03.Crack Down

by Val McDermid

  I’d once seen that photograph that Cherie kept in her bedroom. She’d shown me it when she’d asked me to hunt her husband down. He’d been in uniform, the maroon beret of the Paras cocked jauntily on his head. He’d been nearly ten years younger too. But that scar clinched it. The man who was fingering cars for Terry Fitz was none other than Crazy Eddy Roberts. At the very least, it was a strange coincidence.

  It takes more than bereavement to divert small boys from arcade games. By the time they’d fought in the streets, driven several grand prix, played a round or two of golf and done enough terminating to get us jobs with Rentokil, the effects of the afternoon’s trauma had receded noticeably. When we all piled back into my car, the haunted look had left their eyes. I didn’t doubt that it was only a temporary respite, but even that was enough to ease my guilt at having taken advantage.

  I dropped them off, promising that we’d keep in touch, then I drove Davy back to Alexis’s. Of course, he was fired with curiosity as to why they’d moved back to their house and why he was staying with them there instead of with me in Coverley Close. Luckily, he was tired enough to be fobbed off with the excuse that Alexis and Chris needed to be at home now they were back at work because all their clothes and stuff were there. Alexis greeted him like a long-lost friend and hustled him off to the spare room, where she’d moved the video and the portable TV from their bedroom. I made the coffee while she made sure he was sufficiently engrossed in The Karate Kid for the dozenth time.

  ‘You all right, girl?’ Alexis asked when she returned. ‘You look about as lively as a slug in a salt cellar.’

  ‘Gee thanks. Remind me to call you next time my self-confidence creeps above the parapet. I’m just tired, that’s all. I’ve not had a decent night’s kip since last Wednesday.’

  ‘Why don’t you crash out here now? You can have the sofa bed in the study.’

  ‘Thanks, but no thanks. I’ve got to go and sit outside a house in the dark.’

  ‘Hey, the sofa bed’s not that bad,’ Alexis protested, joking. ‘I’ve slept there myself.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that, Alexis,’ I said, pretending deep concern. ‘I hadn’t realized your relationship was in such a bad way.’

  ‘Hey, carry on getting it that wrong and you could get a job on the Chronicle’s diary column.’

  ‘Tut-tut’ I scolded. ‘And you the one that’s always telling me how unfairly you journos are maligned for your inaccuracies. Anyway, enough of this gay repartee. I’ve got work to do, and you’ve got a child to mind. I’ll call you later.’ I headed for the door. ‘And Alexis? I know you probably think I’m over-reacting, but don’t open the door to anyone unless you know them.’ I was through the door before she could argue.

  I got in the car, revved up noisily, and drove round the corner. I gave it a couple of minutes, then turned back on to Alexis’s street, stopping as soon as I had a clear view of the path leading to the house. I picked up my mobile and dialled a familiar number. It rang out, then I heard, ‘Hello?’

  ‘Dennis? It’s Kate. Are you busy tonight?’

  ‘I don’t have to be,’ he said, his voice too crackly for me to hear whether he sounded pissed off or not.

  ‘I need a major favour.’

  ‘No problem. Whereabout?’

  I gave him brief directions and settled back to wait. OK, so I was being paranoid. But like they say, that doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. There was no way I was leaving this street until I was sure that Davy, not to mention Alexis and Chris, had someone to watch over them. And there was no minder I’d trust more than Dennis. He had an added advantage. Years of earning his living as a burglar had developed in him an astonishing ability to stay awake and alert long after the rest of us are crashed out snoring with our heads on the steering wheel. If he was sitting outside the house in his car, I’d feel a lot less worried about the possibility of Jammy James wanting to use me or Davy as a lever against Richard. Not that I believed for one minute that the demolition of my front door was a message from James. I just thought it was better to be safe than sorry. Or something.

  While I was waiting, I wondered how Richard was coping. I felt bad about missing the evening’s visit, but I figured he could live without seeing me for a day. Whereas, if I didn’t do all I could to finger the people who were responsible for the holes in my door, he might have to get used to the idea of not seeing me again. Ever. It wasn’t a comforting thought.

  The house on the corner of Oliver Tambo Close wasn’t the ideal place for a stake-out. The chip van’s presence meant a constant flow of people up and down the street, as well as the gang of local yobs who hung round the van every evening just for the hell of it. Add to that the general miasma of poverty and seediness up this end of the estate, and I knew without pausing to think that the Peugeot would stick out like a sore thumb as soon as that evening’s rock audience from the Apollo had gone home. I swung round by the office lock-up and helped myself to the Little Rascal van we’ve adapted for surveillance work.

  I stopped behind the chip van, bought fish, chips and cholesterol and ostentatiously drove the Little Rascal back round the corner on to the street running at right angles to Oliver Tambo Close. From the tinted rear windows of the van, I had a perfect view of the house, front door and all. I pulled down one of the padded jump seats and opened my fragrant parcel. I felt like I’d done nothing but eat all day, yet as soon as I smelled the fish and chips, I was ravenous. I sometimes think we’re imprinted with that particular aroma while we’re still in the womb.

  While I tucked in, I checked out the house. I’d once been inside one of the other houses on the estate demanding action against the toerag who’d been anti-social enough to smash my car window and walk off with my radio cassette. Sparky, who runs the car crime round here, wasn’t too pleased about a bit of private enterprise on his patch, especially from someone who was too stupid to work out which cars belonged to locals and which were fair game. Incidentally, he’s not called Sparky because he’s bright; it’s because he uses a spark plug whirling on the end of a piece of string to shatter car windows. Anyway, I thought it was fair to assume this house would have the same layout as Sparky’s. It looked the same from the outside, and Manchester City Council’s Housing Department has never been renowned for its imagination.

  The door would open into a narrow hall, the kitchen off to the right and the living-room to the left. Behind the kitchen was the staircase, a storage cupboard underneath. I’d gone upstairs to use the bathroom and noted two other doors, presumably leading to bedrooms. That checked out with what I could see of the house on the corner. My job wasn’t made any easier by the vandals who had busted the streetlamp in front of it. I could see heavy curtains were drawn at every window, even the kitchen. That was unusual in itself. If you’ve got curtains for all your windows in Oliver Tambo Close, the Social Security snoopers come round and ask where you’re getting your extra income from.

  I could see a crack of light from a couple of the windows, but apart from that there was no sign of life until nearly half past ten. The front door opened a couple of feet and spilled a long tongue of pale light on to the path. At first, there was no one to be seen in the doorway, then, sudden as sprites in an arcade game, two kids barrelled down the hall and out on to the path. They were both boys, both good-looking in the way that most lads have grown out of by adolescence. Unfortunately for the teenage girls. I’d have put them around nine or ten, but I’m not the best judge of children’s ages. One had dark curls, the other had mousey brown hair cut in one of those trendy styles, all straight lines and heavy fringes that remind me of BBC TV versions of Dickens.

  The two boys seemed in boisterous, cheerful moods, pushing each other, staggering about, giggling and generally horsing around. They stopped on the corner and pulled chocolate bars out of the pockets of their jeans. They stood there for a few minutes, munching chocolate, then they ran off down the street towards the blocks of flats where Cherie Roberts had tried to bring he
r kids up as straight as she knew how. A slow anger had started to burn inside me when those kids appeared on the path, all alone at a time of night that’s a long way from safe in this part of town. Apart from anything else, it’s an area that’s always full of strangers in the evening, since the city’s major rock venue is just round the corner. If a child was lifted from these streets, the police would have more strange cars to check out than if they clocked every motor that cruises the red-light zone.

  I bit down on my anger and carried on watching. About twenty minutes later, the door opened again, more widely this time, and a young man appeared. He couldn’t have been more than five-six, slim build, blond, late twenties, cheekbones like chapel hat pegs. He had his jacket collar turned up and sleeves rolled up. Clearly no one had told him Miami Vice is yesterday’s news. He walked with a swagger to a Toyota MR2 parked at the kerb. I toyed with the idea of following him, but rejected it. I didn’t know that he was anything to do with the drugs being foisted on kids, and besides, chasing a sports car in a delivery van is about as much fun as that nightmare where you’re sitting an exam and you don’t understand any of the questions, and then you realize you’re stark naked as well.

  So I stayed put. The MR2 revved enough to attract the envy of the chip-van gang, then shot off leaving a couple of hundred miles’ worth of rubber on the road. Ten minutes later, the door opened again. This time, the hall light snapped off. Two men emerged. In the dimness, it was hard to see much, except that they both looked paunchy and middle-aged. They walked towards my van, near enough for me to see that they both wore Sellafield suits – those expensive Italian jobs that virtually glow in the dark. Surprisingly, they got into an elderly Ford Sierra that looked perfectly in keeping with the locale, and drove off.

  I carried on with my vigil. There were no lights on that I could see, but I figured there might still be someone in the bathroom, or the bedroom at the rear of the house. The chip van packed up at midnight, and the gang wandered off to annoy someone else. By half past midnight, it had started to drizzle and the street was as quiet as it was ever going to get. There was still no sign of life at the house. I unlocked the strongbox in the floor of the van, and helped myself to some of the essential tools of the trade. Then I pulled on a pair of latex surgical gloves.

  I got out of the van and walked towards the narrow alley that runs up the back of Oliver Tambo Close so the bin men have more scope to strew the neighbourhood with the contents of burst black rubbish sacks. As nonchalantly as possible, I made sure I wasn’t being watched before I nipped smartly down the alley. The house on the corner had a solid fence about seven feet high, with a heavy gate about halfway along. Luckily, one of the neighbours was trusting. A couple of doors down was a dustbin. I retrieved the bin and climbed on top of it.

  The rear of the house was in darkness, so I scrambled over the fence and dropped into a tangle of Russian vine. Come the holocaust, that’s all there will be left. Cockroaches and Russian vine. I freed myself and stood on the edge of a patchy lawn staring up at the house. There was a burglar alarm bell box on the gable end of the house, but I suspected it was a dummy. Most of them round here are. Even if it was for real, I wasn’t too worried. It would take five minutes before anyone called the cops, and by the time they got here, I’d be home, tucked up in bed.

  The back door had two locks, a Yale and a mortise. The patio doors looked more promising. You can often remove a patio door from its runners in a matter of minutes. All it takes is a crowbar in the right place. Only problem was, I was fresh out of crowbars. With a sigh, I started in with the lock picks. The mortise took me nearly twenty minutes, but at least the rain meant nobody with any sense was out walking curious dogs with highly developed senses of smell and powerful vocal cords. When the lock clicked back, I stretched my arms and flexed my tired fingers. The Yale was a piece of cake, even though I couldn’t slide it open with an old credit card and had to use a pick. Cautiously, I turned the handle and inched the door open.

  Silence. Blackness. I slipped into the carpeted hall and left the door on the latch. Slowly, painstakingly, I inched forward down the hall, my right hand brushing the wall to warn me when I reached the living-room doorway. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I made out a patch of lesser blackness on the left. The stairs. As I drew level, I paused and held my breath. I couldn’t hear a thing. Feeling slightly more relaxed, I carried on.

  The living-room door was open. I moved through the doorway tentatively, scared of tripping over furniture, and closed the door softly behind me. I switched on the big rubber torch I’d taken from the van’s glove box and slowly played it over the room.

  It was like two separate rooms glued together in the middle. In the far end of the room, the walls were painted cream. There was a cream leather armchair, a pair of school desks with child-sized chairs, and a pair of bunk beds complete with satin sheets. Where there should have been a light fitting hanging from the ceiling there was a microphone. At the midpoint of the room, a camcorder was fixed on a tripod, flanked by a couple of photographer’s floodlights.

  The other half of the room, where I was standing, was like the distribution area of a video production company. There was one of those big video-copying machines that do a dozen copies at a time, a desk set up for home video editing, boxes of Jiffy bags and shelf upon shelf of videos, one title to a shelf. Titles like, Detention!, Bedtime Stories and You Show Me Yours…There were also sealed packets of photographs. Now I began to understand why kids were being handed free drugs that would smash their inhibitions to smithereens and make them see the funny side of being exploited to hell. I could only come up with one explanation of what was going on here, and the very thought of it was so sickening that part of me didn’t want to hang around checking the evidence. The only thing that forced me to do it was the thought of some smartass from the Vice Squad doing the ‘so if you didn’t look at these videos, how do you know they weren’t Bugs Bunny cartoons?’ routine on me.

  I picked a title at random and slotted it into the player on the editing desk. I turned on the TV monitor. While I waited for the credits to come up, I slit open a packet of photographs. Twelve colour five-by-sevens slid out into my hand. I nearly lost my fish and chips. I recognized the blond man who’d left earlier in the Toyota, but the children in the shots were, thank God, strangers. I’d have been fairly revolted to see adults in some of those poses, but with children, my reaction went beyond disgust. At once, I understood those parents who take the law into their own hands when the drunk drivers who killed their kids walk free from court.

  If the photographs were bad, the video was indescribably worse, all the more so because of the relentlessly suburban locations where these appalling acts were taking place. I could barely take five minutes of it. My instincts were to empty a can of petrol on the carpet and raze the place to the ground. Then common sense prevailed and reminded me it would be infinitely preferable if those bastards ended up behind bars rather than me. I switched off the video and ejected the tape. I picked up the photographs and stuffed them inside my jacket. I grabbed another couple of videos off the shelf. The night relief at Longsight police station were in for an interesting shift.

  I stood up. I heard a sickening crunch. My eyes filled with red, shot through with yellow meteors. A starburst of pain spread from the back of my head. And everything went black.

  24

  Mosquito. Unmistakable. High-pitched whine circling my head, in one ear and then in the other. Bluebottle. Low, stuttering buzz mixing in with the mozzy. You wouldn’t think two little insects could make enough noise to give you a splitting headache, I thought vaguely as I surfaced.

  Then the pain hit. You know when you catch your finger in a door? Imagine doing that to your head, and you’ll start to get the picture. The sharp edge of the agony snapped my brain back into gear. In the tiny gaps between waves of pain and nausea, I started to remember where I’d been and what I was doing when something seriously brutal put my memory on pause.<
br />
  As that memory returned, so my senses started to catch up. I still couldn’t force my eyes open, but my hearing had recovered from its dislocation. I wasn’t hearing a mozzy and a bluebottle. I was hearing a voice. The words drifted in and out, like listening to a pirate radio station on the edge of its transmission area. ‘I don’t fucking know how she got in,’ I heard. ‘I was fucking sleeping, wasn’t I? Look, it’s your job to sort out problems…’ The voice tailed off. The silence was blissful.

  Moments later, the voice started yapping again. This time, I registered that it was a man. ‘I don’t give a shit what you’re doing. Look, you’re paid to do this sort of thing. I’m just paid to copy videos and be here, not whack people over the head with tripods. You’d better get your arse over here now and deal with this cow.’ Silence again. Then the voice, higher pitched, angry. ‘You’ve already been paid once to warn her off, and it didn’t work, did it? So you’d better come round here and finish the job or else I’ll have to ring Colin and tell him you’re not prepared to turn out, and he won’t be pleased about that, not being disturbed this time of night.’

  It finally dawned on me that this was me he was talking about. If I’d had the energy to be afraid, I’d have been gibbering. As it was, the immediate prospect of being executed helped focus my mind even more. My eyes still refused to open, but I became aware of a shooting pain in my shoulders and managed to work out my position. I was suspended by my wrists, which were manacled by something warm and solid that was biting into the flesh. My hands were jammed up against what felt like hot and cold water pipes. My body was dangling, my legs were crumpled under me, not actually taking any of my weight.

  Before I could test whether it was possible to shift my weight to my feet without making a noise, the voice started yammering again. ‘Look, it’s your responsibility. She’s got to be dealt with, and now. She’s seen the videos, for God’s sake. You might want to spend the next ten years being buggered by some Neanderthal in the nick, but I don’t.’ He paused. ‘Fine. You better be here, that’s all, or I’ll be right on the phone to Colin. And if you want another wage packet like today’s, you won’t want me doing that.’ I heard the sound of a phone being slammed down. The jangling crash cut through my head like a blunt axe, snapping my eyes open.