by Zoe Sharp
The hairs prickled on the back of my neck. I dumped my tank bag down slowly on the top step, moving up onto the landing with my back to the wall. I ran through a mental checklist of options and actions. Movement, when it came, was sudden enough to be shocking.
A figure reared out of the shadows on the other side of the landing, making me spin round fast. I had an instant flashback to the night before.
I went straight into a half-crouch, with my heart pounding, eyes frantically straining to catch the first glimpse of the angle of attack.
“Bloody hell, Foxy, you don't mess about, do you?”
I recognised the voice and unwound gradually, coming upright. I took a couple of deep breaths to try and slow my body systems down. My hands were clenched so tight into fists I could feel my fingernails digging in to my palms.
The fear had made me suddenly cold, and now I shivered. “Christ, Dave,” I said, annoyed to hear my voice shake. “You frightened the shit out of me.”
Dave grinned. “Better than you beating the shit out of me,” he said. As he came forwards into the light I saw he was dressed in zip-up orange nylon jacket that I thought went out of fashion twenty years ago. If you were into the club scene it was probably right back in now, which shows how much attention I pay.
I picked up my bag again, still feeling ruffled. “What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for you,” he said. The grin died and he was suddenly pensive. “Look, Charlie, I need your help.” His voice grew sober. “There's some serious shit going on at the New Adelphi and I think I could be in danger.”
Fourteen
I considered him for a few moments, trying to gauge if he was serious or just winding me up. I couldn't help but be intrigued. It was worth the trouble of finding out, I suppose.
I pushed the front door open. “Come on in, it isn't locked,” I said.
He looked disgusted. “You mean I've been hanging around on your draughty landing all this time when I could have been lounging around on your—” He saw the state of the living room and stopped short.
“I should point out that this is not my normal idea of good housekeeping,” I told him dryly.
“Fuck me,” Dave murmured in wonder, looking round wide-eyed.
I thought his reaction was a bit over the top. Irritated, I dumped my tank bag down on the table. If I carried on like this, most of the fruit I'd bought was going to be so mashed I was going to have to purée it.
“OK Dave,” I said with a touch of impatience, “what's the script? As you can see, I've got rather a lot on my plate at the moment.”
He swallowed and dragged his eyes away from the slashed furniture. “What happened?”
I sighed, not really wanting to have to explain. “Just cut to the chase, will you?” I said tiredly.
“Sorry.” He finally managed to get his thoughts back on track. “This is just so—” His voice petered out and he shrugged, lost for words.
I glared at him. He took the hint.
“OK, OK. It's just that there's something spooky going on at the club right now. Len and Angelo have been in foul moods since last week, and so's Mr Quinn, but it's been worse the last couple of days. At first I thought it was the fuss over those lads you laid out on Saturday, and having the police round. The way you did that was brilliant, by the way,” he added, flashing me an engaging grin.
I refused to warm to his charm. Disconcerted, Dave ploughed on. “Well, then yesterday I was in the club sorting out some new material. I'm normally there on a Sunday. Anyway, when they came in – Len and Angelo – that is, they didn't know I was there.”
He eased his shoulders nervously, almost a twitch. I didn't interrupt him, waiting for him to carry on. After a pause, he did.
“Len was furious about something, really crazy with it. He was practically screaming at Angelo that he'd gone too far this time, and he – Len – didn't think he could cover up for him. Angelo was just really on edge, not far away from exploding. I thought they were going to start killing each other at any moment. It was scary stuff.”
“So what had Angelo done?”
“I don't know. Len was yelling like a madman, when the boss man walks in.”
“Marc?” I said, startled.
“Yeah,” Dave grinned again at my reaction, more slyly this time. “He broke them up and they all went into the office. They were only there about five minutes before there was all this crashing and shouting going on and they came bursting out of there. Of course, I stuck my head up to see what was happening.”
“And?” I prompted.
“Well, it looked like Mr Quinn had clouted Angelo good style, split his lip and everything. The boss was white with anger. You know how some people go kind of deadly quiet with it? He told Angelo he'd broken the rules and he wasn't going to stand for it, no way. Len looked like he didn't know whose side to go for. I mean, Angelo's his mate, right? But it's pretty obvious he thinks Mr Quinn's the dog's bollocks.”
“But why on earth did Marc hit Angelo?” I wondered.
Dave shrugged. “Search me. Old Angelo's obviously been up to something he shouldn't and got found out for it. Maybe Mr Quinn found out that the kids in the club are not just getting their kicks from the music, if you get my drift?”
He shivered suddenly and when he next looked up at me, there was fear in his eyes. “They saw that I was there, then, and Mr Quinn really lost his rag. He got me up against the wall and told me to keep my nose out of things that didn't concern me. Look.”
Dave unzipped the top of his nylon jacket. It crackled with static as the material folded. If he walked across a man-made fibre carpet and then went out in the rain, he'd probably electrocute himself. Underneath the jacket he wore a T-shirt. The round neck revealed a band of livid bruises circling his throat.
I eyed the yellow and bluish marks with a certain amount of sympathy. After all, I had more or less a matching set of my own. My body seemed to be covered with them. Big blotches like spilt ink on tissue paper. There were so many smaller dabs I'd lost count. “So why are you telling me all this?” I asked, keeping my voice neutral.
Dave tried another grin, but it didn't quite come off. “I'm scared, Charlie,” he admitted. He fastened the jacket right up to the top again and gave me a level stare.
“I need your help,” he said baldly. “I need to know how to look after myself because, I tell you, whatever's going on at the New Adelphi, it's starting to get real nasty.”
“What do you mean, Dave, it's getting nasty at the club?” I asked. I tried to shake off an uneasy sense of misgiving. If this was true, what was Marc's real part in it?
Dave looked indignant. “Isn't this enough?” he demanded, gesturing to his neck.
I gave him a pointed stare. “All that proves is they don't like eavesdroppers,” I told him.
“Oh come on, Charlie! Think about it!” Dave jumped up, agitated, and paced around. The floor was too cluttered in debris for him to make a proper job of it. After a few moments he sat down again, leaning forwards with his muscular forearms resting on his knees, intent. “Look, I've seen quite a few of the kiddies on the dance floor high as kites, even though Mr Quinn swears nobody brings anything into the club, right?”
Reluctantly, I nodded.
“So, they must be getting it from somewhere, yes?”
I nodded again.
“And if they're not bringing it in, they must be getting hold of it after they're inside. If Angelo's been indulging in a bit of private enterprise, and Mr Quinn's found out, he'll be for the chop – one way or another.” He shivered again. “If Mr Quinn’s going to get serious about it, well,” he swallowed, “he won’t want any witnesses, will he?”
“I suppose not,” I agreed slowly. Something wasn’t right with Dave’s argument. Something didn’t gel, but right now I couldn’t put my finger on just what it was.
I knew Marc worked by his own code. The lines he drew might not have matched legal ones very closely. If you stepped over them, h
is retribution would be swift and without mercy. I could almost feel sorry for Dave. His fear seemed genuine, even if I wasn’t sure about the cause.
“So what help do you want from me?”
“Well, like I said, I want you to teach me some self-defence.” He regarded me hopefully, looking anxious when I didn’t immediately respond. “That is what you do, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I agreed tiredly, “but it’s not as simple as that, Dave. You can’t just have a quick lesson and turn into Jackie Chan overnight.”
Without persistent training, knowledge was irrelevant. In fact, it was probably more dangerous than not knowing anything at all. Understanding the right moves for taking the knife away from the Scouser last night would have been useless without an instinctive reflex speed and sense of timing. That only came with constant practice. It seemed I’d been getting plenty of that lately.
“No, no, I want you to teach me regularly,” he said. “I’ll pay.”
I was about to refuse. When I glanced at him he was so tense you could have tuned a guitar by banging his head on a chair and listening to the resonance.
I sighed. “OK, Dave,” I said.
He jumped up again, unable to contain his bounce. He made me feel dog tired by comparison.
“That’s great!” he said. “When can we start?”
“Soon,” I promised. I got to my feet with an effort, my muscles protesting from the brief period of inactivity. The flexibility from Tris’s ministrations earlier seemed to have evaporated. I flicked him a pained look. “Just not right now, OK?”
***
After Dave had gone I made a half-hearted attempt at clearing up a little. At least I managed, with sweat and swear words in almost equal amounts, to turn my shredded mattress over so I had something solid to sleep on.
The locksmith turned up with commendable promptness, only shortly after four o'clock. He was a skinny old bloke with a sorrowful expression, and a foul-smelling cigarette permanently drooping from his bottom lip. For once I was too wearied to protest.
He came in, clucking at the state of the place, and barely concealing his disgust at the lack of security provided by my existing lock.
“Can't beat a good old five-lever mortice,” he said, wriggling his eyebrows. It was only when he asked if the police thought they'd catch the little buggers who'd done it that I realised I still hadn't called them.
It didn't take me long to work out that I wasn't going to.
When he was finished, I thanked the locksmith and secured the door behind him. A locked door might not have proved much of a barrier last time, but I admit it made me feel better.
I ate a thrown-together tea in silence. Mainly because everything I owned that made noise had been comprehensively destroyed. It was eerie and uncomfortable.
Then I dragged myself back out to teach my usual class at Shelseley, rearranging the curriculum so I did as little physical stuff as I could get away with. One or two of my pupils looked curiously at the more visible bruises, but they didn't ask too many questions. I was grateful for their reserve.
I made it home again by early evening, and the time seemed to stretch away in front of me. I tried ringing Jacob and Clare, but there was no reply. Even Sam's answering machine was on. I put the phone down without leaving him a message.
Instead, I managed to uncover the local phone directory, and looked up Terry Rothwell's address. It wasn't too far away, one of the new estates, and the weather was uncharacteristically dry. I had quite a few questions for Terry, not least of which was to find out from whom, exactly, he acquired that damn lap-top in the first place.
My next question would probably have concerned the fact that he chose to drop my name into it, when all I'd been doing was a favour for a friend. As I gathered up my leather jacket and helmet, I was in the mood to get stroppy with someone who wasn't in a position to shout back.
***
I found my way to the collection of streets where Terry lived easily enough, but finding his house was another matter. The planners in their infinite wisdom had used the same name for a Street, an Avenue and a Way, all right on top of one another.
The light was gone by the time I got there. I had to park up and dig out the piece of paper I'd scribbled his address down on before I could discover which one Terry actually lived on. By that time it wasn't worth moving again and I left the bike where it was. I didn't chain it up, just set the alarm, and took my helmet with me.
Wilmington Avenue consisted of a featureless sprawl of brick boxes. They were detached, but only just, with an alleyway between each that was so narrow you could have reached out and touched both walls without stretching.
At first I couldn't work out what looked wrong about the way they were laid out, but then I realised there were no pavements along each side of the road. The pocket handkerchief-sized front lawns ran straight down into the gutter with only a line of edging bricks between the two.
I didn't know how long the estate had been built, but little attempt had been made by the occupants to individualise the houses. A few little stunted shrubs in the gardens, the odd neat planting of small clumps of unidentifiable greenery. In the driveways stood two- or three-year-old sensible saloon cars.
As I rounded a curve in the road I spotted Terry's house. There was nothing very different about the exterior, except for the fact it had his damn great green Merc van parked smack outside. I'd bet the residents' association – and there had to be one – loved that.
I toddled up by the side of the van to the front door, wondering how he put up with keeping it next to the house. It must block out half the light from the downstairs area. It was pretty dark down there as I rang the bell. The door was made up of wooden slats, with long thin frosted glass panes between. I peered through the glass and could see a light on, somewhere in the back.
I rang the bell again, listening carefully for the chime indoors to make sure it was working. I tapped on the glass with my keys as well, just to be certain, but there was no movement inside.
I carefully made my way round the side of the house, squeezing through the narrow alleyway between house and garage. There was a window into the garage and, instinctively nosy, I peered in through that as well. I could just make out the front wing of the Merc coupé in the gloom. If the car and the van were here, Terry surely must be, mustn't he?
Bolder now, I carried on round to the back, looking warily round the darkened fence bordering the garden. There were no lights on in the houses overlooking the rear of the property, which made me feel slightly better. If Terry wasn't in, the last thing I wanted to do was get wrestled to the ground by some rabid Neighbourhood Watch brigade as a suspected burglar.
The back garden was as featureless as the front, with a flat slabbed patio and a couple of steps leading up to a big sliding door. There was a bit of light sliding out down the steps from between partly drawn curtains and I cautiously edged my way over to it.
The first thing I saw, when I looked through, was a picture on the far wall oddly tilted to about a forty-five degree angle. The wallpaper was a horrible mixture of red, grey and silver diagonal stripes. Hmm, very eighties, Terry. I moved round slightly to get a different view, and saw a small table tipped over, with the clock and ashtray that had obviously been on its surface strewn across the carpet.
A kind of fear jerked in me then. Even for someone who was as much of a slob as Terry, this didn't look like normal living conditions. I moved further, jigging from side to side like some obscure exotic dancer to try and get a full picture through the narrow gap in the curtains.
A lampshade was awry, throwing strange long oval shadows up one wall. I caught a glimpse of a sofa, in grey velour, which had a hole in the backrest, the yellow foam puffing out of it like a dirty cloud.
I peered more intently. The place was a mess. There were dark patchy stains all over the carpet. Right at the extreme edge of my vision was the doorway leading, I assumed, out into the hall. On the wall by the door frame was a
handprint. It looked as though whoever had made it had dipped their hand liberally in brown paint, there were drips running down the wallpaper. Perhaps Terry went in for finger painting. Or perhaps . . .
I shook myself, suddenly feeling cold with an unease that gripped me tightly, making it hard to breathe. Without really knowing why, I reached for the handle of the patio doors. Partly to my surprise, they moved.
I should have turned round then. I should have walked away down the side of the house and not looked back, but I didn't. And it probably wouldn't have made any difference to the final outcome, anyway. The train was already rolling down this line, and the brakes had failed.
With my heart pounding against my ribs, and my mouth dry, I slid the door open a foot and slipped through the gap into Terry's lounge.
From inside, the room looked even worse than it did from the garden. The sofa had been comprehensively slashed, the stuffing bursting out from a dozen slits in the fabric. Books, papers and a broken glass vase were scattered across the floor.
I crouched and looked more closely at one of the rusty brown stains. Was it blood? Frankly, I'd no idea. It was dried in, just a dull mark. Where the water from the vase had run across one patch, it seemed paler, but it could have been anything, including beer, or wine.
Who was I kidding? I just knew it was blood. You don't spill alcohol round the place in such a way that it sprays across a room, up the sides of the sofa, on the coffee table, even across the face of the TV.
I moved carefully over to the door and checked out that handprint. It was so detailed that the hand which made it must have been covered in blood. The lounge door, the usual flimsy internal plywood job, had a splintered fist-shaped hole at about shoulder height.
I moved cautiously through into the hallway, looking very carefully each way before I did so, like a kid on a kerb who's just had the Green Cross Code hammered into them. I felt like a character in one of those films where you sit there clenched on the sofa watching, shouting, “No, don't go in there! Get out of the house!” because you know full well the madman with the axe is lurking behind a curtain in the next room.
