‘Can you make out the registration?’ said Diane.
‘No.’ Angie put her hand on the door. ‘Do you want me to…?’
‘No. Stay where you are.’
‘Why?’
‘Remember what I told you — no heroics.’
‘I was only going to get a sodding number plate.’
‘Well, wait.’
Maybe it had been a mistake to let her sister come with her tonight. ‘Loose cannon’ was an expression which fit her perfectly. If there was going to be trouble, Angie would cause it.
Diane watched the man cross the road, stare through the fence, and stop at the bridge to light a cigarette.
‘Okay.’
She got out of the car and began to walk towards the bridge. It wasn’t the walk she’d imagined making when she came to Birmingham. She’d pictured herself taking that long walk down the corridor from the witness room to take the stand in a crown court trial. Only a few yards, but a million lonely miles when you were going to face your own demons.
Barnes took no notice of her, even when she came right up to him. She stood carefully a couple of steps away, the best position for defence.
‘Darren Barnes?’ she said.
‘Maybe.’
‘Or should I call you Doors?’
‘And who the hell are you?’
‘You don’t recognize me? Well, no — you wouldn’t. I was never a person to you, was I?’
He looked at her then. ‘You know what? I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.’
‘Let me explain.’
‘No, no explanations. I heard there was something in this for me, right? Or am I being fed some crap?’
‘I want information from you.’
Barnes smiled. His eyes were half closed as he peered at her through his cigarette smoke. He smelled of some expensive deodorant or hair gel.
‘Oh, information is it? I don’t know who you are, but you’ve come to the wrong guy with your bullshit. The last bloke who messed with us ended up in that canal. They needed three bin bags for the bits. You get me?’
‘It’s a river,’ said Fry.
‘What?’
‘It’s not a canal, it’s a river.’
‘Like I care. This is some kind of joke, right?’
Fry could read the contempt in his face. He took the cigarette out of his mouth, and blew the smoke towards her. Then he spat towards her foot.
‘I’m going to ask you some questions,’ she said.
‘You,’ he said, ‘ain’t going to do shit.’
Before Fry could react, Angie’s voice came in her ear.
‘Diane, we’ve got more company.’
‘Damn. Don’t leave the car.’
Quickly, Diane turned, and Barnes laughed.
‘Hey, where you going? I was just getting to like you, kind of.’
She ignored him, moving back across the waste ground to the wall. Though she’d brought a torch, the narrow pool of light it cast only seemed to emphasize the blackness outside its reach, to make her isolation total and threatening. From beneath the railway arches, the shadows had begun to sidle towards her, bringing back the memories. They were memories that were too vivid to be erased, too deeply etched into her soul to be forgotten. They merely wallowed and writhed in the depths, waiting for the chance to re-emerge.
Standing back in the darkness, watching, laughing. Voices murmured and coughed. ‘It’s a copper,’ the voices said. ‘She’s a copper’
She’d always known those old memories were still powerful, and ready to rise up from the darkness. Desperately, she tried to count the number of dark forms that loomed around her, some of them mere smudges of silhouettes.
The memories churned and bubbled. Brief, fragmented glimpses of figures carved into severed segments by the streetlights, the sickly reek of booze and violence. And then that rough, slurring Brummie voice that slithered out of the darkness. ‘How do you like this, copper?’ The same taunting laughter moving in the shadows, the same dark, menacing shapes all around. Hands grabbing her, pinching and pulling. Her arms trapped by fingers that gripped her tightly, painful and shocking in their violence.
Then she saw that Angie had left the car and was surrounded, dark shapes on all sides of her. Diane began to run across the waste ground, feeling the energy pouring into her limbs, drawing in the deep breaths that expanded her lungs and quickened her muscles. The group turned towards her, astonished at her charge.
‘Who’s that?’
‘It’s another woman.’
She could smell them in the darkness, see their shapes moving towards her as her brain began to flood with the memories. It was the same old film that had run through her mind constantly, no sooner reaching its climactic end than it would start all over again. A great rage came over her, swamping her resistance, and she badly needed something to hit out at.
Automatically, her hands closed into fists, the first two knuckles protruding, with her thumbs locked over her fingers. Concentrate. Pour the adrenalin into the muscles. Get ready to strike.
The men were grinning. They weren’t taking her seriously, even though she was now within reach. One of them turned to reach out towards Angie, and Diane reacted. She hit him in the kidneys, swept his legs from under him and split his nose with the edge of her hand.
With a startled shout, a second man came at her from the left. But he had hesitated too long, and she diverted his fist with a forearm block. She swivelled, cracked his kneecap with a side kick.
Then an arm closed round her throat as she was grabbed from behind. The third man was strong and much heavier than she was. The impact of his body forced her up against the factory wall, trapping her arms and banging her forehead on the bricks. Her face to the wall, she clutched at the sweating brickwork, felt her fingers slither on the greasy surface.
When she was firmly pinned, her attacker shifted his grip. The possibility she was most afraid of was a knife. A miasma of beer fumes filled her nose, and his breath pressed hot on the back of her neck. The feel of his body pushed up against hers and the smell of his sweat-soaked hands brought back all the remembered terrors.
‘Now panic drove her. She took a deep breath through her nose before folding suddenly forward at the waist, kicking backwards into his groin with her heel and driving her elbow hard into his solar plexus. He grunted in pain, and his grip loosened. She spun round, using a full rising block to break his grip completely.
She found herself facing Darren Barnes again. Diane drew her ASP, and opened it with a flick of the wrist.
‘Do you know who I am now?’
‘You’re the copper.’
‘Who was the third person that night?’
‘You know who it was, though. Right?’
‘No.’
‘You’re a cop. The cops know.’
‘Tell me anyway.’
He gasped, struggling to get his breath as he stared at her, sweat running down his face. He was far too unfit for this. He relied too much on the presence of his friends to protect him.
‘Well, I couldn’t give a shit,’ he said. ‘It was the lawyer guy-’
‘William Leeson?’
‘Yeah, yeah, him. Leeson. We had a meeting set up with him, at the pub.’
