by Nicky Black
Nicola pushed her aside and ran out of the toilets with orders to get Kim’s wounds seen to.
She got to the house in under a minute, running as fast as her leaden legs would carry her. She banged loudly on the door and looked through the letterbox. She could see the edge of the sofa in the living room, the filling pouring out onto the floor where the fabric had been slashed.
‘Mark!’ she shouted through the letterbox. ‘Mark, it’s me! Open the door!’
She put her ear to the letterbox, her chest heaving from the effort of running. She tried to listen over the pounding of her heart. She could hear the baby crying upstairs and sirens in the distance. She stood up to try to gauge how close they were, then bent back down to the letterbox.
‘Mark! Let me in, please!’
She walked back up the path to see if she could spot any movement upstairs. She shaded her eyes against the sun gleaming off the window, noticing the torn net curtains of the front bedroom.
The sirens were getting louder and she turned back to face the front door.
‘Come on, come on,’ she muttered to herself. If she could just get to him, she could talk him out of it, just like she’d done a hundred times. She heard the police cars screech around the corner.
‘Shit!’ she spat. ‘MARK!’
She was back at the letterbox, slamming her hands against the glass of the door. She peered in again, but could see nothing. The baby’s cries were getting louder, more frantic. When she turned around she saw four or five police cars and an armoured van, armed officers pouring out of them. Nicola looked on in amazement.
‘What the…?’
An officer in charge ordered the swarm to take positions and then held a megaphone to his mouth. Nothing came out and he fiddled with it in frustration, giving it a couple of wallops before raising it to his mouth again. Nicola continued to pound on the door.
‘Mark, just open the door before there’s any bother!’
‘STEP AWAY FROM THE HOUSE!’ boomed the officer in charge, making her jump.
She turned to face them all, looking from one blank face to another, staring through her as if she were a piece of the infrastructure. She pursed her lips and with a final hateful glare bent down to pick up half a brick as more sirens announced the arrival of ambulances and another unmarked car.
‘PUT THAT DOWN! STEP AWAY FROM THE HOUSE!’
Lee stepped out of the unmarked car just as Nicola turned defiantly to face the front door. She smashed the brick into the glass door pane, swiftly releasing the lock.
She barged in as the officer in charge shook his head in despair, dropping the megaphone to his side and looking around in disbelief that someone would disobey his orders.
‘Bastards!’ Nicola sputtered. ‘Bastards!’
She tumbled over the baby walker and hit the floor with a thud. Pain shot through her ankle and she cried out, tears of frustration spiking her eyes. She hopped into the living room and surveyed the devastation, the walls hacked at, curtains and furniture in pieces. She turned to the stairs, dragging herself up with her hands and on one leg.
When she turned the corner at the top of her stairs, her hand clasped her mouth in horror. There, hanging from the catch of the loft hatch was Mark, a belt around his neck, his face contorted, bloated and purple, his eyes bulging blood red, his tongue black and fat. The samurai knife that once hung over the fireplace lay on the floor under his feet.
‘Oh no… no!’ Her shaking hand went to her heart and she held her breath, tidal waves of nausea rocking her body.
Outside, Lee heard a cry that came from the depths of the soul, primal and anguished. He looked up to the bedroom window. A hand threw it open and Nicola’s face appeared.
‘Help! Can somebody help?!’ she screamed, then disappeared.
The officer in charge held up his arms. ‘Wait! Nobody moves till I give the order!’
Lee ignored him, jumped over the garden wall and ran into the house.
‘What the hell is he doing?’ the officer in charge asked his colleagues, who shuffled awkwardly.
Lee took the stairs two at a time, and saw Nicola with her head through Mark’s legs trying to take his weight. Her face was scarlet with the effort, her teeth clenched and exposed like a wrestler. The baby screeched in another room. Lee quickly picked up the toppled chair, stood on it and released the belt around Mark’s neck. Nicola took Mark’s weight, collapsed to the floor and lay under her brother, still and exhausted.
Lee felt for a pulse. Nothing. He bent forward and listened for breath. Still nothing. He pulled Mark from Nicola and laid him on his back, pulled back his head and started to breathe into his mouth, but the airway was blocked by the swelling in his throat and his bloated tongue. Lee felt his own breath escaping from the sides of his mouth. He put his hands to Mark’s chest and started compressions. One, two, three, rest. One, two, three, rest. He looked at Nicola, his sweating brow crushed with regret. Nicola stumbled to her knees and looked down at her brother. She put her hand on Lee’s arm, as blood started to trickle from the side of Mark’s mouth. Lee stopped, and Nicola put her hands towards Mark’s face, almost touching it, but frightened to feel the lifeless skin. She swallowed a sob, took Mark as gently as she could in her arms and rocked him back and forth, holding his head to her cheek, her eyes tight shut, the tears streaming out. Howling waves started to pour from her. Lee sat next to her and she looked up at him, eyes pleading. He pulled her head towards his chest. ‘He’s gone,’ he said gently. She clung to the sleeves of his jacket, sobbing salty tears. When his arms closed around her she felt herself melt, allowing the grief to envelop her.
‘DS Jamieson, please respond…’ The voice came from inside Lee’s jacket, and Nicola lifted her head and wiped her face.
‘DS Jamieson, pick up.’ Nicola sat up sharply now, looking at Lee’s chest, puzzlement turning to dismay as he released his radio from his inside pocket, raising it to his mouth.
‘Send in the paramedics,’ he said in a low voice, avoiding Nicola’s eyes.
Nicola sprang back away from him, clinging to Mark, trying to get him free of Lee. Lee leant into her.
‘GET OFF HIM!’ she spat at him.
Lee backed off and looked away, ashamed. He stood up as the paramedics came up the stairs to prise Mark out of Nicola’s arms. Nicola screamed at them to leave him alone and only relented when the screech of the baby overpowered her own. She stood slowly, wiped her face with her arm, and hobbled into the bedroom, scooping the baby out of her cot.
‘Shhhhh. It’s alright, it’s alright,’ she cooed.
The baby gave little hiccup cries as Nicola searched the cot and found her dummy. The baby sucked on it as Nicola walked back to the landing and watched the paramedics strap Mark to a stretcher, his face covered with an orange blanket. She wiped her face again and, gathering all her dignity, followed Lee and the paramedics down the stairs. They filed past the officer in charge. ‘I’ll be speaking to your superiors,’ he scowled at Lee as he passed. Lee tried to catch Nicola’s arm.
‘Hang on,’ he said. Nicola wrenched her arm free of him, but Lee kept on. ‘We’ll need to talk to you.’ Nicola ignored him and pushed past a line of police with the baby in her arms.
Two officers stood relaxed against the garden wall. ‘One less smackhead to worry about,’ one said to the other as the stretcher was carried past them.
Nicola turned. ‘What did you say?’ She squared up to the officer and he looked at her vacantly. ‘My brother was not a smackhead, right?’
‘If you say so,’ he shrugged. ‘Come on.’ He slapped his partner on his chest with the back of his hand. ‘Shift over.’
They walked away and Lee touched Nicola on the shoulder. She jumped as if she’d got an electric shock.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
She gave him a look that told him all he needed to know. He stepped back and she limped away, her head high, her heart broken.
FOUR
‘It won’t happen
again,’ said Lee, one hand in his trouser pocket, the other holding the back of the black leather chair.
‘Dead right it won’t,’ affirmed Carole Meadows, sitting on her desk. ‘You might’ve had a reputation to live up to in London, but you don’t here.’
‘I thought that’s what you employed me for,’ replied Lee, stony-faced.
‘What, disobeying an officer in charge?’
‘Getting results.’
‘You didn’t get a result!’ DI Meadows leaned forward as Lee’s shoulders fell and he looked at his feet.
‘Valley Park is unpredictable.’ She pointed a finger at the window. ‘Send a couple of uniforms in at the wrong time of day and it starts a riot –’
‘– I know Valley Park,’ interrupted Lee defensively.
‘You knew it,’ snapped DI Meadows. ‘From now on you stick to procedure. Police procedure, not your own.’ Lee waited, his retaliation sticking in his throat. DI Meadows rose from her desk, sighed heavily and strode to her chair. ‘Close the door behind you,’ she said, conversation over.
Lee left the DI’s office feeling like a kid again. He could never do anything right then, and he felt the humiliation as hotly now as when his father would rant at him day and night about how useless he was. As he walked into the silent, open-plan office he felt the eyes of his colleagues looking anywhere but at him. He sat at his desk amidst the odd cough and rustle of paper. He called Jane Thompson over.
‘Everything okay?’ she asked cautiously.
Lee looked petulant and angry and avoided her eyes.
‘Could you get me Mark Redmond’s files, please?’
‘What, all of them?’
‘Yes. And where’s Gallagher? We’re supposed to be handing over.’
‘Sick, Sarge.’
‘Sick? What do you mean, sick?’
Thompson shrugged and walked away apologetically. Lee heard his stomach groan with hunger: he’d had nothing since breakfast and it was fast approaching four o’clock. He was logging onto his computer when six large, red files marked ‘MARK ANTHONY REDMOND’, a Twix and a can of Coke appeared in front of him. He turned to see DC Thompson walking back to her desk.
‘Don’t mention it,’ she called.
A couple of hours later, Lee stretched his arms over his head and turned to look around the empty office. Only a noisy pedestal fan and DC Thompson, typing steadily, remained. Lee rubbed his eyes and sighed, fatigue washing over him like the tide. Mark’s file told a different story. As far as he could see, persecution and harassment had generally been on Mark’s part, not the police’s. His records stretched back years, the sort of kid who plagued the life out of the authorities, knowing exactly what he could get away with and how to play the system.
With a first offence of shoplifting at the age of five, his run-ins with the police became a regular occurrence over the next decade and beyond. This lad liked cars, too, twocking from the age of nine, one brand new BMW, belonging to a local magistrate, driven to Swan Hunter Docks and launched into the Tyne to its watery end. Besides the shoplifting and the petty crime, Lee counted eleven serious offences by the time Mark was ten. A copy of a care order from 1981 reported that Mark and his eight-year-old sister had been found dirty and malnourished in their home by a truancy officer, abandoned by all accounts by their mother for weeks on end several times a year. The mother was never found, the father not even on the birth certificate. A series of foster parents had been unable to curb Mark’s voracious appetite for criminal behaviour. In fact, it seemed the arrests increased in gravity whenever he was placed with a family – criminal damage, handling stolen goods, possession of drugs – until finally, on his sixteenth birthday, he left care only to be detained in a youth offenders’ institution for six months. The last entry in the files was dated August 1995 when Mark was twenty-one, and he was given a four-year suspended sentence for burglary. From then on, one little toe out of line and he’d be locked up for six years at least. Lee didn’t see anything in the files on this last arrest, the one that would have had Mark in court that afternoon and, if found guilty, facing a long jail sentence.
‘Jane?’ he called, flicking backwards through the file, his back to DC Thompson who was putting on her coat. ‘There must be another file?’
She looked at her watch, already twenty minutes late for her date. She sighed and walked back to the filing cabinet, searched for a minute then called over to Lee that there were no more files on Mark Redmond. She watched with unease as Lee walked over to DC Gallagher’s desk and searched through the mess. He tried the drawers. All locked. He surveyed the office, hands on hips.
‘Go home, Jane,’ he said.
‘Yes, Sarge.’ She gathered her bag quickly before he could change his mind, but it was too late.
‘Actually, there’s one thing we need to do,’ he said, ‘but you can keep your coat on.’
Nicola put a chattering Liam on the living room floor next to Michael Jnr, their combed hair still wet from their bath, Power Ranger pyjamas rolled up at the sleeves and legs. She pressed play on The Lion King video for the hundredth time. She sat on the sofa next to Mark’s baby girl, Amy, propped up with cushions and playing with one of Nicola’s hairbrushes. Her head was heavy from the waves of grief that racked her body every ten minutes or so. Her hand rubbed at the Tubigrip around her throbbing ankle. It squashed her foot, making her toes swollen and blue.
It was getting late – she’d been calling Micky all day, left him half a dozen voice messages. Most of the time she couldn’t move for him, but now she needed him he was nowhere to be seen. She heard shuffling from the hallway, walked to the living room door and peered round to see Kim making her way down the stairs. She guided Kim to the sofa, sat next to her and put her arm around her limp, frail shoulders. Kim rested her head on Nicola’s chest.
‘They’ll think he’s guilty now,’ she slurred through the Temazepam given to her by the hospital doctor.
‘Who?’ asked Nicola.
‘Everyone,’ said Kim.
‘They won’t,’ said Nicola, rubbing Kim’s back.
‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,’ said Kim, chewing on her thumbnail and staring into nothing.
‘Shall we get Amy ready for bed?’
Kim shook her head and Nicola stroked her clumpy hair, still matted with dried blood.
‘Okay, I’ll do it for now, but she needs her mammy.’ Kim nodded but didn’t move.
Nicola couldn’t help but feel the burden of taking care of others, when she desperately needed some comfort herself. But she had to make sure Kim was okay. Mark had loved her since they were teenagers. Kim was the younger and the weaker of the two and easily beaten by life’s problems, often turning to drugs and alcohol. But Mark had become a man, shouldered his responsibilities and kept her straight for the last few years. They had been devoted to each other and blessed with this beautiful, healthy baby girl whom they’d both adored.
They both jumped as the front door slammed closed. Micky. With that little turd Mooney clinging onto his shirt tails like a limpet.
‘Seen me trainers?’ Micky asked, standing in the doorway.
‘Where’ve you been, Micky?’ asked Nicola, her voice shaking.
Mooney peered around him and immediately caught sight of Kim’s chopped-off hair. He pointed at her.
‘Fucking hell, who did that? The fucking apprentice?’ He laughed loudly, self-consciously trying to cover his rotten teeth with his lips and the back of his hand. He pranced on hot coals and looked to Micky for acknowledgement.
Micky ignored him and walked into the living room, taking in Kim’s bandaged hand. ‘Taking up boxing or what?’ he asked suspiciously. Mooney laughed even louder, still glancing at Micky, yearning pathetically for a wink or a playful punch to his arm.
Nicola turned to Mooney. ‘Shut up!’
‘HEY!’ Micky shouted at Nicola, making Liam start to cry. Micky picked Liam up and cuddled him to his massive chest. He looked at the faces of his
wife and sister-in-law and realised all wasn’t right. He turned to Mooney.
‘Want a cup of tea?’
‘Aye! Cheers!’ said Mooney happily, beaming behind his hand, lowering his watery eyes to the floor, then back up to Micky.
‘Go on then, make me one while you’re at it.’
Mooney’s smile faded to a twitching grin and he left the room, scratching the back of his head and muttering to himself.
‘So?’ Micky asked.
Nicola pulled him towards the window. ‘Mark’s dead,’ she said quietly, her chin quivering, her fingers pulling at her top lip.
‘What?’ He put a struggling Liam back onto the floor.
‘This morning....’ She leaned her forehead onto his chest and he put his arms around her. Nicola’s hands went to her face as the comfort of the embrace brought fresh tears. Mooney appeared back at the door.
‘How many sug...?’ He stopped dead, staring out of the window. Micky followed Mooney’s gaze and saw a squad car pull up outside the gate.
‘What’s going on?’ asked Micky, confused.
Nicola looked up, saw the car and stiffened. ‘I’ll tell you later.’
‘Tell me now,’ he ordered, his eyes darting between the window and Kim who cowered, her fingers in her mouth, staring out of the window at one uniformed and one plainclothes officer glancing around them as they locked the car. ‘Why are they coming to my door?’ demanded Micky, but Nicola was free of his grasp and heading for the hallway. ‘You better tell me!’ Micky yelled after her. He turned to challenge Kim, but changed his mind when he saw her trembling body wilting like a discarded doll in the corner of the sofa.
‘They’re here because Mark killed himself,’ she whimpered.
Mooney fidgeted awkwardly. ‘That’s a bit drastic like,’ he said.
Micky threw his head back and sighed, looking up at the ceiling, as if the news were just another irritation in his life. Mooney hovered, agitated, his hands searching deep into his tracksuit pockets. He slumped down next to Liam and Michael on the floor and joined them in their love of Simba.
