RIOT ACT: Charlie Fox book two

by Zoe Sharp

  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 l
east 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.

  I dropped back further, letting the van rocket ahead along the narrowing road. There wasn’t so much traffic to hide behind now, and as we reached the site entrance, the tarmac was clodded with earth from the construction machinery. It wasn’t the sort of surface I wanted to approach at a gallop.

  As the van turned in and bounced over the rough ground, I rode past carefully, and nipped into the old industrial estate next door. Half the ramshackle units were empty. The weathered shabbiness of the letting agents’ signs was a clear giveaway that these weren’t recent vacancies.

  I slid the bike into a narrow gap between two of the boarded-up units that backed onto the new development, and killed the lights and the engine. For a few moments I sat there in the rapidly encroaching darkness, listening to the Suzuki’s aluminium engine ticking and pinging as it cooled down, and chewing over my options.

  I could just turn round and go back to Pauline’s, but if I did that I’d have achieved little more than partial confirmation of Wayne’s story.

  Equally, I could go marching in through the front gate, demand to speak to Mr Ali, and then confront him about his connection with Langford’s vigilante group.

  Forthright, yes, but stupid, also.

  On the other hand, the third alternative was possibly the least attractive. I could squeeze my way through the six foot fence in front of me. Then I could go sneaking around the building site on the other side to see what I could find out that way.

  I had the darkness on my side, coupled with the fact that my everyday leathers are black anyway. They might be a bit bulky to be absolutely perfect for a bit of surreptitious B&E, but at least they were the right colour.

  I left my helmet hanging over one of the bar-ends, but kept my gloves on. It was a good job, too. The planked wooden fence was made from cheap rough timber, and I would have come away with half of it bedded in as splinters.

  I pushed my way through, stepping into the mud on the other side with a disconcerting squelch, and took a quick look around me. There wasn’t much sign of activity, and no-one seemed to have noticed my arrival.

  After a moment to get my bearings, I turned and walked openly in the direction of the site entrance, where I could see several of Mr Ali’s Transit vans parked up. There were numerous big lighting rigs set up and as I moved I threw out multiple shadows from them like a floodlit football player.

  I didn’t see any point in scurrying from one shadow to the next like I was doing a prison breakout. If anyone did spot me, behaving furtively was going to look far more suspicious.

  Still, when I saw Langford picking his way across the mud to one of the stacked Portakabins, I couldn’t help but duck out of sight behind a parked digger. Peering out carefully, I watched him go over to the nearest one, push open the door, and walk straight in without knocking.

  Once he’d disappeared, I came out of cover and hurried over to the Portakabin. Light was flooding out of a barred window in the side opposite the door, and I sidled up close to it.

  Inside, the Portakabin was split into two, with a partition wall and a door down the centre. This turned the half I could see into a smallish square room containing a cheap veneered desk, a brown filing cabinet, and a swivel typist’s chair with a torn tweed cover and the foam stuffing coming out of the seat.

  The room was harshly lit with an unshaded fluorescent tube slung across the ceiling. There was a mess of what looked like architect’s plans spread across the desk. But no occupants.

  I could only assume that Langford had gone into the second room, for which there was no window. If I wanted to find out what was going on in there, I was going to have to get closer. Damn.

  Still, I’d come far enough to be in deep trouble if I got caught, so what was another few feet between friends? As quickly as I could, but trying not to look as though I was hurrying, I moved round to the door on the other side of the Portakabin, and turned the handle. There was enough ambient noise from the diggers to mask any squeaks the hinges gave out, but I put the door to very carefully behind me once I was inside. The latch seemed to make an incredibly loud click as it engaged.

  I tiptoed across the bare
plywood floor to the closed door that separated the outer and inner office, and put my ear against the panelling.

  “It’s going to have to stop, Mr Langford,” came the unmistakable high note of Mr Ali’s voice, tinged with bluster. “Things are going too far. You’ve been doing a good job for me up until now, but this is too much.”

  Langford’s voice, when it came, was so close it nearly made me flinch back. He could almost have been leaning against the frame on the other side of the door. “Don’t back out now, Ali, just when things are starting to get interesting,” he said, insolent. “As you’ve said, I’ve been doing a good job for you, and the wheels are turning. We both know it.”

  Mr Ali had begun to pace, I could feel his footsteps through the wooden floor, making the Portakabin rock. “That is beside the point,” he said, agitated. “People are beginning to suspect something, and I can’t afford for our arrangement to come to light, particularly not after what has just happened.”