by Nicky Black
‘Sink’s just in the corner, there,’ she said.
Sally sat slumped on the edge of the bed while he washed his hands. She was in a “normal” ward now, Doctor Flynn deeming her recovery quite the miracle. She was going to write an article about it, she said. Might even get published in the British Medical Journal. She seemed very pleased with herself for a woman who’d called his daughter Sarah on more than one occasion.
After drying his hands, he helped Sally into bed, pushing her shoulders back against plump pillows. She smiled. It was meagre and frail, but it was a smile nonetheless.
‘Won’t be long before you can talk, they say,’ Peach said, sitting on the bed and straightening the sheet around her waist.
Sally’s smile faded, but her eyes stayed on his.
‘And you know, there’s nothing you can’t tell me.’
She looked down quickly, pointed at her throat. ‘Hurts,’ she croaked.
‘Your headmistress is a bit uptight.’
Sally sank further down into the bed.
‘That’s okay.’ Peach rubbed her arm, reading her face; there were always clues in faces. ‘You rest, I’ll be back later. And tomorrow morning. And tomorrow night, and the day after, and the day after that.’
Her eyes glazed over.
‘And when you’re strong enough, we’ll talk,’ he added pointedly.
‘Mr Peach?’ Pamela stood at the curtain. ‘There’s a phone call for you.’
With a wink at Sally, Peach rose from the bed and followed Pamela to the nurses’ station, picking up the receiver of the telephone.
‘Thought I’d give you the heads-up.’ Murphy’s voice was low and conspiring. ‘McNally’s looking for you, and between you and me, boss, he’s going fookin’ mental.’
Minutes later, Peach strode out of the hospital where Ben Stone from the Northern Gazette and the African nurse smoked and drank tea from polystyrene cups, their smiles fading as Peach walked across the ambulance bay. Behind them a small crowd of men and women in sharp suits stood at cars and vans displaying various logos: BBC, ITN, and some he’d never heard of. Peach paused for a second, and the African’s smile returned – too bright, too shiny, and Peach wondered if he was telling Ben Stone the whole story about Sally’s recovery, or whether he was milking the Northern Gazette for every penny they were prepared to give.
He pulled up the collar of his Mac as he headed to his car, but to no avail. He heard the squalling cries of the mob approaching him and he quickened his pace.
‘Detective Chief Inspector? How is your daughter? Do you know who supplied the drugs? Will the police be making any arrests?’
Reaching his car in the nick of time, he opened the door into one of the polystyrene cups that sent brown liquid coursing down Ben Stone’s shirt. He turned the key in the ignition as the microphones bounced off the windows, reversing the car without regard for the reporters who sprung out of its path. He wouldn’t tell them she was on the mend. Not just yet. Not when it might get him what he wanted.
***
At the station, he took a deep breath before opening Superintendent McNally’s door. Murphy was right, his boss was livid, and McNally commenced his rant before Peach had even stepped over the threshold.
‘I am this far away from putting you on gardening leave.’ McNally held up a forefinger and thumb to get his point across. ‘That’s if you’re not suspended immediately, which is possible. No, probable.’
Another armed robbery on a petrol station and a ram raid at the Metrocentre over the last two days had been added to the mounting catalogue of serious crimes that were going uninvestigated. And now a “moral panic” was swarming the media, and everyone was up in arms. Sally’s half-dead face was plastered on every newspaper in the land and every television news item carried it as their headline, and the Chief Super was on his way to bollock them both.
Detective Chief Superintendent Forbes was a rough-as-you-come man with broad cheeks and a shiny, bald head. Brought up on the Meadows Estate in North Tyneside – a place that made Valley Park look like Disney Land – he had a look of Buster Bloodvessel and didn’t take shit from anyone. Forbes’ use of slang words and phrases had left McNally mystified in his early years in the north-east, and Peach had often had to step in to translate.
‘You better keep quiet and let me explain,’ said McNally, every word straining on a leash. ‘You’ve been under a lot of stress, so we might get away with some extended sick leave.’ He was talking to himself now, thinking about how he could explain away his own ineptitude. ‘But you’ve crossed the line, Mike. I’m … I’m disappointed.’
Peach took a chair opposite McNally. They’d been friends once. Their wives had tried being friends. There was a time Kathleen had talked non-stop about Patricia McNally as if she were some sort of goddess: a career, kids, lovely home, great cook, witty, clever, beautiful. The list went on. He looked at McNally now: knackered, cynical, and old. That’s what happened when you married Wonder Woman.
Seeing McNally stiffen, Peach turned as the door was flung open and the chief superintendent stood in the doorway in full uniform, his hat under his arm. He didn’t say a word, just stood there in all his fatness. Breathing. His face was frighteningly taut, and Peach thought he heard McNally whimper as Forbes strode in and sat next to Peach in a chair that creaked under his weight.
The chief super didn’t believe in pleasantries. ‘What in the name of fuck is going on?’ He threw his hat onto McNally’s desk.
Peach kept his eyes down, hands clasped, rolling his thumbs around one another.
‘You bollocking idiot,’ he heard Forbes snarl. ‘You’ve let this get completely out of hand.’
Peach glanced up to find the chief super’s eyes trained on McNally.
‘My bastard phone’s never stopped all night. Fucking MPs calling me at all hours. And you know what I’m like when I don’t get my sleep!’ A bit of spit hit McNally’s desk as Forbes pronounced the “p” of sleep.
McNally flushed. ‘DCI Peach and his team have put a stop to the last two warehouse parties—’
‘One of which put his bairn in hospital,’ said Forbes. ‘Why didn’t I know about it?’
‘I didn’t want to bother you with it, sir,’ said Peach. Team?
McNally’s shoulders fell, and Peach felt his boss’s betrayed eyes burning into him.
‘Sir.’ Peach spoke directly to Forbes, ‘if I may.’
‘Get on with it,’ said Forbes.
Peach leant forward, elbows resting on his knees. ‘These raves are highly dangerous, held in totally unsuitable locations. There’s considerable organisation involved, but, equally, the amount of deception and disregard for safety and the concerns of the local community are outrageous.’ He’d rehearsed it, more than once.
‘Doesn’t bear thinking about,’ sniffed Forbes. ‘Death-traps for thousands.’
‘Hundreds, sir,’ said McNally. ‘Let’s not get sensational—’
‘We have reason to believe that the next rave will attract many thousands, and that some serious criminals are involved,' said Peach.
‘Drugs?’ barked Forbes.
‘Sir,’ McNally said with renewed assurance. ‘Every time we’ve raided one of these parties, there’s been no evidence of mass drug distribution, no more than you’d find in a regular night club. We’ll struggle to back up all this media hype with statistics of young people dropping like flies at all-night parties.’
Forbes took no heed. ‘When’s the next one?’ he asked. ‘I’m hearing all sorts of horror stories and I’ll not have this city debated in Parliament as an example of depravity and lawlessness. I want it stopped.’
McNally interceded once more. They needed to be careful, he said, needed to think about the consequences of thousands of angry youths stranded. As far as he was concerned that was a bigger risk to public safety than the parties themselves.
Forbes looked away from him and faced Peach, searching for the answers he really wanted.
‘We’re tr
ying to find out,’ said Peach, ‘but without the resources …’
Three minutes later Peach had his resources: a team of six dedicated full-time officers of his choosing, use of the new Air Support Unit, and priority access to whatever back-up he needed from Northumbria and neighbouring forces, including the Armed Response Unit.
‘We’ll need search warrants,’ said Peach.
‘Whatever you need, you’ve got,’ said Forbes.
McNally’s face was almost forlorn, no doubt thinking about the budget implications. ‘Sir, I—’
But Forbes was getting to his feet. ‘This is coming from the top,’ he said. ‘And, when I say the top, I mean The Top. Good work, Inspector.’
Peach stood and shook Forbes’s hand, mentally thanking Mrs Thatcher herself for her astuteness and foresight; and there was him thinking the old hag was a pompous idiot.
‘I’ll see you tonight, Larry.’ The Chief Super turned away from McNally and winked at Peach, patting his stomach. ‘Mrs McNally’s doing one of her fondues,’ he said. ‘My missus is just about pissing herself. She loves a fondue.’
As the door closed, Peach stood quietly as the metaphorical tumbleweed blew across McNally’s office. Humiliation had left its blotchy residue on his boss’s neck and McNally peered at Peach with the unveiled resentment of a defeated man.
‘That was uncalled for,’ he said.
TOMMY
Three: beware of your enemies.
Tommy hadn’t heeded the billionaire’s rules and now he was in the deepest shit possible.
The breaks of the single-decker bus squealed like the dying birds Paul Smart would peg to the clothes line back in the days when Tommy and Jed would be dragged to weekend coffee mornings by their gossiping mams, Barry in his pram, eliciting the stares of the ignorant.
The Smarts had lived two doors down from the church hall in the seventies, a far cry from the plush manor Paul now called home. It was the only house in the street with a tree growing out front. And grow it did, year on year, morbidly shielding windows whose curtains were perpetually drawn. Like every other house on the street, it had a back yard, housing an outside toilet and a pigeon coop, the smell of bird shit overpowering anyone walking down the back lane.
Old Mr Smart was a morose man, his wife a fragile jumble of nerves who always walked two steps behind her husband. In the summer, when a window was open or a door of the Smarts’ house ajar, the howls of the teenage Paul could be heard over the roars of Mr Smart and the screams of Mrs Smart. People would walk by, heads lowered, their pace quickening in an attempt to rid themselves of the images the sounds induced.
‘That poor lad,’ Tommy had heard his mother mutter to Betty on occasion, and they too would hurry past, their chins wagging about the sister who was long gone by then, never visited, was living up in Longhouton, middle of nowhere, couldn’t get away quick enough.
Six-year-old Tommy had done it for a dare – a Caramac up for grabs for the one who had the guts to scale the wall of the Smarts’ back yard. A weird squawking noise had been heard by Jed and the McFall brothers the weekend before, and rumours were rife that old Mr Smart was murdering his pigeons and selling the meat to Chinese restaurants. The same disturbing sound had been heard that spring morning and Jed was soon dragging Tommy down the back lane.
Mr Smart spent every Saturday in the pub with his toothless wife who spent the entire afternoon cradling a bitter lemon, awaiting the bitter tang of blood that would inevitably fill her mouth later in the day when Mr Smart had had one too many.
Jed had balanced on a dustbin, Tommy standing precariously on his shoulders, peering over the top of the Smarts’ backyard wall, scared half to death but with the sweet taste of caramel urging him on. The pigeons flapped and cooed safely in their cages, feathers and white faeces littering the ground.
That was when he saw the birds, a row of half a dozen fledglings, wings broken, pinned with wooden pegs to the blue string that reached from the gate post to the edge of the pigeon coop. Tommy had gasped and clung to the wall, the sugary anticipation turning horribly sour.
Then, a shadow had appeared at the kitchen window, morphing into Paul’s face like an apparition as he pushed his nose up to the dirty glass. Tommy had toppled backwards, hitting the ground with a crash as he, Jed, and the bin tumbled. They’d run like the wind, the weird, squawking noise clarified, and the Caramac completely forgotten.
Birds, dogs, people. Paul Smart had a thirst for pain, so long as it wasn’t his own.
The drugs were safely hidden for now in the airing cupboard behind a mound of towels in a pair of never-worn pixie boots Sam was hoarding until they came back into fashion. There they would stay until he had a buyer for them. With Peach on his back, he couldn’t afford to be accosted by the cops with a pocket full of Es.
Not being acquainted with drug dealers other than the self-appointed Paul Smart, he had limited options. Jimmy Lyric had as good as thrown him out of his house that morning.
‘I’m on license,’ he’d said. ‘Do you think I’m a mug, or what?’
‘I only want two grand for them.’ A couple of grand would get Tommy the deposits he needed for the rigging and lighting, the chippies to build the stage. Maybe the sound too if he was canny enough. Jed had been right: a few hundred in a warehouse was a different kettle of fish to a full-scale rave. He needed professionals, people with the right amount of gear and the right amount of personnel to be able to work quickly.
‘Tommy, you’re a nice lad,’ Jimmy had said. ‘What you getting messed up in drugs for? You’re looking at a three-year stretch.’
The last thing Tommy needed right now was a preachy ex-con going straight, and he’d put fifteen hundred forward. Last offer.
‘Tommy.’ Jimmy had circled a tattooed finger around his mouth. ‘Watch my lips. No fucking way.’
Hadgy Dodds had been next on his list – a long shot, he knew, and Hadgy had looked at Tommy as if he’d been asked to complete a trigonometry problem, such was his confusion. Drugs? Fuck off, Tommy.
Out of desperation, he’d even approached Darren who was out on the streets of Valley Park doing his “detached youth work,” an attempt to persuade kids who’d known nothing but crime and drugs that there was another way of life. But the anger and disappointment in the youth worker’s face had sent him scuttling away with his tail between his legs.
The bus exhaled into its final stop. There was only one person Tommy knew who wouldn’t recoil at the selling of drugs, or who would find him a buyer at least. And he knew exactly where Trevor Logan spent his days sticking needles into his arms.
***
The stench of the railway arches was enough to turn even the strongest of stomachs. Covering his nose with his arm, Tommy clambered over the sodden sleeping bags and cardboard boxes. It didn’t seem to matter what time of year it was, the arches were forever dank and wet.
Movement under a grey blanket caught his eye. Standing over the mound, he pulled the blanket to one side with the tips of a thumb and finger. A young girl’s face blinked up at him, couldn’t have been any older than Jed’s brother, Barry. Fifteen tops.
‘Fiver to suck you off,’ she said, sleepily.
‘Nar, you’re all right,’ Tommy replied. He mentioned Trevor’s name, and the girl waved a hand in no direction at all.
‘Next one down,’ she grumbled, pulling the blanket back over her head.
He found Trevor Logan slumped against the cold, grey sandstone of the next arch. It was a pitiful sight, Trevor’s ribs rising and falling in his bare chest, one hand trembling against his thigh, his cheeks streaked as if he’d been crying. Tommy thought back to a time when Trevor would play out on the street with himself and Jed and the other kids, kicking a football about, gliding over self-assembled ramps on a home-made skateboard fashioned by Billy from bits and bobs. There were only a few years between them. They could have been friends.
Tommy, feeling no sense of danger from the lifeless Trevor, sat next to him, stretc
hing his legs out parallel to his, and with a sigh of sheer exhaustion, Trevor turned his head away from him. He looked tired and vulnerable – spent, as if any movement at all was beyond his capability. It was a far cry from the whirlwind of fury and abuse he usually exhibited. Here in his cave, Trevor Logan could be someone entirely different.
Trevor mumbled quietly, ‘What do you want?’
‘Need a favour.’
‘Fuck you,’ came the inevitable reply.
Trevor coughed, and Tommy noticed a trickle of sweat run down his neck and onto his chest.
‘I need a buyer,’ said Tommy. ‘Ten per cent for you.’
Trevor turned towards him with a sneer, but Tommy could sense his desperation. ‘What is it?’
‘Ecstasy.’
Trevor waved a fragile hand. ‘It’s smack people want, man.’
‘Hey, don’t knock it ’till you’ve tried it,’ Tommy said. ‘Here.’ He took a single pill from his pocket, held it out like a peace offering. ‘Make you so happy you won’t know how miserable you are.’
Trevor knocked it from his hand. ‘Bollocks to that,’ he slurred dismissively. ‘I’ll be back inside soon, anyhow. Then I’ll be sorted. This is nee life, this.’
Tommy leant forward and picked up the pill, dropping it back into his pocket as Trevor’s head slumped to his chest. Guilt and pity were feelings Tommy hadn’t anticipated.
‘Couple of hundred quid,’ he tried again. ‘Tide you over.’
Trevor’s head stayed bowed. ‘Need to know the supplier.’
Tommy hesitated, unsure if it was wise to mention Paul’s name, unconvinced by Trevor’s current calm demeanour.
Trevor lifted his waxen face. ‘No point selling drugs to someone who’s already sold them to you.’
Tommy imagined Trevor handing the tubes of drugs out to Paul Smart and asking for money. ‘Smartie,’ he said.
Trevor’s glazed eyes met Tommy’s and he let out a short laugh which grew into a hacking, phlegm-ridden cough that doubled him over, making his eyes stream. Not tears then.
