Death Row - Mark Pearson [9]
The sergeant set off at a run and Kate jogged quickly over to where the woman was gagging into her hand. ‘Did he hurt you? Has he robbed you? What’s happened?’
The woman took her hand away from her mouth, her eyes wide with fear, with shock. She shook her head, unable to speak, and stumbled a couple of yards to throw up in the gutter. Kate stepped across to help her but she pointed with a shaking finger to the alleyway behind them, a narrow passage running between two houses. Kate walked back and looked – she had missed it as she ran up but now she could see what had distressed the woman. A young dark-haired and dark-skinned man, she couldn’t tell his nationality in the shadows, lay slumped face up on the ground. He was maybe Middle Eastern, she thought, it was hard to tell in the dim light, but what she could tell from the blood staining his bright white shirt and dripping onto his outstretched and motionless hand was that he had been stabbed or shot and left to die.
She rushed over to kneel beside him, putting a slender finger on his cooling throat, checking his carotid artery for signs of life. She gently felt the wound, determining that he had indeed been stabbed, and took off her white woollen scarf – cashmere and a present from Jack. Folding it, she made it into a compress which she held against the wounded man’s chest.
A short while later a breathless Bob Wilkinson returned.
‘The little bastard got away. Oh shit …’ He didn’t finish the sentence when he saw what Kate was attending to. ‘Is he dead?’
Kate looked up at him. ‘There’s a faint cardiac rhythm. Very weak. An ambulance is on its way.’ She took off her coat to drape it around the cold and unconscious man and Bob immediately took his off and offered it to her.
‘I’ll be fine, thanks, Bob.’
‘Yeah, you may well be but I won’t. Jack Delaney would have my balls for conkers and dangling on two bits of string if he found out.’
Kate smiled briefly. Then she turned back to look at the man on the ground. His eyes cold, his dark skin looking pale in the moonlight, his lips thin and bloodless. This city, she thought.
This bloody city.
*
The girl turned in her bed. Voices had awoken her, raised voices. Voices fat with alcohol and drugs. Slurred with anger and cruelty. She put an arm over her head and sighed – she couldn’t blot out the sound. She heard a slap and a gasp of pain. And then the woman’s voice shouting back and another slap and a thump. And then silence.
She looked across at the window, the curtains not fully closed. She looked out at the dark night sky, brooding clouds swelling low over the city like the belly of some alien creature. She’d seen Doctor Who, seen London threatened by monsters time and time again. She was fourteen years old, nearly fifteen and she already knew that monsters didn’t come out of the sky or from the back of wardrobes or portals in time and space. They came from now. They came from next door. They came from downstairs.
She heard the creak on the steps and knew what was coming next. Better her, she thought. Better her.
The door opened, a spill of light from the downstairs lounge threading its way across the dust-laden carpet of her bedroom. The man peering through the light, unsteady on his feet, his shirt hanging untidily half in and half out of his trousers. His face looking like it had been moulded from wax and been left too long under a hot sun, his eyes small and cold like a guinea pig’s. She could smell his rank odour coming off him like waves of heat. His mouth opened in a crooked cruel smile, and she could imagine the fetid breath, could remember the crude words whispered in her ear. It wasn’t pain any more, at least not in a physical way.
‘It’s all right, darling, she’s asleep,’ he