by David Peace
I’ve got my fingers up his nose, my keys to those big brown eyes of his.
‘Please man, I swear.’
‘I will kill you.’
‘I know it man, I know it.’
‘So tell me.’
‘Tell you what? I don’t know where she is.’
‘You know she’s gone?’
‘Every fucker does.’
‘So tell me something no fucker knows.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like who was pimping her?’
‘Who was pimping her? You’re joking right?’
‘Do I look like I’m fucking joking?’
‘Eric, man.’
‘Eric Hall?’
‘You didn’t know?’
‘She was his grass.’
‘Fuck that. He was pimping her.’
‘You’re lying to me Joe.’
‘You didn’t fucking know?’
I grip his throat.
‘I swear it, man. Eric Hall was pimping her. Ask anyone.’
I stare into those big brown eyes, those big brown blind eyes of his and wonder.
‘Look, she’ll be back,’ he’s saying. ‘Like a boomerang, like the lot of them.’
I let go and he drops to the floor.
I walk towards what’s left of the door, all shattered wood and splattered sevens.
‘Cept the ones your Captain Jack gets,’ he’s still saying. ‘Cept the ones that pirate takes.’
‘You call me, Joe. The second you hear the slightest thing, you call me.’
He’s nodding, rubbing his throat.
‘Or I’ll come back and I will fucking kill you.’
In a hell of fireworks, she’s gone and I’m alone on the street.
I dial again, no Louise.
I dial again and again, no Louise.
I dial the hospital but they won’t put me through.
I dial York and ten minutes later the Sister tells me Mr Ronald Prendergast died this morning of the haemorrhage caused by the injuries sustained during the robbery.
I look up and see the sky through the trees.
See more rain.
I dial again, no Louise.
I dial again and again, no Louise.
I dial the hospital but they hang up.
Fuck Karen Burns.
Fuck Joe Rose.
Fuck Ronald Prendergast.
Fuck the fucking Ripper.
Fuck Maurice.
Fuck Bill.
Fuck Louise.
Fuck them all.
She’s gone:
I’m gone
In hell.
Battering down doors, battering down people, kicking in doors, kicking in people, searching for her, searching for me.
In hell in a stolen car.
Eric Hall, Detective Inspector Eric Hall, out of the Bradford HQ at Jacob’s Well, and that’s where I am, Jacob’s Well, waiting in a stolen car, his car, Eric’s car, the one I took from his drive out in Denholme:
No-one home, the taxi gone, my money with it.
Round the back of Eric’s little castle, through the rain on the panes, the nets and the gaps in the curtains, kicking in his back door, through the stink of the family pets, the family photos, into his study with the big windows and views of the golf course, through his boxes of medals, his old coins, looking for anything, any piece of Janice, any little piece of her, finding nothing, taking the housekeeping and the keys to his brand new Granada 2000 in Miami fucking blue.
Cunt.
Down the Halifax Road, on to Thornton Road, through Allerton and into Bradford, one road straight to Jacob’s Well.
Radio on:
‘Mr Clive Peterson, the sub-postmaster at Heywood Road, Rochdale, was found unconscious early this morning after challenging intruders on his premises. Police on both sides of the Pennines were examining the possibility of a link to a similar series of crimes in the Yorkshire area.
‘Mr Ronald Prendergast of New Park Road, Selby, died this morning having failed to regain consciousness after he disturbed intruders at his sub-post office on 4 June. Mr Prendergast is the second sub-postmaster to have been killed in as many months. A spokesman for the Post Office said …’
Cunts.
Foot down.
One road straight to him, to Eric Hall, Detective Inspector Eric Hall.
Cunt.
In an empty Bank Holiday car park, trying to think straight, trying to get some quiet in my brain, the rain drumming on the roof, the radio droning on:
‘The RAC described conditions as the worst in years
Bitter winds and rain forecast.
‘Weather is the only enemy to the biggest party in twenty-five years …’
Wanting a party of my own, getting out of Eric’s car to find a phone box.
In hell in a stolen car, the lights all red.
I’m sat on the bonnet of his brand new Miami-blue Granada 2000, waiting for him.
He comes across the deserted car park, a sheepskin coat in summer, rain flattening his thin fair hair and crap ‘tache, and he sees me, clocks the car, his car, and starts running, about to go fucking mental like I knew he would, and it hits me then how far I’ve come and it can’t be more than 5 p.m. on Monday 6 June 1977, but it hits me then there’s no way back from here.
This is where I am:
‘You fucking cunt,’ he’s screaming. ‘That’s my fucking car. How you, what the …’ and he pushes me off the bonnet on to the ground, jumping on top of me, the pair of us rolling about in the puddles, him punching me once in the side of the head.
But that’s all he’s getting.
I hit back, once, twice, getting him down, the side of his face flat on the car park tarmac:
‘Fuck is she, Eric?’
He struggles, but when he speaks his lips bleed into the floor.
I pull him up by the thin bits of shit he calls hair:
‘Fuck is she?’
‘How the fuck I know, you cunt. She’s your fucking tart …’
I smash his skull down into the ground and pull it back and his eyes are rolling about and I’m thinking stop it, stop it, stop it, you can’t do that again, you can’t do that again, you cannot do that again or you’ll kill him, you’ll kill him, you will kill him, and there’s blood pouring from his scalp and I’m fucked here and I grip his face between my hands until he focuses and I say:
‘Eric, don’t make me do that again.’
And he’s nodding but I don’t know what that means.
‘Eric, I know you were pimping her.’
And he’s still nodding but it could mean fucking anything.
‘Eric, come on.’
And I slap him across his pink fat cheeks with the bits of car park stuck there between the broken blood vessels and fucked-up blood pressure.
‘Eric …’
He’s coming back, the nodding slowing.
‘Eric, I know what you were doing, so just tell me where she is?’
He looks at me, the whites of his eyes red-streaked nicotine, the blacks wide in the blue, and through the spit he says:
‘I pimped her before. She asked me …’
My fists clench, he flinches, but I stop:
‘Eric, the truth …’
There are tears running down him.
‘It’s the truth.’
I pick him up, the pair of us falling about like a couple of ballroom drunks.
I lean him against the bonnet of his Miami-blue Granada 2000:
‘So where is she?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen her in over six months.’
I dust down his coat, knocking the gravel and scraps of paper off him:
‘You’re a liar, Eric. And not a very good one.’
He’s breathing heavily, sweating worse in that sheepskin coat of his.
I tell him:
‘She got picked up on Friday night.’
He swallows, shaking.
‘Here. In Manningham.’
&n
bsp; ‘I know.’
‘I know you know, cunt. Because she called you, didn’t she Eric? Wanted to meet you.’
He’s shaking his head.
‘What did she want, Eric?’
I pick a piece of shit off his collar and wait.
He closes his eyes, nodding:
‘Money, she wanted money’
‘And?’
‘Said she had some stuff, information.’
‘What kind?’
‘She didn’t say?’
‘Eric …’
‘Robberies, she didn’t say anything else. She was on the phone.’
I stroke his cheek:
‘And you arranged to meet her, didn’t you?’
He’s shaking his head.
‘But you sent the Van, didn’t you?’
He’s shaking that head, faster.
‘And they picked her up, didn’t they?’
Faster.
‘Thought you’d teach her a lesson, didn’t you?’
Side to side, faster.
‘And she told them to call you, didn’t she?’
Faster.
‘So they called you, didn’t they?’
And faster.
‘You could have made them go away, couldn’t you?’
He’s shaking.
‘Could have made them stop it, couldn’t you?’
And I grip that fat fucking face and an inch away I scream:
‘So why the fuck didn’t you, you piece of fucking fucking fucking shit!’
His eyes, his weak watery eyes, they frost over:
‘She’s yours, you took her.’
I have him now, in my hands, I have him, and I could kill him, batter his skull into the tarmac until it shattered, tip him into the boot of his brand new Miami-blue Granada 2000 and drive him up on to the Moors, or down into a quarry, or off into a lake, or over the edge and into the sea.
But I don’t.
I push the fat fucking cunt off the bonnet of his car and I get inside.
And he just stands there, in front of his Miami-blue Granada 2000, staring through the windscreen at me sat behind the wheel, his wheel.
I start the car, his car, thinking, move or I will kill you with your own car.
He steps to the side, his mouth moving, a black slow-motion hole of threats and promises, treats and curses.
I put my foot down.
And I’m gone
In hell in a stolen car, the lights all red, the world lost.
Straight out of Bradford, the A650 Wakefield Road into Tong Street, Bradford Road, King Street, under the M62, under the Ml and into Wakefield, out on to the Doncaster Road, out to the one place left, the last place left:
The Redbeck Cafe and Motel.
I sit there, in another lonely car park, Heath Common before me, three big black unlit bonfires against the clearing evening, waiting for their witches.
I reach into my pocket and take out my keys.
And there it is, Room 27.
In hell in a stolen car, the lights all red, the world lost like us.
In my dream I was sitting on a sofa in a room. A nice sofa, three seats. A nice room, pink.
But I’m not asleep, I’m awake
In hell.
John Shark: You saw this, Bob? [reads]: Among the jubilation there is a note of hostility from extreme left-wing groups who are busy printing anti-monarchist stickers and publishing articles describing the Jubilee as an appalling affront to the working population of 1977.
Caller: Bloody rubbish John, that’s what it is. Working population? These people, they’re not the working population. They’re just a bunch of bloody students. Your working population are all for the Jubilee.
John Shark: You reckon?
Caller: Course they are, it’s two days off bloody work and an excuse for a right old piss-up isn’t it?
The John Shark Show
Radio Leeds
Tuesday 7th June 1977
Chapter 10
It was pissing it down.
Real fucking sheets of the stuff, across six lanes of empty Jubilee motorway.
Over the Moors, across the Moors, under the Moors:
Fuck you then you sleep.
Kiss you then you wake.
No-one; no cars, no lorries, nothing:
Deserted spaces, these overground places.
The world gone in the flash of a bomb.
But if there’s no-one here, no-one left, how is it I wake so bruised from sleep?
I switched off Twenty-five Years of Jubilee Hits and put my foot down, just the tapes in my head playing full blast:
DIARY MAY BE CLUE TO KILLER
A diary thought to be in her missing bag could hold the clue to a woman’s killer.
Twenty-six-year-old Clare Strachan was found battered to death in a disused garage a quarter of a mile from Preston town centre, and last night police toured public houses in a bid to trace her killer.
Miss Strachan was last seen at 10.25 p.m. on Thursday when she left a friend’s house.
A woman noticed her body as she passed the open doors of the garage in Frenchwood Street, Preston.
At a press conference today Detective Superintendent Alfred Hill said robbery was the likely motive behind the killing. He said a diary thought to be in her lost bag would hold a vital clue.
He said: ‘I am anxious to hear about anyone who has been missing from Preston since Thursday.’
Det. Supt. Hill, second in command of Lancashire CID, is leading a team of eighty detectives hunting the killer.
Miss Strachan, originally from Scotland, lived in the Avenham area of Preston and also used the surname Morrison.
Hard bloody crime reporting from the wrong side of the hills, from the wrong year:
1975:
Eddie gone, Carol dead, hell round every corner, every dawn.
Dead elm trees, thousands of them.
Culled from clippings, torn from tape.
Two years going on two hundred.
The History Man.
Bye Bye Baby.
Start at the finish.
Begin at the end:
I slowed on Church Street, crawling up the road, looking for Frenchwood Street, looking for the garages, her garage.
I stopped by a multi-storey car park.
The car stank, my breath rank from no sleep, no breakfast, just a bellyful of bad dreams.
The clock on the dashboard said nine.
Rain, buckets of it drenching the windows.
I pulled the jacket of my suit over my head and got out and ran across the road to an open door swinging in the piss.
But I stopped before it, dead in my tracks, my jacket down, the rain in my face, flattening my hair, sick with the stench of dread and doom.
I stepped inside, out of the rain, into her pain.
Under my feet, under my feet I felt old clothing, a blanket of rags and paper, bottles brown and green, a sea of glass with islands of wood, crates and boxes, a workman’s bench he surely used for that piece of work, his job.
I stood there, the door banging, everything before me, behind me, under me, over me, listening to the mice and the rats, the wind and the rain, a terrible soul music playing, but seeing nothing, blind:
‘Your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.’
I was an old man.
An old man lost in a room.
‘You look like a drowned rat. How long you been out here?’
‘Not long,’ I lied and followed the barmaid inside St Mary’s, in out of the rain.
‘What can I get you?’ she asked, putting the lights on.
‘A pint and a whisky’
She went back behind the bar and started pulling my pint.
I took a stool at the cold early bar.
‘There you go. Sixty-five, please.’
I handed her a pound note. ‘Odd name for a pub.’
‘That’s what they all say, but place’s more like a church anyway. I m
ean, just look at it.’
‘Same name as that place down the road?’
‘The hostel? Yeah, don’t remind me.’
‘Get a lot of them in, do you?’
‘All we get,’ she said, handing me my change. ‘What line you in?’
‘I work for Yorkshire Post.’
‘Knew it. You’re here about that woman who got done in a couple of years ago? What was her name?’
‘Clare Strachan.’
She frowns. ‘You sure?’
‘Yeah. Knew her did you?’
‘Oh yes. They reckon now it could have been this Yorkshire Ripper, don’t they? Imagine if it was, I mean bloody hell, he was probably in here.’
‘She came in a fair bit then, Clare?’
‘Yeah, yeah. Gives you the creeps, doesn’t it. Get you another?’
‘Go on then. What was she like?’
‘Loud and pissed. Same as rest of them.’
‘Was she on game?’
She started wiping the top of the bar. ‘Yeah. I mean, they all are from that place.’
‘St Mary’s?’
‘Yeah. She was so out of it, I mean she probably gave it away.’
‘Police talk to you about her?’
‘Yeah. Talked to everyone.’
‘What did you tell them?’
‘Like I say, just that she came in here a lot, got pissed, didn’t have a lot of brass and what she had she probably got from selling it up on French.’
‘What did they say?’
‘Police? Nothing, I mean like what would they say?’
‘I don’t know. Sometimes they tell you what they’re thinking.’
She stopped wiping. ‘Here, you’re not going to put any of this in paper are you?’
‘No, why?’
‘I don’t want that bloody Ripper reading my name, do I? Thinking I know more than I do, thinking he better silence me or something.’
‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to say anything.’
‘Bet you always say that though, you lot, don’t you?’
‘As God is my witness.’
‘Yeah, right. Another?’
‘I’m sorry, I’m looking for a Roger Kennedy?’
The young man in the dim corridor, in the black glasses, he was shaking, sniffing, shitting himself.
I asked him again: ‘Roger Kennedy?’
‘He doesn’t work here any more.’
‘Do you know where I could find him?’
‘No. You’ll have to come back when the boss is here.’
‘Who’s that then?’
