by Nicky Black
Nicola stopped, the sincerity of his voice colliding with the turmoil in her head. She turned and took the card from him. She looked at it. ‘Women’s Aid.’ She laughed to herself under her breath.
‘They’ve put an emergency care order in place.’ Lee stood where he was as she walked away from him. ‘It could be classed as neglect!’ he called after her.
Nicola bowed her head, ploughing on to the bus stop at the end of the estate. His words cut her to the quick, and as soon as she was round the corner and out of his sight, she sat on a garden wall, lit a cigarette with shaking hands, and quietly began to cry.
Later that evening, Lee sat at the window of the hotel bar. He knew it was wrong, keeping the Mark Redmond file to himself instead of handing it back for closure. But he felt a deep unease at the way it was being handled – or not, as the case may be. And besides, the more he found out about Mark, the more insight he had into the life and background of Nicola. DI Meadows had already ordered him to let it go, it wasn’t a live case, it wasn’t their concern, they had to focus on the bigger regeneration picture for the estate. That was, after all, why they had employed him. Her demeanour was sharp and touchy, the Chief Constable was on her back – targets, targets, targets. Half of the department was either off sick or on maternity leave, and her spend forecast was going through the roof. Suddenly he wasn’t the best thing since sliced bread anymore, more of a RoboCop with a rep who’d never had her vote in the first place. She’d thrown the Valley Park Community Strategy at him across the desk that afternoon. This is what they wanted, she’d said, this is how it’s done now. Crime reduction by committee, and he would work to whatever approach she deemed appropriate.
It was a strategy he’d seen and read a hundred times before, the same trite, politically correct garbage endorsing CCTV, parenting classes and intergenerational projects, but no commitment to who would do it, when, how it would be paid for, and what effect it would have. Nobody took it seriously. When Lee had tried to brief the team on it, Gallagher and Clark were on their knees playing with half a dozen clockwork penises, winding them up and racing them across the floor, the box marked ‘EVIDENCE’ lying empty on its side. He’d held up the Community Strategy and asked who’d read it. Three pairs of eyes stared blankly at him. He asked who attended the steering group meetings.
‘Uniform – community plod,’ they all agreed.
‘And who does community plod feed back to?’ Lee asked.
‘Me, Sarge,’ said Gallagher, his hands deep in his pockets, ‘but thankfully that responsibility is no longer mine.’
‘Right, well I’d like to see the last six months’ feedback reports.’
‘It’s more of a verbal arrangement,’ sniffed Gallagher.
Lee noted a private smirk between Gallagher and Clark as Gallagher picked up his clockwork toys and put them back in the cardboard box. Fucking shower, thought Lee, his conversation with DI Meadows earlier that afternoon still fresh in his mind. She hadn’t taken kindly to being told that the detection rate was abysmal, not because the criminals were descended from Einstein, but because she had a kindergarten for a team.
He’d unlocked his drawer and taken out Mark’s last file to take back to the hotel. As he locked the drawer, he heard an incensed Jesus Christ from the other side of the office. DC Gallagher was holding his payslip in his hands, his eyes scouring the information.
‘Have you seen the tax I’m paying?’ he said, eyes wide and mouth open. ‘I reckon I’m keeping a couple of single parents with this. I should have shagging rights.’
Lee had had enough. He grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair and put it over the file he held in his arm. As he left, he threw a pile of Women’s Aid cards onto each desk.
‘We don’t do domestics,’ lisped DC Clark.
‘You do now.’ Lee strode across the office and out of the door. Gallagher picked up his Women’s Aid cards and threw them in the bin by his desk, sat back in his chair, and belched loudly.
Lee ordered another beer from the waiter and took Mark’s file from his bag. He opened the file at Mark’s mugshot. A tired, emaciated young man. Something in the melancholic eyes reminded Lee of who he could have been. What he could have become. What some of his friends from Valley Park had no doubt become many years ago. Hoots, Clarkey and Simon ‘Dinger’ Bell, mates he drank cans of Diamond White with in Darkie’s Cave, the hollow of the big oak tree on the Rec where a black man was rumoured to have been hanged in 1969. He’d had to work hard to become one of the crowd. No one had any sympathy for a family striving to be middle-class hitting hard times. You either fitted in or you kept yourself to yourself. He’d had to let his grades drop, not too much, but enough to be just above average, rather than unacceptably ahead. He started smoking, took on the role of lookout whilst cans were lifted from the delivery vans. The crime was petty, but the punishment severe from the community, parents and teachers if caught. These days, crime was destructive, yet either ignored or accepted by the neighbourhood. People were battle-worn, the authorities no longer able to deliver a clip around the ear or a truncheon to the kidneys.
He turned the page, and there, staring out at him, was the wiry, red-haired youth from the Nags Head. The same eyes, turned down at the edges, a pincushion of tiny pimples swamping his freckled forehead. Lee removed the photograph and turned it over – Tyrone Woods, 23.02.99. Behind it was a typed statement with Tyrone’s rickety signature at the bottom. For the prosecution’s key witnesses, the statement was very basic. It stated that Mark had sold cocaine and cannabis to Tyrone on at least three occasions, and that he’d attempted to sell him heroin. He looked back at the signatures and saw clearly, Paul Gallagher, Detective Constable, scrawled across the bottom of the page. He flicked back to Mark’s photograph again. It was Nicola’s face, too, the sorrowful eyes that had pleaded with him as she’d held her dead brother in her arms.
He closed his eyes, and he was back in that house in Kenton, watching his father stride down the path on his way to work that blustery morning. He wondered if he’d romanticised his family life before the move to Valley Park. Who’s to say his mother wouldn’t have found solace in booze anyway, her expectations of Victorian houses with stripped floors in leafy suburbs always destined to be out of her reach, the disillusionment staring at her from the bottom of a glass of gin? Had his dad been quiet and strong, or just surly and morose, the blight of a disappointed woman hanging around his neck like an albatross? The many paths Lee’s life could have taken lay before him in Mark Redmond’s desolate eyes, each route determined by some tiny decision, like a trip to Eldon Square to watch the girls in their drainpipe jeans, or a pint in the pub at lunchtime on your birthday. These could have been his eyes, had Frank not bullied him out of the house. But instead they belonged to the brother of a woman who intrigued him. She was unbefitting of that estate. She had real beauty, dignity, strength and an intelligence that would normally have been wrenched from you had you shown it, growing up in a place like that. He found himself thinking about her a lot when he should have been thinking of Debbie, who was, after all, the mother of the child he ached to know. He knew it was out of the question, any kind of relationship with Nicola. Of course it was. But the least he could do was find some answers.
Lee looked out of the window at the river and the people streaming onto the quayside, dressed up to the nines for their night out. Every night was Friday night in Newcastle. The women, some teenagers, some old enough to know better, swung their white handbags as they linked arms in groups of four or five, heckling the red-faced men in their short-sleeved shirts, ironed to perfection by their mams. They shouted, they sang, they laughed raucous laughter. Some of the girls were just bairns, slaughtered already, smoking and tipping along in their heels and their boob tubes. One of them pulled her top down and shook her chest at him while her orange-faced mates screeched and howled silently at him through the thick glass of the hotel window, crossing their legs in case they pissed themselves. Christ, they hardly
even had breasts yet, he thought. Then it dawned on him and his heart lurched. He hoped like hell Debbie didn’t let Louise come into town for a night out.
His phone buzzed on the table in front of him. He looked at the flashing blue screen.
Debbie.
SIX
Nicola let the breeze of the open window of the taxi slide over her face. It felt good on her pounding skin. She kept her purple, swollen cheek buried behind her hand, hidden as much as possible from the judging eyes of the taxi driver who glanced at her frequently in the rear-view mirror.
She’d slept fitfully on the tiny hospital fold-out bed over the last couple of nights. The social worker had been in and out of course, a skinny runt of a menopausal woman with a weak handshake and a sweaty top lip. As long as Nicola stayed away from the house and Micky, she could keep the children with her until the emergency case conference had been held, but any sniff of Micky and his associates, and the kids would be in a home without delay. She riled against it inside, but knew that any outburst of anger on her part would do nothing to help her case. Last night was even worse, with Michael joining them, happily snuggling next to her in little Jimmy’s Spider-Man pyjamas, pleased to be wrapped up in his mother’s silence again. Poor Michael. He’d had to endure two days at Margy’s house, her phone clanging every five minutes, her door a constant haven for shouty women waving letters in the air – letters from the school or the Social, from the courts or the debt collectors. That was the trouble being a community worker on the estate where she lived. The job had become twenty-four-seven. The dog barked. The TV blared so Joe and little Jimmy could hear it over the noise of the unremitting raised voices, then they, too, had to shout over the TV to make themselves heard. Clothes, boxes and files littered the dark living room, piled high in pyramids in all corners. Michael had pined for a quiet hour on his dad’s lap in front of The Simpsons, feeling the ripples of a laughing belly in his back. So when no one heard his unhappy whimpering, he howled and banged his fists on the arm of the sofa until the dog was hoarse and Margy gave up and drove him to his mother at the hospital.
When Nicola stepped out of the taxi, Liam on her hip clinging onto a plastic carrier bag, she expected to see an ugly fortress, barbed wire, barred doors and windows. Instead, she faced an ordinary house, a big house, yes, but one just like every other on the street. Michael sat sulkily in the back seat of the taxi, the school’s sports day going ahead without their star egg-and-spooner.
‘Michael, get out, the man’s got to go.’ Nicola smiled Sorry at the driver who nodded at her politely and fiddled with his radio. In the end she reached into the taxi and dragged the rigid Michael by his arm until he was out of the car and on the pavement. Ow, ow, OW! he accused her furiously until she let go of his arm, apologising, stroking his face and kissing his forehead. As the cab pulled off, Nicola hiked Liam up onto her hip, took Michael’s surly hand and, with a deep breath, walked with purpose up to the house and rang the bell. She could hear laughter approaching the door, a laugh that suddenly bellowed when the door was thrust open and the owner of the voice, a massive, barefooted woman of about thirty, stood wiping her hands on a tea towel and staring down at them. The woman called behind her, ‘Here’s some more, lasses!’ A sea of hollow faces ambled out into the long corridor from hidden doorways, women in leggings and slippers, some eating, some smoking, some doing both at the same time.
The enormous woman ushered her in. She had the blondest hair Nicola had ever seen, shorn into a lopsided bob which she flicked constantly out of her eyes, a round, pink face and the sunken mouth of a woman who’d lost too many teeth. Self-inflicted tattoos littered her hands, and her forearm spelled out her name in lavish script: Brenda.
In the kitchen Nicola sat Liam on the table, and stroked the head of Michael Jnr who clung to her leg, trying not to look like he was interested in the huddle of women gathering around them. Tracey, ‘a right scrubber’, was vigorously wiping down the kitchen sink, while Lisa, a skinny, stooped woman of nearly six foot with lank, greasy, salt-and-pepper hair, put the kettle on and emptied the contents of a huge teapot into the clean sink, causing Tracey to kick up a cursing fuss. A good-humoured outpouring of expletives was exchanged between the two until Brenda raised her hands and shouted over them, reminding them of the rule of no swearing in front of the fucking kids, right? They backed down. Brenda was in charge.
While Tracey took Liam and Michael to the playroom, Brenda did the honours and showed Nicola the bedroom they would be occupying, three lonely, single beds hugging each corner of the room. She demonstrated the panic alarms scattered secretly under tables or high on the walls out of the reach of the kids, just in case the perps managed to find their way in. She boomed questions at her. What had he done to her, the cunt? How long had he been thrashing her? How often? What with? What about the bairns? Did he wallop them an’ all? She showed little interest in Nicola’s mumbled responses, but had few misgivings about making known the niceties of her own circumstances. She boasted of a husband in jail, convicted of murdering her unborn twins with his booted foot, almost killing her in the process. Brenda laughed forcefully, recalling the fact that her fanny had bled so much they’d had to strap her up by the legs to stop her insides pouring onto the ambulance floor. Nicola noticed that the toothless, bragging mouth laughed hard, HA HA HA, but that the eyes remained empty.
She accepted the strong, orange tea thrust at her at the bottom of the stairs and entered the playroom. She looked at Michael Jnr and Liam, playing happily together with a Scalextric, making the noises of the cars, the skids and the horns. Michael smiled up at her. ‘Mam, can we get one when we go home?’ Brenda had asked about the bairns. The thought made her feel sick to her stomach. She’d withstood the fists, the feet, the pulled hair and punched arms, but the kids were fine. They didn’t know anything. He’d never hurt their children. Nicola swallowed her guilt and felt Brenda’s heavy arm go round her shoulder in consolation. But she felt no comfort, just the heavy heart of a woman between a rock and a hard place.
Lee and DC Gallagher dunked Jammie Dodgers into strong tea in stained mugs bearing the logos of stationery companies. They sat in an upstairs room at the Neighbourhood Housing Office, a converted house on the edge of Valley Park, the barred windows and heavy metal door testament to the fearful and suspicious personnel inside. The staff sat behind scratched perspex, handing out forms, stamping benefit books and rebounding off the angry voices of people whose boilers and windows had been left unfixed for weeks or months.
Gallagher was grouchy, wondering why there had to be pre-meetings for meetings that needed to be followed up with meetings. Lee tapped his fingers on the table while they waited. Joyce Oduwu, the Director of Housing, had requested an audience with the person taking responsibility for crime reduction on the estate. That would be Lee. She wanted him to meet the team, more ineffectual people with badges round their necks, no doubt.
When she arrived, apologising for her lateness with the air of someone who loved to be late, she smiled and threw her heavily pregnant bulk onto the chair opposite Lee. She held Lee’s gaze for longer than a few seconds, with a curious look that suggested she’d been waiting to meet him for some time. She was attractive, beautiful even, with flawless, mixed-race, olive skin, a shock of tiny brown ringlets framing her face and striking, hazel eyes. She threw a glance at Gallagher before looking pleased with herself then struggling to bend to her bag to pull out a battered copy of the Community Strategy. She held it up like a trophy and asked if Lee had seen it.
‘Absolutely,’ he replied.
She was very pleased with it, she said smugly, very pleased indeed. She’d spent a two-day residential at a country hotel in Northumberland with twenty other senior managers, planning and discussing the content of it. And oh! She’d had the best carrot cake she’d ever tasted in her life with her afternoon tea on day two. Lee smiled and nodded, while Gallagher helped himself to a custard cream, examining it before soaking it in hot tea and putting it wh
ole into his mouth.
When Lee asked how she saw the strategy helping residents, she smiled a self-gratified smile. She knew the answer to this one alright. Her housing managers held regular meetings at the community centre, of course. Very popular with the residents. That’s where they were going next, so she could introduce him to some very committed tenants and her wonderful staff team. Lee’s thoughts turned to the miserable employees sitting downstairs, their eyes almost bleeding with scorn for the people they were paid to support. He looked at the papers for the meeting they were about to go to. Margy Allen had been at the last one accompanied by two other residents, followed by a long list of housing officers. Popular indeed. Lee asked what issues concerned residents most, at which point Joyce sucked in her breath and shook her head with woe. Dog muck. Broken taps. The lack of shops, she said sadly. Drugs? Crime? Harassment? No, no, they didn’t want to discuss any of that. Not much point reporting burglaries when you can’t get insurance. Besides, most people didn’t hang around for long. She leant forward and spoke furtively as if about to give away a national secret. Did he know that the average length of tenancy on Valley Park was twelve weeks? She sat back in her seat and threw her hands up helplessly. Lee raised his eyebrows and tapped his pen on the table.
‘So, doesn’t it strike you that there’s something seriously wrong here?’ he asked.
‘Aye, it’s a dump,’ said Gallagher helpfully. Lee turned in his chair to glare at Gallagher.
‘Do you mind?’
‘Sorry, boss, forgot you were a native,’ he said, the faintest of smiles flickering across his face.
‘Of course there’s something wrong,’ she breathed, shaking her head at Gallagher like a disappointed parent, rubbing one hand around her protruding belly and stretching her neck from side to side. ‘But you know... the crime and lawlessness....’ She pursed her lips and looked at Lee expectantly.