Acid Row

by Minette Walters

  ‘Leave off,’ Colin said crossly, shaking himself free. ‘It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Giving the perverts something to think about.’ He grinned in satisfaction as Wesley Barber drop-kicked the bricks and dislodged another three. ‘Good one, Wes.’

  Melanie smelt the lager on her brother’s breath and saw the wild look in Wesley’s eyes that suggested speed or worse. She cast around wildly for Gaynor. She couldn’t believe what was happening. It was supposed to be a peaceful march of mothers and kids with placards, but those who didn’t live on Humbert Street had dropped out at the end of Glebe Road when they saw the barricade on Bassindale Row. Someone was going to get killed, they warned fearfully, seizing their little ones’ hands and heading for home. Gaynor had gone after them to try to persuade them back, and that was the last Melanie had seen of her.

  Where was she now? the girl wondered desperately. Had she deserted, too? The thought panicked her. What about Rosie and Ben? She had taken them with her to the gathering on Glebe School forecourt – Ben in a buggy, Rosie on foot – but by the time the ‘march’ reached Humbert Street it was out of control and she had thrust the kids through her front door and told them to watch telly till things quietened down outside. It was vain optimism. The crowd was getting bigger and more boisterous by the minute and the maisonette was just one door away from number 23. If drunken idiots like Colin started hurling bricks about . . .

  She punched his arm. ‘You’re frightening Rosie,’ she hissed furiously, seeing her daughter’s white face in the window. ‘I had to put her and Ben inside because it was too dangerous out here.’

  Startled, he followed her gaze. ‘Jeez, Mel! They’re supposed to be round at our place. Mum said Bry was gonna look after them. What do you wanna bring them on a thing like this for?’

  She wriggled her shoulders unhappily. ‘Everyone brought their babes . . . we wanted to embarrass the council . . . but the others all left . . . and Mum’s vanished. I’ve been looking everywhere.’

  ‘You’re such a tit,’ he said scathingly, looking at the mass of people blocking each end of the road. ‘You’ll never be able to get them through that lot. These guys’re all rat-arsed. It just needs one of youse to trip and you’ll all get trampled.’

  She felt tears stinging at the back of her eyes. ‘I didn’t know this was going to happen. It was supposed to be a protest march.’

  ‘It’s you started it,’ he told her. ‘Nonces out, you said.’

  ‘Not like this,’ she protested. ‘It’s all gone wrong.’ She caught his arm again. ‘What’m I going to do, Col? I’ll kill myself if anything happens to my babes.’

  The terror in her face sobered him. ‘Find Jimmy,’ he suggested. ‘I reckon he’s big enough to push a way through and get youse all to safety.’

  Inside 23 Humbert Street

  Sophie stood motionless in her corner, listening. There had been no more breaking glass, and she guessed the sound they heard must have been the remains of the sitting-room window falling in. A quick glance at her watch told her it was a good thirty minutes since she’d been hit by the stone and ten since she’d called Jenny, but all she could hear was the continuous muted rumble of the crowd.

  No police sirens. No megaphones barking orders. No shouts of fear. No stampeding feet as the rioters fled.

  She watched the men from beneath lowered lids, her brain weary with the endless thoughts that kept circling inside her head. Nicholas was studying his watch as if he, too, was wondering what had happened to the police, but Franek had eyes only for her. What did he want from her? ‘You keep us safe till the police get here . . .’ Was she a hostage? Was she a victim? Was she both? Did Franek care what shape she was in as long as her presence kept his persecutors at bay? ‘Animal . . . fucker . . . pervert . . .’ How dangerous was he? Did he think if he raped her she wouldn’t find the courage to try to escape? Was he right? What would happen if the minutes of waiting became hours? Questions . . . questions . . . questions . . .

  She wished she hadn’t hemmed herself in so tightly that the only way she could relax was to prop one shoulder at a time against a wall. She tried to keep her movements to a minimum, aware that every time the silk of her camisole stretched across her breasts it excited him more, but she was becoming exhausted and knots of anxiety tightened in her stomach as her indecision about what to do grew worse. His raking gaze – a horrible perversion of a normal man’s admiration – made her feel dirty . . . and guilty . . . and she folded her arms across her chest in a vain attempt to cover herself.

  She should never have worn a sleeveless top . . . she was exposing too much flesh . . .

  Melanie was wrong . . . he couldn’t be a paedophile . . . he wouldn’t be looking at her like this if he were a paedophile . . .

  The silence in the room was unbearable. So was the heat. The smell of the old man’s body odour filled her nostrils and made her want to puke.

  She forced herself to speak. ‘Something’s wrong,’ she said, her voice grating with dryness.

  Nicholas glanced nervously towards the window. ‘What?’

  ‘There ought to be sirens by now.’

  He thought so, too, because his Adam’s apple lurched violently in his throat. ‘Perhaps no one’s bothered to tell them what’s going on.’

  Sophie ran her tongue round the inside of her mouth. ‘Why wouldn’t they?’ she said on a more even note.

  Nicholas glanced at his father but the old man continued to stare at Sophie, refusing to be drawn into explanations.

  ‘They don’t like us,’ said Nicholas.

  She attempted irony. ‘I guessed that.’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘I’m not too keen on my own next-door neighbours,’ she went on, desperate to keep the conversation going, ‘but I wouldn’t stand by while a mob threw stones at them.’

  ‘It would have been all right if they’d sent an ambulance. Dad and I could both have got out and none of us would be in danger.’

  ‘Did you know this was going to happen?’

  He gave a small shrug which she could interpret as she liked.

  ‘Why didn’t you call the police?’

  ‘I did,’ he said wretchedly. ‘Several times. They never came.’

  ‘So you called the surgery?’

  He nodded. ‘I told them not to send a woman . . . but they didn’t listen.’

  ‘You said it was an emergency,’ she reminded him, ‘and the nearest male doctor was twenty minutes away.’ She shook her head in bafflement. ‘What would a man have been able to do that a woman couldn’t?’

  ‘Nothing. I just didn’t want a woman involved . . . not one like you, anyway.’ He made a despairing gesture with his hand. ‘But it’s too late now . . . there’s nothing I can do.’

  Oh, God! Fear wrenched at the knots in her stomach. What was he trying to tell her? Involved with who? The crowd outside? His father? Instinct told her it was Franek because her flesh crawled every time she looked at him. He reminded her of a sewer rat – unpredictable, vicious, a carrier of disease, something repellent and evil. She tried to persuade herself it was a reaction to the way he’d thrust himself against her, but she knew that wasn’t true. He frightened her because she had no control over him . . . and neither, she believed, did his unnaturally submissive son . . .

  ‘There’s nothing I can do . . .’

  Outside 23 Humbert Street

  Melanie pressed the redial button on her mobile for the tenth time in as many minutes and listened to the computerized voice asking her to leave a message on Jimmy’s voicemail. ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ she told her brother. ‘He never talks this long even when he’s on a landline.’

  ‘Then he hasn’t got it with him.’

  She took a deep breath. They’d been round this circuit several times before. ‘I already told you. I saw him put it in his pocket,’ she repeated patiently.

  He shrugged. ‘Then it’s switched off.’

  ‘He wouldn’t do that, not when he’s
got deals going down.’

  ‘Then it’s been nicked and whoever nicked it’s doing the talking.’

  Stress got the better of her. ‘How many times do I have to tell you?’ she snapped. ‘Nobody nicks anything from Jimmy. Something bad’s happened, so why the fuck can’t you get that into your skull instead of blathering rubbish at me?’

  It was the excuse Colin had been waiting for. There was no fun hanging around his sister – all she ever did was lecture him – and the call of his mates was stronger than the unwanted responsibility of a niece and nephew. He shoved a finger under her nose. ‘You’ve gotta be wrong sometime,’ he told her. ‘If it’s not stolen . . . if he didn’t leave it in the house . . . if he ain’t got it switched off . . . if it ain’t lost . . . then he’s gotta be talking to someone.’ He turned away. ‘But I’ve fucking well had it, Mel. It’s your mess . . . you sort it.’

  Inside 23 Humbert Street

  The old man could read Sophie’s mind. ‘You think I fake the panic to make a prisoner of you,’ he said suddenly. ‘It make you angry to be fooled. Maybe you not so good a doctor, after all.’

  She forced herself to look at him. ‘Did you?’

  His eyes glittered spitefully. ‘You so clever, little girl, you work it out for yourself.’

  She shrugged as if to demonstrate that his browbeating had no effect on her. ‘I already have. You may have exaggerated it a bit, but most of what I saw was genuine. You’re certainly asthmatic. Your breathing’s troubling you now . . . has been since you moved the wardrobe.’ She smiled slightly. ‘You should use your inhaler before it gets any worse, Mr Hollis.’ She watched him pat his trouser pockets and allowed herself a momentary thrill as his eyes flickered nervously towards the door. It was a small triumph – his son had bundled him out of the sitting-room too fast to remember his inhaler – but a big step on her route to wresting back some control. ‘I think you’ll find you left it downstairs,’ she said.

  ‘So? I manage without.’

  ‘If you can.’

  He smacked his chest. ‘Sound as a bell. Nothing wrong. You try to frighten Franek.’

  Too bloody right! ‘I don’t need to.’ She jerked her chin towards the front of the house. ‘What do you think’s going to happen when half a ton of angry men burst through your front door? You’ll be so scared, you’ll die of respiratory failure.’

  He gave an amused snort as if he enjoyed her spirit. ‘You help me if this happens,’ he told her. ‘It’s your job. You swear the oath of Hippocrates.’

  Sophie shook her head.

  ‘I take you to court . . . sue you for negligence.’ He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. ‘Get you sacked . . . win lots of money.’

  ‘You won’t be able to,’ she said.

  ‘How you make that out?’

  ‘I’ll scream “rape” the minute I hear footsteps on the stairs. If it’s the police, you’ll go to prison. If it’s your neighbours, they’ll tear you apart.’

  ‘You try . . . I snap your neck . . . like this.’ He wrenched imaginary vertebrae between his muscular fingers.

  Nicholas shifted unhappily. ‘Is this necessary?’ he asked.

  His father ignored him.

  ‘We don’t know how long we’re going to be here,’ Nicholas told Sophie. ‘Shouldn’t we try to get along?’

  The sweet voice of reason, she thought. ‘Then let me negotiate for you. That’s far more sensible than sitting in this oven and dying of dehydration. We don’t have any water,’ she pointed out.

  ‘It won’t be long. The police will be here soon. We can be friends till then.’

  ‘Friends . . . ? ’ Was he mad, too? ‘Your father threatened to kill me.’

  ‘And you threatened to have him ripped apart,’ he reminded her. ‘It’s not that I blame you . . . you’re frightened . . . we’re all frightened. I just can’t see what good it’s doing. We’d do better to sit in silence than keep sniping at each other. At least that way we can hear what’s going on outside.’

  Her inclination was to agree with him because her temperament was naturally amenable. Also, she was desperate to sit down and relax her guard. Perhaps he saw the indecision in her face, because he reached for one of the chairs to pull it away.

  ‘No,’ she snapped, clamping her hand on the chairback.

  ‘You’ll be more comfortable out here,’ he said persuasively.

  It was a seductive invitation, and one not lost on Franek, who gave his son’s shoulder an approving pat. Suspicions flowered wildly in Sophie’s mind. Was Nicholas his father’s procurer? Was this a variation on the good cop–bad cop routine? Was the son the seducer? Did that explain his submissiveness? Somewhere in the turmoil of her mind, common sense told her it would be the other way round. It was the customer with dirty secrets who was vulnerable . . . the procurer with power to blackmail who was in control . . . ‘I prefer it where I am,’ she said tightly.

  He didn’t press the issue. ‘OK,’ he said, taking his hand away. ‘Let me know if you change your mind.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘You not so tough,’ said Franek. ‘Soon you fall over – poof –’ he chopped his hand towards the floor – ‘then your mind goes to sleep and Franek makes the decisions.’

  She didn’t say anything.

  He studied her lasciviously, grinning when she clamped her arm across her breasts again. ‘Now you scared,’ he jeered.

  She was. She couldn’t bear the way he knew what she was thinking. It was as if he understood the trigger points of a woman’s terror and recognized their signatures in every tiny shift of expression. It was an invasion. A brutal assault on resolve, setting her at war with herself about whether to keep standing up to him or appease through silence. She needed desperately to run her tongue across her lips – there was no moisture left in them – but she forced herself not to. He’d see it as another sign of fear . . .

  . . . and fear excited him . . .

  The thought ripped through her mind like a lightning strike. Fear excited him. God, she’d been slow! People had written books about fuckers like this. She could even remember the definition in her medical dictionary. ‘Sadism – sexual pleasure and orgasm derived from the infliction of pain or suffering on others, specifically humiliation and torture.’

  It wasn’t her breasts that were exciting him, it was the guilt he read in her face every time she covered them. It wasn’t his penis against her arse he was remembering, it was the terrified way she’d wiped the taste of his filth from her lips. The little shit was getting his rocks off by abasing her. ‘You not so good a doctor, after all . . .’

  She had to stand up to him. Oh, God! Oh, God! But was she right? If only Bob were there. He would know. He was an expert in bastards like this. He treated them, for God’s sake. Her eyes flooded suddenly at the memory of her fianc She was supposed to be meeting him, and he wouldn’t even know why she’d let him down.

  Do it! She moistened her lips and dropped her hands to the chairback, staring Franek down. ‘Tell me about Nicholas’s mother,’ she invited him. ‘Tell me how scared she had to be before you could get an erection?’

  He frowned at her angrily and said something to Nicholas.

  ‘He doesn’t understand what you mean,’ said the younger man, lowering his eyes and refusing to look at her.

  ‘Yes, but you do,’ she said, ‘so translate for me. Ask him what he had to do to her to get himself in the mood? Tie her up? Beat her black and blue?’

  Nicholas shook his head.

  ‘OK. I’ll do it. I’ll spell it out for him in words of one syllable. He’s thick as pig-shit but he ought to be able to understand the word “sadist”.’

  A tiny narrowing of the old man’s lids told her he did. ‘You stop now before Franek get angry,’ he ordered.

  She laughed, terrifyingly complacent, thrilled to have scored so easily. ‘So where is Milosz’s mamma now?’ she asked, leaning forward and aping his accent. ‘Fucking someone else?’

 
; Of course she wasn’t ready. Nothing in her life could have prepared her for the speed with which Franek launched himself from the floor and smashed his fist into her face.

  Fourteen

  Saturday 28 July 2001

  Hampshire Police Headquarters

  DCI TYLER WAS IN his office at headquarters when a call came through from the Bella Vista hotel in Majorca. There was a gabble of Spanish from an operator, then: ‘The manager said I could call you on his phone,’ said a girl’s tearful voice. ‘He says you might give me some money because you were asking about Eddy.’

  Tyler sat up immediately and reached for a pen. ‘Do you mean Edward Townsend?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she wailed. ‘He’s such a bastard. The manager says I have to pay the bill . . . but it’s huge . . . and I can’t . . .’ The voice broke into racking sobs.

  ‘Who am I talking to?’ he asked patiently. She sounded too young to pay bills.

  ‘Franny Gough. He said he loved me,’ she wept. ‘He said he was going to marry me. I don’t know what to do . . . I don’t have a plane ticket because he never gave me one . . . and the manager won’t let me leave till the bill’s paid. He’s taken the hire car . . . and there’s no way for me to get to the airport . . . and if I phone my mother she’ll kill me. She kept telling me he was no good . . . but I just thought she was jealous because Eddy’s the same age as her and she can’t get a man . . .’

  He listened to the pathetically immature voice at the other end, spilling the same woes and misconceptions that girls had been spilling for centuries, and he wondered if she was as gullible as she was pretending or if she thought naivety was a way to win a man’s sympathy. But whose? His or the manager’s? ‘When did he leave?’

  ‘Yesterday. I did everything he wanted . . . you know, got dressed up . . . but he said I didn’t look right because my hair was too short . . .’