by Zoe Sharp
Jav and a couple of his mates were playing at one of the tables at the far end. As soon as they recognised us, they started to scatter.
One of them tried to make a dash for the door past Wayne, who grabbed him with one huge hand, twisting the cue the boy had been about to use as a weapon out of his grasp with disdainful ease, and slamming him against the edge of the nearest table.
“You may as well let him go,” I called across, nodding to where we had Jav cornered. “This is the one we want.”
Madeleine, meanwhile, had walked right up to our quarry.
“Hi Jav, remember me?” she said brightly, then brought her knee up sharply between his legs.
Jav reeled back, gasping, and bumped against the nearest wall. He slid down it to the floor as all the strength leached out of his limbs. Tears sprang to his eyes. Wayne and Attila shifted their feet in unconscious male sympathy.
I grabbed Madeleine’s arm, spun her round.
“This was not how we agreed to do this,” I said in a low growl.
“It wasn’t how you agreed to do it,” she threw back, eyes fired, “I never got to have my say, did I Charlie?”
When I didn’t immediately answer she stepped forwards again and dug her fingers into Jav’s hair to wrench his head up. His face looked more puffy and bruised than it had done when he’d collared me outside the flat, only the night before.
It seemed a lifetime ago.
“This bastard set you and Sean up,” Madeleine went on, voice rising. “Sean took a bullet in the shoulder because of this little shit, and you want me to reason with him?”
I stared at her blankly for a moment as she dropped her hold on Jav’s hair and stalked round me, then I caught the faintest glimmer in her eye.
I shrugged. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. “Well, we’ve a hole dug if we need to use it, Mad,” I said, keeping my voice artfully casual, “but you ice him too fast and we won’t find out what we need to know.”
Jav’s eyes swivelled between Madeleine and me, and back again. He looked beyond us, but Wayne and Attila, bless them, just stood a few feet away like a two-man roadblock, their faces devoid of expression.
I watched as it finally dawned on him that there was no escape. Whatever threats had been made to him, they were nothing in his mind compared to the danger he was facing now.
Madeleine smiled nastily. “Oh, he’ll talk,” she said, and somehow managed to inject just a trace of insanity into her voice, a slightly unbalanced singsong note. “It may take a while, but he’ll talk. They always talk in the end.”
I shrugged again, flicked my eyes dispassionately over Jav’s huddled figure. “Sorry Jav,” I said, sounding genuinely regretful. “You had your chance.”
I started to move away.
Madeleine took one step closer to him. That was all it took. Jav scrunched himself into a ball and started wailing.
“OK, OK,” he yelled. “I’ll tell you! Just keep that crazy bitch away from me!”
I jerked my head to the boys and they moved forwards like they’d been practising for a synchronised display. They dug a hand under Jav’s armpits and lifted him clear off the floor. I swept the loose snooker balls on the table top out of the way and they dumped him on his back in the middle of the green baize.
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 n
ative 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 situation 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 a
nd 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.
