Acid Row

by Minette Walters

  Garden of 9 Humbert Street

  The old soldier watched the black man’s antics from where he was standing. None of the fences were so high that Jimmy’s ducking and weaving were hidden from him. He put the worst interpretation on what he saw. There was only one reason for a man to stare into windows as he slipped past the backs of the houses before taking cover behind a tree to case one of them. The negro was using the opportunity of the riot to break into any property that looked empty.

  The old soldier’s indignation at being an unwilling abetter to crime was colossal. Did the man think he was stupid? Or a coward? Did he take it for granted that a pensioner would turn a blind eye while his neighbours were robbed?

  As he saw Jimmy jump the fence, he stooped to retrieve his machete from where it was propped against the post and set off after him.

  Inside 23 Humbert Street

  For Colin, who was fumbling for a grip on the hot metal latch through the baggy hem of his T-shirt, the sound of the splintering doorjamb in the kitchen was the last straw. Fear paralysed him. Every horror that he could possibly have imagined was coming true. He was caught in a trap . . . couldn’t run . . . couldn’t hide . . . and the only thought he had in his head was that none of this would be happening if he hadn’t helped Kevin and Wesley make petrol bombs.

  Upstairs, Sophie and Nicholas froze as the crash of the door flying open below them shook the floorboards on which they were standing. All their energy was concentrated into listening, heads tilted to catch sounds that could be translated into meaning. It’s said that a thousand thoughts can race through the brain in seconds. In both their minds was just one.

  Who . . . ?

  The back of Sophie’s head cracked against the wall before she was even aware that two strong hands had gripped her ankles and jerked her off her feet. She had a confused impression of a chair being swung at Nicholas’s face, before she felt herself being dragged into the middle of the room and Franek’s filthy hand clamping itself across her mouth to stifle the scream that was rising in her throat.

  She stared up at him, eyes like saucers.

  He lowered his mouth to her ear. ‘You want Franek to fuck you now, little girl?’ he whispered.

  Jimmy was alarmed by the running taps and overflowing bowls in the sink. He didn’t attempt to work out what they were for, merely accepted that it meant someone was nearby. He shrank against the wall beside the door and tried to calm his breathing. He became aware of sounds from upstairs. Something heavy dropping to the floor. The scrape of wood on wood, like furniture being moved. The shouts from Humbert Street carried through to him as if a door or a window were open somewhere. Also a smell of burning wood and petrol.

  He glanced at the taps again, putting two and two together. Petrol bombs. Running water. It wasn’t difficult to guess that someone was trying to put a fire out, nor that whoever it was must have heard him. But which of the Hollises was it? The psycho or the nonce? And were they waiting for him in the corridor?

  In one fluid movement, he yanked the table into the middle of the room, kicked the door wide and grabbed the microwave with both hands, ready to bring it down on the head of whoever was out there.

  He was greeted with a wail of fear which was cut off in mid-breath. ‘Oh, fuck it, Jimmy!’ bellowed Colin as he burst into tears again. ‘You scared the shit out of me! I thought you was the pervert come to bugger me.’

  Such was Colin’s reputation for thieving that Jimmy’s first thought was that he was looting the place, till he saw the bucket at the boy’s feet. He lowered the microwave to the floor and padded past the back room and the stairs, taking a quick glance at both as Colin had done. He had a clear view of the front room, saw the devastation caused by the bricks, took in the broken window and the waiting crowd outside.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked, grabbing the boy by the shoulders and pulling him into a hug.

  ‘Everyone’s gone crazy,’ wept Colin. ‘The sodding door’s on fire but the kettle don’t work.’ He wiped his tears on his sleeve. ‘Mel’s on the other side, trying to stop them making it worse, but she’s being forced away ’cos it’s too hot. I was gonna open the door and chuck water on it, but I’m shit-scared Wesley’s gonna bomb me. Kev’s already gone up like a fucking torch . . . half his skin’s burnt off.’

  Jimmy made what he could of this. ‘How d’you get in?’

  ‘Through the window.’

  ‘OK.’ He didn’t waste time on further explanation. ‘They’d have fired the sitting-room by now if that’s what they wanted,’ he said. ‘You open the door. I’ll work the bucket. Are you up for it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Jimmy seized the handle of the pail. ‘Just don’t open it too far,’ he warned, ‘or we’ll both get fried. Ready? Go.’

  But he knew as soon as the door began to open and flames licked round the jamb that the fire was too well established for one pail of water. He kicked it closed again and threw the water against the crack between the door and the frame. ‘It’s too late,’ he said. ‘We can’t put it out from this side.’

  Colin started to wail again. ‘Oh, Jesus, Jesus! What we gonna do? If this place goes up, Mel’s’ll go, too . . .’n’ Rosie ’n’ Ben’re in there. That’s why she’s trying to stop the fuckers throwing any more bombs.’

  Jimmy thought rapidly, then steered him towards the sitting-room door. ‘Shift your arse back out there and I’ll feed you buckets through the window. Get Mel and her line to help you. When the fire’s out, tell them all to stand in front of the door and the window till I give you the signal it’s OK to leave.’ He put his hand on the back of Colin’s neck and gave it an encouraging squeeze. ‘Can you do that, mate?’

  ‘Sure.’ He was so relieved to have Jimmy take over that it never occurred to him to ask what he was doing there or how he knew that Melanie had established a line in front of the pervert’s house.

  Command centre – police helicopter footage

  Faces weren’t recognizable from the air, but hair and clothes were. The Co-op vandals had the sense to wear caps and dispose of their clothes immediately after the riot. The barricaders wore balaclavas and scarves, and did the same. None of them was ever identified.

  Video footage of what went on in Humbert Street was a different matter. Few believed that vigilantism was a crime, and the hovering helicopter attracted upturned faces and gestures of defiance as if to say: this is how justice should be administered. Perverts out. The same rule for Acid Row as for Portisfield. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. Fear for fear.

  Despite their denials afterwards that they were there, had a part in or incited murder, over one hundred people were identified from still photographs reproduced from the tape. It was a long and painstaking exercise which took over two years to complete, but which came to nothing when a jury failed to recognize the first defendant to come to trial from the grainy black and white mask of hatred that was presented to them. In their judgement, there was no resemblance between the clean, smartly suited, smiling eighteen-year-old in the dock and the vicious-looking adolescent in the picture. All subsequent cases were dropped.

  In the end, the only people who admitted their part in what happened were the brave handful who formed Melanie Patterson’s line. Everything they did was captured by the helicopter’s camera, from holding the petrol bombers at bay to putting out the fire and trying to hold off the assault when it finally came. But none of them would give evidence of incitement against particular individuals. They were too frightened of Acid Row’s violent gangland culture of retribution on grasses.

  The single exception to this was Wesley Barber.

  Everyone named him.

  Twenty-three

  Saturday 28 July 2001

  Inside 23 Humbert Street

  JIMMY KEPT HIS ears open every time he returned to the kitchen to fill the bucket and bowls. Once, there was a muffled thump as if someone’s head had been slammed against the floor; another time, he thought he heard voices. There
was certainly no one downstairs. On his passage through to the sitting-room he pushed the door of the back room wide and a quick recce showed it to be empty. Of people.

  It was full of other things. An Aladdin’s cave of sound equipment and instruments. Computers. Synthesizers. Mixers. Amplifiers. Keyboard. Guitars. Drums. Even a saxophone. To a man like Jimmy, it was heavy temptation. A studio in the making. Everything he needed to go straight. It prejudiced his thinking from the moment he saw it. He didn’t want it trashed or stolen. He wanted it for himself.

  On his third trip past, he checked the lock and found a key on the inside of the door. It was half a second’s work to shoot the bolt and zip the key inside his pocket. It wasn’t much of a deterrent if the idiots outside decided to charge it, but it might hold long enough for him to hoof it back and stake a claim.

  Afterwards, of course, he regretted locking the door because it took away the only hiding place in that dreadful house.

  But it’s easy to be wise in retrospect . . .

  Sophie had grown bolder as the afternoon wore on. If Franek managed to catch her again, she had told herself, she would scratch his eyes out, drive her knee into his testicles, bite, claw, cripple. She certainly wouldn’t give in. Better to fight to the bitter end than let him think a woman was easy. Such brave thoughts. Taken from fiction, not from real life. Designed to bolster confidence while she was on her feet and holding a weapon in her hand. Impossible to implement when she was flat on her back on the floor.

  She was pinned like a butterfly to a board, unable to break free. The weight of his body was holding her down, his hands clamping hers to the floor above her head, his fleshy breasts and thick black curls smothering her mouth and nose and preventing her from crying out. He stank of dirt and sweat and she could feel the bile of disgust and defeat rise in her throat, threatening to choke her. She didn’t know if it was her fear or his strength that had stolen her energy. All she knew was that if she didn’t want to be punched again, the sensible thing was to lie quiet and not provoke him.

  He laughed against her ear. ‘You like the rest,’ he gloated. ‘You rather Franek fuck you than spoil your pretty face. But maybe I do both. How will that make you feel, little miss? Ugly? Dirty? Will you run away and hide because Franek make you frightened? This is good. You not respect a man the way you should.’

  She felt him force her hands together so he could grasp them both in one of his. She felt his other hand move down to her trousers and tear at the waistband. And all the while she could hear the sound of someone moving downstairs. She wondered if it was Nicholas. Had he gone away and left her to his father? Did he think that if he wasn’t in the room it made his responsibility less?

  Tears of anger pricked behind her eyes. She hated the son with a passion. He was a coward. A two-faced creep. Why had he listened to her if he had no intention of standing by her? How dare he abandon her? How dare he allow his father to empty his filth into her?

  Later, she would ponder the irony of misdirected anger. She had torn strips off Bob once because a patient had been rude to her but, instead of tackling the patient, she had taken her fury out on Bob. He had waited calmly till the storm blew itself out, then murmured that if she planned to make a habit of anger-transference then she ought to take up boxing. ‘We all know it’s safer to beat up on people who won’t retaliate,’ he told her, ‘but it’s a quick way to lose friends. You need to find ways of dealing with confrontation when it happens.’

  ‘I’d rather avoid it.’

  ‘I know. It’s a woman’s thing. You’re afraid of making a fool of yourself.’

  Perhaps her subconscious remembered the conversation. Perhaps, more simply, the reality of Franek’s groping hand ripped through apathy and reawoke determination. She had promised herself she wouldn’t submit.

  But what was this if it wasn’t submission?

  She twisted her face sideways and let out a scream – a piercing, high-pitched sound that carried to Jimmy downstairs – cut short by a sudden blow to her face as Franek let go of her hands and punched her in the teeth.

  ‘Shut up, bitch,’ he growled, face contorted in fury, blood running down it where her nails had clawed the scabs from his wounds. ‘You want Franek to do what he do to Milosz’s mamma?’

  He chopped at her face with his fist, over and over again, as if she were piece of meat that needed tenderizing and, as consciousness began to drift, she understood that Milosz’s mother was dead.

  Jimmy heard the scream as he lifted the bucket across the sill, his chest heaving with the effort of running back and forth to the kitchen. ‘That’s gotta be the last one, Col,’ he panted. ‘You’ll have to take over now. I need you to keep those bastards at bay for another five minutes. You reckon you can hold out that long?’

  Colin’s face fell. ‘What’ya gonna do?’

  ‘You don’t wanna know, mate. Just trust me, OK?’ He looked beyond the boy to Melanie, who was rearranging her line to a rain of insults from Wesley Barber and his friends. He’d remained largely hidden to the crowd by the body of Colin, but word had spread that a black man was inside the pervert’s house. The taunts had been endless as they’d struggled to put out the fire. ‘That your man in there, Mel . . . ? ’ ‘What’s a brother doing with perverts . . . ?’ ‘How come you let him put a black bastard in your belly if he’s a shirt-lifter . . . ? ’ ‘Maybe you gotta yen for sickos yourself . . . ? ’ ‘Just keep the retard off my back,’ he said grimly, ‘because I’ll tear his head off if he comes anywhere near me. Can you do that?’

  Colin looked panic-stricken. ‘What happens if I can’t?’

  ‘Lock yourself and Mel into the maisonette with the bairns. I’ll be back for you as soon as I can.’ He smacked the boy’s palm. ‘You’re a good bloke, Col. You’ve got more guts and brains than that nigger’ll ever have.’

  Garden of 21a Humbert Street

  The old soldier heard Sophie’s scream from his place in the shadow of the apple tree, but with only a vague idea from his neighbour of why Acid Row was rioting – ‘They’ve been moving queers into Humbert Street’ – he assumed the negro was responsible for the woman’s terror. He didn’t like homosexuals any better than the next man but, sure as eggs were eggs, they didn’t use women in their perverse practices.

  Savages did, though. No white woman was safe with a buck on the loose. He clambered over the fence and gripped the machete with two hands as he crept towards the kitchen door. It swayed drunkenly on its hinges from when Jimmy had burst it open, and was evidence, if the old man needed it, that a strong man was inside.

  Inside 23 Humbert Street

  For all his bulk, Jimmy trod softly on the stairs, sliding his back up the wall and watching for movement on the landing. The house was an exact replica of Mrs Carthew’s, with every door open except the back bedroom’s. He slid round the banisters and gripped the handle with meaty fingers, listening for sounds.

  He heard a man’s voice but he couldn’t make out what he was saying. It was a croon. Soft and sweet and lyrical in a language he didn’t understand. He eased the handle and put pressure on the door, but it was locked and wouldn’t budge. He swore under his breath. What to do? Tell them he was there and waste time on explanations? Or charge another door?

  His shoulder was bruised from his last effort and there wasn’t much room in the confined space of the landing, but the sound of the woman’s scream still echoed in his head and he couldn’t see what option he had other than to take them by surprise. As if to prove the point, there was a sudden flurry of noise in the room, shoes scrabbling against the floor, a piece of furniture moving as if a foot had caught it, a woman’s voice, muffled by a hand, saying: ‘No . . . no . . . no . . . !’, the sickening squelch of a fist hitting soft tissue. Then the crooning again.

  Ah, sweet Jesus!

  He lifted a boot and, using the banister for leverage, brought his heel into direct contact with the lock. It took five kicks before the mortise ripped from the jamb, only for the door
to come up short against an obstruction. Jimmy lowered his head in exhaustion, then, with a deep breath, put his shoulder to the panel and thrust his whole eighteen stone into shifting the door and whatever stood behind it.

  9 Humbert Street

  It was with relief that Gaynor heard the news that exits were opening up all along Humbert Street. Although she didn’t know it then, the story of how “Friendship Calling” used its network to recruit sons, daughters, nieces, nephews and friends to make through-passages to the gardens on both sides became the silver lining to the awful trauma of the July riot. It spoke of a continuing sense of community in even the most fractured of societies, and sowed a seed of hope for the future.

  At the time, since no one had told her differently, Gaynor assumed that Jimmy was responsible. ‘I said he was a good ’un,’ she told Ken Hewitt when he relayed the news. ‘So are you gonna let me go for Mel and Col? I’m that worried about them. My battery’s almost out, and I reckon the lot round here have got the hang of what to do. There hasn’t been any bargin’ and shovin’ for ages.’

  ‘We think we know where Melanie is,’ he said, repeating the information from the helicopter. ‘Jimmy said the description of the blonde girl sounded like Melanie. There’s a lad in the line as well. Holding her hand. Wearing a Saints T-shirt and blue denims. Could that be Colin?’

  ‘Oh, thank God, thank God,’ she said, her voice breaking on a sob. ‘Are they all right?’

  ‘As far as I know,’ said Ken. ‘One of the officers monitoring the footage has been keeping me posted, and the last I heard they were putting a fire out at number 23 to stop it spreading. They’re brave kids, Gaynor. You should be proud of them.’