by Mark Pearson
‘I’m sorry, Bob. I was miles away. What were you saying?’
Wilkinson laughed. ‘I was just saying you were miles away and wondered what was on your mind?’
Kate opened her mouth to reply but at that moment a loud scream, piercing and terrified, came from a side road just ahead of them. They both ran and quickly turned the corner. A woman in her mid-twenties was leaning back against a wall, one hand to her mouth, her legs buckling at the knees, looking as though she was about to topple over. Further up the road, and disappearing fast, a youth in a hooded top was running away. Bob turned to Kate. ‘You see to her and I’ll get him.’
The sergeant set off at a run and Kate jogged quickly over to where the woman was gagging into her hand. ‘Did he hurt you? Has he robbed you? What’s happened?’
The woman took her hand away from her mouth, her eyes wide with fear, with shock. She shook her head, unable to speak, and stumbled a couple of yards to throw up in the gutter. Kate stepped across to help her but she pointed with a shaking finger to the alleyway behind them, a narrow passage running between two houses. Kate walked back and looked – she had missed it as she ran up but now she could see what had distressed the woman. A young dark-haired and dark-skinned man, she couldn’t tell his nationality in the shadows, lay slumped face up on the ground. He was maybe Middle Eastern, she thought, it was hard to tell in the dim light, but what she could tell from the blood staining his bright white shirt and dripping onto his outstretched and motionless hand was that he had been stabbed or shot and left to die.
She rushed over to kneel beside him, putting a slender finger on his cooling throat, checking his carotid artery for signs of life. She gently felt the wound, determining that he had indeed been stabbed, and took off her white woollen scarf – cashmere and a present from Jack. Folding it, she made it into a compress which she held against the wounded man’s chest.
A short while later a breathless Bob Wilkinson returned.
‘The little bastard got away. Oh shit …’ He didn’t finish the sentence when he saw what Kate was attending to. ‘Is he dead?’
Kate looked up at him. ‘There’s a faint cardiac rhythm. Very weak. An ambulance is on its way.’ She took off her coat to drape it around the cold and unconscious man and Bob immediately took his off and offered it to her.
‘I’ll be fine, thanks, Bob.’
‘Yeah, you may well be but I won’t. Jack Delaney would have my balls for conkers and dangling on two bits of string if he found out.’
Kate smiled briefly. Then she turned back to look at the man on the ground. His eyes cold, his dark skin looking pale in the moonlight, his lips thin and bloodless. This city, she thought.
This bloody city.
*
The girl turned in her bed. Voices had awoken her, raised voices. Voices fat with alcohol and drugs. Slurred with anger and cruelty. She put an arm over her head and sighed – she couldn’t blot out the sound. She heard a slap and a gasp of pain. And then the woman’s voice shouting back and another slap and a thump. And then silence.
She looked across at the window, the curtains not fully closed. She looked out at the dark night sky, brooding clouds swelling low over the city like the belly of some alien creature. She’d seen Doctor Who, seen London threatened by monsters time and time again. She was fourteen years old, nearly fifteen and she already knew that monsters didn’t come out of the sky or from the back of wardrobes or portals in time and space. They came from now. They came from next door. They came from downstairs.
She heard the creak on the steps and knew what was coming next. Better her, she thought. Better her.
The door opened, a spill of light from the downstairs lounge threading its way across the dust-laden carpet of her bedroom. The man peering through the light, unsteady on his feet, his shirt hanging untidily half in and half out of his trousers. His face looking like it had been moulded from wax and been left too long under a hot sun, his eyes small and cold like a guinea pig’s. She could smell his rank odour coming off him like waves of heat. His mouth opened in a crooked cruel smile, and she could imagine the fetid breath, could remember the crude words whispered in her ear. It wasn’t pain any more, at least not in a physical way.
‘It’s all right, darling, she’s asleep,’ he said, smiling and stumbling forward, bracing himself with one hand against the door frame. He tried to make his voice seductive, inviting her to be complicit in her own abuse.
The girl rolled onto her front again and lifted her nightdress. There was no point talking. She had learned the hard way that to pretend to want him just meant it was worse when he had finished. That she was to blame. That it was all her fault. She knew better, and she knew the angers that raged within him were beyond his control. She knew why her aunt had got drunk and shitfaced and had taken herself away with needles in her arm until one day she just took herself away for good. She knew why he only wanted her like a boy. The thought of it now chilled her to the bone as she realised that everything was changing. Time was running out.
She heard the porcine grunt, felt his filthy hands hold her, felt him enter into her. Her eyes pricked with the pain at first, tears that she blinked back, willed back, and then her eyes went as cold and dark as the sky outside, as flat and still as water under a full moon.
Better her, she thought. Better her.
His time was coming.
*
Kate closed the door quietly behind her. It was one o’clock and the house was quiet. She glanced into the lounge, but the lights were off. She eased off her shoes with her feet and went quietly into her bedroom. A soft gentle snoring told her that Jack had let himself in, and she was glad. She slipped out of her clothes, shrugged into her bathrobe and, closing the door quietly behind her again, walked to the bathroom, a foolish smile playing on her lips. Jack was all kinds of trouble, she knew that. It was like bringing a whirlwind into her life, but the thing was … she couldn’t picture life without him any more. She held a hand to her normally flat stomach and felt a slight swelling there now, as though she ought to be cutting back on the four-seasons pizzas. Except that Kate knew it wasn’t due to an unhealthy diet, it was due to Jack Delaney. The father of her child.
She let her bathrobe fall to the floor stepped into the cubicle and turned the shower on, adjusting the temperature. She stood underneath the powerful jets of water and felt the tension easing from her body as the water pummelled her flesh. A few months before and she would have had the water a lot hotter, punishing her flesh. Scourging the demons within. Burning the pain and the hurt and the guilt away. Now she just had it hot. Hot enough to wash the smoke and the grime and the smell of the city off her, but not hot enough to hurt. Not any more.
Kate gasped as a large powerful hand snaked around her waist and pulled her backwards against him. She had been so lost in her thoughts that she hadn’t heard him enter.
‘Room for a little one,’ said Jack Delaney.
Kate laughed. A musical, deep-throated laugh that came from deep within her.
‘I thought you were getting up early?’
Delaney leaned in and whispered in her ear. ‘I am.’
Kate pressed back against him and smiled again as she reached around with her own hand. ‘That you certainly are.’
SATURDAY
Outside Bayfield Prison. Morning. Six-thirty. The dawn only just about breaking. Dark but getting lighter by the minute. Not getting any warmer, though. Dampness hung in the air like a very fine mist. Not raining, at least, which was about the only good thing you could say about it, thought Melanie Jones as she adjusted the belt on her raincoat, folded her arms and flapped her hands against them, trying to coax some warmth into her shivering body. The raincoat had been bought from Aquascutum on Piccadilly for a small fortune and might well have kept the rain out but it certainly didn’t keep any heat in. It wasn’t the money she’d spent that she objected to, either: it was the fact that she needed to buy a raincoat at all. Bloody England – that was the prob
lem. London in particular. Sodding London. Sodding rain-sodden London. She was still here! If she had her way she’d be out on the west coast of America where the news stations knew how to respect talent and you only saw a raincoat on late-night reruns of Colombo on a golden-oldies channel. America, the land of opportunity – that was where a woman like her rightly belonged. You wouldn’t catch Fox America putting old battleaxes front of camera in a month of sunny bloody Sundays, would you, she thought bitterly as she stamped her feet in a little dance to keep warm. At least she was with Sky and not having to put up with BBC intellectuals past their sell-by date, banging on about age discrimination. That kind of approach to the industry belonged in the 1930s when you had to wear a bow tie even to read the news on the radio!
Anybody could be intellectual if they read enough books. Oxford and Cambridge had about sixty colleges between them, for goodness’ sake. Brains were ten a penny. But what Melanie Jones had was looks, and she knew it. God-given beauty. And you couldn’t buy that, no matter how good your plastic surgeon was. Just ask Michael Jackson. She looked up at the sky, growing increasingly more pregnant with the possibility of rain, scowled, and thrust her hands deep in her pockets.
‘Here you go, Melanie. Milk, no sugar.’
Melanie took the cup of tea and nodded at Simon Harvey, the eager cameraman who had just handed her the drink. He was in his early thirties but still dressed like he was a film-school student, wearing black jeans, a black jacket and black Doc Martens on his feet. He was smiling at her with puppy-dog eyes. If he’d had a tail she reckoned it would have been wagging nineteen to the dozen. Men! All driven by urges they couldn’t control. Every single last one of them.
They were among a crowd of press and TV journalists and a large mob of the angry public who were waiting outside the prison that morning, despite the cold and the early hour. The anger simmering through the crowd like tidal energy. An anger that had been building for days, ever since the press had splashed across the front pages the news that one of the prison’s more famous inmates, Peter Garnier, had finally broken his vow of silence. The fury had been building for fifteen long years and for the last three days it had simmered to boiling point. Today was the day that he had agreed to take the police to his last burial ground. He was going to take them to the bodies.
Even his name sounded distasteful to Melanie Jones. Peter Garnier, she thought, with an involuntary shudder that had nothing to do with the cold, damp air. Peter Garnier. There was a man who certainly couldn’t control his urges.
A loud trilling sound startled Melanie Jones out of her thoughts. She pulled her mobile phone from her pocket and read the message on it.
She clicked it shut, put down her cup of tea on someone’s car bonnet and nodded excitedly at her cameraman,
‘Come on, Jimmy Olsen. We’re out of here.’
Simon Harvey had a good five inches on her but he had to lengthen his stride to catch up with her.
*
Graham Harper, seventy-six and feeling every year, set his cup back on its saucer. It rattled a little as his trembling hand fought to keep itself steady. The volume went up on his television as it always did when the ads came on. He picked up the remote control, pushed mute and then, his hands still shaking, as they did permanently now, he picked up a packet of cigarettes. His tired eyes blinked as he fumbled a cigarette out and into his mouth and searched in his dressing-gown pocket for his lighter.
He was sitting in the lounge of his two-bedroom end-of-terrace house. A cluttered room, dark with the curtains drawn, and a single lamp and the television providing the only illumination. His daughter had been on at him for ages to sell the place. Put himself in sheltered housing. But he’d worked hard all his adult life and now he was retired he’d be damned if he’d be put in another home again. They’d carry him out and up the street in a wooden box before he’d let that happen. He found his lighter and held it cupped between his knobbly hands, scarred and twisted with arthritis, and after a few rolls of the wheel managed to spark a flame and light the cigarette. He inhaled lightly and after a couple of hacking coughs cursed under his laboured breath as he heard a key turning in his front door and footsteps clattering on the tiled floor of his hallway.
‘Only me and Archie.’
Rosemary Woods was a tall strident red-haired woman in her forties. She came into the room, tugging an eight-year-old boy behind her. While her hair was a tamed auburn, hanging straight to her shoulders, her son Archie’s hair was wild and curly, such a dark brown that it was almost black. He had hazel, impish eyes, and was tugging on his mother’s hand, clearly not happy to be there. Rosemary shook his hand angrily and glared at him and Archie let go. Rosemary took off his padded coat.
‘Now you just behave for your grandfather.’
Beneath the coat Archie was wearing the brand-new Chelsea strip, bright blue with SAMSUNG written in bold white letters across it, over a pair of jeans and black and white trainers. ‘I want to go to Johnny’s house,’ he said. But he quietened as his mother turned to him with another exasperated look.
‘Well, for the hundredth time, you’re not! You’re staying here with Grandpa this morning like we arranged.’ Rosemary reached into her bag and brought out a coloured jumper with a large cartoon giraffe on the front. ‘If you get cold, put this on.’
She handed him the jumper and stepped smartly over to her father’s chair, whipping the cigarette out of his trembling hand and stubbing it out forcefully in an old pub ashtray he kept on the table by his side.
‘Rosemary …’ He started to object.
‘Don’t “Rosemary” me. You know what the doctors have said.’
‘Doctors. What do they know?’
‘They know what an X-ray is. And they know how to read them. What are you trying to do, kill yourself?’
‘Well, it would make you happy, wouldn’t it?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Dad!’
‘And your husband. Maybe he wouldn’t have to be away from home so much. Sell the house and he could cut back on all those trips to the Continent. Maybe sell the truck and open a little café. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’
‘What I want has got nothing to do with it.’
‘See me in my grave and you’d be frying eggs and flipping bacon before the sod’s even settled.’ Graham let out another hacking cough.
Rosemary shook her head as she crossed to the wall and turned the dial on the thermostat up. ‘Daft old sod, more like.’ She turned to her son. ‘Sit quietly on the couch and Grandpa will let you watch your cartoons in a minute.’
The boy hopped up on the sofa, crossing his arms resentfully. ‘I could have just gone to Johnny’s.’
‘Stop looking like that,’ she said, looking at her watch. ‘I told you it’s too early. I’ll be back by eleven and you can see him then.’ She picked up the ashtray from the side table and emptied it into the fireplace that had been set but not lit. ‘And what would happen if you fell asleep and dropped a cigarette?’ she snapped at her father. ‘Do you want the whole house to go up in flames with you in it?’
Graham shared a sympathetic look with his grandson. ‘We’re all going to hell. It’s just a question of when.’
Rosemary buttoned up her coat. ‘Why don’t you take him down to the allotment if the weather improves? But make him wear his jumper – it’s cold out!’
‘Maybe.’
‘Though why you have still got it is beyond me. You don’t grow anything on it any more.’
‘I keep it neat, don’t I?’
‘Well, if it gets you out in the fresh air it can’t hurt, I suppose.’
‘It’s what the doctors said.’
‘If it’s not cold or raining is what they said! And just so long as you don’t just sit in that filthy shed smoking your lungs to ruination.’ Rosemary picked up his packet of cigarettes and put them in her pocket. ‘Why don’t I take these with me, just to be sure?’
She turned to the TV as the news came back on. A pi
cture of Peter Garnier filled the screen and Rosemary shuddered. ‘Can’t you turn that over? Just the thought of it makes my blood run cold.’ She looked over at her son and back at her dad. ‘Put the cartoons on for him.’
Graham Harper fumbled the remote control into his hand and changed the channel.
‘That’s better. I’ll be back for eleven – be good for your granddad, Archie.’
Archie nodded but didn’t turn back, his attention now fixed on the television screen, where futuristic vehicles were transforming themselves into different shapes.
Rosemary sketched a wave in the air and left.
Graham watched her go, sighing resignedly, and looked across at his grandson, his eyes a little wet now. He coughed again, hacking so hard that it hurt his ribs as though they were fractured. He held his hand to his lips and coughed again. Then he looked at his palm, expecting to see blood. He wiped the back of his twisted crablike hand across his damp eyes and fumbled into his other pocket to bring out another pack of smokes.