A Fistful of Knuckles

CHAPTER FIVE: TRACY

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.’

‘Just wait for cable …’ muttered Sam under his breath.

‘All I remember of them are single moments. An image. A sensation. I know enough psychology to know if there’s any meaning in a dream it’s hidden away in the details.’

‘And what details did you remember, Annie?’

Closing her eyes, recalling the ghastly images of her nightmares, Annie said softly: ‘Sometimes I dream of things rotting. There are maggots crawling about. And sometimes I dream of …’ Her eyebrows furrowed. ‘… Sometimes I dream of a man … A man in a suit … A Nehru suit, like they used to wear in the 60s …’

Sam almost jolted.

‘A Nehru suit?’ he whispered. ‘No collar, no lapels …’

‘That’s the one. In the dream, the man always wears a Nehru suit. Expensive, sharp … I can’t see his face, but I’m frightened of him because …’

Sam felt his mouth go dry. He swallowed hard and asked: ‘Why? Why are you frightened of him?’

‘I don’t know.’ She furrowed her brow. ‘It’s like … It’s like he’s … Sometimes I feel it’s like he’s my-’

Quite suddenly, Annie gave a little gasp and sat suddenly upright. Her hand went to her chest, as if she were feeling her own heartbeat.

‘She’s here,’ she whispered. ‘It’s that feeling like before …’

Sam glanced down the corridor at the hospital foyer and spotted a frail young woman, little more than a girl, moving uncertainly amid the to-ing and fro-ing of the medical staff and patients. She was wearing faded denims with a polka-dot patch unhandily stitched over one knee. Her thick-soled, high-heeled sandals made her totter slightly, as if she had not yet learnt to walk in them, and the shapeless, man-sized lumberjack shirt she had on somehow only emphasized her fragility by sitting so bulkily on her.

‘Is that her?’ he asked.

Annie nodded.

As the girl drew closer, one unsteady step after another, the bruising around her eyes and mouth became more apparent. She had attempted to disguise it by letting her mousy hair fall down across her face, and by donning a googly pair of plastic sunglasses with thick, pink frames — but her efforts were in vain. She could have worn a paper bag over her head and somehow you would have intimated that the face beneath it was battered and traumatized. Tracy Porter gave off the air of being a victim the way a business tycoon gives off the air of mountainous wealth.

‘Are you up to speaking to her?’ Sam asked, putting his hand on Annie’s arm. ‘You’re feeling okay?’

‘My heart’s going again, like before. But I’m okay, Sam.’

‘Annie … this dream you were talking about … The man in the Nehru suit …’

‘Oh, for goodness sake, Sam, later. Let me go and have a word with Tracy, just me and her. If she’s not too jumpy, I’ll bring her over, yeah?’

Annie got to her feet, fixed her expression into one of openness, adopted unthreatening body language, and headed down the corridor towards Tracy. The girl flinched and glanced over her shoulder at the main doorway, as if she was ready to bolt back out. Not that she could bolt exactly, not in those blocky sandals. Perhaps teeter away at speed until she twisted her ankle.

Sam couldn’t hear what Annie said to her — no doubt words of friendliness and concern in order to win the girl’s trust just that little bit more. Tracy raised her hands to her face to cover the injuries, but Annie took the girl’s hands in her own and held them, making physical contact, bridging the gulf between her and this terrified, wounded creature.

And then, without warning, the Test Card Girl spoke, right behind Sam’s head. ‘They’re the same man, Sam.’

Sam leapt up like he’d received an electric shock, and span round. There was nobody there — just the now empty bench, and above it the anti-smoking poster, with its image of a small girl breathing in the smoke issuing from her father’s cigarette. Sam peered closer at the poster. Did he know that girl? Was it her, the brat from the test card?

Tentatively, Sam reached out his hand towards the poster. He hesitated, his fingers half an inch from its surface, suddenly unwilling … and then he forced himself to do it. His hand pressed against nothing more than a glossy sheet of printed paper.

‘What did you mean?’ he asked, speaking out loud, staring hard at the girl in the photograph. ‘Who’s the same man? The man I saw at the fair last night and the one in Annie’s nightmares? Is that what you meant? Tell me! Tell me what you meant!’

The girl in the poster did not move. And now he looked harder at her, she was certainly not the Test Card Girl. Nothing like her.

Nothing like her … at least, not now. But what about a moment ago? Did that poster change behind my back? Had she been there, smiling down at me, inches away …?

The thought gave him the creeps.

IF YOU LOVE HER, DON’T KILL HER the poster warned him,

Sam shook his head to clear it, trying to rid himself of paranoia.

‘You know what I meant, Sam,’ said a small girl in a wheelchair as a porter trundled her along.

Sam jumped and span round. The Test Card Girl was sitting in the wheelchair, pale-faced and gently smiling.

‘And when she said she got frightened, and wanted to look over her shoulder … when she said she felt she was the next one in line … she was right, Sam.’

‘No …’ Sam said. Or rather, he silently mouthed the word, because no sound would come.

‘She is the next one in line.’

‘No.’

‘And it’s going be worse than just a beating, Sam. Much worse. Believe me.’

Sam flattened himself against the wall.

The porter looked at him with slow, dull eyes. ‘You all right, mate?’

‘What did you mean by that?’ Sam hissed at her, his fists clenching. ‘Tell me what the hell you meant!’

‘Just tryin’ to ‘elp,’ shrugged the porter. ‘Bloody weirdo.’

And with that, he went on his way, pushing the wheelchair off along the corridor. The Test Card Girl craned round in her seat to keep her smiling face fixed on Sam until she disappeared round a corner.

‘This is him,’ he heard Annie saying. ‘DI Tyler. He’s really kind. A really kind man.’

He turned, and there she was, gently coaxing Tracy towards him.

They didn’t see me jump out of my skin just then. Thank God!

‘Tracy!’ he said, trying to sound perfectly natural and unflustered. He summoned up as friendly a smile as he could manage. ‘Call me Sam. Pleasure to meet you. I was hoping that, before you have your check-up with the doctor, you could spare us the time for a quick chat?’

Sam’s CID badge bought them access to a dreary little room decorated with nothing more than an eye chart and an empty cork board. Tracy shuffled in, nervous and uncertain, wobbling on her built-up sandals. She refused to take off her sunglasses and seemed permanently on the verge of rushing out.

Annie did what she could to put her at her ease. She settled Tracy in a plastic chair and pulled up a seat beside her. Sam sat across from them, not too close — he didn’t want to seem overbearing — but not so far away as to appear remote. He had a clear view of Tracy’s blackened, swollen face. Whether she was pretty or plain was impossible to see; all he could make out were discoloured swellings, stitched cuts, and the blank-eyed stare of those enormous sunglasses.

Patsy must have leathered into her like he was pummelling a punch bag. She’s lucky she didn’t end up in the morgue. How many beatings does this poor girl endure from one week to the next? Is this how she lives her life? Is this, for her, business as usual?

He recalled the Test Card Girl’s taunting words about Annie: ‘She is the next one in line. And it’s going be worse than just a beating, Sam. Much worse.’

I’ll never let you end up like this, Annie. I swear it now. I’ll die before I see you smashed to pieces.

It was no time for thoughts like this. He had an interview to conduct. Sam cleared his mind, focused, and concentrated on Tracy.

How to begin? He decided his opening gambit should be informal, breezy, low key. ‘So. Tracy. You’re not a local lass, are you?’

‘London,’ said Tracy. ‘Kilburn. Like Pats.’

‘If you don’t mind me asking, how did you meet Patsy? Are you a fight fan?’

‘Me and some mates went to the fair. Pats was there, and I caught his eye.’

Sam nodded and smiled: ‘And so he asked you out?’

‘And we ‘ad full blown nookie on the first date, is that what you want to ‘ear is it?’

‘Tracy, I’m just trying to establish a context for-’

‘You wanna know where he stuck it and ‘ow many times?’

Despite her battered body, there was still a spark of fire in this young woman. Was she being protective towards Patsy? Or was her sudden aggression the result of years of misery and abuse? Whatever was going on in her poor, brutalized mind, Sam knew he had to tread very carefully.

‘I have no intention of prying into your private life,’ said Sam, pitching his voice to sound as unthreatening as possible. ‘I’m interested to know more about Patsy O’Riordan. What can you tell me about him?’

Tracy bristled defensively. ‘Before you start on me, mate, I walked into a door.’

‘I understand.’

‘You’d better, mate, coz if you start anyfink else like, I’m right out that door, you reading me?’

‘All I’m doing is asking about Patsy.’

‘Yeah, right, the way coppers are always “just asking”!’

Was he playing this wrong? Was he doing nothing but hitting all of Tracy’s anger-buttons? Sam flashed a glance at Annie; she looked back with an expression that said it’s okay, just keep talking to her.

Trusting Annie’s judgment, Sam went on: ‘So, you and Patsy met at the fair. When was that, do you remember?’

‘A few years back.’

‘Are you happy together? Are you planning on getting married?’

‘Yeah.’

Sam waited for her to elaborate. After a few silent moments, he prompted her: ‘Is that “yeah, you’re happy together” or “yeah you’re planning on getting married”? Or was it “yeah” to both?’

Tracy turned stiffTracely to Annie, holding up her hands in a what the bloody ‘ell’s this fella on about shrug. Annie smiled at her and patted her hand.

Diplomatically, Sam summoned up a self-deprecating laugh: ‘Let me ask you about something else. I’m involved in an investigation concerning a man called Denzil Obi. Does that name mean anything to you?’

Tracy shrugged and shook her head.

‘You’ve never heard of him before?’

‘Am I supposed to have ‘eard of ‘im?’

‘Mr Obi was a boxer,’ said Sam.

Tracy adjusted her sunglasses. Was it a nervous gesture? Sam decided to wait and see what she said next, unprompted.

It took a few moments, but at last she spoke: ‘Was a boxer?’

Sam nodded.

Tracy fiddled with her glasses again: ‘I don’t like the sound of this.’

‘What do you mean, Tracy?’

‘This boxer, he’s gotta be dead, right, which is why you’re askin’ abaht ‘im. Which means you’re looking for somebody to send down.’

Sam kept his voice soft but clear. ‘Mr Obi is dead, yes. But we’re not looking for “somebody to send down”, Tracy, we’re looking for the person who killed him. No fit-ups, no fall-guys. We want the man who killed him. Now — the only reason I’m asking you about Denzil Obi is that I’ve been told he used to know Patsy. They’ve gone up against each other in the ring.’

‘Maybe. I dunno. I never go to the fights.’

‘Violence not your scene?’

The moment he’d said it, Sam could have bitten his tongue off. It sounded provocative, sarcastic, even mocking.

But Tracy took the statement at face value and replied: ‘I don’t like seein’ Patsy gettin’ walloped … though it’s always the other fella what comes off the worst. Besides, Pats don’t like me going out.’

‘Going out? You mean, to fights?’

‘It’s right for ‘im to know where I am,’ said Tracy, and again she sounded defensive, as if Sam were criticizing her domestic arrangements. ‘Fights are for blokes. Birds like me should be at ‘ome waitin’, keeping the place in order and that. Don’t you ‘ave a missus?’

‘Me? No, not a … not a “missus” as such, no. There is somebody but, we’re … well, we’re not …’

‘There ya go then, you don’t know what it’s like, do ya! But I do. A bloke’s missus has her place, and that’s the way it is and that’s what’s right.’ She sat back in her seat and once again readjusted her sunglasses. ‘You’ll find that out for yourself one day, young man.’

She’s a slave, Sam thought. That’s what these bruises are all about. What did she do to provoke them? Wash up a plate and leave a trace of food on it? Speak out of turn? Not have the dinner on the table when Patsy got in?

Without warning, Tracy scraped back her chair and got to her feet.

‘I’ve ‘ad enough of this.’

‘Please stay another couple of minutes,’ said Sam. ‘I promise, I have just two or three more questions I’d like to ask and then that’s it, I’m all done.’

‘No. You’re all done now, mate. I ain’t got nuffing to say that’s no use to you. I walked into a door, and Patsy earns an honest crust down at the fair. He’s a good man. He looks after me. I love him.’ Tracy’s hard London accent twisted that word, stretched it, contorted it: I laahve ’im. ‘I laahve my Pats, and if some bloke’s snuffed it, that ain’t nuffing to do wiv him and it ain’t nuffing to do wiv me, so there’s your lot.’

She tottered on her high shoes to the door, pushing hopelessly at the handle for a few seconds until she realized that the door opened inwards, and then turned her blackened face towards Sam. He saw himself reflected, twice over, in the dark lenses of her sunglasses.

‘Coppers,’ she sneered. There was real venom in her voice.

And with that, she was gone.

Sam and Annie sat in silence, looking at each other. Annie raised a hand and laid it against her chest.

‘It’s beating fit to bust,’ she said. ‘Why? Why does that girl affect me like that, Sam?’

Sam tried to say something comforting, but no words came. What the hell did he know? All he could do was put his arms around her in a mute, hopeless display of protection. And to himself, he repeated his vow:

I’ll never let you end up like that girl, Annie. Nobody will lay a finger on you. I’ll die first. If that’s what it takes, I’ll die to save you.