“It’s Bully’s idea,” said Marc. “A beach party. To celebrate May Day.”
Darren frowned, something he’d once heard on the local news resurfacing. “Don’t you have to get permission off the cops to have one of those, though?”
“Ah,” said Marc, tapping the side of his nose, “it’s in one of them old World War Two pillboxes, up on the North Denes, well out of sight. We scoped it out last Saturday. There ain’t no houses around for miles out there. We’ll just bring a boombox and build a bonfire – reckon it’ll be a laugh.”
Darren and Julian exchanged glances.
“Sounds great,” said Darren, warming to the idea. “So, who else is going?”
“Bully, Kris, Lynn, Al, Bugs, Shaun,” Marc counted them off on his fingers, “you know, all the usual firm. Bring whoever you want,” he said, touching the side of his nose again and winking, “only spread the word discreetly. Know what I mean?”
None of them noticed the figure following behind them, on soft soles and with radar ears.
* * *
“Wahey!” The rocket launched itself from the top of the dune, veered a little to the left as it gained momentum, accelerating skywards. Bully fell backwards onto his arse with a delighted
yell as it exploded in a fountain of blue and pink sparks. Spiked and gelled heads shot up below him from the loose circle they had formed around Marc’s ghetto blaster, where a lazy, sleazy saxophone solo drifted into the evening air.
“Oy!” Kris looked up at his friend. “You’re supposed to save them for when it gets dark!” he yelled. “’Til after we’ve built the bonfire!”
Bully laughed. “Just testing, in’t I? Gotta make sure they still work,” he called back, doing a silly dance on the top of the dune before sliding down the side of it.
Alex got to his feet and hopped across the sand to meet him, catching Bully’s arm and pulling him around in a mock square dance. Debbie watched the pair of them flailing around with a smile of relief on her face.
The Sunday morning after their row he had turned up on her doorstep, clutching a black vinyl peace offering. They had shaken hands, made up, and taken the record up to her room to listen to. After a while, he told her that he wouldn’t be seeing Samantha Lamb any more. It wasn’t just what she had said, but a few other things had changed his mind. Debbie found out the rest on the Monday from Julian, after Samantha got suspended. Alex got rid of all the portraits from his wall. The next time Debbie went over, everything looked pretty much as it had before.
Though Samantha had finally been back at school that week, she’d kept a wide berth. She hadn’t been in the art room, hadn’t raised her head to even speak to anyone in class. Maybe she was embarrassed about the haircut her mum must have made her have, that made her look like Pat Benatar.
But most probably she was smarting from Al’s rejection. Maureen had told Debbie that when Samantha wouldn’t
stop ringing him, Mrs Pendleton had taken her calls instead. She didn’t disclose what had been said, but it seemed to have finally put an end to it.
Debbie wondered what would happen to Samantha’s art now. The thought made her shiver involuntarily.
“What’s up, you cold?” Darren, sitting next to her, put his arm around her. It had been hot and fine all day, and now the sun was just beginning its descent, thin strips of clouds gilded with the rays of its passing floating across the horizon, over the sea.
“No,” said Debbie, smiling up at him. “Just thanking my lucky stars that a certain person is no longer with us.”
Darren’s blue eyes looked iridescent in the golden evening light.
“You can say that again,” his gaze travelled from Debbie to Al and then back to his girlfriend. He was just as relieved to see the back of this relationship, which at one point seemed to him would end up ruining their own.
He leaned in to kiss her. Debbie closed her eyes, the sweetness of his breath and sensation of his lips on hers merging into the yearning tilt of the song, the distant sigh of the sea against the pebbles on the shore.
* * *
Fishing around in the cooler box Marc had brought with him for a decently chilled bottle, Julian watched Alex and Bully dance into the pillbox and crash onto the old sofa they had put in there for the party. Corrine, sitting on the other end of it with Bugs, fell about laughing. Julian smiled as he watched, trying to shake off the absent presence that was also weighing on his mind.
Samantha had waited for him at the end of a corridor last Friday, stepped out and hissed in his ear: “I’m gonna make you
pay for what you did, you sneaky little freak.”
Julian had flipped his middle finger at her, told her to get lost. But the look on her face had actually scared him. And when he had gone to his locker at the end of the day, someone had written POOF across the door in black marker pen.
From inside the pillbox, Alex looked up into Julian’s stare.
“’Scuse me a second,” he disentangled himself from Bully, got to his feet and walked out into the sunlight towards Julian, hoping the right words would come that could make up for the embarrassing fool he had made of himself in the market square. “Julian,” he said, dropping down beside him. “I owe you an apology. What I said the other day, it was stupid, I didn’t mean it like it came out …”
Julian’s smile widened into a grin. “Don’t worry about it,” once more the younger boy cut him off with the shake of his head. “I know what you meant. At least, I think I do.”
That gleam of understanding was back in his eyes, Alex felt sure now, as he offered his hand to shake. “I’m quite into Soft Cell myself,” he said.
* * *
Inside the pillbox, Corrine stared intently at the tattoo on Bully’s arm: a silhouette of the profile of a man, coloured in black, but with his eyes left as colourless slits. A man who looked like an avenging angel, made from smoke and soot. Down the side, in what looked liked stencilled letters, was the word: VENGEANCE
Corrine got a funny feeling when she looked at it. “That’s fucking brilliant,” she said, her hand hovering over the surface.
“’S’all right, you can touch it. The scab come off weeks ago,” said Bully.
Gingerly, she put her fingertips onto the inked skin. The feeling intensified. It was as if some long-forgotten dream was trying to push its way to the front of her mind. “Where do it come from?” she whispered.
“Funny you should ask,” said Bully. “Kris!” he shouted. “Put the Army on!”
“Right you are,” Kris nodded. From the pile of tapes around the ghetto blaster, he selected a cassette. Ejecting Julian’s compilation, he loaded it and pressed play.
A tense pattern of notes sprung out, loose as an elastic band but still deadly precise. A bassline that seemed to call out to that feeling of expectation blooming inside Corrine, that propelled her to her feet.
The notes got louder, more urgent, the drums joining in, quickening the pace. Bully took hold of her hands, pulled her into a dance. Corrine had never danced with a man before but the music told her what to do, stomp her legs to the persistent beat, sand flying across the concrete floor of the pillbox from her twisting feet and Bully’s boxing boots.
A man began to sing, simmering rage compressed into each syllable. His voice bounced along the surface of the song, like a pebble skimmed across the sea. Corrine couldn’t make out exactly what he was saying, but as the verse built towards the chorus, she felt she knew his intentions clearly – he was enunciating something she had yearned for all her life. Freedom …
“
I believe in justice.
”
Bully threw his arms in the air, singing out the words.
“
I believe in vengeance.
”
Made his hands into fists, leaning towards her, a wild grin cracked across his face.
“
I believe in getting the bastard, getting the bastard, NOW!
”
Yeah
, thought Corrine,
yeah
.
Retribution.
Faces flashed through her mind as she laughed and danced on. The faces of the dirty old men under the pier, the sad cavalcade of twisted souls whose only release from the shame, disgust and hurt inside them was to inflict it on others, to corrupt as they had been corrupted. Psycho, Scum and Whiz, laughing their dull, deadly laughs. Rat and his knife, the knife she had dreamt of turning back on him over and over, plunging it into him and seeing the red come out, the evil gushing forth from his guts, one sweet, visceral purge. Making him feel all the hurt he had inflicted on her, but worse, making him feel it forever, making him watch the life draining out of him, horror and sheer disbelief in his eyes.
Oh God, that dream, she had had it so many times. It almost felt as if she had actually looked down on her own bloody hands, with the knife clasped inside them.
And Gina – what would she do with Gina?
“
I believe in justice
,” the chorus kicked in again.
Make her take all of them. All of them that had been forced on her.
“
I believe in vengeance.
”
With her watching, her laughing, her holding up Rat’s head on a stick. A legion of townsfolk behind her, bearing torches and whooping with laughter, curses crackling on their lips like fire. Preparing the scaffold for Gina. A man made of smoke and soot rising up behind them all, bigger than the sky …
I believe in getting the bastard
Oh yeah, and one other.
Getting the bastard
Samantha Lamb. Yes, Samantha Lamb must die!
NOW!
Bully grabbed hold of her hand again, spun her round in a circle. Corrine saw passing through her mind’s eye in rapid succession, like a carousel wheel spinning:
Knives. Blood. Black hair. White skin. Mouths open, screaming.
Then they crashed down on the sofa. Bully’s laugh shook the vision away.
Corrine looked through the door of the pillbox at her friends outside, their faces flushed with joy. Happiness poured through her veins like molten gold.
The sun was nearly set now, the sky painted crimson, the still sea the palest of blues.
“You gonna help me build this fire, then?” said Bully.
* * *
Up on the Iron Duke forecourt, Gray responded to the call-out. “I’m up North Denes now,” he told the controller, “I’ll go take a look. Let you know if I need back-up.”
The dog started whining, straining on the leash.
“What’s that, then?” said Gray, following the direction of the animal’s snout. He raised his palm over his eyes and saw a plume of smoke drifting up into the dimming light, coming from the middle of the sand dunes. “That’s where they are, is it boy?”
* * *
No one saw him coming. The music was too loud and they were all too intoxicated – by the beer, by the songs, by the sense of euphoria that had grown since they lit the fire. Out here in the primal, beautiful night, by the sea, at the edge of the world.
The first that Corrine knew of it was a dog pushing its snout into her palm as she was sat sideways on the sofa, looking into Bully’s eyes while he talked about this band. When she looked up, that policeman was standing over her, the one from under the pier, the dog’s lead in his hand.
“Corrine,” he said, and though he was trying to look stern, there was a glimmer of amusement in his eyes. “Sorry, love, but the party’s over. Time to put that fire out.”
No one saw them, except for the person who had made the call of complaint from a seafront phonebox and now crouched in the darkness, watching the policeman bring events to a premature conclusion, making the gang kick sand over the fire and pick up all their empties. Then escorting them back across the dunes and up onto the sea wall, fun and games over for the night. Watched the deflated procession walking back along the promenade towards town.
The sound of soft laughter drifting in their wake, ringing around the walls of the pillbox.
At the same time the fax machine pinged and whirred into life, Digby, the larger of the two black Labradors lying in front of the fire, began to whine in his sleep. Mr Pearson, who had been staring into the flames ever since he took his daughter’s call, returned from the world of memory with a start.
He looked down at the dog. His front paws were moving, as if he was trying to give chase, and he gave out another strangled-sounding whine that provoked his brother, Lewie, to a response in kind.
“What you dreaming about, boys?” asked Mr Pearson, getting to his feet.
His eyes drew level with the picture on the mantelpiece. It showed him with darker, more luxuriant hair, his arm around a woman of about thirty, clouds of black curls snaked around her shoulders. Between them, a skinny young girl with her hair tied back in a red bandana, wearing a huge smile. Both females fixed the camera with arresting, turquoise eyes. Behind them lay an azure sea and craggy mountains rising into a clear blue sky.
“Sophia,” not for the first time, he asked his favourite image of his wife, “what am I going to do with her?”
Sophia smiled back, sphinx-like. Digby, in contrast, rolled right over and lurched to his feet, shaking himself vigorously awake. He pushed his nose into Mr Pearson’s hand, looked up at him with searching brown eyes.
“Let’s take a look then, boy,” his master said, padding out of the living room and across the hall into the crowded, book-clad room that Francesca called her office.
Pages of paper had begun to spew out of the fax machine.
* * *
“Leonard Rivett,” said Francesca.
“The very same.” He took a step forwards, doffing his hat with one hand, offering her the other. Francesca looked down at it, big and spotted with age, each finger encircled with a band of gold.
And the thumbs of a murderer
, she thought.
But she gave him her most charming smile as she placed her own slim palm in his. “Then I don’t believe I need to introduce myself,” she said.
“Indeed not, Miss Ryman,” Rivett agreed. He did not apply any pressure, just the merest of touches, before he let her hand go. “I know you weren’t expecting me, but I’m afraid DCI Smollet’s been delayed, he ran into a spot of bother on his way out of the station.” Rivett shook his head and raised his thick brows. “You know how it is in our line of work. So he asked me to go ahead and meet you.”