by Zoe Sharp
He tailed off the sentence artfully and stacked his papers on the table in front of him, preparing to clear them into his briefcase. West took his cue and stood, also.
The Residents’ Committee man realised they were about to leave and started to panic. Surely, he said, his voice shaky, there must be some room for negotiation, some scope to talk about this?
“I’m so sorry, but myself and my colleague here have been over and over these figures to see if there was any way at all we could reduce them, but they’re pared to the bone, I’m afraid,” Garton-Jones shrugged regretfully, then put a forced brave face on. “Still, never mind, hey? I’m sure you people will manage without us somehow.”
The way he allowed just a fraction of doubt to cloud his voice at the end there was a masterful touch. All the passion he’d shown when he cornered me and made his threats to Friday might have never existed.
Without haste, the two Streetwise men finished packing away their papers, leaving the Residents’ Committee stuttering.
“Look, obviously you need to think things over and let us know one way or the other,” Garton-Jones said smoothly to the spokesman, as though the whole thing was of no real importance to him. “Why don’t you make your minds up and let us know – say before the end of the week? We’ll stay until then, anyhow.” He smiled, friendly for all the world. “Least we can do.”
And with that, they strolled out, leaving turmoil behind them.
The Residents’ Committee man, who’d looked so sure of his ground when he objected to the price hike, now looked doubtful and bewildered. His eyes darted quickly about him, checking to see if he was going to be generally blamed for this sudden turnaround in fortunes.
Somebody else spoke up, asking for suggestions.
I waited a few seconds to see if anyone was going to be brave. When it became obvious they weren’t I took a deep breath, and waved my hand.
“I know that strictly speaking I’m not really entitled to stick my oar in,” I said. “I’m only on the estate temporarily, but from what I’ve seen your problems are being caused by a small, but active minority, yes?”
I looked around me, and received one or two cautious nods. Madeleine was watching me with a sudden stillness. Mind you, so was everybody else. Perhaps calling attention to myself like this wasn’t such a hot idea. Ah well, too late now.
“All I’m saying is,” I went on, “that there’s nothing to stop you taking the responsibility for your own security yourselves.”
The Residents’ Committee man snorted his derision, glad to be back on safe ground again. “We have tried Neighbourhood Watch before. It isn’t enough,” he argued.
Cautiously, I agreed that Neighbourhood Watch schemes were a start, but the difference they actually made to crime figures wasn’t that great. “On the other hand, recruiting what amounts to a gang of mercenaries to garrison your streets is inviting disaster. I’m sorry.” I shrugged. “But it is.”
“So what do you propose? That we do nothing?”
I took a deep breath, and launched into the details of a plan they could put into action themselves. It wasn’t so much Neighbourhood Watch, more Neighbourhood React. The idea was not that they hid behind their net curtains and watched the crime happening outside, they needed to react to it.
So, if kids were vandalising cars in the street, the entire population of that street had to come outside and tackle them about it. It was a straightforward safety-in-numbers tactic. Even the bravest vandal will think twice about taking on a crowd of fifty, or a hundred, no matter what their age and ability.
There was a chain system they could easily put into operation, where the first person to spot a crime taking place would ring two neighbours, who would each ring another two, and so on. The whole street could be mobilised in minutes. Far quicker than any police response. Far cheaper than Garton-Jones and his men.
“All you need to do is get to know each other, keep in contact, and keep an eye out for each other,” I said at last. “If you don’t learn to look after each other, you’re going to have to pay someone else to do it for you forever.”
I glanced round the faces. Some looked enthusiastic, others dubious, but the majority showed little emotion. I really had no idea whether I’d got through to them or not.
“So, Mr O’Bryan,” said the Residents’ Committee man, “what is your opinion of this scheme?” In the absence of anyone better, I suppose he was the nearest thing to a professional there.
O’Bryan’s features were noncommittal as he slowly pulled a cigarette out of a new pack, and put a struck match to the end of it. For a moment, as he regarded me narrowly through the fresh smoke, I thought he was going to rubbish the idea.
“I’m always reluctant to advise anybody to confront criminals,” he said eventually, almost diffidently, “but this sounds like it’s got legs. I think you should get some detailed proposals from Miss Fox and give them some serious consideration.”
The meeting broke up about then. I found myself agreeing to put something together for the Residents’ Committee before Garton-Jones’s deadline ran out, and joined the throng as they headed out.
I looked round for Madeleine and saw that she’d managed to get to the exit ahead of me. Trying to push through to get to her proved difficult, and by the time I reached the car park she was just about to climb into a black cab that had pulled up in front of the pub. I started forwards, intent on speaking to her.
“Miss Fox.” It was O’Bryan’s voice that stopped me. He came jogging out of the doorway of the Black Lion, car keys in his hand. “Ah, I’m glad I caught you,” he said, panting slightly. “Can I offer you a lift?”
I eyed Madeleine’s back disappearing into the taxi with a certain amount of resignation, then turned back to O’Bryan and lifted my bike helmet. “I have my own transport,” I told him.
“Ah, yes, of course you do,” he said, pausing awkwardly for a moment. “I’m parked just at the back there. Can I walk with you?”
I thought it an odd request, but shrugged my compliance. If nothing else, it was a bit of insurance just in case Langford had decided that tonight was the night he wanted his revenge.
We moved round to where I’d parked the Suzuki, and I noticed a dark green MGB roadster, with wire wheels and plenty of chrome about the grille, parked a couple of spaces away from the bike.
“I like to leave it well out of harm’s way,” O’Bryan confided unexpectedly. “Some people are very careless of your paintwork when they open their car doors.”
“Don’t I know it,” I said, bending to unlock the chain from round the bike’s back wheel. I stood and nodded to the MG. “It seems you’ve got quite a classic car collection.”
“Oh,” O’Bryan looked both embarrassed and pleased. “Another one I restored myself,” he said, pride uppermost. “I enjoy picking them up for a song and doing them up. That old thing was laid up for years. It was in a pretty sorry state when it came to me. Still, the thrill of getting them back out on the open road makes all the hard work worthwhile.”
“How’s the Merc?” I asked.
He blinked and the smile went out. “It’s going to take a bit of effort to get that back up to scratch,” he said, and the steely glint was back in his eyes again. “That was one of the reasons I wanted to speak to you, actually.” He hesitated before going on, occupying his hands with the business of lighting another cigarette.
I shifted from one foot to the other, trying not to shiver in the cold, and said oh yes, in a manner that I hoped was designed to prompt him on.
“Well,” O’Bryan said carefully, “I wouldn’t like you to find yourself in the same position, Charlie. Where they pick you out, I mean, make you a target. And if you take these kids on, set yourself up as some sort of leader in the fight against them, they will mark you out, believe me.”
He paused again, drawing on his cigarette. Took it out of his mouth and expelled smoke upwards into the chilled evening air like an industrial chimney. He glanced at
me, his gaze calculating. “They’ll make it personal.”
Personal. I was on familiar territory there. The thing was, did I have to watch out for the kids who were causing the crime, or Garton-Jones’s thugs who were supposed to be preventing it? Was I supposed to be guarding against the likes of Roger, or protecting him? And where the hell did Sean fit in to all this?
I swung my leg over the bike, then looked back at O’Bryan levelly. “Thanks for the warning,” I said, “but I know all about things getting personal, and I rather think they already have.”
***
My words to O’Bryan might have had the ring of bravado to them, but for days afterwards I lived with my nerves on a knife-edge.
Particularly after I’d put together some proposals for the Residents’ Committee on how they could take over from Streetwise Securities and do the job themselves. It was a simple basic idea, that just involved people finding out a little about their neighbours. Their names and phone numbers for a start, their daily routines.
After that, if someone noticed anything out of the ordinary, they would have a network of neighbours to call upon for help. It was a system designed to build up, street by street, until the whole of the estate could be brought together into a proper community scheme.
Well, that was the theory, but whether it would work in practise or not was something else. In my experience, neighbourly disputes and personality clashes could drive wedges deep enough to bring the whole thing down round their ears. Still, trying it had to be better than leaving matters up to Garton-Jones on an indefinite basis.
The Residents’ Committee must have thought so, too. According to Mrs Gadatra, who seemed to have an inside hotline, when his end-of-the-week deadline hit, they told him they’d decided to try another way, and had regretfully dispensed with his services.
“And how did he take that?” I’d asked with some trepidation over the garden fence.
“Very well,” Mrs Gadatra reported. “If anything, he seemed enthusiastic about the whole idea.”
“You’re joking,” I said, unable to believe he hadn’t gone ballistic.
“No, no,” she assured me. “He just offered to renew his company’s services at some later date, if required, and left it at that. He was really quite gracious in defeat.”
I began to think I must have imagined his vehemence that night in the street, but I knew I hadn’t. There was some wider game at stake here. I only hoped it wasn’t part of Garton-Jones’s plan to bring about his return in the wake of a sudden, violent return to disorder. It was a worrying thought.
With that and O’Bryan’s warning in mind, I stayed away from Kirby Street as much as I could during the following week, without actually breaking my promise to Pauline. The gym became a sort of sanctuary, away from the dark corners of Lavender Gardens.
I went back to my martial arts training, tried to find calm and focus in the balletic smoothness of the moves, the intellectual control. And when that didn’t work, I beat seven bells out of Attila’s punchbag.
Even the big German noticed something was wrong. He had the knack of spotting physical problems developing at a very early stage by the way someone held themselves as they hauled on the rowing machine, or lifted a set of weights, but mental and emotional trauma usually passed him by.
“You’re looking tense, Charlie,” he said, watching me send the punchbag swinging wildly in a flurry of fists and feet, elbows and knees. He folded his massive forearms across his sculpted chest, head on one side as he regarded me with a frown cutting deep between his eyebrows. He nodded towards the canvas bag. “Want to tell me who you’d rather was hanging there?”
I turned, surprised, and wiped the sweat out of my eyes. “I could just be doing this for exercise, you know,” I said, ruffled, trying not to gasp for breath. And I thought I was getting fitter.
“Oh, yeah, for sure,” Attila dismissed. “But to me this does not look like exercise. This looks like training. So, who are you training to fight, because he looks like one tough customer, yes?”
“I’m not training to fight anyone,” I denied, straight away, but even as I said it, I wasn’t sure if it was true. “At least, I don’t think so,” I added.
Attila sighed, and came to sit on the bench nearest to me, a doleful expression on his square face. “You have a lot of scars, Charlie,” he said gently. “And not all of them, I think, are on the outside.”
For a moment I said nothing. The only sound was a slight squeaking as the punchbag rocked to and fro. Instinctively, I reached out and stilled it. It gave me something to do with my hands.
“So,” Attila went on when I didn’t speak, “I think maybe you are training to fight your own demons. You are trying to come to terms with whatever has gone before, and maybe you think that by being strong, by being quick, by being ready, you can beat them next time, yes?”
“Oh, I’ve already beaten them. It’s not the memory of what’s happened in the past that I’m frightened of, Attila,” I said, giving him a twisted smile, “but I tell you, the prospect of what I might do in the future scares the shit out of me . . .”
Nine
I don’t know if I’d worried Attila unduly, but out of the blue he decided that I could go early that afternoon, and I left around half three.
“We’re quiet, and the weekend’s coming up,” he said, when I protested. “Go home, Charlie. Relax. Try and unwind a little, yes?”
“OK,” I agreed eventually, even though I knew I wouldn’t.
The life was already starting to fade out of the day as I rode through town and across Greyhound Bridge. Lancaster sits on the tidal estuary of the Lune, and that afternoon the tide was well out, leaving great expanses of stony sludge exposed to the greying light. There was a bitter wind sizzling in from Morecambe Bay, too. It whipped up over the exposed bridge, and the bike shied away from each gust.
Still, at least there wasn’t much traffic to dice with, and I was soon winding my way through the streets of Lavender Gardens towards Kirby Street. Perhaps it was my imagination, but without Garton-Jones’s paramilitaries lurking round every corner, the estate looked less grim, somehow.
At least the kids felt unharassed enough to be back playing out, despite the cold and the rapidly gathering gloom. They practised their guerrilla tactics among the parked cars, making me slow to a crawl as I threaded my way among them.
I was almost at Pauline’s when a Transit van turned into the other end of the street and came speeding down the middle like the TV reconstruction of a hit-and-run. The driver held it in a low gear, the transmission whining in protest.
I pulled over into a gap, put my feet down, and waited for him to go past. It was one of Mr Ali’s green and purple vans, and I made a mental note to ask him to have a quiet word with his drivers when I saw him again.
What I saw next pushed that thought right out of my mind. Instead of shooting past me the van pulled over right outside Pauline’s house, and the passenger door swung open. I could see there were the obligatory three men in the front. For some reason there are always three men in the front of a Transit van. As I watched, the one on the furthest left hopped down to let the middle passenger climb out.
I was getting used to seeing Nasir in unexpected company, but this time it wasn’t the Asian boy who was out of place. He reached back into the van for his flask and sandwich box, and nodded to the driver.
It was the other passenger who caught my eye. He seemed reluctant to move out of Nasir’s way, standing close up to the open van door, deliberately obstructive. I wondered what it was that was lacking about Langford’s psychological make-up that made him particularly enjoy that kind of game. Nasir had to go out of his way to step round him carefully.
The vigilante broke into a big smile as he recognised the boy’s submission. It was like something out of a wildlife documentary about the pecking order of baboons.
He waited until Nasir had walked about halfway down the drive towards the house, then called after him, “Hey,
Nas!” The boy refused to give any sign of having heard him, so Langford added, “Give my regards to the ladies, won’t you?”
He laughed at the way Nasir’s stride faltered, and climbed back into the van. “OK, drive on,” he said to the other man, who’d stayed morosely silent during the brief exchange. “Take me to your leader.”
The driver rammed the van into gear with a crunch and gunned it away down the street. The sense of realisation settled over me slowly. Wayne had told me that Langford used to turn up and collect a pay packet from Mr Ali every Thursday.
Today was Thursday.
With only a moment’s hesitation, I paddled the Suzuki round in a half circle, and followed the van.
There was only one logical way out of the estate, so I didn’t have to try and look too casual until we reached the main road. The van turned left, and headed towards Morecambe. I purposely allowed a few other vehicles to go by before I pulled out after it.
The Transit was easy to keep track of among the cars, particularly as the streetlights started to come on. If the driver’s reckless lane changing was anything to go by, he wasn’t using his mirrors much, in any case.
At the roundabout just past the college, the van veered off to the left and started to head towards Heysham. The manoeuvre was so abrupt that for a moment I thought he’d spotted me although, logically, I didn’t see how he could have done. I kept up the pursuit.
I nearly lost him as he turned off the escape road they put in just in case anything goes seriously pear-shaped – or should that be mushroom-shaped – at the nuclear power station. I got pushed out of lane by an Irish trucker who was obviously late for his ferry, and had to do another quick circuit of the roundabout to take the right exit.
By this time, though, I’d a fair idea of where they were heading. There was a new three-storey office block going up on the edge of one of the industrial estates. Construction problems had ensured that it had made the local news a few times. I seemed to recall that Mr Ali’s firm had the contract.
