Riot Act (3 page)

“Well, we lost the little bastards.” Langford’s voice was thick with anger as he came stamping up. He lit a cigarette, cupping his hands round the match and dropping it on the paving. His cold gaze lingered briefly on Shahida, but he made no moves to try and help. The boy kept his head down.

The first wail of sirens started up in the distance. We all paused, trying to work out if the sound was growing louder.

When it became clear that it was, the boy’s nerve finally broke. He jumped to his feet, abandoning his nursing duties, and ran like a rabbit. Langford suddenly realised that he’d had his prey right under his nose. He gave a bellow of outrage and took off after him.

The kid might have been built for lightness and speed, but gravel is murder to sprint on, and he didn’t get the opportunity to open out much of a lead. Before they hit the hedge at the bottom of the garden, Langford had brought him down.

And once the boy was on the ground, the vigilante waded in with his feet and his fists. His methods were unrefined, but brutally effective, for all that.

I was up and running before I’d worked out quite what I intended to do. I only knew I had to stop Langford before he killed the kid. No matter what he’d done.

“Langford, for God’s sake leave him alone,” I said. “Let the police deal with him.”

Langford whirled round. In the light from the blazing shed, his eyes seemed to flash with excitement. This was what took him and his men out patrolling the streets night after night. Not some altruistic vision. It all came down to the age-old thrill of the chase, the heat of the kill.

“Get lost, Fox,” he snarled. “I’m sick to death of all this passive resistance crap. Take a look around you. It doesn’t work.” He held up a bloodied fist. “This is all these bastards understand.”

“Leave him,” I said again, my voice quiet and flat.

He laughed derisively. “Or what?” he said, turning his back on me. The boy had half-risen in the lull, and Langford punched him viciously in the ribs, watched with grim delight as he dropped again.

Though I tried to hold it back, I felt my temper rise up at me like a slap in the face. My eyes locked on to a target. I didn’t need to concentrate on the mechanics. All the right moves unfurled automatically inside my head.

“Langford!” I called sharply.

And as he twisted to face me again, I hit him.

I’d like to think it was simply a clinically positioned and delivered blow, carefully weighted to disable, calculated to take him quickly and cleanly out of the fight.

The reality was dirtier than that. I hit him in a flash of pure anger, harder and faster than was strictly necessary, not caring for the consequences. It was stupid, and it could have been deadly.

For a moment I thought he was going to keep coming, then he swayed, and I realised that his legs had gone. He just didn’t know it yet.

There was a mildly puzzled expression on his face as he struggled to focus on me. Then his knees gave out, his eyes rolled back, and he flopped gracelessly backwards onto the stony ground.

I started forwards on a reflex, but he didn’t move. I stood there for a moment or two, breathing hard, my fists still clenched ready for a second blow I never had to launch. Then I slumped, defeated by my own anger. It slipped away quietly, leaving me with a fading madness, and a roaring in my ears.

I turned slowly, and found what seemed to be half the population of Kirby Street standing and watching me in shocked and silent condemnation.

Oh God
, I thought,
not again . . .

Somewhere beyond them, the first of the night’s procession of police cars braked to a fast halt in the road outside.

It wasn’t until the following morning that reaction to the whole thing set in. On a number of fronts, and none of them good.

The first hit me when I stepped out of the shower in Pauline’s nice centrally-heated bathroom. I reached for a towel from the equally warm radiator and my hand stilled abruptly.

Pauline had gone in for mirrors in a big way in her bathroom. I found this strange considering, much as I liked her, she was a woman for whom the battle with rapidly encroaching cellulite was already a lost cause. I don’t think, in her position, I would have wanted to be constantly reminded of the fact from almost every angle. And certainly not first thing in the morning, that’s for sure.

I didn’t seem to have too much of the wobbly stuff myself, but instead all I saw were the scars.

I was putting together quite a collection of them, it seemed, on my arms and torso. They’d been caused by sharp blades of varying descriptions, all wielded with deadly intent. None of them, I’m sorry to say, were gained during the course of routine surgical procedure.

The most serious stretched round the base of my throat from a point just under my right ear, to my Adam’s apple. A thin pale line, crossed by fading stitch marks, like you’d find on an old cartoon drawing of a Frankenstein monster.

Not exactly the prettiest bit of needlework you ever did see, but it wasn’t the appearance of the thing that worried me. I never considered myself much to look at to begin with. I don’t go for a great deal in the way of make-up, and my hairstyle is one that has to survive being constantly squashed under a motorbike helmet.

No, the thing that bothered me most was what those scars represented. How close I’d come to dying, and the depths I’d had to sink to in order to survive. I’d sworn that I’d never put myself in that position again, and had carefully reorganised my life in an attempt to ensure it.

But, when the necessity – or the opportunity, anyway – had presented itself, I’d jumped straight back into the fray without pause for reflection.

The memory of my actions in Fariman and Shahida’s garden came back to me. The way I’d so easily abandoned reasoned argument in favour of violence. I’d sunk straight back down to Langford’s level. What the hell had I been thinking?

I hadn’t – been thinking, I mean – that was the trouble. I’d been acting on an instinctively triggered response to a perceived threat. No doubt my old army instructors would have been delighted that all those months of training had paid off in such an aggressively Pavlovian style, even when I’d been out of a uniform now for longer than I’d been in one.

As for me, I was terrified.

Eventually, I shook myself out of it for long enough to go and get dressed, venturing downstairs to be greeted by an anxious Friday, who went through his usual performance of trying to convince me that he’d wasted half away during the night. I scooped up the post as I passed the front door, then carried on through to the kitchen with the dog trampling on my heels.

Just to get some peace I dumped a double handful of dog biscuits into an aluminium bowl which the Ridgeback was soon shunting enthusiastically round the lino with his snout. I filled the kettle and glanced at the mail while I waited for it to boil.

Besides the usual junk was a reminder notice for a Residents’ Committee meeting to discuss the rising tide of crime on the estate. The meeting was to take place in the back room of the pub just down the road, at seven-thirty that evening.

Whoever had delivered it must have known my aversion to becoming even peripherally involved in anything that has to be run by committee. They had added a personal persuader to my copy, scrawled in red biro across the top and down one margin.

“Miss Fox,” it said, “we’d all be v grateful (underlined twice) if you’d come to meeting, espec in light of events of last eve. Many thanks.” There was a signature to follow, but it could have been anything.

I read the rest of the leaflet again, but it didn’t tell me much beyond the time and the place. I shrugged. Technically, I wasn’t a resident, so I didn’t think it was a wise move to go along to their meeting and stick my oar in, personal invites notwithstanding.

In the end, I tacked it to Pauline’s kitchen cork board, alongside the slightly blurry photographs of Friday. The pictures had been taken indoors with a flash and either the poor dog was secretly the spawn of Satan, or he’d been badly affected by red-eye.

Also pinned up there were money-off vouchers for tubs of low-fat frozen yoghurt, pages of calorie values from Pauline’s slimming club, and a card giving the date of her next hair appointment. No doubt somebody, more talented than I at the art, could have studied that board and told you everything there was to know about Pauline’s lifestyle and character.

I’d known her for just over a year, but she was one of those people you instantly warm to, full of energy and an enthusiasm for collecting new experiences. I expect that Pauline’s life would have worked out quite differently, had her husband of twenty-five years not run off with a nineteen-year-old telesales manageress some time before.

Where most women of forty-eight would never have recovered from this devastating occurrence, for Pauline it offered up a whole new lease of life. She started going to her slimming group, and dyeing the grey out of her hair. She’d even taken up with a boyfriend who rode a Harley Davidson, and signed up for self-defence lessons.

That was where I came in, because at that time I was teaching regular classes to groups of women all around the area. She wasn’t quite at the end of her first course when the events of last winter overtook me, and my teaching career had come to a rather abrupt end.

She’d kept in touch while I was out of action, even held my hand at the inquest. I wasn’t always glad to see her, I must admit, but it was difficult to be depressed for long with Pauline around. Afterwards, I felt I owed her one, and house-sitting for her was the least I could do. Even if it did mean braving the little horrors of Kirby Street.

When Pauline had moved in to number forty-one, Kirby Street hadn’t yet started on its downward course. It was one of a maze of streets of ugly brick and pebbledashed semis built in the fifties on reclaimed marshland, down near the River Lune. As far as anyone knew, the area had never been remotely cultivated, despite the picturesque name.

For the past twenty years, Lavender Gardens had been slowly taken over by the local Asian population. Mainly Pakistani, they’d moved into the streets one house at a time as they came up vacant. And, as is so often the way of these things, the more the Asian numbers swelled, the faster the other houses seemed to come up for grabs, and the lower the prices fell.

For as long as I’d lived in Lancaster, the place had been known as Lavindra Gardens. At least, that was one of its more repeatable nicknames.

Pauline wasn’t remotely Pakistani, but she’d stayed put. “I get on all right with them,” she’d informed me stoutly. “I just don’t stick my nose in where it’s not wanted, particularly with the kids, and they leave me well alone.”

She didn’t appear to make any connection between this wide berth and the presence of Friday, who had the run of the house when she was at work. The dog had arrived as an abused puppy not long after Mr Jamieson had departed and, in the long run, Pauline reckoned she’d got the better end of the deal. If nothing else, he was the best home security system you could wish for.

The Ridgeback was big, and totally aware of his own strength. Besides, he had the much-envied local reputation of once having chased an imprudent dustbin man up onto the roof of the shed in the back garden, and kept him up there all morning. Part of the reason I was staying at Pauline’s was so that Friday could stay in residence, and on guard.

So, I’d moved in to make sure his food came in tins rather than in trousers. I’d agreed to keep lights on in the evening, and the curtains opening and closing at the appropriate hours.

I’d also promised not to interfere in local problems. Not to take sides. Not to get involved. After all, I was only going to be there for a relatively short period. The last thing I’d wanted to do was draw attention to myself.

But it looked like I’d managed it, just the same.

***

After I’d let Friday tow me round the block on the end of his lead, my conscience got the better of me. I bundled him back into the house and crossed over the road to go and bang on the faded varnish of Fariman and Shahida’s front door.

It took a long time for anyone to answer. When the door was finally opened, it wasn’t Shahida who stood there, but an Asian teenager. He was one of those beautiful Indian boys with almost androgynous features, flawless skin and a slender body. It was emphasised by the tight, but grubby white T-shirt he wore, along with dusty jeans, ripped at the knees.

I vaguely recognised him, but seeing him out of context, it took me a moment to put a name to the face. Nasir, that was it. His widowed mother, Mrs Gadatra, actually lived next door to Pauline. Although I’d seen and talked to her two younger children, the elder boy was rarely home, and remained aloof when he was.

I realised that he hadn’t spoken, and was eyeing me with apparent disfavour, as though something with a faintly unpleasant smell had crawled onto his upper lip.

“Yes?” he said at last, sharply, and totally without the grace his appearance would have suggested.

“Hello Nasir. I’m here to see Shahida,” I said, somewhat uncertainly, and when that didn’t seem to impress him, I added, “to find out how Fariman is.”