A Fistful of Knuckles (7 page)

‘Of course, Sam. Sorry. My head’s been so full of that stuff.’

‘I know. No need to apologize.’ He smiled at her, and she smiled back. ‘Do you remember, Annie, a little while ago – I told you I had a strange feeling of needing to be somewhere important … but I didn’t know where or why. Do you remember that?’

‘I remember it,’ said Annie. ‘Of course I do. I told you then that I felt the same thing.’

‘And do you
still
have that feeling?’

‘Sometimes. And you?’

‘Often,’ said Sam. ‘Most days, in fact. It won’t go away.’

‘What does it mean, Sam? Are we going slowly bonkers together?’

‘I don’t think so. And if we are … well, I can’t think of anyone I’d rather end up sharing a padded cell with than you.’

‘How very romantic,’ said Annie.

‘I’m not sure that came out quite right. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because I’m pretty sure we’re not going mad.’ He tried to push out of his mind memories of coming here to the restaurant – mad memories of the Test Card Girl and the hallucinatory worlds she kept dragging Sam into. ‘Do you believe in Fate, Annie?’

‘I don’t know. It’s not something I think about. Why? Do you think it’s Fate that’s making us feel the way we do?’

‘That’s how it feels.’ He looked for the right words and completely failed to find them. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I can’t express it.’

‘Can I tell you something, Sam?’ Annie asked, dropping her voice.

‘Something confidential?’

‘Yes. It’s about that girl who got beaten up – Tracy Porter – but it’s about me too.’

‘Go on.’

Annie thought for a moment, then said: ‘There was something about her that kept playing on my mind. I lost sleep over it. I thought it was just one of those things … you know, pressures of the job … but now I’m not so sure.’ She paused, looking for the words, then went on slowly: ‘I can’t express it any better than you can, Sam, but … it’s like … it’s like when I looked at Tracy, I felt I was somehow seeing
myself
… or … a version of myself. No, that’s not quite it. It’s … it’s like …’

‘It’s like you needed to save Tracy Porter in order to save yourself,’ said Sam.

‘Maybe. Something like that,’ said Annie, looking intently at him from across the table. ‘But … it doesn’t make any sense. Save myself from
what
?’

‘The million-dollar question. I feel the same. And I ask myself the same question, Annie:
what is it that’s out there that I’m so afraid of
?’

‘Because there
is
something out there … isn’t there, Sam.’

Sam nodded, and said: ‘God knows what, but yes, I think there is.’

Instinctively, they reached for each other across the table. Their fingers interlaced.

‘Whatever it is out there that’s so frightening,’ said Annie, ‘it’s not the likes of Patsy O’Riordan. It’s something … something very different.’

‘Patsy O’Riordan?’

‘That’s Tracy’s boyfriend,’ said Annie. ‘That’s the thug who works at Barnard’s Fairground. He’s the one who beats her up.’

‘Patsy O’Riordan …’ muttered Sam to himself. He knew that name. Dammit, he’d heard it somewhere before. But where? When?

‘I’m not frightened of men like Patsy,’ Annie went on. ‘They’re just cavemen. What’s
really
scary is something else, something I can’t put my finger on.’

‘Patsy O’Riordan … Patsy O’Riordan …’ Sam was whispering to himself.

‘Sam? Are you listening to me?’

The image of Stella in her stilettos and zebra-striped top, handcuffed in the Lost & Found room with Gene slapping her about appeared in Sam’s mind.

‘
Denzil and Spider went up against some right hard bastards
,’ Stella was saying.

‘
Names! Names!
’ Gene was insisting, smacking her head back and forth. ‘
Give me names
!’

‘Lenny Gorman, Bartley Shaw, Patsy O’Riordan out of Kilburn. Big men … real men … hard men …’

‘Patsy O’Riordan once fought Denzil Obi!’ Sam said, his mind working fast. ‘Patsy arrives in town with the fairground … and at the same time Denzil Obi winds up dead. That’s it! That’s our lead! That’s our first real lead!’

Instinctively, Sam let go of Annie’s hand and he began searching his pockets for his mobile. He would ring the guv’s office, leave a message on his machine for him to pick up first thing in the morning and …

But then he stopped searching for his mobile and recalled where he was. Some old habits died very hard.

‘Annie – you said you were meeting Tracy when she comes for her hospital appointment, right? Let me come too. Let me speak to her. Maybe she’ll speak to me, or at the very least start to trust me. I can use her to get closer to Patsy O’Riordan. What do you think, Annie? Do you think that would work?’

He looked across at Annie and saw at once that the intense mood between them had been broken.
He
had broken it. Not even the theme from
Zorba
being played for the millionth time could bring it back.

‘This job, eh, Sam?’ said Annie.

It was cold and very dark when they left the snug of the taverna. Sam offered to walk Annie home, but she said it was better to get a cab.

‘You’re not off with me are you?’ Sam asked. ‘When you mentioned the name Patsy O’Riordan a light came on in my head. I suddenly saw a connection.’ He shrugged. ‘You know how it was when you’re working on a case. Sometimes your brain just won’t switch off.’

‘I know what it’s like,’ Annie said. ‘And no, I’m not off with you. It was a lovely evening – almost like being in Greece for real.’

‘Um. Maybe.’

‘And I won’t be offended if you ask me out again sometime.’

‘Would you be offended if I did
this
?’

He leant forward and kissed her on the mouth.

‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Was that … offensive?’

‘Not sure,’ said Annie. ‘Try it again.’

He did.

‘Jury’s still out,’ said Annie. ‘One more. Just to make my mind up.’

‘If you absolutely insist.’

As they kissed for a third time, they were interrupted by howls and wolf-whistles from across the road. They looked round, half expecting to see Gene and Ray and Chris – but no, this time it was just a group of lads, tanked-up and overexcited, rolling back from the fairground.

‘We never seem to get a moment,’ said Sam.

‘Well, at least you can look forward to the red hot date I’ve invited
you
on.’ And when Sam looked at her blankly she pinched his cheek playfully and added: ‘Tomorrow. At the hozzie. Meeting with Tracy.
Remember
?’

He hooked his arm around Annie’s and walked her in the direction of a taxi rank. Away in the darkness, they saw the spinning lights of Terry Barnard’s Fairground. The screams and heavily amplified music rolled through the night and became a filthy mush of sound like something rumbling up out of a nightmare. Momentarily, Sam glimpsed a figure standing silhouetted by the coloured lights. Tall, straight-shouldered, motionless. Was he watching them?

Don’t get paranoid, Sam.

An array of red and blue light bulbs burst into life around the helter-skelter, illuminating the motionless figure’s neat, crisp suit. It was curiously old fashioned, even for 1973. The angular cut, without lapels or collar, recalled the sort of suit that was fashionable back in the sixties.

What did they call it? A ‘Nehru suit’, was it?

The coloured lights played across the man’s body, but strangely his head and face remained in shadow, featureless, anonymous, obscured.

A gang of excited kids raced past, and as they tore off, whooping and laughing, the figure was gone. That sudden absence was even more unsettling than the sight of the man himself. Protectively, Sam tugged Annie closer to him.

You have nothing to fear but fear itself,
he told himself.

And for that moment at least, with Annie nestled against him, he believed it.

Side by side, Sam and Annie strode into the hospital foyer. The place was bustling. Nurses clipped by primly in their white pinafore dresses and boxy paper hats. Doctors in chalk-stripe suits and lab coats strode confidently along clutching bundles of X-rays. Porters wheeled huge beds in and out of the even huger lift doors, or pushed grim-faced patients this way and that in squeaking wheelchairs.

Annie glanced at her watch: ‘We’re early. Tracy’s follow-up appointment is at 10.45.’

‘You think she’ll show?’

Annie shrugged: ‘I got the feeling she was just starting to trust me, and that might be enough to motivate her to come. But who knows?’

‘Then I guess we just have to wait,’ said Sam.

‘No, not there,’ said Annie. ‘Too close to the doorway. She’ll be really jumpy, Sam. She won’t be able to deal with walking through that doorway
and
seeing two coppers at the same time, especially since she doesn’t know you. She’ll need space, and she’ll need to deal with everything very slowly, one step at a time.’

‘That,’ said Sam approvingly, ‘is called “intelligent policing”.’

‘It’s just common sense, you dope. There’s no need to try and flatter me at
every
turn, Sam, I’m not about to go off you.’

Sam laughed and, with exaggerated chivalry, indicated with a sweep of the arm for the lady to go first. Annie led the way along a short corridor which bustled with nurses and porters and hobbling patients. She stopped at a discreet bench tucked away beneath a notice informing of the dangers of whooping cough and a stop-smoking poster depicting a small girl being made to breathe in her father’s cigarette smoke. The legend IF YOU LOVE HER, DON’T KILL HER were emblazoned above the image.

‘This bench is so narrow we’re going to have to squash against each other,’ said Sam. ‘Up close.’

‘What a nightmare. We’ll just have to endure it.’

‘I suppose we will.’

They squeezed themselves, flank to flank, onto the bench. Sam felt Annie nestle tighter against him. He nestled back.

‘Do you think she’ll show up?’ Sam asked.

Annie shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

‘But what do your instincts tell you?’

‘They tell me …’ For a moment, she chewed her lip and thought. Then she looked at Sam intently, with a strange expression behind her eyes. ‘I don’t know what my instincts are telling me, Sam. I …
feel
something … something about Tracy, and this whole case, but …’ She searched in vain for the right words, but gave up. ‘Oh, I don’t know.’

‘
Try
and explain,’ Sam prompted her gently. He took her hand. ‘Try, Annie. I might understand more than you think.’

He felt her fingers close around his.

‘Well,’ she said, her voice very low, her manner hesitant. ‘You know how I said this case was getting me down? The thing is, I’ve been worrying about it all the time. I’ve even been dreaming about it.’

‘That’s one of the hazards of this job.’

‘Oh, I know that. But this is different.’ She broke off, lost in her own thoughts, and then, choosing her words carefully, she spoke with great deliberation. ‘I’ll tell you. These feelings I’ve been getting, Sam … these fears … I’ve been having them for a while, just sort of vaguely floating about in the back of my head. I sort of ignored them. But then it all changed when the nurses here called me in to see Tracy Porter. She was fresh in – she’d just been beaten up. I got here and I … I sensed it even before I walked into the room where she was lying.’

‘What, Annie? What did you sense?’

‘That something was wrong. I mean,
really
wrong. You know that feeling you get when the phone suddenly rings at like three in the morning? You know how your heart jumps into your mouth, coz you know, you just
know,
it’s going to be something awful? Well, what I got was a feeling just like that. Even before I reached the ward they’d put her in, my heart was going, Sam, it was really going, and my palms were all damp, and it was like I was bracing myself for … for jumping out of a plane, or something. And what for? I mean, what the hell for?’

She checked Sam’s expression to see if he was following what she was getting at. Sam said nothing, merely held eye contact and gave her hand an encouraging squeeze.

Annie took a breath, and carried on. ‘So, anyway. I tried to keep my mind on the job, and I walked in the room, and there was Tracy on the bed, her face swollen and her eyes half shut with the bruises. You remember the photo. Now the thing is, Sam, I’ve seen worse stuff than this before. Hundreds of times. So have you. We all have, it’s what coppers deal with every day. But it was really upsetting me – and I mean
really
upsetting me. I got frightened, like I was the next one line to get battered like that.’

‘You felt vulnerable?’ Sam asked.

‘Yes! Helpless. And really scared, like I wanted to look over my shoulder all the time. Why would I feel that way, Sam? Why would it affect me like that?’

Sam sighed and fidgeted awkwardly. What could he say? How could he tell her that somewhere out there, something was approaching through darkness – something evil, something inhuman – something that knew Annie’s name, just as it knew Sam’s, and that all its power and malice was bent towards them? How could he tell her that he had glimpsed this thing, this Devil in the Dark? How could he say that it was through him, through his subconscious, that it was reaching out to her?

‘You said you’ve been having dreams,’ he said. ‘Can you tell me about those?’

Annie laughed nervously: ‘Shouldn’t I be lying down on a couch for that, with you sitting next to me taking notes?’

Sam smiled: ‘I’m not a shrink, Annie, but I reckon I might understand what you’re saying better than anyone. Now – tell me – what have you been dreaming?’

‘It’s all confused, you know, the way dreams are. At first I did my best to forget them, because I’d wake up scared, like the way you did when you had nightmares as a kid. But then, when I kept having them, I tried to remember so I could understand. They’re always muddled, Sam – images all on top of each other, like trying to watch BBC1, BBC2
and
ITV all at the same time.’