“I said I’ve come to apologise.” He lifted the brim of his red beanie hat in a way that was almost gentlemanly. “About tonight’s earlier…misunderstanding.”
Andrew laughed. “You mean when you assaulted me for no good reason?”
“Yeah, I guess you could put it like that. No reason we can’t be friends, though. You and me, we can be bros.”
“We’ll never be friends,” said Andrew, “and I already have a brother, so get the hell off my property and clear off.”
Frankie’s smile left his face and his strange twitch began. “Careful, mate. I don’t appreciate being told what to do, you get me?”
“Look, what do you want? I’ve done nothing to you.”
“I know,” Frankie agreed. “Which is why I’m going to allow you to make peace.”
“Make peace! I didn’t do anything to breach the peace.”
Frankie sighed. “You going to fucking listen to me, mate, or am I gonna have to drop you again?”
“How dare you threaten me in my own home.”
“Fuck your home. You want to be left alone; you do what the fuck I tell you. Give me your trainers.”
Andrew was taken aback. “Sorry?”
“Give me them sweet-ass Nikes and you’ll be left alone.”
“What? No way.”
Frankie grabbed Andrew around the throat and sneered. Andrew struggled back and managed to escape the grip, but his heart was now racing.
“Do you want to die?” asked Frankie.
Andrew shook his head in disbelief. “You’re insane.”
“Damn straight. I’ll cut you up and snort your fucking remains if I feel like it. Question is: are you going behave and do as you’re told, or do I have to show you just how fucking crazy I am?”
Andrew went to reply but was interrupted.
“Who’s at the door, Andrew?” It was Pen shouting from the living room.
Frankie smirked.
“No one,” said Andrew. “I’ll just be a minute.”
“I thought maybe it was the Chinese.”
“No,” Andrew shouted back. “I’ll let you know when it’s here.”
“Having a nice dinner with the missus?” asked Frankie. “You go off the idea of chips then?” He stepped forward, half-inside the doorway now. “Maybe I should join you all? Always nice to know the neighbours. Say, don’t you have a fit daughter I’ve seen around here?”
Andrew pushed the lad back out of the door. “You leave my family the-hell alone.”
Frankie said nothing. He just smiled and stood in the doorway as if waiting for something.
When Andrew realised what Frankie wanted, he sighed, picked up the Nike trainers from the shoe rack, and threw them out of the door. “Here! Now just leave me alone, you jackal.”
Frankie smiled. “You think I’m going to pick them up off the floor? Go get them and hand them to me properly.”
“Are you serious?”
Frankie glared.
Andrew threw his hands up in the air. “Fine! It would be my goddamn pleasure.” He stepped outside and gathered up the shoes from the pavement. Then he returned to Frankie and thrust the trainers into the lad’s arms. “Now leave me alone.”
Frankie nodded as he examined his new possessions. “Deal’s a deal, mate. Have a nice life.”
Frankie walked away just as another figure walked up the path in the opposite direction. When the man reached Andrew at the porch, he held out a brown paper bag. “Chinese delivery?”
Andrew took the bag from the man and tried to smile, but found it impossible. He paid for the food and gave a good tip, but the last thing he felt right now was hungry. In fact he felt downright sick.
CHAPTER THREE
Getting to sleep was a long and lonely struggle. Pen had started her gentle snoring as soon as her head hit the pillow, but Andrew had lain next to her for what seemed like hours, staring up at the ceiling, his head swirling with unwanted thoughts.
The movie Bex had made him watch was disturbing, as she’d warned, full of monsters and giant insects feasting off the flesh of the living. The ending was bleak and depressing, but Bex seemed to enjoy it, grinning between each mouthful of noodles in black bean sauce. The film wasn’t what was keeping Andrew awake though. Frankie filled his mind like a relentless boogieman, terrorising his dreams. Every time sleep came, Frankie’s scarred, twitching face would jar him back awake. It was now 4:00AM according to the LED clock on the bedside table.
Three hours till work. God knows how I’m going to get through the day on zero sleep.
Andrew’s job as an Ad Executive wasn’t physically taxing, but it did require a great deal of concentration. The project he was working on at the moment for a soda company was especially important – the rebranding of a nationally-recognised product. The stress of last night’s events was a concern he could do without right now. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. If there was any chance of him getting an iota of sleep, he would need to empty his mind. He needed to forget that he’d let an adolescent bully take his trainers as if he were some helpless child in a playground instead of the successful family man that he was. The humiliation weighed down on Andrew so heavily that it felt as if his skull would split open and spill the memories of his cowardice all over the pillow. He needed to put it aside for now.
4:40AM.
The minutes flew by and Andrew’s mind flittered between numb consciousness and troubled sleep. His waking thoughts were so vivid that they merged seamlessly with his dreams to the point where he no longer knew whether he was asleep or awake.
5:01AM
Noise.
Andrew’s eyes snapped open. He was sure the noise had been real, that he had been awake to hear it and not imagining things in his sleep. It sounded like a door opening downstairs.
5:13AM.
Noise again.
Somehow, Andrew had snoozed another ten minutes, the beckoning embrace of sleep managing to override his grasp on reality. But now he was awake fully, sitting up in bed as he listened to yet more sounds from downstairs.
Footsteps.
Someone was inside the house. Andrew heard another sound, closer. He realised it was just Pen snoring, but there was no relief in that. There was still someone inside his home.
Someone rifling through our things.
Andrew summoned the courage to get out of bed, reinforcing it with the indignant anger that someone was invading his family’s privacy. Chinese food worked its way up his gullet as the thick, syrupy mixture of fear and loathing took a hold of his body. His legs felt wobbly as he set them down on the soft carpet. There were no more sounds from downstairs but Andrew was sure that there had been a break-in. His thoughts now turned to what the results of that would be.
Have they cleared us out? Taken everything?
Andrew’s mouth filled with saliva and he had to swallow several times as he exited the bedroom into the unlit landing. Bex’s door was open and he could not fight the urge to look inside and check on her as he passed by. Thankfully his daughter was asleep, snoring softly in the identical way that her mother did. She was tucked up beneath her plush duvet and hadn’t been woken by the noises downstairs.
Good. Maybe I can get everything cleaned up before Bex and Pen wake up. Maybe I can reduce some of the shock for them.
Andrew reached the end of the hallway and looked down the stairs, cocking his head to listen for more sounds. He could detect nothing. A slither of hope told him that maybe he had imagined it all, and that the scary movie – and his altercation with Frankie – had just spooked his anxious mind into creating yet more scenes of danger. He thumbed the switch at the bottom of the stairs and blinked as the light filled his unadjusted eyes. The downstairs hallway was clear, untouched, and unoccupied. The photos on the wall were still in place and his grandmother’s bureau still leant against the wall, undisturbed.
So far so good.
Andrew moved over to the living room door and paused outside of it. This was
the room with the television, DVD player, and most other things worth stealing in the house. If anything was missing, it would be from this room.
And if anybody is still inside the house, then they’re most likely to be in this room.
Andrew held a breath and pushed open the door, clutching the handle tightly as he turned it. A smell hit him as he entered the darkness of the room; a bitter, salty odour along with something else that was more acrid. Andrew wrinkled his nose and tried to work it out.
Vinegar?
He reached along the wall and found the light switch, familiar enough with his own home to find it in the dark. His finger lingered over the switch and his stomach performed somersaults. As much as Andrew needed to see the state of the living room, he also wanted to delay things for as long as possible. Once the lights were on, he would be forced to deal with the situation. Right now, he was safe in the darkness, oblivious.
Can’t put things off forever though.
Andrew switched on the light.
The room came into view in a flash and at first presented too much visual information for his brain to interpret all at once. One thing slowly became clear however: nothing was missing.
Thank God!
But a few moments later it also became clear that something had been added. All over the room was a mulched-up mess of what looked like…
Fish and chips.
A cod had been stamped into the carpet while dozens of individual chips had been mashed against the sofa’s upholstery. Even the walls were smeared in deep-fried potato. The smell of salt and vinegar enveloped the room, pungent to the point of making Andrew’s eyes water.
It wasn’t long before he put two and two together – and realised the fish and chips were a message from the person responsible for knocking them out of Andrew’s hands only several hours before.
Frankie did this.
***
The police arrived within the hour, just as the sun rose. The light coming through the window bathed the living room in an orange ambience that seemed unsuitable in the presence of such mess. Pen and Bex sat, huddled together, on the sofa in their nightgowns. Andrew sat at the dining room table with the two police officers – a man and a woman, PC Wardsley and PC Dalton.
“What time did you hear the noises, Mr …?”
“Goodman – Andrew Goodman. And I don’t know exactly, but it was around 5.00AM, I think.”
“Okay,” said the female police officer, PC Dalton, whilst PC Wardsley took notes. “What exactly did you hear?”
Andrew felt like he was going to have a breakdown, so exhausted from lack of sleep and so tense from anger. It took effort to answer calmly. “I’m pretty sure that I heard doors opening and closing, and somebody creeping around.”
“Did it sound like just one person?”
Andrew nodded.
Dalton smiled and nodded back; performing the gestures she had undoubtedly learned through sensitivity training. “Do you have any ideas how someone could have entered your home, Mr Goodman? Were all the doors locked?”
Andrew shrugged. He looked down at the table, not wanting to make eye contact with the woman. “I don’t know. Before this, I never really worried too much about locking everything up at night. It’s a nice neighbourhood, you know? The front and back doors were certainly locked, but I probably left a window or two unlocked.”
“We won’t be doing that again,” Pen added from the sofa, before returning to the dazed silence she had displayed since waking.
“No,” said Andrew. “We won’t.”
PC Dalton asked her next question. “Do you know anyone who would want to do this to you? Nothing was taken, so it seems that causing upset was the primary motive for the break-in. Do you have any enemies?”
Andrew listened to the sound of his own breathing, wishing the whole world would go away and leave him in peace. But it wasn’t going to, no matter how much he wanted it to, so he gave his answer: “Frankie.”
PC Wardsley raised one of his eyebrows. “Frankie?”
Andrew nodded. “There’s a gang that’s been hanging around the last few days. I think the ringleader is a guy named Frankie?”
Wardsley scribbled down some notes eagerly, whilst his partner continued the questioning. “Why do you think this…Frankie…would want to target you?”
Andrew looked over at his wife and daughter; both looked back at him with great interest. He turned back to the female officer. “I know, because the bastard assaulted me yesterday evening – punched me in the stomach. I was carrying fish and chips at the time and he knocked them all over the road.”
“What?” Penelope shouted at him. “Why on earth did you not tell me? You sat with us all night and you didn’t think to tell us that you’d been attacked?”
Andrew looked at her, ashamed. Bex started to cry which only made the feeling worse. “I’m sorry,” he told them. “I didn’t want to worry you.”
Pen folded her arms and shook her head at him. “Worry me? What do you think all this is doing?”
“Okay,” Dalton butted in. “Can you describe this man to me, Andrew?”
“Teenager,” Andrew corrected. “Barely past being a kid.”
“Okay. What else?”
“He’s tall, muscular – like he works out a lot. Red beanie hat. Has a scar across his lip and a weird facial tic thing.”
“He has a twitch?”
“Yeah,” Andrew confirmed. “It’s weird, like a nervous thing.”
“Anything else?”
“The girl that served me at the chip shop said that Frankie had just gotten out of a young offender’s prison; said he was a complete psycho.”
“God, Andrew.” Pen covered her mouth with one of her hands. “How did you get mixed up in all this?”
Andrew felt a pinch of aggression, but managed to stop it going further. None of this was his fault. “I didn’t have much choice, Pen. I had to walk past him on the way to the chip shop, didn’t I? Apparently that’s all it takes to wind this guy up.”
“You’ve done nothing wrong,” said Dalton, looking over at Pen as she said it. “I’m afraid this is just the way some of today’s youth get their kicks.”
“So what do we do?” asked Bex. “How do we get this Frankie to leave us alone?”
“I take it you’re going to arrest him?” Pen asked the officers.
“We will question him, of course,” said Dalton, “but without evidence we can’t arrest him.”
“What?” Andrew couldn’t believe it. “You can’t do anything?”
“We will see what the forensic team brings up when they search the house later. If we find his prints, then, yes, we can certainly arrest him. Did anyone see him assault you?”
Andrew shook his head.
“Okay, well, let me make a call to see what I can find out about this, Frankie. In the meantime pop the kettle on to calm your nerves. Things can seem overwhelming at this point.”
“Okay.” Andrew nodded. “Thank you.
The police officers left the room and returned to their car outside. Andrew joined his family on the chip-stained sofa. They looked distraught, and he felt responsible.
“I can’t believe this has happened,” said Pen. “That…bastard…was in my home.”
Andrew put an arm around her and felt her shaking. “It’ll be okay. The police will do something about it. Just try to stay calm.”
“You heard them!” she said. “They probably won’t be able to even arrest him.”
“Let’s just see what happens, okay? No need to assume the worst yet.”
“Are you okay, Dad?” asked Bex, from the other side of her mother. “Did you get hurt when they attacked you?”
“What do you think?” said Pen, rather unkindly. “There’s nothing pleasant about being assaulted, is there?”
“Hey,” said Andrew. “It’s not Rebecca’s fault.” He gave his weeping daughter a brief smile to reassure her. “I’m fine,” he said. “Just some sore ribs, but I’ll li
ve. I’ll take today off work and rest up.”
“Don’t you ever keep something like that from us again, Andrew,” Pen told him. “Never.”
“Yeah, never,” Bex repeated.
Andrew reached over so he could hug them both at the same time. “I promise. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. What’s done is done though. You should go to work as normal, Pen. Don’t worry about me”
Pen nodded then looked at Bex. “I’ll give you a lift to school, hun.”
Bex screwed up her face. “I don’t even get to have the day off school? Sucks!”
The police officers re-entered the room then and halted the conversation. Dalton was smiling politely, but Andrew could tell by her weary, blue eyes that she didn’t have good news for them.
“Mr Goodman,” she said. “Would you like to step outside for a moment?”
“Why?”
“Because we have information that you may wish to share with your family separately.”
Andrew didn’t like the sound of that at all. He stood up and moved away from the sofa, before following the officers out into the hallway. “What is it?” he asked them as soon as they were out of earshot of his family.
Wardsley looked down at his notepad and began reviewing what he’d written. “We weren’t personally aware of this individual when you first mentioned him, but then PC Dalton and I have only recently exchanged from the Stratford branch. As it turns out, however, this ‘Frankie’ is well-known to the local branch.”
“Who the hell is he?” Andrew demanded.
“A scumbag,” Dalton replied bluntly. “We shouldn’t comment on such things, but Francis Walker was put in a young offender’s institute at fifteen years old after stamping a fellow school pupil into a coma. When the police caught up to him, he had a grand’s worth of cocaine on his person.”
Andrew couldn’t believe it. “What the hell was a kid doing with all that coke on him?”
Wardsley shrugged. “Most likely he was selling it for a supplier. It’s common practise to get kids distributing it – less suspicious. Frankie obviously fell in with criminals at an early age and he’s only gotten worse since being released.”
ASBO: A Thriller Novel Page 3