Authors: Max China
Someone screamed; and then the manager shouted, "I've called the police!"
Two bouncers flanked him; he flashed a menacing glance at each of them. "Don't worry boys, I'm going." The doormen had an unspoken understanding; when it was time to fight - they'd fight, but only if they had to. They had seen what he'd just done and were in awe of his power. Both stood aside, knowing if they tried to stop him, they'd have their hands full; they might not be able to contain the man, so they let him pass.
Over by the bar, Davey O' Connor picked up a stool and moved close, a dangerous look on his face. Tucked in behind him, his younger brother advanced with a knife held low.
"Come near me with that, sonny - and I'll kill you wit' it," the fighter remarked without emotion.
A doorman stepped between, addressing the Irishmen. "Let it go boys, Jack picked on the wrong man tonight." A tense moment followed. The O' Connor's reluctantly stood down.
The stranger backed out cautiously through the door and into the street. No one tried to stop him.
By the time police arrived, he'd vanished.
Chapter 30
After the show, the 'Sultans of Swing' still ringing in her ears, the nurse rolled out unsteady on her feet, dark hair sweaty and dishevelled from dancing. Someone had given her a joint in there, and it hadn't done her any favours. Separated from her friends by the tide of people flooding out of the venue, she gave up looking for them. She stumbled along the back streets, not noticing everyone else had disappeared, unaware of the man following behind.
She tripped, falling against a wall, and muttering curses about her shoes, removed them. Glancing up, she recognised the man who now stood before her.
"Oh! You're that
really
tough guy from earlier. Are you following me?" Her face bore no real expression and the vaguely quizzical look that did form there, reverted to drunken blankness almost immediately. They had stopped outside a house with black railings set in the top of a low garden wall. A locked gate led up the steps to a three-storey house. The windows, surrounded by white painted decorative stonework, stood out in contrast to the dirty buff coloured brick walls.
At first floor level, there was a security camera pointing down over the front door towards the gate. He spotted it. "Come on, the car's round the corner," he said. She started to move off slowly.
The amount he'd seen her drink, she should be all over the place.
She must have the capacity of an elephant.
As she struggled to compose herself, she held a single finger up and focused on it, using it for controlling her body and conducting her words. She waggled it in front of her, keeping approximate time as she spoke. "Oh, I get it. You just want to make sure I get home safe and sound!" she taunted him. "I'm a lover, not a fighter!" She didn't know who sang it, or even when. "Michael!" she exclaimed suddenly in a loud voice. "I keep forgetting his name, 'That girl is
mine
'!" She giggled and started singing a crucified version of Dire Straits' 'Romeo and Juliet'.
"Are you coming?" He held onto her arm. She looked confused. It was hard to tell from her body movements, whether she was resisting or just trying to control her feet.
As they turned into another smart street of terraced houses, the unlikely couple came into the sights of two young police officers. One of whom had just finished speaking into his radio. "John - there's a disturbance at a party down the road - let's go!"
"You go on ahead, I'll catch you up. I want to check those two out," he said pointing at the couple across the street, as he crossed over. His colleague strode off, quickening his pace as he got further down the road.
"Are you all right Miss?" he enquired.
She didn't answer straight away; she tried, without success, to think of something witty to say so he wouldn't realise she was drunk.
"Yes, I'm really tired."
"I can see that," he said with a polite edge of sarcasm.
"Do you know this man?"
"Course I do! He's the one who had the fight earlier." She referred to it casually as if the policeman already knew about it. The stranger cringed.
The officer looked away from her to the stranger, noticing the swollen right eye, the damage to his mouth. "How did that happen?" he said, fixing his gaze on the wounds as he took his notebook out.
"I had a bit of an altercation over a spilt drink . . . no harm done. Looks worse than it is; we shook hands and had a drink together after." He jerked a thumb in her direction. "She's a nurse. I know her from the Hospital. I'm a porter there."
The officer looked at her uniform and asked her again. "Are you sure you're all right Miss?"
She started humming, '
The Girl is mine',
her eyes lighting up as she suddenly exclaimed. "Michael!" she covered her mouth, surprised at the loudness of her voice. "Michael, that's his name. I keep forgetting. 'Course I'm all right!
He's
taking me home."
"That's right. That's what I'm doing," the man said.
"What's your full name and address, Michael?" The officer asked.
Before he could answer, violent shouts from the disturbance further down the street drew the officer's attention, distracting him. The Constable broke into a jog, turning to call back.
"Michael, make sure you get her home safely . . . okay?"
"Oh, I will," said the stranger softly behind the officer's back. "I definitely will."
Her left leg buckled, pitching her down and away from him. Catching her before she hit the pavement, 'Michael' manoeuvred her into the front passenger's side of the car with difficulty, brushing his hand across her breasts as he strapped her seat belt on. Although her eyes were closed, she wasn't actually asleep. She mumbled something unintelligible, and then sighed, exhaling slowly. Within moments, she began to snore.
'Michael' started the engine.
Ten minutes later, her head lolled and bucked with every pothole the car went over as it lurched its way down the dark lane, headlights bouncing up and down, illuminating the shadowy trees before coming to a halt. He turned the lights off, and the moon, almost full, bathed the car in its silvery light.
For a moment, he watched her shallow breathing, and then he leaned over, inhaling her exhaled breath, running his hand up the inside of her thigh. She stirred. He hesitated, and then hooked a finger into her panties, pulling them to one side.
"Huh?" She said groggily, "I hope you didn't do that on purpose . . ."
Chapter 31
Kathy Bird never made it back home that night. The weeks and months rolled by, turning into a long nightmare from which there was no awakening. The appeals and campaigns were in vain; they didn't turn up anything. The case even featured the following year on the pilot Crimewatch programme. Nobody came forward with any new or significant leads.
After a year of endless campaigning, on the first anniversary of her disappearance, her mother broke down.
"I can't take this anymore; she's gone hasn't she . . ." Her small shoulders looked frail, slumped in defeat. She shuddered as she took another breath. A deep sob racked her chest. "We're never going to see her again," she said it as a matter of fact, a strange light in her eyes.
"Don't ever say that again." Kathy's father took her in his arms and held her. "She isn't dead. If she was, I'd know. I would feel it . . ."
"You believe that?"
"I believe it with all my heart . . ."
Her lips found their way onto his. The surprise both of them felt, melted into a kind of urgency, a clinging to life and each other that they hadn't experienced since she'd disappeared. She began to act strangely as if in possession of a new vigour. He was unsure exactly what she was going through, but suspected from their frenzied and frequent couplings that she was hoping for a baby. Finally, he'd asked her as they lay in post sexual silence.
"Yes, I want another little girl, or I'm going to go crazy . . ."
"What if you do get pregnant, and it turns out to be a boy?"
She rolled over onto her side and looked at him with absolute conviction. "It
will
be a girl."
Her parents named her Stella because the name reminded them of the stars. Mrs Bird brought her up as far as she could tell exactly the same way as she did Kathy.
Not long after learning to walk, Stella realised there was a room that was always kept shut. When she was tall enough to operate the door handle, her mother took her inside to satisfy her curiosity. "You have a sister; you look just like her, apart from your hair. She had dark hair and . . ." she told the little girl all about Kathy, every little thing she could think of.
She stared at her mother and asked innocently, "If she is my sister, where is she?"
Her mother gazed into the distance beyond the window. "She's out there somewhere, lost. We will find her one day, your father and I," her eyes misted with tears as she continued. "For now, all we have is that photograph, and you of course." She forced a smile. "She'll come home one day…"
Stella did not recognise the look in her mother's eyes - not in those days - as she stared out of the window into far distant place. It would be years before she realised that her mother was lost, too, and that while Stella was young enough to depend on her, she was just distracted enough to continue to cope.
As Stella got older, a fear grew up inside her mother. Terrified at losing her too; she lost faith in Kathy ever returning. It all proved too much. When she reached eighteen years of age, her parents killed themselves in a suicide pact.
Chapter 32
North Cornwall
, July 1991
The driver possessed photographic recall, or more accurately, an eidetic memory. His mind was like an on-board video camera. When he wanted to remember something vividly, something turned on in him and recorded it forever. It meant he could switch his voice to match any of a repertoire of famous actors, or any voice he chose from his considerable memory banks. It was why he never needed to take trophies. All the details – sight and sound; touch, taste, and smell, were only a moment of concentration away.
Summer of 1967
. . . The last time he came here. Apart from its freshly painted appearance, the signpost looked the same, but he noticed that the directional pointer to the old mine had been removed. Few used to go in that direction anyway, now it would be less. Back then, most preferred the walk across the top from the other side of the hill.
Ahead, the road shimmered with rising heat, silver phantom images of water pooled like distant oases, never getting any closer, eventually disappearing as the road changed direction.
Soaring temperature levels charged the air with static. Sweat ran down his face in rivulets. The heat was making him cranky.
A ferocious electrical storm had disturbed him as he slept in the car the night before. Alerted by a flickering flash of pale blue light, he'd sat up, half-dazed, listening to the thunder rumbling away in the distance and lighting a cigarette he waited for the rain. None came.
A trader in just about anything, he was a travelling man, always doing a bit of this and that. An asbestos removal contractor by trade, he looked far too bulky for a job that was mostly carried out by smaller men. He felt like Gulliver on a few of the sites he'd worked on, the other guys were so small. Self-employed, it gave him an excuse to be places, and the dirty work a reason for keeping a few spare sets of work clothes in the boot. He criss-crossed the whole country, and soon became familiar with places he'd never have found otherwise.
Sweet Mary, it's hot!
The cloying heat enveloped him like a cloak of steam. Even with all the car windows open, the inside was like an oven, the fan just pushing warm air around. He would have loved to floor the accelerator to get the air moving faster, but on this stretch of road the police often lurked in the bushes, stepping out with the speed gun and zapping any car doing more than 40 miles an hour. Although he
was
tempted, the thought of the police pulling him in, kept him on the limit.
He reached over and pulled a cigarette out of the pack on the dashboard, and lit it with one eye on the road, the other on the cigarette. It made his eyes cross, and one stuck there, an ongoing residual effect of the lazy eye he'd suffered from as a kid. Afterwards, it ached as it always did, and he shook his head to clear the pain.
He leaned forward to drop the lighter back in the tray; his shirt, damp with sweat, felt cold and uncomfortable when he sat back again. To and fro, he rocked, easing back against the seat several times, despite the discomfort, just to feel the coolness on his back.
The first few deep drags burned the back of his throat as he inhaled, and though he knew it was a crazy thought, it helped to cool him down.
He mused about the benefits of smoking.
Cigarettes make so many things so much more tolerable. If you were down, a cigarette would lift you. In a temper, a cigarette would calm you down. After sex and drink, a cigarette was the best thing in the world, and if you combined all three …
he grinned at the thought, then toyed with the order.
Sex first, then a cigarette…