Then a voice.
‘The Vodaphone number you have dialled is not in use …’
‘Fuck!’ he snarled and slammed the receiver down.
Mind you, if she was with a client she wouldn’t have the bloody thing turned on, would she?
Fucking bitch.
He took a hefty swallow from the glass, then dialled again, her home number this time, waiting for the message to end, for the long beep to signal he should start talking.
He heard it and tried to speak but found he couldn’t say the words.
The tape was recording silence at the other end.
He pressed the receiver hard to his ear, his eyes closed.
Say something.
Tell her to call you. Tell her you’ll meet her somewhere.
He gripped the handset more tightly.
‘Gina,’ he said, finally then he heard another long beep.
Time up.
‘Fucking bastard!’ he roared at the phone, at the answering machine.
At himself?
He dropped the phone back onto its cradle and got to his feet, refilling his glass.
And if she’d answered, what would you have said to her?
He glared at the phone.
He needed to talk to her.
To anyone.
Talbot walked back to the phone and dialled again.
PART TWO
.. . Let me show you how I love you. It’s our secret, you and me. Let me show you how I love you, But keep it in the family…
.. . The sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures; ‘tis the eye of childhood That fears a painted Devil.
Forty-nine
He thought he’d wet himself.
Doug O’Brian rolled over in bed and slid a hand down towards his groin, his eyes half open, his head still clouded.
He felt no moisture, just the wrinkled skin of his scrotum. O’Brian also touched his penis.
Checking.
He must have been dreaming.
Only then did he become aware of the pressure inside his bladder.
No wonder he’d dreamed he’d pissed himself.
He swung himself quickly out of bed, pulled the cord of his pyjama bottoms tighter and headed for the bedroom door.
Half-way across he tripped on one of his own discarded shoes and almost overbalanced.
He muttered something under his breath and kicked the offending article out of the way, tugging open the bedroom door, his haste to reach the toilet now increased.
The floorboards on the landing creaked protestingly as he crossed, past two other closed doors and another to his right which was slightly ajar.
He peered in and saw two of his children sleeping, one of them hanging precariously close to the edge of the top bunk.
O’Brian thought about tiptoeing in and pushing the child back, but his desire to empty his bursting bladder proved too strong.
The window on the landing was letting in the first, dirty rays of dawn and O’Brian squinted, as if the dull, greyish-blue light was too much for him.
Another day.
A day just like all the rest. They had become indistinguishable from one another, or so it seemed to O’Brian. Get up, work, go to bed.
Sandwiched between were worries about his job (he’d heard that fifty were to be laid off from the Bankside Power station in Southwark where he’d worked for the last fifteen years), his family and his car, which looked like packing up on him again. Bloody thing. It hadn’t run right for more than a week since he’d bought it from his brother-in-law three years ago.
But, at the moment, the only thing which concerned Doug O’Brian was relieving himself.
He pushed open the bathroom door, flipped up the seat and began urinating.
The relief.
He smiled to himself, catching a glimpse of his reflection in the bathroom mirror. His black hair was sticking up at one side like a wayward punk rocker, his eyes looked puffy and he needed a shave.
Otherwise he didn’t look too bad for such an early hour.
He finished urinating but chose not to flush the toilet, not wanting to wake anyone, least of all any of the children. Especially the youngest. She’d be in their bedroom like a shot if he disturbed her. O’Brian wondered if he might just get another hour’s sleep before the alarm woke him. If the youngest heard him moving about he had no chance.
He tiptoed back onto the landing, glancing out of the window, pausing a moment.
There were two police vans parked in the road outside.
He could see uniformed men moving about, pointing to various houses. They were talking to a couple of smartly dressed civilians, one of them a woman.
O’Brian rubbed his eyes.
What the hell were the law doing out there at this time in the morning?
He glanced at his watch.
5.16 a.m.
More uniformed men climbed from the back of a third van, which pulled up and parked on the other side of Luke Street.
The men paired up and O’Brian watched as they headed off in different directions, some towards the front doors of houses.
He blinked hard, as if the uniformed men might disappear.
Perhaps they were part of his dream, too.
Then he saw two of them approaching his house.
The loud knocking on the front door that he heard seconds later convinced him this was no dream.
Two streets away in Blackall Street, there were no vans, just police cars.
Each officer had a plain clothes companion as he approached his designated house.
They all seemed to pause outside the doors of those houses chosen, then, as if a signal had been given, they knocked.
Annette Hilston had watched the police vans draw up in Weymouth Terrace, crouched on her bed, the eyes of a dozen pop stars glaring blankly at her from the posters festooning her walls.
She had seen them approach the house.
She had heard them bang on the door.
Now she listened to shouting. Her father and her mother were yelling at someone, but she heard no words in
