by Zoe Sharp
I glanced round the rest of the room. There seemed to be more people than there had been when we arrived. I kept a wary eye on them, but for the moment they didn’t seem prepared to do more than watch.
Madeleine leaned over Jav, turning the blue ball over in her hand, and then clenching her fingers round it. “D’you think I should leave him with his teeth?” she asked.
Jav tried to struggle upright, but Attila put one hand in the middle of his chest and pushed him down hard against the slate. The boy took one look at the German’s impassive face and stayed down.
I moved round into his line of sight on the other side of the table. “OK Jav,” I said. “Talk. Who set us up?”
He twisted his head from one to the other. “It was them security men,” he said, fright making his words vibrate with sibilance, “you know, the ones on the estate. They wanted you out of the way before they grabbed Roger Meyer.”
“They’ve got him?”
He nodded. “Yeah, not for long, though. Lavender’s about to go up in flames. They goin’ to torch them derelict houses, the ones between the estates. When they do, Roger’ll be in one of them.”
“When?” Madeleine snapped at him.
His eyes rolled, showing all the whites. “I don’t know. Soon.”
“How come you know all this?” I asked, wary in case he was still lying to us.
“They got me to scope out a place for them. Told me to find one with a cellar, somewhere they could stash him.”
“We better get over there right now,” Madeleine said.
Jav shook his head. “He won’t be there yet. They don’t want to risk anyone finding him before the place goes up.”
“Why are they doing this?” I wanted to know. “They’re supposed to be protecting the estate. What’s in it for them?”
Despite his fear, Jav looked scornful. “It’s big business, lady,” he hissed. “You didn’t think it was random, did you – the crime round here?”
“So who’s behind it?” Madeleine pressed, but even with her looming over him, Jav couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell.
“Langford knew, though, didn’t he?” I said quietly. “Is that why he took a knife in the chest?”
Fresh dread bloomed on Jav’s features. You could smell the fear in him as he began to struggle afresh.
I knew we weren’t going to get anything further out of him. Besides, the crowd was growing. They still didn’t try and intervene, but there was a burgeoning air of menace about them, nonetheless.
I touched Madeleine’s arm. “It’s time to go,” I said.
Wayne and Attila let go of the Asian boy and left him still lying there as we all moved towards the stairs. The onlookers took in the solid width of the German’s shoulders, and the mean look the black man had contrived onto his normally cheery face, and carefully gave us room to depart.
Once we made it out at street level, I let my breath out slowly, and turned to find Attila frowning, but Madeleine and Wayne exchanging big grins.
“That,” I said tiredly, “was not exactly how I wanted to play this, Madeleine.”
She shrugged. “It worked, didn’t it?” she said, defiant and completely unrepentant. “We found out what we needed to know.”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice grim as I recalled the sea of watchful faces, “but so did everybody else.”
Twenty-five
I thanked Attila and Wayne again for their help when we dropped them off back at the gym, then I retrieved the Patrol, and Madeleine followed me up to Caton.
The rain was still falling, glazing on the windscreen in the oncoming headlights. The day had already started to weaken into evening, the light levels dropping fast. God I hate the winter.
The boys had returned by the time we arrived at Jacob and Clare’s. Sean was sitting propped in one of the kitchen chairs, very much at home, with his left arm in a very professional-looking sling, and Beezer asleep on his lap.
Jacob had broken out a bottle of wine, which I wasn’t sure was a wise move, in view of the amount of morphine Sean had had over the last twenty-four hours, but it wasn’t up to me to tell him that. In any case, Madeleine jumped straight down that track as soon as we walked in, so I was glad I hadn’t opened my mouth.
“So tell me what happened with Jav,” Sean interrupted the other girl’s flow, calmly stroking the terrier’s ears.
Madeleine stopped talking abruptly, realised that she was onto a loser if she pursued things any further, and let it lie.
Clare smiled at her sympathetically. I got the impression she’d already voiced her objections before we’d arrived, and had met with the same outright disregard.
Clare was bustling round making us all some food, a giant native American sweetcorn soup, reinforced with celery and onions. Madeleine was overcome with enough of an attack of good manners to lend a hand.
Weariness was settling down over me like a leaden fog. I can function on around four hours’ sleep a night if I work up to it, but it’s not a combination that works well with high levels of stress.
I dropped into a chair opposite Jacob and Sean, and helped myself to a glass of the dark, almost metallic red. I gave them the bare facts about what had happened that morning, trying to mask the annoyance I’d felt at Madeleine’s actions. It wasn’t easy.
Sean grinned at my carefully worded account, but his amusement faded when we got to the substance of what Jav had told us.
“So, how do we find out when Roger’s likely to be moved into one of the houses?” he wondered.
“Do you even know where he’ll be?” Jacob put in.
I nodded as I sipped my wine, twirling the short fat stem of the glass in my fingers. “I think so,” I said. “Most of the houses were built in the fifties, but there’s half a street of stone Victorian stuff left, right in the middle of No Man’s Land. They’re the only ones old enough to have cellars.”
“That should narrow the search down a bit,” Sean said, frowning in concentration. He eased his shoulder in its sling, flexing his hand. Would he be ready, if it came to a fight?
“As for when,” I said, “I thought I’d see about moving back in with Pauline for a few days so I can keep an eye out from there. I’d be happier being with her at the moment, in any case. Did I tell you someone threw a brick at her?”
This, of course, was news to Jacob and Clare, and the time between then and the arrival of the food was largely taken up with recounting my last visit to Lavender Gardens.
“That dog of hers is worth its weight in gold,” Jacob said. “You don’t think she’d ever want to part with him, do you?”
I remembered at this point that I also hadn’t told Sean about my latest run-in with Garton-Jones. He listened in silence to the sly hints the security man had dropped about him, his face giving nothing away.
“I really will have to do something about that man,” he said at last, and the calm in his voice was chilling.
We none of us talked much once the food was in front of us, and I realised just how hungry I was. The Succotash was so thick you could have eaten it with a fork rather than a spoon. There was Caesar salad, too. We mopped up everything with chunks of fresh bread torn rather than sliced from a crusty loaf.
Afterwards I think it was Clare who suggested we listen to the local radio station, to see if there was anything mentioned on the early evening news about Langford’s murder. There wasn’t, but what we did hear had us abandoning the dirty crockery where it lay, and heading for the door.
“Police aren’t naming the Asian teenager whose badly beaten body was thrown from a moving car in the Lavender Gardens area of the city earlier today,” the announcer said, “but he’s known to be local to the area. His condition is described as critical. Police officials are calling for calm, but gangs of youths are already forming between there and the neighbouring Copthorne estate.
“Reports are coming in that missiles and some petrol bombs have been thrown, although as yet there are no confirmed injuries. The exact situa
tion is unknown as even fire and ambulance crews are having difficulty gaining access. Police are advising everyone to stay clear of the area until matters have been brought under control . . .”
***
Out on the forecourt, it was Madeleine who commandeered the keys to the Patrol, and I surrendered them without argument. At least the rain had eased, but the air was heavy with the promise that more was on its way.
“We’ll come, too,” Clare said, making for their Range Rover.
“No!”
All of them stopped, turned to look at me as I voiced my dissent. I registered uncomfortably that my tone had been just a touch too vehement, and a tad too loud.
Sean stepped in front of me, searched my set face and didn’t find the answers he was looking for written there.
“No,” I repeated, more reasonably this time. “There’s no need for them to come with us.”
“Why not, Charlie?” he murmured. “We might be glad of their help.”
I shook my head. “They’ve done enough,” I said, dogged. “More than enough. I won’t have you risking their safety.”
Jacob appeared at my elbow. “It’s all right, Charlie,” he said gently. “We know what we’re getting into this time, and we want to do what we can.” He put his arm round my shoulders. “You don’t have to keep protecting us forever.”
“I know that,” I said, swallowing, and wished that I believed it, too.
Jacob seemed to take that as agreement. He released me with a reassuring squeeze, and he and Clare climbed into the Range Rover. The rest of us piled into the Patrol, with me in the back seat. Madeleine led the way, our headlights bouncing wildly in tune to the rutted drive.
It wasn’t until we’d almost reached the edge of town that I realised how quiet she’d gone since we’d heard the news report.
“It’s my fault, isn’t it?” she asked finally, not taking her eyes off the road ahead.
Sean, busy in the process of squirming out of his sling, twisted in his seat to face her. “What is?”
“Well, that was Jav, wasn’t it, who was beaten and dumped?” She flicked her gaze briefly to mine in the rear-view mirror. “Did you know something like this was going to happen?” she wanted to know. “That was why you wanted to handle things more quietly this morning, wasn’t it? I didn’t realise . . .”
Her voice trailed off and for a few moments there was no more noise inside the cabin than the roar of the Patrol’s tyres, and the rumble of the engine. It was a measure of her error, I thought, that even Sean hadn’t leapt straight to her defence.
“I don’t think it would have made any difference however we’d tackled him,” I said slowly, almost surprised to find myself giving her a way out.
My thought processes creaked laboriously into action. “We know that Garton-Jones doesn’t like leaving loose ends, or witnesses. I think this was probably what he had in mind all along. It’s so neat, isn’t it? He needed the right trigger to grenade the estate, and this way he not only achieves that, but he also gets rid of Jav now his usefulness is exhausted.”
Madeleine stopped as the set of traffic lights across Parliament Street turned red against us. “But why did they want to cause a riot in the first place?”
“I don’t think they did, not originally,” I said. “I think it just mushroomed until all they could do was go with the flow.” I remembered that conversation – more like a confrontation, really – I’d had with Nasir over the garden fence.
“Violence – that’s all you people understand!” he’d spat. “Well, I hope you’re happy now with the trouble you’ve caused, spying on us. You and your fascist bully boys! But you make the most of it while it lasts, because I swear to you that we won’t lie down and be beaten for much longer!”
I repeated his words to Sean and Madeleine now. “The only thing I can’t understand is why he thought I was tied in with Garton-Jones in the first place,” I said.
“Maybe it was just because you both arrived on the estate at more or less the same time,” Sean suggested. “Who knows how their minds were working.”
“But if that’s the case, then the gangs may well hold you partly responsible for Nasir, and for what’s happened to Jav,” Madeleine pointed out with apprehension clear in her voice. “Getting in there to get to Roger is going to be that much more difficult.”
Sean gave us both a tired smile that didn’t quite make it to his eyes. “I never thought it was going to be easy,” he said.
***
Once we’d got over Greyhound Bridge we realised that the orange glow we could see in the distance didn’t come from the streetlights. Smoke and flames billowed up into the darkened sky, scattering burning embers which were caught and carried by the wind.
“Oh God,” Madeleine said, “it’s started already.”
“Either that,” I muttered, “or Heysham Power Station’s finally done a Chernobyl.”
A fire engine came screaming past us then. Madeleine stuck two wheels into the gutter as he overtook, giving him room. A police Sherpa was close behind, with the riot shield flipped up above the windscreen like a visor.
We slowed to a crawl by the entrance to Lavender Gardens. Where the panda cars had been parked earlier in the day was now a crush of different police vehicles. The Sherpa pulled up in the midst of them and began to disgorge men in full protective gear, carrying four-foot clear polycarbonate shields.
A dark blue horsebox was ignoring the double-yellow lines on the main road, under the streetlights, but I don’t think the driver was likely to get a ticket. The ramp was down and four big well-muscled police horses were being hurriedly led out. They had riot gear on, too.
Madeleine was abruptly waved on by one of the fluoro-jacketed coppers directing traffic.
“Move it on,” he shouted. “Now!”
Madeleine wound down her window. “What’s happened to the residents?” she demanded. It would have taken a more determined man to have ignored her.
The copper jerked his head. “The ones that aren’t still in there are down at the Black Lion,” he said, grudgingly. “Now get this thing shifted!”
We moved away, heading for the pub where I’d attended the Residents’ Committee meeting. This time, though, there’d be no Langford sneering at me from a corner of the bar.
Most of the residents of Lavender Gardens seemed to be crowded together in the car park outside the pub. They milled around with the kind of shell-shocked lethargy that overwhelms disaster victims the world over.
We pulled up by the entrance, and Jacob slotted the Range Rover in behind us. We all jumped down onto the tarmac.
As soon as I was out, I’d started moving. “Look for Pauline,” I called back.
“But what about Roger?” Madeleine asked.
I turned briefly. “If we’re going to have to go in there we only want to do it once,” I said. “If Pauline hasn’t got out yet, we may as well get two for the price of one, don’t you think?”
Nobody argued and we pressed on. It wasn’t easy to pick out one specific person in the darkened mass, but eventually it was the flash of the white dressings on Pauline’s face that led me to her. That and Friday standing rigidly at her feet.
When I got closer I discovered that Pauline was also holding Mrs Gadatra’s youngest, Gin, wrapped in a blanket and fast asleep. Mrs Gadatra herself was sitting on part of the low car park wall a few feet away, her arms wrapped round her body, weeping loudly.
Aqueel was standing stiff and scared next to his mother, with one hand clutching at her shoulder. He was staring at her as if she’d suddenly grown another head. I called his name, and the look of utter relief that passed across his features when he recognised a friendly face was heartbreaking.
Pauline threw a shaky smile towards us as we approached. She was dry-eyed, but very pink around the lids to show what that was costing her.
“They burned the houses,” she said, trying unsuccessfully to stop her chin from wobbling. “We only just got out in wha
t we’re standing up in.”
The simple statement sent Mrs Gadatra off into a fresh spasm of grief. Her words were partially obscured by the frenzied chop of the police helicopter as it swung low overhead, heading back towards the estate. The searchlight mounted under the front stabbed into the darkness.
“You can’t stay here,” Clare said with a decisive edge. “Come on, Pauline and you, too, Mrs G. You can all come back to the house with us.”
When there were signs of objection from both women, Clare went straight for the emotional jugular. “You can’t leave the children standing around all night in this cold,” she said briskly. “Besides, it feels like it’s going to pour down again at any minute.”
Mention of the impending weather seemed to be the deciding factor. Mrs Gadatra and Pauline allowed themselves to be shepherded towards the Range Rover then. Madeleine had taken Gin from Pauline. The little girl had woken up as soon as she was moved, but she made no protest.
Clare dug in the glovebox and produced a tatty bag of chocolate limes, her emergency stash. Aqueel and Gin accepted this offering with some fervour, a symbol of normality in an otherwise blown-apart world.
“If we’re going to leave, I should tell that nice young girl from the Social Services,” Mrs Gadatra said, fussing. “They came round and took names, to try and find us temporary shelter,” she explained. “I will tell her they can give our place to some other poor family. Aqueel, look after your sister.”
Jacob and Clare said they’d go with her. The three of them hurried off through the crowd, and were soon gone from sight in the crush.
Pauline was standing staring back in the direction of Lavender Gardens, hugging her thin cardigan around her shivering body. Friday was glued to her leg. Sean retrieved a rug out of the back of the Patrol and draped it round Pauline’s shoulders, ignoring the warning growl from the dog.
“I don’t suppose you’ve seen anything of Garton-Jones and his men since this all kicked off?” Sean asked her quietly.
Pauline shook her head. “I understand they’re still in there, though, doing what they can,” she said. She glanced across at me. “I know you didn’t think much to Ian – I didn’t, for that matter – but if it wasn’t for him, we probably wouldn’t have got out of there at all.”
