Residents’ Committee asked Mr Garton-Jones to come and take over. I think they were going to telephone him this afternoon. There is another Committee meeting next week. You should come along perhaps. But isn’t that good news?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head, “I think I missed an episode somewhere. Who is Garton-Jones and what is he taking over?”
Mrs Gadatra laughed. “Oh, of course. I think this is before you came here, but I’m surprised you haven’t heard about him, though. He and his men have been patrolling the streets on some of the other estates. Of course he is not cheap, but the crime there was awful before he came, and now they say it has almost disappeared completely because of him. He sounds wonderful.”
“Mother!” Nasir’s voice from the back doorway as he came out into the garden was sharp enough to cut through his mother’s chatter. “The children will be home from school soon and they will be hungry.”
“Oh yes, of course, Nasir, I was just coming now,” his mother replied serenely, and hurried inside, giving me a cheery wave as she went.
I turned my attention back to the bike. The polish had set to a fine white mist and I began rubbing it off briskly with a soft dry cloth.
“It’s a bit of a waste, isn’t it?” Nasir’s voice made me jump. I hadn’t realised he was still in the garden, regarding me over the fence with that brooding stare.
“What’s a waste?”
He looked me up and down with a slow thoroughness that was as insulting as it was intended to be. “A bike like that belonging to a girl.”
It was the way he said the word “girl” that really got my back up. The same way some people would say “whore”.
“I hate to break this to you, Nasir,” I returned sweetly, “but we’ve just hit the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth. Women have the vote and everything now. Much as I’m sure you’d approve, we can’t all be kept permanently chained to the kitchen sink, barefoot and pregnant.”
His head came up, eyes flashing as his mouth set into a line of fury.
“You want to watch your step,” he hissed, raising his finger. “You are an outsider here, and you are not welcome.” With that friendly thought he stepped back from the fence, his body rigid. I heard the back door slam behind him.
Ah well, I thought, so much for maintaining cordial relations with the neighbours.
***
The day after, my morning walk with Friday revealed that the police were back on Lavender Gardens. It was half a dozen or so burglaries this time, which had brought them out. That and, I suspect, a growing realisation that if they didn’t at least make a show of force round the estate, the public’s trust in them was going to break down completely.
As it was, the local families advanced beyond their net curtains and their front doors. Now they came out into their untidy gardens to stand taciturn in their reproof at how little positive action had been taken before.
It wasn’t just the older generation who stood and muttered, and eyed the squad cars suspiciously. There seemed to be more teenage boys in the mix than I’d noticed hanging around before. Angry, cocky, eager to prove themselves in the face of authority.
For the moment they contented themselves with silent posturing, but I wondered how long it would be before one of them crossed the line. For their part, once they’d come back out into the street, the police stayed close to their cars, tense. I know most of them wear body armour as a matter of course these days, but in this instance it seemed like provocation.
To keep out of the way, I took Friday by the long route, out onto the main road via the cycle way that ran alongside the river. As I popped up onto the main road by Carlisle Bridge I spotted another of Mr Ali’s green and purple vans. You generally saw them all over the place, but this one made me sit up and take notice.
For a start, it had pulled up just where the two lanes from over Greyhound Bridge narrow into one under the railway line, and was causing quite a major constriction in the traffic flow. The second thing that turned my head was the man leaning in through the passenger-side window to talk to the driver.
It was unmistakably Langford.
As I watched, he took his last cigarette out, stuck it between his lips, and tossed the crumpled empty pack onto the pavement behind him. Then he opened the door and climbed in, ignoring the annoyed hooting of horns. The van driver pulled straight out into traffic with enough disdain for the Highway Code to have earned him an instant re-test.
I wondered vaguely if Mr Ali knew that the head of the Copthorne vigilante brigade was cadging lifts at his expense.
***
Several hours later, I wheeled the bike out and headed for work. Within fifteen minutes of relatively easy town traffic I’d pulled up outside the gym.
Attila’s place used to be an auto salvage yard with such a dodgy reputation that some wag had once painted “reserved for police vehicle only” on a section of the rusting iron fencing just inside the gate. It was still there, despite the change of use and ownership, and I ran the bike into the space underneath the faded lettering.
Against every advice, Attila had snapped the whole property up for a song when it finally closed down for good a few years ago. He’d turned the tatty workshop and storage area into a spacious fitness room, complete with a sauna. It wasn’t snazzy, but it had the workmanlike atmosphere that suggests real people who are seriously into the job, rather than a poseurs’ palace.
Usually, it was bustling, but today of all days, it was dead. I spent the first hour as the only inhabitant, and took the opportunity to get my own workout in, just in case things hotted up later.
I used to train a lot, starting when I was in the army and needed to build up both my strength and my stamina. After I was kicked out, it became a method of relaxation of sorts. A way to shut my brain down through sheer physical exhaustion, and rid myself of my frustration and anger, taking it out on the machines.
I was halfway through a tough set of bench presses when I finally got some company. The two blokes who came in were regulars, and they were into it enough to wave me on with the set. Conscious of them watching, I rushed through the last five reps before moving over to the counter to sign them in.
They were a friendly enough pair, giving me the usual cheery amount of stick as they hefted their sports bags and went to get changed. It was only when they reappeared that a sudden thought occurred to me.
“Wayne,” I said to one of them, while they were still doing their warm-up exercises, “don’t you work for Mr Ali, the builder?”
Wayne gave a grunt, but whether that was at my question, or because he was attempting to touch his toes, I couldn’t be sure. He was a well-built black man, with hands like shovels. He was currently struggling to ward off a beer gut and only just keeping pace with it. “Used to, girl,” he said. “Got laid off couple of weeks back.”
“Really? I thought he was doing well.”
“Yeah, so did I.” He gave me a wry smile. “Half a dozen of us got the punt at the same time. Last in, first out. That’s the way it goes. He reckons he’s got a big contract coming off soon, and we’ll be back in there but, tell you the truth, I’m not bothered. I’m working for that mob who are converting the old asylum now. Pay’s better.”
I digested the information, then decided a hunch was worth a try. “D’you know a guy called Langford?”
He frowned. “Oh yeah,” he said, suddenly guarded, “we all know him.”
If I’d been a horse, my ears would have pricked straight up at his tone. “Why’s that?”
For a moment Wayne looked as though he’d said too much, then he shrugged. His loyalties lay elsewhere these days. “He and the boss, well, there’s something going on there, and I’m damned if I know what, girl,” he said. “That Langford used to flag us down like we was bloody taxis. Take me here, take me there. I tried to complain to the boss about it once, but he said don’t ask questions.” He shrugged. “I got rent to pay, so I didn’t ask.”
“And you’ve no idea what was going on?”
He shook his head, plonking one foot up on a bench and reaching over it to stretch his hamstrings. When he came upright again, he said darkly, “All I
