by Harper Fox
***
Drew was right: we were a sorry-arsed cavalry, out here on the kerb beside Lenny’s house, not a clue what to do next. There was no sign of the police, no-one to be seen at all in the daytime street. The summer wind that made the leaves dance in Oak Vale only kicked up dust and crisp packets here. Most of the front lawns were concrete. “Urban desolation,” Andrew observed, as if he’d read my thought. “I bet town-planner George here has some ideas about that.”
I did. Already in my head I’d been planting pollution-tolerant whitebeams up and down the pavements, putting solar panels on the roofs. An anxiety-tic only, the equivalent of another man biting his nails. “What the hell do we do now?”
“Get in there, I guess.” Andrew made for the front door, hand stretched out for the bell, but Jamie intercepted him, grabbing his arm. “Andrew, no,” he said, the fear in his voice making my guts lurch. “If he has got Silver, we shouldn’t give him a warning.”
“Jesus Christ.” Andrew stepped back. “Are we that bloody serious here? Like, the guy hears the doorbell, he’s gonna bash Silver on the head and hide the body?” He stopped, seeing my face. “Sorry, George. Just trying to work out my options. Fancy knocking down the door?”
“We can’t do that. We don’t even know that he’s in there. We should...” I fell silent, listening. Sound carried easily in the dry air, through the thin walls and acoustic echo-boards of flat house frontages up and down the street. Something else I would fix, but not now. I could hear Silver’s phone. I held out a hand to Drew and Jamie, neither of whom had spoken. “Shut up.”
The ringtone cycled three times then stopped. I took out my phone and hit redial, and the sound began again. I could hear it through the letterbox, as if Silver’s jacket or bag—or Silver himself, beaten unconscious—lay in the hall.
I shot past Drew. I hit the door so hard that it bounced on its hinges, then bounced me back with equal force straight into Drew’s arms. He caught me awkwardly. “Fuck me,” he said, hoisting me onto my feet. “Is that the way we’re going?”
“Yes. Now. Help.”
Out of the two of us, he was the husky one. The rugby player, our mum’s pride even now, her big lad to be patted in front of less-fortunate mothers at the Christmas dinner table. He pushed me out of the way, took his own run at the door and slammed his heel against the handle. “Ow, shit!” he yelled, hopping backwards, grabbing at his foot. “Jamie, I don’t suppose your other half keeps a fucking key under a plant pot?”
Jamie, who’d been waiting on the kerb, head down and miserable, suddenly pushed between us. “He’s not my other half. I’m not half a person. If you want to kick a door down, it’s nothing to do with weight, or how fucking strong you are. You’ve just got to do it...” He leaned back, took his weight on one leg with a karate-master’s grace. Aimed his free foot at the lock. “Right.”
The door flew open. And already I’d lost our game for us, whatever element of surprise we’d ever had on our side: already a massive shape was barrelling up from what must be the basement stairs, although because I couldn’t see them, he looked like he was rising through the floor.
Lenny Price, at full roaring gallop. I’d met him once before, Jamie’s ill-advised attempt to drag him along to a work night out. Stuffed into a suit, slugging scotch from a hip flask in the cocktail bar. He was huge.
He had Silver. He was running towards Drew. So everything that mattered to me was pretty much here and now, and I stepped into his path. I had one flicker of time, one bare instant. I threw my punch.
Lenny grunted and went down. He hit the floor like a bag of rocks. Astonishment bypassed me: I’d feel it later, that and the reverberation up and down my arm. I jumped over his body and ran for the stairs.
Oh, God. Oh, God, I would have the life out of the bastard. No, I decided, changing my mind mid-dash across the squalid basement room. Lenny can keep his damn life, if only, if only... I crashed to my knees beside the bed where Silver lay face-down, naked and still. His hands were cruelly hitched to the metal frame, their skin blue-grey. A filthy lump of rope was in his mouth. He was bleeding profusely from a wound to the back of his head. Oh, God.
I found a pulse in his throat. “Andrew,” I bellowed, not looking up, and felt rather than saw his arrival at my side. “Don’t touch the ropes. They tighten when you pull. Call an ambulance. Go up to the kitchen. Get me a knife or something—there’s got to be something there. Go on.”
It took him a second. “Fuck,” he said, staring wide-eyed at the bed. “Fuck. Is he alive?”
“Yeah, but he won’t be if you stand there gawping! Go!”
His footsteps retreated. “Fuck,” I heard him say on his way back up the stairs, and then, as he clattered about in the kitchen, “Fuck, fuck, fuck. Oh, I’m sorry—yes. I need police and an ambulance, please. Twelve, Langley Road, Kensal Green.”
I got a finger into the knot at Silver’s nape. Carefully, carefully, fingers dampening with his blood, I unfastened the gag and eased it out of his mouth. The movement woke him: he choked and began to fight. “No,” I said, grabbing him around the shoulders, trying to lift. “It’s me. It’s George. You’re safe now, but we’ve got to get you untied. Andrew!”
Jamie appeared at my side. He was pale as a cod, and I didn’t want the bond that had formed between us—our shared knowledge of the flesh of this bruised, bleeding man—but at the same time I was glad of it. Nobody else would have a clue. “He’s hurt,” I said desperately. “We’ve got to help him.”
“Andrew’s on the phone. Hold him still.”
“Okay. What are you...” I lost the end of the question as Jamie unshipped, from somewhere in his office gear, a six-inch hunting knife. The blade was honed and made short work of the ropes. “Jesus,” I said, as Silver gave a cry of pain and relief and dropped into my arms. “Do you always carry that?”
“What would you carry, if you were divorcing Lenny Price?”
“Pershing missile, probably.”
Jamie flickered me a tiny grin. “No need in your case, is there? Do you have training?”
“In what?”
He shook his head. “Never mind. Lucky punch, I suppose.”
I helped Silver onto his back. His gaze was wide and lost, all its brown debonair warm lights extinguished. He was breathing slowly and carefully, as if underwater with a limited oxygen supply. After a moment of terrible blankness, he focussed. “George.”
“Yes. Here.” I found an inadequate scrap of tissue and tried to dab it to the back of his head. “Shit, you’re bleeding a lot.”
“Head wounds... Head wounds do.”
“An ambulance is coming.” I didn’t know what to do with myself, now that I had him and he was alive. I wanted to knock a hole in the floor, carry him out of this stinking place and emerge with him on a beach in the Bahamas, where I’d be his cabana boy, heal his injuries and punch anyone who came near us in the face. “You’re going to be all right.”
“Lenny. Where is he?”
“Upstairs. Don’t worry, we got him.”
“You got him? Bloody hell, George.”
“Not just me,” I said, taking hold of one blue-tinged hand and trying to rub life back into it. “Andrew and Jamie too. We’re all here. You’re safe.”
Silver struggled to sit up. I could see his pulse beating wildly in his throat, but the measured, starvation-supply breathing continued. “Jamie?” he echoed, looking round. “Ah. There you are.”
“Yeah,” Jamie said grimly. “I’m so sorry, man. I brought this on you.”
Silver grabbed me and used me like a scaffold to hoist himself upright. I thought he was hardly aware of me, but I didn’t care. I loved it, even—loved that I was something safe and firm enough to be blindly seized and used. “You did?” he rasped. “How do you figure that?”
“Your card. I told him about you, and I left it in the house. He found it.”
“Okay. Listen. He was gonna do this to somebody anyway. He’d have found me some
how. So...” He gripped me harder, and I leaned into his bruising, living strength. “So I’m gonna press every charge I can, and you are too, for all the times he’s knocked you around in the past. Get the army involved. Neighbours, witnesses. Put the bastard away and have your life. And now...”
Jamie swallowed hard. “And now fuck off, Jamie. Right?”
“All I was gonna say was... will you go and get my holdall for me from upstairs? I’ve got to phone the agency.”
I drew a breath to tell him they’d already been called, but he got a subtle fingertip to my mouth. It might not be fuck off, Jamie, but he wanted something, needed something that could only happen without him in the room. He waited, and his breathing dropped to nothing. To silence. Jamie was gone. I gave him a little shake. “Silver?”
“Nothing. It’s okay.”
“Tell me. I’ve got you. I’m not gonna let anybody hurt you now.”
“It’s just that he... gagged me, and I couldn’t get any air in through my mouth. And I know some breathing techniques, to stay calm when you’re in danger, so I started doing those. And now... now I can’t stop. Feels like I’m suffocating.”
I knew a trick worth two of that. Poor Melchior before a big concert, hyperventilating in the wings... I put my arms around Silver and rocked him. “Hold your breath.”
“What? No. Feels like I’ve got a pillow over my head as it is.”
“Just for five seconds. Do it.”
The briefest pause in the shallow, scraping rhythm. “Okay. Now what?”
“Hold it for ten.” I stroked his beautiful naked back while he obeyed. “Did the bastard rape you, Sil?”
A raw, shallow inhalation. “Oh, Christ. He said you can’t rape a whore. Is that true?”
I wanted to round up and set fire to anyone throughout all of history who’d ever held such a shitty excuse for a belief. “No, it is bloody well not. Did he?”
“No. He was gonna. Then... this bloody thunderclap from upstairs, which must’ve been the Fenchurch A-team busting through the door.” A rough chuckle shook him. “Oh, my God.”
“I thought I’d lost you. I couldn’t have stood that.” Having said so much, I thought I might as well make a clean breast of everything. “I love you.”
He hauled in a breath, a proper one at last: all the way, lungs unlocking to their depth. “Jesus, I love you too! When did that happen?”
“Must’ve been when I sent you that photo of the house.”
“Oh. That was for me, then?”
“Yeah. One step short of I want your babies, wasn’t it?”
That did it. He choked, coughed, buried his face against my shoulder. “I didn’t want to die down here, George. I didn’t...”
He broke into ragged sobs. Relief and rage tore through me. Where the fuck was the ambulance, and where were the police, or whoever would stop me from finding Lenny Price and ripping out his pancreas? All I got was my brother, tramping down the stairs with his mouth still wide open in shock, Jamie bringing up the rear with the holdall. “What are you doing?” I demanded over Silver’s shoulder, shielding his skull with my hand. “Who’s looking after Lenny?”
“He’s tied to the radiator,” Drew said, cautiously approaching the bed. He jerked a thumb in Jamie’s direction. “This one did the tying. There’s rope up there, and all the doors and windows are locked from the inside. What kind of bastard is Lenny? Did he hurt him very much? Is he...”
“Shut up, Drew,” I said, not really minding his babble. “He’s freaked out and concussed. We need to get him out of here. Where the hell are the police?”
“On their way. I heard sirens when I was upstairs.” He laid down the holdall and gave Silver a tentative pat. “There’s your bag, mate. Don’t be upset. We’ll get you all sorted out.”
He never could bear to see anyone cry. His kids manipulated the weakness shamelessly. As if picking up on his distress, Silver gave a rasping gulp and stopped. He raised his head, pushed me back a very little way. “I’m all right,” he managed. “Just freaked out, like George said.” He held out a hand. “You’ve got to be Andrew.”
“I am, yeah. Pleased to meet you, though not like this.”
“Aaron Silver. Your brother’s birthday present.”
“Looks to me like he’d better keep you. Jamie, he’s freezing—nip up to the bedrooms and see if you can find a blanket or something, will you?”
Used to taking Andrew’s friendly orders around the office, Jamie whipped round and headed back for the stairs. A siren shook the dust from the air. Tyres squealed on tarmac outside. Relief and a sudden memory forced a racked chuckle from me, and Drew looked at me in concern. “What’s up with you?”
“I was just thinking about... the time you first met Melchior, sitting in that bloody awful little wine bar in West Ken.”
“Oh, God, yeah. The one where I asked for a pint, and the guy behind the bar said, a pint of what, sir? Pinot noir?”
“You did your best with him, didn’t you—Melchior, I mean? But the pair of you were like two cats.”
“Well, yeah. We both tried, but... I’d rather meet you and this new chap in a pub for Sunday lunch, that’s for sure. Sorry, Mr Silver... er, Aaron—I don’t mean to make plans for you, but—”
“It’s just Sil,” Silver interrupted, finding a worn-out smile. “And I can’t imagine anything better right now than Sunday lunch in a...”
He stopped, listening. Andrew and I exchanged a look. A door had banged upstairs on the ground floor, but if that had been the police barging in, there was none of the follow-up I’d expected: no businesslike crackle of radios, no pounding feet. Only a silence. And then a crisp, concerned woman’s voice: Hold on. Easy, easy. He’s taken a hostage.
“Oh, shit. Jamie.” Andrew straightened up. He made a move to turn, but Silver grabbed his wrist and held tight. “Quiet,” he said, and something in his voice stilled both of us, absolutely as foxes in a den. He let go of Andrew and hauled himself off the bed. He could barely move. He evaded the hand I put out to stop him, and crouched just out of my reach.
Jamie reappeared on the stairs. The savage-looking knife he’d used to cut Silver’s ropes was in Lenny’s fist now, the blade pressed to his throat. Lenny’s bulk filled the stairwell, seemed in my fear-shaken vision to loom to the top of the house, to the sky. To all the places I thought of as freedom. The pub lunch. The terraced house in the Vale, so ordinary, now light-years away. “You’ll never believe this,” Lenny grated, shoving Jamie down another step. He was sweating, muscles jumping in his jaw. “Never fucking believe it, but I tried to make it right with this bitch when she decided she was a man. Thought she might be a comrade, you know?”
Jamie writhed. I wanted to beg him to stay still—the blade had already pierced his skin—but he’d gone to some point beyond fear or the hope of self-preservation. His eyes were vacant and black. “I was always your comrade,” he snarled. “It was never about being a man or a woman. It was about being a soldier.”
“Fair enough.” Christ, nothing was fair: Lenny wrapped his free arm around Jamie’s chest and jerked up so hard that his feet left the ground. “A soldier. Whatever.” His gaze sought Silver’s, gloating, sly. “But I never could teach the stupid little shit to tie a knot.”
A uniformed police officer was making her way down the stairs too, leaving a cautious gap between herself and Lenny’s broad back. We hadn’t warranted any kind of SWAT team down here in the Kensal basement: I could hear her male colleague asking for backup in the room above, and I thought there might be just the two of them. “Leonard,” she said, surveying the room over his shoulder. “Did you hurt that guy over there, the one who’s bleeding?”
Lenny gave a snort. “That whore? Yeah, he got what he deserved.”
“Okay. You’re in a shed-load of trouble already, then. You can still make it right. Drop the weapon and let your hostage go.”
“I don’t think so. Having way too much fun.” He hustled Jamie down the last of the steps
and into the basement room. “You all like this bitch of mine so much. All I hear is George did this for me, Andrew paid for that. Okay, then—which one of you self-righteous pricks is prepared to save her life?”
A life worth saving. Time seemed to stop for me, or rather to slide, great broad brushstrokes of existence glimmering on memory’s canvas. Meeting Jess and losing her. Melchior, racked so hard by music that he was scarcely human. The crown of Sabrina’s baby’s head appearing, jewelled with blood. I’d had so much time and life, after all. Enough for my own boy, if he’d lived, to be older than this one here. “What would I have to do to do that?”
Silver made a savage gesture at me. Andrew said, “Shut up, George,” as if I’d just offered to swap one of his Tonka trucks for the kid next door’s marbles. But Lenny grinned. “You, you fat little fuck? Always the ones you least expect, isn’t it? Come over here, then. You can take her place.”
I didn’t dare look at the glittering trail I’d thought might lead away from here, the broad brushstrokes of my future. Silver had said he loved me. But in a way Lenny was right—I was a fat little fuck, a civilian and a desk-jock and whatever else he’d get round to calling me in time. I’d never done anything really brave in my life. “Okay.”
Lenny gave a choked roar of laughter. He shot out an arm. He was closer to me, his reach longer, his grasp far fucking harder than I could’ve known. He yanked me in, with the same powerful movement shoving Jamie off to one side. Jamie hit the wall and dropped, a rag doll thrown out of a toddler’s cot.
This toddler was pissing me off. I knew that I was neck-deep in the shit. I could see my brother’s face, grey-tinged and sick. I could see Silver, expressionless in a way I was coming to understand meant more than an outright scream. Lenny’s fist was gouging muscle from bone on my shoulder, his knife blade pricking my throat. But for God’s sake. “Could you stop calling people names for five minutes?” I demanded. “And... you know what? If you could stop misgendering Jamie, that would be great. How does it help? What’s the point? He’s ten times the man you’ll ever be, rampaging around the place threatening fat little fucks like me with a knife, so—”