Heartman: A Missing Girl, A Broken Man, A Race Against Time (7 page)

I’d touched a raw nerve. He stopped walking and turned to face me square on. His eyes bore into me, the anger in them barely held back by a hard-pressed self-control. They were very similar to those that I had viewed earlier that day. Only this time they weren’t in some old picture and no child was holding his hand to keep him on the level.

“What the hell does it matter to you if the child owned few belongings, or that she was neat, orderly? Tell me, what did you actually achieve or find by illegally forcing your way into the house? I asked you to tactfully make a number of enquiries for me. Not to commit an act of breaking and entering.”

It was at the moment when he said the word “find” that I chose not to inform him about the photograph or the scrapbook that I had found in Stella’s bedroom. It was a decision that I was going to regret.

“Where is this line of questioning taking you, Mr Ellington?” he asked.

He was calm again and his composed demeanour had returned, but inside of the man, I knew something was stirring him up.

“Well, I ain’t too sure, Mr Linney. But you got a missing girl you got me looking fo’, and the way I see it, it don’t look like she wants finding. Now from what I can tell, there was only a handful o’ people who knew her; they’ve been questioned by the police, who have come up with nuttin’. So maybe I’m thinking I ain’t getting the whole picture here?”

I stood, my arms folded across my chest, shivering, waiting for him to answer me.

“You don’t often come up to this part of town do you, Mr Ellington?” His question was loaded and he took some pleasure in asking me it.

“Ain’t much reason fo’ a man like me to be wandering round Clifton in the cold.”

“On the contrary, it’s exactly the sort of place you should be wandering around, as you say. In fact I would wholeheartedly encourage it. Do you believe that the colour of your skin prevents you from living where you wish or from achieving what others, such as our white brothers and sisters, perhaps take for granted?”

“Let’s just say I didn’t feel too welcome when I last walked through the doors of the Berkeley Square Hotel. You know what I mean?”

Linney gave a wry smile at my remark.

“Oh, I know just what you mean. But I believe that I belong anywhere I choose to go. I also believe that the future prosperity for black people is this country is restricted by that same narrow-minded Uncle Tom thinking that you currently possess, and there’s no room for that kind of thinking any more. We need to be looking towards the future, Mr Ellington, and how we mould that future to our own good. Now, as far as I am concerned, you have the whole picture regarding Miss Hopkins. You didn’t think your five pounds a day would be such easy money, did you? Now, just keep searching for the girl and apprise me of your findings, and promptly, please.”

He turned and began to walk away from me before stopping in his tracks and returning to where I still stood.

“I’m sure this will be of some use to you? Goodnight, Mr Ellington.”

He held his hand out to me and casually waved in front of my face the same kind of envelope he had given to me before. I took what he offered and opened it up. Inside, there was money: a lot more money.

Out on the downs, the winter evening twilight had an almost mystical feel to it. I looked out towards the city, then across to the suspension bridge, before I began to make my way back towards Clifton village. The lights of the houses flickered, their collective illumination casting an air of prosperity and security around them. It was only then that the alderman’s words of achieving greater things and wanting more out of my life suddenly resonated within me, and in that moment I felt cheap and foolish for what I had said to him in defence of my status and colour.

I walked back down into St Pauls as if I’d achieved nothing. But that couldn’t be said for the guy who’d been following me since I’d left my meeting with Linney.

At first I thought the guy following me was hired muscle, perhaps somebody to watch Linney’s back while we were having our little chat out on the downs. But I was wrong. He’d stood in what he thought was good cover, obscured by the trees, but I’d spotted him soon after the alderman had turned up. He kept a healthy distance between us as he shadowed me on the opposite side of Cotham Road as I headed back towards my digs.

After about a mile and a half, my new buddy was still with me, and he didn’t appear to be bothered that I knew it. I turned to get a better look at him, and from the orange glare of a street light could see he was white, powerfully built and over six feet tall, with his dark hair kept neat in a military-style crew cut. There was a confidence in his swagger that told me this guy could handle himself.

Anyone who was prepared to follow me this far either wanted to know what I was up to or where I lived. But I didn’t want him knowing either. I wasn’t going to lose the guy unless I tried to outrun him. But I got the feeling the bastard behind me was gonna be real persistent. I needed to put some more distance between the two of us while I thought through the best thing to do. Adrenaline pumped through my body as I quickened my pace.

Heavy sleet had begun to fall as I entered the Kingsdown district, closer to my home turf. I began to walk a little quicker, and when I got the chance took myself off into a side street and kept moving, increasing my speed as I turned into each new road before reaching the steep incline of Marlborough Hill, my tail still hanging in there behind me. I began to climb the slippery cobbled road. I pulled my hat further down over my brow to protect my face from the freezing rain.

Reaching the top, I took a left and pushed myself as close as I could against the red-brick wall of a Georgian house and waited for the guy to catch up. The sleet bounced off of the pavement as I listened for his heavy footsteps, giving me an idea of how close he was. With my heart pounding in my chest, my muscles tightened and I slowed my breathing while I steeled myself for what was to come.

He turned into me with real force as he reached the top of the hill: he had already pre-empted my attack. I lunged from the wall to grab him with my outstretched left arm, my right fist clenched tight, but he was already a couple of steps ahead of me. I felt a sharp, burning pain across my shoulder blade as his first blow made contact, but it wasn’t flesh and bone that had struck me. I caught sight of a slapjack in his hand. I raised my left arm low and tried to connect a solid punch to his ribs, but failed as the big man followed with two more vicious blows to my body.

I fell onto my ass and immediately began to push myself backwards across the slushy ground and towards the kerbside, trying to create some distance between myself and my assailant.

Despite his bulk he moved quickly, his weighty arms swiping the cosh towards me as I fought to get up. He was almost on top of me and about to rain down another hefty swipe of the lead club when I lifted my leg and slammed the flat of my foot with all the strength I had into his kneecap, bringing him down hard onto the pavement in front of me. I brought my foot down again twice more, smashing my heel into the back of his head as he writhed in agony.

There was no siren, only the familiar blue flashing beam of a police car that caught my eye as I struggled to my feet. I turned with relief toward the oncoming vehicle, fighting hard to stay upright as it drove towards me.

Rather than slowing down as it approached, the car began to accelerate.

As it drew along side me, the passenger side door was flung open, hitting me square in the chest, spinning me around and knocking every bit of air out of my body as I was flung across the street and into the gutter. Motionless and sprawled out in the street, I faintly heard a man’s voice call out “check the spade” before I lost grip of my conscious world and darkness welcomed me with open arms.

*

The unwelcoming rank smell of the sewers woke me with a jolt: face up, my head on the iron grating of a drain. Sleet still fell from the night sky; I was soaked through to the skin, the cold ground numbing my limbs where I lay. I pulled myself up and sat on the kerb, hands on my knees, my scuffed knuckles stinging and head pounding. Not a soul passed as I sat for what seemed like an age, freezing water running over my sodden shoes, the blood from my nose dripping into its heavy flow and washing it down the road.

After picking my hat out of the snow, I slowly walked the mile back to my digs with every step sending a sharp jolt of pain through my beaten frame. When I finally reached my front door I fumbled with the keys, fingers frozen, hands shaking with cold as I let myself in, taking each step of the stairs one at a time and falling through the door into my bedsit. I wanted to sleep, just hit my bed and forget everything. But that was foolish thinking. I needed to check myself out first. I took off my sodden clothing and left it in a drenched pile in the hall. In the bathroom, naked and on my knees, my head over the toilet bowl, I threw up until my guts had no more to give.

Straining to get myself up, I leant against the sink and looked at the mess that greeted me in the mirror. My face had got off lucky, a cut across my cheekbone and a badly bruised nose was the sum of it, but I had a nasty gash at the back of my head. I ran the tap and rinsed a towel under it, placing it over the wound for a moment. I felt my scalp and winced as I caught the quarter-inch opening with my prying fingertips. The rest of me was a mixture of grazes and developing bruises that would show their true colours by morning.

I got into bed, pulling the sheet and blankets over my perished body. There I lay in the dark shivering, hoping that sleep would soon be with me. I closed my eyes and began whispering her name over and over again to myself until the phoenix rose out of the ashes of my heart and took me by the hand to the place where she always waited for me.

“Hey, hun, you rest now. Ellie gonna take good care o’ you,” she whispered.

I smelt the scent of the poinciana flowers in her hair, then felt Ellie’s warm body move in close against my back as she softly caressed my face with her hand. I felt the child in her belly, its soothing heartbeat pulsating in time to the rising of my sleeping breaths.

*

I was awakened from the deepest of sleep by a heavy thumping at my door. Bright sunlight shone through the curtains, which gave the room a false sense of warmth. I looked at my watch, which was still strapped to my wrist. It was just after three thirty in the afternoon. I hauled myself into an upright position, my head throbbing, and threw the stained bedclothes off of me.

It wasn’t a surprise to find that my upper torso was covered in a series of emerging, and painful, black and blue bruises where I had been beaten with the slapjack. I pulled a sheet around me and wrenched myself outta bed and down the hall to where my door was about to be took off of its damn hinges by whoever was banging on it. I opened it with a look on my face that the devil would have shied away from.

“Git your sorry, lazy ass out—” His sentence abruptly halted, a shocked and now silent Vic stood before me, his gaze focussing on my knocked-about face.

I swung open the door to let him in. I felt weak and leaned against the wall to keep myself from falling over. Vic closed the door and, with his back against the stained-glass panels, flicked on the hall light to get a better look at me.

“Muthafucka . . .” I heard him mutter deeply under his breath. I looked up and watched his face harden and his eyes close, thoughts of revenge burning within every inch of his being, while he desperately tried to hold at bay the brutal retaliation I knew he wanted to inflict on those who had done me harm. I took a step towards him to calm his anger, arm outstretched in a pacifying but futile gesture as my head began to spin and my legs gave away from under me.

Vic had carried me back to my bed, where I’d slept for another six hours.

During that time I dreamt that Stella Hopkins had found me in the street where I had been beaten. She’d picked me up and tended to my injuries with a lace handkerchief that had the same sanitised odour of her home. She folded the bloody cloth tissue and pushed it into my hand before walking away into the wintry dimness while I kept calling out her name, pleading for her to return to me.

When I woke, it was after nine in the evening and Vic was standing over me, the light of my bedside lamp casting his shadow on the wall. His arms were folded across his massive chest as he smiled down at me.

“ ’Bout time, too. We got to thinkin’ you might be dead, you been laid in that bed so long.”

I heard a familiar laugh, and I lifted myself up on my elbows to take a look and found Carnell Harris on the other side of the room. He was sitting on my kitchen chair, its back reversed so that he could rest his big arms and chin on the arch.

“Hey, JT, you look like crap.”

“Thanks, Carnell, you’re all heart.”

I dropped back onto the bed. A feeling of nausea rose from my stomach into my mouth as the strong smell of the fiery jack ointment hit me. Someone had smothered it over my torso, and its unfriendly aroma wafted from underneath my bedclothes. Vic bent over me and slid his arm under my back; I flinched in pain as he pulled me forward, propping me up with my pillows.

“I got Carnell to bring Loretta over; she cleaned you up and rubbed that nasty shit all o’ your body.”

I heard the tapping of a pair of stiletto heels as they walked on the wood floor in the hallway outside. Carnell’s wife, Loretta, appeared at my bedroom door, her curvaceous figure leaning on the frame. She wore a tight-fitting scarlet satin dress cut with a deep V in the chest that flatteringly showed off her amply proportioned breasts. Her long jet-black hair was pinned back tight across her head and tied with a red ribbon in a bun. From where I was sitting, she looked too damn good to be playing at night nurse.

“He awake? How’s he doing?”

“Boy gonna be just fine, except for the horse cack you gone and smeared all over him,” Vic said.

“That horse cack gonna save his pretty face and take the sting outta his messed-up hide,” Loretta replied, quick as a whip.