Riot Act

by Zoe Sharp

  I saw a flash of blond hair among the dark heads of the crowd, and recognised Jav. He clocked the Suzuki and went very still, but from that distance I couldn’t read the expression on his face.

  I had a nasty feeling that, if I’d been closer, I would have seen triumph there.

  ***

  I called in on Clare at the Defender again on my way to the gym. By the time I got to work, Attila was already in, and the place was buzzing, so I didn’t have much chance to mull over the information she’d given me until later that afternoon.

  Things went completely dead after lunch, as they usually did. Attila and I were taking advantage of the total lack of clientele to shift some of the benches around when Madeleine walked through the door, immaculately dressed as always.

  “Hi, Charlie,” she said guardedly, but treated my boss to a sunny smile that had him preening his muscles. I introduced her as a friend of Sean’s, and left it at that. If Sean wanted Attila to know the real score he could tell the man himself.

  Attila came over all good manners and suggested coffee, which Madeleine accepted with enough enthusiasm to send him scuttling for the kettle in the office.

  When he’d gone Madeleine looked about her with undisguised curiosity. “So, this is where you work,” she said. I couldn’t tell from her voice if she was impressed or horrified. Like I said, Attila didn’t go much for frills. I looked round, but what had, before, seemed businesslike and uncluttered, now looked spartan and shabby.

  I shrugged, and finished moving a pile of loose weights across to the bench’s new position. When I straightened up, I found Madeleine was watching me closely. “I understand you teach self defence,” she said.

  “I used to,” I said shortly. “I don’t any more.”

  “Why not?”

  For a few moments I considered the question. “I was injured last winter,” I said at last. It sounded so innocuous, like I’d fallen down a set of steps, or come off the bike. “Attila offered me this job while I was recuperating, and I never got back into it.”

  She nodded, seeming to accept that watered-down explanation. “I’ve done a few courses myself,” she said now. “Tell me, what do you recommend for defences against someone with a knife?”

  I looked up sharply, wondering if she thought she was being clever, but her face was without particular guile. My eyes slid past her to one of the mirrors on the wall behind her head, checking my reflection to see if the scar was on view above the collar of my polo shirt. It wasn’t.

  I checked Madeleine’s face again. “What do I recommend?” I said, keeping my voice level with an effort. “That you run away. As fast as you possibly can. And you keep running.”

  She frowned, and looked about to ask some more, but Attila returned at that moment with three cups of coffee bunched around a single fist, and the moment was lost. I was never so glad of the interruption.

  “Excuse me a moment,” I muttered, and escaped to the ladies’. Once I was there I closed the door and leaned back against it, with my eyes shut.

  Madeleine didn’t know what had happened, I told myself. She couldn’t do. I was just being paranoid. Over-sensitive. Wasn’t I?

  I opened my eyes, stepped up to the mirror, and stretched the collar of my shirt to one side. The scar wasn’t old enough to have faded much. They’d warned me that it would always be visible, and they’d offered further surgery as an alternative, but with only dubious chances of success. In the end, I’d decided to leave it well alone.

  After all, it was a sharp reminder to me that I should follow my own teachings more closely. That I should run instead of standing to fight. Next time I was faced with a lunatic wielding a knife, maybe I’d do just that.

  Next time.

  Someone tripped down my spine wearing icy boots. I shivered, took a deep breath like a submerging swimmer, and straightened my collar again. A normal-looking girl stared back out of the mirror, giving no hint to what lay beneath the surface. I turned away before I was tempted to try and look much deeper, and walked back into the gym.

  Madeleine glanced up at me as I moved back across the floor, but before she could say much the door went again to herald Sean’s arrival.

  He flashed a quick grin in Madeleine’s direction, then turned his attention on my boss. “Hi, Attila,” he said. “Can I steal your lovely assistant away from her work for a little while?”

  “For sure,” Attila said. He stood up with a ripple of muscle under his T-shirt, and looked from one of us to the other as if reassessing the relationship between the three of us. “But first you can help me move another of these benches, yes?”

  Sean rolled his eyes, but pitched in without any real complaint, taking off his jacket and pushing up the sleeves of his vee-necked shirt. He didn’t have Attila’s sheer bulk, but he didn’t seem to find the weight a problem, either.

  Looking back with an even mind, it had been that economy of movement, that air of total competence, which had all been part and parcel of Sean’s attraction. I don’t think I’d ever seen him fumble.

  When they’d finished he moved over to Madeleine, touched her shoulder in a way I might once have found intimate. Now it simply seemed one of friendship, concern.

  For her part, Madeleine reached up to kiss him, but Sean stopped her.

  “It’s OK, Madeleine,” he said, and his tone was wry. “You don’t have to put on a show in front of Charlie. She knows the score.”

  For a moment the other girl allowed herself a scowl of pure wounded feminine pride, then the full import of his words dug in, and her eyes widened.

  “You told her?” The disbelief was plain. “But, I thought—”

  Sean shrugged it aside. “She had a gun to my head,” he said, without the barest flicker of a smile in my direction. “What can I say?”

  Both Attila and Madeleine stared at him, hoping for some indication that he was joking. After a couple of seconds Madeleine gave up waiting, and started digging in her shoulder bag. I wondered what exactly he’d told her about our confrontation in the flat.

  “I’ve been running a background check on Nasir Gadatra, as you asked,” she said, businesslike, retrieving a spiral-bound shorthand notebook and flipping it open. “He certainly had an interesting past. At one time there was a whole string of arrests for vandalism, burglary, stealing from cars, even assault. O’Bryan had to bail him out on numerous occasions. It seems that when his father died he went right off at the deep end. It was only when it looked seriously like he was going to get put away that he got his act together.”

  She checked her notes again. “For the last few years he’s kept his nose clean, and there hasn’t been a sniff of trouble. He got the job working as a trainee electrician for Mr Ali and did his qualifications at night school. He paid his way towards the rent on his mother’s house, like a good boy. He was a member of a local snooker club, and he had a standing order to a gym as well. Sorry, Attila, not this one.” She shot a quick smile to the German and came out with a name I’d only vaguely heard of.

  Attila grunted. “I know it. A poseurs’ place,” he said, dismissive. “No decent equipment. No decent staff.”

  Madeleine grinned at him, but before he could add anything further, the phone on the counter started ringing. Attila went to answer it.

  When he’d gone we sat down on the benches, Sean hunched forwards with his elbows on his knees, fingers linked. He nodded to Madeleine to continue.

  “The only real oddity I could find is that although he paid his motorbike insurance in instalments, he did it in cash,” she went on. “He used to go into a local broker every month with the money.”

  “Bike insurance?” I queried. “I didn’t know he had a bike.”

  “According to the DVLA computer – and don’t ask, by the way – he’s been the proud owner of a new Honda CBR 600 sports bike practically ever since he passed his test.”

  “How on earth did an eighteen-year-old sparky, who’s apparently firmly on the straight and narrow, afford a CB
R?” Sean wondered aloud. “The insurance company must have been totally hammering him for it.”

  “They were,” Madeleine said, and listed premiums that should have made Nasir’s hair stand on end.

  “How the hell did he afford that?” I demanded.

  “Good question,” Madeleine said, casting me a quick smile as though trying to make up for the earlier animosity between us. “His wages didn’t cover it, that’s for certain.”

  “So,” Sean said, frowning, “he had to be getting the extra cash from somewhere. Any clues?”

  “None, sorry. I’ll keep looking,” she said. “I suppose we can’t rule out the possibility that he was on the fiddle somewhere at work. Snaffling stuff away off the site he was on, maybe. What d’you reckon?”

  Her words jogged my memory towards the conversation I’d overheard on that building site in Heysham. “What if he’d found out that Langford was working for Mr Ali, and threatened to spill the beans. He could have been doing a bit of blackmail,” I suggested.

  Sean was frowning again. “Could be. I suppose that brings his boss into the frame, but don’t forget that Nasir had been paying out this extra cash for a while. Why would Ali wait until now to get rid of him? And surely on a building site they could have conjured up some likely-looking ‘accident’? Besides, who was Nasir threatening to tell, and was it really worth killing him over?”

  We fell into a glum silence, pondering over the variables and not managing to make them slot together in any sort of order.

  “What about you, boss, any sign of Ursula?” Madeleine asked.

  Sean shook his head. “Nothing yet. I’ll keep on it, though. There’s only so many people she could have gone to.”

  “Is there any point in talking to that Community Juvenile bloke, O’Bryan, to see if he knows anything either about Nasir or your sister?” I offered. “He seems to be the one with his finger on the pulse as far as extra-curricular activities go.”

  “I don’t see why not,” Madeleine said. “We know Nasir’s been in a lot of trouble in the past, and O’Bryan would be the man who’d have the details. If Nas’s been up to anything recently it might even give us an idea where he was getting his money. What d’you think?”

  He nodded. “OK,” he said slowly, then turned back to me. “Have you had a chance to find out any more from your friend on the paper?”

  “A little,” I said. “They’ve fixed Nasir’s time of death to around three hours after we last saw him, and they reckon he was practically dead before he was moved.”

  Sean rose, began pacing restlessly. “OK,” he said, “so let’s take some jumps in the dark here, shall we? Nasir comes and takes a pot-shot at you, Charlie, under duress, or so it would seem. He and Rog run away, and within a few hours Nasir’s been shot and left for dead. Question: why?”

  “Was he shot because he tried to kill Charlie, you mean?” Madeleine supplied. “Or because he failed?”

  “Exactly,” Sean said, turning to me. “Which brings it down to this – why does somebody want you dead?”

  I swallowed. It was a question I hadn’t wanted to give much thought to. “I don’t know,” I said. “O’Bryan did warn me I’d become a target for the kids who’ve been doing these robberies if I stuck my neck out. It could have been that.” It sounded unlikely, even as I said it.

  “What about this Garton-Jones character?” Madeleine said. “From what I saw of him at that Residents’ Committee meeting he’s a nasty piece of work, and he didn’t like being thrown off the estate. Disposing of you would have been a good way of killing two birds with one stone, as it were. He gets rid of his opposition, and frightens people enough to want him back at the same time.”

  “And when that failed he took second best, you mean, and shot the messenger instead?” Sean pondered. “I don’t know. It’s all a bit extreme, and Garton-Jones strikes me as the sort of guy who’d have wanted Charlie to know who was behind it, and why, before the hit.”

  Attila finished his phone call and replaced the receiver. Sean and Madeleine seemed to take this as their cue to leave, and I walked out to the car park with them.

  “What about Langford?” I asked. “I don’t suppose you’ve had a chance for your little chat yet?”

  Sean shook his head and gave me a half-smile as he unlocked the Cherokee’s doors. “He seems to be keeping a pretty low profile at the moment, but I suppose that’s hardly surprising after he tipped you off about my neo-nazi past.”

  I glanced at him, puzzled. “But he didn’t,” I said slowly. “It was Jav who told me about it first. Then I confirmed it through the archives at the paper.”

  Sean stopped, turned. “Jav?” he demanded. “Young lad, peroxide hair?”

  “That’s him. Why, d’you know him?”

  He nodded, thoughtful. “Yeah, he went to the local college with Ursula. He was interested in her at one time, but Nasir supplanted him. I don’t think he took it very well.”

  I digested the information for a moment. “Hang on, if Jav knew about Nas and Ursula, why did he tell me all that stuff about you hating Nasir? He must have known you didn’t have a problem with it.”

  “Maybe he was jealous that she turned him down,” Madeleine suggested. “Maybe he wanted to cause trouble for the family by way of revenge.”

  Sean glanced at me, his expression troubled. “Or maybe someone else just put him up to it.”

  “Like who?”

  “We come back to Langford again,” I said. “He certainly would have known about your past connections.”

  “Yes, but so would anyone who had access to a newspaper library,” Madeleine argued.

  “Well, there’s one way to find out,” Sean said, climbing into the Cherokee and sticking the keys into the ignition. “I’ll ask Harvey Langford. You ask Jav.”

  “Yeah, great,” I muttered under my breath, stepping back as they slammed the doors and the V8 fired into life. “All I’ve got to do now is find him.”

  Eighteen

  Two days later, Pauline came home. I had mixed feelings about it, on the whole. Of course, I was delighted to see her back safe, but with the situation on Lavender Gardens worsening, it might have been better if she’d stayed away.

  The police had implemented a Zero Tolerance policy on the estate. Their uniformed presence was high, but it wasn’t providing the calming effect they’d been hoping for.

  Inevitably, it seemed to be the teenagers who were bearing the brunt of the draconian measures. Between the boys in blue and Garton-Jones’s mob, they were getting it from all sides, and the temperature was rising. I was uneasy about leaving the house with only Friday in residence to go and meet Pauline from her flight.

  All the kids were keeping their heads down, including Jav, who seemed to have gone to ground. I hadn’t even caught sight of the Asian boy since Sean, Madeleine and I had our meeting at Attila’s place, never mind caught hold of him.

  Now, sitting in traffic on the M61, I had time to let my mind wander in circles, mentally cursing the lack of hard information I had to go on.

  Still, at least I didn’t have to slum it getting down to Manchester. Jacob said he had some parts to collect from a dealer friend of his in the area, and he’d kindly agreed to combine the trip with an airport run. Pauline hadn’t mastered the art of travelling light, and the cavernous rear load bay of Jacob’s battered old Range Rover was filled to bursting by the time we’d crammed all her cases in.

  I took the back seat and let Pauline ride up front. She settled into the worn leather upholstery with an air of satisfaction. “This is a proper way to travel. It beats a smelly old taxi any day,” she announced. “You should try sitting in one of those airline seats for hours. The feller next to me was all elbows and a weak bladder. Up and down every five minutes. I swear I didn’t get a wink of sleep all the way back. I’ve no idea what day it is, even.”

  It wasn’t long before she worked the conversation round to the situation at home. Then I spent the rest of the journey being
bombarded with questions about Fariman’s state of health, Mrs Gadatra’s state of mind, and Lavender Gardens’ state of readiness.

  When I told her about the new policing policy, she snorted. “Daft buggers, they’re going to make things ten times worse.” She twisted over her shoulder to look at me. “I hope you told them, Charlie.”

  “Unfortunately, the local chief constable doesn’t consult me before he decides these things,” I said dryly.

  “Well, what about that policeman feller who used to come calling when you were ill last winter?” she demanded. “MacMillan, wasn’t it?”

  “He came to see me twice,” I pointed out. And I hadn’t exactly been welcoming. His overwhelming disapproval of the actions that had led to my temporary incapacity had been too plain to be ignored, however much he seemed to have softened down his attitude since.