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