by Mark Pearson
Bible Steve blinked again and then snarled and banged on the window.
‘A corruption! A plague!’ he shouted. His native tongue broader now than earlier that day. His voice raspy with the rawness of the whisky and his outrage. ‘And the Lord says that he who eats with the pigs shall be as swine. Consumption and damnation is your bill. And ye shall pay it in punishment and in death!’
He banged on the window again. The Chinese woman leaned out from the doorway and shouted at him.
‘I call police! I call police! You go now.’
Bible Steve looked across at her and belched. ‘Madam, I shall gladly go now, as per your instructions.’ He belched again.
He looked down at the bottle of whisky in his hand, now empty, and tossed it imperiously to one side. Then glared at the woman once more. ‘As per your commandment, so mote it be!’ He fumbled with his trouser zipper and pulled out his member. ‘If you want me to go I shall go. And great shall be the mic … the mic …’ Bible Steve said, struggling to find the word and then grinned showing a full set of yellowed teeth. ‘Great shall be the micturation!’ he said and began to urinate powerfully on to the window, splashing down onto the pavement. The Chinese woman hopped, horrified, back into the restaurant, flapping her arms and shouting like a startled crow.
Bible Steve looked down and grinned again. ‘And the Lord looked down at the waters that came to pass and he was pleased,’ he said before falling backwards to crash unconscious on the floor, a river of piss still flowing toward the kerbside.
A short while later and in the distance was the faint sound of an ambulance siren. But Bible Steve didn’t hear it. He was snoring like an elephant, and the buzzing, for a while at least, had stopped in his brain.
Above him clouds scudded past, revealing a full moon that hung even lower and fatter in the sky now, its pits and craters clearly visible to the naked eye. Yellow, seemingly, like ancient wax, swollen and pregnant with omen.
The Chinese woman looked up at it and made another gesture. Warding with her fingers and muttering under her breath. She looked scared.
She had every good reason to be.
11.
DR KATE WALKER lifted the eyelid of the man lying supine on the cot in the holding cell and shone a small torch in his eye.
The man’s pupils contracted but he continued to snore. Loudly. She looked over at ‘Slimline’ Matthews and shook her head.
‘Sleeping Beauty here won’t be round any time in the near future.’
‘Not surprised.’
‘Get someone to look in on him in the morning.’
‘The amount of booze he had in him, probably take a day or two before he’s fit for questioning. It wouldn’t be the first time.’
‘You know him?’
‘Oh yeah. Keith Hagen’s been a customer of ours since he was fourteen years old,’ said the sergeant as they walked out of the cell. He closed the door behind them none too gently but the snoring could still be heard.
‘And how old is he now?’
‘Twenty-two.’
‘Really? He doesn’t look older than eighteen,’ said Kate, surprised.
Dave Matthews shrugged. ‘I guess some people have all the luck.’
‘It’s the kind of luck that won’t see him making thirty.’
The sergeant shook his head as they headed towards the custody area. ‘I’m not so sure. The thing is, he only does it now and again. Most of the year he’s as good as gold. Works for the post office, volunteers at a local charity shop most Saturdays.’
‘So what sets him off?’
Dave Matthews jerked his thumb to the moonlight shining through the front window of the police station. ‘The full moon. Brings all the loonies out.’ He twiddled his finger round his temple in case Kate had missed his point.
Laura, who was putting a report behind the reception desk, turned round and frowned at him.
‘Not a term we in the medical profession entirely endorse, sergeant.’
Kate walked across and looked out of the window at the night sky. The moon hung clear for a moment or two, as it had all evening, and then clouds began to drift around it, quicker than she would have thought, and soon the moon was wrapped and hidden and the night was dark.
‘They reckon we’re due snow any time now,’ she said.
‘Shouldn’t wonder,’ the sergeant grunted, looking none too happy at the prospect.
‘Not looking forward to a white Christmas, Dave?’ asked Bob Wilkinson cheerily for a change. ‘Not going all “bah humbug!” on us, are you?’
Dave Matthews’ scowl deepened. ‘We’re spending it at the in-laws’.’
‘Ah,’ Bob nodded sympathetically.
‘Ah, indeed.’
The telephone on the front desk rang and PC Wilkinson snatched it up.
‘White City Police Station?’ he said and listened for a moment or two. ‘Okay, Peggy. Show me as attending.’
He hung up and nodded to Dr Laura. ‘You’re with me.’
Laura looked at her watch. ‘I’m off soon. Can’t you go, Kate?’
‘Sorry. I’m off shift, and I’ve got a pile of paperwork to process before I can get home.’ Kate shrugged apologetically.
‘It’s only Edgware Road,’ said Bob Wilkinson to Laura. ‘Come on, Doctor, the sooner we go, the sooner we’ll be back.’
12.
A SHORT, FAST ride later and Laura Chilvers and Bob Wilkinson were walking down Edgware Road.
There were plenty of people out on the streets. London doesn’t stop for the cold; it doesn’t stop for anything, particularly at Christmas. The restaurants were packed with office parties, and the sound of their celebrations spilled out into the street as doors were opened and closed. A lot of sore heads in the morning, if the raucous laughter and the unsteady balance of people leaving and waving drunkenly for taxis were anything to go by, in Laura’s considered, professional opinion. She stepped aside as one drunken man in his twenties staggered out of McDonald’s and lurched by, clutching a hand to his mouth and hurrying to the kerb looking like he was about to be violently sick. She left him to it. Taking the Hippocratic Oath didn’t mean she had to rush to the aid of every binge-drinking idiot in London. She’d be working round the clock from here to Michaelmas if she did.
Bob Wilkinson was chatting to her as they made their way down the road, moaning about something or other as usual, but she wasn’t really listening. She was thinking about partying herself and the night ahead that she had planned. A new, fashionable fetish-club was opening in the West End and she was looking forward to paying it a visit. A young woman she had met last week at a gay bar in Soho had invited her. Laura had coolly told her she might be there, she might not! The woman was clearly the submissive type, but absolutely gorgeous, and Laura liked to play mind-games, as well as the other games. Mind-fuck them first, she thought to herself, and she was happy to take the dominant role if that was what was required. It wasn’t always her thing, but if the mood took her she’d get into it as much as any of the serious players. S&M was more about the mental than it was about the physical – something women understood a lot better than men in her experience. Laura didn’t consider herself a sadist as such, but she liked giving sensual pain if it was consensual. Not the kind of all-out beatings that some women she had met wanted. The kind that draws blood, leaves serious bruising; she couldn’t even watch that, at some of the clubs and private parties she had been to. She was a doctor after all and the Hippocratic Oath definitely did go against that kind of thing! She smiled to herself at the thought.
‘What?’ Bob Wilkinson asked her as he stopped walking and looked at her curiously.
‘Nothing,’ she said, keeping the smile on her face. She couldn’t imagine what the perennially cranky police constable would make of her thoughts, or her plans for that night. She certainly had no intention of telling him. Her private life she kept exactly that. And when she did attend the kind of clubs like the one she was going to later, she always wore a mas
k and went incognito. A sexy mask, mind. She was not only a doctor but a police surgeon, after all, not the sort of thing she wanted to be public knowledge. Fetish wasn’t quite the new gay yet. Hell, gay wasn’t even the new gay in the Metropolitan Police. She had lost count of the number of women who had hit on her. Some of them married, some with boyfriends, others not. But a lot of them asking her to keep it strictly between themselves. There were some women who were out and proud, of course. Chief Inspector Diane Campbell and her gorgeous girlfriend, who worked in the evidence area back in White City, for one. But a lot of gay women – and men come to that – kept that part of their life separate from work and, in all honesty, she didn’t blame them. It was a lot easier for her to come out as a student going on to be a doctor than it was for a cadet over at Hendon.
‘Down here,’ said PC Wilkinson, snapping her out of her thoughts and heading her off the main drag down a small cul-de-sac of a lane. There were a few shops, closed for the night now; some offices where homeless people were huddled together with their backs against the wall, taking some small comfort, she assumed, from the heat emanating from it. She looked up at the night sky, heavily swollen with snow, and wondered why they didn’t make it to one of the homeless shelters. Maybe they would later. She fished in her pocket and came up with a couple of pound coins. She threw them onto the blanket laid out in front of a young woman seated with a man and another woman, both much older than her. The girl looked up at her. She had the face of an angel, Laura found herself thinking. A malnourished, haunted-eyed angel. Homeless girl by way of Margaret O’Brien. But the girl’s eyes were unfocused as well as enormous and sad, the pupils dilated and huge. God knows what cocktail of booze and pills she was on. Laura wanted to stop and speak with her but the girl mumbled some thanks and closed her eyes, unable to keep them open, and leaned up against the older man next to her.
Bob Wilkinson pointed ahead some twenty yards further on to the Chinese restaurant. An elderly Chinese woman was waving angrily at them. In front of her restaurant window a homeless man lay sprawled on his back, a broken whisky bottle on the pavement near him, his arms outstretched. Cruciform. A hobo Christ nailed to a London side-street.
‘He piss on window,’ the Chinese woman was saying as they approached, still waving her hands around. ‘All the time he come and piss on window, and police do nothing!’
‘Yeah, well, we’re here now, missus,’ said Bob Wilkinson, trying to be placating, but his gruff tone did little to assuage the indignant old woman.
‘Yeah, you here now!’ she continued, spluttering with rage. ‘Then you let him out, and then he come and piss on my window. People eating dinner here! How you like him to come and piss on you when you having your roast beef and gravy?’
Bob looked down at the man lying near his feet for a moment, and then back up at the woman.
‘I don’t think the wife would approve,’ he said.
Dr Laura Chilvers knelt down and put her hand to the unconscious man’s neck. She felt for a pulse, somewhat unnecessarily, for at that moment he made a wet, slapping sound with his lips and grunted. His eyes remained firmly closed, however, and his stretched arms still stayed wide and immobile. Laura looked up at the sky again. Maybe he was welcoming aliens from space. It wouldn’t be the first time a mentally ill person had ended up on the street. Not by a long chalk, and certainly wouldn’t be the last.
She looked down at the man again, wondering what his story was, and then shrugged and nodded up at Bob Wilkinson, who stood with a couple of tall, uniformed police constables that she didn’t recognise.
‘He’s alive at least, I can tell you that much,’ she said. ‘He’s got a steady heart rhythm. Lungs seem to be functioning fine too.’
Bob Wilkinson glanced across at the now-broken and empty bottle of whisky and grimaced sourly. ‘Take more than a cheap bottle of Scotch to kill Bible Steve, I reckon,’ he said.
‘You know him?’ asked Laura.
The sergeant nodded. ‘Don’t know his real name. I’m not sure even he does any more. Everyone calls him Bible Steve. He’s always quoting the scriptures or preaching at people. When he’s not falling down drunk, that is, or pissing on Mrs Lucky Dragon’s window.’
Laura glanced back at the man sprawled on the pavement. He looked like an actor, she thought, but couldn’t remember who he reminded her of. Hard to tell under all the grime and the greasy, matted hair. Maybe an older version of Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, when out-of-his-face on booze. Maybe Oliver Reed in his hell-raising heyday. This man’s hair was dark at one time, she could see, but it was mostly grey now, tangled, long. Impossible to tell what he would look like when he was shaved, shorn and cleaned up. Either way she knew for certain he wasn’t Oliver Reed and was pretty certain he wasn’t Mickey Rourke nor likely to be getting a call from Hollywood any time soon. Cricklewood maybe.
‘Bible Steve we’d call a bit of a nut-job,’ continued PC Wilkinson. ‘But what you medical types would probably classify as having mental difficulties.’
Laura didn’t smile. ‘Whatever he is, he shouldn’t be left out unconscious on a cold night like this. Is he violent?’
‘Not particularly. Harmless enough most of the time. But when he’s had a drink in him, he has been known to swing his fists. No different from most of them on the streets, when they’re out of it on drugs or booze.’
‘He’s pretty much dead to the world now, but you better get him back to the station. So he can’t harm himself. Or anyone else, come to that.’
She stood up and sprayed some antibacterial, disinfectant into her left palm and rubbed her hands together.
Bob Wilkinson gestured to the two uniforms to pick up the sleeping man, his nose wrinkling. The drunk continued groaning, muttering half-formed obscenities, his hands twitching, but he didn’t waken. PC Bob Wilkinson scowled and looked down at the homeless man as they manhandled him to his feet. ‘And for God’s sake put that thing away, and zip him up.’
13.
DR LAURA CHILVERS had only been back at the station for a short while, but had had to see to a couple of forty-year-old businesswomen who had got into a fight in a male lap-dancing club over one of the dancers, and needed minor treatment before being booked; a nineteen-year-old woman who was cycling the wrong way up a one-way street dressed only in her underwear, a feather boa and a Santa Claus hat on her head; and a seventy-year-old retired army general who had become convinced after several bottles of Dom Perignon that he was living in the nineteenth century and that the head concierge at Claridge’s was a Russian cavalry officer, he’d led his own Charge of the Light Brigade with an empty luggage trolley and had fractured one of his shins.
Laura was coming round to Bob Wilkinson’s way of thinking as he led her to one of the holding cells. Nut-jobs. The guest in number-two cell was awake, according to the sergeant, and she could hear it for herself as the sound of his drunken shouts reverberated from the locked room.
‘Lord, you have assigned me my portion and my cup; you have made my lot secure. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance. I will praise the Lord, who counsels me; even at night my heart instructs me. I have set the Lord always before me. Because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken!’
Bob Wilkinson opened the door and held it wide for Laura Chilvers to enter. ‘All right, calm it down, Bible,’ he said. ‘You’re not in Kansas now.’
Bible Steve stood up from the bench-bed, casting his eyes heavenwards and spreading his arms wide, and shouted, ‘It is God who arms me with strength and makes my way perfect. He makes my feet like the feet of a deer; he enables me to stand on the heights. He trains my hands for battle; my arms can bend a bow of bronze. You give me your shield of victory, and your right hand sustains me; you stoop down to make me great. You broaden the path beneath me, so that my ankles do not turn.’
Lowering his arms, he looked at the doctor, then squinted his eyes. ‘I know this harlot!’ His finger jabbed tow
ards her chest and Laura took a step back.
‘No, you don’t, Bible. She just moved down here.’
‘She is a Jezebel! Satan’s spawn.’ He continued to point, saliva running into his beard.
‘She’s a police surgeon from Reading,’ said PC Bob Wilkinson.
‘I think you must be mistaking me for someone else,’ said Laura Chilvers patiently, and smiled at him, trying to calm him down.
The drunken man clasped his hands over his ears. ‘That voice,’ he said, almost reverentially. ‘Are you my angel?’
‘No, like the constable said,’ she replied, ‘I’m just a police surgeon.’
He opened his raw eyes and looked at her, tears welling up now. ‘Are you my guardian angel?’ he asked.
‘I’m nobody’s angel!’ she said. ‘He’s still drunk, Sergeant. Get him some tea and I’ll check back later.’
‘What about—’ the sergeant started to ask her, but Laura was already moving away, her heels clacking on the stone floor.
14.
PATRICIA HUNT STOOD by her bedside window looking out, just as her husband had done earlier in the evening, at their garden below her.
It was late. Past midnight. A few hours into a new day that she was dreading. Had been dreading for years, even though she didn’t know what the day would bring. But, just as her husband felt the ache of arthritis in his bones, so in her bones she knew that their time was coming. Sometimes you can run for ever, but justice is always there ahead of you. Waiting patiently for you.
