by Zoe Sharp
***
We detoured round the trouble-spot through one of the kiddies’ playgrounds, sideswiping a slide in the darkness and splintering the fragile glass fibre. I pushed away the pang of guilt.
The short cut brought us out close to our target, on the far side of Kirby Street and further out towards the darkened No Man’s Land between the estates. The lights of Copthorne blazed in the near distance.
Sean eyed the black outlines of the last remaining line of terraced houses in the centre with relief.
“At least they haven’t torched them yet,” he said.
The row in front of our destination had long since collapsed. The slate had gone to thieves, the glass to vandals. Then the rain had picked away at the mortar between the rubble-filled stone walls until, at last, the houses had simply tumbled into their own cellars.
The weeds and the brambles had whipped up to hold what was left fast to the ground, as if they were afraid it would be taken from them, if they let go.
We couldn’t get right up to the front of the row where we suspected Roger had been stashed. Madeleine nosed the Patrol to a careful halt as close as she could among the fallen masonry and dead timber, and cut the engine.
We all climbed out, feeling the bite of the night air. Sean handed Madeleine the body armour we’d brought for Roger, and picked up a big Maglite.
Friday jumped down and lifted his head, blinking as he sampled the breeze, as if overwhelmed by the barrage of scents that assaulted him. He circled aimlessly round the Patrol, seeming interested in everything. Pauline had said he was a good tracker, but it was difficult to know if he was onto something.
The fronts of the houses had been boarded up with sheets of de-laminating plywood, and although we walked quickly down the row with the torch, none of them looked to have been recently disturbed.
“We’ll try the back,” Sean said. “We’ll be here all night if we have to fight our way into every one from this side.”
The rear of the houses could be reached down what had once been an alleyway, with cobbles underfoot, and a gully drain down the centre. The mirror-image row that would have backed onto it was no more than a disconnected pile of stones.
The gates leading to the tiny back yards had mostly disintegrated, or were dangling by the rusted remnants of their hinges. One dislodged completely and clattered to the floor as we brushed past.
The back doors had been made of sterner stuff than the gates, but they’d been kicked in instead. Inside, the houses were very dark and reeked with a pungent blend of old urine like a neglected public lavatory. The beam of the torch picked out empty two-litre bottles of cheap cider, scrunched-up crisp packets, and blackened shards of silver foil. I didn’t see the needles, but I tried to curb Friday’s explorations with a hand slipped through his collar, just in case.
The Ridgeback didn’t show any signs of involvement until the fourth house along. As we stepped through the doorway he suddenly went rigid, and jerked forwards out of my grasp.
He shot through the kitchen. We followed at a slightly slower pace, trying not to break our necks in the gloom by tripping over rotting furniture too shabby even for the house clearance gannets to cart away.
In the living room we found Friday scrabbling at the base of a mattress that was leaning up against the wall by the stairs.
I clicked my fingers and the dog reluctantly pulled back. Between the three of us we dragged the mattress into the centre of the room and dropped it onto the boards, raising musty clouds of dust that spiralled and spun in the beam of the torch.
Behind it, the door leading to the cellar had been secured with a shiny new galvanised bolt and padlock.
Sean gave the door an experimental nudge, but the house dated from the 1890s’, back when they built them strong. I tapped him on the arm and handed him my Swiss Army knife. The Philips screwdriver attachment was already unfolded.
“You always were the prepared one, Charlie,” he said with a grin that I heard in his voice rather than saw. “I think you must have been a Boy Scout in a previous life.”
“Didn’t you know?” I said, laconic. “I’m a member of the Anti-Woggle League.”
Madeleine shone the Maglite onto the door. It didn’t take Sean long to undo the two screws which held the catch onto the outer frame. The door swung outwards with the bolt and padlock still attached, without us having to bother forcing them. Sean gave me back the knife and took the torch from Madeleine.
Its narrow beam revealed a small dank stairwell that seemed to disappear much further than it should do in order to descend just one level into the cellar.
Something brown and furred scuttled across one of the lower treads and paused to stare red-eyed up into the flashlight, unconcerned. It was the size of a small rabbit, igniting a dread I hadn’t experienced since childhood. Friday growled deep in his throat, and Madeleine groaned.
“You stay here,” Sean told her. “I don’t like the idea of all of us being down there, anyway, just in case.”
She nodded gratefully, and I was forced to swallow my own fear, starting nervously down the stairs as though I was expecting the damned thing to leap out at me at any moment. All the hairs on my arms had stood bolt upright like I’d had a static charge.
“Are you OK?” Sean asked.
I forced a smile, managed through gritted teeth, “If there’s once thing I can’t stand, it’s fucking rats.”
Sean glanced at me, and when he spoke his voice was dry as the desert. “So don’t fuck them,” he said.
Friday wasn’t in the mood to miss out on the action, particularly with the prospect of an interesting snack in the offing. He was destined to be disappointed. The rat scarpered as soon as he put his first foot on the stairs, disappearing into a hole in the stonework from which it failed to re-emerge.
Sean edged downwards with more circumspection, holding the torch at shoulder height, just behind the bulb so he could use the other end as a club. Once we reached the rough floor we both stood silent for a few moments, scanning the corners of the cramped room.
The cellar was little more than ten feet square, the walls covered with crumbling plaster which had slipped to reveal large areas of mouldy stone underneath.
Sean cast about with the light, but the search pattern revealed the cellar to be almost empty, apart from the junk. Piled against the far wall were great stacks of mildewed newspapers, wilted slabs of cardboard, and rags, all mixed up together. It smelt of corruption, and festering decay.
For a minute we thought it was a false alarm, and I felt the sharp, sour tang of disappointment. Then Friday gave up inspecting the hole where the rat had made its exit, and came over to give us the benefit of his sensitive nostrils.
He padded casually across the uneven cobbles and thrust his face straight into the dross until he was buried up to the ears, like he’d put his head under water.
The result sent us both reeling back in shocked amazement.
The pile of rubbish exploded upwards and outwards with a wailing cry. A small, stinking apparition launched itself from the dregs and lunged for the gap between us and the freedom of the stairs.
Twenty-seven
For a moment I was totally stunned, made too stupid by it to act, but Sean snagged his foot under a shin as it rushed past him, sending the figure sprawling.
“For fuck’s sake, boy,” Sean roared, shining the torch on him. “Just for once in your life will you stop running away from me?”
Roger had been scrabbling away on his hands and knees and it took him a couple of seconds to register the sound of his brother’s voice. His desperation subsided, but the wariness didn’t leave him.
“We’re not with O’Bryan in this, Roger,” I said quickly, moving forwards. “We’ve never been with him.”
Roger recognised me and suddenly it was like something cracked open inside him. The tears overflowed to drip down his cheeks, leaving clear tracks through the dirt.
“I didn’t want to do it,” he said, desp
erate, anguished. “We had to. He made us.”
“We know, kid,” Sean knelt by the side of him, put his arms round the boy’s shoulders and hugged him fiercely. “We know all about O’Bryan.”
“He said, if we didn’t k-kill Charlie, he’d make sure Ursula went to p-prison,” Roger went on, the words spilling out of him in gulps, even though his face was buried in Sean’s chest, and his voice was muffled. I had to bend closer to hear what he was saying.
“He said they’d give her a rough time inside. He said—” he broke off as a fresh breaker of tears rolled over and smashed, “that he’d make sure she l-lost the baby.”
His thin shoulders shook as he wept for what seemed like a long time. Sean had let the end of the torch dip, so that the beam hit the cellar wall, but in the light reflected back I could see the sorrow in his face, and the anger.
I touched his shoulder, feeling like an unwelcome intruder into their grief.
“We need to move,” I said.
He was still for a moment, then he nodded, gently levering Roger back so he could look into his face.
“Are you ready to get out of here, kid?”
The boy nodded mutely, the fight gone out of him. I led the way up the cellar steps to find that Madeleine was using her Zippo to light the stubs of some old candles she’d found. She gave Roger a big smile, and a hug too, which was pretty brave of her considering how rancid he smelt.
We used the flickering light to strip off the kid’s ragged sweatshirt so we could put him into the body armour we’d brought for him. Roger let us undress him, pliant, like a doll.
He barely made a sound as his sleeve was peeled away and the top of a big scab from a deep abrasion on his forearm came with it. The wound was maybe a couple of days old. It hadn’t been treated, and had started to heal, after a fashion, into the material.
“How did this happen?” Sean asked him.
Roger stared at his arm as if he’d never seen it before. “Oh. That,” he said slowly. He shrugged. “They knocked me off the bike.” His voice was disconnected, as though he was reporting a dull incident that had happened to someone else.
Sean tightened the Velcro straps on the body armour without trusting himself to speak. He fed Roger’s head and arms back into his sweatshirt, trying to keep the oozing arm away from the sleeve.
We were about to move out when the sound of shouting and the clatter of movement outside had us all freezing in our tracks. Sean tiptoed to the back door and disappeared briefly and silently into the yard. He was back a few moments later.
“Is that O’Bryan’s lot?” I demanded in an urgent whisper.
“Not unless he’s learned to speak Gujarati,” he said. “They’re just kids, but I’m not prepared to risk getting into a confrontation. We’ll hold tight until they’ve gone.”
Madeleine produced half a bar of chocolate – from where I’m not entirely sure – and handed it over to Roger. The boy tore at the wrapping and devoured it like he hadn’t eaten for days. The sugar hit seemed to put some animation back into him, some life back behind his eyes.
“What happened to Nasir, Rog?” Sean asked him then.
“O’Bryan shot him,” Roger said tonelessly, licking his fingers when he was done, and the inside of the wrapper, too. “We had to go back and report. You know – after.” His eyes skated over me briefly, then fell away. “Nas said he’d talk to Mr O’Bryan, but I was scared. He’d tried to talk to him before, when Aqueel took—”
He broke off again, aware that he’d said too much, but Sean nodded encouragingly. “We know all about Aqueel and the others breaking into O’Bryan’s car. What did he take?”
“I’m not sure. Nas never showed it to me. He just said he knew it had come from one of the robberies. Said he could use it to get us off the hook, but Mr O’Bryan just laughed at him and said he knew Nas’d been about to make trouble because she’d told him.”
He waved a hand in my direction. There was an accusing note in his voice that I couldn’t deny. After all, I had indeed told O’Bryan about that, too, the first day he’d come to see me.
Guilt walked cold fingers into my chest cavity and clutched at my heart. Again, I remembered Nasir’s outburst that day in the back garden, and realised now why he’d been so vehement.
Roger shrugged and went on. “Anyway, Mr O’Bryan said he couldn’t prove anything. And if Nas did try to stir it he’d make sure we all went down. That’s when he started getting nasty about Ursula.”
“So what happened this time, when Nasir went to talk to O’Bryan after the shooting?”
Roger swallowed, as though the chocolate he’d wolfed was now making him sick. “Mr O’Bryan’s got this barn on the road out to Glasson where he keeps his classic cars. He told Nas to meet him there. I went with him, but Nas told me to wait outside. He was cool with it, you know, thought he could reason with him, get us another chance.”
Another chance.
My God, I thought. They were going to have another go at killing me. As if that first time at the gym wasn’t enough.
“What went wrong?” Sean asked, and I opened my mouth to say, “They missed,” when I realised we were at cross-purposes. I closed it again, and let Roger go on with his story.
“They were ages in there,” he said now, shivering so hard that Sean slipped out of his jacket and put it onto the boy. He had to turn the sleeves up three times before his fingers showed at the end of them. “I wanted to know what they were saying, so I found a little window, round the back, and I looked in. I couldn’t really hear, but Mr O’Bryan was ranting at him, I could tell. Then he just grabbed the gun off Nas and shot him with it.”
His eyes had lost immediate focus, seeing again in his mind’s eye the argument, and the shooting. He must have seen it over and over, bound up in the torment of knowing that nothing he did or said could call it back, or cancel it out, or change the outcome. I’d been locked in a similar little cul-de-sac of hell myself, and I could recognise the signs.
“Nas went down screaming,” Roger whispered. “Even through the glass and the walls I could hear him. And Mr O’Bryan just stood there, and watched him lying on the ground, writhing and screaming.”
He turned his face up to Sean’s, and the candlelight showed that he was crying again. “And then Nas didn’t scream any more. And I ran away. I didn’t help him. I didn’t even try!”
“There wasn’t anything you could have done, Rog,” Sean told him quietly. “If you’d tried, he would have killed you, too.”
Roger wiped his nose on the back of his hand, nodded, but it was a desultory kind of nod. The kind that carries no real conviction. I could see it being a long time before he was going to be able to look in the mirror and not see the face of a coward staring back at him. Some people never managed that leap, never made it back.
Friday had started to pace and whine, making eyes towards the way out as if he was the one wearing a wristwatch. Taking the hint, we checked the back alley and found it was clear. Madeleine snuffed out the candles and we headed for the door.
We’d just gone through it and out into the back yard when the thump and crack of a tremendous explosion rippled through the air like someone had let off a giant petrol bomb in the next street.
Which, in a sense, they had.
We looked upwards, seeing a tongue of flame licking at the clouds over the rooftops of the houses, close by, and heard the patter of fallout on the slates. Some of it landed too close for comfort.
“What the hell was that?” Madeleine demanded.
I glanced at Sean. “At a guess?” I said. “That was the No Claims Bonus on your motor insurance.”
Sean turned, grabbing Roger’s shoulders. “Get out into the rubble and hide,” he told him. “Don’t come out until I come and get you. Understand?”
Roger looked about to argue, as stubborn as his brother, but Sean didn’t have the time or the patience for a long and involved dialogue. “You’re a vital witness, Rog,” he said. “If they get hol
d of you they’ll kill you and all this will have been for nothing. Go on, get out of here!”
This time Roger did as he was told. We already knew he’d have made a world-class sprinter, given the opportunity. If the way he scaled the nearest pile of shifting stones was anything to go by, he hadn’t lost much of his form.
The rest of us walked round the end of the buildings, carefully skirted the rubble, and were faced with the conflagration that had once been Sean’s Nissan. He gave it a single, regretful glance, and moved on.
“Well, well, if it isn’t Miss Fox,” said a cool voice from the shadows, and three figures stepped forwards into the pagan circle of light from the fire.
Somehow, I knew who they were before I saw their faces clearly.