by James Craig
Jade looked along Praed Street. Back home, the streets would have been long since deserted, but here there was still plenty of activity. A bus rumbled past, full of tired passengers heading home. Across the road, a 24/7 mini-market was still doing a brisk trade. Sticking a hand in her pocket, she found a handful of coins, more than enough for another couple of cans of lager. Just as she was about to step off the pavement, a car pulled up. The driver, an Asian guy, wound down the window and gave her a friendly smile.
‘Missed your train home?’
‘Uh-huh.’ Jade placed a hand on the car roof to steady herself.
‘Need a place to stay?’
‘Nah.’ Jade shook her head. ‘I’m okay. Just gonna get another drink and wait in the station.’
‘We’ve got a nice place just round the corner. Lots of booze. And you can have a kip until it’s time to get your train.’
Jade looked up and down the road. Suddenly, the place seemed deserted. She gripped the vehicle more tightly for support. ‘Nah. It’s fine.’
‘Come on, it will be fun. We can have a party.’
There was a loud click. The back door of the car opened and a big white bloke struggled out.
Why didn’t I notice you before? Jade thought. She suddenly realized how tired she felt. Her head was swimming and she wondered if she was going to be sick.
‘You don’t want to be stuck out here in the middle of the night,’ the white guy said, taking her by the arm. Jade noticed he had a CFC tattoo on his forearm and her face broke into a crooked grin.
‘Chelsea,’ she slurred. ‘JT and the Special One. My boyfriend’s a Chelsea fan.’
‘Top man,’ the guy smiled, carefully ushering her into the back of the car.
FORTY-ONE
Pushing open the door of his battered Vauxhall Corsa, Sergeant Adrian Napper stepped out into the deserted alleyway, yawning as he stretched. Three hours sitting in the car watching sweet fuck all happening was exhausting. Surveillance work was invariably a pain in the arse, and this was a complete waste of time. He was ready to call it a night. First, however, he needed a piss.
Slipping round the back of the vehicle, Napper lined himself up facing a garage door and unzipped his fly. ‘Aaaah,’ he breathed contentedly as a stream of piss slammed against the metal, ‘that feels good.’
He was still in full flow when he heard the sound of an engine coming towards him. Keeping his head down, he continued about his business as the car rumbled slowly past, coming to a stop thirty feet down the road. There was the click of a door opening and then the sound of footsteps on the cobbles behind him. Zipping himself up, Napper turned to face a large bloke standing in front of him with a crooked smile on his face. Under the sodium lighting, he could see that the guy had a tattoo on his arm and a hammer in his hand.
Shit. Tensing, Napper realized that he had left both his radio and his pepper spray in the Corsa. He glanced down the alley, trying to distinguish the remaining figures in the other car.
Catching the direction of Napper’s gaze, the guy let the hammer swing limply at his side. ‘What are you doing?’
Napper held up his hand in a conciliatory manner. ‘Just taking a piss, mate.’
Grimacing, the guy took a step forward. ‘Fucking filth. What are you doing here?’
The guy knows who I am. How does he know that? Has he seen me before?
The questions could be saved for later. Keeping his eyes on the hammer, the sergeant moved on to the balls of his feet as he quickly contemplated his options for escape. There was no way he could get back inside his car without taking some heavy blows. But if he could somehow get himself back to the main road, he was fairly sure that he would be safe. If he had to make a run for it, he decided he would go left. It was maybe two hundred yards to the end of the alley and he had a start on his would-be attacker. He could feel the adrenaline pumping through his system and knew that he would be able to out-run the fat bastard. The people in the car shouldn’t be a problem, either. By the time the driver realized what was going on and started reversing down the road, the sergeant would be free and clear.
That was the theory, anyway.
Fear mingled with excitement as Napper’s heart felt like it was about to jump out of his chest. Stop thinking about it, he admonished himself. Just run. Taking a couple of deep breaths, the sergeant watched the guy edge closer. Go, go, go. With a grunt, he pushed off, slipping between the Vauxhall and the garage, heading for the traffic on the Uxbridge Road.
‘Hey. Fucker!’
Head down, arms pumping, the sergeant saw something fly past his left shoulder, clattering across the cobbles before bouncing into the gutter. Rather than try and chase after him, the bloke had thrown the hammer. And missed. Heh, heh, Napper chuckled, fuck you, you fat bastard, I’m outta here. Lifting his right arm in the air, he gave his attacker the one-fingered salute while careful not to slacken his pace. Focused on the end of the alley, he lengthened his stride, planting his left foot straight into a pothole about a foot deep. ‘Aargh.’ Sticking out his arms, he cushioned his fall as best he could as he went arse over tit. Sprawling across the cobbles, he slammed head first into a row of wheelie bins with a sickening thud.
For a moment, there was silence as he felt the cool of the stone against his cheek. Up, up, up. Shaking himself out of his daze, Napper struggled to his feet. Foot to the floor, he tried to resume his flight but was halted by the intense pain shooting up his left leg. Supporting himself on one of the bins, he looked despairingly towards the safety of the main road. Standing unsteadily on his one good leg, he turned to look back down the alley at the hulking figure of his assailant. Pausing only to bend down and recover his weapon, the man moved steadily towards his prey.
The clock high on the wall said that it was well after three in the morning. After a couple of hours’ dozing on a chair in the corridor, Umar Sligo felt as if he’d been trampled by a herd of bulls. What he needed was a minimum of twelve hours’ uninterrupted sleep in a nice, warm bed. But, like someone once said, you can’t always get what you need.
Yawning, he pushed open the door to Interview Room 4 and stepped inside. Nodding at the WPC sitting in the corner, he placed two small paper cups on the desk and pulled out a chair.
‘Here you go.’
‘Thanks.’ Melissa Graham picked up the nearest cup and took a tentative sip of the steaming coffee. ‘Urgh.’
‘I know,’ Umar replied, sitting down, ‘it’s terrible.’
‘At least it’s hot.’
Melissa seemed to be holding up reasonably well, under the circumstances. He knew that she had already made an initial statement. DI Postic had called it a night and gone to get a few hours’ kip. Unless anything interesting came up while the DI was in the Land of Nod, she would probably charge Melissa later in the morning. Every police officer was the same: you go for the obvious answer until proven otherwise. It seemed an open-and-shut case.
Melissa’s clothing had been taken away for forensic examination. Sitting opposite Umar, she was wearing a cheap pair of jeans and a shapeless red sweatshirt. It wasn’t a good look.
Leaning forward, the sergeant placed his forearms on the desk and clasped his hands together. ‘Sorry it’s taken me so long to come and see you. I am not part of this investigation, so I had to get the permission of the officer in charge. And I also had to wait until you’d seen a lawyer.’
‘I’ve spoken to a lot of people already,’ she said quietly. ‘I can’t remember all of their names.’
‘That’s understandable.’ Umar sat back in his chair. ‘It’s quite a situation you find yourself in.’
‘But why would anyone want to kill . . .’ her voice trailed off. Sniffing, she wiped her nose on the back of her sleeve. He could see that she was working hard to try to hold back the tears.
Umar gave her a supportive smile. ‘That’s what I was hoping you might be able to tell me.’
She looked at him quizzically. ‘I thought that this wasn’t yo
ur investigation?’
‘It isn’t. But I am a policeman. And the only reason I’m allowed in here at all is because you want to talk to me.’
Placing the cup on the desk, she shot him a hurt look. ‘You want me to confess?’
‘I want you to tell me precisely what happened,’ Umar said gently. He pulled out a small black notebook and a biro from the back pocket of his jeans and tossed them on the table. ‘If your story is going to check out, we need to find some evidence to support it . . . quickly.’
Walking out of the police station, Umar saw Sergeant Lawrence Shames coming the other way. As he bounded up the stairs, there was a spring in his step suggestive of a man contemplating a quick win in a big case.
‘Did you see her?’ Shames asked, stopping on the top step.
‘Just spoken to her.’
‘And?’
Umar tapped his notebook against the back of his free hand. ‘And nothing, really. She says she walked in and found them there. Tried to revive the boyfriend, which is how she got covered in his blood. Doesn’t have any idea who might have done it.’
‘There you go,’ said Shames cheerily, patting him on the shoulder. ‘We are sorted on this one.’
‘What about the forensics?’
‘Ach, we’ll have to wait and see, but you know . . .’
‘Yeah.’ Umar did know. The wheels of justice were moving fast and it would take something spectacular to slow them down.
‘What are you going to do?’
Umar made a face. ‘Not much. I’ll speak to a few people. But it’s not really my investigation.’
‘That’s right,’ Shames headed inside the station, ‘and don’t you forget it.’
FORTY-TWO
No trains were listed on the electronic indicator. However, the board above the platform helpfully reminded her that the time was now four fifty-eight and thirteen seconds. The first service of the morning should arrive in around twenty minutes. Shivering in the pre-dawn gloom, Chantelle Malloy gazed vacantly at the lights burning in the office block across the road. From this distance, the large, squat building which housed a large part of the BBC’s London operations looked like it was made of tinfoil. At this time in the morning, the place would be largely empty, but still, most of the windows were shining brightly. Stupid bastards, she thought, what a waste of electricity. Haven’t they heard of global warming?
A mail van barrelled down Wood Lane, accelerating through a red light and disappearing in the direction of Shepherd’s Bush. Yawning widely, Chantelle kicked the bucket of dirty water along the empty platform of the westbound platform of White City tube, cursing her supervisor for putting her on cleaning duty again. She had been forced to wash down the station platform for three of the last four mornings. It simply wasn’t fair: the other members of her crew, Marlon, Pavel and Anton, all got to sit inside, reading the paper and having a kip while she slogged her way from one end of the station to the other, picking up litter and cleaning up after the dirty bastard passengers. Nothing surprised Chantelle any more – in less than a month on the job, she’d had to retrieve everything from false teeth to used condoms. People were so disgusting. Not for the first time, the girl wished that she had stuck with her hairdressing course at Goldhawk Road Technical College.
Wearied by the injustice of it all, Chantelle pushed her mop across the sticky concrete. This was exploitation, pure and simple, but there was bugger all that she could do about it. The supervisor, Crina, was a skanky bitch from Romania or some other Eastern European hell-hole. She had all of them reporting for duty at four o’clock in the morning so that her employment agency could claim workfare credits from the Department of Work & Pensions. Meanwhile, Chantelle had to work for six and a half hours a day for no money or risk losing all of her state benefits.
‘What do they want you to do?’ her father had asked when the letter from the DWP had arrived, instructing Chantelle to report for their latest welfare-to-work programme. ‘Go on the game?’
‘Probably,’ Chantelle grumbled. The idea had crossed her mind. Her useless bastard father wouldn’t give a toss if she did but, instinctively, the girl knew that she didn’t have the stomach for it.
‘I would tell them to get stuffed,’ her dad huffed, retreating behind his copy of the Daily Express.
Easy for you to say, Chantelle thought. Her dad hadn’t done a day’s work for more than thirty years. Good luck to anyone trying to get him back into a job.
In the end, however, there was no alternative. Two weeks later, Chantelle had reported for duty with her career reorientation provider, a company called New Life Horizons, which operated out of a two-room office in the basement of a crumbling office block just south of Brook Green. The place smelled of cigarettes and piss. All the people looked like they were on medication. After filling in a handful of forms, Chantelle was informed that she had been assigned to an environmental services crew who would be providing outsourced services to London Underground.
‘What are outsourced services?’ she’d asked the young guy behind the desk.
‘You’ll be doing the cleaning,’ he told her, not looking up. ‘Make sure you pick up your uniform before you go.’
‘Hey. Do it all.’ The Romanian slag, all peroxide hair and fake fingernails, appeared from behind a pillar and took a deep drag on her Lambert & Butler cigarette. Exhaling into the dark morning sky, she pointed towards the far end of the platform, past an advert for the latest James Bond movie.
‘Fuck off,’ Chantelle whispered to herself.
‘What you say?’ Crina jabbed an angry finger in Chantelle’s direction. ‘I’m watching you.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’
Standing about five feet four inches tall, the Romanian woman was dressed in jeans and a red puffa jacket. Not for her the green jumpsuit with the letters NLH in black on the back that Chantelle and the other ‘employees’ were forced to wear. Behind her slapdash make-up, the woman could have been anywhere between thirty and fifty. Taking another drag on her cigarette, she glanced at her watch. ‘The station opens in less than half an hour – you have to finish soon.’
Looking up, Chantelle caught sight of Anton through the staffroom window. He was pointing at her and laughing. ‘Sod you,’ Chantelle mouthed, flipping him the finger.
‘Leave him alone,’ the woman snapped.
‘Get them to do some work,’ Chantelle demanded, stomping along the platform like an angry eight year old.
‘They work,’ Crina said flatly.
‘Yeah, right.’ You don’t tell them others what to do, Chantelle thought bitterly, ‘cos they’d kick your bony arse all the way back to the shitty little country you came from. Get you deported, so you can spend the rest of your life standing by the side of the road, sucking off Russian truck drivers for a living.
‘Hurry up!’ the woman squawked.
With her foot, Chantelle pointed at the cardboard box containing a selection of industrial-strength cleaning materials. ‘I need more disinfectant.’
Shaking her head, Crina took a final drag on her smoke and flicked the stub towards the empty train tracks. ‘There’s more stuff over there.’ She pointed at a small concrete shack, a glorified cupboard about six feet high by three feet wide, set to the side of the station building. To the right of its metal door was a keypad. ‘The code is 1026. Don’t take forever.’ Lecture over, she headed back inside.
‘Dunt tek fowevvva,’ Chantelle parroted in a cod Eastern European accent. Letting the mop fall from her hand, she watched the woman disappear into the ticket hall. ‘Fuuukkk uuu.’ Slouching across the platform, she stepped up to the shed door.
‘Urgh.’ White City really was an outdoor khazi. Something didn’t smell good and the cleaner looked around to see if she could locate the offending excretions. Wrinkling her nose, she punched in the key code, waiting for the lock to click open before reaching for the door handle. As she did so, the door swung open and the stink intensified.
‘Bollocks.’ The
cleaner jumped backwards as a large black bin bag fell out on to the platform. As the sack hit the concrete, it split open to reveal its contents. As Chantelle realized what was inside, her eyes grew wide and she felt her legs wobble.
‘Crina.’
Slowly she backed away.
‘CRINA!’
What time was it? Where was she? Jade Jones tried to sit up in bed but the searing pain bouncing around her skull caused her to abandon that idea pretty damn quickly. She didn’t remember drinking that much, but this sure was a monster hangover. Her mouth was dry and her head felt like it had been split open with an axe. She could feel some noxious brew bubbling away in her stomach, all too eager to force its way back up her throat.
Concentrating on not throwing up, Jade waited for the nausea to subside, before trying to piece together the events of the night before. Slowly, it started coming back to her – the row with her boyfriend, the spur-of-the-moment trip to London, the guys in the car, the bottle of Smirnoff Black, the party . . . The bit she didn’t want to remember. Gently easing herself off the bed she sifted through the crumpled pile of clothing lying on the floor. Where were her knickers? Deciding that it didn’t matter, Jade picked up her jeans and checked the pockets. To her relief, she still had her return train ticket, ATM card and some spare cash. Her mobile phone was still in her jacket. It was time to get the hell out of this shit-hole, get back home and have a nice bath, forget all about last night. Hopefully Paul had learned his lesson. She had certainly learned hers.
Flopping back onto the bed, Jade struggled into the jeans before slipping on her trainers. Pulling on her jacket, she stepped gingerly towards the door. When she turned the handle, however, it didn’t budge. It took her a couple of moments to realize that the door was locked. She gave it a smack with her fist, followed by a series of rapid kicks.