Hold Back the Night Read online

  He shifted in his seat. Now the smile.

  ‘I just want your camera is all, my friend.’

  His face was in shadow but I could make out his gold-capped teeth, glowing in the light of a street lamp that just reached in this far. It wasn’t the only thing that was shining. Before I could tell him where to get off he brought up a bowie knife with his right hand and rested it on the top of the passenger seat beside him. It was six inches long, and the hook on the end looked sharp enough. My eyes went straight to the point.

  He held his knife tight and it twitched as he moved forward in his seat towards me.

  ‘Hey!’ I said. ‘Jesus! OK, OK!’

  I moved back from him, back from the knife.

  ‘The camera.’

  ‘Take it easy.’

  I edged back further. I tried to put a blanket in my voice. Slowly: ‘You can have it. All right? Just take it easy, OK? Please.’

  Carefully, I slid back along the seat and leant backwards, as though that would make it easier for me to get the camera strap over my shoulder to hand it to him. My right hand went to the strap. The man didn’t move. Good. I put a scared rabbit in my eyes. Without taking them off the driver I tried to get the strap over my head but I got nervous and the strap got tangled up. I moved back even more to compensate.

  When I figured I was far enough back I yanked my leg up hard, and kicked it out even harder, straight at the thin gold face, pushing my shoulders back on the door arch with all I had. I saw the face change, and the flash of the knife as it found its light. I felt a connection, a good solid crunch with nice give, and I pushed through, letting my thigh extend to the knee. I felt his head go back against the windshield, and then a sharp burn on my shin bone. I pulled back my leg and scrambled for the door handle.

  But the door was locked; it wasn’t the side I’d got in. The driver was moving forward again, groggy with the blow to his head. I couldn’t see the knife, he must have dropped it, so I lashed out at him again. I missed and he caught hold of my leg, but I still managed to yank up the tee on the door and pull the handle. The door swung open with my weight, but the driver still had hold of my leg. I kicked out, and again, madly, trying to get free before he could find the blade. I remember thinking what an amateur he was. I could feel him scrabbling for his weapon with his left hand. Another kick, then one more and I was clear, and I half scrambled, half fell out of the car, my camera still over my shoulder, landing heavily with my elbow on hard concrete. I tried to push myself to my feet and run at the same time, fell, and then righted myself.

  Then I was up.

  I was just about to break into a sprint when I saw the Sierra.

  I was pretty sure it was the other cab, the one that had pulled out after us when we’d left the club. I’d been so busy watching for the car with Lucy I hadn’t noticed it behind us. It had stopped halfway down the dead end, and the second of the two men inside it was just getting out. He joined the first one and they fanned across the road, walking slowly towards me. I turned round. I looked for a low fence, or a drainpipe to climb, but there was nothing. The depot had a chain fence topped with razor wire, and the two men had already blocked my path to the flats. I edged back towards the steel red pull-down door behind me. I could feel my leg, and looked down to see a rip in my jeans where the knife had gone through.

  ‘The camera.’

  He was West Indian too, but you couldn’t have called him loose-limbed. Beside him the other guy was a similar size, but with the streetlight behind them I couldn’t make either of them out. They just looked big. One was rubbing his hands together, the other had his behind his back.

  ‘Give us that, we leave you alone.’

  Slowly, they moved towards me.

  ‘The camera,’ he said again, snapping his fingers this time.

  I didn’t say anything. I took a few more steps back, keeping my eyes tight on the two men. I was thinking what to do when the door of the first car was pushed open, and my driver got out. He looked shaky. He pushed himself round the bonnet of the car and joined his friends, who had stopped about fifteen feet away from me.

  ‘Just give us it and we’ll leave you be, OK?’

  There was something in the voice that sounded genuine, and I hesitated. But then I saw the driver. With one hand the driver was nursing his teeth, where my foot had caught him. The other hand held the bowie knife. He didn’t look like there was anyone who could persuade him to leave me be, not after what I’d done to him. That was it. I made the decision.

  The three men had stopped. I lifted the camera over my head by its strap. Without even pretending to hand it over to them, I swung it high over my head and brought it down hard against the concrete. The three guys looked stunned. I hadn’t done too much damage to it, a fact that I knew would have made Carl very proud, so I did it again, and this time the lens flew off, the back opened, and various pieces of metal and plastic smashed out and skidded across the hard ground. On the third swing there was nothing much of any size left intact.

  ‘You shit-stained motherfucker,’ the third guy said. It was the first time he had spoken. When he let his hands drop from behind his back I could see he was carrying a short piece of metal tubing that was probably an exhaust pipe.

  I let the strap drop to the ground and waited for them.

  Chapter Nine

  When I came to it was still quite dark. I was surprised; I couldn’t have been out for as long as it felt. Days. I moved my eyes. Everything was very still. I was lying on my front, pieces of loose stone biting into my cheekbone. I didn’t move for a second, mentally checking to see if there was anything seriously wrong with me. The back of my neck was tight. I moved a leg. I stretched an arm. I moved the other leg and felt a shout of pain in my shin. Then, when I tried to push myself up, my head expanded to the size of a nightclub before returning to its usual size in the space of half a second.

  What a rush. It took me right up to puking but not quite there. When it was gone I stayed on my knees for a second, feeling all around my head for cuts. There was a soft patch at the back but I couldn’t feel any blood. I made it to my feet. I stood for a second, waiting for aftershocks, but even though my head hurt and my neck hurt and my right leg hurt, I felt stable. I took a look around, to see if there was anything left of my camera. I could make out various fragments and bits and pieces but what little that could have been left of the main body was gone.

  It told me something.

  Slowly, I straightened up, finding it easier than I had any reason to expect. When I’d seen that pipe, and that bowie knife twitching, I’d expected a lot more than a quick and efficient dispatch to the canvas. I remembered the thin guy holding back while the other two moved in, and then I remembered landing a few shots before going over to a big right. Before I could get up the pipe had come down, and before I passed out I saw the thin guy walking forward. I remembered thinking, oh fuck. One of the other two must have stopped him, must have held him off. I felt grateful to him. The only thing I was really worried about was my shin. My jeans were ripped and there was a long cut where my calf muscle met the bone, probably made by the knife when I first lashed out in the car. It had stopped bleeding but when I rested some weight on the leg I felt it open up, a warm stream of blood heading down my ankle into my shoe.

  I balanced on one leg and brushed myself down. Slowly, I centred myself, and thought back to the moment I’d got in the cab. I couldn’t believe what had happened to me; this was just supposed to be a simple search and snap. I was angry. I wanted to work out what had happened but instead I tried to focus on the immediate problem of getting myself home. I looked up the road, the way the cab had taken me.

  Hobbling, I made it out of the dead end, out of the shadow of the council blocks, and I saw that it was lighter than I’d thought, but it was still an hour or so from dawn. I needed to get back to the main road, or to a phone box. I checked my pocket for my wallet. It was gone, but I knew I hadn’t been mugged. Not just that. Someone had wante
d my camera or, rather, the film that was in it. I started to run a couple of scenarios through my head but I couldn’t get them going. They could wait. My leg was throbbing and my head rang. I really could hear little birds singing.

  I limped along, gingerly moving up the street, up towards the place where we’d lost the Escort.

  I was through with this. I was going home. I was going home to bed and I was going to forget all about a certain Mrs Bradley and her two sexy flipside daughters. I thought back to the moment in my office when I’d had the impulse to tell Mrs Bradley where to get off. It felt like a golden chance I hadn’t taken, the best tip on a nag I’d ever turned down. If only.

  I stumbled up the slight incline towards Agar Grove, walking in the middle of the street to avoid the garbage. Even from there I could smell it, drifting up around me, staining the tense, pre-dawn air. I could feel the cut on my calf opening up more and more, and I started to worry about it. I moved over and leant back against the side of a house, ripping back the denim. It was worse than I’d thought. I managed to tear off a long strip of the fabric to make a tourniquet, thinking all the time that I had precisely no chance of persuading a cab driver to stop for me. My mind went back to my camera again. Lucy must have clocked me with it from the bus, or else the boy had told her. Actually, thinking about it, I didn’t blame her that much. She didn’t know who I was. I remembered my friend Olly, the paranoia he’d shown at the thought that his parents might find him. I even found myself being slightly impressed by the resources she must have had at her disposal.

  I was in the process of winding the strip of denim round my leg when a loud crack echoed through the empty streets. It sounded like the hard smack of a door slamming without shutting, although I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t really care. I had more pressing concerns. I finished tying the strip in place. The sound wouldn’t have bothered me at all but it was immediately followed by the insistent thwack of soft shoes on hard tarmac.

  I didn’t give a shit about the sound except that it was coming towards me, from round the corner. It sounded like a simple burglary gone wrong, but then I realized that the footsteps were coming from the street the Escort had driven down. Suddenly, I was interested. They were getting nearer. Without really knowing why, I pushed myself off the wall and went to look round into the street. I moved towards the corner, but before I could take more than three steps, a shape came steaming round it, smacking straight into me. It knocked me backwards and we both went over, the shape sprawling across me. I was winded, but I managed to get my hands in front to protect me. The shape wasn’t in any mood for fisticuffs, however, it reacted instantly, trying to get up again as if I hadn’t even been there, trying to make it up and keep going. I was all for that. I tried to get out of its way, to let it by, but suddenly our eyes met. It stopped. All of its forward momentum came to a halt as it stared at me.

  As the boy stared at me.

  His face went through shock to surprise and then to something else. For a split second he looked at me as though I was a ghost, as though I was the most terrifying thing he had ever, ever seen. His eyes widened and his still fat bottom lip began to tremble.

  He scuttled backwards like a crab.

  ‘You bastard,’ he said. ‘You fucking bastard.’

  And then he was off and I made no better an attempt at running after him than the fat man in the yellow shirt had done.

  I sat there. I still wanted to go home, but there was something about his face. I looked after the kid but he was gone. I made it slowly to my feet for the second time that night, and leant back up against the wall. I peered round the corner, to make sure there weren’t any more early morning Linford Christies in the area, my eyes fixing on a long street of drab, two-storey houses. Doors straight onto the street, bin bags, cars. I saw the Escort, and then my eyes went to a door halfway down on the right. It was open, still moving on its hinge, slowly coming back round to closed. I straightened myself up. With the cars on my left to support me I hop-walked down towards it.

  I’d take a quick look. You bastard. What had I done? But only a quick look, I wasn’t going to fuck around. I crossed the road and headed towards the house.

  The door had stopped moving and was ajar. After listening to nothing for a full minute, I pushed it open slowly and found myself standing in a living room. There was no hallway. What there was instead was a mess. Foil food trays, pizza cartons and beer cans. One knackered old armchair and a mattress on the floor. I didn’t look at it for long though because I could hear something. There was a door straight ahead of me, and the sound was coming through it. It was a low sound, a pressured hissing that wasn’t very loud but seemed to be building. I stepped across the room, trying not to make any noise. It didn’t sound human. I stopped halfway to listen. There were no voices of any kind that I could hear but it was late, there may have been people in the bedrooms. The noise in the room ahead took me again.

  I told myself to be careful. Something had made that kid leg it. The noise intrigued me, it sounded like a snake, getting slowly madder. Is that what the boy was scared of, he’d found a boa constrictor going through his cornflakes? I made it to the door. I took a breath. Then I moved forward, my hand on the handle, turning and pushing at the same time. I made it through quickly, my left hand forward, my shoulders tense, ready to take on whatever it was that was making that increasingly sinister noise.

  As I stepped through the door the red plastic button on the top of the kettle snapped neatly into place, leaving only the low rumble of boiling water, which was sending a plume of steam up to the ceiling of the squalid, sparsely furnished kitchen.

  I let out a breath. My throat went through a dry swallow. Jesus. The great investigator, super-sensitive to active kitchen appliances but he couldn’t see that a dodgy cab man was obviously trying to get him into his car, when there were hordes of other people he could easily have driven home. I walked over to the kettle, breathing in and out through my nose. There was a cup with a tea bag in it. The boy must have got spooked when he was waiting for the kettle to boil, while he was in the process of making his tea. The kettle was sitting on a set of units backed by a large, rectangular-shaped window. I walked over and looked out of it, into a small backyard with three-foot weeds forcing their way through badly laid concrete. Had the kid seen something out there? I couldn’t. All I could see was a low wall leading onto waste ground, and beyond that the sunrise, a timid slice of red coming up behind Islington and Hackney like it really didn’t want to. I had another listen for any voices. The house was dead.

  The boy had legged it for a reason but I didn’t know what it was. The reason could wait, and so could Lucy, who was probably sleeping whatever it was off upstairs. The tea bag looked inviting. I shrugged my shoulders, poured some water into the cup and then walked over to the fridge. But, like the front door, the fridge was ajar. There was a carton of milk on the floor, lying in a small white pool which was still seeping slowly through the dirty cracks in the lino. I stopped. Something was wrong. Very wrong. It was. I reached down to pick the carton up and my eyes went out through the glass of the back door, out to a huge mound of bin bags that were stacked up against the garden wall, a pile of bags four feet high, seven feet long at least. I dropped the carton. I guessed I wasn’t the first to have dropped it.

  I got the back door open using a key that was hanging from a hook on the wall. The bags smelled fetid and rank, and looked it too. I had no desire to touch them, no desire to see any more of what was beneath them. What I could see was a long, slim foot. An ankle. Part of a calf. The foot didn’t have a shoe on it. It was getting lighter all the time and I could make it out easily. It was on its side. It didn’t have a sock or any tights on it. It was quite long, and it had polished toe nails. A silver colour like the stuff I used to paint Airfix models with when I was a kid. It was a girl’s foot, a young girl’s foot, leading up to a girl’s ankle and a girl’s calf, and about six inches of instep.

  I moved forward, slowly. I bent
down but stopped. I shouldn’t touch this. I’d get into grief if I touched this. Did the house have a phone? I’d just wait for the law, I’d wait for Andy Gold and his team of toothbrush boys. I stood up again. I moved back towards the door. I had my hand on the handle when I heard the noise.

  It was a rustling, a movement from underneath all that trash. Another. She was moving. That little cunt, that dirty little cunt, he hadn’t even checked before he’d left her there.

  I rushed forward and began pulling the bags aside, trying to get them off her. Another movement. I grabbed at the bags, yanking them back behind me, covering myself in shit. I put my foot through one, into a mess of old chicken bones, livid with maggots. I cut my hand on a can. But then I got to her, her body smeared with filth. There was blood, a lot of blood beneath her head. It wasn’t sitting right. But she’d moved. I pushed more bags aside. When they were all gone I took her wrist, feeling for a pulse; nothing. I felt her neck. No. Her skin was pale. Too pale. I worked my finger into her mouth, clearing the mess out of it, and then I tried to breath life back into her, gagging on the taste, trying to block out the stink. Nothing. I tried again. Nothing. I started to press down on her chest. She’d moved, she had, she…

  And then I saw the rat. It was sitting on top of one of the bags that I had thrown aside, less than three feet away from me. It was squinting at me curiously, without even the hint of any fear, looking slightly annoyed that I’d interrupted it. In its whiskers I saw flecks of its food, and I saw that some of them were held together by a thick, dark liquid. I held its gaze for a second and then I saw a movement to my right. It was another one, scurrying off along the side of the wall behind some boxes. Then the one in front of me broke its look and scrambled down into the pile of bags I’d created, making a loud, rustling sound as it went.

  The sound I’d heard.

  I turned away from it. Then, as the shy lidded eye of the sun took its first nervous look at a brand new day, I looked down at the naked, filthy body of Lucy Bradley.