Life on Mars: Get Cartwright
Time to leap into the Cortina as Sam Tyler and Gene Hunt roar back into action in a brand new installment of Life on Mars.‘Women in the Force?! It’s against nature! Just look what happened here when they let Cartwright in. Like bloody Yoko, she’s been.’The team at CID is falling apart. Internal conflicts are stretching loyalties, wrecking friendships and turning A-Division against itself. And somehow, with their department splitting like Rod Stewart’s tightest trousers, DCI Gene Hunt and DI Sam Tyler must deal with a case that is leaving dead coppers all over the city, threatening to destroy the mighty Guv’nor himself, and sees Annie Cartwright pursued by a killer who will let nothing stop him – not even death.
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Get Cartwright
by Tom Graham
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Shadow of the Past
Chapter Three: One Spent Cartridge
Chapter Seven: This is Diplomacy
Chapter Eleven: Lost and Found in Lost & Found
Chapter Twelve: Gene, God and the Meaning of the Western
Chapter Thirteen: A Quiet Drink
Chapter Fifteen: Dreams of Life
Chapter Seventeen: Duke of Earles
Chapter Eighteen: It’s Complicated
Chapter Nineteen: Death of a Cortina
Chapter Twenty-One: Clive Gould
Chapter Twenty-Three: Siege at Trencher’s Farm
Chapter Twenty-Five: Yellow Brick Road
Chapter Twenty-Six: Into The Emerald City
It was Sunday morning. Manchester was drowsy and still. And DI Sam Tyler was staring death in the face.
My God …! It’s him …
His blood had frozen in his veins.
Don’t run. Stand your ground.
Sam’s heart was hammering in his chest.
This is it. This is the showdown. Don’t run – be a man – it’s time to finish this thing here and now!
The silent confrontation between him and death had been as sudden as it was unexpected. Sam had been walking through the city on a typically dead Sunday morning. Manchester was lying in, its curtains still drawn, its head under the covers, refusing to budge. Here in 1973, Sunday trading was still just a promise – or a threat – that lay in the future. Apart from a few corner shops and wayside cafes, all the shutters were down. Hardly a car moved in the streets. An elderly man walked his elderly dog. A solitary council worker gathered up discarded cans of Tennent’s and stinking chip papers. And through this, Sam had made his way, lost in his own thoughts.
Hurrying past the Roxy cinema, a sudden movement had caught his eye. He glanced up – and at once he gasped and stumbled to a halt. Stepping out noiselessly from the dark façade of the cinema came a shadowy figure, blank-faced and featureless. It positioned itself in Sam’s path, standing motionless in front of a gaudy poster for Westworld, which remained visible through its hazy, insubstantial body. Grotesquely, Yul Brynner’s face – falling away like a mask to reveal robot mechanics underneath – could be seen where the shadow’s own face should have been.
Sam knew at once what – or rather who – that phantom was. He knew the aura of horror that hung about it, had experienced before the primal terror that surrounded this dreadful apparition.
Running a dry tongue over dry lips, Sam said as calmly as he could: ‘So. Looks like you’ve found me, Mr Gould.’
There was no sign of response. Yul Brynner glared back at him through the blank mask of the Devil in the Dark.
Sam tried to pluck up the courage to take a challenging step towards this thing of darkness. But his feet would not obey him. He remained rooted to the spot. Acting tougher than he felt, he said: ‘How are we going to do this? Do we fight? Or do you just zap me with a death ray? Whatever it is, let’s do it. Right now. Let’s finish this.’
Brave words. But he felt anything but brave. A bead of sweat rolled down Sam's face.
The shadow shifted its position, and now, through its hazy form, Sam could see the Westworld poster’s tag-line, perfectly readable through Gould’s chest:
‘Don’t just stand there,’ Sam said, lifting his head and refusing to be cowed. ‘You want Annie? Forget it. You’re not getting her. She’s with me now, you filthy, bullying, murdering bastard. You’re never going to lay so much as finger on her ever again. You and her are history, done with. But you and me, Mr Gould, we have business to finish.’ He raised his fists. They felt puny and weak, like the fists of a child. ‘So let’s get on with it.’
Clive Gould, the Devil in the Dark, remained still and silent, an insubstantial shadow, a dark, hazy stain upon the air. But Sam could still recall the broad-nosed, snaggle-toothed face of Clive Gould from that awful night he had witnessed the murder of Annie’s father, PC Tony Cartwright. In dreams and waking visions, the Test Card Girl had shown him more of Gould’s cruelty, the sickening treatment Annie had suffered in life from this brute, the beatings, the assaults, the psychological torture. And although he had not seen it for himself (thank God), he knew that it was at Gould’s hands that Annie had died. She had died, just as Sam had died, and Gene Hunt and all the rest of them, and wound up here in this strange simulacrum of 1973 that lay somewhere between Life and the Life Beyond.
And at some point Clive Gould died too, Sam thought. But unlike Annie, he shouldn’t have come here. His place was elsewhere. But that hasn’t stopped him. He’s forcing his way into 1973, strengthening his presence here, becoming more and more real. At first, he was a dream, a glimpse of something awful in the dark recesses of my mind. Then I saw him personified in the monstrous body tattoos of bare-knuckle boxer Patsy O’Riordan. Then, in Friar’s Brook borstal, I saw his face, and I saw how he murdered Annie’s father.
