by Zoe Sharp
As I waited for Friday to finish his minute nasal examination of a tree trunk, it struck me abruptly that, unless they were very, very stupid, that was precisely why the kids on the road hadn’t had anything to do with it.
It was a train of thought that kept me occupied almost right back to Pauline’s front door. I discovered when I got there that two pairs of brown eyes were anxiously watching my return through a gap in the hedge.
Aqueel and Gin were Nasir’s younger brother and sister, of around eight and six. I discovered very soon after my arrival that they regarded Friday with a kind of horrified fascination. They were particularly intrigued by the fact that I could get so close to him, when Pauline was away, without getting bitten. I didn’t enlighten them as to how suddenly tolerant the dog became of the person who controlled the can opener. When Pauline returned, she would want to find Friday’s good name savagely intact.
I waved to them through the hedge and, having been spotted, they waved back. Or at least, Aqueel did, being the braver of the two. Gin merely ducked behind her brother’s back, chewing her hair.
“Is Friday being very fierce today, Charlie?” Aqueel asked me gravely.
“Yes Aqueel, I’ve struggled to keep him from attacking several people,” I told him, with equal seriousness, adding with a hard stare, “He is very annoyed about all this broken glass all over the pavements where he has to walk. It hurts his feet and makes him especially bad tempered.”
Aqueel swallowed and, over his shoulder, his sister’s eyes grew round as coffee cups.
I knew I was trying that one on for size, but I was pretty sure that one of the Mercedes vandals had been Aqueel. Despite his angelic face and general air of butter-wouldn’t-melt.
“Please tell Friday that it wasn’t me, Charlie,” he begged now. “It wasn’t. Honest!”
I glanced at the dog, who had given up waiting for me to open the front door and had sat down heavily on the drive. He stared up at my face with his head on one side, as though considering.
I shrugged. “I’m not sure he believes you, Aqueel,” I said sadly. “You see, he thinks he saw you out there yesterday, and—”
“That was yesterday,” Aqueel protested. “All these cars, that was not us. It was white people, like you.”
“Aqueel! Gin! Get inside immediately, and get ready for school.” It was Nasir who rebuked them, stepping out of the front porch to favour me with a contemptuous glare. He cuffed them both round the head as they dodged under his arm and through the doorway.
Nasir wasn’t dressed for work today. No ripped jeans and T-shirt, but designer labels were in abundance and he had the right build to show them off.
“Morning Nasir,” I said now, as cheerfully as I could, but he didn’t answer. Before I could find a way of bringing the conversation round to his outburst at Shahida’s house, he’d ducked back indoors without speaking further, letting the front door close firmly behind him. I shrugged. There’d be another time. Then I finally let a patiently yawning Friday into his own home for breakfast.
***
It wasn’t until later that afternoon that I was treated to the next instalment. I’d decided to wheel the Suzuki onto the concrete flagged patio in the back garden to give it a good clean, having only worked a half day at the gym.
If you’re into serious body-building, and you live anywhere round Lancaster, then the chances are that you do your training at Attila’s place. Not that Attila was the muscular and athletic owner’s real name, but his German parentage and almost stereotypical Aryan good looks made the misnomer inevitable.
I’d been going to the gym on and off for practically as long as I’d lived in Lancaster, and I’d been working there for around three months.
I’d fallen into the job by accident, really, having spent a good deal of my time rehabilitating there during the early part of the summer. I might have technically emerged as the victor from my encounter with a vicious killer the winter before, but it was a points decision at best. The knife wounds had healed a lot quicker than the broken bones, and it had taken me quite a while to get back to something approaching full fitness.
By that time, Attila had grown used to seeing me as part of the furniture.
“I think I need to encourage more women to come and train here,” he told me. “Having you around to show them we are not all macho apes with bulging muscles has been very useful, Charlie, and you know what you’re doing. We’ll see how it goes, yes?”
And, having nothing better to occupy me at the time, I’d agreed.
Working a regular number of set hours a week had taken a bit of getting used to after several years of working for myself, but I was just about getting into the swing of it.
It had meant that I’d neglected the bike a bit, which was not something I could afford to do when the council were throwing salt around the roads like it was going out of fashion. The aluminium box frame was pitting with corrosion faster than I could keep up with it.
I washed the worst of the salt away thoroughly, then leathered it off and gave the whole of the bodywork and the exposed bits of frame a coat of wax. While I waited for the wax to glaze over, I sat back on my heels and just looked at the bike.
It wasn’t in its first flush of youth, but it was still my pride and joy. Lightweight and compact, the two-stroke RGV was frighteningly quick for a quarter-litre machine, with straight-line performance that bikes more than twice its size struggled to match. Not to mention the cornering agility of a cheetah.
They were out of production now, and when the time eventually came to replace it, I struggled to know what to go for instead. Which made keeping it in good condition even more important.
“Oh, there you are, Charlie,” Mrs Gadatra’s head appeared over the fence. She seemed to have recovered her good humour. “Did you see all the mess on the street this morning? Wasn’t it terrible?”
I agreed that it was and inquired after Fariman’s condition.
“They are still worried about the infection, but his breathing is much easier,” Mrs Gadatra replied. She stared at the Suzuki. “However do you ride such a machine?” she asked. “Whatever does your mother think?”
“She thinks it’s better than walking,” I said, which was nearly the truth.
“These days, I can understand her thinking,” Mrs Gadatra said, nodding wisely so that her earrings jangled. “Still, at least this street should be safer soon, don’t you think?”
“Safer soon? What do you mean? Have the police caught the vandals?”
“The police? Ha.” Mrs Gadatra pulled a face and flapped her hand languidly from the wrist at the very suggestion, setting a dozen gold bangles jingling. “I don’t think they have even looked,” she said. “No, last night the Residents’ Committee asked Mr Garton-Jones to come and take over. I think they were going to telephone him this afternoon. There is another Committee meeting next week. You should come along perhaps. But isn’t that good news?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head, “I think I missed an episode somewhere. Who is Garton-Jones and what is he taking over?”
Mrs Gadatra laughed. “Oh, of course. I think this is before you came here, but I’m surprised you haven’t heard about him, though. He and his men have been patrolling the streets on some of the other estates. Of course he is not cheap, but the crime there was awful before he came, and now they say it has almost disappeared completely because of him. He sounds wonderful.”
“Mother!” Nasir’s voice from the back doorway as he came out into the garden was sharp enough to cut through his mother’s chatter. “The children will be home from school soon and they will be hungry.”
“Oh yes, of course, Nasir, I was just coming now,” his mother replied serenely, and hurried inside, giving me a cheery wave as she went.
I turned my attention back to the bike. The polish had set to a fine white mist and I began rubbing it off briskly with a soft dry cloth.
“It’s a bit of a waste, isn’t it?” Nasir’s voic
e made me jump. I hadn’t realised he was still in the garden, regarding me over the fence with that brooding stare.
“What’s a waste?”
He looked me up and down with a slow thoroughness that was as insulting as it was intended to be. “A bike like that belonging to a girl.”
It was the way he said the word “girl” that really got my back up. The same way some people would say “whore”.
“I hate to break this to you, Nasir,” I returned sweetly, “but we’ve just hit the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth. Women have the vote and everything now. Much as I’m sure you’d approve, we can’t all be kept permanently chained to the kitchen sink, barefoot and pregnant.”
His head came up, eyes flashing as his mouth set into a line of fury.
“You want to watch your step,” he hissed, raising his finger. “You are an outsider here, and you are not welcome.” With that friendly thought he stepped back from the fence, his body rigid. I heard the back door slam behind him.
Ah well, I thought, so much for maintaining cordial relations with the neighbours. Sorry Pauline.
***
The day after, my morning walk with Friday revealed that the police were back on Lavender Gardens. It was half a dozen or so burglaries this time, which had brought them out. That and, I suspect, a growing realisation that if they didn’t at least make a show of force round the estate, the public’s trust in them was going to break down completely.
As it was, the local families advanced beyond their net curtains and their front doors. Now they came out into their untidy gardens to stand taciturn in their reproof at how little positive action had been taken before.
It wasn’t just the older generation who stood and muttered, and eyed the squad cars suspiciously. There seemed to be more teenage boys in the mix than I’d noticed hanging around before. Angry, cocky, eager to prove themselves in the face of authority.
For the moment they contented themselves with silent posturing, but I wondered how long it would be before one of them crossed the line. For their part, once they’d come back out into the street, the police stayed close to their cars, tense. I know most of them wear body armour as a matter of course these days, but in this instance it seemed like provocation.
To keep out of the way, I took Friday by the long route, out onto the main road via the cycle way that ran alongside the river. As I popped up onto the main road by Carlisle Bridge I spotted another of Mr Ali’s green and purple vans. You generally saw them all over the place, but this one made me sit up and take notice.
For a start, it had pulled up just where the two lanes from over Greyhound Bridge narrow into one under the railway line, and was causing quite a major constriction in the traffic flow. The second thing that turned my head was the man leaning in through the passenger-side window to talk to the driver.
It was unmistakably Langford.
As I watched, he took his last cigarette out, stuck it between his lips, and tossed the crumpled empty pack onto the pavement behind him. Then he opened the door and climbed in, ignoring the annoyed hooting of horns. The van driver pulled straight out into traffic with enough disdain for the Highway Code to have earned him an instant re-test.
I wondered vaguely if Mr Ali knew that the head of the Copthorne vigilante brigade was cadging lifts at his expense.
***
Several hours later, I wheeled the bike out and headed for work. Within fifteen minutes of relatively easy town traffic I’d pulled up outside the gym.
Attila’s place used to be an auto salvage yard with such a dodgy reputation that some wag had once painted “reserved for police vehicle only” on a section of the rusting iron fencing just inside the gate. It was still there, despite the change of use and ownership, and I ran the bike into the space underneath the faded lettering.
Against every advice, Attila had snapped the whole property up for a song when it finally closed down for good a few years ago. He’d turned the tatty workshop and storage area into a spacious fitness room, complete with a sauna. It wasn’t snazzy, but it had the workmanlike atmosphere that suggests real people who are seriously into the job, rather than a poseurs’ palace.
Usually, it was bustling, but today of all days, it was dead. I spent the first hour as the only inhabitant, and took the opportunity to get my own workout in, just in case things hotted up later.
I used to train a lot, starting when I was in the army and needed to build up both my strength and my stamina. After I was kicked out, it became a method of relaxation of sorts. A way to shut my brain down through sheer physical exhaustion, and rid myself of my frustration and anger, taking it out on the machines.
I was halfway through a tough set of bench presses when I finally got some company. The two blokes who came in were regulars, and they were into it enough to wave me on with the set. Conscious of them watching, I rushed through the last five reps before moving over to the counter to sign them in.
They were a friendly enough pair, giving me the usual cheery amount of stick as they hefted their sports bags and went to get changed. It was only when they reappeared that a sudden thought occurred to me.
“Wayne,” I said to one of them, while they were still doing their warm-up exercises, “don’t you work for Mr Ali, the builder?”
Wayne gave a grunt, but whether that was at my question, or because he was attempting to touch his toes, I couldn’t be sure. He was a well-built black man, with hands like shovels. He was currently struggling to ward off a beer gut and only just keeping pace with it. “Used to, girl,” he said. “Got laid off couple of weeks back.”
“Really? I thought he was doing well.”
“Yeah, so did I.” He gave me a wry smile. “Half a dozen of us got the punt at the same time. Last in, first out. That’s the way it goes. He reckons he’s got a big contract coming off soon, and we’ll be back in there but, tell you the truth, I’m not bothered. I’m working for that mob who are converting the old asylum now. Pay’s better.”
I digested the information, then decided a hunch was worth a try. “D’you know a guy called Langford?”
He frowned. “Oh yeah,” he said, suddenly guarded, “we all know him.”
If I’d been a horse, my ears would have pricked straight up at his tone. “Why’s that?”
For a moment Wayne looked as though he’d said too much, then he shrugged. His loyalties lay elsewhere these days. “He and the boss, well, there’s something going on there, and I’m damned if I know what, girl,” he said. “That Langford used to flag us down like we was bloody taxis. Take me here, take me there. I tried to complain to the boss about it once, but he said don’t ask questions.” He shrugged. “I got rent to pay, so I didn’t ask.”
“And you’ve no idea what was going on?”
He shook his head, plonking one foot up on a bench and reaching over it to stretch his hamstrings. When he came upright again, he said darkly, “All I do know is, he always turned up on a site, convenient like, on a Thursday afternoon, and the boss used to hand him a pay packet just like the rest of us. If Langford wasn’t such a bloody racist, I’d say they must be related or something. Know what I mean?”
The door went again as more of the evening lads came in. I smiled my thanks to Wayne, and went to deal with them. Langford and Mr Ali? As unlikely combinations went, it was right up there at the top of the list.
***
Attila came in around six-thirty, and that’s when the place really started to busy up. Once people knew his schedule they tended to time their visits to coincide with his presence. I didn’t take it personally. It was his place, after all.
I finished around nine, changed into my leathers and stuffed my gear into my tank bag. It was dark outside, cold and drizzly. I didn’t wait too long for the Suzuki to warm up before I was on my way.
Traffic was starting to bulk up through town. As I filtered down the outside of it going past the bus station, a taxi stuck its nose out from the rank into traffic, blocking my path.
I sighed and braked to a halt with the rain tenaciously drilling its way down the back of my neck.
I tried to leave as much room as I could between my front wheel and the taxi’s exhaust pipe while I reflected morosely that it didn’t seem to be my day for clean air.
There were times when riding a bike all year round was a real pain. I really was going to have to splash out on a decent pair of gloves. My fingers were already wet and before I got back to Pauline’s I knew the tips of them would have gone numb.
We were alongside a little café and I glanced idly through the window into the brightly-lit interior with something like envy. There were two people sitting at the table by the window, drinking coffee. Their hands were wrapped round the mugs and I could just imagine the warmth of the hot liquid seeping through the china.