coughs.

Wolf used the break in proceedings to unthread his shoelaces, hoping that he would never find himself within close enough proximity to Masse for them to come in useful. He was just coiling the loose laces around his hand when he froze; Masse was sliding the heavy hood away from his scarred scalp.

He had seen photographs, read the medical reports, but none had fully captured the devastating extent of Masse’s injuries. Rivers of scars meandered over a deathly white surface, narrow tributaries flooding or drying up with his changes of expression. He finally looked up into the gallery.

Wolf had learned from his own investigation that Masse had come from money – public school, family crest, sailing clubs. He had even been quite handsome once. There was still a hint of his upper-class diction mutilated somewhere within his graceless delivery, and yet it was nothing short of bizarre watching this scarred, merciless killer addressing him so eloquently and quoting Victorian novelists.

It started to dawn on Wolf why Masse had isolated himself, why he could never go back to his family’s life of fundraisers and golf clubs, why he had been so desperate to return to the army; there was no place for him back in the real world.

A brilliant mind trapped within a broken body.

He wondered whether Masse would merely have been another normal member of society had events unfolded differently, or if he had simply lost the protection of his aristocratic facade in that bomb blast.

‘Tell me William, is it all that you hoped it would be?’ asked Masse. ‘Can little Annabelle Adams finally rest easy in the knowledge that she has been avenged?’

Wolf did not answer.

A lopsided grin cut across Masse’s face:

‘Did you bask in the heat as the mayor went up in flames?’

Subconsciously, Wolf shook his head.

‘No?’

‘I never wanted this,’ murmured Wolf, unable to help himself.

‘Oh, but you did,’ smirked Masse. ‘You did this to them.’

‘I was sick! I was angry. I didn’t know what I was doing!’ Wolf was furious with himself. He knew that he was letting Masse get to him.

Masse sighed heavily.

‘I will be so very disappointed if you turn out to be one of those: “I didn’t mean it”, “I need to go back on our arrangement” or my personal favourite: “I found God”. Although, if by chance you have, I would sincerely love to know where the little prick is hiding.’

Masse’s wheezy laughter erupted into another bout of tearing coughs, giving Wolf time to compose himself:

‘And I’ll be disappointed if you turn out to be one of those freaks—’

‘I am not a freak!’ Masse interrupted, leaping to his feet, screaming louder than Wolf even thought possible.

The sound of sirens approaching pierced the tense atmosphere.

Frothy blood foamed on the courtroom floor as Masse panted in rage, his terrifying loss of control only encouraging Wolf.

‘… who blames all his darkness and perversions on the voices in his head. You kill for the same mundane reason as everybody else – it makes the weak feel powerful.’

‘Must we pretend that you don’t know who I am? What I am?’

‘I know exactly what you are, Lethaniel. You are a deluded narcissistic psychopath, soon to be nothing more special than another freak in a boiler suit.’

The look that Masse shot Wolf scared him. He remained unsettlingly quiet as he considered his reply.

‘I am constant, eternal, forever,’ said Masse with utter self-belief.

‘You don’t look particularly constant, eternal, or forever from where I’m sitting,’ said Wolf in feigned confidence. ‘In fact, you look as though a mild head cold might take you out before I get the chance.’

Masse ran a self-conscious hand over the deep valleys running through his skin.

‘These belonged to Lethaniel Masse,’ he said quietly, remembering. ‘He was weak, frail, and as he burned in the fire, I claimed the vessel he left behind.’

Prising the ceremonial sword from the wooden desk, he walked back out onto the courtroom floor.

The sirens were right on top of them now.

‘You’re attempting to antagonise me? This is why I like you, William! You are defiant, determined. If the courts say you need evidence, you fake it. Should the jury declare someone innocent, you take it upon yourself to beat them within an inch of their life. They fire you, they rehire you. And even when you come face to face with death you cling devotedly to life. It’s admirable. Really.’

‘If you’re such a big fan …’ quipped Wolf.

‘Let you go?’ asked Masse, as though the idea was entirely new to him. ‘You know that is not how this works.’

The sirens had gone quiet, meaning that the building would be flooded with armed officers at any moment.

‘They’re here, Masse,’ said Wolf. ‘There’s nothing you can tell them they don’t already know. It’s over.’

Wolf got up to leave.

‘Fate … destiny. It is all so cruel,’ said Masse. ‘Even now you believe that you won’t die in this courtroom – and why would you? All you have to do is leave through that door and not come back. You should. You really should.’

‘Goodbye, Lethaniel.’

‘It is so sad to see you like this: muzzled, kicked into submission. This …’ Masse gestured up at Wolf, ‘this isn’t the real William Fawkes, weighing up his options, making sensible decisions, actually showing some sense of self-preservation. The real William Fawkes is all fire and wrath, the man that they had to lock away, the man who came to me for vengeance, the man who tried to stamp a killer into this very floor. The real William Fawkes would choose to come down here to die.’

Wolf was unsettled. He did not understand what Masse was trying to achieve. Cautiously, he made his way to the exit.

‘Ronald Everett was quite a large man,’ said Masse conversationally as Wolf pushed against the door. ‘Thirteen pints of blood maybe? More? He accepted that he was going to die with gentlemanly dignity. I punctured a small hole in his femoral artery and he talked to me about his life as he bled out onto the floor.

‘It was nice … calm.

‘Approximately five minutes in, he began to show the first signs of hypovolaemic shock. I would hazard a guess at twenty to twenty-five per cent total blood loss. At nine and a half minutes he lost consciousness, and by eleven minutes his exsanguinated heart had stopped beating.’

Wolf paused when he heard Masse hauling something across the floor.

‘I only mention this,’ he called up to Wolf from somewhere below the gallery, ‘because she’s already been bleeding for eight.’

Wolf slowly turned back round. A smear of bright red blood painted their route across the courtroom floor as Masse dragged Baxter behind him, pulling her along by a fistful of her hair. He had gagged her with the silk summer scarf that she always kept in her bag and her own handcuffs bound her hands together.

She looked weak and startlingly pale.

‘I must admit, I’m improvising here,’ Masse called up to Wolf as he heaved her further into the room. ‘I had other plans for you. Who would ever have thought she would come looking for us alone? But she did, and I now see that this is the only way it could have ended.’

Masse dropped her to the floor and looked back up at Wolf, whose expression had turned dark, in anticipation. Any apprehensions that he had harboured regarding the faux demon or the weighty weapon that he wielded had dissipated.

‘Ah!’ said Masse, pointing the sword up at Wolf. ‘Finally! There you are.’

Wolf burst out through the doors and towards the stairs.

Masse knelt down over Baxter. Up close, the scar tissue pulled taut and wrinkled as he moved. She tried to fight him off as he took hold of her arm. She could smell his foul breath on the air and the concoction of medicines and ointments that he had slathered on to soothe his angry skin. He replaced her elbow just to the right of her groin and pressed down until the bleeding slowed.

‘Just like before. Keep the pressure on.’ He dribbled over her as he spoke. ‘We don’t want you running out too quickly.’

Masse stood back up and watched the doors:

‘And so our hero comes to die.’

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