‘All right,’ Macrae said to a uniformed sergeant. ‘Forensic can have him now.’
He looked past the screens to the small crowd standing in the icy wind. Some of them, with briefcases, would be late commuters, but the others were dossers and street kids.
He turned to the duty officer. ‘I want the dossers and layabouts,’ he said.
‘All of them, sir?’ There was surprise and distaste in his voice as he thought of them in the police station.
‘The lot. Someone may have seen something. It’s no good taking names and addresses because they haven’t got any bloody addresses except cardboard boxes. If you don’t grab ’em now you’ll never find them again.’ He turned to Silver. ‘Come on, laddie, let’s get to work.’
Chapter Six
Terry had never been close to a horse before. Now, from his place in the straw above them, he could look down on the broad backs of six horses as they fed in their stalls.
It was a world remote from his experience and it both comforted him and made him nervous. It was a strange mixture. He was afraid of the horses. They were so big and so clearly belonged in this place. But at the same time he was comforted by the strong smell of manure and urine and hay which were mixed up together.
It reminded him of a small country circus to which his grandfather had once taken him. They had walked round the back of the big top and his grandfather had spoken to one of his friends who worked there and Terry had been able to get close to the animal cages.
He wasn’t sure if this was the same smell as he had smelled then but it reminded him of that day with his grandfather. It had been a happy day.
The horses moved restlessly, stamping and whickering, as they fed. It had been this noise which had first drawn him to the stables.
After the park labourer had left him, Terry had wandered through the streets of Bayswater until he came to Paddington Station. By this time he was hungry. He had stood near the top of the stairs that come up from the tube station and had started begging.
‘Excuse me, sir, can you spare some change for some food, please?’
That was the way Gail had done it and often she’d collected ten or eleven pounds in an afternoon.
Once, she had taken him on the underground trains and had gone from coach to coach pretending he was her younger brother and that he needed a rail ticket to get home to Portsmouth. She’d made quite a bit of money that way. On the streets people could walk past and ignore you, but on the trains, if you stood in front of them and asked for money they would often give you a few coins just to get rid of you.
But he decided not to go on the tubes. What if he became trapped down there? What if someone saw him? How would he get out? No, better to beg in the streets. However, the people, on their way home on this cold March evening, did not want to part with their money and shoved past Terry angrily.
When he was with Gail he had seen one street kid, not much older than himself, go up to people at Waterloo Station and say, ‘Gi’ us some money. Come on. Gi’ us some money.’ And when they didn’t he swore at them and gave them two fingers and once threw an empty beer can at an old man.
The boy’s name was the Rat and he had carried two knives and a death star and said he’d once cut up a night watchman.
Anyway, Terry didn’t get anything from begging. Instead, he was told by a policeman to move along. That had scared the wits out of him. He hadn’t seen the cop at all. He’d come out of the dark roadway where the taxis emerge and had suddenly been there, right in front of him.
Terry had run across the road almost before the words were out of the cop’s mouth. But just to show he wasn’t afraid, not really afraid, he had grabbed a bunch of grapes from the street display of a Pakistani supermarket and had gone on running after he’d heard the owner shout: a hundred metres flat out and then floating across Sussex Gardens – just like Arthur Wint.
And that’s how he had come to the mews where the stables were. The last thing Terry would ever have thought of was that there were stables in London. In fact if Gail, well, not Gail or his grandfather, but if anyone else had told him, he would have said bullshit.
He hadn’t seen the stables, not at first. What had struck him was that once he turned on to the cobbled surface of the mews, the sounds of London retreated and he could hear the thud-thud-thud of his trainers again.
The mews comprised facing rows of double-storeyed terraced houses which dated from the age when wealthy Londoners had carriages. The houses, where once the horses and the carriages had been kept, were now expensive bijou residences.
In summer their walls were covered in roses and clematis and most had pot plants at the front door. It was city-suburban, and Broadhurst Livery Stables (which hired out horses by the hour to be ridden in Hyde Park) did not seem out of place.
Terry had been able to read the name by the lights of the block of flats which towered above Broadhurst Mews. Then he had heard the stamping and the whickering and had smelled the smell of the circus.
In that instant he had decided to spend the night there. He had managed to reach a small window by standing on a tub of dead geraniums and in a matter of seconds had dropped down on to the other side and found himself among the horses.
Some jerked and stamped in alarm, turning wide apprehensive eyes in his direction. He stood in the semi-darkness for some moments. The stables were lit by a weak electric lamp and soon he could make out saddles and bridles and blankets, curry-combs and brushes, buckets and rags.
‘Hello,’ Terry said softly to the nearest horse, a sixteen-hand grey which was looking at him with mild interest. ‘I’m Huntsman.’
Above the horses was a hayloft and Terry climbed up a wooden ladder. The hay had its own sweet smell, another he had never smelled before. He could look down on the horses now and see their flanks rise and fall as they breathed. He could hear the crunch of their teeth grinding the oats.
He had seen on TV how people had rubbed horses down and he thought he would like to do that. Not now, but sometime. He’d like to touch the warm skins and soft muzzles. But later, when they had got used to him.
He was glad he had decided to stay here for the night. It was warm out of the wind. He was snug in his track suit and his green beanie.
He finished the grapes. His hands were sticky. There was a tap below and he went down and washed them. He knew he was washing off the blood too, and suddenly he was hit by a quaking fear as he remembered what had happened. The blood spurting out. The groan. For that’s all it had been. Just a groan. He took out the knife and washed it too. Don’t think. Don’t look.
Day . . . lee . . . Day . . . lee . . . It was a ritual incantation, a mantra, but Terry did not know that.
And then the stables, the smells, the horses, all seemed to occupy his mind, to calm him. He stood next to the grey for some minutes wondering if it had a name. He supposed horses had names but he had no idea what they might be. ‘I’m going to call you Mr Garner,’ he said softly, and put his hand gently on the grey’s rump. Instantly, the skin twitched as though to reject a fly.
Terry stepped hurriedly back. ‘I ain’t going to do nothin’ to you,’ he said.
He climbed back up into the hayloft. The hay was in tied bales but behind the bales, over the years, straw had collected into a loose pile. Mice and rats lived here, but Terry gave them no thought as he burrowed down into the straw. He gave no thought to anything, and especially not to the following day.
For months and months, lying in his bunk bed and listening to his mother entertain her ‘friends’, either in her own room or the small lounge, he had tried to block out reality with thoughts of the decathlon.
Ten events in two days . . . that’s what Daley Thompson had done and that’s what he, Huntsman Collins, would do.
‘Mon, you’re small for the decat’lon,’ his grandfather had said. ‘But you’ll grow.’
Anyway, what he did was take each discipline in turn, one a night, and thought about it just before he went to
sleep. He loved that word discipline. His grandfather had never used it, he called them ‘events’, but on TV when they showed the athletics they always called them disciplines.
The discipline tonight was the long jump.
So, OK, Bob Beamon, Jesse Owens, Ter Ovanesian, (that was a name) and Huntsman Collins. Each with one jump left. Jumping at sea level and going for Beamon’s Mexico City record. And Huntsman’s left heel bruised and sore . . .
‘You always going to have heel troubles, mon,’ his grandfather had said. ‘Every long jumper I evah heard of had heel troubles. All you can do is put in a rubber pad, ’cause you got to bang that heel down. You gotta attack that board. No use you just lolloping down that run-up. You gotta hit and then . . . up . . . into the hitch-kick and you flying . . . jest like a bird . . .’ That’s where he knew his grandfather was old-fashioned. They didn’t worry about the hitch-kick so much these days. Or the ‘hang’. They ran so fast and jumped so far they didn’t need anything else.
But that’s how his grandfather had talked, and he loved it. In the high jump it was the ‘western roll’ and the ‘eastern cut-off’. They sounded terrific names, Terry thought, even though no one jumped like that these days.
Anyway, it was Huntsman Collins to jump. His markers were red. If he hit each one he’d be on the board with a millimetre to spare . . . So get ready . . . The flag was up . . .
But somehow, tonight, here among the munching horses and the smell of urine and hay, the great competition at White City between him and the world’s greatest, he could not quite get started. Gail’s face kept coming between him and the long jump pit. It was as though she was standing there, looking along the run-up, a little smile on her face. And when he thought about her, he wanted to cry.
Chapter Seven
Maria was still in the small sitting-room. The fire had died and the TV was on but the sound was down. The flickering pictures were only there for company. She was trying to convince herself that one more drink would make no difference, would, in fact, help the sleeping pill to work, but she knew it was dangerous. She was listening to the house. She could hear the ticking of the long-case clock in the drawing-room. Richard had inherited it from his mother and when they had first come to Hampshire it used to strike the half hours and the hours. But when she was alone the strokes always startled, even frightened, her, especially the twelve strokes of midnight with their heavy symbolism. So she had begged him not to wind the striking mechanism and now the clock only ticked.
Suddenly, from her schooldays, she remembered a line, ‘The clock that clicked behind the door.’ Goldsmith. An example of onomatopoeia. God, that was a long time ago.
Other noises. The house timbers stretching arthritically. Rain water gurgling in the down pipes. The central heating boiler in the cellar switching itself on.
She had had a vision of coming to the country. It was a vision that would take them away from London. She no longer loved a London where their car had been broken into three times and the house twice, and where she no longer wanted to be alone on an underground train at night. Her mother had often told her what London had been like before she married Maria’s father and went to live in West Berlin.
Then, it had been a series of villages. In the King’s Road in Chelsea there had been real butchers, real fishmongers, real greengrocers. Hampstead was a village, so were Richmond and Chiswick and Greenwich. They had had their own characters.
Her vision had been a simple one, to leave the city and come to the country – something millions had done before her.
She had idealised their life: a baby (perhaps two), a dog, a cat, fields of ripening corn speckled with Flanders poppies. That was the summer. And, in the winter, long brisk walks, cosy evenings round a log fire, the dog stretched out on the hearthrug, the cat on her lap, Richard by her side. Like something out of a Victorian painting called The End of a Perfect Day.
Even at its best it would never, could never, have been like that. But that was the vision.
Instead, they had bought a grand but gloomy house, she had lost the baby, was living a life she hated and feared, and was now in the process of losing Richard.
Everything that could have gone wrong had gone wrong. Their kitten had died of cat ’flu. They’d gone to a dog rescue organisation and got Caesar: instant companion, instant protection. But no one had ever told the dog to be a companion, or trained it to be a protector. Later they learned it had been badly ill-treated.
She decided to compromise and have half a drink, so she poured herself a whisky and turned up the news. It was the story of an eighty-two-year-old woman who had been raped in her flat. Hastily, she turned it down again.
She put a Vivaldi flute concerto on the CD to cheer herself up. Richard had given it to her as one of her presents at Christmas.
She knew she was postponing going to bed because of the things she would have to do first. She would have to put Caesar out and sometimes he did not come back when she called. She wasn’t going to go blundering about the garden tonight. If he didn’t come back he could stay out.
And then she would have to check all the catches on the windows and the doors. She knew she had done them earlier but they needed checking again. Sometimes she checked three or four times.
She also had to find something to read. Something light but lasting, so that if she woke up at two or three she could read until dawn. And she was going to leave lots of lights on. Downstairs and upstairs. Everywhere.
At that moment the telephone rang.
Richard! This time it really would be him! He was phoning to tell her he was back! Or coming back tomorrow. She ran to the hall and picked up the receiver.
‘Hello!’
The voice sounded far away, behind a barrage of other sounds.
‘Hello?’ she said again. ‘Richard? Is that you?’
‘Maria? It’s Jack.’
‘I can’t hear very well.’
‘Jack Benson.’
‘Jack! God, I’m sorry, but it didn’t sound like you. Where are you?’
‘Bombay.’
‘Oh.’ She felt a sudden sense of disappointment. ‘What on earth are you doing there?’
‘Look, is Richard there? I need to talk to him.’
‘No, he isn’t.’
‘You mean he’s up at the house in London? I’ve just phoned there. No reply.’
‘No, he isn’t there either. He left for Lisbon this morning.’
‘Oh, shit.’
‘Why, is something wrong?’
‘Will he be back tomorrow?’
‘No. He’s gone for the weekend.’
‘The whole weekend? The Easter weekend?’
‘On business. Yes, the whole weekend.’
She heard him laugh softly. ‘Poor liebchen.’
Part of her was irritated by the soft laughter, but another part seemed to melt. He had called her liebchen years ago. It had been his pet name for her on those days when they had gone out to the Wannsee and lain in the sun and then, filled with summer warmth and golden Riesling, had gone back to his apartment behind the Kurfurstenstrasse to make love in the dusk. Her ‘Berlin Days’ as she thought of them now.
‘Trust Richard,’ he said.
‘It’s business,’ she repeated, defensively.
‘I never thought it was anything else. You on your own?’
‘That’s right. Is there anything I can do?’
‘Well, now . . .’ He let the phrase hang there for a few moments and then said, ‘Listen, I’m on my way home.’
‘To Hong Kong?’
‘Christ, no. London.’
‘London!’ Her heart gave a jerk. ‘Why? What’s happened?’
‘I get in the day after tomorrow. Why don’t we have dinner? I’ll tell you about it then. I could come down to Hampshire. That’s if you aren’t booked up.’
‘I’m not.’
‘I’ll have the day to get straight. We’ll go out on the town, if there is a town to go out on down there
.’
‘There isn’t. Not the sort of place you’d be interested in anyway. But . . .’
She paused.
‘Are you there?’ he said.
‘Yes. I’m here.’
‘Well, then, how about coming up to London? We could have dinner, do a show. You could stay at the house and I could drive you home the following day. How about that?’
‘I don’t think that would be a good idea.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well . . . Richard might phone or something.’
‘And he might not. Look, you know Richard. He’s a workaholic.’
‘Yes, I know, but . . .’
‘It’s only for one night. You’ll be back home the next day. I want to see you. It’s important.’
‘What is?’
‘I’ll tell you that, too.’
Other objections surfaced but she pushed them aside.
‘Liebchen? Are you there?’
‘OK.’
‘OK what?’
‘I’d love to.’
‘Marvellous.’
‘Why don’t I meet you at the house round about six? I’ve still got my key if you’re late.’
The house would be neutral ground, she thought. It was part office, part living space, and was often used by Richard’s overseas agents when they came to London. Jack had used it several times in the past.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Six.’
‘Oh, and liebchen, as far as you’re concerned I’m still in Hong Kong. OK? Just in case anyone should ask.’
‘Is there any . . .? Jack?’ But the line was dead.
She put down the phone and wandered slowly back to the sitting-room. Without thinking she poured herself a whisky and sat in front of the fire. She could feel her heart thumping away in her ribcage and she knew there was a flush on her cheeks because she could feel the warmth.
Of all the people to phone!
God, it was like a . . . what did they call it in English? A leading?
She tried to picture him. She had not seen him for some time. She conjured up his square good-looking face, with the cynical mouth and eyes.
Dirty Weekend (Macrae and Silver Book 1) Page 4