The breath left her body. She was shaking, like she was about to faint.
‘So you get me thrown out. Then what? I’ll be waiting for you. Because you’ve got to leave sometime. So what’s it going to be?’ He then sat back and opened his arms expansively. ‘Come one, I’m not such a bad guy. And you’ll have somewhere to stay for the night.’ He leaned forward again, placed his left hand over her right. ‘Could be a lot worse. A lot worse. Come on. It’ll be fun. You know you want to.’
Without pausing to think or question her actions, she picked up her fork and, channelling her fear and anger into strength and force, she slammed it down into the back of his hand.
At first he didn’t react. Then the pain hit. He jumped back, staring at his hand with the fork still sticking out. Blood was starting to pump out, dripping on to her half-eaten burger. That was the end of her meal.
He then realized what she had done and his face rapidly changed. All pretence of friendliness was gone, in its place just feral hatred.
‘Bitch! Fuckin’ bitch!’
He lunged at her over the table. Abigail was aware of the rest of the diner reacting in shock as his hands, now balled into fists, were flung in her direction. She tried to shrink back into the booth. As she tried to dodge the blows he was inexpertly swinging at her her drink and the plate went flying.
‘Help me …’ Abigail didn’t know whether she had screamed or whispered those words. ‘Please …’
She felt rather than saw him looming into her vision and screwed her eyes tight shut in anticipation of the hail of blows that were about to fall.
But they didn’t come.
Slowly she opened her eyes. Gavin was being restrained round the neck. He was attempting to fight off his assailant but without much success. Abigail heard a familiar voice shouting, gasping out angry words.
‘Good at picking on girls, are you … see how you get on with me …’
She looked closely at the assailant. Jeans, T-shirt, hair slightly greying, slightly too long. Her dad.
Joe Donovan.
She sat up straight.
Donovan was dragging Gavin from the booth, one arm locked round his throat, the other twisting his left arm up behind his back. He tumbled him on to the floor. Kneeling on him as he did so. He pulled Gavin’s left arm up further. Gavin screamed.
Behind him, people were gathering. Staff hovered, nervous about interceding. From the doorway came two burly, suited men. Bouncers from the club down the lane. Someone must have gone to get them.
‘It’s OK,’ Abigail shouted as they approached, ready to haul Donovan off, ‘he’s my dad. He’s come to pick me up. This guy was attacking me.’
They stood off, pumped for a fight, clearly unhappy at the thought that there would be no initial violence. Donovan looked up.
‘If you’d like to take over, gents, I’d be more than happy.’
Donovan loosened his grip, stood up. The bouncers moved in, picked Gavin up from the floor. Looked between Donovan and Abigail, the waitress, as to what to do next.
‘He called me a whore!’ shouted Abigail. ‘He wanted to, to do things to me. Take me back to his. I’m only fourteen, for God’s sake.’
That was all the incentive the bouncers needed. They dragged him out of the diner, while he whimpered. She didn’t want to think about what would be in store for him. She looked at her dad. He smiled.
‘Hey,’ he said.
She smiled in return. Felt like crying. ‘Hey, yourself.’
She ran to him. He opened his arms. She hugged him and the floodgates opened, tears streaming down her cheeks, body wracked by sobs. Eventually she pulled away from him. Looked at him, puzzled.
‘How did you find me?’
‘You left your phone on, thank God. We’ve got a GPS tracking system at Albion. Highly illegal, but I bet you’re glad we have.’
She smiled.
He broke the embrace, turned to the waitress, gave her his card. ‘Any damages, give me a call.’
The waitress, clearly fearful of a lawsuit, returned it unused, hurriedly telling him there wouldn’t be, that she was sorry for what had happened and that under the circumstances Abigail’s meal was on the house.
Donovan picked up her bags and they moved towards the door.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is a pleasant surprise.’
No matter what she had said to him in the past, how she had treated him and what she thought about him, she was so glad to see him now. She smiled again.
‘Let’s go home,’ he said.
They walked off into the night.
Together.
PART THREE
SONS OF
‘That first place they sent me to, when I got out, in eighty-eight, that was horrible. Horrible.’
She stubs her cigarette out in the ashtray as hard as she can for effect.
‘The Powell Estate in Paddington?’
She nods.
‘In what way?’
‘Just …’ She thinks for a few seconds. ‘It was where they sent the people they couldn’t deal with, that they didn’t want to know. Sweep them under the carpet, like. I’d been all over the place by then and I was looking to settle down somewhere, you know, find some roots.’ She gives a harsh, fag-enriched laugh. ‘Like I’d want to put down roots there.’ She falls silent again, thinking. ‘It was no better than prison. People were frightened to leave their homes at night. Or during the day, some of them. Awful. Mind you, they say it’s not like that now. That it got better when I left.’ Another harsh laugh. ‘Typical.’
‘And that was where Jack was born?’
She nods.
‘And … conceived?’
She nods again. Looks out of the window while she talks. ‘But I wasn’t therefor long. I moved soon after that.’
‘Why?’
She shrugs. ‘Wanted a change.’
‘Was Jack’s father with you?’
‘I told you, I’m not talkin’ about him.’
He tries something else.
‘You were there when that boy died? Guy Brewster?’
‘Dead boys.’ A small note of irritation in her voice, threatening to get bigger. ‘What is it with you and dead boys?’
He chooses to regard her question as an outburst and ignores it.
‘What happened to Guy Brewster? Can you remember?’
She keeps looking out of the window. ‘A boy was found dead. Murdered.’ She sits silently.
‘That’s all?’
She folds her arms. ‘As far as I’m concerned.’
‘So you didn’t know the boy? Didn’t have any contact with him?’
She stares at him. He doesn’t know whether it’s defiance or fear. She says nothing more. He waits. Eventually she speaks.
‘They kept tellin’ me I was one of the lucky ones there. ‘Cos I had backup Social workers. Well, I wasn’t lucky. Not a bit.’
He frowns. This isn’t what he was expecting her to say. ‘What d’you mean?’
She keeps staring out of the window. A Metro train rumbles past. She barely notices. Her eyes are on something she can see. Eventually she looks back at him.
‘I’ve got Jack, though. So some good came out if it.’ She smiles. ‘Yeah.’
11
Anne Marie’s screams woke her up. The nightmares were still clawing at her, trying to claim her, pull her back. She had escaped from them.
For now.
They were getting stronger. There was no denying the fact, no trying to ignore it or pretend it wasn’t happening. They were getting stronger. The bad spirits had faces this time.
Trevor Cunliffe looking up at her. Smiling, trusting, big mouth, missing teeth, head full of curls. Her hands on his neck, choking, pressing. His face changing colour, the fear in …
His eyes. She couldn’t see his eyes.
Sylvia Cunliffe standing there next to him, watching. Angry face. At the other side of her, a man. She knew who it was. Trevor, grown up. Trevor denied. Watchin
g himself as a boy die. Watching Mae Blacklock kill him.
Behind them another man. She could only see an outline but she knew who that was. A shadow with a razor-slash mouth, blood-red lips, blade-white teeth. Laughing.
She screamed, opened her eyes again. Nothing. No screaming or shouting. No grinning shadows. Just grey November light creeping round cheap curtains. Rob snoring.
She breathed deeply, trying to get settled again. Closed her eyes.
Saw Calvin Bell’s smiling face. The one from the papers, the TV.
Saw him cry out in agony.
Blades slicing …
The grinning shadow …
Calvin … Trevor …
The others …
She opened her eyes again.
‘Oh God …’
She breathed heavily, like her chest was about to burst. Despite the cold, sweat covered her whole body. Her head was spinning, the room sparkling before her eyes.
‘Oh God … I’m … oh God …’
Her tablets. They were in the bathroom. She needed her tablets. Slowly throwing the covers off her body, she pulled her body upright, trying to ignore the pounding and swirling in her head, and put her feet on the floor. Slowly, she got up. Put her hand out to steady herself. Saw a trail of blood on the wall.
She looked at her bandaged hands.
There was fresh blood on them.
She moved as quickly as she could to the bathroom to take her tablets.
And to throw up.
Trellick Tower dominated the landscape. The neo-brutalist Sixties tower block had survived sour times, including women being raped in the lifts, children being attacked by heroin addicts and squatters trying to burn the building down from inside, to become something of a landmark. Modernism’s last gasp.
It stood in West London, straddling the border between the gentrified Notting Hill and the much less genteel Kensal Town. Once the domain of social housing, its three-bedroom flats were now going for nearly half a million.
Amar Miah and Peta Knight stood at the base of the tower, staring up at it in the harsh, autumn morning light. Amar was in his early thirties, Asian, with a trim, gym-worked body. He was dressed in his usual working uniform of parka, jeans, T-shirt and trainers. All either designer labels or high-end high street. Peta, her blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, had on her jeans and trainers, a fleece-lined jacket covering her top. They both looked fit, like they could handle themselves.
‘Listed building, you know,’ said Peta, shutting and locking the door of her Saab soft-top.
‘Looks straight to me,’ said Amar, a smile playing on the corners of his lips.
Peta shook her head. ‘God save us from terrible jokes this early in the morning.’
Amar persisted. ‘You know the guy who designed this was called Goldfinger? Like in James Bond? Apparently Ian Fleming hated the tower so much he named a villain after him.’
‘Am I paying for this guided tour?’
‘Sorry.’ Amar became mock-hurt. He pulled his padded jacket around him, hitched up his jeans, polished the tops of each box-white trainer on the back of his calf. ‘Just trying to be entertaining.’
‘Find the directions to where we’re going. That should be entertainment enough.’
A few hurried phone calls had been made the day before and they had driven up from Brighton first thing in the morning. It felt to Peta like lunchtime, they’d been up so long, but it was not yet nine o’clock. London was waking up, going to work.
‘It’s this way,’ Amar said, consulting a printed page of A4 and an A to Z of London and pointing up a street. He began walking. Peta followed him.
Until the previous night they had been tracking Matt Milsom in Brighton. They had given the house he was in a round-the-clock vigil, as well as setting up a live feed that went to their rented flat and to Joe back at Albion. And, beyond taking deliveries of food from supermarket vans, there had been no movement in or out. There had been a light on in the flat at all times and only the faintest of movement glimpsed behind the pulled curtains. They had waited. Nothing.
‘He must have a secret tunnel,’ Amar had said, several days previously in the rented apartment in Brighton where they were then based. ‘Where he can come and go without us spotting him.’
‘Prob’ly goes to the pub an’ back,’ Jamal had said. ‘Or comes round here to laugh at us watchin’ him.’
Peta had smiled at her colleagues. Despite the seriousness of the job in hand, she enjoyed working with them. Recently there had been a real chance they would not be working together again at all. Or that not all of them would even be alive. But they had prevailed. They had survived. They were Peta’s closest friends, as close as family. Closer, in fact.
The last few months had been traumatic for Peta. She had discovered the true identity of her biological father only to have him taken away from her before she could get to know him properly. She had promised her mother they would spend some time together to come to terms with it all, but found she didn’t want to talk to her. She couldn’t come to terms with her mother’s deceit. Perhaps in time she could, but not quite yet. And then this happened. Donovan’s near death and the hunt for Matt Milsom. She had been so relieved. And as soon as she had started looking for him she had realized something. What happened in the past isn’t important. This is who I am now. These are the people who are important to me.
Closer than family.
She looked at Amar, walking up the road, trying to read both things at once. He looked fit and strong, healthy. Barely a trace of the pain a bullet had caused him over a year ago. He had kicked the drugs, controlled his drinking. Started working out again, looking after himself. And he had started dating again, not just casual bar pick-ups, but proper dates. And dating safely now, which, for a gay man who had once been as promiscuous as he had, was a weight off her mind.
They had argued about who would do what. Jamal had been adamant.
‘Nah, man,’ he had said back in Brighton. ‘It’s best if I stay here. Really.’
Peta had looked at him. He was seventeen, streetwise beyond his – and probably her – years but still just a boy. He was growing into a handsome young man. And he had joined the two of them in the gym, started to work out. With his mixed-race, light-skinned features giving him lean and attractive good looks, accompanied by his increasing taste in high-end urban fashion wear, he resembled a professional footballer, with the confidence but without the attitude or arrogance. She was proud of the part she had played in his upbringing. They all were.
‘No,’ she had said. ‘Milsom’s dangerous. We know that. What if he spots you? Finds you? What if he tries to do to you what he did to Joe?’
Jamal had smiled. ‘He won’t though, will he? He’ll be lookin’ for, like police an’ proper tails an’ stuff. He won’t be expectin’ me. I’ll be like a ghost. Slippin’ in an’ out through the cracks in the pavement.’ Jamal smiled, pleased with the analogy.
‘OK ghost,’ said Amar. ‘Supposing you do stay.’
Jamal started to speak. Amar held up a hand for silence.
‘And I’m not saying you do. Just supposing. What then? What are you going to do if he’s on the move and you have to follow him?’
‘I’ve got my scooter.’
Donovan had bought him a scooter for his seventeenth birthday. Jamal had tried to pretend he didn’t like it, that it was wussy and underpowered, but he was secretly thrilled with it. He had even insisted on bringing it down to Brighton in the back of Amar’s battered old Volvo estate.
‘I think he might move faster than a scooter,’ said Peta. ‘He might get on a train or move out of the city.’
‘Then I’ll follow him. Whatever. Leave your car here, man. I been takin’ lessons.’
‘My car?’ said Amar.
‘Not like it’s a good one.’
Peta had hidden a smile at Amar’s shocked face. Unsuccessfully. His taste for designer gear didn’t extend as far as his car. Once he had calmed dow
n, the two of them exchanged a glance then looked back at Jamal.
‘Look, man,’ Jamal said, his hands out, imploring. ‘Just trust me, yeah? I ain’t no kid any more. I can handle a job like this. If he does anythin’ or goes on the move, like, I’ll be on the phone like lightnin’, you get me?’
Peta studied him, making up her mind. What he said sounded reasonable but she sensed there was something else, something he was avoiding. His eyes gave it away. They were going on the trail of missing boys, lost boys. Boys from horror-film families and uncaring care homes. Boys with pasts like Jamal. He didn’t want to be reminded of it, she thought, didn’t want his past dredged up again.
Another glance at Amar. He knew what she was thinking. He nodded. That sealed it.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘But on one condition. My friend who’s on the force here. The one who spotted Milsom. I’m going to ask him to come down and check you’re OK. Work with you.’
‘Ah, man, you don’ have to do that.’
‘I do, Jamal. Or you’re not staying. This is serious. He’s a professional. Consider him one of us for the duration.’
Jamal wanted to argue. But it was clear he had no choice. ‘OK,’ he grumbled.
‘Good. Amar and I’ll get on with this other thing. You stay here. But be careful.’
‘You know me, man. Careful is my middle name.’
‘After Mouthy and Tosser,’ said Amar smiling.
Jamal looked hurt. ‘No need to be rude, man. Just ‘cos I dissed your car. An’ you know it’s true.’ He smiled to show no offence. ‘Look, peeps, I’ll be good, yeah? I’m strong. I’ll laser lock him like a heat-seekin’ missile, man. Won’t let him out of my sight.’
‘I know,’ said Peta.
Peta had made her call, everything was agreed there. They had left almost immediately.
‘Here it is,’ said Amar, trying to match the real coordinates with what his A to Z said.
‘You sure?’ Peta said. ‘Your map-reading skills are worse than mine. Last time I asked you to find somewhere you confused Leamington Spa with Learning Bar. You’ll be telling me the Dogger Bank is in Jarrow next.’
Speak No Evil Page 10