Singleton's Law

by Reginald Hill

Such altruism gave him a self-congratulatory glow which lasted perhaps half a minute. Then the aches of hunger and battered flesh took over again.

  He had been heading steadily east, navigating by glimpses of London’s tallest building, Athletic House, and occasional sightings of the burnt-out stick of the old Post Office Tower. His destination was the American Embassy, but it was a choice made for the sake of making a choice rather than from any real hope. He knew from his activities as a journalist that even if a special watch were not being kept there, the normal security team had strict orders to check all those entering or leaving. For years the Americans had regularly protested at such harassment, but the new English Diplomat had been brought up in a tougher, blunter school than the old. The word of an Englishman was once more famous throughout the world. Only the word had changed.

  In any case, the Americans would be reluctant to find themselves with an ‘incident’ on their hands. This Embassy in Athletic Territory was their sole beachhead not only on British soil, but on European soil too. Seven years earlier after the revelation of the Hyperion series of nuclear tests in outer space, the European Parliament had broken off all relations with the U.S.A. and only in the new fragmented Britain had the Americans found a niche. Whitey knew Sam Exsmith, the Ambassador, well enough to know that he would not risk his country’s standing here for the sake of a single man.

  But there was nowhere else to go. He riffled through the five-year-old address book he carried in his mind and dismissed the names one after another. John Caldercote perhaps. He might be attracted by such a good though unprintable story. He had come nearest to being a close friend. But not so close that they hadn’t drifted apart in the years before Whitey’s arrest. It was this sense of being unable to hold anyone close which had contributed in part to his sudden marriage. He had needed someone, and the young golden haired Scottish girl he had met on that last assignment to Rangers territory had been deeply and obviously infatuated. It might have been the comparative glamour of his job. Men who could still move with some freedom round the country were rare. Or perhaps it was his reputation, already firmly established, as an outspoken attacker of the Four Club system.

  Or perhaps it was just affection, which would have deepened to real love. There was no chance to find out. The Management had had enough and they were waiting for him when he returned from Glasgow with his new bride.

  He had fought. It was useless, but he’d done it all the same. All the Strikers needed to do was hit him on the head once. But it is a truth proven by police forces all over the world, that if once they have guns, someone will fire. And Audrey, still too surprised to be afraid, had fallen to the ground, her golden hair spread over the airport concrete like a sunburst.

  She had died in hospital they told him in his cell. He had taken no interest in anything for a while after that, existing in a trance-like state even when his unknown rescuers took him from the prison hulk and laid him in the stinking bilges of the ancient loading barge which floated him downriver to freedom.

  He had been letting his feet choose their own course for several minutes now as his mind drifted back over those long past events. Now he stopped, bewildered and fearing he was lost. Far from it, he realized, as the familiarity of his surroundings suddenly struck him. He had almost reached the Bayswater Road. His feet, left to their own devices, had turned off the path to the Embassy and taken him home. Two more streets only, then round a corner and there ahead was Ramsey House, the big, square undistinguished block of flats which for so many years had been home.

  He heard a car approaching and stepped into a doorway. The vehicle passed the end of the street and disappeared. It was foolish to stay here, but he remained in the doorway staring at the flats, wondering what had happened to all his belongings, his papers. There had been two thirds of a novel there, never to be finished now. The man who could have finished it was long gone.

  A burst of high-pitched laughter snapped him out of his reverie. Across the street the door beneath a sign saying Klub Kocatrice had opened and four women were pretending to be exaggeratedly dazzled by the daylight. They were extravagantly dressed in the Edwardian style which Whitey presumed had superseded the Puritan-Maid look which had been the fashionable irony last time he was in London.

  The women were crossing the road now, talking and laughing. They were heavily painted and powdered and a little drunk, so he assumed from their noise and flamboyancy. One of them spotted him and pointed. The others laughed and to his annoyance veered towards him. He stepped from the doorway and started to walk away but the woman who had pointed ran after him and seized his arm. She was a tall, boldfaced creature whose large but well-proportioned frame he might on another occasion have greatly admired. Now the strength of her grip was a cause of annoyance, not sexual excitement.

  “Whither away, chuck?” she asked. “Don’t you like the look of me, then?”

  She ran her tongue round her lips till they glistened with saliva and with her free hand patted the gleaming red hair which was visible beneath her feather bonnet. Her companions laughed once more and began to circumambulate Whitey, inspecting him as though he were modelling some new gown hot from the designers.

  “He’s a bit battered,” said the smallest of the four, a round faced blonde who winked at Whitey with what seemed real friendliness.

  “So he is, the poor mannikin,” said the big woman. “Has some nasty reffer been beating you up?”

  “Perhaps he likes it,” interjected one of the others.

  “Likes it? Ooh, that would be nasty. No, he doesn’t look as if he likes it. In fact, I don’t know who designs your clothes, my poppet, but I’d say you were running away from it.”

  They all peered closely at Whitey’s prison clothes. The blonde fingered the material with distaste.

  “Oh yes. Isn’t it awful? Imagine having that next to your skin.”

  They went off into peals of laughter once more and Whitey, feeling the big woman’s grip relax, tried to move on.

  “Where are you going, my mouse?” she demanded, putting her arm over his shoulders and pressing her body close to his. “Don’t leave your friends so precipitately. You need someone to look after you. We’ll look after him won’t we, girls?”

  “Oh yes, yes,” came the chorus.

  “We’ll find you somewhere nice to stay. Get you some nice new clothes. He’ll like the clothes, won’t he?”

  “Oh yes!” The shrieks of laughter again, almost hysterical now. For a second Whitey had been half-tempted to regard this as a genuine offer of help. Perhaps the golden-hearted tart myth was not after all without foundation. But there was something threatening, something disturbing about these women. In some intangible way something was not quite right. The large woman pressed harder against him, almost locking his thigh between her legs; And suddenly the something not right was absolutely tangible.

  He broke away with a violent effort.

  “No thanks. No,” he said, trying to move on. But they all pressed close now in a tight square.

  “If he doesn’t want protection, he must want the other thing,” said the little blonde.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I thought he looked bent.”

  Whitey looked round the compass of faces, teeth showing, eyes gleaming in anticipation of what was to come, saw the masculine run of their jaws and set of their shoulders and wondered how he could ever have seen anything else. He was sweating with fear, but he tried to adopt a blustering bullying tone.

  “Right, you reffing glibs,” he said. “You reff off, or I’ll get a couple of Supporters along to sort you out. Go on! Split!”

  “Hark how he talks!” mocked the big ‘woman’. “Supporters indeed: The only supporters you have will be for your hernia.”

  “Has he got a hernia?” asked the blonde, solicitously.

  “If he hasn’t, it can be arranged.”

  They laughed as the first blows struck home. Whitey retreated against a wall in an effort to protect hi
s rear, but it was merely a time-saving operation. In his condition, a frontal attack from any one of them would have been almost impossible to resist. His only hope was flight. Perhaps the drink and their cumbersome clothes would slow them down enough for a short sprint to shake them off. Anything more than a short sprint was quite beyond him.

  Head down, arms flailing, he launched himself from the wall, breaking through the line of assailants by the suddenness of his move. His impetus gave him a ten-yard start, but a quick glance back after thirty or forty yards showed him that the ‘women’ were far from averse to a chase. Skirts hilted above the knees, eyes alight with wild pleasure, they were striding after him. To a casual observer it must have been a comic sight. To Whitey it was terrifying. If they caught him, the very least he could expect was a beating which would leave him so incapacitated that recapture would be certain. As it was, his weary and bruised muscles were already shrieking their demands for instant and lengthy rest. He knew he could not outrun his pursuers. The only chance was to hide.

  He flung himself right, crashing through the swing doors of Ramsey House.

  Ahead of him was the lift and the stairs. On the wall between them was a list of flat numbers with the occupants’ names alongside. Automatically his eyes flickered to 3.35. And stayed.

  The name on the card was the same as it had been five years ago.

  Singleton.

  His mind was racing with crazy speculations as he headed for the stairs. Only fools and the well supported used lifts. Like any confined space they were to be avoided.

  Suppose, his insane thoughts whispered as he scrambled madly up the stairs, suppose Audrey had not died; suppose that was just one more turn of the screw they had applied to him; suppose she had come out of hospital after his escape, been allowed to take possession of his old flat, kept so closely watched that she had never been able to get word out to him.

  It was all quite impossible. But he had to find out. And to find out, he had to survive. Round another corner and ahead was the first floor landing. Behind him he could hear the feet of his pursuers clattering on the wooden treads.

  The extra effort needed to run up the stairs had exhausted his small reserves of energy even more quickly than anticipated and he knew now that his hopes of getting far enough ahead to lose the ‘women’ in the maze of corridors which ran through the huge building were dim. Calling for assistance or knocking on doors was pointless. Nowadays people barred their homes like bank vaults and only opened up when convinced it was safe to do so. A strange man in a prison suit was hardly the best kind of guarantor.

  He had to stop for breath and leaned up against the wall, panting hard and resting his brow on the pleasantly cool metal of the fire-extinguisher.

  The following steps had also slowed down because of the ascent, but they were close now. There was little he could do. His old flat was on the next floor but one and even if he reached it, no woman used to living on her own in London was going to open the door and let him in. Force was out of the question. There just wasn’t the time or the strength.

  There was, however, he discovered, the time and the strength to lift the extinguisher from its bracket and to rest it on the floor at the head of the stairs. And just sufficient time and strength remained to break the plastic seal, lift the cup and depress the plunger which sent a stream of custard-yellow foam into the face of the blonde as ‘she’ rounded the corner. It unseated the hat and wig revealing a basin-cropped mousy stubble before the foam replaced the errant blonde wig with a fell of yellow bubbles.

  Perhaps this witless fate which has got me into this mess is now arranging for me to slide out of it, thought Whitey and instantly put his thesis to the test by crashing his elbow through the glass panel next to the fire-extinguisher bracket and pressing the alarm button.

  As he laboriously dragged himself up the stairs to the third floor, he thought of Audrey (he was sure now it would be Audrey) roused from her early morning half-sleep by the siren’s shriek, getting out of bed, looking through the window in an effort to spot smoke, slipping on a dressing gown, pausing before the mirror to make sure that she was presentable to the outside world, then making her way to the main door of the flat to begin the complicated business of releasing the multiplicity of bolts and locks which kept her safe and cosy through the night. If fate had done a face-about, she would be the first in her corridor to open the door and peer out and she would do this just as he arrived.

  It went as pre-ordained. He felt no surprise at seeing the handle turn as he limped towards the door; he accelerated, confident that his arrival was going to be perfectly timed; and his shoulder hit the door just as the night-gowned woman within became aware of his approach and tried to slam it shut.

  The force of his entry bowled her over and sent her crashing across the polished floor of the entrance hall.

  Whitey nearly followed suit, but managed to retain his balance and crash the door shut behind him just as other doors up and down the corridor began to open and disgorge their fire-terrified inmates into unprecedented confrontations with each other.

  Whitey leaned against the door, sliding home bolts and saying a little prayer of thanks to his new friend, Fate. Then he turned to face his wife.

  The woman cowered on the floor, hardly able to move, clearly fearing the worst. Or perhaps not that. When a desperate-looking man forced his way into a woman’s flat in the early hours of the morning, even the best was fearful enough.

  But the terror on her face was well matched by the disappointment on Whitey’s.

  He had never seen this woman before in his life.

  Nixon Lectures: Fifth Series

  Documentary Material

  3 (b) Extract from ‘Civil Strife and Football:’ The Report of a Committee of Enquiry appointed by the Secretary of State for Home Affairs: 1983

  It is with considerable regret that the Commission concludes that the only solution to the grave problem before us is a suspension sine die of the playing of Association Football at all levels. It is our hope that the social climate may so change that a review of this ban may be possible within a few years.

  It is also recommended that the stadia and their facilities be leased to the many official Supporters Clubs in the hope that they will become social centres and strong influences for stability.

  Chapter 5

  “It’s all right,” said Whitey. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  He nodded reassuringly at the woman and pressed his ear to the door in a vain attempt to learn what was happening outside. Only the howl of the fire-alarm pierced the four inches of solid plas-teak which modern living required as standard thickness for an outer door.

  It didn’t matter. The glibs would hardly hang around to be investigated by the building’s security team. And there was no reason for anyone to check this particular flat, not even the Scrubs Strikers. Not now that it appeared it wasn’t his wife’s. Felix culpa, he told himself smugly, turning back to the woman.

  She had gone.

  Through the open lounge door he saw her, telephone in hand, staring at him with a desperate impatience in her face which told him she had not yet been connected.

  This is what came of sounding reasonable, he told himself as he moved towards her. His little bit of reassurance had merely given her strength to head for the ’phone.

  His hand smashed down on the rest. He put his face close to hers.

  “Another trick like that and I’ll tear you in half,” he said.

  That worked nicely. She slid weakly to the floor, dropping the receiver. He picked it up and replaced it on the stand.

  “Just stay there,” he said. “Answer when you’re spoken to. Do what I tell you to. Otherwise just sit. Right? One wrong move and you’re relegated.”

  It was the authentic note. This was a scene every woman living alone must have rehearsed. All that was necessary was to remember the right lines.

  He made a quick tour of the flat. One thing became clear. He had made no mist
ake. This had been his flat. The decor had been altered but there were still things he could remember. The M-shaped crack in the ceiling plaster which always opened up no matter how often you filled it. The creaking board one pace through the kitchen door. The Athletic red bathroom suite, complete with First Team portrait tiles, the choice of a previous occupant. He looked at the row of shiny faces and smiled, recalling how expert he had become at toothpaste graffiti.

  “I’m a good Supporter.”

  It was the woman’s voice, pleading and fearful. She had been following his progress round the flat and seeing him pause so long at the red bathroom door, obviously hoped he would be impressed.

  “I told you to keep tight,” Whitey snapped. “Till I ask questions, which is now. How long have you lived here?”

  “I don’t know. Four, five years.”

  “Four, five years,” repeated Whitey. “Interesting. Who had it before you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Come on, girlie! Just throw your mind back. Who had it before you?”

  “I don’t know. It was empty when I moved in. I never saw the other people!”

  She was close to hysteria in her effort to convince him. Whitey felt sick at the thought of being able to frighten someone into this state, yet it was not only sickness he felt. He turned back to the bathroom unwilling to face the girl, and looked at himself reflected in the bright red tiles like a spirit in Hades.

  “That name list in the entrance-hall,” he said. “It says someone called Singleton lives here.”

  “Does it? I never bothered to put my name up when I came. My friends know where I live.”

  Perhaps I’m less famous than I think, thought Whitey. But surely someone in the block would have let her know she was occupying the one-time residence of the great criminal, Whitey Singleton?

  He dismissed the speculation as idle. The thing now was to rest up for a while. He was very hungry and very tired. It was quite hard to focus his eyes on the girl who sat before him, head bowed, like a Pre-Raphaelite model posing for Despair.