Hold Back the Night Read online

  Part Two

  Chapter Ten

  Over the last few days I hadn’t given much thought to James Bradley. In fact, I’d never even known his name. I dare say that the overwhelming personality of his wife had somehow blanked him out, like a middle-aged father in one of those Jane Austen novels Sharon had lent me. So when he called me at my office one Wednesday morning ten days after his daughter Lucy had been found dead, and asked me to meet him in a cafe in Hampstead, I was a little surprised. I had imagined that it would have been his wife who would have contacted me, if anyone, or even his one remaining daughter. It was probably the fact that it was him, and not either of them, that had made me agree to go and meet the man.

  As it was, meeting the Bradley family, or at least its female quotient, had not been a very positive experience for me. I had been bullied, followed, beaten up, knifed, and placed in the centre of a murder inquiry from which I had yet to satisfactorily extricate myself. All because of them. I wasn’t too keen on continuing my association. Yes, I was sorry for them. No, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what they were going through. But that didn’t mean I had to have any more to do with them. Ever since the events of that Saturday night I’d been trying to shake off thoughts of them like a summer flu. It must have been the curiosity that had refused to let go of me, or else the bleak, flat tone of the man’s voice, which finally persuaded me to go and talk to the only male member of the family.

  Over the last week I had spent a lot of time in the company of men. A couple of men in particular. One of them was a sometime friend of mine and the other used to be my boss. Andy Gold and Chief Inspector Kenneth Clay had taken a great deal of interest in my involvement with the Bradley family, especially in my proximity to the corpse of their missing daughter. I hadn’t known it at the time but Carr Street, where I’d finally found Lucy, is just within the borders of Islington Borough, which meant that it came under my former colleagues’ jurisdiction.

  ‘You topped her there on purpose, didn’t you, Billy?’ Ken Clay had announced, once he had got me safely ensconced in the station house on Calshot Street. ‘Just so you’d have the pleasure of a little chat with me.’

  That morning, ten days before meeting James Bradley, I hadn’t stayed long kneeling by the side of his daughter. Just long enough to take in the artificial light of her silver-blonde hair, and too long not to be able to see what a beautiful girl she had been. I’d stood up and pulled my eyes away from her. I’d turned towards the door, but then turned back quickly when I’d heard the rats again. I’d kicked at the rubbish, trying to drive them away, and then I’d dragged myself back into the house where I did find a phone, sitting on the floor amongst the clothes and the cans and the fast food debris.

  I’d called Andy Gold at home, wanting a familiar face around when the cavalry came, and then I’d dialled three nines, just so that I would be registered as having done so. Andy was very pissed off that I’d called him, telling me angrily that he was pretty busy right then. I told him that I’d found Lucy Bradley. He wasn’t interested. I told him how I’d found her. He was.

  Andy arrived five minutes after the first patrol car, and by the time the last one came there were ten vehicles blocking the road outside, and more people in and around the premises than at a house-warming party. Andy led me straight outside, to show him what I’d found and tell him what I’d done. When I told him that I’d thought the owner of the ankle I’d seen was alive, and had shifted all the bin bags off to get to her, Andy looked at me as if I was either very stupid or lying. His manner changed to one of complete detachment from me. He spoke to me like he was the copper, and I was someone involved in something, which even if it wasn’t murder, was something he wanted to know about. His voice had that you-must-think-I’m-very-stupid tinge. From that moment on I didn’t have any illusions left about the gulf that separated him and me.

  As the noise inside the house grew, the backyard began to look like a film set. The police activity had slowly begun to wake the neighbours and the first thing to happen was that a blue canopy was erected to shield Lucy’s body, and the policemen acting on or about it, from the horrified eyes of the local residents. It was getting lighter all the time, but a trio of halogen lamps was set up to get the proceedings under way as quickly as possible. All the time I was allowed to remain on the spot, which didn’t really surprise me. I guessed that Andy Gold wanted to monitor my reaction to having to look at Lucy, to see if I gave away signs of any sort of a connection to her.

  The reaction of the other people present varied. A young policewoman who had helped erect the canopy maintained a professional look with a tinge of bitterness. Her eyes skirted round the prone, naked girl who was at the centre of her actions. She very deliberately did not look at me. A male constable in his late forties was similarly efficient in his duties but the look on his face was a mixture of sadness and fear, as he possibly connected the age of the victim with that of a daughter, or a niece. The rest of the uniformed officers were youngish men, and theirs was a confusion of revulsion and fascination. They all tried to look businesslike when they saw Lucy lying there but they couldn’t help being affected by her, seeing her young body beneath the filth, beneath their job, beneath the fact of her death. Her breasts, her nipples, a deep armpit. Long elegant legs. I saw one, making an unnecessary journey from one end of the yard to the other, sneaking a hurried glance as he passed by her.

  From my position next to the back door, I could hear officers knocking up those residents not aware of the drama unfolding in the neighbourhood, and beginning to ask questions. Beneath the canopy, a police photographer arrived, and took pictures of the entire scene before going over the same ground with a video camera. The duty pathologist arrived and had a quick chat with Andy before conducting a brief examination of the body. He bent over Lucy, checking her skin for cuts and bruises, and for lividity. He paid particular attention to the back of her head, and her neck. He took out a thermometer and went to take a vaginal reading, but stopped and bent to look closer. He reached in his case for a sample bottle and a spatula, and he took some swabs. When he’d secured the lid on the tiny bottle he turned to look up at me, his look one of blank but undisguised disgust. I could only guess what he’d found. Then he returned to his task, taking a temperature reading from the corpse, which he could use to ascertain the time of death.

  A far more thorough examination would be conducted at the morgue, but the quicker the police can get information in cases like this the better. Even if the horse has bolted the door still needs shutting. Once the man had finished, and the position of Lucy’s body was mapped onto a sketch of the scene, two officers lifted her onto a plastic sheet and carried her into the house. Then a set of plastic crates was brought out and, after they had been numbered and their position noted, all of the rubbish bags were loaded into them. I guessed it was the first rubbish removal to have occurred in that part of London for two weeks. The officers lifted up the bags gingerly, setting their faces against the stench, hardly talking. Andy Gold went as far as directing operations. Towards the end of the clean-up my friend the rat scurried out from his quickly vanishing habitat and ran straight between the legs of a young noddy carrying out a tray of tea. The boy stepped back quickly onto a broken bag and went arse over tit, something that would have been very funny at almost any other time. As it was nobody laughed, not even Andy Gold. He even helped the kid pick up the broken tea cups.

  A tall, pinched-faced detective I recognized with much reluctance came out from the house and whispered to Andy. They both looked at me and then I was led round the side of the house, into the road, and sat in the back of a squad car where I was left in the company of the middle-aged constable. He didn’t say anything. I watched the pinched-faced detective walk outside and hold the door of a large, shapeless Nissan open for an equally large, shapeless man. I watched the man being shown into the house, which was being guarded by two officers like the door of Number Ten.

  The road was rammed now, mil
ling with officers slowly walking up and down, looking at the floor as though the Queen had lost a contact lens. The street was sealed off, from the top to the bottom, and one angry householder was being told that he wouldn’t be allowed to leave for his fishing trip just yet. Then, as I sat there, I suddenly remembered my leg or, rather, it remembered me. I could feel it, but when I bent down to check I was relieved to see that it wasn’t bleeding. It was still quite open though, and looked a mess. I checked my hand too, clenched on a lump of toilet paper. Not deep, but it needed cleaning.

  I was wondering whether I should ask my heavy-faced companion if he remembered his first aid training when the door of the house opened. Two officers were carrying Lucy, now in a body bag, swinging her a foot from the ground, one going backwards until he was out on the street. They carried her to a waiting ambulance where she was passed in by one of the medics, who had initially arrived on the scene. The doors of the wagon were closed, a couple of police cars moved, and the ambulance pulled away. I couldn’t help but think of where Lucy was being taken, and what would be done to her, how she would be dissected and investigated, her organs removed and sewn back up, fluid taken from her eyes, her sexual organs probed into and examined. It made me almost as sick to think of as what had already happened to her. I followed the ambulance as it passed, and saw that the copper to my left was following it too. Then it was gone, into the brightening morning.

  The door beside me opened. Ken Clay got in next to me, dumping his weight down on the springs, forcing me to move right up against the tired foot soldier on my left. He shrank back from me as though I had the plague. Another PC got in the front. Clay looked at me and sighed, letting me know that he hadn’t bothered stopping to clean his teeth before leaving the house that morning.

  ‘Home, James,’ he said, rapping the back of the driver’s seat twice. ‘And don’t spare the horses.’

  * * *

  The place we met was a fake French cafe on Hampstead High Street, a little piece of Disney Gaul to keep you going until your next trip over for the cheap vino. I had used the occasion as an excuse to wear a light, pale grey suit that had been conceived before I was born, and a sky-blue shirt without a tie. It was the first time I’d worn a suit in weeks and it had the odd effect of making me feel cooler than my usual shorts and trainers. The cafe was crowded when I got there but as James Bradley had arrived before me I didn’t have to worry about finding a seat. I didn’t know what he looked like, and we hadn’t agreed on any carnations in buttonholes, but it didn’t take me long to spot the man who had called me, sitting alone at a small round table in the corner. He was the only man there who looked like his daughter had recently been hit over the head with an as yet unidentified object and then strangled. To her death. I picked him out easily. There was just something about him.

  When I had shaken James Bradley’s hand and sat down opposite him, my first reaction was surprise. He wasn’t what I had expected. In fact, I’d had no idea what to expect. No real image of the husband of the woman who had employed me had come to mind. I had vaguely pictured a tall, hearty man with the same self-confidence and direct manner as his wife, but the man I had met did not come across like that at all. Even before I’d spoken to him I was wondering how it was that he and his wife had come to be married.

  James Bradley was a smallish man, possibly only about five seven. He was wearing an oldish grey suit cut a touch too small for him, the knot of his tie pulled fastidiously tight. He was thin, and he sat with his legs crossed and his arms folded in a way that made him seem timid, even slightly effeminate. The grey hair that I have already mentioned was still full and very soft, and the face it fell over had a withdrawn, awkward quality that I didn’t think was due simply to the circumstances, although the pallid state of his complexion probably was. Irrespective of his current state, James Bradley seemed to me to be a shy, quiet man, totally unlike his wife. He made me think of a crumpled and sad version of Dirk Bogarde, or at least a character he might have played.

  The table next to us was occupied by three well-dressed ladies approaching a certain age talking about the universities their children were applying to. A brisk but efficient waiter brought me an espresso and Mr Bradley a fresh cup of filter coffee, to which he added a little milk before ignoring it completely. I asked him how his family was.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, in a thin voice, not that far back. He looked everywhere but at me. ‘We’re trying to cope. The police won’t release the body yet though so it’s all a bit of a strain. Maybe, after the funeral, you know…’

  ‘Emma?’ I asked.

  Mr Bradley paused.

  ‘She…I don’t know.’ He bit his lip. ‘Mostly she just sits in her room and won’t talk. My wife has spent a little more time with her than I have but she’s very withdrawn. I hope she’ll pick up when we go back to Sussex but it’s difficult to know how she really is yet, what sort of effect this will have in the long run.’

  ‘She’s a strong girl,’ I said, ‘I’m sure she’ll get through it eventually.’

  Mr Bradley wanted to know how I knew that his daughter Emma was a strong person, and I told him about meeting her, and how she had tried to follow me. I was surprised that she hadn’t told him herself. I’d told the police about it, just so they didn’t think I was hiding anything from them, but they can’t have informed Emma’s parents. They can’t have thought it very important which, to my mind, was the case. Nothing I had done was important, I had nothing to do with anything. I had, over the days following the incident, been at great pains to convince them of this.

  Once my hand had been looked at, my leg bandaged, and samples of my blood taken, I was asked to remove my clothes and hand over my boxer shorts. I was then left to my thoughts in the same interview room I had occupied some months previously, in no less trying circumstances. The room was as grey and harsh-looking as I remembered it, designed to make those invited there want to leave as soon as possible; i.e. talk. Outside it could have been any time of the day, any season of the year. I was beginning to get tired now, and was grateful of the diarrhoea-thick tea I was presented with, though I only managed to get through half of it before the room’s only door rattled. A uniformed officer came in and held the door open for Ken Clay, and his tall sidekick, who really did look like an angel had picked him up out of the mould by his face. The sidekick leant against the wall. Clay manoeuvred his bulk down at the table opposite, totally engulfing the flimsy wooden chair. Then he rested his two huge hands on the table in front of him and looked down at them, seeming to think of something.

  I stared into Clay’s raw, livid face, the colour of fresh liver, and thought how much more pleasant it would have been to look into a wound. His piggy little eyes flicked up and fixed on me. He started to speak but a thought changed his tack.

  ‘You really are a queer one, Billy Rucker,’ Clay said finally, his head shaking slightly. His voice, almost forgotten Glasgow menace, was loud and cheerful. ‘I really, really don’t understand you. I never have.’

  ‘Tape recorder,’ I said.

  ‘You had a good job, good prospects.’ He nodded to himself. ‘People were saying nice things about you. Your name, as it were, was at the top of a lot of different lists. People liked the way you did things.’

  ‘A tape recorder. On. Now.’

  ‘But you had to chuck it all away, didn’t you?’ He waved a hand at me. ‘Oh, I understand, I understand at the time what you were going through. We all did. A tough break, no doubt about it. But you couldn’t get beyond it, could you?’ His lumpen hands interlocked on the table top like octopuses mating. ‘So what did you do? You bollocksed up, let it all go to shit. Handed in your book. The one way you could have dealt with it, maintain a structure, do something meaningful, you pissed away, you turned your back on it.’

  He was waiting for me.

  ‘I dealt with it. Playing your stupid games wouldn’t have been dealing with it.’

  He gave a shrug, just with his mouth. ‘Your mate Go
ld got most of what you’d have got, you know. He’d have been polishing your magnifying glass now if you hadn’t gone soft.’ He smiled. ‘And he knows it. Probably doesn’t make him very happy, when he thinks about it. But what is the real shame, the tragedy here if you like, Billy, and what I’m trying to get at, is that if you’d stuck on this side of the table, you wouldn’t be sitting on that side of it, would you?’

  Clay reached over and took a swig of my abandoned tea, getting the skin stuck on his fleshy top lip. Then he smiled, wider this time, giving me a mouthful of livid pink gums scraped back too far over small, urine-coloured teeth.

  ‘And that’s what you call dealing with it, is it? Hey? Topping a pretty young girl you’ve been paid to find? Giving her one first. Or after? Is that what you call dealing with the fact that your brother’s a cabbage? Golden Luke, the principal boy, getting his life out of a tube. And more to the point dealing with the fact that it was all, all because of you, because you wouldn’t leave something alone? Fuck, Billy!’ A shock of laughter burst up from somewhere within him. ‘I’d hate to see what you’d have done if you hadn’t been able to deal with it!’

  Clay gave way to the laughter, and then to coughing, specks of phlegm falling on the table in front of me. I stared at him, containing a pale anger, the anger I knew he wanted to burst right out of me. Clay didn’t think I’d done it. But that wasn’t the point. He wanted to show me that he was perfectly willing to take me all the way for it, so that I’d give him everything I had. So that I’d go out there and solve the thing for him, scared that if I didn’t I’d be back sitting there talking to him. There was something else too, something less tangible that I had never been able to pin down. I got the feeling that the control freak in Clay was afraid of me, afraid of the fact that I’d once been part of the team and was now out of there. Maybe he thought I knew something, something about the way he operated, that he didn’t want me blabbing about. Sometimes I thought he was almost desperate to get me out of his hair. But whatever he was worried about he needn’t have been. I didn’t have a thing on him.