1977

It opens.

I step inside.

The window open, drawers out, bed stripped, radio on:

Hot Chocolate: So You Win Again…

The cupboards bare.

I pick a letter off the dresser.

To Bob.

I read it.

She’s gone.

The John Shark Show

Radio Leeds

Sunday 5th June 1977

Chapter 8

‘There’s been another,’ Hadden had said.

But I’d just lain there, waiting, watching tiny black and white Scottish men on their knees, tearing chunks of turf out of the ground with their bare hands, the phone slipping in my own hand, thinking, Carol, Carol, is this the way it will always be, forever and ever, oh Carol?

‘Press conference is tomorrow.’

‘Sunday?’

‘Monday’s a Bank Holiday.’

‘It’s going to play hell with your Jubilee coverage.’

‘She’s not dead.’

‘Really?’

‘She got lucky.’

‘You think so?’

‘Oldman reckons he was disturbed.’

‘Hats off to George.’

‘Oldman says you should get in touch the minute you receive anything.’

‘He took something then?’

‘Oldman’s not saying. And neither should you.’

Oh Carol, no wonders for the dead?

Jubelum…

There was another voice in the Bradford flat, there in the dark behind the heavy curtains.

Ka Su Peng looked up, lips moving, the words late:

‘In October last year I was a prostitute.’

She had travelled ten thousand miles to be here, sat across a dim divide of stained chipped furniture, her skin grey, hair blue, ten thousand miles to fuck Yorkshire men for dirty five pound notes squeezed into damp palms.

Ten thousand miles to end up thus:

‘I don’t know many of the others so I’m usually alone. I do the early time on Lumb Lane, before the pubs close. He picked me up outside the Perseverance. The Percy they call it. It was a dark car, clean. He was friendly, quiet but friendly. Said he hadn’t slept much, was tired. I said, me too. Tired eyes, he had such tired eyes. He drove us to the playing fields off White Abbey and he asked me how much and I said a fiver and he said he’d give it to me after but I said I wanted it first because he might not pay me after like happened before. He said OK but he wanted me to get into the back of the car. So I got out and so did he and that’s when he hit me on the head with the hammer. Three times he hit me and I fell down on to the grass and he tried to hit me again but I closed my eyes and put up my hand and he hit that and then he just stopped and I could hear him breathing near my ear and then the breathing stopped and he was gone and I lay there, everything black and white, cars passing, and then I got up and walked to a phone box and called the police and they came to the phone box and took me to hospital.’

She was wearing a cream blouse and matching trousers, feet together, bare toes touching.

‘Can you remember what he looked like?’

Ka Su Peng closed her eyes, biting her bottom lip.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘It’s OK. I don’t want to remember, I want to forget, but I can’t forget, only remember. That’s all I do, remember.’

‘If you don’t want to talk about it…’

‘No. He was white, about five feet six inches…’

I felt a hand on my knee and there he was again, as if by magic, smiling through the gloom, meat between his teeth.

‘Stocky build…’

He patted his paunch, burped.

‘With dark wavy hair and one of them Jason King moustaches.’

He primped at his hair, stroking his moustache, that grin.

‘Did he have a local accent?’

‘No, Liverpool perhaps.’

He arched an eyebrow.

‘He said his name was Dave or Don, I’m not sure.’

He frowned and shook his head.

‘He was wearing a yellow shirt and blue jeans.’

‘Anything else?’

She sighed, ‘That’s all I can remember.’

He winked once and was gone again, as if by magic.

She said, ‘Is that enough?’

‘It’s too much,’ I whispered.

After the horror, tomorrow and the day after.

Suddenly she asked, ‘You think he’ll ever come back?’

‘Has he ever gone away?’

‘Sometimes, sometimes I can hear his breathing on the pillow next to me,’ she said, her sad face hewn from violence with blunt tools, black and blue leaves of hair weeping across the damage.

I reached out across the dark, ‘May I?’

She leant forward, parting her hair.

In the back room she drew the curtains.

I placed a ten pound note under the clock on the bedside table and then we sat with our backs to each other on opposite sides of the same single bed, unbuttoning our clothes on a Sunday morning in Bradford.

I stood up and lowered my trousers.

When I turned round she was lying on the bed, naked.

I laid down on top of her, my penis limp.

She moved her hand between my legs until she stopped and pushed me on to my back and leant over to the bedside table and took out a johnny.

She placed it over my cock and then straddled me, me inside her.