Riot Act

by Zoe Sharp

  I knew I should have left Friday at home.

  Before I could react to contradict this outrageous bluff, Shahida and a group of her neighbours appeared en masse round the corner of the house. They had the air of a mob, racking the boys’ nerves another notch towards breaking point.

  Then Shahida caught sight of Fariman’s inert body and she started screaming. It was the kind of scream that nightmares are made of. A full-blooded howling roar with the sort of breath-control an opera singer would have killed for. It didn’t do me much good, so it must have struck utter terror into her husband’s attackers.

  And, having accomplished that, Shahida broke free of her supporters, and bolted across the garden to avenge him.

  “Shahida, no!” I’d failed Fariman, I couldn’t let her down as well.

  As she rushed past me I let go of Friday’s straining leash and grabbed hold of her with both hands. Such was her momentum that she swung me round before I could stop her. She struggled briefly, then collapsed in my arms, weeping.

  Suddenly unrestricted, Friday leapt forwards, eager to be in the thick of it. He bounded through the ranks of Langford’s men and into plain view on the gravel, moving at speed. With the idea of an attack from the dog firmly planted in his mind, the boy with the cigarette lighter must have thought he could already feel the jaws around his throat.

  He panicked.

  The tiny flame expanded at an exponential rate as it raced up the rag wick towards the neck of the bottle. He threw the Molotov in a raging arc across the garden, onto the stony ground. The glass shattered on impact, and sent an explosive flare of burning petrol reaching for the night sky with a whoosh like a fast-approaching subway train.

  Langford and his men ducked back, cursing. I dragged Shahida’s incoherent form to safety, yelling for Friday as I did so.

  He appeared almost at once through the smoke and confusion, ears and tail tucked down, looking sheepish.

  Voices were shouting all around us. Langford’s crew had skirted the flames and redoubled their efforts to get to the boys. Christ, would they never give up?

  Another Molotov was lit, but it was thrown in the other direction. Away from the vigilantes.

  And into the shed.

  This time, there was more than the contents of the bottle to fuel the fire. With bitumen sheeting on the roof, and years of creosote on the walls, they couldn’t have asked for a more promising point of ignition.

  The flames caught immediately, sparkling behind the window, washing at the doorway. The speed with which they took hold, and the heat they generated, was astounding.

  Fariman!

  “Get the fire brigade,” I yelled, jerking one of the neighbours out of their stupor. “And an ambulance.” Where the hell were the police when you needed them?

  I shouted to the dog to stay with Shahida, but didn’t wait around to find out if he obeyed me. I ran forwards, shielding my eyes with my hand against the intensity of the fire. The old man was still lying where he’d fallen by the shed door. The flames were already licking at the framework nearest to him. I grabbed hold of a handful of his paisley dressing gown and heaved.

  For all the difference it made, I might as well have been trying to roll a whale back into the sea.

  I shouted for help, but nobody heard in the brawl that was fast developing all around me. The smoke hit in gusts, roasting my lungs, making my eyes stream. I tugged at Fariman’s stocky shoulders again, with little result.

  In the mêlée, somebody tripped over my legs and went head-first onto the gravel, landing heavily. I lunged for the back of their jacket, keeping them on the ground.

  “Wait,” I said sharply as they began to struggle. “Help me get him out of here.”

  The boy stared back at me with wide, terrified eyes over the scarf that had slipped down to his chin. He tried again to rise, but desperation lent me an iron grip.

  Something exploded inside the shed, and shards of glass came bursting out of the doorway. I spun my head away, but still I kept hold of the boy. I turned back to him.

  “If you don’t help me, he’ll burn to death,” I said, going for the emotional jugular. “Is that what you want?”

  There was a moment’s hesitation, then he shook his head. Taking a leap of faith, I let go of his jacket and fisted my hands into Fariman’s dressing gown again. To my utter relief, the boy did the same at the other shoulder.

  He was little more than a kid, but between us, a few feet at a time, we managed to drag the old man clear.

  We got him onto the crazy paving by the back door of the house. It wasn’t as far away from the inferno as I would have liked, but it was better than nothing. The effort exhausted the pair of us.

  I searched for the pulse at the base of Fariman’s his neck. It throbbed erratically under my fingers. I heaved him over onto his stomach and pulled up the dressing gown. Underneath, he wore pale blue pyjamas. The back of the jacket was now covered with blood, which was pumping jerkily out of the row of small holes in the cloth.

  I glanced up at the boy, found him transfixed.

  “Give me your scarf.” My words twitched him out of his trance. For a moment he looked ready to argue, then he unwound the scarf from his neck and handed it over without a word.

  I balled the thin material and padded it against the back of Fariman’s ribcage. “Hold it there,” I ordered. When he didn’t move I grabbed one of his hands and forced it to the substitute dressing.

  The boy tried to pull back, didn’t want to touch the old man. If you didn’t want his blood on your hands, sonny, you should have thought of that earlier. With my forefinger and thumb I circled his skinny wrist, and dug cruelly deep into the pressure points on the inside of his arm, ignoring his yelp of pain. “Press hard until I tell you to let go.” My voice was cold.

  He did as he was ordered.

  I checked down Fariman’s body. When I got to his legs I found the skin on one shin bubbled and blistered where it had been against the burning shed door. It looked evil. I carefully peeled the charred pieces of his clothing away from the worst of it, and left it well alone.

  Burns were nasty, but unless they were serious they were low on the priority list when it came to first aid. Besides, without even a basic field medical kit, there was little else I could do.

  “Where the hell’s that ambulance?” I growled.

  Shahida reappeared at that point, with Friday trotting anxiously by her side. I braced myself for another bout of hysterics, but she seemed to have run out of steam. She slumped by her husband’s side and clutched at his limp hand, with silent tears running down her face.

  I put my hand on her shoulder and shot a hard glance to the boy, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  The neighbours had swelled in number and organised themselves with buckets of water and a hosepipe. Where the first petrol bomb had landed there was now a soggy, blackened patch on the sandy-coloured stones.

  Then the whole of the roof of the shed went up. A rejuvenated blast of flame kept the people back to a respectful distance. Burning embers came drifting down on the still night air like glitter, dying as they fell.

  “Well, we lost the little bastards.” Langford’s voice was thick with anger as he came stamping up. He lit a cigarette, cupping his hands round the match and dropping it on the paving. His cold gaze lingered briefly on Shahida, but he made no moves to try and help. The boy kept his head down.

  The first wail of sirens started up in the distance. We all paused, trying to work out if the sound was growing louder.

  When it became clear that it was, the boy’s nerve finally broke. He jumped to his feet, abandoning his nursing duties, and ran like a rabbit. Langford suddenly realised that he’d had his prey right under his nose. He gave a bellow of outrage and took off after him.

  The kid might have been built for lightness and speed, but gravel is murder to sprint on, and he didn’t get the opportunity to open out much of a lead. Before they hit the hedge at the bottom of the garden, Langford
had brought him down.

  And once the boy was on the ground, the vigilante waded in with his feet and his fists. His methods were unrefined, but brutally effective, for all that.

  I was up and running before I’d worked out quite what I intended to do. I only knew I had to stop Langford before he killed the kid. No matter what he’d done.

  “Langford, for God’s sake leave him alone,” I said. “Let the police deal with him.”

  Langford whirled round. In the light from the blazing shed, his eyes seemed to flash with excitement. This was what took him and his men out patrolling the streets night after night. Not some altruistic vision. It all came down to the age-old thrill of the chase, the heat of the kill.

  “Get lost, Fox,” he snarled. “I’m sick to death of all this passive resistance crap. Take a look around you. It doesn’t work.” He held up a bloodied fist. “This is all these bastards understand.”

  “Leave him,” I said again, my voice quiet and flat.

  He laughed derisively. “Or what?” he said, turning his back on me. The boy had half-risen in the lull, and Langford punched him viciously in the ribs, watched with grim delight as he dropped again.

  Though I tried to hold it back, I felt my temper rise up at me like a slap in the face. My eyes locked on to a target. I didn’t need to concentrate on the mechanics. All the right moves unfurled automatically inside my head.

  “Langford!” I called sharply.

  And as he twisted to face me again, I hit him.

  I’d like to think it was simply a clinically positioned and delivered blow, carefully weighted to disable, calculated to take him quickly and cleanly out of the fight.

  The reality was dirtier than that. I hit him in a flash of pure anger, harder and faster than was strictly necessary, not caring for the consequences. It was stupid, and it could have been deadly.

  For a moment I thought he was going to keep coming, then he swayed, and I realised that his legs had gone. He just didn’t know it yet.

  There was a mildly puzzled expression on his face as he struggled to focus on me. Then his knees gave out, his eyes rolled back, and he flopped gracelessly backwards onto the stony ground.

  I started forwards on a reflex, but he didn’t move. I stood there for a moment or two, breathing hard, my fists still clenched ready for a second blow I never had to launch. Then I slumped, defeated by my own anger. It slipped away quietly, leaving me with a fading madness, and a roaring in my ears.

  I turned slowly, and found what seemed to be half the population of Kirby Street standing and watching me in shocked and silent condemnation.

  Oh God, I thought, not again . . .

  Somewhere beyond them, the first of the night’s procession of police cars braked to a fast halt in the road outside.

  Two

  It wasn’t until the following morning that reaction to the whole thing set in. On a number of fronts, and none of them good.

  The first hit me when I stepped out of the shower in Pauline’s nice centrally-heated bathroom. I reached for a towel from the equally warm radiator and my hand stilled abruptly.

  Pauline had gone in for mirrors in a big way in her bathroom. I found this strange considering, much as I liked her, she was a woman for whom the battle with rapidly encroaching cellulite was already a lost cause. I don’t think, in her position, I would have wanted to be constantly reminded of the fact from almost every angle. And certainly not first thing in the morning, that’s for sure.

  I didn’t seem to have too much of the wobbly stuff myself, but instead all I saw were the scars.

  I was putting together quite a collection of them, it seemed, on my arms and torso. They’d been caused by sharp blades of varying descriptions, all wielded with deadly intent. None of them, I’m sorry to say, were gained during the course of routine surgical procedure.

  The most serious stretched round the base of my throat from a point just under my right ear, to my Adam’s apple. A thin pale line, crossed by fading stitch marks, like you’d find on an old cartoon drawing of a Frankenstein monster.

  Not exactly the prettiest bit of needlework you ever did see, but it wasn’t the appearance of the thing that worried me. I never considered myself much to look at to begin with. I don’t go for a great deal in the way of make-up, and my hairstyle is one that has to survive being constantly squashed under a motorbike helmet.

  No, the thing that bothered me most was what those scars represented. How close I’d come to dying, and the depths I’d had to sink to in order to survive. I’d sworn that I’d never put myself in that position again, and had carefully reorganised my life in an attempt to ensure it.

  But, when the necessity – or the opportunity, anyway – had presented itself, I’d jumped straight back into the fray without pause for reflection.

  The memory of my actions in Fariman and Shahida’s garden came back to me. The way I’d so easily abandoned reasoned argument in favour of violence. I’d sunk straight back down to Langford’s level. What the hell had I been thinking?

  I hadn’t – been thinking, I mean – that was the trouble. I’d been acting on an instinctively triggered response to a perceived threat. No doubt my old army instructors would have been delighted that all those months of training had paid off in such an aggressively Pavlovian style, even when I’d been out of a uniform now for longer than I’d been in one.

  As for me, I was terrified.

  Eventually, I shook myself out of it for long enough to go and get dressed, venturing downstairs to be greeted by an anxious Friday, who went through his usual performance of trying to convince me that he’d wasted half away during the night. I scooped up the post as I passed the front door, then carried on through to the kitchen with the dog trampling on my heels.

  Just to get some peace I dumped a double handful of dog biscuits into an aluminium bowl which the Ridgeback was soon shunting enthusiastically round the lino with his snout. I filled the kettle and glanced at the mail while I waited for it to boil.

  Besides the usual junk was a reminder notice for a Residents’ Committee meeting to discuss the rising tide of crime on the estate. The meeting was to take place in the back room of the pub just down the road, at seven-thirty that evening.

  Whoever had delivered it must have known my aversion to becoming even peripherally involved in anything that has to be run by committee. They had added a personal persuader to my copy, scrawled in red biro across the top and down one margin.

  “Miss Fox,” it said, “we’d all be v grateful (underlined twice) if you’d come to meeting, espec in light of events of last eve. Many thanks.” There was a signature to follow, but it could have been anything.

  I read the rest of the leaflet again, but it didn’t tell me much beyond the time and the place. I shrugged. Technically, I wasn’t a resident, so I didn’t think it was a wise move to go along to their meeting and stick my oar in, personal invites notwithstanding.

  In the end, I tacked it to Pauline’s kitchen cork board, alongside the slightly blurry photographs of Friday. The pictures had been taken indoors with a flash and either the poor dog was secretly the spawn of Satan, or he’d been badly affected by red-eye.

  Also pinned up there were money-off vouchers for tubs of low-fat frozen yoghurt, pages of calorie values from Pauline’s slimming club, and a card giving the date of her next hair appointment. No doubt somebody, more talented than I at the art, could have studied that board and told you everything there was to know about Pauline’s lifestyle and character.

  I’d known her for just over a year, but she was one of those people you instantly warm to, full of energy and an enthusiasm for collecting new experiences. I expect that Pauline’s life would have worked out quite differently, had her husband of twenty-five years not run off with a nineteen-year-old telesales manageress some time before.

  Where most women of forty-eight would never have recovered from this devastating occurrence, for Pauline it offered up a whole new lease of life. She started g
oing to her slimming group, and dyeing the grey out of her hair. She’d even taken up with a boyfriend who rode a Harley Davidson, and signed up for self-defence lessons.

  That was where I came in, because at that time I was teaching regular classes to groups of women all around the area. She wasn’t quite at the end of her first course when the events of last winter overtook me, and my teaching career had come to a rather abrupt end.

  She’d kept in touch while I was out of action, even held my hand at the inquest. I wasn’t always glad to see her, I must admit, but it was difficult to be depressed for long with Pauline around. Afterwards, I felt I owed her one, and house-sitting for her was the least I could do. Even if it did mean braving the little horrors of Kirby Street.