The Man Every Family Owes

Chapter Two: The Brass Lantern

For three long seconds, nobody in the ballroom moved.

Declan lifted his hand from the gold pen. Beneath it lay a plain white card with nothing printed on it but a phone number, and June's fingers closed around it before she seemed to understand what she was doing. In the confusion, the little girl twisted free of Grant's grip and ran to her mother, and June pulled her in tight against her side. "Maisie, baby, I've got you."

Beatrice recovered first. "Murderer!" The scream tore out of her, and she stumbled back against the fireplace as if Declan had drawn a knife. "He's escaped! He killed my son, and now he's come back for the rest of my family. Somebody stop him!"

The room broke apart. Women shrieked, a table of glasses went over, and a dozen phones rose into the air at once, flashes firing. Declan didn't move. He stood beside June with his hands loose at his sides and waited.

A heavyset man in a rented tuxedo pushed out from Beatrice's own table, already pulling a badge from his jacket. Declan knew the face. Seven years ago, Inspector Doyle Sutter had built the case against him, one convenient piece at a time. "Declan Hurst," Sutter said, loud enough for every camera, "you're under arrest."

He wrenched Declan's arms behind his back and snapped on the handcuffs, tighter than they needed to be. Declan let him. As the steel bit into his wrists, he lowered his head and murmured a single word toward his collar. "Briar."

"What did you say?" Sutter demanded.

"Nothing that concerns you."

Sutter marched him toward the doors, straight past June. Declan slowed just enough to meet her eyes. "Don't sign anything," he said quietly. "Not tonight, not ever. I'll be back before morning."

June's hand came up and cracked across his face so hard his head snapped sideways. He tasted blood where his lip had split against his teeth. The ballroom gasped.

"I buried you," June said. Her voice shook, but her eyes were dry and furious. "I wore black for a year."

Declan had no answer for that. Behind her, half hidden in the folds of her mother's grey dress, Maisie peered up at him with his own grey eyes. "Mommy," she whispered, "is he the bad man?"

June didn't answer her. Somehow, that hurt more than the slap.

Sutter didn't take him to a cell.

The squad car pulled into the back lot of the Ninth Precinct a little after eleven, and Sutter walked him in through a service door, well away from the booking sergeant at the front desk. They took his earpiece, his watch and his belt in a stairwell that smelled of bleach. Then they went down two more flights to an old holding cell at the end of a corridor, with a steel table bolted to the floor and a camera in the corner that had been broken for a year. Nobody had ever asked for it to be fixed.

Two officers in shirtsleeves were waiting. They didn't speak. The first punch landed under Declan's ribs and folded him over the table, and the second caught his jaw on the way back up. After that, he stopped counting. He stayed on his feet as long as he could, then they shoved him into the chair and kept going.

Sutter leaned against the wall and watched, rolling a cigarette he never lit. "You should've stayed dead, Hurst. Everybody was happier." He took a small paper envelope from his jacket and set it on the table, white powder showing through the fold. "Mrs. Fairholm is a generous woman. The guilty killer comes home after seven years on the run, can't face what he did, and at dawn they find him on the floor of a holding cell with this in his blood. Overdose. Nobody cries over a junkie." He smiled. "This time there'll be a body to bury."

Declan raised his head slowly. Blood ran warm from his nose and his split lip, and one eye was already swelling shut. He spat red onto the concrete and looked at Sutter with something close to sympathy.

"How's the debt going, Doyle?" he asked. "Four hundred thousand to the Silver Stag in Lowmarsh. They don't usually wait this long." He let that settle. "Does your wife know about the second mortgage yet?"

Sutter's cigarette slipped from his fingers. Both officers turned to stare at him. Nobody alive should have known that, not his partner, not the woman who slept beside him every night.

"Who told you that?" Sutter said hoarsely. When Declan only smiled with bloody teeth, he lunged off the wall. "Who told you?"

The door opened.

Police Commissioner Nolan Briar stood in the doorway in a camel overcoat thrown over striped pajamas, his grey hair flattened on one side from the pillow. He looked at the envelope of powder on the table, the two officers, and the bleeding man in the chair, and his mouth went tight. In his right hand, he held a black envelope.

"Get those cuffs off him," Briar said.

"Sir, he's a convicted murderer, he escaped..."

Briar didn't let him finish. "No warrant, no booking, and a bleeding prisoner in a cell that's been closed for a year. This arrest never happened. You're suspended, Doyle. I want your badge and your gun on my desk by eight."

He walked Declan out himself, one hand under his elbow on the stairs. In the empty corridor at the top, he stopped and tipped the envelope open, and a brass lantern no bigger than a thumb rolled into his palm. It caught the fluorescent light like something alive.

"Fourteen years ago, I lost my temper in an interview room," Briar said quietly. "A suspect went down a flight of stairs with my hands on him, and he never walked again. There was a tape. A man I never met made that tape disappear overnight. He called himself the Lantern. All he asked was that I keep this, and answer when it came back. Everyone says the Lantern died last year. I believed it, until this came under my door an hour ago with one instruction. Release Declan Hurst."

"Then you've done it," Declan said.

"I don't know who you are to him, and I don't want to know." Briar closed his hand around the lantern. "Whatever I owed, it's paid. Tell him that, if you ever see him."

"He knows," Declan said.

A dark grey sedan was idling at the curb. Tamsin Okafor sat behind the wheel, small and precise, her reading glasses pushed up into cropped black hair. She handed him a cloth for his face without a word, and only spoke once the station was behind them.

"You know what that cost," she said. "Briar's debt is spent. One debt, one call, that's how the ledger works. We just used the police commissioner of Brackwell to get you out of a basement."

"It wasn't a basement," Declan said, pressing the cloth to his lip. "It was a funeral."

Before she could answer, the phone in the console began to ring. It was the number on the card he'd left under the pen.

He answered, and June was screaming.

"They took her! Declan, they took her!" Her words broke apart into sobs. "Men with an emergency court order. They pulled Maisie out of her bed. She was crying for me, and they just carried her out the door."