developing at a very early stage by the way someone held themselves as they hauled on the rowing machine, or lifted a set of weights, but mental and emotional trauma usually passed him by.
“You’re looking tense, Charlie,” he said, watching me send the punchbag swinging wildly in a flurry of fists and feet, elbows and knees. He folded his massive forearms across his sculpted chest, head on one side as he regarded me with a frown cutting deep between his eyebrows. He nodded towards the canvas bag. “Want to tell me who you’d rather was hanging there?”
I turned, surprised, and wiped the sweat out of my eyes. “I could just be doing this for exercise, you know,” I said, ruffled, trying not to gasp for breath. And I thought I was getting fitter.
“Oh, yeah, for sure,” Attila dismissed. “But to me this does not look like exercise. This looks like training. So, who are you training to fight, because he looks like one tough customer, yes?”
“I’m not training to fight anyone,” I denied, straight away, but even as I said it, I wasn’t sure if it was true. “At least, I don’t think so,” I added.
Attila sighed, and came to sit on the bench nearest to me, a doleful expression on his square face. “You have a lot of scars, Charlie,” he said gently. “And not all of them, I think, are on the outside.”
For a moment I said nothing. The only sound was a slight squeaking as the punchbag rocked to and fro. Instinctively, I reached out and stilled it. It gave me something to do with my hands.
“So,” Attila went on when I didn’t speak, “I think maybe you are training to fight your own demons. You are trying to come to terms with whatever has gone before, and maybe you think that by being strong, by being quick, by being ready, you can beat them next time, yes?”
“Oh, I’ve already beaten them. It’s not the memory of what’s happened in the past that I’m frightened of, Attila,” I said, giving him a twisted smile, “but I tell you, the prospect of what I might do in the future scares the shit out of me . . .”
Nine
I don’t know if I’d worried Attila unduly, but out of the blue he decided that I could go early that afternoon, and I left around half three.
“We’re quiet, and the weekend’s coming up,” he said, when I protested. “Go home, Charlie. Relax. Try and unwind a little, yes?”
“OK,” I agreed eventually, even though I knew I wouldn’t.
The life was already starting to fade out of the day as I rode through town and across Greyhound Bridge. Lancaster sits on the tidal estuary of the Lune, and that afternoon the tide was well out, leaving great expanses of stony sludge exposed to the greying light. There was a bitter wind sizzling in from Morecambe Bay, too. It whipped up over the exposed bridge, and the bike shied away from each gust.
Still, at least there wasn’t much traffic to dice with, and I was soon winding my way through the streets of Lavender Gardens towards Kirby Street. Perhaps it was my imagination, but without Garton-Jones’s paramilitaries lurking round every corner, the estate looked less grim, somehow.
At least the kids felt unharassed enough to be back playing out, despite the cold and the rapidly gathering gloom. They practised their guerrilla tactics among the parked cars, making me slow to a crawl as I threaded my way among them.
I was almost at Pauline’s when a Transit van turned into the other end of the street and came speeding down the middle like the TV reconstruction of a hit-and-run. The driver held it in a low gear, the transmission whining in protest.
I pulled over into a gap, put my feet down, and waited for him to go past. It was one of Mr Ali’s green and purple vans, and I made a mental note to ask him to have a quiet word with his drivers when I saw him again.
What I saw next pushed that thought right out of my mind. Instead of shooting past me the van pulled over right outside Pauline’s house, and the passenger door swung open. I could see there were the obligatory three men in the front. For some reason there are
I was getting used to seeing Nasir in unexpected company, but this time it wasn’t the Asian boy who was out of place. He reached back into the van for his flask and sandwich box, and nodded to the driver.
It was the other passenger who caught my eye. He seemed reluctant to move out of Nasir’s way, standing close up to the open van door, deliberately obstructive. I wondered what it was that was lacking about Langford’s psychological make-up that made him particularly enjoy that kind of game. Nasir had to go out of his way to step round him carefully.
The vigilante broke into a big smile as he recognised the boy’s submission. It was like something out of a wildlife documentary about the pecking order of baboons.
He waited until Nasir had walked about halfway down the drive towards the house, then called after him, “Hey, Nas!” The boy refused to give any sign of having heard him, so Langford added, “Give my regards to the ladies, won’t you?”
He laughed at the way Nasir’s stride faltered, and climbed back into the van. “OK, drive on,” he said to the other man, who’d stayed morosely silent during the brief exchange. “Take me to your leader.”
The driver rammed the van into gear with a crunch and gunned it away down the street. The sense of realisation settled over me slowly. Wayne had told me that Langford used to turn up and collect a pay packet from Mr Ali every Thursday.
Today was Thursday.
With only a moment’s hesitation, I paddled the Suzuki round in a half circle, and followed the van.
There was only one logical way out of the estate, so I didn’t have to try and look too casual until we reached the main road. The van turned left, and headed towards Morecambe. I purposely allowed a few other vehicles to go by before I pulled out after it.
The Transit was easy to keep track of among the cars, particularly as the streetlights started to come on. If the driver’s reckless lane changing was anything to go by, he wasn’t using his mirrors much, in any case.
At the roundabout just past the college, the van veered off to the left and started to head towards Heysham. The manoeuvre was so abrupt that for a moment I thought he’d spotted me although, logically, I didn’t see how he could have done. I kept up the pursuit.
I nearly lost him as he turned off the escape road they put in just in case anything goes seriously pear- shaped – or should that be mushroom-shaped – at the nuclear power station. I got pushed out of lane by an Irish trucker who was obviously late for his ferry, and had to do another quick circuit of the roundabout to take the right exit.
By this time, though, I’d a fair idea of where they were heading. There was a new three-storey office block going up on the edge of one of the industrial estates. Construction problems had ensured that it had made the local news a few times. I seemed to recall that Mr Ali’s firm had the contract.
I dropped back further, letting the van rocket ahead along the narrowing road. There wasn’t so much traffic to hide behind now, and as we reached the site entrance, the tarmac was clodded with earth from the construction machinery. It wasn’t the sort of surface I wanted to approach at a gallop.
As the van turned in and bounced over the rough ground, I rode past carefully, and nipped into the old industrial estate next door. Half the ramshackle units were empty. The weathered shabbiness of the letting agents’ signs was a clear giveaway that these weren’t recent vacancies.
I slid the bike into a narrow gap between two of the boarded-up units that backed onto the new development, and killed the lights and the engine. For a few moments I sat there in the rapidly encroaching darkness, listening to the Suzuki’s aluminium engine ticking and pinging as it cooled down, and chewing over my options.
I
Equally, I could go marching in through the front gate, demand to speak to Mr Ali, and then confront him about his connection with Langford’s vigilante group.
Forthright, yes, but stupid, also.
On the other hand, the third alternative was possibly the least attractive. I could squeeze my way through
