Hold Back the Night

by Hold Back the Night (retail) (epub)

  Andy wasn’t there so I dialled his mobile and left a message on his voice mail. I put the kettle on, and made myself eat a few spoonfuls of bio-yoghurt with wholegrains. My, I was a healthy fella. After only a couple of minutes the phone rang again and I managed to get to it after only one ring.

  ‘Billy Rucker.’

  ‘Billy,’ he said. ‘It’s Andy.’ He was using a payphone and my mind automatically tried to make out where he was calling from. ‘I’m at the hospital.’

  My breath stopped still and my stomach tensed. I waited for him to say it.

  ‘It’s the girl.’

  I knew that. Who else could it be? ‘Yes?’

  ‘She woke up,’ Andy said.

  ‘What?’ I let the breath out and sat back against the sink unit.

  ‘She woke up,’ he said again. ‘Very briefly, this morning. Only for a minute or so. They called me and I came right over.’

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘The same,’ he said. ‘She’s the same as she was, except her vital signs have improved. Not much, but a little.’

  ‘I’ll come over.’

  ‘There’s no need, but you can if you want. They won’t let us in anyway. They’ve put a nurse with her full time for us though, in case she says anything else.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yes. But don’t get too excited. She mumbled something, nothing much apparently. I’ll get the noddy to tell you if you’re coming.’

  ‘Give me half an hour,’ I said.

  I stepped back out of the kitchen to put the phone back down and saw Shulpa, sitting up in bed, the duvet beneath her arms like a lady in a Cary Grant film. She must have heard the phone ringing. She was looking slightly nervous.

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Hello,’ she said. She bit her lip. ‘Was that…?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Was that my brother?’

  ‘Your brother? No.’

  ‘No? I thought you might be…I don’t know. Thank God.’

  ‘Thank God indeed.’

  Shulpa smiled, and relaxed. I walked across the room to my wardrobe and pulled out a shirt.

  ‘What’s that for?’ she said. It was a childish, mock petulant sound.

  ‘The usual.’

  ‘Oh! Not yet. Come here.’ Shulpa stretched out her shoulders and stifled a delicate yawn. She was one of those women who can drink like a Russian sailor and wake up looking like a Polish nun.

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘That call. I really have to go.’

  ‘I wasn’t asking,’ Shulpa said. She laughed and her eyes narrowed. ‘Just for a minute.’

  ‘A minute.’ I tossed the shirt on a chair.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘You shaved. Let me feel.’

  I walked over and sat on the bed. Shulpa sat up, but kept herself covered. She ran a lazy hand over my face.

  ‘I was very drunk last night,’ she said, in a teasing voice.

  ‘You were,’ I agreed. ‘Very. Me too.’

  ‘Everything seems…a bit hazy.’

  ‘Yes’

  ‘Yes. What a waste. It’s a shame.’ She took my hand and pulled me towards her.

  ‘Listen, Shulpa. I’ve just arranged—’

  ‘Shh,’ she said. ‘I want something I can remember, something I can really see later. Don’t you?’ Her hand went for my towel. ‘Something like this,’ she said.

  * * *

  ‘Half an hour, you said.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Andy. The traffic. How is she?’

  ‘The same,’ he said. ‘Like I told you. I don’t think there’s any point hanging around. They won’t let us in, they think we’re as bad as that lot.’

  We were in the ante-room outside the ward. Andy nodded to the corner where a group of bored men sat twitching beneath a No Smoking sign. Natalie’s mother and father occupied the seats opposite them.

  Andy introduced me to the PC who had been sitting with Natalie and he told me what the girl had said when she’d woken. It was simply the words ‘I can see things’, repeated over, until she’d faded back out. Andy told the PC that he’d done good work.

  ‘Be nice to the nurses,’ Andy said to him, quietly. ‘Flirt with them. Tell them you want to sit with her. That you were talking to her and that’s what made her come round. Anything. Yes?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Make them trust you, show them that you really care for the girl. OK?’

  The guy seemed a bit shocked at what he was being told; he looked as if he did care about Natalie, but he nodded anyway. I thanked him again and followed Andy outside. I was pretty tired but I didn’t feel as bad as I deserved. I was going to go straight back home to a hopefully by now empty bed, but Andy thought it might help to go over the scene again, and he asked me if I wanted to come.

  ‘Without young Mr Finch there’s fuck all else left to do,’ he said.

  I had already made a note to ask Andy if I could have another look at the house where Lucy Bradley died, and even though I would have rather done it on my own I took him up on his offer. I followed his Astra in my Mazda, parked on the quiet, drab street, and met him outside the door. Andy used a set of keys to open the police locks, before breaking open the tape seals. I followed him into the living room, taking in the stained chairs and the ripped sofa and the rest of the skip-salvaged furniture. I told him about my meeting with the old lady opposite, and about the history of the house. Andy nodded. I stood in the centre of the room as he poked around, opening some drawers, looking behind a built-in bookcase. I checked to see if any of the skirting was loose, and got a chair to look inside the lampshade, but neither of us found anything more than a spider, a take-out pizza menu and an old copy of The Face.

  It seemed odd to be there in the daylight. I wandered into the kitchen, and then Andy found the key to the back door, and we both dutifully stared at the spot Lucy had lain in, before going back inside the house, and upstairs. We looked in the two sparse bedrooms, one with a single mattress, the other with a double bed that had probably stood in the same spot for forty years. Maybe it was even the same one in which Mrs Chortney from opposite had laid out June Anthony’s second husband. We looked under the bed and flipped over the mattress but of course we didn’t find anything. Andy even took his Swiss Army knife and cut both mattresses down the middle, but there was nothing inside except stuffing.

  There wasn’t much else to see. The clothes had all been removed for forensic analysis that hadn’t yielded anything, and all that was left was a tube of toothpaste in the bathroom, some empty hair-dye bottles and an aerosol spray on what must have been Lucy’s dressing table. There were also traces of fingerprint powder, which had shown up prints matching those taken from the dead girl, plus mine from the kitchen, the back door and the phone, and those assumed to belong to the kid we were looking for. Lee Finch.

  ‘They’re being checked against the prints in his file,’ Andy told me. ‘They’ll match.’

  No other prints were found in the house.

  Andy went through his version of the sequence of events again and I followed him as we walked it through. Something didn’t seem right to me, but it wasn’t necessarily what I was hearing, which sounded perfectly plausible. After Andy had finished we walked back into the living room and Andy started to reseal the house, before adding his signature to the list of officers who had been on the scene in the last week. Ken Clay’s name was one above Andy’s. Andy held the door open for me and I was just about to duck under the tape when I stood up again.

  ‘It’s very clean,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The house. The whole house. It’s not tidy but it’s clean.’

  It was something I hadn’t noticed the time I’d been there before. It had been too late, too dark. There’d been too much else going on.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Young people aren’t known to be house proud’, I said, ‘at the best of times. But squatters?’

  Andy shrugged. ‘So they got fed up, and
had a spring clean. What are you getting at?’

  I thought hard for a second but then shrugged back. ‘Fucked if I know,’ I said.

  Once we were outside, standing in the sticky heat, I asked Andy if any of the team showing Lee Finch’s picture around had had any bites. When he told me they hadn’t, I suggested using a different one, a different shot from the ones I’d taken.

  ‘It can sometimes help,’ I said. ‘Sometimes a photograph just doesn’t look like the person, you know? The angle or the lighting or something. The expression on his face might not be the way he usually looks.’

  Andy said it couldn’t hurt to post an alternative image, if I had one, and I said I did. I asked him if he wanted to come over to my office and pick one up, telling him I’d buy him lunch for helping me out. Andy looked uncomfortable. He said he’d prefer it if I sent it, or else dropped it off at the station.

  ‘You see, Bill,’ he said, ‘and this is between you and me. I’d just as soon steer clear of your place.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well.’ Andy folded his arms and sucked some air in through his teeth. ‘It’s just that I’ve been screwing that little piece from your cafe.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The girl, the Italian bird. I know, I know. You’d have thought she’d have better taste, go on, say it. But I dropped by one day and you weren’t there so I asked her out. Bingo.’

  ‘You and Ally.’

  ‘Yeah. She’s a fiery little thing, believe me, didn’t take much persuading. But the thing is, she’s been getting a bit keen.’

  ‘She has?’

  ‘Talking about ditching her boyfriend, that kind of thing. And don’t get me wrong, I’m up for giving her the benefit now and then, who wouldn’t be? But hold on. Anyway, I’d be grateful if you could pop the picture round. For one, her old man might be there, which I can do without, and I really don’t want to give her the wrong idea.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Cheers then.’

  Andy walked off down the street to his car. After a few steps he turned but kept walking.

  ‘I still think you got to her first,’ he laughed.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I drove back and ate lunch in the relative cool of the Sand Bar. Upstairs in my flat I discovered that Shulpa had left me a note, to the effect that Nicky had been wrong about my not taking her anywhere she’d want to go. I dropped the note in the waste-paper bin and spent the rest of the afternoon asleep on my futon, lulled by the remnants of an unfamiliar scent.

  Sal called at about four, after I’d already woken up and made myself a cup of tea. She thanked me for the night before and then said it was her turn to apologize.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I really am. You were vulnerable and I was pissed. I hope we can still be friends.’

  ‘Sal, of course. And there’s no need—’

  ‘There is, Billy. There is. There’s no excuse for emotionally blackmailing you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Talking about my husband, acting the sad lonely widow. It was pathetic really, and I knew what I was doing as well, I’m ashamed to say. I was just having such a good time with you I didn’t want it to end. It’s been a long time since I was so easy with a man – when he’s not wearing gloves that is.’

  ‘I understand. And I wanted to be with you too,’ I said. ‘So don’t worry.’

  ‘OK,’ Sal said. ‘But I wanted you to know that I am sorry about Sharon, I really am. I could tell you were hurt. The last thing you needed was to get it together with someone else last night.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘yes. You’re probably right about that.’

  I told Sal I’d try to make it down to the gym that night, if nothing else came up. But as it happened I didn’t really feel like it much, and I drove down to see Luke instead, at about seven. Faber had sent through the finished copy of his book, which I set by the side of his bed. I even read from it to him, a long poem about a childhood friend of his whose father had died suddenly, how the boy’s mother had brought him round for Luke to play with that afternoon. I noticed one of the nurses stop what she was doing to listen, and though I don’t claim to read well she did say she enjoyed it. I told her she was welcome to have a look at the rest of the book if she wanted. When I told her it was by Luke she said, ‘Oh,’ quietly, and when I left she was leafing through the pages.

  At eight I met Nicky for dinner, at Randall and Aubin on Brewer Street. Once we’d sat ourselves down on a couple of long stools and had a quick look at the menu, Nicky turned to me.

  ‘So,’ he said. He didn’t look that friendly. ‘What happened last night?’

  ‘I…’

  ‘With that woman? Sally. And don’t give me any bollocks.’

  ‘Nothing happened. Not a lot anyway.’

  ‘Billy,’ Nicky said. ‘I’m your friend, you know that, and I liked Sally, I really did. But are you being fucking stupid or what? You are going out with one of the most beautiful, brilliant women I’ve ever met, and she certainly doesn’t need treating like—’

  ‘Nicky,’ I said. ‘There’s a lot that I have to tell you.’

  I filled Nicky in and he said he couldn’t believe it, and then said that he didn’t believe it. I assured him it was true, but what he meant was he didn’t believe what Sharon had told me.

  ‘I’ve seen the way you are,’ he said. ‘It’s right. I don’t care about this other guy. She’s kidding herself.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I saw them together. The way she clung on his arm. She looked…she looked happy. What can I do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Nicky said. ‘Nothing. Don’t do anything. She’ll realize, she will. I know it.’

  Nicky continued to express his shock at what I’d said but it was still too early for me to talk about it. I just didn’t have a clue what I felt, I still couldn’t look at it, the bare fact that she was with someone else. That another man had been making love to her at the same time I had, that she hadn’t really been there, not like I’d been there. It seemed ludicrous; the whole idea of it was as ridiculous to me as it was to Nicky, but it did nothing to change the fact. She was with this guy, Ronan. A tall, slightly seedy-looking man in a suit that didn’t fit him. I would have trusted them alone on a desert island where the only food was oysters.

  I changed the subject, asking Nicky how he liked his new friends, and he pulled a face. Then, after we’d had a couple of glasses of Rueda he insisted on getting in a bottle of Langi Ghiran at thirty-five quid, and paying for it. When I told him he didn’t have to do that, just because I’d been dumped, he said that wasn’t the reason.

  ‘It’s to make up for the Ridge,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Ridge. Carla put it with some spare bottles of house red that wouldn’t normally have been touched. But, well, we got busy.’

  I put my hands in front of my face.

  ‘One of the waiters, and they’re all denying it, gave it to a couple of city boys. Both bottles. I saw them finishing it off. I didn’t even get a sip.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus.’

  ‘And when their bill came they complained.’

  ‘Huh?!’

  ‘The menu said the ’ouse wine was French, mate.’

  After dinner Nicky suggested one of the clubs he’s a member of but I told him I wasn’t up for a big night. We caught a cab back to Clerkenwell and he persuaded me to stop into Fred’s for one, the bar at the near end of Exmouth Market. The place was fairly busy and we had to stand at the bar. I bought him a pint of Guinness and he asked me how I liked his sister.

  ‘She was lovely,’ I said.

  ‘A pain in the arse. And you’d better watch out, she liked you. Whatever you do, don’t tell her you’re single.’

  Nicky moved to let a couple of girls into the bar and I took a deep breath, thinking that I’d better just get it over with and tell him, but I was saved by Alberto. He just tapped me on the arm and nodded over my shoulder. I turned to see Em
ma Bradley, standing nervously at the far end of the bar, with a small bag over her shoulder. I sighed to myself and walked over to her.

  ‘Emma,’ I said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s nothing. I’m sorry. I was just sat at home…I just needed someone to talk to, and you did say anytime. I didn’t know you were with your friends, I’ll go—’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘Stay. Really.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Thanks. But can we not…? I mean, it’s hard to talk here.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Right. Just give me a second.’

  I said goodnight to Nicky and Alberto and took Emma upstairs to my flat. She spoke for about twenty minutes, telling what she was feeling, expanding on the kinds of things she’d already said to me. I nodded now and then but I couldn’t really concentrate on what she was telling me. The light on my machine was flashing, and when she went out to use the toilet I hit ‘Play’ and there was a message from Sharon on it. She was asking me how I was. Her voice sounded nervous, and I was glad she hadn’t tried to mask that and put on a fake kind of bonhomie. I almost felt that she was in the room with me, and I couldn’t help but wonder why she was calling. Was Nicky right? Had she realized she’d made a mistake? As soon as I had the thought I told myself not to be stupid, but I couldn’t dismiss the hope, it had found its way into me before I could stop it.

  When Emma came back from the toilet she asked me again what I’d found out. I had to tell her not a lot, but I did mention going to the care home the boy had been at. Emma nodded, and then asked me if she could have a drink. I thought it couldn’t hurt and poured some wine.

  Emma drank a lot of it, quickly, and it wasn’t long before it got to her. She started to sob. I held her until she’d finished crying and then made to move away, but she held on to me. I waited, then tried again with a little more force, but she held on to my hand and pressed it to her face.