Runaway (40 page)

We got back to the house around nine, when we knew the party would just be starting to get into full swing, and no one would notice us arriving. The place was already jumping. You could hear the music halfway down the street, and we could see partygoers dancing beyond the balustrade up on the roof terrace. Silhouettes against the evening sky. The front door was open, the hall and stairs leading up to the next floor jammed with the young and beautiful people of these Swinging Sixties. The rich and the famous from the world of music and movies, drinks in hand, spilling out from the kitchen and into the breakfast room and downstairs lounge. The Stones version of ‘Under the Boardwalk’ from their second album was blasting out of the lounge, and I could hear the single ‘Zoot Suit’ pounding down from the first floor, raw and filled with energy.

We pushed through the bodies in the hall, to the stairs leading down to the basement flat. No one wanted to party down there. It was too gloomy and cold and smelled of damp. Maurie shouted above the noise that he was going to find Rachel, and he headed off into the house.

As I turned to go down the stairs a girl caught my arm. She was beautiful, with long, tangled blonde hair and a skirt so short it barely covered her arse. Her eyes were glazed, pupils dark and dilated, her pale pink lipstick blurred around slightly too-full lips.

She pouted at me. ‘Who bust your nose, baby?’

‘Long story,’ I said, and pulled my arm free.

‘Don’t you want to fuck me?’ she called after me as I hurried down the stairs.

‘No!’ I shouted above the melee, without looking back.

And I heard her scream, ‘Well, fuck you, then!’

The sound of the party was muffled in the basement, but it vibrated through the ceiling. We went off to our separate rooms to gather our things and pack them into the bags we had brought with us. It didn’t take us long, and in five minutes we were gathered in the sitting room waiting for Maurie and wondering if Jeff was even in the house. No one had seen him all day.

It was nearly fifteen minutes of anxious waiting before Maurie appeared with a sullen-looking Rachel clutching a holdall. Black eyeliner was smeared and smudged around her eyes.

‘She’s coming with us,’ he said. ‘All the way.’

But she didn’t look happy, and it was clear she didn’t want to go. Somehow Maurie had persuaded her, and I wondered what it was he’d said.

‘What aboot Jeff?’ Dave asked.

Maurie sighed. ‘Rachel says he’s dancing up on the roof. We’re going to have to go and get him.’

Rachel shrugged. ‘I think you’ll find he doesn’t want to go with you, either. I saw him about half an hour ago. He was high as a kite. He might have dropped a tab.’

‘Not going without him.’ Maurie’s voice was low and determined.

And we all knew that the only chance of saving Jeff from himself was by getting him home.

‘Come on, then,’ I said. ‘Let’s go bring him down.’

We left our stuff in the flat and hurried up the stairs to the hall. Dave was ahead of the group, but even before he reached the top of the stairs he stopped suddenly and turned back, colliding with the rest of us.

‘Jesus,’ he hissed. ‘It’s fucking Andy!’

‘What? Rachel’s Andy?’ Maurie looked at him in disbelief.

Rachel paled to a sickly green-tinged pallor.

I peered up through the bodies beyond the bannister and saw Andy and two others that I recognized from the stairwell at Quarry Hill. Andy wore a black leather jacket with the collar turned up. His face was carved from concrete. Hard and rough-edged, cancerous and unforgiving. He was pushing through Dr Robert’s party guests as if they weren’t there. Ignoring their protests, shoving them aside. His henchmen followed in his wake, kicking or punching anyone who got in their way. Drinks were spilled, glasses broken, but beyond the path they scythed through the crowd, revellers in the kitchen or the lounge were oblivious, ears deafened by the music, senses dulled by drink and drugs.

I ducked back out of sight. ‘It bloody is!’

‘How the hell did he find us?’ Dave growled.

And everyone looked at Rachel.

‘I never gave him this address.’

Maurie’s eyes bulged with disbelief. ‘You mean you spoke to him? After everything we went through to get you away from there?’

Defensiveness made her angry. ‘It was after I got pregnant . . . and before the abortion –’ She broke off, and for the first time met my eye. But only for the most fleeting of moments. ‘I was so low. I wanted . . . I needed . . . I don’t know what I needed.’ Then, more determinedly, ‘I wanted a fix, that’s what I wanted. And Andy was the only one I knew who could give me that.’

‘So you told him where we were?’ Maurie slapped his hands on either side of his head. ‘I can’t believe you, Rachel.’

‘I didn’t!’

Luke ushered us all out of sight, back down the stairs.

Rachel’s voice dropped to a hissed whisper. ‘I told him I had this job working with loonies at an experimental residence in the East End. I didn’t think for a minute he could track us down to the Victoria Hall.’

‘Well, obviously he did!’ Dave’s face had lost all colour and he was glaring at Rachel. ‘Someone there must have given him oor address here.’

‘I’m sorry!’ But Rachel’s apology was aggressive and lacking sincerity. ‘I was depressed. Okay? I couldn’t see any other way out of it.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘Anyway, I changed my mind the next day. Never, ever thought he would come looking for me.’

‘Fuck!’ Maurie’s exasperation made me think he was not going to forgive her easily.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘We just need to get Jeff and get out of here. And stay out of Andy’s way in the process.’

And so we set off again up the stairs, very carefully. Threading a path through the fabric of the party, and making our way in ones and twos up to the first floor.

There were fewer people here, where Dr Robert had his study and bedroom. The door to the living room was shut. I tried the handle but it was locked.

With all the doors closed in the hall that led to the back of the house, it was dark there. But at the far end of the passage, electric light lay across the floor and angled up the wall opposite the open door of Dr Robert’s study. Shadows moved through the light, and we heard raised voices.

‘Oh my God, that’s Andy!’ Rachel’s hand flew to her mouth.

I heard Dr Robert shouting, ‘Get out! Just get out!’

We crept along the hall until we could see into the room. Andy was on his own, and I glanced over my shoulder, suddenly afraid that his sidekicks might be sneaking up behind us. But there was no one there.

Andy was leaning forward, his hands bunched into fists and planted on Dr Robert’s desk. ‘Not until you tell me where I can find them. Or I’ll kick the shit out of you. And that’s no idle threat, friend.’

Dr Robert stood on the other side of his desk, emboldened by its presence between him and the gatecrasher. ‘I’m warning you. I’ll call the police.’

He lifted the phone and Andy snatched the receiver from his hand, banging it back into its cradle.

‘I told you. Do. Not. Fuck. With. Me!’

I hissed at Luke, ‘Jesus, just let’s get Jeff and go!’

And we turned and ran back along the hall, to push our way up the stairs to the second floor. It wasn’t until we reached the upper landing that I realized that Maurie and Rachel weren’t with us. But there was no point in turning back. And no time, anyway. None of us had the least idea where Andy’s unsavoury friends might be, and the last thing we wanted to do was bump into them.

Dave and I followed Luke into the lounge. The French windows leading to the roof terrace stood open. Rachel had said that the last time she’d seen him, Jeff had been dancing out there.

The roof was thick with dancers, music from loudspeakers fed by a gramophone in the lounge booming out into the fading light of the evening and echoing across the rooftops. The air was heady with the perfume of marijuana, and simmering with unfettered sexuality. The dancers seemed transported, frenzied, bodies rubbing one against the other. Male, female. Male, male. Female, female. It didn’t seem to matter. The dance and the music were primitive, tribal, a release of the most basic of human instincts.

For the briefest moment I saw JP dancing like a maniac among all these beautiful people, wild-eyed, transported as far from reality as the patients he treated at the Victoria Hall.
And I recalled seeing him just a few hours earlier, crying like a child in his office.

‘There he is.’

I turned at the sound of Luke’s voice, and my heart very nearly stopped. Jeff was balanced on the low stone balustrade on the street side of the roof. His feet were drawn together and he held himself very erect, arms straight out on either side, for all the world like a competitor preparing himself for a medal dive in an Olympic competition. No one was paying him any attention, and he seemed oblivious to the presence of the dancers crowding the roof.

‘Jeff!’ I positively screamed at him.

His head came around. He smiled when he saw us, and we began shoving our way through the bodies to get to him.

‘I can fly,’ he called over their heads.

‘Jesus!’ Dave’s voice exploded from his lips.

‘No, you can’t!’ Luke shouted.

But Jeff just grinned that big stupid grin of his. ‘Yes, I can.’

Before we could get to him, he had flexed his knees and swung his arms straight out in front, as if he thought he was Superman. And he launched himself into space.

I heard the echo of my own voice yelling back at me from the rooftops. And then others. Those nearest the balustrade who saw him go. And the shockwave swept back through the dancers like a tsunami. Those who got to the balustrade first began screaming.

I was still numbed by an overwhelming sense of disbelief. That what I had just seen could not possibly have happened. I wanted to get to the balustrade and look down to find Jeff smiling in the street below and waving back up at us.

But all such illusions were dispelled in a millisecond when we reached the spot where Jeff had jumped, to be replaced by the most gut-wrenching feeling I have ever experienced in my life, before or since.

Jeff was spreadeagled on the wrought-iron railings below, face up, skewered by half a dozen spikes which had punctured his back and exited through his torso and neck. I could see his eyes wide and staring back at us, and I knew that he was dead. But his body was still twitching, lost in the convulsions of some awful death throes.

I turned away, blinded by tears, and threw up on the bitumen, gasping for air and thinking that my insides were about to drop out of me. I felt Luke’s hand on my arm, strong, reassuring.

‘We’ve got to go.’

And I looked up at him to see the shock on his face.

It was chaos all around. Girls screaming, people running inside. I straightened up and Luke pushed me towards the door, Dave at my side, and we somehow managed to force our way through the lounge and into the hall.

People inside still had no idea what had happened, and music blasted up the stairs from below. We had reached the top of the staircase when I saw Andy’s friends running up towards us, faces upturned and contorted by the scent of revenge. And all the shock and loss that I felt in the wake of what I had just witnessed converted itself somehow into pure, distilled fury.

I swung round and saw a fire extinguisher fixed to the wall. I cannot even begin to describe the thought processes that led me to rip it from its bracket and slam the release valve into the wall. I was simply incandescent. Foam exploded from the short length of rubber hose that I turned on the thugs as they reached the top of the stairs. Into the face of one, then the other, before I swung the canister full into the chest of the nearer of the two. The force of it sent him cannoning into his friend, and they fell backwards down the staircase.

The screaming and yelling all around me was deafening, drowning out even the pounding of the music that came from the living room and up the stairwell. Those people must have thought I was a madman, and in truth I felt possessed as I ran down the stairs, Luke and Dave right behind me, jumping over the sprawling bodies of the thugs from Leeds who lay in a tangle halfway down.

I heard someone shouting, ‘Call the police. For God’s sake, someone call the police.’

We got to the first landing and turned into the hallway, very nearly colliding with Simon Flet. I felt his open hand thump into my chest as he pushed me out of the way, and I saw the blood on his face and hands, and the terror in his eyes as he ran past, turning to sprint down the stairs to the ground floor, bellowing at partygoers to get out of his way.