Dead of Night

by Deborah Lucy

  ‘Why are you here?’ asked Temple. He had no more of a wish to get Wallace back to the station and start form-filling than Wallace had. He wanted to go back and see Linda and Amy Davidson, and taking Wallace into custody would scupper that.

  ‘I’m here to find my daughter. Look, please, sir – take a look.’ Paul Wallace had taken a flyer out of his backpack and put it into Temple’s hands. It was a picture of Megon with her name beneath it.

  ‘There’s more in here,’ he said, gesturing to his back. ‘She’s only thirteen and she’s been missing from home for four, nearly five weeks now. I got a text from one of her mates to say that she’d come to Swindon. I’ve been looking for her for weeks around London. I’m from Hackney and now I’m here, walking the streets trying to find her. I must find her. Please don’t stop me looking. She’s my baby and she needs me to look for her.’ The words just tumbled out, so desperate was he to win Temple’s favour.

  Temple looked at the flyer and back to Paul Wallace.

  ‘Please don’t arrest me. I’m sorry. I thought you were after a girl and I wanted to stop you. I wanted to keep her safe. Please don’t arrest me.’

  Temple could see the desperation in his face. As Temple stayed silent, Wallace carried on.

  ‘I swear I’m here looking for my girl.’

  The bloke looked knackered, with dark rings around his eyes and almost frightened since Temple had thrust his warrant card in his face and flashed his handcuffs.

  ‘Yeah, all right, calm down. It’s your lucky night. Look, you’re de-arrested, but only because I’ve got better things to do. I suppose there’s no harm done.’ Temple rubbed the side of his body where Wallace had landed his punch. It was tender.

  ‘Can I get you a cup of coffee by way of saying sorry?’ Paul Wallace nodded towards a street vendor at the end of the road. ‘Try and make up for it?’

  ‘Yes you can.’ They walked further down the road to a white van with a counter flap on the side. The warm, spicy smell and sound of onions and burgers frying hung enticingly in the air and drew in customers. Wallace bought two watery-looking coffees in polystyrene cups. Temple took a sip and winced at the bitter taste.

  ‘I’m also looking for a missing girl,’ Temple confided. ‘Well, at least I think she’s missing. Have you seen her about anywhere?’ Temple showed Paul Wallace a photo of China Lewis on his phone.

  ‘No, sorry I haven’t. There are so many young girls out here on the streets at night. I’ve just got this real feeling that Megon’s out here, you know, as if she’s willing me to find her.’

  ‘How long did you say she’s been gone?’

  ‘Getting on for five weeks now. Her mother’s going mad with worry. She’d be with me, only she’s recuperating from breast cancer treatment, the bloody chemo, and she’s got to look after our other two little ’uns, Megon’s sisters. We’ve got a dog just about to have pups too.’

  Temple felt sympathy for him. It sounded as if he was really up against it.

  ‘You need to watch yourself out here, especially around this area. There are men dealing in drugs and women who won’t think twice about mugging you. Lots of Romanians and Albanians and they’re violent bastards.’ Looking through the steam the coffee generated, Temple took another sip.

  ‘It’s the same where we are.’ Wallace shook his head. ‘We’ve got the estate gangs, boys and girls taking drugs, knifing each other. It’s everywhere. My Megon didn’t stand a chance really, growing up where she did. I know why she ran away – she ran away from her life.

  ‘A shitty London estate, rife with drugs, violence and gangs and then her mum gets ill. Her mum doesn’t even look like her mum anymore, she loses her hair and gets all thin and she thinks maybe she’ll die. Her dad works all day and has barely got time for any of his daughters and she’s got to take all this, look after her sisters, watching her mum lying sick on the settee, walking the bloody dog amongst the scum and their knives and needles.

  ‘And then I get made redundant, so then there’s no money coming in. I can’t even feed them properly, let alone buy her and her sisters the clothes they need just to keep their heads up at school. She’s thirteen and her life’s already shit.’

  Temple felt glad he hadn’t pursued the arrest of Paul Wallace. Listening to what he said, he knew that it was likely that Megon had succumbed to some kind of peer pressure back at home, especially if money was tight and she was trying to survive on a tough London estate.

  Kids were being lured and trapped into drug-running on a large scale by London dealers, on the promise of earning large sums of money. It was a sinister and evil world where kids were cynically exploited. One of the signs of this was that kids were going missing for periods of time. He knew that if Megon was caught up in this, no matter how shit Paul thought her life was before she ran away, it would be ten times worse if she wasn’t found – and fast.

  Chapter 19

  Temple walked around the streets with Paul Wallace, looking for Megon. They stopped by some homeless men and asked if they’d seen her. Paul left them a flyer. They spoke to some members of the Salvation Army and left Megon’s flyer with them. Temple showed him where she might be likely to hang out and told him he would make sure Megon’s photo was circulated with PCSOs and response teams. Temple felt genuinely sorry for him and before he left, said that he would keep a look out for her. They swapped mobile numbers.

  Linda Davidson’s house was dark when he got there. Temple parked further up the road so that he could observe from a distance. She’d said that she and Amy were at the cinema tonight. He was on a rest day after this so really needed to speak to Amy to find out what she knew about China Lewis from the visit the night before, and what China had disclosed to her.

  Temple wasn’t cut out for surveillance; he couldn’t just sit still in a car watching for very long before getting bored. He needed to keep things moving. After an hour of them not showing, he drove off back to the Manchester Road area to see if he could spot the girl he’d seen coming off the train.

  He parked up and went back to the street where he’d literally bumped into Paul Wallace. Where had the girl disappeared to? He hadn’t seen a car pull up for her to get into, but then he’d been upside down on the pavement. And her minder had disappeared before she had. Terraced houses lined one side of the street; on the other side were some shops and small commercial buildings. He walked up and down the pavement looking at the fronts of the houses, trying to form an opinion of what might lie behind. He crossed the road and kept out of sight in a doorway, watching for any activity.

  It wasn’t long before three young men emerged out of a house not far from where Temple had last seen the girl standing on the kerb. Dressed in jeans and T-shirts despite the cold, one was shouting down a mobile. They were arguing but their language was foreign and as he walked across the road, he couldn’t make out what they were saying. They were tall and lean and as they shouted, pushed and shoved each other, their language sounded more frantic and raised in volume.

  He drew closer, under the illumination of a street light. Temple could hear that they were Eastern European. They started to jostle one another; it looked as if a fight was about to ensue. Two of the men traded blows as the third looked around and ran down the road. As the lookout saw Temple approach, he tapped one of his friends on the arm and shouted something. They broke from their fight and looked around; seeing Temple, they turned, running off down the street. Temple knew better than to run after them and instead stopped outside the house they had come from. It was a nondescript run-down terrace with a forecourt, not far from where Paul Wallace had grounded him.

  Just then, the door of the house opened. A large man stepped out and walked towards him. Even with his head down, Temple knew him. DS Simon Sloper. They’d last worked together six months ago, on the same murder investigation that had resulted in Temple now facing a disciplinary hearing. Sloper, the chief witness against him. Sloper, the lying bastard.

  Sloper was also a good frie
nd of Harker. Seeing him now reminded Temple what a pincer movement Sloper and Harker had him in. In just a few days’ time, he’d be standing in a hearing facing Sloper and Harker, and have to listen to their lies. It would be time for Harker to settle the score sheet, as he’d never forgiven Temple for the long-past relationship with his daughter Gemma. As Sloper looked up and saw Temple in front of him, his face changed.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. Sloper showed no respect for the man holding a higher rank than him.

  ‘Working,’ Temple replied. ‘You?’

  ‘Making enquiries.’ Sloper seemed in no mood for talking. In fact, for once he looked a little rattled.

  ‘What’s going on in there?’ Temple nodded towards the door of the house.

  ‘Just some little druggy scumbag who was helping me with my enquiries. Nothing for you to worry about.’ Sloper moved his twenty-stone bulk towards Temple as if he was just going to charge into him. Temple stood his ground.

  ‘Is there a girl in there?’

  ‘No, it’s empty now. I’m off.’ Sloper pushed his bulk past Temple but then suddenly stopped. He stepped back, putting his face close to Temple. ‘So, why are you here?’

  ‘Nothing that concerns you,’ Temple replied. Sloper snorted in response, and drawing himself up, walked off to his car without a backward glance.

  Temple hung around Swindon for a while before going back to the station. With a rest day looming, he’d have to pick up on China Lewis in two days’ time, when he was back on duty. In the meantime, he hoped she would be spotted.

  * * *

  ‘Hey, girl. Come over here. Come and sit by me. Come on.’ The man spoke to her in broken English.

  China Lewis looked over to him. He was vile. They were sitting in the back room of a tiny terraced house. The room was a rectangle shape with two cheap and dirty sofas against the walls at right angles to each other. She was sitting on one sofa, as far away as she could get from the male sitting on the other sofa, but given the size of the room, that wasn’t far. They were both alone in the house.

  She had been there for four days now. She was being held there because she’d lost some drugs and money. She knew this sort of thing happened, of course she did, she’d been around long enough, but she had actually no idea of the danger she was in. Danger no longer registered with her.

  ‘Come and make friends with me,’ he said with a half-smile.

  The man was Eastern European – she didn’t know exactly what country he came from. They all sounded the same to her whether they came from Romania, Estonia, Croatia, Albania. It amounted to the same. To her, they were evil, nasty bastards.

  She looked at him with his close-shaven head. She could see white scars visible on his scalp, tiny ones and larger ones. But that was nothing compared to the one on his face. It started by his ear and snaked across his cheek, ending by the corner of his mouth. It was wide, as if it had healed without being stitched together properly.

  But it was the other side of his face that held the horror for her. His right eye was dead and unseeing, like an opaque, grey, wet marble had been fixed in its place. She was both transfixed and terrified by it as it stared out of his face.

  When he spoke, his attempts at smiling revealed a tooth missing from the upper left side, the dark hole giving his grin menace. Put altogether, he repulsed her. He wasn’t old – she guessed he was about twenty-five – but she found him so ugly that any attempts at being friendly made him seem even more menacing than he already was.

  He’d told her they were his battle scars: battles for territory, turf battles and fights for survival. He wore his scars with pride; they were the marks of the man he was. They showed his resilience and his fearlessness to fight. They were a warning to others. But there was something more than the scars.

  He’d told her that he had killed men, and she believed him. She could feel he had. There was something so cold, so empty about him. He was just a shell. There was nothing human, nothing remotely feeling about him. He was dead. Alive, but at the same time dead. And she couldn’t bear the thought of this man lying on her. But that’s what he was after now.

  It wasn’t that she was scared of him. It wasn’t that. She’d seen so much in her short life, so much that had threatened her very existence, that she had ceased being scared.

  In these situations, she looked to her future; that bright future where she lived a perfect life, with all this behind her as if none of it had ever happened. There she was in her perfect home, with her perfect husband and their two adorable children, where she had everything she ever wanted. She saw it as clearly as she saw this ugly man before her now. She was sure that was the life she was destined to live, she just didn’t know how she would get there. But it didn’t seem like such a giant leap. All it would take was one of the many men she encountered to love her and want to protect her.

  He fingered the scar running across his cheek. He wanted sex now and this girl was here. He was waiting for some friends and he wanted to have her before they arrived. He had been alone there for nearly three hours; left to watch her, make sure she didn’t leave. He had watched her, talked to her and now he wanted her. Still seated, he unzipped his trousers.

  ‘China. China.’ He coaxed her with her name. ‘Come to me, China. Come and see what I have here for you.’

  She gave him a sideways glance. He looked across at her, his half-smile like a grimace.

  ‘You’ve got no fucking chance.’ Her mouth never let her down; it just came out, her spirit leapt up and came out of her mouth. She heard the words like they had been said by someone else. She was sick of being used and she wasn’t going to let this ugly man use her. He chimed her name again.

  ‘China, I’m being nice to you. Come over here. Sit on my lap, China. Do as you’re told for the nice man.’ He was mocking her. He knew she knew all about men, had done from an early age, no thanks to her brother. He was giving her a chance for this to be mutual between the two of them. But his patience would run out if she didn’t shut her mouth and do as she was told.

  ‘You can just fuck yourself, go on. Fuck. Your. Self,’ she retorted, her words spat across to him like a slap in the face.

  His mood changed instantly. Like all the rest, this stupid bitch didn’t realise that he would just take what he wanted. He flew across to her, enraged by her. He would show her how she should treat him. He wanted to choke the words in her throat. He wanted to hurt her, badly. This was not how he should be spoken to. More than once he’d killed for less than this.

  She was taken by surprise, by the speed of his move towards her. There was no time for her to get to her feet. He grabbed her by the throat with one hand while she was still seated and squeezed tightly. She was looking up at him now; he had her full attention. His face was contorted. She could see the gap in his teeth as he grimaced, and the milky white eye in its socket. He continued to squeeze as her hands pulled at the hand at her throat.

  Her eyes were wide and her mouth was open as she fought for breath. She was pulling hard with both hands to try and get him to release the grip round her throat. He was strong. As he continued to throttle her, he was also kicking at her legs, trying to force them to open until he was standing in between them. She felt his free hand tugging at the top of her tracksuit bottoms and her hand instinctively moved there to stop him. He squeezed her throat tighter still, but she would not give up fighting his hand trying to get between her legs. She could see that his jeans were unzipped.

  He was leaning down on her now and she was trapped against the sofa. But she still continued to fight him. He knew she was a hair’s breadth away from losing her life. But he didn’t want to fuck a corpse. His hand then went behind him and from his back pocket he drew a flick knife, pressing the button on it close to her face. As the blade flicked up, her eyes widened in terror.

  At that moment the front door opened and Megon was pushed inside the narrow passageway. With direct line of sight to the pair on the sofa, Megon saw the a
ttack and screamed out her friend’s name. The fat man gripping her arm and the man behind him also saw what was happening.

  ‘Hey, hey, hey! Tarek, no!’ Both he and the fat man behind pushed Megon along the narrow passageway and rushed over to pull him off, leaving China gasping for breath.

  ‘She’s no good to us dead, man, she’s no good to us dead.’ They were trying to calm their friend Tarek, who was visibly angry. He shook off their hands. Megon went over to China to comfort her.

  China was rasping, but she was not prepared to let his assault on her go. With all her energy she let out another rant at him, squeezing the words out through her tight, burning throat.

  ‘You filthy bastard . . . you dirty, filthy bastard. . .’ He went to lunge at her again, the knife still in his hand. The men restrained him, pulling him back, one of them speaking to him in his own language. Before Megon and China had a chance to speak, the fat man clamped hold of China’s arm and took her out of the room and upstairs to a back bedroom.

  ‘Stay in there where he can’t see you. Don’t come back down.’

  She sank down onto a stained and dirty mattress on the floor, her hand at her throat. Megon was downstairs; they had been reunited. But he was down there too. Megon wouldn’t be safe. She could hear raised voices.

  Suddenly she leapt up again and kicked the closed door in anger before slumping back down on the mattress. Her heart was racing; it had all happened so quickly she hadn’t had time for tears. Now they came, hot and angry. She tried to stop them as she didn’t want anyone to know she’d been crying, but she could still feel his squeezing fingers around her throat. She choked back the tears before fear took hold. She had to escape.