Hold Back the Night

by Hold Back the Night (retail) (e

  Nothing happened for a minute or so. Donna just sat there, hardly moving. Then a few more people walked onto the platform. When a woman walked into the shot and sat on the nearest bench to the camera I put my finger back on the screen.

  ‘The tourist,’ I said. ‘The German lady.’

  The next train didn’t come for another six or seven minutes, during which time Donna walked right down the platform and into much clearer view. She was wearing baggy, burgundy coloured trousers of a thin material and a green top with a cross-laced front, the laces untied. She had on a pair of black Converse boots and her hair was tousled. Whereas before she had seemed simply lost, now she was clearly distressed. Her mouth kept opening and closing and she looked all around her, as if afraid that someone was trying to harm her. Then she stopped, and seemed to just think, before looking round again. Most obviously she seemed confused, as if she had mislaid something, something very important. When she got as close to the camera as I knew she ever did, I hit pause.

  ‘Look,’ I said.

  I pointed to Donna’s face and though the picture was less than clear I thought I saw bruising. I hit the button again and watched as Donna wandered round a bit more, before sitting next to the woman on the bench. The woman looked at Donna and gathered her bag to her. In her statement she said that Donna had been talking to herself, odd random words that didn’t seem to make any sense. She couldn’t remember any of them. On screen the woman continued to glance nervously at Donna and twice looked at her watch.

  I gave a look to Fursten that was supposed to warn him but he was staring hard at the screen. After two or three minutes of sitting on the bench Donna simply took hold of her hair in both hands and started screaming for no apparent reason. The woman beside her looked shocked and uncertain. Donna stood up quickly and just as quickly my hand reached out to hit the button again.

  ‘You don’t have to watch the rest. What I wanted you to see was that reaction. Why would…?’

  Fursten’s lips were pursed and his eyes were focused in front of him. He still didn’t look at me. Instead he reached for the recorder and touched the pause button, sending the figure of Donna into motion again. She ran straight forward with her hands in front of her face, into the path of the incoming train, which sent her flying backwards up the platform. Because there was no sound, the impact looked unreal, as if Donna were just a puppet, jerked backwards by an invisible wire. She flew backwards and then landed on the floor. Then she slid along the wall until she was rammed into the iron legs of a low bench and jolted suddenly to a halt. After that she was completely still. It was all over in less than a second.

  The train slowed quickly but carried on along most of the rest of the platform. The lady on the bench had stood up. The doctor and I watched as she began to move, slowly at first, before running the rest of the way towards Donna. I reached forward and turned the video off.

  I hit eject on the machine and sat back in my chair with the cassette. I turned to the doctor. He let a breath out of his nose.

  ‘It’s very strange’, he said, shaking his head, ‘to watch that. We normally only ever see the aftermath.’

  I nodded, and slid the cassette back into its case. ‘But you can see why I think it’s odd?’

  He thought about it. ‘Yes, I can.’

  ‘I mean, if she’d been on acid, or mushrooms even. To just suddenly scream like that. And then run.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  ‘It just looks so sudden. She’s distressed, sure, but then she just flips, like she’s seen, I don’t know…giant green ants or killer spiders. If she’d been on acid, I could understand it.’

  Fursten nodded and folded his arms. ‘I was chased by ten-foot razor blades,’ he said. ‘1977. I locked myself in my room but they tried to slice their way through the door. It was my friends, actually, but I didn’t know that. I nearly jumped out of the window and I still don’t know what stopped me. Terrifying. My first and only experience of LSD.’

  ‘But Ecstasy?’

  The doctor hesitated. ‘I know what you’re getting at. Between you and me, I have used it a few times and no, it never made me act that way. Or anyone else I know about for that matter. But we don’t know what was going through Donna’s mind. She’s a very messed around girl, as you know. You told me, remember?’

  ‘But to act so suddenly …’ I said again. ‘I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem right…’ Fursten gave me another big shrug.

  ‘What can I tell you?’ he said. ‘I agree it looks off, and it’s not what I would have guessed if I had just seen this, but the tests are very clear. A limited amount of alcohol, a lot of E. Nothing else. I wish I could help you but faced with that, there really isn’t anything else I can say. Except that it is, of course, very, very sad indeed.’

  I knew that Fursten was right but nevertheless there was a story there, a series of events that produced Donna’s behaviour, something we didn’t know. I was sure it was something other than the obvious but Fursten couldn’t tell me what it was. There wasn’t anything else to ask him so I thanked him for his time, and he apologized for not being of any more help to me. A cleaner knocked on the door and looked at us strangely when we opened up, but she didn’t say anything. We then snuck out of the office wing as furtively as we had entered, and waited for the lift. Fursten told me he would get in touch with Andy if there was any news about Donna.

  I parted with the doctor on the fourth floor, where he got out. Once downstairs again I spoke to the ward sister and she said it was OK to sit with the girl for a while. She told me that there was no change in Donna’s condition: stable but critical. I sat in the same seat I had before, and the constable, who recognized me from before, took the opportunity to wander off up the ward to chat to his colleague minding the door. When he was gone I looked at the flowers by the side of the head that was still swathed in bandages. There was a name tag by the bed, placed there I imagined, so that any nurse with a free second could come and chat with the girl. The name tag said Donna. But she called herself Natalie. I’d come to think of her as either, or both, and I wondered which name referred to her most, which person she really was; the girl she had run away from being or the body lying still in front of me? I decided she was Natalie, not Donna, and I admired her for trying to reinvent herself, for not accepting the hand she had been dealt by life. I thought of the girl in the photograph, with the pony, and then of Natalie’s dyed hair and eyebrow ring and the contrast they made with the person she was before. It moved me to think of the fragile, ephemeral foundations we use to build our personalities upon.

  I smiled down at the girl and even spoke to her, telling her simple, inconsequential things, nothing that would have been at all important to her. I chatted for twenty minutes or so before the constable came back. It wasn’t difficult. I’m an old hand. I left her at about five and walked back out into the corridor.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I was back in the hospital foyer but this time I didn’t see any ghosts. I found a phone next to a vending machine and took a sip of coffee as I dialled Andy’s number. He was back at the station and I thanked him for the tape. He didn’t tell me that my voice was any different. Andy said he’d been through the tape himself and I asked him what he made of it. I told him what I thought. He’d noticed the possible bruising on Natalie’s face himself, but wouldn’t say it was there for certain.

  ‘The doctors?’ I asked him, suddenly thinking of it. ‘Could they tell how fresh it was?’

  As soon as Andy laughed I realized it wasn’t very likely. ‘If she hadn’t nutted a tube train, maybe,’ he said. ‘As it is, forget it.’

  Even if there had been bruising on Natalie’s face prior to the train hitting her, Andy couldn’t see that it changed anything. She wasn’t exactly leading a risk-free life. He pointed to the fact that we were looking at clear and unambiguous proof of an attempted suicide, in which no one else was directly involved.

  ‘It’s just one of those things,’ he sa
id.

  Andy wasn’t too interested, either, in my qualms about Natalie’s behaviour.

  ‘Its not a controlled drug,’ he said, ‘Ecstasy. Who knows what it’ll make you do? When I took it I ended up tonguing one of the most hideous, disgusting bints you have ever seen in your entire life, and thinking she was Denise van fucking Outen.’

  I could hear him wincing at the memory.

  ‘And she ended up tonguing you,’ I told him.

  I hung up and walked outside to my car. Huge, dense clouds squatted over the city, still and heavy. My shoulders felt heavy too and my stomach cramped at the coffee. I pulled out into the traffic. I’d intended going home to catch up on some of the sleep that I’d done without the night before but after a minute or two I thought better of it. I knew it wouldn’t work. I’d tried earlier without any success. I’d laid down and shut my eyes but my mind had kept looking for answers, some sort of way round what I’d been told. And it kept showing me pictures I didn’t want to see. Eventually I’d given up and returned to the window, as if something out there would suddenly let me know what was going on. St Paul’s didn’t tell me anything.

  At Archway I took a right, and drove towards Camden. The video was niggling the hell out of me but I put it to the back of my mind with all the other crap I couldn’t work out. I focused on the boy; I still had to find him, and as yet I hadn’t really started looking. I knew I’d probably end up walking the streets or sitting in cafes until he either turned up or I gave up, but while there was something more positive to do first I’d do it. I had one possible link to the kid. I parked the car right outside George Curtis’s kebab shop and killed the engine, knowing that I could keep an eye on it and move it later if I needed to.

  I clicked my belt loose and went to open my car door, but as my hand reached for the handle I stopped. I suddenly wondered if actually it might not be such a good idea to let Mr Curtis see the car I drove. In fact, I couldn’t see any point either in simply asking the man the same questions Andy had. He’d be sure to tell me what he’d told him, if he even agreed to speak to me at all. I took my hand off the door handle and turned the key again. I pulled out, back into the traffic. I cruised round the one-way system and pulled into the car park thoughtfully provided by the Sainsbury’s people.

  I sat in my car for a couple of minutes, tapping my thumbs on the steering wheel. Then I got out, opened the boot, and from amongst the pile of stuff I keep in there I pulled out a leather bag. Inside it was a non-iron blue shirt, which I buttoned up over my tee shirt. I dug out a nondescript tie and put that on too, before untying my shoelaces. I ignored a middle-aged woman loading groceries into the back of a Volvo and pulled down my jeans, before stepping into a pair of dark trousers and some old black loafers with a nice polish. A jacket finished the effect. I picked up a briefcase that was also in the boot, took out half of what was in it while making sure that what I needed was in there, and walked back up the High Street.

  ‘Mr Curtis?’

  I’d waited until the shop was almost empty, pretending to look at the illuminated menu on the side wall. Then I laid my briefcase flat on the counter. I opened it up, took out a blue plastic clipboard and turned over a few pages. The man behind the counter stared at me.

  ‘Could I speak to…Mr George M. Curtis please?’

  ‘He’s out,’ the man said. It wasn’t the same guy as the time before, though there was something very familiar about him. He was a balding, pit bull of a man wearing an Arsenal tee shirt, and if I’d still been on the Force I’d have arrested him just for that. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m a health and safety officer, sir,’ I announced, with a brisk, professional smile.

  I reached into my briefcase again and handed the man another set of credentials that Carl had whipped up for me on his Mac about a year ago; another laminated photocard, but also this time a much folded piece of yellow A4 detailing my rights of entry as a health and safety officer of the Crown. And had I been such an officer I would indeed have had such rights. They explained that I was allowed to inspect all areas of the premises without warning, at any hour of the day or night that I saw fit. That hour, I explained, was now.

  ‘If you’d like to show me through,’ I said.

  The man shuffled. The one remaining customer had obviously overheard our conversation and thought better of it – the door clanged shut behind him. I was about to ask the man again if he would please show me into the kitchen when the doorway behind him was filled by a large figure in a plain yellow button-down, which gave ample space to the little polo player galloping above the breast pocket on the left-hand side. ‘George,’ the man said. ‘You are in.’

  George Curtis didn’t look quite so big as I’d remembered him, but then he was no longer doing battle with a very thin kid a good foot shorter than he was. He was still pretty large though; a good six two with round shoulders that didn’t look to have gone all the way to fat yet. He had glasses on, which was a slight surprise, as was his manner. He didn’t seem fazed to see me, or if he was he didn’t show it. He must have been highly confident of his hygiene standards.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  His voice was a bigger surprise, perhaps the deepest bass I ever heard. It was pure, cartoon bulldog.

  ‘John Hammond,’ I said, feeling like Aled Jones, dueting with Tom Waites. ‘Health and Safety.’ The other guy handed Curtis my documentation, which he glanced at before giving me a shrug.

  ‘Follow me,’ he rumbled.

  Carl had created this new ID for me some years ago, when I’d been looking for a thirteen-year-old Turkish boy whom I suspected of working in a restaurant kitchen in Ladbroke Grove. I’d taken his picture in the course of photographing the entire place. But this time I didn’t need the camera. I followed George Curtis into a small, clean-looking kitchen space with a chip fryer, a grill, a hotplate and four gas rings. Trying to look as official as possible I set my briefcase down on a steel work surface and took out a thermometer. I opened up the fridge that was nearest to me, slid the thermometer onto the top shelf and closed the door again.

  Curtis stood watching me, with his arms folded and a bored though patient expression on his face. He had a broad, flat face with cheeks that did all they could to push themselves forward, his nose small, his forehead slightly scorched from the sun, and a dirty three-day beard. He stood watching me, breathing through his mouth. Remembering the man outside I asked him if the staff wore hats at all times while preparing food.

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  I asked him to please show me the hats, which he did, opening a drawer to reveal a pile of white paper berets.

  ‘In that case can you tell me why the man on the counter isn’t wearing one?’

  Curtis looked to his right and barked over my left shoulder. He’d hardly left a beat. ‘Steve! Put a fucking hat on! How many times do I have to tell you? Huh?’

  The other man scurried through and put a hat on before disappearing again. Curtis’s mouth opened again and he took a few breaths. I opened the fridge and retrieved my thermometer. I nodded and wrote the reading down, having no idea whether it was cold enough or not.

  After that I poked around, looking in cupboards, pulling open drawers and nodding to myself now and then. Curtis didn’t seem to mind. I did the job systematically, with occasional glances to see if he looked any more relaxed at all. If he did it would mean I’d missed something, but he just looked bored and stoical; a small businessman having to endure more ridiculous bureaucracy. When I’d finished taking temperature readings and making sure the fire exits were clear I asked Curtis if he could show me the back of the building. He shrugged again and walked past the work surfaces to the rear of the kitchen.

  The back door was ajar. Curtis held it open for me and I stepped into a small yard with a mini-skip at one end and a rubbish bin on the left-hand side. There was a small, circular drain in the middle. The yard was enclosed by a seven-foot wall with pieces of loose glass on the top. There was a wooden
door in the centre of it, presumably leading out into the alleyway, and after a cursory look around I put my hand on the handle. I pulled, but the door didn’t give, and I tried again with the same result. I made a tick on my pad and then held it with both hands down in front of me.

  ‘I take it you keep this door shut,’ I said, turning round.

  ‘Of course.’ Curtis stuck his hands on his hips.

  ‘At all times?’

  ‘All times.’

  ‘Are you sure, Mr Curtis?’

  ‘Yes I’m sure.’

  I left a second and looked the man in the eye.

  ‘I’m afraid that is not what we have been led to believe,’ I said. ‘We received a report from the police that you had a break-in here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A break-in. The police report all such matters to us, when they involve places where food is prepared.’

  ‘They do?’

  How the hell did I know? It sounded plausible.

  ‘In case the security of a building threatens public health,’ I explained. ‘This door, for instance. If it were left open, anyone could have access to your kitchens. People could tamper with the food. And, with the recent problem concerning rubbish removal, there have been a lot of cases of rat infestation reported to us. If this door were left open, rats could easily gain access to your kitchens.’

  ‘It’s closed, always.’

  I glanced down at my file. ‘The police report says that a boy stole in here and that you ejected him. Is that right?’ He nodded. ‘I find it hard to believe he could have done so if the door was locked,’ I said. I looked upwards. ‘That’s a pretty high wall you’ve got there.’

  George Curtis didn’t bother looking upwards but instead he looked at me, veiy deliberately. He took three slow breaths before a look of sarcastic tolerance settled on his features.