Acid Row (31 page)

“Cleaning out the pervert's house,” Col had said. "There's a fortune in stereos in the back room? Fucking bastard. He'd always thought more of money than he did of her.

Colin grabbed her by the arm again. "Jeez, Mel. You sure you're OK?

You're swaying all over the place, sis."

Her weary eyes filled with tears. "I don't reckon Jimmy loves me no more, Col. Where's he been all the time? Why didn't he answer his phone? Do you think he's messing with someone else?"

"Course he isn't. He just had stuff to do."

“Like what? What's more important than me and the baby?”

“Just stuff,” said Colin uneasily. But he, too, was plagued with doubts. He couldn't believe Jimmy would put stereos before Mel and him. They'd been family to him and everyone knew you didn't desert family.

Inside 23 Humbert Street Jimmy used a tie from the wardrobe to bind Franck's hands in front of him, before slapping his face to bring him round and hauling him to his feet. “We're leaving,” he told him. "I'm taking Milosz. You can stay or you can come. If you come, you do as you're told. One false move and I feed you to the crazies. Capeesh?"

“Untie me.”

“No. You're a fucking psycho and I don't trust you.” He dragged Milosz into the centre of the room then knelt to hoist the limp body over his shoulder in a fireman's lift. He watched Franck all the while. "It's your call. You follow or you die. I'm not turning round for you, and I'm not gonna help you. You make a mistake .. . anyone notices you .. .I'm outta there with Milosz and Sophie. Get it?"

Franck's breathing started to labour. "You put me in danger with my hands tied."

“I know. It sucks, doesn't it?” Jimmy headed for the door, putting a hand behind Sophie to urge her through. "I bet that's what the hookers said before you beat the shit out of them."

The old soldier retreated hurriedly from the bottom of the stairs when he heard Sophie's scurrying footsteps and Jimmy's heavier tread on the landing. He had heard voices in the room above, but hadn't been able to make out words against the commotion from outside. He was elderly and disorientated, and, as he freely admitted to himself, extremely frightened. He hadn't realized how large the crowd was in Humbert Street, nor how angry it seemed to be.

On previous occasions when trouble had erupted though never on such a scale as this it was invariably in response to heavy-handed treatment by the police. Acid Row harboured strong resentments against the forces of law and order, believing itself to be singled out for brutal treatment. There had been running battles on several occasions after gangland leaders had been beaten by truncheons because the police claimed they were resisting arrest. Like most of the older inhabitants of the estate, the soldier always believed the constabulary's version but it occurred to him now that something very bad must have happened for such a large number of people to be so irate.

He regretted following the black man into a trap. Pride had brought him here. A determination to prove that he was still a man to be reckoned with. He cursed himself for his own stupidity. His wife had been fond of saying that he lost whatever sense he'd been born with when he donned the King's uniform. Touting a gun in the jungles of Borneo, she would snap crossly, hadn't given him the right to lecture everyone else on their faults. Fighting never achieved anything except the death of other women's children. It had been the cause of every row between them, because he couldn't bear to have his lifetime's single real achievement belittled.

He looked around desperately for a hiding place but there was none in the corridor. Terror settled in his stomach like a millstone. The door to the back room was locked and he hadn't the speed to reach the safety of the gardens before the black man caught him. It was Jimmy he feared and the gang he had with him not the louts in the road, who would recognize the 'grumpy old sod' who took them to task every Saturday night for being drunk and disorderly outside his house.

Clutching his machete to his chest, he sidled into the front room and hid behind the door .. .

Gardens, Humbert Street Gaynor decided against trying to push through the crowd, recognizing that anyone who hadn't taken the chance to escape was sturdy enough and strong enough to hold their place. Instead, she ran through Mrs.

Carthew's house and followed Jimmy's path behind the houses, reasoning that if exits were opening along the road she could bypass the crush and come out somewhere near her children.

It was eerily quiet at the back. She expected the gardens to be full of frightened people and she couldn't understand why they weren't. Her pace slowed. The beat of the helicopter's blades in the sky above reminded her that the police were watching everything. Should she be doing this .. . ?

Command centre -police helicopter footage The video camera caught her upturned face in the garden with its climbing frame, while it waited for Jimmy's withdrawal from 23. Ken Hewitt's instructions had been to confine the exits to the even side of the road until he received word that Sophie and the Zelowskis were out.

There was a collective sigh of relief from the watchers when three figures emerged, with the big man in black leather carrying a fourth on his shoulder.

The lens tracked them towards Bassindale Row as Jimmy kicked down fences with a well-aimed boot, then panned back towards Humbert Street.

“What happened to the guy with the tin helmet?” asked one.

No one knew.

Gardens, Humbert Street To Gaynor, three houses down, Jimmy was unmistakable as he came through the kitchen door. She had a fleeting sense that she knew the woman beside him but there was too much blood on her face to be sure. She raised a hand in recognition but they turned left out of the door heading for Bassindale Row, and never even glanced in her direction.

She called out: “JIMMY!” but he was intent on kicking down fences and running for the next one, and he didn't hear her.

Not for a second did she guess that she was watching the exodus of the paedophiles. She had barely thought about them since the riot started except to blame herself for inciting the march, and she didn't know where she was in relation to Melanie's maisonette as she had never been inside the gardens before. She could only interpret what she saw from what she thought she knew, which made this one of the exits Jimmy had been sent to establish.

It was obvious there had been an accident. Or something worse. Another petrol bomb? A stampede? It was the only explanation for Jimmy's frantic haste, the body across his shoulders, the blood on the woman's face and the elderly man who followed behind them, holding his hands in front of him as if he were hurt. Jimmy was taking the injured out.

Her heart lurched with immediate fear for her children. She took tentative steps past the climbing frame, expecting to see other people come running out in Jimmy's wake, but it was strangely quiet. She raised her face to the helicopter again, shielding her eyes from the sun. What on earth was going on? Where was everyone?

Jimmy lowered Milosz to the ground behind the six-foot fence that was the border between the garden of the end house in Bassett Road and Bassindale Row. He had tracked through to the Bassett gardens in the hope that the crowd spilling out of Humbert Street was thinner there although the yelling and shouting were still far too close for comfort.

They could hear feet pounding the tarmac, people talking, even the smell of cigarette smoke as bystanders lit up to watch from a distance.

He saw his own fear mirrored in the eyes of Sophie and Franck as he held a finger to his lips to keep them quiet.

It was an unnecessary instruction to Franck, whose face was as white and pasty as his son's. He slumped into the lee of the fence and covered his head in his hands as if hiding behind flimsy waney-lap panelling could somehow protect him from the terrifying reality of mob bloodlust. Neither Sophie nor Jimmy paid him any attention.

Jimmy knelt on the ground beside Milosz and took several deep breaths before he could speak. "I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to carry him the whole way out,“ he whispered in Sophie's ear. ”He weighs a ton. Do you think he's dead?"

She was squatting next to him and pressed her fingertips to Milosz's neck before resting a hand on his chest to feel for movement. "He's out cold," she whispered, rolling an eyelid back with the ball of her thumb, 'but his automatic responses are functioning he's breathing and his pulse is strong. It's not concussion, because he'd have come round by now, so I'm guessing he's switched off completely this time."

“What does that mean?”

“It's how he deals with fear,” she murmured. "Retreats inside himself.

His father's doing the same thing by covering his head." She dug her fingernails into Milosz's nostrils and bit them into his septum. There was a flicker of his eyelids as his nervous system registered pain but no returning consciousness in the way the policewoman had responded to Eileen Hinkley's smelling salts. “Sorry,” she whispered apologetically. "He needs more help than I can give him at the moment.

Even if I could bring him out of it, he'd be too uncoordinated to walk for a while."

Jimmy jerked his head towards the fence. "We've gotta break out on to Bassindale and aim for the perimeter wall. It means pushing through the crowd coming the other way, and that's gonna be fucking hard with a dead weight on my back and a couple of cripples in tow. Sorry, lady but you look like shit' he nodded at Franck - 'and he ain't much better. I don't see how we're gonna do this. It only needs one of us to fall and we're all up the fucking creek."

Sophie's own fear came back in a tidal wave. She hadn't realized he meant what he'd said to Franck in the upstairs room. She had assumed it was an excuse to get them out of the house. “Oh, God,” she said pulling herself away from both him and Milosz. "I can't do this.

Truly, I can't. I'm not brave enough."

“The doc said you were.”

“Which doc?”

"Harry ... at the clinic .. . and someone called Jenny. Reckoned you were a fighter." He gripped hold of her hand to stop her moving any further away. "You're Sophie, right? My Mel's doctor. The lady who started “Friendship Calling”. The one whose wedding we're coming to.

Shit, girl! Mel's standing in front of that house stopping the fucking retards throwing Molotovs. Are you telling me she's got bigger balls than you have?"

Sophie's eyes filled with tears. "Melanie Patterson? Are you Jimmy James?"

He nodded. "I gave my word I'd bring you and these fuckers out before I went back for Mel and the babes. But we've gotta get a move on and you've gotta help me. I can't do it on my own. A lady by my side'll make it look kosher."

She envied Nicholas his coma. Why couldn't she lie down and refuse to make any more decisions? She wanted to say: I'm hurting .. . Fm bleeding .. . Fm frightened.. . Instead she flicked a glance at Franck. "What are you going to do if he collapses? You can't carry two dead weights."

"He won't. He's scared shitless of being left behind. He'll be ripped apart if he doesn't keep up."

“He has asthma. He might not be able to.”

“Then he's a dead man,” said Jimmy unfeelingly.

Oh, God! Her imagination was in overdrive again. Nothing was that simple. Even in Acid Row you couldn't just abandon old men beside the road with their hands tied. People would ask questions. "You don't know what he's like. He'll call out.. . draw attention to himself ..

. make you go back to stop us all being killed. Someone will recognize him."

“Trust me,” said Jimmy with more confidence than he felt. "Most of the guys out there don't even know what this fight's about, and even if they do, they won't reckon a black guy and a girl would be hanging around nonces. They'll just think we got caught in the middle of something.“ His face broke into a smile. ”Tell them you're a doctor .. . talk medical stuff .. . give us credibility. Your mate, Harry reckons you can take the steam out of anything."

Briefly, Sophie closed her eyes. She felt like screaming. Harry was an idiot. And she didn't trust anyone whose idea of credibility was for a battered and bloody woman to walk down the road talking 'medical stuff'. “Where are we exactly?” she said then, glancing towards the nearest house.

She was off her head, like the policewoman, thought Jimmy. "The end house in Bassett Road,“ he told her, 'the corner with Bassindale.”

“Which number?”

“Dunno.”

She looked towards the Humbert Street house behind them. "If that's the Bassindale Row end, then it must have a higher number than Melanie's?"

“Yeah. Hers is the other side of 23 from here.”

“OK.” Sophie pictured the layout of the streets in her mind, mapping them according to patients. "That makes this 2 -' she pointed at the neighbouring garden 'that one 4 and the one beyond 6. I know the woman who lives in 6."

"It doesn't help us. We'll be going the wrong way, and half of Bassett's out in the road, anyway. She probably won't even answer the door .. . but, let's say she does, we've still got to get back on to Bassindale. It's just adding time to the journey."

Sophie shook her head. "She only leaves the house to go to the hospital and she won't have an appointment on a Saturday. We can take shelter there, and it'll give me a chance to bring Milosz round while you go back for Melanie and the kids.“ She pulled a wry face. ”I feel like death warmed up at the moment, Jimmy, and you can't carry all of us. So get us to number 6, then go back for Mel. Please?

Jimmy nodded towards Franck. “What about him?”

“I'll tie him up so tight he'll wish he'd never set eyes on me.”

“OK.” He hauled Milosz into a sitting position then lowered his shoulder to hoist him up again. "So what's wrong with this patient of yours?" he asked, pushing himself upright with an effort and locking his knees. “Why won't she go out?”

“Squamous cell carcinoma,” said Sophie succinctly. "They had to take off most of her nose to eradicate it. She's got a hole in the middle of her face."

Oh, shit.. . !

Command centre police helicopter footage The camera picked up Jimmy and his group again when the spotter watching them said they'd switched away from Bassin-dale Row and were heading back into the Bassett Road gardens. The observers at headquarters pinpointed the house they entered as number 6, and a check of their records showed the occupier was a Ms Frensham. This information was passed to Ken Hewitt at the Nightingale Health Centre and verification came back immediately that Clara Frensham was a patient of Dr. Sophie Morrison's. The assumption, rightly, was that Sophie had opted to take shelter, and Jimmy's reappearance through the back door, alone, some two minutes later confirmed this.