Bleed for Me (48 page)

Retreating down the escalator, through the automatic doors, I emerge on street level. A toddler runs under my feet. Half catching him as I fal , I bounce up and spin around, planting the boy on his feet. His mother gives me a foul-mouthed tirade, but I’m looking past her for Marco.

I can’t see him. He was on the far side of the square. Pushing through the crowd, I look for his red basebal cap. In the periphery of my vision I catch sight of Julianne. What’s she doing? She must have seen Marco too.

Suddenly, someone col ides with me from the front on my right-side and continues walking. I glimpse his features - the marks on his cheeks, more like scars than tattoos, as though his face has been sewn together from discarded pieces of skin.

I can hear my breath escaping as I watch his right hand slip into his coat pocket. He moves away. I know I have to chase him. Stop him. Instead I feel an overwhelming sense of fatigue. One step. Two steps. Three steps. What’s happening?

I glance down. A red plume spreads out from my ribs down to my trousers. The blade slipped in so easily that I didn’t feel it enter beneath my ribs, rising towards my heart and into my lungs.

I’m staggering, fal ing to my knees, frantical y trying to stay upright. My head keeps bobbing and weaving but it’s not one of Mr Parkinson’s cruel jokes. The pain has arrived, a dul throbbing, growing in intensity, screaming at me to stop. It’s as if someone has driven a heated metal rod into my chest and is jerking it from side to side.

My shirt is sodden, sticking to my body. I look up and around, frightened. Through the forest of legs, I can’t see Marco. Maybe he’s gone. Maybe he’s running. Julianne must be close. I see her first. They’re together.

In that instant, I recognise Guilfoyle’s hooded sweatshirt. His right hand comes out of his pocket. The blade is flush against his forearm. He’s moving at pace through the crowd.

I try to yel , but it comes out as a groan. Guilfoyle is only a few paces away, passing Marco on his knife-hand side, his arm in motion, using his momentum to drive the blade beneath his ribs, aiming for the heart.

At that moment a girl in a pink skirt and candy-striped leggings loses her helium bal oon. Marco spins on one foot and tries to catch the trailing string. The blade slides through his shirt and into his flesh, but the angle is wrong.

Guilfoyle knows it. The speed of the thrust has carried him two paces from Marco and he turns. Julianne has seen him. She screams, open-mouthed, terrified. Head down, hands in his pockets, Guilfoyle carries on, pushing through the crowd.

Marco drops to his knees, holding his side. I can’t see him any more. People are stepping around me and over me. A woman trips over my legs and almost fal s. She has tight blue jeans and a huge arse. Another face, upside down. Her husband - he’s wearing an AC/DC T-shirt.

‘Are you al right?’ he asks.

I can’t answer.

‘That’s blood!’ says his wife.

‘He’s been shot,’ says someone else.

‘Do you want me to cal an ambulance?’

‘Who shot him?’ asks another voice.

‘It could have been a sniper.’

‘A sniper! Where?’

‘There’s a sniper!’

It’s like watching a rock being thrown into a tranquil pond, rippling outwards. People scatter. Yel ing. Running. Fal ing down. Dragging children. Fighting to get away. There are cries and yel s and scuffles.

Now I see Julianne clearly. She’s safe. I feel a quickening torque of my heart. She takes off Marco’s shirt. Blood is leaking over the waistband of his underwear and jeans.

At the far end of Merchant Street a black Range Rover pul s up. Carl Guilfoyle jumps into the passenger seat. I glimpse a woman behind the wheel. Rita Brennan.

Ruiz is charging after them. He runs like a front-rower with his head down and knees lifting, everything happening below the waist. He grabs the driver’s door and pul s it open. Rita Brennan accelerates and the door swings out and back in again. Ruiz grabs at the wheel and wrenches it down. Moments later I hear the crunch of metal on metal but can’t see what happened.

There are police sirens. Growing louder.

The pain in my chest is overtaking every other sense. My fingers are cold, my skin clammy. Nothing feels like it is happening to bring help. Where are the paramedics? Someone get a doctor.

Julianne looks up and sees me. I wish I could smile bravely, but I’m scared and I’m shaking.

She’s with me now. Kneeling.

‘Where?’

I lift my arm. She can see the puncture wound below my rib cage. The hole seems to be breathing. She takes off her trench-coat and presses it to the spot.

‘That’s going to stain,’ I tel her.

‘I’l soak it.’

Straddling me, she presses her fingers against my ribs, keeping pressure on the wound. Her eyes are shining. She’s not supposed to cry.

‘I need you to stay awake, Joe.’

‘I’m just closing my eyes for a second.’

‘No, you stay awake.’

‘You were right,’ I tel her. ‘I should have protected you and Charlie.’

She shakes her head as a signal that I’m not supposed to talk about this now.

‘How’s Marco?’

‘He’s going to be OK.’

My heart is no longer battering. It’s slowing down.

‘I’m just going to have a little rest.’

‘Don’t! Please.’

‘Sorry.’

Julianne lowers her head to my chest and it feels like we’ve slipped back through the years since we separated and she’s listening to the same heartbeat that serenaded her to sleep for twenty years.

‘Don’t be angry with me,’ she whispers.

‘I’m not angry.’

My lips are pressed into her dark hair.

I remember the last time we made love. I had come home late and Julianne was asleep or only half awake. Naked. She rol ed on top of me in the darkness, performing the ritual half-blind, but practised. Rising and descending inch by inch, accepting my surrender. I thought at the time that it didn’t feel like make-up sex or new-beginning sex. It was goodbye sex, a dying sigh drawing colour from the embers.

If that has to be the last time then I can live with that, I think, opening my eyes again.

‘Charlie is going to be OK,’ I say.

Julianne raises her face to look at me. ‘I know. It just makes me a little sad because you two are so alike.’

‘You think she’s like me?’

‘I know you both too wel .’

She runs her finger down my right cheek, tracing the scratches.

‘Who did this to you?’

‘The woman who kil ed Ray Hegarty.’

‘It wasn’t Sienna.’

‘No.’

I have a student waiting to see me outside my office. His name is Milo Coleman and I’m supposed to be overseeing his psychology thesis, which would be a lot easier if I had something to oversee.

Milo, one of my brighter students, has spent the past four months trying to decide the subject of his thesis. His most recent suggestion was to pose the question whether loud music in bars increased alcohol consumption. This only slightly bettered a proposal that he study whether alcohol made a woman more or less likely to have sex on a first date.

I told him that while I appreciated how diligently he would research such a subject, I doubted if I could get it past the university’s board of governors.

Opening my office door, I don’t find him waiting on the row of chairs in the corridor. Instead he’s chatting to Chloe, an undergrad student who answers the phones in the psychology department. Milo is dressed in a James Dean T-shirt, low-slung jeans and Nike trainers. Chloe likes him. Her body language says so - the way her shoulders pul back and she plays with her hair.

‘When you’re ready, Milo,’ I announce.

Chloe gives him a look that says, Next time.

‘Professor O’Loughlin, how’s it hanging?’

‘It’s hanging just fine.’

‘I heard about you being stabbed and I was, like, shocked, you know. I mean, that’s a heavy scene.’

‘Yes, Milo, very heavy.’

He takes a seat opposite my desk, leans forward, elbows on his knees. A long fringe of hair fal s across one eye. He brushes it aside, tucking it girlishly behind his ear. Smiling quietly. Beaming.

‘I think I’ve got it: the big idea.’

‘Hit me with it.’

‘Wel , I went to see a comedy night last week and I was watching this black dude tel ing jokes, real y edgy stuff, racist, you know. He’s tel ing nigger jokes and al these white people in the audience are laughing and cheering. I got to wondering what effect racial humour has on prejudice.’

Milo looks at me nervously. Expectantly. Hopeful y.

‘I think it’s a great idea.’

‘Real y?’

‘Yes, real y. How are you going to do it?’

Milo gets to his feet, pacing the room while he lays out his ideas for a cognitive study involving an audience and a series of questions. He’s energised. Animated.

‘So how long do I have?’

‘Start work now and you can update me at the end of November.’

He cocks his head, looking at me with one eye. Milo often looks at me sideways so I never see both his eyes at the same time.

‘That’s only two months.’

‘Sufficient time.’

‘But I got to work out questions. Parameters. Study groups . . .’

This is the other side of Milo’s personality - making excuses, questioning the work involved.

‘Two months is plenty of time. Show me too little and I’l mark you down as being lazy. Show me too much and I’l think you’re sucking up to me.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘You tel me.’

‘Huh?’

‘You’ve spent four years studying human behaviour. Decide if I’m lying.’

Milo pushes back his fringe. Frowns. Wants to argue.

‘I know what you’re like, Milo. You cruise. You coast. You wear that earring and that T-shirt because you see yourself as a rebel without a cause, channel ing the spirit of James Dean.

But let me tel you something about Dean. He was the son of a dental technician from Indiana, where he went to a posh school and studied violin and tap dancing.’

Milo looks completely bemused. I put my hand on his shoulder. Lead him to the door. ‘Start your thesis. No more excuses. Show me something by November.’

I watch him disappear along the corridor with his exaggerated slope-shouldered walk. My old headmaster at prep school, Mr Swanson (who looked like God with long white curly hair) would have barked at him, ‘It took a mil ion years for humans to learn to walk upright, Coleman, and you’re taking us back to the trees.’

Coop Regan is sitting nervously on a chair. Dressed in a coat and tie, he has combed his oiled hair across his head and buttoned his jacket as though waiting for a job interview.

This is a completely different man to the one I met four months ago in Edinburgh, hiding away in a dark lounge watching old home movies of his missing daughter. Now clear-eyed and sober, he stands and shakes my hand firmly, holding my gaze.

‘Ah’m sorry to bother you,’ he says, in a voice ravaged by years of smoking. ‘Ah know you’re a busy man.’

‘That’s OK.’

‘We couldn’t go home without saying goodbye.’

‘Where’s Philippa?’

He motions outside. ‘Bil y wanted to play. It’s a long old drive home.’

Glancing out the window, I see a young boy running through the trees, being chased by a large woman in a bright green cardigan who is shaped like a fireplug. Philippa has no chance of catching Bil y, but she’l keep on chasing as long as he keeps laughing.

‘Vincent brought us to see you,’ says Coop.

Then I notice Ruiz standing beneath a tree, which has blooms as big as his fists. Bil y runs towards him and hides behind him for a moment as though his legs are tree trunks.

‘We’re going to have to watch that one - he’s cheeky like his ma used to be.’

‘You’l do fine.’

Coop’s chest expands and he stares at his polished shoes. ‘Ah said some things to you before, when you came to see us. Ah blamed Caro for making us love her so much. Ah was going off my head.’

‘I understand.’

Coop nods. ‘Aye, Ah think you do.’

He pul s me into a hug. I can smel his aftershave and the dry-cleaning fluid on his jacket.

Releasing me, he turns and wipes his eyes. I walk him downstairs and say goodbye to Philippa, who is pink-faced and breathless, ten years younger than I remember with her bright red hair pul ed back from her round face.

They wave and toot their horn, taking their grandson home. Ruiz lets his eyes wander across the grass to a group of pretty students having a picnic in the shade. For a fleeting moment I glimpse a yearning in him - a longing to be young again - but he’s not a man to look over his shoulder or contemplate what might have been.

It has been two months since I left hospital and three months since the stabbing. The stiletto blade entered beneath my ribs and travel ed upwards through my spleen, aiming at my heart. Narrowly missing the chambers and aorta, it punctured my left lung, which slowly col apsed. The slenderness of the blade limited blood loss external y but fil ed my chest cavity. I needed three blood transfusions and two operations.

I came out of hospital on the same day that Natasha El is appeared in Bristol Crown Court charged with the murder of Ray Hegarty and attempted murder of Annie Robinson. These were crimes of passion and crimes of revenge. Natasha thought she was losing Gordon to another schoolgirl lover - someone just like her.

At first she denied the al egations and then tried to strike a deal after Louis Preston found her DNA on a hand-towel at the murder scene.

On that Tuesday evening, Natasha let herself into the Hegarty’s house using a key that she copied from Sienna. She hid behind the teenager’s bedroom door, looking at the reflection in the mirror so she knew exactly what moment to strike.

She was expecting Sienna, but Ray Hegarty arrived home instead. He must have heard a sound and walked upstairs into Sienna’s room. Perhaps he saw Natasha at the last moment as the hockey stick was fal ing.

She couldn’t risk being recognised or identified so she silenced him, cutting his throat, right to left.

Ronnie Cray said it on that first day - it had to have been someone smal to hide behind the door. Somebody left-handed. Somebody who neatly folded the hand-towel in the bathroom.