Strangers

by Paul Finch

  So it was with the usual air of stoic boredom that, one Wednesday night, she and PC Malcolm Peabody, the twenty-year-old probationer she’d been puppy-walking for the past couple of months, drove their liveried BMW saloon onto the Hatchwood, to attend 24 Clapgate Road in response to a reported domestic.

  This house was in no better or worse state than those around it: a small front garden, which was mainly a trash heap (though it hadn’t used to be, Lucy recalled), a rotted gate hanging from its hinges and thick tufts of weed growing through the lopsided paving along the front path. They could hear the hubbub inside as soon as they pulled up. When they actually entered – the house’s front door having opened immediately to Lucy’s firm, no-nonsense knock – the interior looked as if a bomb had hit it, though it was difficult to tell whether this was a new mess or just the usual one. Dingy wallpaper and mouldering carpets implied the latter, but it was hard to make out whether the bits of strewn underwear, or the beer tins, dog-ends and other foul bric-a-brac, were recent additions. The atmosphere, of course, was rancid: a mingled fetor of sweat, cigarettes, booze and ketchup – which was sad as well as sickening, Lucy thought, because again, that hadn’t always been the case at this address.

  The occupants were Rob and Dora Hallam, he a displaced and unemployed Welshman, she a local lass who’d recently been sacked from her supermarket job for being light-fingered. They were both in their late thirties, though they looked older: ratty-haired, sallow-faced, gap-toothed. Rob Hallam was short, stumpy and overweight, Dora thin to the point of emaciation, her facial features sunken as though the very bone structure was decaying. At present he was wearing Y-fronts, a vest and a pair of dirty socks. She was in flip-flops, pyjama bottoms and a Manchester United shirt.

  Both were streaming blood, Rob from a split eyebrow and gouged left cheek, Dora from a burst nose, which as she sniffled into a handkerchief, continued to discharge itself in a constant succession of sticky crimson bubbles.

  The main set-to looked to have occurred in the lounge. That was where most of the wrecked furniture and broken glass was congregated. The door connecting the lounge to the kitchen, which now lay wrenched from its hinges against an armchair, was also a giveaway. But whatever violence had erupted before, it was over now, primarily because the combatants were too exhausted to continue. They stood apart, one at either side of the room, panting, glaring. In between them, quite surreally, the television played away to itself, screening the crazy antics of Cow and Chicken.

  ‘So what am I going to do with the pair of you?’ Lucy asked, having stood in stony silence during the predictable exchange of accusations and counter-accusations, and refusing to give a moment’s thought to Rob Hallam’s meandering explanation that the squabble had started over his wife’s ‘fucking stupid’ assertion that the Red Guy, Cow and Chicken’s nemesis, was supposed to be imaginary and not the real-life Devil.

  ‘You’ve got to arrest him,’ Dora whimpered, seemingly surprised that this hadn’t happened already.

  ‘Arrest him?’ Lucy said. ‘Dora … every time we try to arrest him, you either go ballistic as soon as we lay hands on him, or come rushing down to the station and insist he hasn’t done anything wrong.’

  ‘You can see that this time he has.’ Dora yanked her hair with bloodstained fingers. ‘Look at the state of me.’

  ‘And look at the state of Rob.’

  ‘But I had to defend myself …’

  ‘What did you use?’ Lucy asked. ‘A meat-grinder?’

  Dora’s mouth dropped open, guppy-like with incomprehension.

  ‘The point I’m making, Dora,’ Lucy said, ‘is that you’re both as bad as each other. Every time you have a drink, you have a fight, usually over nothing … and you wake the whole neighbourhood up. And it’s not just every Friday and Saturday. Now it seems it’s weekdays too.’ She glanced at Rob. ‘And what’ve you got to say for yourself? And don’t give me some bollocks excuse about kids’ cartoons!’

  Rob regarded her hollow-eyed. ‘She’s right. I need locking up. Even if she withdraws her complaint, you can do that, can’t you? You said that last time.’

  ‘That’s right, Rob … but this isn’t a straightforward assault, is it? You’re going to need at least as many stitches as she is. Your brief’ll have a field day. Unless I lock you both up, of course.’ Lucy knuckled her chin. ‘I could charge you both with wounding, breach of the peace, causing damage to council property … that might get a result.’

  ‘Both of us?’ Rob looked startled.

  ‘Both of us?’ Dora echoed, as if this had never been part of the plan.

  ‘It’s the age of equal opportunities, love,’ Lucy replied. ‘Spousal abuse works both ways these days.’

  Dora’s mouth slackened into another bewildered gape.

  ‘Course,’ Lucy added, ‘ultimately, it’d be a waste of all our time, wouldn’t it? Not to mention expensive … when what you really need is to go and get some counselling.’ She stepped across the wreckage-strewn room, and took a framed photo from the cluttered mantelpiece. It depicted a little blond boy, smiling happily despite his missing front teeth. ‘When Bobbie died, it changed everything for you two, didn’t it?’

  Rob slumped onto the couch. He shook a can, sipped out a last dreg and discarded it onto the floor. ‘I can’t remember a time before that,’ he said.

  ‘You need to try,’ Lucy replied.

  In response, he reached into a carrier bag next to the couch, took out a fresh can and ripped it open.

  ‘What do you mean counselling?’ Dora asked.

  ‘Grief counselling,’ Lucy said. ‘Look, I know Bobbie’s death changed your lives, Dora, because I never had to come here in the middle of the night before then. But it’s five years ago, love. And it’s still tearing you apart. So you need some professional help. There’s something else. You need to stop hitting the pop.’ She snatched the can from Rob’s grasp and placed it on the mantel. ‘You can get some help for that too … but you’ve got to want it first.’

  Rob gazed blearily up at her. ‘So … I’m not getting locked up?’

  He seemed puzzled rather than relieved, though perhaps now that he’d calmed down a little, it was dawning on him that the advantages of being allowed to sleep in his own bed outweighed the disadvantages of being cooped up in a vomit-stained police cell.

  ‘That depends.’ Lucy indicated the broken door. ‘What about this?’

  ‘Suppose I can fix it.’

  ‘Definitely?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon as I get round to it.’

  ‘Not good enough, Rob. I’m back on duty tomorrow afternoon. I’ll make this my first port of call. Will it be fixed by then?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Sure? Stare me in the eye and say it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said again, though he looked too haggard to be totally convincing.

  ‘Okay …’ Lucy pondered. ‘Before I leave here, I want a solemn promise from you two jokers that, for the rest of tonight … no, let’s not cheapen it … for the rest of this year, I won’t get a call-back to this address.’

  ‘Promise,’ Dora said quietly.

  Rob nodded again.

  ‘You have to get some help, you understand?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  Lucy knew they wouldn’t. It might be all quiet now, but in a few days’ time tempers would flare again over something completely ridiculous. The Hallams were too stuck in this rut, too damaged by events, too drunk on misery and hopelessness to effect any kind of change in their own fortunes. For anyone to keep proceeding down a dark, dank tunnel there had to be at least a flicker of light at the end. But in truth, Lucy didn’t really care a great deal. She couldn’t afford to. At times she was so tired out by these mini disasters in the lives of others that all she wanted to do was shut them down any way she could, even if it was only temporarily.

  ‘Alright …’ She put her radio to her lips. ‘1485 to Three, receiving?’r />
  ‘Go ahead, Lucy,’ Comms crackled back.

  ‘Yeah, I’m finished at Clapgate Lane. No offences revealed. All parties advised, over.’

  ‘Roger, thanks for that.’

  ‘That was so cool,’ Peabody said, as they climbed back into the panda.

  ‘Cool?’

  ‘The way you defused that situation.’

  ‘It defused itself.’ She put the car in gear. ‘They were too knackered to keep fighting.’

  ‘Yeah, but we could’ve locked them both up. Plenty of reason. Instead, you calmed it down, had a few words, put them right, spared them a difficult time …’

  ‘And saved us a raft of paperwork.’ Lucy drove them away from the kerb. ‘That was my main motivation.’

  Peabody chuckled. ‘Can’t fool me. You just didn’t want to bring any more crap down on them … you’re getting soft-hearted in your old age.’

  He was a rangy, raw-boned lad, red-haired and freckled, and to an outsider his tone might have seemed a tad impertinent given that Lucy was a ten-year veteran of the job and he’d only been in it a few months, but a few months on the beat in a town like Crowley counted for a lot. Even a few days spent side-by-side on the frontline could bond coppers together like no other job outside the military.

  ‘Well …’ Lucy swung them towards the south end of the estate. ‘It’s not like they haven’t had a lot to deal with.’

  ‘What happened to the kiddie, anyway?’

  ‘Run over.’

  ‘Christ!’

  ‘On the way home from school. Horseplay with his mates … ends up stepping off the pavement in front of a bus.’

  ‘Sounds messy …’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘You were there?’

  ‘First responder. But there was nothing anyone could do. After that, I had to deliver the death message.’ She sighed. ‘Not among my favourite memories.’

  Before Peabody could say more, the air was shattered by a burst of static from the radio.

  ‘November Three to all units, urgent message … female reported under attack in the telephone kiosk at the top end of Darthill Road. Anyone to attend, over!’

  ‘1485 and 9993 en route from Hatchwood Green!’ Peabody shouted as Lucy spun the car in a U-turn and blazed back across the housing estate, activating the blues and twos as she did.

  They were three miles from Darthill Road, which ran from top to bottom of a steep hill; on its south side it was lined by houses but on its north it gave way to arid spoil-land. As such, there was only one real approach to it, but other patrols had been closer and by the time Lucy and Peabody arrived at the phone-box, Sergeant Robertson in the Area Car had got there ahead of them. A Traffic unit was also in attendance, alongside an ambulance, which rather fortuitously, had already been in the area. From the radio messages bouncing back and forth, it sounded as if the assailant had fled on foot.

  Lucy and Peabody jumped out and dashed forward.

  The girl, who was clearly young but too bloodied around the face to be recognisable, sat crying on the kerb, two female paramedics kneeling as they tended her cuts and bruises. Robertson was on his phone to CID, but a quick conflab with the Traffic guys, who were already deploying incident tape, revealed that the attacker had dragged his would-be victim a few yards onto the rough ground, before she’d fought him to a standstill. He’d then had to punch her repeatedly to subdue her, after which, thinking he’d knocked her out, he’d started going through her handbag – only for her to suddenly jump up again and leg it. Having already lost her mobile to the bastard, she’d scrambled into the phone-box and called 999. The assailant was kicking the hell out of its door when she managed to get through. That was when he finally did a runner.

  Lucy raced back to the car and leapt in, Peabody hurriedly following.

  ‘Get onto Comms,’ she told him, flinging the vehicle around in a rapid three-point turn. ‘Tell them we need India 99.’ That call sign wasn’t officially used any more in GMP, but some police terminology never changed. ‘We want the eye in the sky.’

  ‘So where are we going?’ Peabody asked.

  ‘The other side of the Aggies.’

  ‘You think he’ll have got over there already?’

  ‘He’ll have heard our sirens, Malcolm … if that doesn’t put wings on his heels, nothing will.’

  ‘This time of night he’ll break his bloody neck.’

  ‘Most of these scrotes grew up round here. They’ll have played there as kids. Don’t underestimate their local knowledge. Now get me that bloody chopper!’

  The Aggies was one of numerous spoil-heaps in Crowley. A former hotbed of coalmining and cotton-weaving, the township was sandwiched between Bolton and Salford, November Division on the GMP register. It had definitely seen better days, the glory years of muck and brass having long departed. Most of its factories were closed, either boarded up or redeveloped into carpet warehouses, while its collieries were totally gone, pitheads and washeries dismantled, even some of the slagheaps and derelict brows flattened and built over, though for the most part these remained as barren, grey scars, sometimes covering hundreds of unusable acres.

  The Aggies was typical. A hummocky moonscape dotted with the ruins of abandoned industry, no road led over it. Lying between inner Crowley and Bullwood (an outer district that was almost as depressed as Hatchwood Green), it was rectangular in outline, which meant that someone trying to get clean across it on foot, so long as he knew his way, had a reasonable chance of reaching the other side ahead of someone in a car, as the latter would have to drive the long way around. And it wasn’t as if Lucy could activate the blues and twos. At its lower, western end, the Aggies terminated in a swampy region caused by a polluted overflow of the River Irwell, and a mass of black and twisted girders marking out the remnants of the old Bleachworks, which had burned to cinders twenty years ago. Aside from that, it was wide open down there – there were no other houses, and the stretch of road looping through that section, Pimbo Lane, was unlit, so anyone crossing the Aggies from south to north, especially on the higher section in the middle, would clearly spot the police car’s beacon as it raced around to intercept him.

  But if nothing else, the day and the hour were in the officers’ favour. All the way down Darthill Road, they met not a single vehicle coming the opposite way, and as they swerved onto Pimbo, only a night-bus cruised past, and its driver had the sense to pull into the kerb to allow them swifter passage.

  Meanwhile, messages crackled on the force radio. They broke constantly and the static was loud, but it was just about possible to glean from them that the AP, who had only just turned eighteen, had suffered facial injuries and wounds to her neck and chest, but that otherwise she was safe and well. Apparently, she’d described her assailant as somewhere in his late twenties, blond-haired and wearing a green tracksuit with white piping. Peabody scribbled this down as Lucy steered them at reckless speed along the swing-back lane.

  They arrived in Bullwood five minutes later, Lucy slowing to a crawl and knocking the headlights off as the BMW prowled from one darkened side street to the next. She’d zeroed in on several rows of terraced houses, each one of which terminated at the edge of the Aggies. Superficially, you couldn’t gain access to the wasteland from any of these residential streets – in some cases there were garages there, in others wire-mesh fencing had been erected. But the local urchins enjoyed their desolate playground too much to tolerate that. Thanks to the various holes they’d made over the years, passage through was easily possible if you knew where it was.

  The only question now was did their suspect know all that?

  Assuming he had come this way at all.

  The first three streets were bare of life, nothing but cars lining the fronts of the identical red brick terraces. Most house lights were now off, given that it was almost midnight. But in the fourth street, Windermere Avenue, they glimpsed movement, a dark figure sauntering out of sight into the mouth of a cobbled alley. Lucy turned her radi
o down to the minimum and indicated that Peabody should do the same, before cruising on past the top of the road and pulling sharply up before the next street, Thirlmere Place.

  ‘Leave your helmet off,’ she whispered, opening her door.

  Peabody nodded and slipped out onto the road, just as a walking man appeared from Thirlmere, turned sharp right and receded away along the pavement. It was difficult to distinguish details in the dull streetlamps, but he wore a light-coloured T-shirt, which fitted snugly around a muscular, wedge-shaped torso. More important than any of this, he also wore tracksuit bottoms, and had a tracksuit top tied around his waist by its sleeves.

  If this was the guy, one might have expected him, on hearing the chug of the engine, to try to hide, but instead he was going for “normality”, Lucy realised; rather than skulking in some backstreet and probably drawing more attention to himself, looking to brazen it out by hiding in plain sight – like he was just an everyday Joe on his way home.

  They walked after him, padding lightly but gaining ground quickly, hands tight on their duty belts; Lucy clutched her CS canister, Peabody the hilt of his extendable Autolock Baton. When five yards behind, they saw sweat gleaming on their target’s thick bull-neck, dampening his fair, straw-like hair. They could also see his tracksuit properly – it was green with white piping.

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ Lucy said. ‘Can I talk to you?’

  He walked on, not turning, not even flinching at the sound of her voice.

  They closed the gap, at any second expecting him to bolt.

  ‘Excuse me, sir … we’re police officers and we need to speak to you.’