and I look up at her face, at the red folds in her neck, the white damaged hair, the big blue eyes, and I wonder what on earth would possess someone to do this job, and then I think the same about my own job before I remember how I’m suspended and I probably won’t be doing my own job anyway, no matter what they say, and I look at my watch and realise how much I’ve lost track of the time, much I’ve lost track of the minutes, I’ve lost track of the hours, lost track of the days, track of the weeks, of the months, the years, decades, and I walk away down the polished corridor, the nurses still talking, another one coming out from the booth, the three of them watching me go until I stop and turn around and walk back up the corridor to thank them and thank them and thank them and then I turn around and I walk away again, down the polished corridor, the little police car in my hand, down the stairs and out the door into the morning, or what I think is a morning but the leaves on the trees are all tinged red and the sky is turning white, the grass blue, the people alien greys, the cars silent, the voices gone, and I sit on the steps, rubbing my eyes until they sting like bees and I stop and I stand up and walk down the long drive towards the road and wonder how the fuck I get home from here and so I stick out my thumb and stand there for a long time until I fall over and lie there beside the entrance to the hospital in the blue grass, staring up at the white sky, at the red leaves, and if I sleep, then I wake, and when I wake I get up and dust the blue grass off me and walk down the road to a bright red phone box and inside I find a white card for a taxi and I dial and ask a foreign voice in a foreign place for a cab and then I stand outside the box and watch the silent cars with all their Rippers at their wheels, watch them speeding up and down the road, watch them laughing and pointing at me, dead women in their boots, at their back windows, dead women waving and asking for help, white hands dangling from their boots, white hands pressed to their back windows, until at long, long, bloody last the taxi pulls up and I get in and tell him where I want to go and he looks at me like he doesn’t know where the fuck I mean but off we set, me sat up front, the radio on, him trying to talk to me but I can’t understand what on earth he’s saying or why on earth he would want to say anything to me until I ask him where the fuck he’s from and he doesn’t say anything after that, just concentrates on the road ahead until we pull up some two days fucking later outside my house and I tell him I’m sorry but I haven’t got any money so he’ll just have to wait there while I go inside and find some, which upsets him no end but what can he do, so I go up to the house and put my key in the lock but it doesn’t work any more so I ring the bell for the rest of the day until I go round the back and try another key in another lock but that doesn’t work either, so I spend the night knocking until I put the brick that stops the garage doors banging, I put that brick through the little window next to the back door and stick my hand in there but that doesn’t help at all so I set about the door with my fists and my feet until finally I get inside and go into the front room and take the milk money out of the top drawer and go back out down the drive to the taxi driver but if he hasn’t fucked off after all that, not that I can blame him, so I wave to the neighbours across the road and go back inside to find Louise and Bobby, going from room to room, but they’re not there, not in the drawers, not in the cupboards, and not under the beds, so I go back downstairs and pop round to Tina’s to see if they’ve nipped round there or if she knows where the bloody hell they’ve got to, so I wave to all the neighbours again and go up Tina’s drive and knock on her back door but she doesn’t open the door so I keep knocking into the middle of next week, Kirsty the dog yapping away on the other side, and I keep knocking until at long fucking last the door opens and it’s Janice, just fucking stood there, as large as life, and you could knock me down with a feather I’m that surprised, and I tell her straight, I thought you were dead I say, thought Eric Hall or John Rudkin raped you and hit you on the head and then jumped up and down on your chest, and she’s crying and saying no, saying she’s all right, and I ask if the baby’s all right and she says it is and so I ask if I can come in because I feel like a right prick stood out there for all the world and his wife to see, but she says no and shuts the door and I try and open the door again and she’s shouting and telling me how she’s going to call the police and I remind her how I am the police, but it’s obvious she’s not going to let me in and then I know she can’t really be Janice, because Janice would let me in, and I sit on Tina’s back step and wish in my heart I was more like Jesus, until I get up and go back round to mine and when I get to the drive I see the garage doors are wide open and banging in the rain and so I decide to go for a drive to try and find Louise and Bobby, fucked as I am if I know where they could be or where to start, but I get in her car and set off anyroad because it’s hardly like I’ve got a lot of bloody pressing engagements, is it?
Part 5. The damned
Radio Leeds
Thursday 16th June 1977
Chapter 21
I woke with a start in my car, my chest tight, sweating and breathing fast.
I looked at the clock in the dashboard.
7.07.
I was on Durkar Lane, Durkar, at the bottom of Rudkin’s drive.
I looked in the rearview mirror. Nothing.
I sat there, waiting.
Twenty minutes later, a woman in her dressing-gown opened the front door and took in the two pints of milk from the doorstep.
I waited until she’d shut the door, then I started the car, put the radio on, and drove off.
Down into Wakefield, out along the Dewsbury Road, over Shaw-cross, down through Hanging Heaton and into Batley, radio on:
