Carnal Acts (3 page)

Joni looked at her watch, a cheap thing she’d bought from a street-seller in London who claimed he was from Nigeria though she thought his accent was more Brixton. Growing up with money permanently in short supply had made Joni oblivious to fashion and status symbols. Her mother, Moonbeam, was an art teacher in a comprehensive, but she spent most of her salary on robes and other Wicca impedimenta, rather than saving to get out of the council flat she’d been assigned when she was a single mother. Whence Joni’s nine-year-old Land Rover, identical dark grey trouser suits and pairs of heavy-duty black boots. Her only weakness was for blinding blouses, though she generally kept to white for work. She pulled on a tan leather jacket and headed out.

From what Joni had learned, May Sunday was one of the few times of the year when there was a degree of harmony in Corham. Perhaps there had been a homogeneous population in Roman times, though the presence of legions raised in continental Europe and even Asia Minor suggested otherwise, but in the final decades of the twentieth century the divisions between the town’s northern and southern halves had attracted sociologists from the universities in Newcastle, Durham and beyond. The medieval town, built on a strategically salient hundred-foot cliff above the River Derwyne, had become a centre of worship and commerce because of the large abbey and monastery. It encompassed the remains of the Roman town, an important camp servicing the Wall fifteen miles to the north. In later centuries, tanning and distilling developed outside the old walls, still on the northern side. There had also been a large sugar mill,
owned by the ennobled Favon family. It was only with the discovery of iron ore a few miles south of the town that the steel works and surrounding workers’ communities sprang up there. The area was called Ironflatts and Corham’s burghers paid as little attention to the rapid development there as they could, until they realised they could make money – serious money – from the works and the workers, as well as turn their town into a nascent city. They even built a second bridge to supplement the still operational medieval one. Pride was swallowed and profits pocketed.

But not by the poor. They had always been Corham’s problem, and the multitudes that colonised Ironflatts made it worse. The tanneries, sugar processing plants and distilleries needed more labour than was available locally, so families had moved from the Derwyne and Wear urban areas. The landowners, bankers, lawyers and preachers who controlled Corham saw them as a necessary evil, but made sure only a minimum of the town’s wealth was spent on them. Cheap two-up, two-down houses in narrow streets ran outwards like the spokes of a wheel from the old town centre, the abbey and its environs occupying a teardrop-shaped peninsula that the river wound around in a ‘u’ bend.

Ironflatts and its neighbouring communities south of the river were even worse. Terraced houses to the west and sixties tower blocks in the east stood up to the disparaging gaze of the Northies, as the people beyond the Derwyne were known to the Southies. The blocks’ expanses of glass reflected the red explosions from the foundries as well as the weak north-eastern sun. True Corham natives blinked before shaking their heads. The brief presence of Ironflatts Rovers in the 1970s First Division was also a shock, but the team plummeted along with the local heavy industry. When the works were finally shut down in the mid-eighties, thousands of people left the area, turning it into a social and industrial wasteland. Drugs were the only burgeoning commercial venture and generations of Southies had been
raddled by heroin, crack and any other poisons the disaffected youth could get its hands on. AIDS took a swathe as well. Meanwhile Northie kids did alcopops, weed and Ecstasy at weekends, dutifully doing their homework when they’d sobered up. But not on May Sunday.

Joni went down into Corham Square, with the Abbey on one side and refurbished shops and pubs on the others. It was full of braying and squawking humanity. Her uniformed colleagues had cordoned it off, but that hadn’t stopped some idiot dressed as a traffic light standing in the middle of one of the access roads. He had rigged up functioning red, amber and green panels, which he changed every so often. People paid due attention, egged on by his friends; waiting when he displayed red, and then moving on with green. The level of hysteria this provoked drew Joni closer, though she had to push her way through a group of men in bikinis with peacock feathers sprouting from their heads.

‘Come on, Nick!’ a short-haired youth with a red plastic fish on his head shouted. ‘Beer time!’

Joni saw there was a slit in the tall cardboard rectangle the traffic light had erected on his shoulders. The eyes behind it were creased in amusement.

‘A few more minutes,’ he said. ‘This is fucking brilliant!’

Joni wasn’t sure whether impersonating a traffic light was illegal, but swearing in public definitely was, under section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986. Not that she particularly cared. There were no small children nearby to be harassed, alarmed or distressed and this Nick was hardly the only person using profane language. She watched as the red light above his head came on. Then his friends lost patience and grabbed him, holding him horizontally and driving him like a battering ram into the Coach and Horses. Not all of them looked over eighteen, but that wasn’t her problem either.

The crush of people headed down Derwyne Street, the main thoroughfare, and Joni went with them. There was a lot of
drunken bonhomie, mainly to do with the amount of flesh on display. A guy dressed as a mermaid, tail split, was sitting on a fat man’s shoulder. The beast of burden was naked to the waist. On closer inspection, Joni realised the black-and-white stripes on his abdomen were a tattoo.

‘Like what you see, lass?’ the man asked, with a grin.

Joni glared at him until his bravado departed. ‘Two things. I’ve got a judo black belt. And I’m a police officer.’ She watched as he took a step back, provoking an angry yell from the man whose toes he’d trodden on. ‘Fancy your chances?’

He patently didn’t. She let them go, the mermaid bending down to find out what had happened. Maybe her mother was right, Joni thought. Moonbeam claimed that Wicca was about harmony and not doing harm to anyone. If only life – let alone police work – was so straightforward.

Over the hours Gaz had worked himself into a state of serious anger. He was ashamed at himself for being used by a woman – he was used to telling the cows what to do – and he was fucked off big time by the gorilla who had rolled all over him. What the shithead didn’t know was that Gaz had form when it came to dishing it out. He had knocked out plenty of guys behind
nightclubs
and pubs. He’d even lain in wait for a forward who made a fool of him during a football match and done major damage to his kneecaps. He wasn’t going to take being kidnapped and used as a sex slave lying down.

When the door crashed open, Gaz was ready. The man in the balaclava wasn’t carrying the cattle prod this time, though he did have the knife in his belt. Gaz stood up, his shoulders down to make it look like he was defeated.

‘Sit down, fuck face,’ his captor said.

Gaz thought about it, then complied. Anything to get the gorilla up close.

‘You’re in luck, bonnie lad. Her highness wants another dose.’ He looked at Gaz’s groin. ‘I hope you’re clean.’ He laughed. ‘If you aren’t, that’ll make a fine sausage for my dog.’

That did it. Gaz had no idea what the woman was planning for him, but he was getting a bad vibe from her enforcer.

‘I’m clean, me,’ he said softly, dropping his head.

‘Lie down then. Cuff time.’

Gaz made his move, grabbing the knife and pressing the point against his captor’s belly.

‘Back!’ he shouted. ‘Get away from me! And take that fucking balaclava off!’

The man was a couple of yards from him now and the knife wasn’t an immediate threat any more, but he uncovered his face all the same. It was that of a classic hard man, gaze unwavering, square jaw, nose broken, heavy moustache.

‘You think you’ll get far, bonnie lad?’ he asked contemptuously.

Gaz had thought it through. He knew there would be more doors. ‘Keys,’ he said. ‘Now!’

‘You really don’t want to be doing this,’ the gorilla said.

‘Oh, yes, I fucking do. Take off your boots an’ all.’ Although he’d been given clothes, Gaz had no footwear – not even slippers. ‘Sit down while you do it!’ The man’s boots were
thick-soled
and heavy, and would do damage if he threw them.

A couple of minutes later Gaz had the keys and the boots, though he didn’t waste time putting the latter on now. He took a step towards his former captor, the knife extended. ‘I should cuff you and slash your wrists,’ he said. ‘But I’m not like you. I’ll just lock you in here.’

He turned and ran for the door, slamming it hard and fumbling to get the key in the lock and turn it. He shot the bolts too. Then he laughed and sat down to put on the boots. They rang loudly on the first stone steps.

The whistle from inside the room was loud and high-pitched.
Gaz looked round, then turned to the front again. The dog – he recognised it immediately as a Doberman – was already in the air, its spittle-flecked jaws wide open.

Gaz’s head hit the floor hard and he lost consciousness. In that, he was lucky. The dog tore his throat out.

Joni had followed the crowd to the Old Bridge, where it split. The Northies hung around the riverside park, waiting for the firework display, while the Southies crossed the refurbished medieval structure, claiming that the view was much better from their side. She looked around, taking in the willows whose branches were touching the water, and the lights on the wall that had been built along the bank. Some idiot teenagers – the males dressed as well-endowed schoolgirls in short skirts and the females as mechanics in gaping overalls – climbed up, but they were soon shouted down by the few adults who weren’t the worse for alcohol. Joni had only drunk from the water bottle in her pocket, not having a head for booze. That had been another thing that differentiated her from her colleagues in the Met. She had never smoked either, let alone touched drugs. Growing up in Hackney, she’d seen the damage they did.

‘Hey, Nick, get up on the wall!’

She turned when she heard the shouts to her right. The guy in the traffic light rig was being carried towards the riverbank. As she watched the group of lively young people, a tingling started at the top of her spine and then invaded her mind. It wasn’t the first time this had happened. A month after she’d started in plain clothes, she’d reacted without conscious thought. She’d become aware of a small boy at the edge of the pavement near her flat in Vauxhall. She got to him as he had one leg in the air, pulling him back as a white van flashed past.

‘Let him go!’ a thin woman with rat-tail hair shouted from a shop doorway. ‘Help! The brown bitch is taking my son!’

Fortunately a well-spoken middle-aged man in a suit, white like the woman, had seen the whole thing and told the mother she should be thanking Joni for saving her boy, and what did she think she was doing letting him so near the road unattended? The woman eventually mumbled thanks. Back home, Joni sat down and closed her eyes. The boy was still there, his back to her as it had been before she’d clutched him. The boy. He was
mixed-race
too. Would she ever have a son or daughter? Her mother was forever pressing her. They said the stabbing hadn’t damaged any of the relevant organs, but she was still wary.

The traffic light was on the wall now, showing green. The youth’s mates were chanting, ‘Red! Red! Red!’ None of them noticed that his legs were unsteady and his back was angling towards the river. He was very close to falling.

Joni came at him from the side, leaping on to the wall before she grabbed him, and lowering her left shoulder so that he would topple towards the others. They were caught before they hit the ground.

‘What the…’

‘Jesus, Nick,’ one of the boys laughed. ‘What have you pulled now?’

The laughter died in their mouths when Joni got up and stared at them. She pulled the traffic light to his feet.

‘That was dumb,’ she said, peering at the eyes through the slit in the cardboard. ‘Grow up before you do yourself an injury.’ She looked round the made-up male and dirt-streaked female faces. ‘Now go away.’

The young people started muttering but did what she said, moving eastwards along the bank. Joni watched them go, suddenly aware that she’d put her body on the line for the first time since the Met operation that had finished her career down south. She was expecting the tingling to fade. It didn’t, and that hadn’t happened before. She suspected she needed to see a shrink
again. She should go to the police doctor, but that was the last thing she wanted so soon after she’d taken the job in Corham. Besides, the sensation seemed to have a purpose. It was some kind of warning. She moved through the jovial crowd, keeping the top of the traffic light in sight.

‘Hello, lass,’ came a soft voice to Joni’s left.

She turned and saw the small figure of Maureen Hughes, her sixteen-year-old son looming behind.

‘Maureen. How are you?’

‘Oh, you know,’ the woman said, grimacing. The bruises on her face had almost gone, though her right arm was still in a sling. ‘Wayne here’s been helping out.’

Joni nodded at the boy, who avoided her eyes. He’d been knocked out by his father when he came to the aid of his mother. It had been Joni’s first significant case in Corham and the trial was coming up.

Maureen looked down. ‘He’ll … he’ll be sent away for a long time, won’t he?’

‘I’ll make sure of that,’ Joni said, though she knew how random the justice system could be.

‘I canna … I canna thank you enough for what you did,’ the woman said. ‘He’s been hurting us for years.’

Joni nodded, trying to keep sight of the traffic light bobbing through the crowd. She had tracked Vince Hughes down to an abandoned shed on the moors and broken his arm after he laid out the DC accompanying her. She’d had her photo in the
Corham Bugle
and been door-stepped by a reporter from Newcastle, as well as being required to do a press conference by Assistant Chief Constable Ruth Dickie, who was keen to publicise the new force’s commitment to gender equality and racial diversity.

‘I’m sorry, Maureen, I’ve got to go.’

‘That’s all right.’ The woman squeezed her arm. ‘Work to do, no doubt.’

Joni did her best to conceal the shock of being touched, her
skin hyper-sensitive even through the layers of leather and cotton. The intense feeling that something important was about to happen was making her jumpy.

‘I’ll see you soon,’ she said, nodding to Wayne and his mother, and set off again through the crowd. What were Nick and his friends up to now? Surely they’d have learned from what had nearly happened on the wall. Some of them were drunk, but none was raving or raging; yet. She knew that could change at any moment. She followed the group down the road that led to the former tanning and distillery district, now being redeveloped but still the location of several dodgy bars and clubs. This was old Corham’s dope-dealing centre, though most of the serious business went on across the river in Ironflatts. Was that what the kids were doing down here? If so, she was going to step in.