unable to speak, and stumbled a couple of yards to throw up in the gutter. Kate stepped across to help her but she pointed with a shaking finger to the alleyway behind them, a narrow passage running between two houses. Kate walked back and looked – she had missed it as she ran up but now she could see what had distressed the woman. A young dark-haired and dark-skinned man, she couldn’t tell his nationality in the shadows, lay slumped face up on the ground. He was maybe Middle Eastern, she thought, it was hard to tell in the dim light, but what she could tell from the blood staining his bright white shirt and dripping onto his outstretched and motionless hand was that he had been stabbed or shot and left to die.
She rushed over to kneel beside him, putting a slender finger on his cooling throat, checking his carotid artery for signs of life. She gently felt the wound, determining that he had indeed been stabbed, and took off her white woollen scarf – cashmere and a present from Jack. Folding it, she made it into a compress which she held against the wounded man’s chest.
A short while later a breathless Bob Wilkinson returned.
‘The little bastard got away. Oh shit …’ He didn’t finish the sentence when he saw what Kate was attending to. ‘Is he dead?’
Kate looked up at him. ‘There’s a faint cardiac rhythm. Very weak. An ambulance is on its way.’ She took off her coat to drape it around the cold and unconscious man and Bob immediately took his off and offered it to her.
‘I’ll be fine, thanks, Bob.’
‘Yeah, you may well be but I won’t. Jack Delaney would have my balls for conkers and dangling on two bits of string if he found out.’
Kate smiled briefly. Then she turned back to look at the man on the ground. His eyes cold, his dark skin looking pale in the moonlight, his lips thin and bloodless. This city, she thought.
This bloody city.
*
The girl turned in her bed. Voices had awoken her, raised voices. Voices fat with alcohol and drugs. Slurred with anger and cruelty. She put an arm over her head and sighed – she couldn’t blot out the sound. She heard a slap and a gasp of pain. And then the woman’s voice shouting back and another slap and a thump. And then silence.
She looked across at the window, the curtains not fully closed. She looked out at the dark night sky, brooding clouds swelling low over the city like the belly of some alien creature. She’d seen
She heard the creak on the steps and knew what was coming next. Better her, she thought. Better her.
The door opened, a spill of light from the downstairs lounge threading its way across the dust-laden carpet of her bedroom. The man peering through the light, unsteady on his feet, his shirt hanging untidily half in and half out of his trousers. His face looking like it had been moulded from wax and been left too long under a hot sun, his eyes small and cold like a guinea pig’s. She could smell his rank odour coming off him like waves of heat. His mouth opened in a crooked cruel smile, and she could imagine the fetid breath, could remember the crude words whispered in her ear. It wasn’t pain any more, at least not in a physical way.
‘It’s all right, darling, she’s asleep,’ he said, smiling and stumbling forward, bracing himself with one hand against the door frame. He tried to make his voice seductive, inviting her to be complicit in her own abuse.
The girl rolled onto her front again and lifted her nightdress. There was no point talking. She had learned the hard way that to pretend to want him just meant it was worse when he had finished. That she was to blame. That it was all her fault. She knew better, and she knew the angers that raged within him were beyond his control. She knew why her aunt had got drunk and shitfaced and had taken herself away with needles in her arm until one day she just took herself away for good. She knew why he only wanted her like a boy. The thought of it now chilled her to the bone as she realised that everything was changing. Time was running out.
She heard the porcine grunt, felt his filthy hands hold her, felt him enter into her. Her eyes pricked with the pain at first, tears that she blinked back, willed back, and then her eyes went as cold and dark as the sky outside, as flat and still as water under a full moon.
Better her, she thought. Better her.
His time was coming.
*
Kate closed the door quietly behind her. It was one o’clock and the house was quiet. She glanced into the lounge, but the lights were off. She eased off her shoes with her feet and went quietly into her bedroom. A soft gentle snoring told her that Jack had let himself in, and she was glad. She slipped out of her clothes, shrugged into her bathrobe and, closing the door quietly behind her again, walked to the bathroom, a foolish smile playing on her lips. Jack was all kinds of trouble, she knew that. It was like bringing a whirlwind into her life, but the thing was … she couldn’t picture life without him any more. She held a hand to her normally flat stomach and felt a slight swelling there now, as though she ought to be cutting back on the four-seasons pizzas. Except that Kate knew it wasn’t due to an unhealthy diet, it was due to Jack Delaney. The father of her child.
She let her bathrobe fall to the floor stepped into the cubicle and turned the shower on, adjusting the temperature. She stood underneath the powerful jets of water and felt the tension easing from her body as the water pummelled her flesh. A few months before and she would have had the water a lot hotter, punishing her flesh. Scourging the demons within. Burning the pain and the hurt and the guilt away. Now she just had it hot. Hot enough to wash the smoke and the grime and the smell of the city off her, but not hot enough to hurt. Not any more.
Kate gasped as a large powerful hand snaked around her waist and pulled her backwards against him. She had been so lost in her thoughts that she hadn’t heard him enter.
‘Room for a little one,’ said Jack Delaney.
Kate laughed. A musical, deep-throated laugh that came from deep within her.
‘I thought you were getting up early?’
Delaney leaned in and whispered in her ear. ‘I am.’
