Never Forget

by Lisa Cutts

  ‘Benjamin, the knife,’ I said, trying as best I could to sound like I wasn’t scared out of my wits. I watched him stare down at the hand holding my kitchen steak knife, as if he wasn’t sure how it had got there. I took the opportunity to slide a little to my right, away from the corner I’d been backing into. The movement refocused him. He pivoted his head in my direction. My hands went down to the kitchen drawer handle.

  As he lunged the knife at me from his left side I pulled the drawer out, knowing it would come loose, and threw myself back into the ninety-degree corner of the cupboards, jarring my back as I did so. I swung the drawer and its contents up as I lurched to the side. His arm hit the wooden base of the drawer and the gas and electric bills in it spilled to the floor. But it wasn’t enough to stop him coming at me. Most of the material was chipboard. By now I was in danger of ending up on the floor. Even during training, with my mate looming over me with a rubber knife, that hadn’t ended well. The last thing I could let happen was to find myself on the ground.

  I straightened up, put my hands on the edges of the worktops and pushed my feet off the ground. I had all my weight behind my legs as I brought my knees up to my chest and kicked out at his abdomen. The force of the kick, and the impact as he tried to pick up speed in the last couple of feet between us, had the desired effect of winding him and pushing him backwards. Unfortunately, as I flung my head back I caught my skull on the plinth around the bottom of the wall unit.

  The blow stung but didn’t hinder me. I was cornered. I ran for the door. Mistake. He grabbed my right hand with his, the one holding the wire. I sensed rather than felt a movement with his other hand. The blow to my stomach stopped me in my tracks for just a second until I remembered he was armed so I did the only thing I could think of – I went for the arm holding the knife. I caught a glimpse of it, processing the thought that it was covered in blood. He must have cut himself when I kicked him. That would give me an advantage.

  I didn’t realise I had fallen until I felt the cold ceramic tiles on my bare arms. I’d tried my best, but I was in pain and couldn’t work out why. I slumped on the ground, finding breathing trickier than it had been a couple of minutes earlier, when all I could hear was my heart.

  Another sound came to my ears but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. I could have sworn I heard the back door opening, but I doubted that Makepeace would leave me alive so he was hardly likely to walk away. He’d come to make me pay for Jake Lloyd’s obsession with me. It was a totally insane reason to kill me and a terrible one to die for. The pain in my stomach was like no other I’d ever felt. It began somewhere in my middle but raced like a flash-fire all along my body, making any movement hurt. I was half sitting up with a view of Makepeace’s knees straight in my eye-line. I couldn’t lift my head to look up at him.

  A shower of earth rained down on me, scattered with fragments of crockery, as Makepeace’s knees fell away from my view and were replaced by his shoulders. My gaze followed the shoulders to the ends of the arms and saw that one was still holding the bloodied knife, the other the curtain wire. He must have stabbed himself and passed out. But where had the earth come from, and the other pair of feet?

  A scrawny, unkempt face came into view. ‘Love, love. You alright?’ It looked familiar but my mind was doing funny things. I put it down to shock, but, if I wasn’t mistaken, Joe Bring, the world’s worst shoplifter and burglar, was in my kitchen.

  ‘You’ve been stabbed,’ he said, crouching to speak to me.

  ‘No. He has,’ I said, struggling for breath. I tried to point at the knife in his outstretched hand. Joe jumped up to stamp on Makepeace’s wrist. A grumbling noise came from the prostrate killer as he involuntarily released the handle. The jogging-bottom-clad Joe kicked it to the far side of the kitchen.

  ‘Gonna get you an ambulance. Where’s your phone?’ said Joe, bending back down. He smelt quite bad, but then he always did. My sense of smell brought me back to the severity of the situation. If I was dead, I wouldn’t be repelled by Joe’s scent. It got stronger as he lifted me under the arms and inched me along the ground to lean me against the oven door. ‘You need to stay upright,’ he told me, running towards the living room. He actually was getting some use out of those joggers – how about that?

  He was back within a couple of seconds, my landline in his hand, dialling as he went through the drawers. For a moment I thought he was hunting down my valuables, until he pulled out a couple of teatowels and pressed them against my stomach. I could hear him talking, picking out words like ‘stab’, ‘blood’ and then ‘officer down’. I tried to tell him that no one in the UK said ‘officer down’ – that was American TV shows – but I just gurgled at him and marvelled at the deep red colour my teatowels had taken on.

  Joe stayed crouching down beside me for what felt like some time. But it was probably only a few minutes before I heard the sirens and the pounding of pairs of heavy boots coming for me once more. There was a certain amount of shouting which, I later found out, was largely aimed at Joe, ordering him to get away from me and get on his knees. Poor Joe. He’d saved my life and been repaid by half of the force shouting at him. A couple of uniform police officers spoke to me; I couldn’t have told you if they were male, female, black or white. I just saw endless body armour and heard a ceaseless stream of talk on the radio.

  Hands snapped into rubber gloves in front of me. Made me think back to Wingsy and myself finding Jason Holland’s body. That felt like many years ago now.

  I tried to think about what had happened. I knew they’d want a statement from me. That was what police officers did – they spoke to the witnesses, wrote it down and, by and large, got them to sign it. How else would evidence get to court? Someone was wrapping clingfilm around my stomach. That’s my clingfilm, I wanted to say, but couldn’t really find the strength. I decided to let it go. I had an emergency roll somewhere else. That sad, unheroic thought in mind, I passed out.

  Chapter 77

  6th October

  Some of the next few hours I remembered in chunks, other parts not so much. I guessed I’d only been stabbed once, which seemed like good news. While it was perfectly possible to die from a single cut, I also knew of instances of multiple knife injuries not taking the life of victims. It often took the victims months to get back to normal, though, and being stabbed might well render me unable to do my job, so I’d be made redundant only an ill-health pension to live on – but I’d worry about that when I was out of hospital. For some reason, I started to find being unemployed quite funny and began to laugh. That really hurt. Someone in green told me to lie still. I think I was in the ambulance at that point, but I wasn’t really sure.

  When I woke up, I was propped up in a hospital bed, hooked up to several monitors and a drip. There was a great deal of bleeping coming from some of the machines but they were all drowned out by the sound of Bill snoring. He was asleep in an armchair, head to one side, dribbling on to his own shoulder. I watched him slumber until a nurse came into my view. ‘Hello, Nina,’ she said, scrubs rustling as she came to the side of the bed. ‘I’m Charlotte, the ICU staff sister. Do you know what’s happened to you?’

  I tried to speak but my voice came out in a raspy knot. I heard Bill shift in his chair and looked over at him. ‘Good to see you awake,’ he said.

  I tried to swallow, but it felt as though the last thing I’d drunk was a bucket of sand. Charlotte held a clear plastic beaker of water with a straw up to my lips. ‘Only take a small sip,’ she warned.

  Even leaning forward a couple of centimetres to meet the straw halfway was agonising. I leaned back, worn out from such a tiny task.

  ‘Was I stabbed?’ I asked. She had bent her head level with mine to hear me.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘One stab wound to your stomach.’ She straightened back up to point to her own stomach, just beneath her waistband, or where one should have been if she hadn’t been wearing a baggy blue top over baggy blue trousers. ‘It was here. We had to
knock you out for a while in case of internal bleeding or complications we couldn’t see, but it all looks fine. The doctor will come and speak to you later, and some of your colleagues want to talk to you, but I’ve told them not to wear you out. I’ll be back in a minute.’

  She bustled off towards the nurse’s station. I was too tired to care what she was doing if truth be told.

  ‘Hey,’ said Bill, moving his chair closer to the side of the bed. ‘Are you in pain?’

  ‘No – no, I’m not really. Probably off my tits on painkillers. I didn’t imagine it, did I? Benjamin Makepeace was in my kitchen with one of my knives?’ I shut my eyes, sagging back against the pillow. I felt Bill’s hand on mine. He probably thought that I was trying to put a brave face on the pain, but the truth was I was totally shattered. ‘I realised it was him from the photos I’d seen of him. Accent was a bit of a giveaway too.’

  ‘Don’t worry about him. Makepeace has been nicked and is being interviewed.’

  I did a quick mental calculation of how long it took to get a person to custody, booked in, swabs and samples taken, clothing seized and at what point they would attempt to take his bite mark imprints. It would have taken hours. I couldn’t see whether it was light outside as the window was behind me. The NHS was doing its best to block out all natural light and any hope of fresh air breaking into the building, bringing with it a hint of the time of day or weather conditions.

  The sound of a man’s shoes making their way towards me on the hard, shiny floor, accompanied by the clip of a woman’s high heels, made me wish hard for Eric Nottingham and Catherine. I should have known better than to wish for something so carelessly as, on this occasion, it came true.

  I managed a smile in their direction, pathetic as it was. Bill’s hold on my hand tightened marginally. He didn’t ask if I wanted him to stay, but assumed I did. He already knew me very well.

  ‘You look pale, Catherine,’ I croaked at her.

  ‘Never mind me, how are you feeling?’ she said.

  ‘Like someone stabbed me,’ I said.

  This was met with awkwardness for some reason. It wasn’t like everyone was unaware Makepeace had jabbed one of my steak knives into my gut. I was the one on morphine. What was their excuse for not having a grasp of all the facts?

  ‘Nina, we couldn’t have foreseen that Makepeace would come after you,’ said Nottingham. ‘If we’d had any idea, we’d have warned you and moved you.’ He was finding it difficult to look at me as he spoke. He continued, ‘He had several newspaper articles on him, some naming you and Jake Lloyd.’

  Now that the DCI had got this off his chest, there was an uncomfortable pause. I concentrated on the bleeps and pings of the equipment. I was finding the noise comforting. It meant I was still alive.

  Nottingham’s voice broke my concentration. ‘Makepeace put a lot of effort into trying to implicate others. On examination by the custody nurse last night, he was found to have a fairly recent cut, possibly self-inflicted with the knife we found in the rear of Gary Savage’s van.’

  Through morphine, fatigue and shock, I tried to recall who Gary Savage was and why DCI Nottingham was telling me about his van. I had an image of Wingsy and myself peering at a bloodstained knife at an early morning warrant, and the details came back to me. He was off the hook, then. At least the nick’s toilets could get their final coat of paint.

  ‘We’ve started the interviews but we haven’t got much out of him,’ Nottingham was saying. ‘I have a feeling there’s a great deal about Benjamin Makepeace that we’ve yet to get to the bottom of.’

  ‘Can you tell us what happened last night in your kitchen?’ Catherine said, stepping forward to the edge of the bed.

  ‘Got home, opened my back door when I saw the shed door was open, went outside to shut it. When I went back into the kitchen, I saw one of the knives was missing, saw something move in the kitchen, turned to see Benjamin Makepeace. He stabbed me in the stomach. Joe Bring saved my life.’ I closed my eyes again. I’d had enough. They had what they’d come for: scanty on detail but an account they could tell the CPS in case I died before they came back to take a statement. Now I wanted them gone.

  Without opening my eyes again, I knew someone else had come into the room. The noise of her uniform gave her away. ‘OK, you two,’ said Charlotte, ‘Nina needs to rest. You can come back later.’ I hoped I’d remember to thank her when I woke up.

  Laura and Stan were sitting next to me when I opened my eyes some time later. They didn’t notice me at first but continued to chat, chairs beside one another, until Laura glanced in my direction.

  ‘Nina,’ she said. ‘Am I glad to see you.’ She jumped out of her chair to give me a peck on the cheek. I remained motionless; even seeing someone else move took it out of me. She stroked my face with the back of her hand.

  ‘You certainly know how to worry me,’ said Stan. ‘I’ve spoken to your parents. Your dad will be here later but he didn’t think that your mother would be up to it.’

  To be fair to her, over the years, there’d been a lot of trips to one hospital or another. I was hardly surprised. It made me think of my sister. I had no idea whether I was still wearing her St Christopher. I tried to lift my hand up to feel for the necklace, but the cannula stuck in the back of my arm seemed to weigh pounds. ‘Your necklace is in the locker with your other possessions,’ said Stan, as if reading my mind. ‘Apart from the clothing the police have taken.’

  I was about to ask if they’d taken my underwear. My colleagues bagging up the knickers I’d been wearing for something like fifteen hours prior to seizure was a bit too embarrassing. Then I figured I would worry about it when I had the energy. I realised that Stan and Laura were peering intently at me as though they knew I was about to say something. I thought I’d leave my knickers out of it.

  ‘What happened to Joe Bring?’ I asked. This caused me to cough, and Laura to hold the water-straw combo out for me again.

  She waited for me to take a sip before she said, ‘He was arrested for ABH of Benjamin Makepeace initially, as it wasn’t clear what happened. You started to explain that he’d saved you from Makepeace, so he was then further arrested on suspicion of burglary.’

  I could only muster a raised eyebrow, and even then I might only have done so in my own head. Somehow I managed to convey my surprise to Laura, as she got the point.

  ‘When it became clear that he was only in your house to help you, it was looking quite good for him… until a search of the garden indicated he’d been living in your shed.’

  I smiled to myself at that. Joe Bring had always had a strange smell. It must have been the waft of him travelling on the breeze that I had smelt in my garden.

  My smile must have looked odd: Laura’s face held concern as she said, ‘You alright? Want us to leave?’

  I shook my head and she continued, ‘Joe’s wife threw him out about three weeks ago. He was spending the odd night with friends here and there until he decided to sleep rough in your shed. He’s not saying why it was your shed, just sticking to saying it was a random choice.’

  Another, slightly older memory came into my mind: of the musty smell in my house when I got back from Birmingham. It explained why I could never find my remote control. He’d broken into my house and watched my television. Joe might even have watched the DVD of Jake’s interview – the DVD I wasn’t supposed to have in my possession. What else did he know about my past now?

  For some reason, right now this didn’t seem to worry me as much as I’d have expected. It had all been in the papers anyway. Life sometimes brought the oddest situations to your door. In my case, it had brought Joe Bring in the form of a very unlikely hero. For his troubles, he’d been nicked. At least it had given him somewhere to sleep. And with any luck they’d have let him have a shower. His clothes would have been seized, too, so he’d have got some new ones. Standard issue police jogging bottoms and a sweatshirt.

  Stan stood up to go in search of a canteen, leaving me and La
ura alone.

  ‘They let Joe go?’ I squeaked, voice still full of holes.

  ‘No, he was wanted for two other burglaries through DNA hits at both houses,’ said Laura. ‘He’s been charged and remanded.’

  ‘I owe him a lot,’ I said, with a slightly improved voice.

  ‘He wanted to go to prison this time. He was happy to have somewhere to live now that he’s had to vacate your shed.’

  I smiled again at this. I was still racked with fatigue and I wasn’t even sure I didn’t nod off again for a minute or two. I wanted to tell her that she was my friend and I was glad she was here in the hospital with me, but the utterance of a simple sentence was too much for me to handle right then. I summoned the energy for another smile.

  ‘You OK? Do you want the nurse?’ she said. I was going to have to stop smiling; it clearly wasn’t working. My reply was a shake of the head, as talking was beginning to hurt.

  Stan reappeared with two hot drinks, handing one to Laura and resting the other on his thigh.

  ‘Got these from the machine,’ he said. ‘Listened to my voicemail, too. Your dad is on his way, Nina. He’s bringing your sister with him.’

  Acknowledgements

  So many people to thank but firstly, a massive thank you to everyone in the Myriad family but especially Candida Lacey for taking a chance on me and this book, Vicky Blunden – a more patient and generous editor you’ll be hard pushed to find – and Linda McQueen for her amazing copy-editing skills and for taking the time to explain to me where I was going wrong and putting me right.

  My family and friends have been very encouraging and, although I can’t list them all here, I would especially like to thank Elizabeth Haynes, for encouraging me to start writing in the first place and for all her support and enthusiasm over the last eighteen months; my friend Liz Hubbard, who read an earlier draft and made some fantastic suggestions; and Andrew Goose at Studio 96, who not only read through the manuscript but has helped me with my blog and website. I’m grateful as well as technically inept.