Beneath the Bleeding (4 page)

She walked down the corridor, already pulling out her mobile phone so she could turn it back on as soon as she left the hospital building. As she passed the nurses’ station, the woman she’d spoken to earlier gave her a wink. ‘So much for feeding the cat.’

‘What do you mean?’ Carol asked, slowing.

‘According to his mum, he does a bit more than that for you.’ Her smile was arch, her eyes knowing.

‘You shouldn’t believe everything you hear. Does your mother know everything about you?’

The nurse shrugged. ‘Point taken.’

Carol juggled bag and phone and pulled out a card. ‘I’ll be back later. That’s my card. If there’s anything he needs, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.’

‘No problem. Good cat feeders are hard to find, after all.’

Yousef Aziz glanced at the dashboard clock. He was doing well. Nobody expected him to make it back from a nine o’clock meeting in Blackburn much before lunchtime. Everybody knew what Monday morning trans-Pennine traffic was like. But what they didn’t know was that he’d rearranged the meeting for eight. Sure, he’d had to leave Bradfield a bit earlier, but not
the whole hour, because he would avoid the worst of the rush hour this way. To cover himself, all he’d had to say to his mother was that he wanted to be sure he wouldn’t be late for this important new client. He knew he should have felt uncomfortable when she’d used his supposed punctuality as a stick to beat his little brother with. But it was water off a duck’s back with Raj. Their mother had spoiled him, the youngest son, and now she was reaping what she’d sown.

The main thing was that Yousef had created a little window of opportunity for himself. It was something he’d grown accustomed to doing over the previous few months. He had become adept at squeezing unmissed hours from the working day without raising suspicion. Ever since…He shook his head as if to dislodge the thought. Too distracting. He had to try to compartmentalize the warring elements of his life, otherwise he would be bound to give something away.

Yousef had kept the Blackburn meeting as tight as he could without appearing rude to the new client, and now he had an hour and a half for himself. He followed the instructions of his satellite navigation system. Down the motorway and into the heart of Cheetham Hill. He knew North Manchester pretty well, but this particular section of the red-brick warren was unfamiliar. He turned into a narrow street where a battered terrace of weary houses faced on to a small industrial estate. Halfway down, he spotted the signage for his destination.
PRO-TECH SUPPLIES,
in scarlet against a white background inside a border of black exclamation marks.

He parked the van outside and turned off the engine. He leaned on the steering wheel, breathing
deeply, feeling his stomach wind itself into knots. He’d hardly eaten anything that morning, using his urgency to get to his meeting to defuse his mother’s oppressive concern with his recent loss of appetite. Of course he’d lost his appetite, just as he’d lost the ability to sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time. What else could he expect? This was how it was when you embarked on something like this. But it was important not to arouse suspicion, so he tried to be away from the family table at mealtimes as much as he could.

Given how little he was eating and sleeping, he couldn’t quite believe how energized he felt. A bit light-headed sometimes, but he thought that was more to do with imagining the effect of their plan than the lack of food and rest. Now, he pushed back from the steering wheel and climbed out of the van. He walked through the door marked
RETAIL SALES.
It led into a room ten feet square partitioned off from the warehouse behind. Behind a zinc-topped counter that bisected the room, a skinny man hunched over a computer. Everything about him was grey-his hair, his skin, his overalls. He looked up from his computer screen as Yousef entered. His eyes were grey too.

He stood up and leaned on the counter. The movement stirred the air enough to send the bitter after-smell of cheap tobacco across the gap between them. ‘All right?’ Yousef said.

‘All right. What can I do you for?’

Yousef pulled out a list. ‘I need some heavy-duty gloves, a face shield and ear protectors.’

The man sighed and pulled a dog-eared catalogue
along the counter. ‘Best have a look in here. That shows you what we do.’ He opened it, flicking through the creased pages till he reached the section on gloves. He pointed to a picture at random. ‘See, there’s a description. Gives you an idea of thickness and flexibility. Depends what you want them for, see?’ He pushed the catalogue towards Yousef. ‘You decide what you’re after.’

Yousef nodded. He began to pore over the catalogue, a bit taken aback by the range of choices on offer. As he read the descriptions of the items, he couldn’t help smiling. For some reason, Pro-Tech didn’t list his project among their recommended uses for their protective gear. Mr Grey behind the counter would shit himself if he knew the truth. But he never would know the truth. Yousef had been careful. His tracks were clean. A scientific and chemical supplies warehouse in Wakefield. A specialist paint manufacturer in Oldham. A motorbike accessories shop in Leeds. A laboratory equipment supplier in Cleckheaton. Never, never, never in Bradfield, where there was an outside chance of being spotted by someone who knew him. Every time, he’d dressed the part. Painter’s overalls. Biker’s leathers. Neatly pressed shirt and chinos with a line of pens in a pocket protector in the shirt. Paid in cash. The invisible man.

Now, he made his decision and pointed out what he wanted, adding a protective chest shield for good measure. The warehouseman entered the details into the computer and told Yousef his goods would be along in a minute. He seemed nonplussed when Yousef offered to pay in cash. ‘Have you not got a credit card?’ he asked, sounding incredulous.

‘Not a company one, no,’ Yousef lied. ‘Sorry, mate. Cash is all I’ve got.’ He counted out the notes.

The warehouseman shook his head. ‘That’ll have to do, then. Your lot like cash, don’t you?’

Yousef frowned. ‘My lot? What do you mean, my lot?’ He felt his fists clench in his pockets.

‘You Muslims. I read it some place. It’s against your religion. Paying interest and that.’ The man’s jaw took a stubborn set. ‘I’m not being racist, you know. Just stating a fact.’

Yousef breathed deeply. As these things went, the man’s attitude was pretty mild. He’d experienced much, much worse. But these days, he was hypersensitive to anything that had the faintest whiff of prejudice about it. It all served to reinforce his choice to stay on this road, to carry his plans through to the end. ‘If you say so,’ he said, not wanting to get into a ruck that would make him memorable, but equally reluctant to say nothing at all.

He was saved from further conversation by the arrival of his purchases. He picked them up and walked out without responding to the warehouseman’s ‘See ya.’

The motorway traffic was heavy and it took him the best part of an hour to make it back to Bradfield. He barely had enough time to take the protective gear to the bedsit, but he couldn’t leave it lying round in the van. If Raj or Sanjar or his father saw it, it would provoke all sorts of questions he definitely didn’t want to answer.

The bedsit was on the first floor of what had once been the town house of a railway baron. A sprawling pile of Gothic Revival, the stained stucco covering the
gables and bays was scabby and crumbling, the window frames rotting and the gutters sprouting an assortment of weeds. It had once had a view; now all that could be seen from its front windows was the cantilevered slant of the west stand of Bradfield Victoria’s vast stadium half a mile away. What had once been a quarter endowed with a certain grandeur had declined into a ghetto whose inhabitants were united only by their poverty. Skin tones ranged from the blue-black of sub-Saharan Africa to the skimmed-milk pallor of Eastern Europe. According to a survey carried out by Bradfield City Council, thirteen religions were practised and twenty-two native tongues spoken in the square mile to the west of the football ground.

Here, Yousef travelled under the radar of his own third-generation immigrant community. Here, nobody noticed or cared who else came and went from his first-floor hideaway. Here, Yousef Aziz was invisible.

The receptionist tried to hide her shock and failed. ‘Good morning, Mrs Hill,’ she gabbled on automatic. She glanced down at the calendar on her desk, as if she couldn’t believe she’d got it so wrong. ‘I thought you…we weren’t…’

‘Good, it keeps you on your toes, Bethany,’ Vanessa said as she swept past on her way to her office. The faces she passed on the way looked startled and guilty as they stammered out their greetings. She didn’t imagine for one moment they’d done anything to be guilty about. Her staff knew better than to try to put one over on her. But she liked that her unexpected arrival sent a ripple of anxiety through the office. It
was a sign she was getting her money’s worth. Vanessa Hill wasn’t a touchy-feely employer. She had friends already; she didn’t need to make her employees her buddies. She was tough, but she thought she was fair. It was a message she tried to hammer home to her clients. Keep your distance, win their respect, and your HR problems would be minimal.

Pity it wasn’t that straightforward with kids, she thought as she dumped her laptop on the desk and hung up her jacket. When your staff didn’t cut the mustard, you could sack them and recruit someone better suited to the job. Kids, you were stuck with. And right from the start, Tony had failed to live up to expectations. When she’d fallen pregnant to a man who had disappeared like snow off a dyke at the news, her mother had told her to put the baby up for adoption. Vanessa had refused point blank. Now, she looked back in bewilderment and wondered why she had been so adamant.

It hadn’t been for sentimental reasons. She didn’t have a sentimental bone in her body. Another position she recommended to her clients. Had she really gone that far out on a limb just to spite her demanding, controlling mother? There had to be more to it than that, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember. It must have been the hormones, addling her brain. Whatever, she’d endured the neighbourhood spite and gossip that went with single parenthood back then. She’d changed jobs, moving right across town to where nobody knew her, and lied about her past, inventing a dead husband to avoid the stigma. And it wasn’t as if she’d had any illusions about basking in a hazy glow of motherhood. With her father dead
and no prospect of a husband now, she was the breadwinner. She’d always known she’d be back at work as soon as was humanly possible, like some bloody Chinese peasant dropping one in the ditch then getting back to the paddy field. And for what?

Her mother had taken reluctant charge of the boy. She didn’t have much choice since it was her daughter’s pay packet that kept them all afloat. Vanessa remembered enough of her own childhood to know the regime she was condemning her son to. She tried not to think about what Tony’s days would have been like and she didn’t encourage him to talk about it. She had enough to contend with, running a busy personnel department, then branching out to set up her own business. She relished the challenge of work, but she didn’t have energy to spare for a whiny kid.

Credit to him, he got that pretty early. He learned to put up and shut up, and to do what he was told. When he forgot himself and bounced around her like a puppy, it only took a few sharp words to knock the stuffing out of him.

Even so, he’d held her back. No doubt about that. All those years ago, no bloke wanted to settle down with some other man’s kid. He was a handicap professionally too. When she was getting her own business established, she’d had to keep the travel to a minimum because her mother kicked off if she was left overnight too often with the boy. Vanessa had missed chances, failed to build fast enough on the contacts she was making and played catch-up too bloody many times thanks to Tony.

And there had been no pay-off. Other women’s
kids got married and provided grand-kids. Photos on the desk, anecdotes in the meeting breaks, family holidays in the sun. Ice-breakers, all of them. Confidence-builders. The bricks and mortar of professional relationships that generated business and earned money. Tony’s continuing failures meant Vanessa had to work that much harder.

Well, it was payback time now and no mistake. Things couldn’t have worked out better if she’d planned it. He was stuck in hospital, groggy with drugs and sleep. No hiding place. She could get access to him whenever she wanted and pick her moment. All she had to do was make sure she avoided the girlfriend.

Her PA slipped in and wordlessly delivered the coffee that always arrived within minutes of her settling behind her desk. Vanessa opened up her computer and allowed herself a grim little smile. Fancy Tony landing a woman with looks and brains. Carol Jordan wasn’t the sort of catch Vanessa expected of her son. If she’d imagined him with anyone, it would have been some mousy slip of a girl who worshipped the ground he walked on. Well, girlfriend or no girlfriend, she was going to have her way.

Elinor raised her hand to knock then paused. Was she about to commit career suicide? You could argue that, if she was right, it didn’t matter whether she spoke up or not. Because if she was right, Robbie Bishop was going to die anyway. Nothing could alter that. But if she was right and she didn’t speak up, someone else could die. Whether accident or intent lay behind whatever had happened to him, it could happen to someone else.

The thought of having another death on her conscience swung it for Elinor. Better to make an arse of herself in a good cause than have to deal with that. She rapped on the door and waited for Denby’s distracted, ‘Yes, yes, come in.’ He looked up impatiently from a stack of case notes. ‘Dr Blessing,’ he said. ‘Any change?’

‘In Robbie Bishop?’

Denby pulled a half-smile. ‘Who else? We claim to treat all our patients equally, but it’s not exactly easy when we have to run the gauntlet of football fans whenever we enter or leave the hospital.’ He swung round in his chair and looked through the window to the car park below. ‘Even more of them now than when I came back in after lunch.’ He turned back as Elinor began to speak. ‘Do you suppose they think being there can influence the outcome?’ He sounded more bemused than cynical.