Crack Down (27 page)

While I tucked in, I checked out the house. I'd once been inside one of the other houses on the estate demanding action against the toerag who'd been anti-social enough to smash my car window and walk off with my radio cassette. Sparky, who runs the car crime round here, wasn't too pleased about a bit of private enterprise on his patch, especially from someone who was too stupid to work out which cars belonged to locals and which were fair game. Incidentally, he's not called Sparky because he's bright; it's because he uses a spark plug whirling on the end of a piece of string to shatter car windows. Anyway, I thought it was fair to assume this house would have the same layout as Sparky's. It looked the same from the outside, and Manchester City Council's Housing Department has never been renowned for its imagination.

The door would open into a narrow hall, the kitchen off to the right and the living room to the left. Behind the kitchen was the
staircase, a storage cupboard underneath. I'd gone upstairs to use the bathroom and noted two other doors, presumably leading to bedrooms. That checked out with what I could see of the house on the corner. My job wasn't made any easier by the vandals who had busted the streetlamp in front of it. I could see heavy curtains were drawn at every window, even the kitchen. That was unusual in itself. If you've
got
curtains for all your windows in Oliver Tambo Close, the Social Security snoopers come round and ask where you're getting your extra income from.

I could see a crack of light from a couple of the windows, but apart from that there was no sign of life until nearly half past ten. The front door opened a couple of feet and spilled a long tongue of pale light on to the path. At first, there was no one to be seen in the doorway, then, sudden as sprites in an arcade game, two kids barreled down the hall and out on to the path. They were both boys, both good-looking in the way that most lads have grown out of by adolescence. Unfortunately for the teenage girls. I'd have put them around nine or ten, but I'm not the best judge of children's ages. One had dark curls, the other had mousey brown hair cut in one of those trendy styles, all straight lines and heavy fringes that remind me of BBC TV versions of Dickens.

The two boys seemed in boisterous, cheerful moods, pushing each other, staggering about, giggling and generally horsing around. They stopped on the corner and pulled chocolate bars out of the pockets of their jeans. They stood there for a few minutes, munching chocolate, then they ran off down the street towards the blocks of flats where Cherie Roberts had tried to bring her kids up as straight as she knew how. A slow anger had started to burn inside me when those kids appeared on the path, all alone at a time of night that's a long way from safe in this part of town. Apart from anything else, it's an area that's always full of strangers in the evening, since the city's major rock venue is just round the corner. If a child was lifted from these streets, the police would have more strange cars to check out than if they clocked every motor that cruises the red-light zone.

I bit down on my anger and carried on watching. About twenty minutes later, the door opened again, more widely this time, and a
young man appeared. He couldn't have been more than five-six, slim build, blond, late twenties, cheekbones like chapel hat pegs. He had his jacket collar turned up and sleeves rolled up. Clearly no one had told him
Miami Vice
is yesterday's news. He walked with a swagger to a Toyota MR2 parked at the curb. I toyed with the idea of following him, but rejected it. I didn't know that he was anything to do with the drugs being foisted on kids, and besides, chasing a sports car in a delivery van is about as much fun as that nightmare where you're sitting an exam and you don't understand any of the questions, and then you realize you're stark naked as well.

So I stayed put. The MR2 revved enough to attract the envy of the chip-van gang, then shot off leaving a couple of hundred miles' worth of rubber on the road. Ten minutes later, the door opened again. This time, the hall light snapped off. Two men emerged. In the dimness, it was hard to see much, except that they both looked paunchy and middle-aged. They walked towards my van, near enough for me to see that they both wore Sellafield suits—those expensive Italian jobs that virtually glow in the dark. Surprisingly, they got into an elderly Ford Sierra that looked perfectly in keeping with the locale, and drove off.

I carried on with my vigil. There were no lights on that I could see, but I figured there might still be someone in the bathroom, or the bedroom at the rear of the house. The chip van packed up at midnight, and the gang wandered off to annoy someone else. By half past midnight, it had started to drizzle and the street was as quiet as it was ever going to get. There was still no sign of life at the house. I unlocked the strongbox in the floor of the van, and helped myself to some of the essential tools of the trade. Then I pulled on a pair of latex surgical gloves.

I got out of the van and walked towards the narrow alley that runs up the back of Oliver Tambo Close so the bin men have more scope to strew the neighborhood with the contents of burst black rubbish sacks. As nonchalantly as possible, I made sure I wasn't being watched before I nipped smartly down the alley. The house on the corner had a solid fence about seven feet high, with a heavy gate about halfway along. Luckily, one of the neighbors
was trusting. A couple of doors down was a dustbin. I retrieved the bin and climbed on top of it.

The rear of the house was in darkness, so I scrambled over the fence and dropped into a tangle of Russian vine. Come the holocaust, that's all there will be left. Cockroaches and Russian vine. I freed myself and stood on the edge of a patchy lawn staring up at the house. There was a burglar alarm bell box on the gable end of the house, but I suspected it was a dummy. Most of them round here are. Even if it was for real, I wasn't too worried. It would take five minutes before anyone called the cops, and by the time they got here, I'd be home, tucked up in bed.

The back door had two locks, a Yale and a mortise. The patio doors looked more promising. You can often remove a patio door from its runners in a matter of minutes. All it takes is a crowbar in the right place. Only problem was, I was fresh out of crowbars. With a sigh, I started in with the lock picks. The mortise took me nearly twenty minutes, but at least the rain meant nobody with any sense was out walking curious dogs with highly developed senses of smell and powerful vocal cords. When the lock clicked back, I stretched my arms and flexed my tired fingers. The Yale was a piece of cake, even though I couldn't slide it open with an old credit card and had to use a pick. Cautiously, I turned the handle and inched the door open.

Silence. Blackness. I slipped into the carpeted hall and left the door on the latch. Slowly, painstakingly, I inched forward down the hall, my right hand brushing the wall to warn me when I reached the living-room doorway. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I made out a patch of lesser blackness on the left. The stairs. As I drew level, I paused and held my breath. I couldn't hear a thing. Feeling slightly more relaxed, I carried on.

The living-room door was open. I moved through the doorway tentatively, scared of tripping over furniture, and closed the door softly behind me. I switched on the big rubber torch I'd taken from the van's glove box and slowly played it over the room.

It was like two separate rooms glued together in the middle. In the far end of the room, the walls were painted cream. There was a cream leather armchair, a pair of school desks with child-sized
chairs, and a pair of bunk beds complete with satin sheets. Where there should have been a light fitting hanging from the ceiling there was a microphone. At the midpoint of the room, a camcorder was fixed on a tripod, flanked by a couple of photographer's floodlights.

The other half of the room, where I was standing, was like the distribution area of a video production company. There was one of those big video-copying machines that do a dozen copies at a time, a desk set up for home video editing, boxes of Jiffy bags and shelf upon shelf of videos, one title to a shelf. Titles like,
Detention !
,
Bedtime Stories
and
You Show Me Yours
… There were also sealed packets of photographs. Now I began to understand why kids were being handed free drugs that would smash their inhibitions to smithereens and make them see the funny side of being exploited to hell. I could only come up with one explanation of what was going on here, and the very thought of it was so sickening that part of me didn't want to hang around checking the evidence. The only thing that forced me to do it was the thought of some smartass from the Vice Squad doing the “so if you didn't look at these videos, how do you know they weren't Bugs Bunny cartoons?” routine on me.

I picked a title at random and slotted it into the player on the editing desk. I turned on the TV monitor. While I waited for the credits to come up, I slit open a packet of photographs. Twelve color five-by-sevens slid out into my hand. I nearly lost my fish and chips. I recognized the blond man who'd left earlier in the Toyota, but the children in the shots were, thank God, strangers. I'd have been fairly revolted to see adults in some of those poses, but with children, my reaction went beyond disgust. At once, I understood those parents who take the law into their own hands when the drunk drivers who killed their kids walk free from court.

If the photographs were bad, the video was indescribably worse, all the more so because of the relentlessly suburban locations where these appalling acts were taking place. I could barely take five minutes of it. My instincts were to empty a can of petrol on the carpet and raze the place to the ground. Then common sense prevailed and reminded me it would be infinitely preferable if
those bastards ended up behind bars rather than me. I switched off the video and ejected the tape. I picked up the photographs and stuffed them inside my jacket. I grabbed another couple of videos off the shelf. The night relief at Longsight police station were in for an interesting shift.

I stood up. I heard a sickening crunch. My eyes filled with red, shot through with yellow meteors. A starburst of pain spread from the back of my head. And everything went black.

Mosquito. Unmistakable. High-pitched whine circling my head, in one ear and then in the other. Bluebottle. Low, stuttering buzz mixing in with the mozzy. You wouldn't think two little insects could make enough noise to give you a splitting headache, I thought vaguely as I surfaced.

Then the pain hit. You know when you catch your finger in a door? Imagine doing that to your head, and you'll start to get the picture. The sharp edge of the agony snapped my brain back into gear. In the tiny gaps between waves of pain and nausea, I started to remember where I'd been and what I was doing when something seriously brutal put my memory on pause.

As that memory returned, so my senses started to catch up. I still couldn't force my eyes open, but my hearing had recovered from its dislocation. I wasn't hearing a mozzy and a bluebottle. I was hearing a voice. The words drifted in and out, like listening to a pirate radio station on the edge of its transmission area. “I don't fucking know how she got in,” I heard. “I was fucking sleeping, wasn't I? Look, it's your job to sort out problems …” The voice tailed off. The silence was blissful.

Moments later, the voice started yapping again. This time, I registered that it was a man. “I don't give a shit what you're doing. Look, you're paid to do this sort of thing. I'm just paid to copy videos and
be
here, not whack people over the head with tripods. You'd better get your arse over here now and deal with this cow.” Silence again. Then the voice, higher pitched, angry. “You've already been paid once to warn her off, and it didn't work, did it? So you'd better come round here and finish the job or else I'll have to ring Colin and tell him you're not prepared to turn out, and he
won't be pleased about that, not being disturbed this time of night.”

It finally dawned on me that this was me he was talking about. If I'd had the energy to be afraid, I'd have been gibbering. As it was, the immediate prospect of being executed helped focus my mind even more. My eyes still refused to open, but I became aware of a shooting pain in my shoulders and managed to work out my position. I was suspended by my wrists, which were manacled by something warm and solid that was biting into the flesh. My hands were jammed up against what felt like hot and cold water pipes. My body was dangling, my legs were crumpled under me, not actually taking any of my weight.

Before I could test whether it was possible to shift my weight to my feet without making a noise, the voice started yammering again. “Look, it's your responsibility. She's got to be dealt with, and now. She's seen the videos, for God's sake. You might want to spend the next ten years being buggered by some Neanderthal in the nick, but I don't.” He paused. “Fine. You better be here, that's all, or I'll be right on the phone to Colin. And if you want another wage packet like today's, you won't want me doing that.” I heard the sound of a phone being slammed down. The jangling crash cut through my head like a blunt ax, snapping my eyes open.

I closed them to a slit at once, eager to look like I was still out for the count. If I had any chance of getting clear of this place before the hit man arrived, it was by playing dead and hoping my captor would leave me alone. Through my lashes, I could see I was in the kitchen, the fluorescent light a stab behind the eyes. At the far end of the room, the man who'd been using the wall-mounted phone turned towards me. He was tall and slim, his gingerish hair tousled from sleep. He had a neat, full mustache that jutted out like a ledge above thin lips and a sharp chin. The bleary eyes he focused on me narrowed vindictively. “Bitch,” he said, savagely tightening the belt of his toweling dressing gown.