Rough Treatment (31 page)

All three stared at one another.

Hugo Furlong stared at the two intruders, who, after looking hard and quizzically at each other, stared back at him.

“Don’t …” Grabianski began to say.

The jar slid between Furlong’s fingers and crashed on the parquet floor, raspberry juice and shattered glass. For some seconds the spoon stuck out from Furlong’s mouth; anything less than silver, he would have bitten it right through.

Grice made a move towards him and Hugo Furlong turned fast and smacked his head against a raised wooden pillar, hard. He cried out and rocked on his heels, clutching at the pillar as he slid towards the ground.

“Move!” Grice shouted, grabbing at Grabianski’s arm.

But Grabianski was leaning towards Hugo Furlong, drawn by the muffled sounds emerging from the crumpled body.

“Now!”

Grabianski shrugged him off. Down on one knee beside Furlong, careful not to kneel in raspberry jam, he took hold of him by the arms and turned him over. Blood ran freely from a cut alongside the right eyebrow, but it wasn’t the blood that Grabianski was concerned with. More worrying was the sudden paleness of his face, his lack of consciousness.

“We’re out!” called Grice. “As of now.”

Grabianski struggled with the knot of Hugo Furlong’s tie, fingers too fast and fumbling, forced himself to slow down, prise his fingernail beneath the silk.

“What the hell d’you think you’re playing at?”

“He needs help,” Grabianski said. Even though his hands were less than steady, his voice was strangely calm.

“Help? We’ll be the ones who need help.”

“He seems to be having some kind of heart attack.” Grice pushed his arms around Grabianski from behind and hauled him to his feet, not easy with such a big man. “Listen,” Grice said, the manner of explaining to a recalcitrant child, “we are getting out of here this minute. We do not want to take any more risk than necessary. No fault of our own, we’re already in trouble enough. Right?”

Grabianski seemed to nod.

“Good. We’re going.”

“What about him?” Grabianski was glancing back over his shoulder.

“He’s no concern of ours.”

“I think he’s stopped breathing,” Grabianski said.

That morning, the fourth morning in a row, Hugo had sat down to what some restaurants still described as a traditional English breakfast. Right up to and including the fried bread. He had spent the previous two days—and most of the evenings—attending a sales conference in Glasgow. All the reasoning that dictated orange juice, bran flakes, at most a couple of slices of wholemeal toast, went out of the window as soon as he caught the familiar smell of bacon crisping at the edges, the spit and splutter of frying eggs. Besides, wasn’t that what everyone else was having?

What Hugo Furlong was having, right now, on the polished wooden flooring of his not-yet-fully-occupied new house, was a heart attack.

“Come on,” said Grice.

Grabianski continued to unbutton the man’s shirt, the pain in his head gone now, disappeared as he struggled to remember what he had read one damp afternoon, a magazine he had been leafing through while waiting to have a new exhaust fitted in a quick-fit garage in Walsall.

“Leave him.”

Clothes loosened, Grabianski began to search for a pulse; pressed his thumb as hard against the inside of the wrist as he dared and there was nothing. He shifted his position and felt alongside the neck. No pulse. Not even a whisper.

Grabianski got up and moved around the body, straightening the legs, pulling the arms back down to the sides.

“Call an ambulance,” he said.

“You’re joking!”

Grabianski pointed down. “Does this look like a joke?”

“Sure. It looks like a fucking joke to me. That’s exactly what it looks like.”

“You’re not going to call an ambulance,” Grabianski said, back on his knees, “then get over here and give a hand.”

Grice watched as Grabianski took hold of the man’s head—as carefully as if it were some vase that might crack, never mind the blood that was collecting there, smudging his hand—took hold of the head and tilted it back.

“A cushion!” Grabianski sang out.

“What about it?”

“Get me a cushion.” He wasn’t sure if that was right, but took the one that Grice almost reluctantly handed him and squeezed it behind Hugo Furlong’s shoulder blades, the back of his neck.

“Now what’re you doing?” said Grice with a strange sort of fascination. Grabianski was opening the man’s mouth like he was a dentist.

“Clearing the airway.”

To Grice it sounded like something to do with pirate radio.

“Shit!” Grabianski exclaimed.

“What’s up?”

“He’s got false teeth.”

“His age, what else d’you expect? Forty-five, fifty, you expect it. I’ve got an upper set, none of them mine. Don’t you?”

There were a lot of fillings in Grabianski’s head, but every tooth was his own. Brush with salt his grandmother had told him, salt and warm water, every day. These lower dentures had been jolted loose by Hugo’s fall and were sideways across his mouth, pushing up against the palate. Finger and thumb, Grabianski eased them out and shook them a little before laying them aside.

“Jesus!” Grice complained. “That’s disgusting.”

“You’d rather he died?”

“Of course, I’d rather he died. He saw us, didn’t he? He’s not another one you can talk into calling us a couple of niggers. He’s going to pull through this, help some police artist with a photofit, there we are flashed up all over the country on
Crimewatch.
He’s dying, let him die.”

Grabianski wasn’t listening.

Still on his knees, he straightened the rest of his body, brought both hands level with his face, the left locked around the wrist of the right, which was shaped into a fist.

“What the hell …?” Grice began. He was wondering if what he was watching was some kind of primitive Polish prayer.

Grabianski brought his fist down into the center of Hugo’s chest with all the force he could muster, striking a couple of inches to the left of the sacrum.

“Jesus!” Grice shouted again. “I didn’t mean to kill him.”

Hugo’s body, the upper half of it, had lifted forward with the impact of the blow, a bolt of air expelled from the lungs. But when Grabianski checked for a pulse, there was still nothing. He shifted closer to the head, pinched the nose tight and lowered his lips over Hugo’s mouth.

“I’m going to throw up,” said Grice, as much to himself as either of them. The one on his back wasn’t hearing too well, anyway.

“Pump his chest,” said Grabianski urgently.

“What?”

“Pump his chest.”

“Hey, you’re Dr. Kildare here, not me.”

“Okay,” Grabianski swiveled on his knees, pushed himself to his feet, one hand going in that damned jam and picking up a splinter of glass for his troubles. “Get round there, give him some mouth to mouth.”

“No way!”

Grabianski had his hands locked, one over the other, arms tensed straight; he leaned forward and began to pump hard against the man’s heart. One, two, three, four … Glancing at Grice, threatening him with his eyes. Five, six, seven … Allowing himself a breather. There, eight, nine, ten and one for luck. Grice was still hovering, holding himself back. “Are you going to do this or not?”

“Give myself a mouthful of whatever he’s been chucking down all day? Forget it!”

“Give him mouth to nose, then?”

Grice looked disgusted. For a moment he thought, genuinely, that he was going to be sick. Grabianski elbowed him aside and repeated the mouth to mouth, twice, remembering to let the chest fall.

Move fast, more bumps to the heart. He could only keep this up so long, and without help what was the point? He would be losing him.

Grice was thinking the same things. “Look,” he said, “Jerry, I know what you’re trying to do. Other circumstances, you know, it’s the right thing to do. But here … we got to leave him.”

Grabianski jumped up from a couple more mouth-to-mouths and hit Grice across the face, more of a slap than a punch, not too hard but hard enough. “You don’t give a shit what happens to him, fine. Just think what kind of charge they’ll give us if they find out. Eh? Think about that and get to the phone. Call emergency, tell them they’ve got about five minutes.” He glanced round at Hugo Furlong. “Less.”

There wasn’t time to see that Grice was doing as he was told. Grabianski checked the pulse again. Shit! Already his arms were beginning to weaken, muscles aching; his own breathing was becoming ragged. He thought it possible Grice might have left the house without phoning, left them both where they were. But then he heard the receiver being replaced. The hospital, the ambulance station, both were less than a mile away.

“Come on,” Grabianski yelled at the body below him, “whoever the hell you are. Don’t die on me now.”

As he pumped his mind continued to race. From somewhere he pulled the fact that the brain could last out three minutes after the blood had stopped flowing from it. He hoped that was right, fact and not fiction. He had no thought of still being there when the ambulance crew came barging in, all hi-tech trained, armed to the teeth with electric paddles, their—what was the word for it?—defibrillator.

In less than two minutes he heard the siren.

He covered Hugo Furlong’s mouth with his own for the last time. Exhaled. Watched the chest rise and fall. “Good luck,” he called, heading not for the rear window, but the front door, sliding the catch down on the lock so there was no way it could slam shut. The siren seemed to be only in the next street and as he ran he caught sight, reflecting off the buildings, of the swirl of blue light.

Thirty

Jack Skelton had scarcely slept at all and when he had he had stirred restlessly, a ragged turning from one side to the other. Even so, it was his wife who woke first, alerted by the cautious opening of the door.

“Jack,” she said, hushed, her hand pushing at his back. “Jack, wake up.”

With a small groan, Skelton rolled towards the center of the bed, levering himself into a sitting position. Kate stood in shadow just inside the doorway, looking towards them. When Skelton spoke her name she turned and left the room, the door open behind her.

Standing, Skelton refastened his pajamas and slipped on his dressing gown. “Go back to sleep.” He kissed his wife high on the cheek. It was a little after three in the morning.

Kate sat on one of the kitchen stools, dribbling honey from the blade of a knife down on to a slice of bread she had already smeared with peanut butter. Her skin was sallow spots, small and white and without heads, clustered above and below the corners of her eyes and close to her hairline. When she had arrived back from the police station the previous afternoon, she had gone straight to her room and locked the door. Aside from visits to the bathroom, she had not emerged until now. Sandwiches and tea that had been left on a tray outside had remained untouched. She had not spoken a word to her parents, not to either of them.

Skelton watched the thin sweet line falling from his daughter’s hand. In rather less than three hours there was a meeting at the station, the latest information to be appraised, final decisions to be taken, briefings to be given. All of that had to happen, regardless.

“They’ll send me to prison, won’t they?”

“No.”

“’Course they will.”

“I shouldn’t think it will even go to court.”

“Why not?”

“Because it won’t.”

“Because of who I am, you mean?”

“No, that isn’t what I mean.”

“Yes, it is. ’Cause I’m your daughter.”

“That won’t have anything to do with it.”

“Yeah!” Kate laughed harshly, turning her head sharply away. “Not much it won’t.”

“You make it sound as though you want to be convicted.”

“They send some poor twenty-year-old with a baby to Holloway for not paying her TV license, why not me?”

Skelton fidgeted on his stool, sighed. “Because of your age, the lack of previous convictions, all manner of reasons.”

“Like my family.”

Skelton looked at her.

“That’s right, isn’t it? That’s what the solicitor or whatever will say. Good home, caring parents. Good family. They’ll say that, won’t they?”

“Probably.”

He looked at her for a while and then asked. “Would it be so far from the truth?”

Kate twisted the knife then put the end of the blade between her lips, licking it clean. “Not what the papers will say, is it? If they get hold of it.”

Skelton wanted to make another cup of tea; he wanted to go to the bathroom and pee. He watched as Kate began to spread the honey here and there across the peanut butter, as though making a painting with a palette knife. He knew all too well what the newspapers would make of it, should it get out.

“Kate …”

He stopped himself, but not before she had followed where his eyes were pointing. Some of the honey had started to run across the surface of the table. “That’s it,” she said, “your daughter’s been done for shoplifting and all you’re worried about is getting the kitchen in a mess.”

“I’m sorry,” Skelton said.

She jumped up and tore away several pieces of kitchen roll. “Here,” pushing them into his hands, “wipe it up. Clean and tidy before she comes down.”

“Kate …”

“There, go on. Every last little …”

Skelton threw the paper in her face, lunged forward with his arm and swept everything from the table. The knife clattered against the front of the microwave, the bread landed face down, the honey jar shattered and stuck where it fell. For the first time since she had been very small, Kate looked into the anger of her father’s face and was frightened.

“Jack?” came the voice from the stairs. “What happened?”

“Nothing. It’s all right. Go back to bed.”

“I heard a crash.”

“It’s all right.”

Slippered steps and the closing of the bedroom door. Kate opened the cupboard beneath the sink to take out a dustpan and brush.

“Leave it,” Skelton said.

“It won’t take a minute.”

“Kate. Kate. Please. Leave it be.” He reached out to take the dustpan from her hands and she flinched as if he were going to strike her. Skelton stepped back, shoulders slumped. When she looked at him, her face was still angled away.