by Zoe Sharp
“There, you see, it’s not so bad, is it, Miss Fox?” Garton-Jones said. His tone was supposed to be soothing. It only succeeded in winding my irritation up a notch higher. West stood slightly back and to his left, keeping quiet, but missing nothing. “Once we’ve identified everyone with a right to be here, you won’t be troubled again.”
When I gave my name, West pulled out a hardbacked notebook from his inside pocket and flicked on his own torch as he studied the pages. “I don’t seem to have you listed as a resident here, Miss Fox,” he said politely, his voice deceptively mild. “Would you mind telling me the purpose of your visit tonight?”
“I’m house-sitting for a friend,” I bit out. I knew I was going to have to tell them more than that, but they were going to have to work for it.
“House-sitting?” Garton-Jones repeated, his interest quickening. “For whom? Which house?” He rapped out the questions. Despite his upper-class accent, the civility was little more than a cigarette-paper thin veneer covering the savagery underneath. I knew that if I was clever I’d stop being obstructive now, and tell them what they wanted to know.
So, I gave them Pauline’s name and address, told them how long she was going to be away. West jotted it all down in his notebook, which he shut with a snap when he was finished.
“OK, Miss Fox,” Garton-Jones said. “You can go now. We’ll be having a word with Mrs Jamieson when she returns, though. Just to let her know that there’s no need to trouble any of her friends in the future. Streetwise Securities are in control of this area now. Next time she’s away, we’ll be looking after her property.”
I bridled silently at his smug tone. Pauline would probably have something to say about that, but it wasn’t up to me to put words into her mouth. “I’m sure she’ll be thrilled,” I told him sweetly.
Garton-Jones either didn’t hear the sarcasm or chose to rise above my low wit. “It’s all part of the service,” he said neutrally, standing back and waving me on with a slight bow.
I tugged my helmet back on, trying not to mutter under my breath. But, as I toed the bike into gear, I was blinded by the sudden flare of main-beam headlights from the other end of the street.
“What the—?” Garton-Jones spun round, jerking a hand up to protect his eyes.
I heard the roar of a big V8 engine, being caned straight down the middle of the road. The sound seemed to leap towards me, increasing in size with such speed and ferocity that for a moment I was paralysed.
At the last minute, I grabbed a handful of throttle and banged the clutch out. The bike jumped forwards like a racehorse leaving the starting gate and shot across the road.
I just about managed to slot into a gap between two parked cars, and jolted clumsily up the low kerb onto the pavement, stalling the motor.
I twisted round to see Garton-Jones and West dive out of the way with an undignified haste that was grimly pleasing. It was difficult to make out much more than the basic shape of the vehicle that came barrelling through the space we’d so recently vacated. One of these new four-by-fours, with a set of industrial bull-bars on the front. Other than that, I couldn’t even have given you the colour.
It reached the corner of the street and slithered round it in a near-perfect sideways drift, engine howling as the tyres skittered over the wet road surface. I couldn’t suppress a certain amount of admiration for the driver. Whoever was behind the wheel obviously knew his stuff.
Before the taillights had even disappeared, Garton-Jones had grabbed a walkie-talkie from his belt and was snarling into it. “Gary! What the fuck’s going on at your end?” he demanded. “That damned Grand Cherokee with the Dutch plates on it has just been through here again like it’s a fucking racetrack. Either keep that end of the estate locked down, or I’ll put someone in charge who can.”
He shoved the walkie-talkie into his jacket pocket without waiting for a reply. He glared first at West, and then across at me, as though daring either of us to comment. Neither of us fancied the prospects of that move overmuch.
I busied myself with flicking the gear lever back into neutral so I could kick-start the bike again. I rode it carefully ten metres along the uneven pavement until there was a gap between the parked cars, and dropped back into the road.
As I rode the short distance to Pauline’s place, I reflected that the arrival of Garton-Jones and his mob on Lavender Gardens should have meant things had just got better. So why couldn’t I shake the feeling they’d just taken a downward turn? And one so steep it was more like a nose-dive.
***
That evening, unable to put it off any longer, I rang Pauline in Canada.
I’d been avoiding making the call, in the hope that things were going to get better. The likelihood of that one was far away, and growing dimmer all the time.
I couldn’t lie to her when she asked what had been going on, and even though I severely edited down the truth, she was still horrified by news of the attack on Fariman, and the arrival of Garton-Jones and his boys.
“The Committee were talking about calling his lot in before I left, but I didn’t think they’d be stupid enough to actually go ahead with it. They’ll bleed us dry,” she said bluntly, her voice coming across the transatlantic line as clear as a local call. “Oh, why did this have to happen now, when I can’t do a damned thing about it?”
“There’s another Committee meeting next week. I’ll go,” I heard myself saying. “I’ll try and stall them. He’s just totally the wrong man for the job.”
“OK, Charlie,” she said, still sounding worried, “just don’t do anything rash, will you?”
I said of course not in what I hoped was a convincing tone, and Pauline rang off, slightly more reassured.
I didn’t want to go walking into that meeting completely blind, but it still took me a few moments of staring at the telephone to make the decision to call Jacob and Clare for help.
If you’d asked me at the beginning of last winter if they were my friends I would have said yes without hesitation. Then I’d put Clare in a position of danger from which she’d been lucky to escape alive. It wasn’t that they hadn’t forgiven me over it, you understand.
I hadn’t forgiven myself.
I picked the receiver up quickly, and dialled before I had chance to change my mind. Jacob answered almost straight away.
“Oh, hi Charlie,” he said. Was it me, or did he sound a little cool in his greeting? “Long time, no hear.”
I could picture the long rangy figure, his dark wavy hair flashed through with grey. He would be sitting at the scrubbed pine table in the kitchen of their big, comfortably untidy old house just outside Caton village.
In theory, Jacob had a study from which to run his classic motorbike spares and antiques business, but I’d never seen him do any work there. He always preferred to use the kitchen, where he could listen to the radio and be company for the dogs.
Even now, once Clare was home from work in the evening, he tended to stay put, still making or waiting for phone calls from other dealers in the States. He always complained that they had no idea which way time zones operated.
“Sorry, I’ve been a bit up to my neck,” I said, feeling even more guilty that I was only ringing now because I needed a favour.
“So, girl, when are we going to see you round here for some supper?” he said, and I realised I’d been being oversensitive. “I’ve got this great new way of roasting lamb that’ll have you drooling.”
“Sounds great. I’ll try and get up there soon,” I promised. “I’m house-sitting at the moment. A friend’s place on Lavender Gardens.”
“Yeah? Well, I hope you’ve got your bike alarm set fine, then, because from what Clare tells me all things both red hot, and nailed down have been disappearing from round that neck of the woods lately.”
Clare works for the local paper, the Lancaster & District Defender, so she gets all the news and gossip before it filters down to us proles. Not that she’s a journalist, but even working in the Acco
unts department she still hears plenty.
“I was hoping she might be able to give me a bit of gen about that, actually,” I said, wincing in case Jacob saw through my obvious ploy. If he did, he was too much of a gentleman to comment on it.
“Hang on,” he said. “I’ll give her a shout. She climbed straight into the bath when she got home and I think she might still be there, the wrinkled old prune.” I heard him cover the mouthpiece to yell for Clare up the stairs. “No, you’re in luck,” he said after a moment, “she’s surfaced and she’s on her way. You take care now, Charlie,” he added softly, “and don’t leave it so long next time, hey?”
“I won’t,” I told him, unable to suppress a warm, gooey kind of feeling at the rich sincerity in his voice. Jacob has that persuasive way of talking that makes even the most casual of conventional remarks seem like it’s been said just for you. The best thing is, he hasn’t the faintest idea he’s doing it. If he wasn’t just about double my age – not to mention well and truly spoken for – I’d be in there like a shot.
Still, the age thing has never worried Clare much. She’s twenty-six, like me, but there the similarity ends. I’m afraid I can’t lay claim to blonde supermodel good looks, nor her ability to ride her Ducati 851 Strada like the local B-roads are her own personal racetrack.
She and Jacob have been together for as long as I’ve known them. They might seem an unlikely couple, particularly as he’s partly crocked up from too many youthful motorbike racing accidents, but I couldn’t honestly imagine either of them with anybody else.
I heard Clare come into the kitchen and take over the receiver. “Hello stranger,” she said brightly.
We exchanged idle chit-chat for a few minutes, then I steered the conversation back round to the recent happenings on Lavender Gardens, with particular reference to Ian Garton-Jones’s presence on the estate. “I understand his company, Streetwise Securities have been working on a couple of other estates locally, and he’s had quite an effect,” I said. “Your mate on the crime desk wouldn’t be able to fill in any gaps for me, would he?”
“Probably,” Clare said. “The name rings a bell, and I seem to remember us running some stories on him. I got the impression that we took a slightly disapproving stance – you know, the vigilante angle – but the residents all thought he was wonderful. I’ll find out what I can and give you a shout.”
After we’d finished our conversation I spent some time thinking over the decision to intervene more than I had done already in the affairs of Lavender Gardens. I wondered if it was a poor choice.
I came to the conclusion that it probably was.
Six
By the time Streetwise Securities had been on guard for three days, my vague impression of unease had hardened into certainty.
Garton-Jones was efficient all right, but he achieved his results with a ruthless disregard for personal freedom. Nobody got in without their say-so, which was irritating, but OK. But, nobody got out either. In the space of a few short days, Lavender Gardens had been ghetto-ised. I doubt the Gestapo could have done it better.
The kids in particular were running scared of him. Before, they’d played football in the road, or sat around on the corner of the next street along, by the little late-night convenience store, furtively smoking cigarettes. Now they were conspicuous by their absence. It was like they were under curfew.
For myself, I remembered my promise to Pauline, and kept my head down. After my initial run in, Garton-Jones’s men didn’t stop me again, but they always seemed to be around, lurking in the background to note my movements. I wondered if they were compiling a dossier.
They popped up out of nowhere the first few times I took Friday for his twice-daily constitutional. The way they suddenly materialised was too constant ever to be coincidence. It was at this point I discovered that, either by good luck or good training, the Ridgeback regarded any approaches on the street by strange men as a hostile act. Afterwards, they steered well clear of us.
As the dog’s senses were infinitely more acute than my own, he provided me with a superb early warning system. If I was on foot, I took him nearly everywhere with me and remained totally unmolested.
Sod’s law, then, that the one time when I could have really used the services of a big fierce dog was also the one time I’d left him at home.
It was another miserable evening. A thick stifling blanket of fog had coasted up from the River Lune and was hanging over Lavender Gardens like doom. Friday had been singularly unimpressed by it during his walk. When I rattled his lead to suggest another outing just before nine o’clock, he slunk onto his beanbag in the kitchen and studiously pretended to be asleep.
It was only a short distance to the shop. I set out alone in search of something as mundane as a pint of milk, and didn’t think I was risking my neck by doing so.
As it was, I cut through another of the little ginnels that dissected all the streets on Lavender Gardens, keeping my head down against the mist that clung to my face like a cobweb. The illumination from the streetlights was reduced to an eerie cone-shaped glow round their bases. I began to wish I’d been a little more insistent with Friday.
The fog muffled sound as well as sight, so that I was almost on top of the men before I realised they were there.
Looking at it clinically, it was a good quiet spot for an ambush. A secluded area tucked away behind the shop, little more than an alleyway, colonised on one side by a row of lockup garages. There were no overlooking windows, and plenty of space to put the boot in.
And somebody was doing that with gusto. Putting the boot in, I mean. I heard the sickening sounds of fists and feet being applied with enthusiasm. Grunts of exertion, and corresponding gasps of pain. So much for Garton-Jones and his boys stopping this sort of thing happening, I thought bitterly.
Without really knowing what I was going to do, I edged closer, staying close to the garages. Gradually the scene unfolded out of the murk. On balance, I think I preferred it when it was out of focus.
There were two men standing with a boy lying buckled at their feet. They were part of Garton-Jones’s merry brigade if looks were anything to go by. I wondered if he made all new staff have the same company haircut.
I moved forwards, keeping slow and careful, although it was difficult to be stealthy with so much loose gravel under my feet. The two men had their full attention riveted on their fallen prey. Their faces told me that’s all he was to them. Blood lust is never pretty, and this was about as ugly as it gets.
The boy was down, but he wasn’t out yet, I’ll give him that. I don’t know how long they’d been working him over, but as I watched, he dragged himself up onto his elbows and tried to escape. To crawl away on his belly, oblivious to how hopeless a cause it was.
The man nearest to the boy let him move a couple of feet, then kicked him brutally in the ribs, hard enough to flip him over. He put all his strength into it, arms splayed for balance, like a pro footballer aiming to blast the ball right through the back of the net.
“You Paki-loving little bastard,” he spat. “You’ve had your warnings, and your chances, but you were too fucking stupid to listen, weren’t you, sunshine? And if this doesn’t teach you a lesson, you know who we’re going to come after next time, don’t you?”
I reckoned I’d let things go about as far as I could stand. Abandoning my cover, I stepped out into open ground, and walked towards them. I aimed for calm, but the rage was bubbling away dangerously under the surface.
As I closed the gap between us, the boy lay mewling quietly on his back, exposed. His clothes were caked with dirt, his face an unrecognisable slab of blood and swelling. He wasn’t Asian, but that was about as far towards identifying him as I could get. Right now, his own mother would have struggled.
The second man moved forwards eagerly for his turn, pulling back his fist to land another grinding blow to his victim’s head.
“I think he’s had enough, don’t you?” I said coldly, pitching my voice ju
st loud enough to be heard.
The men wheeled round in sync, shifting to stand between me and the boy, as if to hide what they’d been up to. Only their faces weren’t ashamed.
“Fuck off if you know what’s good for you,” one of them growled.
“And let you kill him?” I demanded. “What’s the matter – don’t you have the balls to pick on someone your own size?”
The would-be footballer gave me a vicious grin. “Nah,” he said. “And I don’t mind hitting women, neither.”
Just to prove it, he launched himself at me. It was clumsy and obvious, but then, he wasn’t expecting opposition. I made sure I hit him hard enough for his legs to fold under him. Caught the dull surprise on his face as he went down.
Astounded, his partner watched him fall. He came on then with a ferocity laced with guile, feinting me out. I nearly didn’t make it out of the way at all, and thought myself lucky to dodge back, smarting, with just a split lip to show for the exchange.
You should have run, I told myself bitterly, riding another punch. You should have run screaming for the police. They would have left him alone then. Ah well, too late for that now.
When the first man got to his feet and joined in, I knew I was in big trouble. They were brawling without restraint, but I couldn’t free my mind of the last time I’d truly let go. I’d unleashed a demon I couldn’t control, and daren’t try to again.
It was like trying to fight with my hands tied, and eventually it was what overpowered me.
A stunning blow to the side of my head took me off my feet. Once I was on the floor they started in with their boots, as they had done on the boy. It wasn’t exactly what I’d choose to do for fun.
Then, as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. I rolled over onto my side and was aware of a band of brilliant light cutting through the mist. There was no mistaking the bellow of the V8 that accompanied it, rumbling through the concrete under us.
The Dutch-registered Grand Cherokee that had run me off the road only a few days before roared into the mouth of the garage area. The headlights leapt and shuddered as the wheels smacked through the potholes. It slammed to a halt twenty metres away, nodding on its suspension.
