Acid Row

by Minette Walters

  Colin jerked his head towards a huddled group at the edge of the semicircular space outside number 23. ‘Over there.’

  In contrast to the bottlenecks at either end of the road, the space in front of the paedophile’s house, and those beside it, had remained relatively clear, almost as if an invisible cordon were holding the crowd back. In a sense this was true, since those at the front, unwilling to be ousted from their grandstand view, were constantly pushing backwards to counter the pressure from behind.

  It had allowed Melanie to stand guard over her front door, hitting out at anyone who tried to encroach, but she drew no comfort from it since the reason for this jealous guarding of the space was excitement. It had become the gladiatorial arena where the more bullish of the youths launched their bricks and stones into the pervert’s sitting-room, destroying everything of value to the exultant ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ of the crowd.

  ‘Stay here,’ she said, shoving her mobile into Colin’s hand.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Stop them,’ she said fiercely.

  She charged across the tarmac and grabbed one of the youths by his collar. ‘Where’s Wesley?’ she demanded.

  The boy tried to shake her off, but as he moved aside she saw Kevin Charteris squatting on the ground and flicking an unresponsive lighter to a petrol-soaked rag in a bottle. ‘Oh, my God!’ she stormed, seizing him by his ponytail and hauling him to his feet. ‘What d’you think you’re doing, you stupid bugger?’ She smacked the lighter out of his hand. ‘My house is next door and my kids’re in there.’

  ‘Sod off,’ he said furiously, twisting to get away from her.

  She hit him across the head with her other hand and swung him round in front of his friends. ‘Are you crazy or what?’ she demanded. ‘Where d’you get these bottles from? Whose fucking idea was it?’ She jerked Kevin’s head back. ‘It had to be yours and Wesley’s, Kevin. You’re the only ones stupid enough.’

  ‘Why d’ya always pick on me?’ said the boy sullenly, his face flushed with alcohol. ‘Everyone’s doin’ it.’

  Melanie cast about wildly to see if he was telling the truth. ‘The whole place’ll go up and who’s going to put it out? You reckon those idiots on the barricades’ll let fire engines through?’

  ‘It was your idea, Mel,’ he said, yanking his hair from her hand and backing away from her. ‘You said you wanted rid of the nonces and that’s what you’re gonna get.’ He nodded to Wesley, who was standing behind her, and grinned when the boy tossed over another lighter. ‘We’re gonna burn ’em for you.’

  She lunged at him but was held back by Wesley. ‘What about Amy? D’you want to burn her, too?’

  ‘She ain’t in there.’

  ‘She was seen at the door.’

  ‘It don’t make no difference,’ he told her carelessly. ‘Stands to reason, she’ll be dead meat under the floorboards by now. That’s how it works, Mel. Perverts kill kids. We kill perverts.’ With another broad grin, he set fire to the rag and shifted the bottle to his right hand in order to lob it towards the shattered window of number 23.

  He knew very little about how to construct a Molotov cocktail, and because he was drunk his reactions were slow. He did not know how quickly the neck of a bottle would heat up when the petrol inside it ignited, or how dangerous a Molotov cocktail could be to the thrower. The principle behind such an incendiary device – to keep the petrol contained in the bottle until it shattered against its target – was little understood by amateurs. Certainly Kevin had no idea of the value of screw-top lids or tying the rag round the neck of the bottle rather than stuffing it inside.

  There was a frightened bellow from the crowd around him as, with a cry of pain, he dropped the bottle from scorched fingers and it broke on the road at his feet, engulfing him in flames. Like the ripple effect on a pool after the surface has been disturbed, the stampede to get away from him eddied out in frantic waves. His friends, ablaze themselves from their proximity to the exploding bottle, lurched backwards, beating at their arms, chests and hair; women and children screamed as they were pressed into the solid wall of people behind.

  Only Melanie, protected by the bodies of his friends, remained where she was, her attention focused on the fireball in front of her. She had time to think that she didn’t even like Kevin Charteris. He was the evil influence that had caused Colin to be arrested twenty times for petty theft and vandalism, and he was so far out of control that he’d helped Wesley Barber put his mother in hospital twice.

  But she knew him – it wasn’t some stranger on fire – and the tug of kinship was powerful.

  She was screaming, too – she couldn’t help herself – but in the midst of the bedlam she had the wit to take off her jacket and throw herself on Kevin, wrapping the leather round him and using her own weight to force him to the ground. She rolled him from side to side to smother the flames, gagging on the smell of his burning hair, eyes stinging from the heat of the blazing petrol on the tarmac. She was aware of people coming to her assistance, dragging the boy away from the source of the fire, adding more clothes to the rolling body, before she was hauled backwards and someone was beating at her head.

  ‘You stupid bitch,’ her brother sobbed as he pushed her face down on the ground and threw himself on top of her. ‘Your sodding hair’s on fire.’

  Inside 23 Humbert Street

  Franek’s fist caught Sophie high on the cheekbone, rattling her brain. The blow was powerful enough to knock her off her feet, but the wall behind her kept her upright. Instinct made her fight back when there was no reasonable hope that anything she did would be effective. A second blow would knock her out. She responded with the only thing to hand – the chair – shoving it hard against him and bringing the seat into contact with his knees.

  There was no logical thought behind it – she was too dazed for that – but when he grunted in pain she remembered the vase. Hit back or die. She seized the vase by the neck and smashed it against the wall, scything it towards his head in a desperate piledriver of a forehand. ‘You FUCKER!’ she screamed, slashing the razor-sharp edges across his face.

  He groped for his eyes, blood streaming, and she swung the vase again, slicing the skin on his fingers like the serrated fat on pork. ‘Get AWAY from me!’ she roared, adding her other hand to the neck of the vase and balancing it for a double backhander. ‘GET AWAY!’

  This time she missed him completely and the vase flew from her hand to shatter against the far wall. She was like a madwoman. Cursing. Bellowing. ‘FUCKER! FUCKER! FUCKER! I hope you DIE!’

  She was reaching for the cricket bat to bring it down on his head when she was grabbed round the waist by his son and dragged away. ‘Stop! Stop!’ yelled Nicholas. ‘Do you want to kill him?’

  Sophie cradled the bat in one hand and drew the chair against her with the other, rearranging her defences, crouching like a kestrel on a post, watching like a ferret. She couldn’t speak because she couldn’t breathe. Like Franek earlier, adrenalin and panic had collided in her chest to rob her of oxygen. But in her head a scream of hatred circled: Yes! Yes! YES!

  Nicholas tried to pull Franek’s hands away from his eyes but the old man resisted, rocking and keening to himself. ‘I think you’ve blinded him,’ he said, turning towards Sophie.

  She lifted the bat above her head, ready to bring it down in a chopping blow if he took a step forward.

  ‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ Nicholas protested, spreading his hands in a pacifying gesture. ‘But this is all so crazy. Why do you keep provoking him?’

  She didn’t move, just kept watching him.

  Outside, people started screaming in terror.

  9 Humbert Street

  Gaynor heard the screams from her place in Mrs Carthew’s doorway. She looked up for a moment, half-thinking she could hear Melanie, but the sound of an engine somewhere in the distance distracted her. ‘Something’s happening,’ she told Ken Hewitt into her phone, as people squeezed past her one at a tim
e.

  ‘What?’

  ‘People are screaming,’ she said fearfully, ‘and I can hear an engine. Could that be the police coming?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ There was a short pause while she heard the sound of his radio. ‘I can’t get through at the moment,’ he told her calmly. ‘Just keep going, Gaynor. How many have you got out so far?’

  ‘I don’t know. Fifty maybe. It’d be quicker if we let them through two at a time. They’re starting to push.’

  ‘Don’t,’ he said urgently. ‘You won’t be able to control it.’

  The warning came too late.

  Cries of alarm from the crowd further down as they stampeded from the burning petrol spread panic like wildfire at Gaynor’s end of the street. Frightened people in front of the door pushed to get through and, unable to keep her feet, she was carried in with them. She clung desperately to the handle to pull herself in behind the door, then shoved Lisa and the big child towards the garden. ‘Get out now,’ she ordered. ‘Go home.’

  They were ripped away by the flood, and she saw Lisa’s face turned towards her as she was carried along. ‘Look where you’re going!’ Gaynor screamed after her, flattening herself against the wall. ‘Stay on your feet!’ But the child was already out of sight.

  There was nothing Gaynor could do except stand and watch. She felt bruised and battered from the flailing hands that shot out to find support as bodies thrust through the doorway, but she knew there was no way she could close the door on her own if a catastrophe happened. No way she could prevent the pushing and shoving as desperate people struggled to stay upright. No way she could slow their impetus.

  She was responsible. If she hadn’t insisted on the march – even been proud to be one of its leaders – none of this would be happening. She found herself praying: ‘Dear God, please don’t let anyone die.’ She repeated it over and over again without pause, as if continuous intercession were the only way to hold God’s attention. But she knew He wasn’t listening. At the back of her mind lurked the awful guilt of the lapsed Catholic. If she’d been a better person, listened to the priests, confessed her sins, attended church . . .

  Command centre – police helicopter footage

  The video link from the air to the command centre ten miles away gave an alarming overview of what was happening on the ground. Activity was concentrated around Humbert Street and the barricades at the four entrances to the estate. It was estimated that some two to three thousand people were massing in and around Humbert, with overspills in Bassindale and Forest, while the barricades were attracting a river of recruits as word spread of their existence. The police were powerless to act. Events had taken them by surprise and they lacked the manpower to respond.

  The watchers in the centre stared in disbelief at the aerial pictures of Humbert Street, wondering what malign fate had placed the paedophile in a road where the short-term policy of infilling gaps between properties to create more accommodation had turned it into a solid-walled rat-run. It would lead to argument and recrimination afterwards, with the police blaming council officers for refusing to take their warnings about access seriously, and the council blaming the police for not doing their jobs properly. For now, all anyone could do was watch as the ignorant mob, unaware of the danger it was in, squeezed relentlessly into a space that was too small to take it.

  The sheet of flame as Kevin Charteris’s petrol bomb exploded, followed by the thrust of panic as the crowd surged away from the flaming tarmac, was caught vividly on camera. It was as if a giant magnet had suddenly reversed its poles and impelled people outwards like so many iron filings. There was terror in the upturned faces of women and children as they were slammed into each other or forced against the constraining walls of houses. Sickening pictures of youngsters falling under trampling feet. Only the exit through Mrs Carthew’s house offered any hope of a lifeline as a stream of wildly stampeding people fled into the tablecloth-sized garden at the back, crashing through fences to reach the relative safety of Forest Road.

  A separate focus of activity was the Co-op supermarket and the shops surrounding it. Rightly or wrongly, the managers had chosen to close when the first rumours of trouble reached them, and the security gratings across the windows were now under heavy assault from axes as a fifty-strong band of thieves looked to plunder the goods. This activity, too, was attracting recruits, and groups of youths, wearing baseball caps to disguise themselves from the hovering helicopter, were pouring towards the area to pick up any scraps the axe-wielders left.

  Evidence that there was some pre-planning of the riot showed most clearly in the organized way the cars had been positioned at the entrances. This was no random overturning of vehicles where they stood, rather solidly built fortifications, shaped like arrow heads and angled out towards the main road in a deliberate attempt to frustrate any push by police armoured wagons to ram through them. Fires were being lit in the gardens to either side, piles of tyres and green-wood branches, saturated in petrol – further evidence of pre-planning – driving thick black smoke towards the slowly assembling riot squads on the other side of the main road.

  Even as officers in the command centre were watching the pictures, they were already questioning why there had been no prior warning that something of this magnitude was brewing in Acid Row. The assumption continued to be that news of a paedophile in their midst had roused the estate to anger – a view bolstered by reports from social workers and housing officers – but it wasn’t at all clear from the video pictures whether the masked youths on the barricades were linked to what was taking place in Humbert Street or had taken advantage of the estate’s discontent to launch a war of their own.

  It was a female officer who summed up what most of them were thinking.

  ‘We’ll be crucified when the press get hold of this.’

  Glebe Tower, Bassindale Estate

  Jimmy James and Mrs Hinkley stared at each other suspiciously as the lift doors opened. Neither was impressed. She looked ancient. He looked shifty. She had a bad-tempered mouth like an inverted horseshoe. He was a dandy, covered in gold jewellery. She was like his aunt . . . fond of lecturing. He was a crook . . . who had never come by that jewellery honestly.

  Her face softened as she looked at the policewoman. ‘Can you lift her into this?’ she asked, pointing to the wheelchair in front of her. ‘Our friend the ambulance man said you must keep movement to the minimum . . . If she has a skull fracture, the important thing is to avoid slivers of bone going into her brain.’

  ‘I do know that,’ said Jimmy through gritted teeth.

  ‘Then don’t do anything in a hurry . . . and you must support her head very carefully . . . like a baby’s.’

  He bared his teeth in a wolfish smile. ‘Sure thing, baas.’

  ‘It’s Mrs Hinkley.’

  She looked him straight in the eye, daring him to continue playing the fool, and the likeness to his aunt intensified. But she was far too thin – his father’s sister was a barrel of a woman – and there was a suggestion of slovenliness about Mrs Hinkley, with her lank white hair, ill-fitting shoes and old cardigan with frayed cuffs and darns in the elbows, which implied poverty or carelessness.

  He relented slightly. She was doing him a favour by agreeing to help him, and it wasn’t her fault that they came from different generations and different cultures. He offered a bloodstained hand. ‘Mr James . . . Jimmy to my friends.’

  He hadn’t expected her to shake it – it wouldn’t have worried him if she hadn’t – but she surprised him by taking it warmly between the two of hers. ‘Splendid. I’m Eileen to mine. Shall we proceed? I have bandages in my flat. Also washing facilities.’

  The wheelchair was obviously hers, because she clung to his arm, walking with a dragging limp, as he pushed the policewoman to the flat. ‘I broke my hip two years ago,’ she explained, ‘and I haven’t been steady on my pins since. In here,’ she said, pushing open the door to her bedroom. ‘Put her on the bed and I’ll see what I can d
o about cleaning some of this blood out of her hair. Did the ambulanceman explain how you were supposed to lay her down?’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked at the frilly cream counterpane with matching pillowcases. ‘I’d better take these off first,’ he said reaching down to pull the counterpane back.

  She smacked his hand. ‘No.’

  ‘They’ll get ruined,’ he warned. ‘Look at me.’ He gestured at his clothes. ‘All my decent clobber fucked to blazes.’

  She tut-tutted at the obscenity. ‘I have to sleep in this bed,’ she told him. ‘I’ll throw the counterpane away if necessary.’

  He couldn’t see the logic. ‘It’s a good one. Why don’t we just put her on a sheet, then all you have to do is make the bed again afterwards?’

  ‘Because I can’t,’ she said crossly, holding up arthritic claws. ‘I have a home help who comes in every week to do it and she’s not due again till next Friday. It’s the reality of old age, I’m afraid. Dependence on others to do – rather badly – what you did so well yourself just a few years ago. It’s deeply frustrating. It makes me want to scream sometimes.’

  He eased her aside and stripped the bed down to the bottom sheet. ‘I’ll do it for you,’ he told her as he lifted the policewoman carefully out of the chair and eased her into the recovery position on the flat surface.

  ‘Hah! You’ll be long gone before the ambulance gets here,’ said Eileen shrewdly. ‘Now you’re shot of the responsibility you’ll be off like a rocket.’

  She was right, of course. ‘My pregnant lady and her two kids are out there,’ he said. ‘I need to know what’s happened to them.’ He saw the disillusion in her eyes. ‘What time do you usually go to bed?’ he asked.

  ‘Nine o’clock.’

  ‘Then I’ll be back before nine. Is that a deal?’

  ‘We’ll see,’ she said, bending over the young woman and feeling the pulse in her neck. ‘A deal’s only a deal when it’s honoured.’ She pointed towards a bathroom on the left. ‘There’s a tin bowl in there and a tray with some cotton wool and disinfectant. There’s also a roll of bandages in the cupboard over the basin. I need the bowl filled with warm water and everything brought out here. If you clear the bedside table first and pull it forward, we can use it as a work surface.’