by Gary Bell
After three successful trials for him, this pseudo Yardie hired me to defend his youngest son, Nelson, on a charge of armed robbery. Nelson had decided to help himself to the valuables of a student house in Hyson Green, allegedly using a hefty knife to subdue the three young lads living there, while he pocketed their girlfriends’ handbags. He was caught only a mile from the scene with the stolen goods, riding a stolen bike, and then identified upon parade. During the trial, however, I managed to prove that the victims had fabricated the knife out of embarrassment about failing to confront the intruder. I’d thought the day was won.
The three pairs of size elevens that had just battered my sides were a stark reminder of why a barrister should never make guarantees of success to a client before the jury’s verdict. Oddly, failed defendants never blame the coppers who arrest them, the barrister who prosecutes, the jury who convicts, the judge who sentences, or themselves; it’s always the defence barrister’s fault.
One of Nelson’s cohorts panicked, voice muffled by a scarf that I only now noticed, with a sting of irony adding to my injuries, to be the red-and-white stripes of Nottingham Forest.
‘Fuck! Shut him up, man!’
Nelson’s hand went into his pocket, and this time the air in my lungs escaped me, as the sliver of a blade in his hand caught the yellow of the nearest street light. The scar on my chest burned with fear.
‘Stick him,’ one of them hissed. ‘Do it, Gangsta!’
They spoke with Notts-interpretations of Jamaican accents, but I would’ve wagered that none of them had ever stepped foot in Kingston.
I swallowed hard. ‘You’re going to stick me on camera, are you, Nelson?’
He hesitated; with a careful tip of the head I gestured to the front of the hotel behind me, hoping it was dark enough to prevent them from calling my bluff.
I must’ve split his lip with my only successful swing because blood was gathering in dark lines between his bared teeth, flecking onto the ground, and a smudge of grey ash had burned across his dark, bony cheek like chalk.
I got painfully to my feet, the sound of blood pounding through my ears, pushing heat up and out of a gash in my hairline, and stepped closer to the edge of the blade. Adrenaline can make even the wisest man a fool. ‘You see that on the floor?’
His eyes darted down and then back up to me in a fraction of a second, the tremble in his hand bringing the knife nearer.
The dark spatter he saw on the ground was, I knew, most likely my own blood, but I’d split his lip, and he’d never been the sharpest kid to begin with.
‘That’s your DNA,’ I told him. ‘Hard evidence. You do this, leave me here to die in a puddle of your blood, on camera, and it won’t take Sherlock to look back and figure out a motive. You’re still sobbing about a few months? You’ll go down for life, and it won’t be a fucking nursery like the last time. You think you’ll make it with the big boys in Category A?’
His tongue quivered fast and snakelike, collecting the blood from his chin, eyes burning from under his hood.
‘Let’s take him up to the water!’ one of his accomplices cried through his scarf. ‘Do him there!’
‘My partner’s inside!’ I could hear my words falling faster and faster, betraying my cool, and I showed them my empty palms. ‘She knows I came out for a cigarette, and she can ID your car from the mosque. I’m guessing you rang every hotel in the city to find out where I was staying. Clever! You think they won’t be able to trace that? You reckon they won’t have your car picked up on automatic number-plate recognition?’ A pause, an exchange of nervous glances, so I swirled a gobful of metallic spit and propelled it onto the pavement. ‘Just making sure there’s a decent trail.’
The closest assailant quickly scrubbed at the spit with the sole of his Nikes, as if to wash it away.
‘That’s it,’ I said, ‘you just get that DNA all over your person. Good idea!’
I could see they were rattled, each waiting for the other to make a move, and I risked no sudden gestures; if my work has taught me anything, it’s that there are few things more lethal than anxious men forced into a corner.
Nelson pressed the blade up against the wool of my coat, undergoing what appeared to be a serious internal struggle, then he pulled it back to his side, and gritted bloodied teeth. ‘See you’re still the fucking clever cunt.’
‘It’s a curse,’ I shrugged, and reached into my pocket for another cigarette; when I brought it up to my lips, it was vibrating wildly in my grip.
‘Fuck him. Let’s get the fuck out of here,’ Nelson muttered to the others, and they started to storm away, returning to the car. ‘Don’t come back, Rook. If I see you again, you’re a dead man.’
I didn’t dare respond with any sort of rejoinder. My head was pounding, dizziness almost throwing me over as I bent to collect my scattered papers from the gutter, and then I looked at the crumpled sheets in my hand and paused.
‘Wait!’ Even after the attack, the hard-wired barrister inside had sensed an opportunity. ‘I want to ask you something!’
They turned, car doors already open, Nelson at the passenger side.
‘You what?’
I wiped a thin streak of wet warmth from my forehead, smearing blood onto the back of my smoking hand, and thrust one of the sheets towards them; it had curled almost closed in the damp.
‘Any of you ever seen this girl on your scene?’
‘Our scene?’
‘You know,’ I said, ‘whatever you’re into.’
Nelson glowered truculently, clenching his jaw, kneading his right fist. ‘We ain’t into nothing.’
‘No? What is that?’ I nodded to the car. ‘Last year’s registration? What are you, the Midlands’ three amigos of investment banking? I don’t think so.’
They exchanged glances, bemused, and I had to admit to myself that it was a strange turn of events.
That’s just how life is sometimes. Every fight has to end somehow.
‘Come on,’ I said, checking the road in both directions, the emptiness of the fog, ‘just look at the fucking picture.’
Nelson scoured the empty windows overhead, leaned forward, cagey.
‘Could be anyone,’ he muttered. ‘What’d you take this on, fucking Nokia 3210?’
‘All right,’ I growled, rummaging through the damp, creased pages in my hands, ‘then how about this one?’
I shoved it up to his face and he reeled back against the car. It was indeed of a much clearer quality, her face now beaten, bloated and broken beyond repair. I shouldn’t have done it, but a few fists to the head tend to provoke the worst in me.
‘I don’t know nothing about that shit!’ Nelson cried. ‘You ain’t pinning that on us!’
‘Why?’ I jabbed. ‘Did you do it? Some of your homeboys get a little carried away one night in spring?’
‘I ain’t never seen her in my life!’ Nelson spat, and I switched my glare to his cohorts, who were hastily shaking their heads.
‘What about working girls? Prostitutes? You ever heard about that going on down in Cotgrave?’
Nelson shrugged. ‘Happens everywhere, doesn’t it?’
‘This would’ve been about six months back.’
He nodded slowly, circumspectly, still checking around. ‘There was a pop-up down there for a bit, but it ain’t there no more.’
‘A what?’
‘Ain’t you meant to be a lawyer?’ He rubbed his lip with his free hand; both were swelling by the second, and a youthful part of me was glad to know I could still throw a good punch.
‘You mean a pop-up brothel?’
‘Yeah. They find a place for rent, send one of their gals round to check it out, dressed up all nice, pay deposit in cash. All happy families, far as the landlord’s concerned. Then they move the rest of the gals in and run them until they have to move on.’
‘You’re talking about, what, a gang?’
‘I don’t know. Albanians or some shit, straight-up Bad Men, they bring them o
ver here and put them to work.’
‘Any idea where they’re set up now?’ I asked, perhaps a little too eagerly.
One of the others laughed, shaking his head in disbelief, and pulled the scarf down from his face; he was much younger than Nelson, only twenty if he was a day. ‘Man wants some pussy, is it? Course we know where it is!’
‘Reckon you can take me there?’
I heard myself say it without thinking, and Nelson’s jaw actually dropped.
‘Now I know you’re playing. You think we’re gun’ get your blood and mess in our car for the courts? You can fuck right off, Rook. Take your games elsewhere.’
‘Come on,’ I said, folding the case papers and slipping them into my coat pocket, flicking the filter of the cigarette off into the fog. ‘I bet you’ve got a couple of napkins knocking around in that glovebox to clean me up. I’ll keep my hands to myself. Just get me to the right place, and it might help me forget about that assault with a deadly weapon that just happened on camera …’
He glowered, weighing his options, and now the driver spoke. ‘No fucking way. Not in my car!’
‘Shut the fuck up, Ross!’ Nelson snapped, and then he went rummaging through the glovebox, cursing under his breath, and tossed me a single-sachet, lemon-scented hand wipe, before checking the street one final time, and gesturing into the back seat.
It was only once I was inside, sobering fast with my attackers around me, lemon-scented wipe bloodied and blowing away down Fletcher Gate, that I remembered my mobile phone charging peacefully in the room, and decided that this might’ve been the worst idea I’d ever had.
Nobody spoke a word as the car rumbled into the belly of St Ann’s, built on the rubble of my birthplace.
The slick fog lights grinned over the shadows of Hungerhill, one of the oldest allotments in the world, and I tried to snub the nauseating image of being found bullet-riddled or shanked there, eighteen stone of fertiliser left for the autumn squashes.
Even when we got to the place, and I wasted no time scrambling out of the car, I was half expecting to spring a sudden leak from somewhere between my shoulder blades.
‘Here we end, Rook,’ Nelson snarled as he let me out, pointing one hand off to the shadow of the house. ‘We didn’t see each other tonight, and we ain’t never going to see each other again, you get me?’
‘That’s fine by me, Nelson,’ I said, backing away. ‘Let’s forget this ever happened.’
And then the door was slammed and the car rolled off into the dark, leaving only the smell of fumes clinging to the fog in the otherwise empty suburb around me.
Darkness, and little else.
Relief rushed through me like iced water to the parched, but the sensation was just as quick to evaporate by the time I reached the house ahead.
18
That place.
It wasn’t a structurally attractive building by any means, but at least it matched its dismal, blockish, pebble-dashed neighbours; it might’ve even made an inviting little retirement snug in another time that wasn’t so distant, a universe not too far.
Unfortunately, as with so many other, similar council estates, the area had turned into a clash of generations; the settled elderly residents had suddenly had the young, urban-poor shoved in atop them, and lovingly tended gardens were now interspersed by overgrown yards strewn with litter, hand-me-down see-saws, broken prams and, in one case, an adjustable weight bench, rusting in the damp.
Only one house out of twelve had its lights on in the dead-end road. My watch said it was coming up to two.
Pink, orange and red glowed faintly at the edges of thick, mismatched curtains, and I could hear the steady bass of music coming from within as I entered the unkempt garden, stepping carefully over the scattered glass of a vodka bottle, the ammonia stink of alcoholic piss.
Reason urged me to turn back, sanity told me to leave, but the door ahead opened before I had the chance, making the fateful decision for me, and I froze.
A man was standing in the doorway.
His classic Eastern European buzz cut was marbled by scarring where the hair no longer grew, his brow was a solid brick above a fat, meaty nose, and his eyes were as dead as any I’d encountered in the dock. He filled the door frame completely in his black tracksuit and trainers, blocking all the surreptitious goings-on, except for the music.
Words wouldn’t come straight away, so I just stood there, pain prickling around my head, coat held tight against the penetrating chill of the fog. I’d mopped as much of the blood away as the napkin had allowed, but I suspected it had been a poor attempt.
Incredibly, the stranger said not a word, but gestured me inside with one massive hand. Ignoring my own final plea for sagacity, I followed.
What hit me first was the stench.
Beneath the heady soaking of cheap perfume, it smelled of sweat, ash and the musk of cum-stained fabrics, the chemical smoke of crack cocaine drifting from the dark upstairs, sweet and synthetic as plastic and caramel burning in a rusted tin.
I was led through to the kitchen, or what once had been a kitchen, where a thin red veil was now draped over the only lamp on the worktop, casting crimson light onto the rising damp, which lifted speckled wallpaper up in waves beneath the wood-panelled ceiling. Instead of culinary equipment, the sides were scattered with glass ashtrays, empty cans of weak, supermarket-brand lager, and an assortment of erect dildos, with one especially intimidating model drying off in the sink beside an empty plate.
The music flowed through the whole house from a source unseen, but it couldn’t silence the pressing moans behind every wall, which suggested I was standing in one of the only rooms that hadn’t been transformed into a makeshift boudoir. Indeed, I caught just a glimpse into the old sitting room down the hall, and saw a mattress laid out there like a camping bed, a webcam pointing at the shadow of long legs stretched out and open over the sheets.
Times had changed since Aidan and I had gone down to Forest Road, Nottingham’s red-light district of the early eighties, to watch the girls from afar in the small hours after a miserable defeat at the City Ground. That was still years before the Kerb Crawling Taskforce had driven them away from the corners with cameras and plain-clothed patrols, and it was believed then that as many as three hundred were working in the area; copping a look-see was a renowned pastime for the bolder young lads, and we were feeling brave. It was only when we’d reached around the thirty-metre point that we spotted a man who looked a lot like Sean, bartering with two ladies on the next corner, and we scarpered, humiliated, and didn’t speak of the evening again.
Since then, I’d never approached a brothel, and certainly never seen such a rank, surreal locale for one, and yet the women of the house were staggeringly attractive, or else might have been, were they not slightly malnourished, or strung-out on whatever poison abounded there. They moved back and forth through the shadows of the building, every curve punctuated by jutting bone under flimsy translucent slips, with dark hair and naked legs. I even spotted a young man in loose pyjama trousers slinking out of the sitting room and up the staircase; barely into his twenties, he threw me a wink from an eye surrounded by burn scars, drinking a pint of milk straight from the bottle and revealing his bare back, where a tattoo of a torero in traditional traje de luces fluttered a great scarlet flag.
The alcohol that had bolstered my actions seemed to be draining through a gaping sinkhole, replacing itself with growing unease.
I had no idea what I was doing there.
The intermediary who had let me into the building kept a watchful eye from his post by the bottom of the staircase as the compering duties were handed over to the madam of the evening, a tall woman with sharp features and piercing black eyes, a prominent collarbone and slightly sallow skin.
She looked at the swelling around my face and lifted the arc of her painted eyebrows.
‘Rough night?’
Jagged appearance aside, her voice was every bit as silky as the flowing gown she
wore, and textured with the undertones of a faraway land; my snap decision to force a local accent, on the other hand, meant reversing my time-worn disguise for an altogether blunter approach.
‘Aye, you could say that.’
She studied my face. ‘I don’t know you?’
‘Doubt it, love.’
She shook her head. ‘We arrange our business online. The girls are listed on Red Sheets, and you can book an appointment on here.’
‘Ah, come on,’ I teased. ‘You wouldn’t believe the night I’ve had. I could really use some attention,’ and before she had chance to refuse again, I fished out the wallet that I’d thankfully kept in my coat pocket, carefully covering my protruding driving licence with one thumb, and showed her the wad of money inside.
I had the strangest memory then, of getting those precious brown envelopes on Friday afternoons, back when nobody I knew even bothered having a bank account. It was a habit I hadn’t grown out of – carrying cash – something of a working-class giveaway, but now it paid off.
‘I’m good for it,’ I said, ‘clean, and I won’t be any trouble.’
For a moment, I thought we’d hit a wall. Cajoled by the presence of hard cash, however, she quickly changed her mind, and went on to list the price of every available service in crude detail, as pragmatically as a market butcher peddling value meat from a stall. The rates were so low I’d be ashamed to ever repeat them out loud. I handed over the money and then she offered me my pick of the litter, calling for three of them to come and form a neat line like suspects in an identity parade. Two almost looked like they might be interested in what was happening, while the other seemed lost in a glazed, introspective trance. Coupled with the rising hangover, it all made me feel quite sick.