Nineteen Seventy-Seven: The Red Riding Quartet, Book Two (7 page)

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Both arms and forearms have extensive and jagged wounds
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The right thumb shows a small superficial incision about one inch long, with extravasation of blood in the skin and there are several abrasions on the back of the hand showing the same condition
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On opening the thorax it appears that the right lung is minimally adherent by old firm adhesions. The lower part of the lung is broken and torn away
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The left lung is intact: adherent at the apex and there are a few adhesions over the side. In the substance of the lung are several nodules of consolidation
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The pericardium is open below
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In the abdominal cavity is some partly digested food and fish and potatoes and similar food was found in the remains of the stomach attached to the intestines
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Spitalfields, 1888
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The heart is absent and the door locked from the inside
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I woke to find them still perched across the sofa.
I flew from the bed and, casting them aside, I flung open Oldman’s dossier:
Murders and Assaults Upon Women in the North of England
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I read and read till my eyes were blood-red and bleeding from all that I’d read.
And then I began to type, type as they chattered among themselves, wheeling around the room in dreadful disharmony, Carol taunting me, scolding me:
‘You’re late. You’re late. You’re always so late.’
One bitten finger in my ear, I kept typing, texts rewritten in a matching, fetching, fresh blood-red.
In the darkest part of the night, before the dawn and the light, I’d finished, just one last thing to do:
I picked up the telephone and pulled the numbers round the dial, my stomach turning with each digit.
‘It’s me, Jack.’
‘I thought you’d never call.’
‘It’s not been easy’
‘It never is.’
‘I need to see you.’
‘Better late than never.’
With the dawn and more soft rain, I woke again. They were sleeping, wilted across my furniture.
I lay alone, staring up at the cracks in the ceiling, the chips in the paint, thinking about her, thinking about him, waiting for St Anne.
I rose and tiptoed past them to the table.
I pulled the paper from the typewriter.
I held the words in my hand and felt my belly bleeding:
Yorkshire, 1977.
The heart absent, the door still locked from the inside.
She came up behind me, leaning over my shoulder, warm against my ear, staring at the words I’d written:
Yesterday’s news, tomorrow’s headline:
The Yorkshire Ripper
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The John Shark Show
Radio Leeds
Thursday 2nd June 1977

Chapter 5

Spade work:
Twenty-four hours’ solid digging.
No sleep since we left Preston –
The drive back over Wednesday morning, Rudkin and Ellis as hung-over as fuck, passed out in the back.
Home, Millgarth still chaos and bodies, tips coming in one a bloody minute, no fucker free to follow them through. Me thinking, his name could be right here now in this room, right here now written in ink, right here now waiting for me.
Me, flying through slips, chasing up calls.
3.30 p.m. and I get the last call I want: another post office, another sub-postmaster.
Rudkin giving Noble shit: ‘Fuck’s it got to do with bloody Bob?’
‘We haven’t got anyone else.’
‘Neither have I.’
OT ban kicking in, Uniforms having voted to continue the ban while we were over the hills in Preston, Rudkin with his, ‘Who can fucking blame them?’ speech.
‘You’re getting to be a right whining bastard, John. It’s just for a couple of days.’
‘This is bollocks. We haven’t got a couple of days. He’s supposed to be Prostitute Murder Squad.’
But Noble’s gone and I’m back on the fucking post office jobs:
Hanging Heaton, Skipton, Doncaster, and now Selby
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Fuck-ups from start to finish.
Would be Robbery Squad and five years maximum if the dumb bastards had kept their fucking fingers off their bloody triggers in Skipton and didn’t insist on battering each of the old gits half to death.
Murder: life for a life
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Well done, boys:
Suspects believed to be four, gloved and masked with local accents.
Could be gypsies: surprise, surprise.
Could be black: no surprises.
Level of violence suggested white, late teens/early twenties, previous form and too much
Clockwork Orange
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I speak to Selby on the phone:
Mr Ronald Prendergast, sixty-eight, closing up his corner shop sub-post office on the New Park Road when he’s confronted by three masked intruders, armed
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A struggle ensues, during which Mr Prendergast is clubbed repeatedly by a blunt instrument, rendering him unconscious with severe head injuries
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There by half-five and spend the evening between the crime scene and the hospital, waiting for Grandad Prendergast to come round.
Wife had been doing the flowers at Church, the lucky bitch. Eight o’clock on, I stalk the hospital corridors, phoning and phoning:
Calling Janice.
Zero
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Knowing she’ll be working, me desperate to crawl the streets, desperate to see her, desperate to stop her
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Calling home:
Zero
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Louise and Bobby in one hospital, me in another, the wrong one
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Calling Millgarth:
Less than zero
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Craven picking up, no sign of Noble or Rudkin, all them slips full of tips and no-one to work through them. Craven hanging up, seeing him limping back to Vice, thinking they must have invented it just for him and that fucking sneer
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Nine and it doesn’t look like Mr Ronald Prendergast will be saying much, just drooling and looking like warmed-over-death-in-waiting, me praying and praying that he hangs on so it won’t turn into a double-murder and knowing now, knowing now how much I want this:
Prostitute Murder Squad
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And knowing now, knowing now why:
Janice
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Two hours later all my prayers pay off, answered:
‘Sergeant Fraser, would Sergeant Fraser please come to reception.’
Down the corridor, out of Intensive Care, back into Intensive Hell – Rudkin in Leeds, calling me home: ‘We found Barton.’
Foot down into town, the whole of Millgarth humming, buzzing, burning. The Midnight Briefing:
BRING HIM IN.
The radio spits into life: ‘Right, now,’ cackles Noble’s voice across the night: Thursday 2 June 1977.
Ellis is howling, ‘Thank fucking Christ for that.’
And we’re out the car and walking across Marigold Street, Chapeltown, Leeds.
Rudkin, Ellis, and me:
A shotgun, a sledgehammer, and an axe.
Up the top end of the terrace I can see Craven’s boys coming down the street, the rest of them round the back.
We’ve got the front door.
Ellis raises the sledgehammer.
Rudkin looks at his watch.
We wait.
4 a.m.
Big John gives Ellis the nod.
Tick-tock, no need to knock:
He heaves it up over his head and yells, ‘Rise and fucking shine you black bastard,’ and brings it crashing down into the green door and there’s splinters everywhere, and he pulls it out and does it again and then Rudkin sticks the boot in and in we go, me shitting it in case the fucking shotgun goes off, but half cracking up when we see one of Prentice’s lads with his fat arse stuck in the fucking kitchen window, neither in nor out and us with the jump up the stairs where Steve Barton, Mr Sleepyhead himself, is standing in his blackest birthday suit, rubbing his gollylocks and scratching his knackers and shitting them, all in the five seconds it takes him to clock me and my fucking axe as I hit the stairs screaming at the dumb cunt, Rudkin and Ellis and the two barrels of the shotgun right behind me, giving full fucking voice to the four hours we’ve been sat in that car, sat in that unmarked pitch of hell, no phone, no Janice, no nothing, sat waiting for the bloody word, and I wind Barton straight off so he doubles over and topples down the stairs straight into Rudkin and Ellis who help him on his way with a kick and a punch and then they’re back down there after him cos they don’t want Prentice or Craven to beat them to it, and I’d be right behind them but Barton’s cousin or his aunty or his mother or whatever part of his huge extended fucking tribe’s been sheltering him, they go and put their head out the door of one of the bedrooms and I give her a quick squeeze on the tit and grab a feel of her cunt and push her back inside the bedroom where a baby’s started crying and the woman’s too scared to go to it cos she’s too busy flunking about hiding, thinking she’s going to get raped, which is what I want her to think so she’ll stay in the room and leave us be, but I want her to shut that bloody baby up, to stop it sounding like Bobby and making me hate it and hate her and hate Bobby and hate Louise and hate everyone in this whole fucking world except Janice, but mainly because it’s making me hate me.
I slam the door.
Back down the stairs they’ve got Barton outside, naked in the road, lights going on up and down the street, doors opening and then there’s Noble, Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Noble standing there, bold as the fucking brass he is, standing in the middle of the street like he owns the place, hands on his hips like he don’t give a fuck who sees this and he walks right up to Barton who’s trying to curl up into the tiniest little ball he can, whimpering like the tiny little dog he is, and Noble looks up just to make sure everyone is watching and just to make sure everyone knows he knows everyone is watching and he bends down and whispers something into Barton’s ear and then he picks him off the road by his dreadlocks, twisting them tight around his fist, pulling him on to the tips of his toes, the man’s cock and balls nothing in the dawn and Noble looks up at the windows and the twitching curtains of Marigold Street and he says calmly, ‘What is it with you fucking people? A woman gets to wear her guts for bloody earrings and you don’t lift a fucking finger. Didn’t we ask you nicely to tell us where this piece of shit was? Yeah? Did we come and turn all your shitty little houses upside down? Did we have you all down the Nick? No we fucking didn’t. But all the time you’re hiding him under the fucking bed, right under our bloody noses.’
A maria comes down the street and stops.
Uniforms open the back.
Noble spins Barton into the side of the van, bringing him round all bloody and reeling, and then he tips him into the back.
Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Noble turns and looks again at Marigold Street, at the empty windows, the still curtains.
‘Go on hide,’ he says. ‘Next time we don’t ask,’ and with a spit he jumps inside the van and is gone.
We head for the cars.
By the time we get to Millgarth, they’ve got Barton down in the Belly – the huge fucking hole of a cell right down in the gut, all strip lights and wash-down floors.
There’s about twelve or fifteen blokes standing around.
Steve Barton’s on the floor, still stark-bollock naked, shivering, shaking, shitting it.
We stand there, smoking, flicking ash here and there, Craven showing off his cuts and bruises, all black hate, the rest of us looking bored, waiting for the show.
And just as I’m thinking about Kenny D and wondering if I can sit through another nigger beating, Noble shoulders through the crowd and everyone breaks into a circle, leaving Barton and Noble in the centre, the Christian and the Lion.
Noble is holding a white plastic cup, the kind you get from the coffee machine upstairs.
He looks into it, looks at Barton, then tosses it on to the floor in front of him and says, ‘Come into that.’
Barton looks up, eyes all wide red streaks.
‘You heard,’ says Chief Superintendent Peter Noble. ‘Put your fucking jungle juice in that.’
Barton is here and there, searching the room for a friendly face, some kind of help, and for a brief second his eyes light on mine but finding nothing there they keep on going till they end up back on the white plastic cup in the centre of the room.
‘Fuck,’ he whispers, the fucked-up horror of his situation sinking into them dense black bones.
‘Get it hard,’ hisses Noble.
And then the slow handclap starts up and I’m right there, beating out the rhythm, banging out the time, as Barton slithers around in the smallest circle his body’ll let him, this way and that, twisting and turning, this way and that, no escape at all, that way or this, no escape.
Noble nods and the claps stop.
He bends down and cups Barton’s head in his hand:
‘Let me help you out, boy. Let’s imagine that dead woman of yours isn’t dead any more and it was all just some ugly dream. Yeah? Let’s get her all naked and hot, get her wet, yeah. Bet you could make her wet Steve, yeah? Bet you can get a right big cock on you when you want, can’t you Steve? Go on, show us what a big black cock you got. Show us how big you got it for Marie. Come on boy, don’t be shy. Among friends here, all lads together. Don’t want to have to put you in with some big fat babber-stabber from Armley, now do we? No need for that. Let’s just picture dear old Marie, hot and naked and waiting for that big old cock o’yours, stroking that big old bush of hers, getting it all big and pink and hanging out like a little fat juicy cherry, just waiting for you. Ooh. Ooh. What’s that? A drop of the good stuff slipping out, sneaking off. Come on Steve, she’s not dead, you didn’t kill her, she’s here and she’s hot and she’s waiting for you to stick that big old cock of yours inside and give her a good seeing to, a right good time. Come on, get it hard. Come on, she’s all wet and waiting, begging for it, flipping on to her belly, her fat little fingers right up her juicy chute, wondering where the fuck you are when she needs you. Where’s Stevie, she’s thinking, and then the door opens and in comes a big black dick, but it isn’t you is it Stevie? It isn’t your big black dick, is it? Well, well, if it isn’t your old mucker Kenny D and he’s looking at her all wet and naked and lying there with her fingers up her cos you’re nowhere to be seen and so he whips it out and puts it in and out, in and out, in and out, till she’s got it running down her legs and then here you come and you clock him and her, your woman and your mate making the old beast with two backs and you’re pissed off aren’t you Steve? Pissed off and who wouldn’t be? Him with his big black cock up your white woman, your white woman who should be out earning your cash not fucking around with your mate giving it away for nowt. Makes you sick, just fucking sick eh? Your mate and your woman. Hard to take, eh? That’s what happened, isn’t it Steve? And you had to get her back, pay her back big time didn’t you Stevie, didn’t you?’
‘No, no, no,’ he’s whimpering.
Noble stands up, Barton sobbing between his legs.
‘So you come, then you go.’
Steve Barton reaches for the cup and puts it over his shrivelled dick.
Fifteen white faces stare at the black man on the floor before us, a white plastic cup on his dick, his other hand shaking it, stopping it shrinking anymore.
There’s a shove in my back and there’s Oldman.
He looks at the scene before him, at the black man on the floor before him, a white plastic cup on his dick, his other hand shaking it.
Oldman looks at Noble.
Noble raises his eyes.
Oldman looks pissed off.
‘Get the black cunt some porn and get his fucking spunk down the lab,’ he says.
‘You heard him,’ shouts Noble at the man nearest the door, me.
Craven makes a move, but Noble points at me.
I’m down the corridor, up three flights of stairs and into Vice, Craven’s lair.
Dead, half of them back down in the Belly.
I pull open a cabinet: envelopes.
Next drawer the same.
And the next.
Thinking, this is fucking Vice, there ought to be some.
And then it hits me and I look back at the door, the thought right in front of me: JANICE.
Back into the cabinets, eyes every second second at the door, ears bleeding for the slightest footfall.
Ryan, Ryan, Ryan …
Nothing.
Nowt.
Nil.
I’m almost out the door before I remember the fucking porn.
I reach across the desks and pull open a drawer: two magazines, cheap and nasty, a fat blonde woman with a sun visor and her cunt wide open.
Spunk
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I grab them and go.
Back down into the Belly, the crowd parting, Barton still lying on the floor in a ball, still fucking crying, a blanket beside him.
I chuck the magazines down on the ground next to him.
He turns his head and pulls the grey blanket slowly across the concrete towards him.
‘Had an Aunty Margaret,’ Rudkin is saying. ‘Went by the name Mags. We all called her Nuddy for short.’
Titters and giggles.
‘Should get one of the women to do it for him,’ says someone else.
‘Do rest of us while she were down here.’
‘Long as she does me before Sambo.’
Noble kicks the magazine closer. ‘Get on with it.’
Barton lies on his side beneath the blanket, the magazine before him.
Ellis bends down and opens it.
Everyone laughs.
‘Go on, Mike,’ shouts Rudkin. ‘Give him a hand.’
Belly laughs in the Belly.
Barton’s started moving beneath the blanket.
More laughter.
‘Here, don’t forget the fucking cup,’ says Oldman. ‘Don’t want it all over the blanket.’