The Collected Short Fiction

Direct Line (2004)

As Sharpe strode into the passage under the railway he heard a woman talking to herself ahead. Since the last of the lights had been vandalised overnight, the tunnel was flooded with darkness. He wasn’t about to be daunted by that or by her, even if she was homeless or mad. As he halved the distance to her, the train he’d just left passed overhead as though the July heat had congealed into an elongated clap of thunder, and he glimpsed her clutching at her face. “No,” she cried, high-pitched as her footsteps and their echoes as she fled. An object clattered down the wall to join the rest of the litter. Sharpe was opening his mouth to ask her to retrieve it when he saw it was luminous.

An abandoned hypodermic to which it lent a poisonous green glow distracted him from immediately seeing that it was a mobile phone. Even he recognised that it was expensive, the kind of item his pupils at school boasted about. It weighed less than a tiny skull. When he brought it not too close to his ear, he was greeted by a rush of static that seemed for a moment to be trying to form words. The noise sank into the dark as the phone was extinguished, and he hurried to catch up with its owner. Wastefulness offended him as much as litter.

The tunnel opened onto the road to the school. The road was rowdy with schoolboys, some of whom nudged each other at the sight of him. Had the woman been intimidated by the mass of them? She could have taken refuge in any of dozens of grimy houses split into secretive flats or in one of the alleys strewn with refuse. He was holding up his find as if this might draw her out of hiding when behind him a boy said “Sharpy’s got a mobile now. He can’t say nothing about ours.”

Sharpe swung around to confront the twelve-year-old’s unnecessarily small face, which grew smoothly innocent. “Perhaps you saw the lady this belongs to, Lomax. She ran out of there not a minute ago.”

The boy’s stunted crony Latham peered up from under his brows as though out of a lair. “We thought she must of been raped.”

“We looked for who done it and we seen you.”

“I was attempting to return the property she dropped. I hope you would have done as much.” When this provoked two identical disbelieving stares he said “You were asked to tell me where the lady went.”

“Behind them houses like she couldn’t wait to have a shit,” Lomax said, pointing to the alley Sharpe had just passed.

“No, it was them like she had to piss,” said Latham, indicating an alley beyond the exit from the pedestrian tunnel.

Sharpe hadn’t time to rebuke the vulgarity, whether it was automatic or deliberate. He sidled down the nearer alley, past bulging waist-high plastic bags torn open by animals or kicked asunder by children. Halfway down he met a transverse alley overlooked by the backs of two streets. There was no sign of the woman, but another at an upper window turned her head to keep an offensively suspicious eye on him. When he called “I’ve lost property for someone” it neither assuaged her stare nor attracted the owner. He stowed the mobile inside his jacket as he left the alley, ignoring questions and suggestions about where he’d been and why.

Lomax and Latham were even less eager than usual to reach the school. He caught up with them at the entrance to the schoolyard packed with uproar and furtive misdeeds, those that bothered to be furtive. “Did you give it to her, sir?” Lomax enquired.

“Did she like it, sir?” said Latham.

Their untypical enthusiasm made their meaning clear, but he wasn’t going to waste time on it. “I shouldn’t have expected any sense from the terrible Ls,” he said.

He was entering the school when the bell began to clang. He helped herd the scholars to the assembly hall and joined his colleagues on the stage, from which he fixed his stare on his class near the front of the long hot room. The general restlessness lessened as the headmaster marched to his lectern. Mr Thorn let his gaze roam until there was silence, which turned more inert as he addressed the question of self-sacrifice. Soon he was asking five hundred boys to think of items they could live without. He had just cited mobile phones when one rang.

For once it didn’t belong to any of the boys, though it was set to the remains of a chorus from the Messiah with a disco beat: “Hal-lel-lu-jah, hal-lel-lu-jah, lu-jah, lu-jah, lu-jah ...” As Sharpe glanced along the rank of his colleagues he realised that several were gazing at him. “Excuse me, head,” he murmured, “not mine,” only to demonstrate something like the opposite by retreating into the wings. He snatched out the mobile and thumbed the key that bore an icon of a vertical receiver. He was about to speak when the phone did so in a woman’s voice so impatient it left politeness behind. “Got it?”

Sharpe responded in a whisper, if a loud one. “Yes” was all he said, since it seemed obvious.

“Can you bring it?”

“Where?”

“Usual place.” As he concluded she had less language to her than the worst of his pupils she added “It’s Sue.”

His own terseness was designed to interfere as little as possible with Mr Thorn’s speech. “Where again?”

“What?” Even more suspiciously she asked “Is this Janey?”

“If she’s the lady who owns the phone she dropped it. Perhaps you could—”

“Wrong number. I don’t know any Janey. I’m not Sue either.”

Presumably she had run out of denials. A sound like a wind through a bone replaced her voice. He poked the button inscribed with a supine receiver and was putting the mobile away when it rang again. Mr Thorn faltered irritably in the middle of a word. Sharpe jabbed the first button and hissed “Yes?”

At first he heard nothing but static as the green glow of the mobile isolated him in the dimness. When it spoke, the voice was barely distinguishable from the mass of thin sound, and he had to strain to grasp the words. “Give it back.”

“That’ll be Jane, will it?”

“Give it back.”

The shrill voice was so unsteady it seemed close to dissolving into the static. “You need to tell me where you are,” he said.

“Don’t.”

“How else would you suggest I do as you asked?”

“Give it back.”

“You may collect it this afternoon if you wish,” Sharpe said and quelled the call.

He stayed offstage until Mr Thorn said “Use the day wisely” as usual. The folding seats and then their occupants produced sounds that might have accompanied the collapse of the roof. As Sharpe appended himself to the parade of teachers, the headmaster beckoned him. “Important calls, Kenneth?”

“I think the police may be interested.”

Mr Thorn’s bland chubby face twitched and underscored its receding hairline. “The more that can be resolved internally the better. We don’t want to gain a reputation as a school that has to keep calling the police.”

“It isn’t any of the boys this time. I’ve a strong suspicion this belongs to somebody we’d want to keep away from them.”

“By all means do so at your earliest convenience.”

“I intend to,” Sharpe said and applied some dignity to descending from the stage. He thought of entrusting die phone to Mr Thorn or the school secretary until lunchtime, but suppose either of them answered it and sent the owner into hiding? He hadn’t time to explain the situation when his class was bound for the classroom. He strode in pursuit so fiercely that some of the boys in the corridor lowered their voices or even made way for him.

Too many of his pupils strewn about the classroom looked ready to be amused by him. It was clear that Lomax spoke for them all by enquiring “Did the woman you was chasing want you, sir?”

“Sit down. Sit down. Sit down now.” Once a similar formula quietened them at last Sharpe said “She wants her phone. Who can tell me how to switch it off?”

No other question he had ever asked had brought a fraction of the enthusiasm. When he succeeded in hushing the uproar he gave the mobile to Latham, since the boy and his associate were on the front row. “It’s off, sir,” Latham said, fingering a button.

“Well done, Latham. Let’s see if you can do as well with algebra.”

Apparently the comment sounded like a joke. Sharpe returned the unlit mobile to his pocket and talked through the equations he’d chalked on the board after yesterday’s last class so that he didn’t have to turn his back.

The virtually uniform blankness that confronted him only stiffened when he asked if there was anything that anybody hadn’t understood. “Heads down, then,” he said wearily and watched them duck to their exercise books like cattle to sparse parched grass.

How could they fail to enjoy mathematics? It enshrined truths that had lasted and would last as long as the universe. It gave shape and stability to life, and everything depended on it. If they couldn’t appreciate its beauty, how could they resist its excitement? It was the universal language and a system of belief immune to change. Rather than grow depressed by the sluggish ruminations or the pretence of them all around him, he strolled to look over the shoulder of one of die few budding algebraists. He was watching the solution to an equation appear on the page under small inky fingers—he thought life had no greater satisfaction to offer him—when an insect larger than it had any right to be came to life.

It buzzed silently as it writhed against his chest until he dragged it out to wriggle on his palm. “What have you done to this, Latham?”

“Means someone’s trying to get you,” Latham said over the general laughter.

“They may continue trying,” Sharpe declared and shut the phone inside the teachers’ desk, where it struggled on its back before growing dormant. In his hand it had felt unnaturally vigorous, desperate to move, and the possibility that it might recommence crawling about in the desk distracted him more than the other outbursts of restlessness he had to subdue. If the desk had locked he might have left the mobile there instead of taking it to the staffroom.

“That’s not like you, Kenneth,” the English master said with a flutter of his eyelids. “Expecting a date?”

“Most emphatically not,” Sharpe said and covered the phone on the staffroom table with a teaching journal. The mobile had to accompany him to his other morning classes, however. In the last one it seemed to wriggle for an instant in his hand as though unwilling to be abandoned to the desk. He shut the lid and wished he could have nailed it down.

For once he was nearly as eager as his pupils for the lunchtime bell. He buried the mobile in an outer pocket, only to have to rest a hand on it in case any of the pickpockets tried to filch it as he hurried through the school. More boys than he suspected had permission were swaggering or sneaking out of the gates, but he hadn’t time to interrogate them. Could Jane—he felt uncomfortable being on first-name terms with her—have trailed him to wait until he left the school? More than once he seemed to glimpse a tattered scrawny form pacing him more or less on all fours behind the houses on the way to the police station. It must be a dog draped in some of the trash it had scavenged.

The police station was at the far end of the street from the railway. Beyond the glass doors of the low concrete block, youths lounged against the enquiries counter while an old couple sat on straight chairs and looked nervously out of place. Two trills of the bell on the counter were required to bring a constable out of the office. “Can you wait a few minutes, sir?” she barely asked Sharpe.

“A lady dropped this.”

“I’ll get a lost property form,” the policewoman said with visible relief, and reappeared with a clipboard. “Your name, sir?”

“Sharpe. Kenneth Sharpe, but I ought to say I think this may belong to one of our local drug dealers. I believe I was called by one of her customers earlier.”

The policewoman let the clipboard fall. “Do you wish to make a formal complaint?”

“I don’t think I’ve die evidence to do that. I couldn’t identify the caller. I just thought you should be aware what kind of person may be reclaiming the phone.”

“You think it’s likely they’d come here for it if they’re what you say.”

One of the youths sniggered, and Sharpe recognised him from years ago: Latham’s older and even less virtuous brother. “Not if you told them to come here,” Sharpe confined himself to saying. “I thought if they rang, someone might arrange to meet them in plain clothes.”

“Have you done much investigating yourself?”

“I’m a teacher,” Sharpe said, meaning yes.

“You’ll have checked the last number that called you, then.”

“I must confess I haven’t.”

She tapped keys too swiftly for him to follow and raised the mobile to her face. “No last number. It might as well have been nobody.”

“The boy I asked to switch it off for me must have done that.” Sharpe restrained himself from glaring at Latham’s brother and said “Can you really not learn anything?”

“Best if you keep it, sir. You can let us know if something significant comes up. You’re at the school down the road, are you? We can always find you there if the lady gets in touch.”

Did the policewoman think his find too negligible, or might she even disbelieve him? As he stalked out of the building he heard another snigger and almost swung around in case he caught her sharing the derision. She hadn’t called him sir as often as she could have and, besides, he knew that many of the boys used the word as a gibe. Perhaps she had. He strode angrily back to the school, failing to overtake or identify a group of boys emitting smoke that he was almost sure wasn’t tobacco, and left the mobile in the office.

The last period of the afternoon returned him to his own class for a geometry lesson. He was feeling close to conveying the beauty of a theorem when the school secretary knocked at the door. “Can you turn this off, Mr Sharpe? I haven’t time to keep answering it.”

“I thought it had been switched off.” About to confront Latham, Sharpe realised the policewoman must have revived the mobile. “Not you, Latham,” he nevertheless said and offered the task of killing the phone to the most numerate pupil. “Did you say you took some calls, Miss Dodd?”

“One. I didn’t think it could be for you. They just kept saying they wanted something back.”

“That will be the lady who lost it. Who can find me her number?”

All the boys began to clamour. It seemed safest to leave the job to the numerate boy, but he looked puzzled. “Says there wasn’t anybody.”

“Better stick to figures, Jarvis.” Of course the woman had withheld her number. Sharpe collected the mobile and held it out to the secretary. “Anything amiss, Miss Dodd?”

She shook her head while the class giggled at his choice of words. She might have convinced him if she hadn’t hesitated another second. As soon as the lesson petered out, having failed to recapture the communication he had thought he was establishing with more of the class than usual, he made for the office. “What exactly was the matter, Miss Dodd?”

“I just didn’t like the feel of it.”

“Which you’re saying was ...”

“Like it wanted to crawl out of my hand.” With a laugh apparently intended as disparaging she added “I expect I was distracted. I nearly dropped it because I thought someone was hiding behind the railings.”

She could do with an English lesson, he thought. The railings of the schoolyard were inches apart and less than an inch thick. He took the mobile to his classroom and set about marking homework. As he penned cross after dispiriting cross the green ink put him in mind of the glow that had led him to the phone in the tunnel. He couldn’t help growing tense in case the mobile sprang to life, and once he seemed to glimpse a figure watching him between entirely too few railings. Miss Dodd’s fancies must have impressed him more than they had any right to. When he glanced up, the street was deserted except for a momentary flurry of movement above a kerbside grid. Without doubt it was an effect of the heat, which also made him mop his forehead.

At least the street was still deserted when he left the school. Whatever his class might be up to was no longer his concern. Could the tunnel under the railway be where Jane met her customers? When he peered down it he saw nothing except litter. A low restless heap several feet long was scraping against a wall in the depths of the gloom.

More passengers than usual in his carriage on the train had mobile phones, unless he was more aware of them. The spectacle of so many people talking to nobody visible made him feel threatened with having to do so. He mustn’t allow it to turn him against using the train; his car had been vandalised once at the school, and Mr Thorn’s response had been so guarded that Sharpe had felt accused of bringing the place into disrepute. He did his best to ignore the voices all around him while he gazed out at the embankment strewn with litter that twitched and jerked with the passing of the train. He could almost have thought the disturbance was following him.

Most of the litter fell short of his station. The trees shading the streets were too mature for vandals to destroy but surely too slender for anyone to hide behind. He had glanced back only twice by the time he reached his neat two-bedroomed single-bedded house. Usually closing the door behind him felt like being sure of the rest of the day: a simple dinner with half a bottle of wine, the news on the radio, a browse among the comfortable old novels that occupied the spare bedroom, a book to take to bed. Now all this felt brittle with the possibility of an interruption. He planted the mobile on the kitchen table and watched it as he ate, and imagined it stirred furtively more than once before it started to writhe so vigorously it knocked against his plate. As he seized it and jabbed the appropriate button he thought of disguising his voice in case the caller wasn’t the owner. Disgust with the situation provoked him to demand “Yes?” Static rushed at him, bearing but almost drowning a voice. “Give it back.”

“We’ve already established I need to know where it should be taken.”

The static rose to meet him, and he had the impression, all the more unpleasant because irrational, that the speaker was doing the same. “Give it back.”

“Are you incapable of saying anything else?” All at once Sharpe’s temper deserted him. “Is it the effect of your drugs?”

There was silence or rather wordlessness for so long that he knew he’d scored a point. At last a thin desiccated aspect of the static pronounced some of “Give it back.”

“If you want your property I suggest you contact the police. I have.”

Should he have added that? Wouldn’t it make her afraid to reveal herself? Perhaps she was too brazen or too befuddled by drugs not to do so. When there was no response beyond a sluggish flurry of noises too shapeless for words, he ended the call. He felt he’d shown enough responsibility for one night, and tried to remember how Jarvis had switched the mobile off. He must have mistaken the formula, because halfway through the triumphal procession from Aids the mobile set about diminishing Handel.

Sharpe grabbed it from the low table it was sharing with Nicholas Nickelby and poked the rampant icon, then the prostrate one. This didn’t earn him much of a respite. Verdi’s procession was still on the march when the phone recommenced abridging Handel. He jabbed the keys again and thought of flinging the insistent object in the dustbin. Instead he paused the compact disc while he tramped with the phone to his bedroom, the most distant room. He shoved the mobile under both his pillows and leaned on them as if it might give in to his hopes and suffocate.

Not even its ditty did. He heard it several times during the section of the opera he forced himself to appreciate. It persisted throughout the news, after which it refused to let him read so much as an uninterrupted page. Surely the battery must run down soon, but it had lost none of its vim by the time his eyes began to ache. He retrieved the mobile from its lair to bury it under a cushion in the front room and under Nickelby as well.

How often did it ring as he laboured to sleep? He couldn’t tell when the tune reduced to idiocy was only in his head. He wished he hadn’t let the phone into his bedroom. Once, as he started awake from almost no doze at all, he thought he felt it crawling under the pillows, unless somebody was groping in search of it or something it had left behind was coming to a kind of life. He reared up to seize the light-cord, and as he uncovered the sheeted mattress he had the impression of turning over a stone. Was the patch of darkness on the sheet only the shadow of his head? Since no amount of rubbing the mark with the underside of a pillow had any visible result, he lowered his head into the dark.

He dreamed he slept more than he did. In the morning he stumbled down to glare at the phone, mockingly silent now. At least the day allowed him to put enough distance between them and, he hoped, to think how to dispose of his burden. On the train he felt trapped by ringtones, especially by the threat of hearing the one he’d grown to loathe. In the passage from the station he caught up with a trail of spicy smoke that none of his fellow commuters seemed to find worthy of remark. Was one of the boys in the street the culprit? Sharpe’s eyes were smarting with his attempts at detection by the time he reached the school.

As he trudged to the assembly hall he met Mr Thorn. “No interruptions today, I trust,” the headmaster murmured.

Sharpe thought this worse than unfair, not least because several boys had overheard, but restrained himself to saying “I hope so too.”

He was able to continue until early in his first lesson. He thought he’d snagged the imagination of some of the class with the concept of infinity until a phone burst into the theme from a television horror series. “I thought I’d switched it off,” Lomax said, less an apology than a complaint that Sharpe couldn’t help feeling was aimed at him, especially when the boy added with a fraction of a grin “It’s for you, sir.”

“Bring it to me.”

Once the boy had finished sauntering up to him Sharpe managed to turn the phone off before shutting it in his desk. “Aren’t you going to answer it, sir?” Lomax said.

“You may collect it from the office after school. Heads down to your work now. Silence. Heads down.”

Sharpe’s triumph was rather undermined by Miss Dodd, who looked wary of accepting a mobile from him when he detoured to the office on the way to his next class. He would have welcomed a mid-morning break and a longer one at lunchtime, but he was in charge of the yard. As he watched for misbehaviour and swooped to deal with miscreants, he kept being confused by the heat and his lack of sleep—kept glimpsing movements too large for a spider but otherwise as thin beyond the railings. Of course nothing was there whenever he gave in to the temptation to check.

Before lunchtime was over he knew he was the butt of a joke. In less than an hour three boys with mobiles told him they had a call for him. Their expressions were sullen or bewildered or both, which he put down to slyness if not to drugs. The first two exhausted his patience, and he sent the third to explain himself to the headmaster. Sharpe suspected that the hellish Ls were the instigators of the prank even before Latham’s mobile interrupted the elucidation of a theorem in the final lesson. “It was off,” Latham objected.

“Exactly like your friend’s, no doubt. Do tell us all who’s calling.”

“Dunno,” said Latham, having brought the rudimentary tune to an end. “It’s for you, though.”

“Unluckily for you I’ve heard that more than once too often. I’ll have the truth this time.”

“It is,” the boy protested with an aggrieved air. “Maybe it’s your dealer. My brother said—”

“All this tomfoolery was his idea, was it? I rather think if anybody’s dealer is calling it will be yours. Let me speak to them at once.”

“It’s not. They never call me. I’ve not got none.”

“Which means you have.” With an odd sense of sleepwalking Sharpe darted to wrench the phone from the boy’s grasp, only to be met by silence as flat as the earpiece. “Show me the number that rang,” he ordered.

Latham dealt a key a resentful poke and displayed a blank screen. “See, I didn’t know.”

“Go and convince the headmaster of that if you can. The rest of you, heads down.”

Should he have taken the boy to Mr Thorn? The class would have degenerated into chaos in his absence. Without order you had nothing, a point that Latham proved by not returning. Presumably he’d stolen home, unless he was meeting his dealer. The thought that Sharpe could be responsible for this lodged like hot ash behind his eyes. He was returning Lomax’s phone at the end of the lesson when a thirteen-year-old brought the message that Mr Thorn wanted Mr Sharpe in his office.

“Yes, head.”

“I’ve just had to deal with one of your boys.” As if the name might be written there, the headmaster frowned at the papers arranged on his desk before saying “Latham.”

“He did come to see you, then. We haven’t lost all control.”

“That may seem to be the question.” Mr Thorn lifted his gaze, which appeared to hope to see more than it did. “He says you accused him of buying drugs in class. I take it you’ve some proof.”

“I didn’t quite say that to him, but I certainly wouldn’t discount the possibility.”

“Best kept to yourself unless there’s evidence, Kenneth. And then he says you assaulted him.”

“Assaulted, good heavens, I think not.” Sharpe had a disconcerting sense of having dreamed the incident or of dreaming now. “I took a phone away from him,” he said. “Phones in class are still against the rules, I believe.”

“By force.”

“No more than necessary. Really none at all.”

“Would his classmates agree with you, do you think?” As Sharpe’s sense of injustice stopped up his words, Mr Thorn said “I’m hopeful that I’ve persuaded him to accept your apology on Monday, but it will depend on what his parents choose to do, his guardian, rather. Try and forget about it over the weekend and relax. If you’ll forgive my saying so, you seem a little drugged yourself.”

He maintained a guardedly sympathetic expression until Sharpe turned away in disgust. By the time Sharpe reached the door Mr Thorn was intent on his paperwork. “Head down,” Sharpe muttered, no longer caring if he was heard.

He was being sent home as a wrongdoer, was he? Let the school and the homework he had still to mark survive without him for a few days, then. He ignored all the boys and their activities, however villainous, as he made for the station. If intervening earned him more blame than the culprits, it wasn’t worth the risk.

A dog was grubbing among the rubbish in the middle of the passage beneath the railway. He heard its surreptitious feeble movements and saw the dull glint of its eyes, if those weren’t hypodermics it was shifting. He didn’t need to venture in to confirm how unpleasantly skinny it was.

The train felt like a refuge from it until he remembered he would be surrounded by phones. When he saw a man in the next carriage take a call and look around in quest of someone, Sharpe couldn’t help crouching out of view, however irrational that was. Surely the man wasn’t shouting after him as Sharpe hurried away from the train.

As soon as he was home he dashed into the front room to discover what the choked sound was. The battery must be low; the mobile wasn’t ringing so much as rattling. Even when he leaned on the cushion the ragged noise refused to be suffocated. When the cushion began to twitch as if the phone was struggling to reach him, he left the room and slammed the door.

He couldn’t eat much. He couldn’t concentrate on music or reading or even the news. It seemed impossible that he could hear the half-dead sound through both the cushion and the door, but wherever he was in the house, he did. Was lack of sleep inflaming his senses? When the words of a Victorian chapter grew as restless on the page as he heard the mobile was, he retreated to bed.

At last his ears gave up straining to listen for activity in the house. In the early hours he awoke and hastened downstairs to return the mobile where he’d found it. He used its glow to search the passage for the owner. It wasn’t she, however, who wobbled upright in the gloom, raising a face so withered it was featureless except possibly for eyes and parting tattered greenish lips to mouth “Give it back.” As some of a hand groped to catch hold of him he managed actually to waken. He wanted to think he was still asleep, because he heard a whisper somewhere near him.

He had to force himself to extend a hand into the dark. Once the light was on he identified the noise as the death rattle of the mobile. This wasn’t reassuring; it sounded far too like a sluggish almost formless repetition of the phrase from his dream. As he struggled to believe he was imagining the similarity, he heard a feeble thumping downstairs—a knocking on a door.

He kicked away the bedclothes and stumbled onto the landing. The sound was in the front room. Something was bumping weakly but persistently against the far side of the door. He ran downstairs and flung the door wide, sweeping the object backwards. At once it began to crawl towards him in the midst of a dim flickering greenish stain that was the only illumination in the room.

He’d had enough. The police could deal with its antics however they liked. He dashed upstairs to drag yesterday’s clothes on. Having picked up the mobile between finger and thumb, he dropped it in an outer pocket of his jacket and left the house. He mustn’t be fully awake. He was making for the local police station before he remembered it had been closed last year.

The one by the school was the closest, half an hour’s walk away. As he tramped in that direction, the houses shrank around their loudness. Beyond some of the open windows sleepless televisions flared, while other rooms were packed with discoloured silhouettes jigging to pile-driver music. Once a car screeched past him, full of boys who looked too young to be out so late and drawing behind it the smoke of a fat shared cigarette. He was glad not to recognise any of the boys, but shouldn’t the police be dealing with them? If the absence of the law meant the police station was shut for the night he would leave the mobile outside.

The buildings closest to the railway were derelict but not untenanted. He had the impression that the district was as teeming with life in the heat as a corpse. The intermittent light of a single streetlamp apparently too tall to smash plucked at the rooms beyond the broken windows and brought shapes that might be alive lurching forward, dodging back. It kept spilling into the tunnel and retreating from the dark. Whatever lay in there was almost asleep if not worse; he couldn’t judge whether the scrawny form was twitching with the instability of the dimness or with a trace of life. Sharpe didn’t know of any other route to the police station from this side of the track. He ran through the passage, almost colliding with the opposite wall in his eagerness to avoid the denizen. He was within inches of the exit when a whisper, or at least the fragments of one, halted him. “Give it back.”

Had he really heard it? The mobile in his pocket hadn’t rung or stirred. As he faltered at the end of the tunnel he heard footsteps wandering towards him. A woman whom he seemed to recognise was drifting from side to side of the street. He didn’t move until he was certain, by which time she was mere yards away. “I believe this belongs to you,” he said.

Her eyes glimmered dully with the light across the railway as she turned to look, first at him and then at the mobile. “I’ve got one,” she mumbled.

“You wanted this. You’ve asked for it often enough.”

“I’ve never.”

“Then who’s been calling,” Sharpe demanded, “if not you?”

An uneasy glint began to surface in her drugged eyes. “She used to. She told me she was shooting up when she was meant to be at school.”

“If it’s your daughter you’re talking about I rather think that’s your responsibility.” Sharpe was provoked into raising his voice over the approaching screech of wheels. “You can’t expect us to keep children at school without the support of their parents.”

“You’re a teacher, are you? Maybe you’re the kind that made her stay away.” Just as accusingly the woman said “She called me when she od’d. She didn’t know where she was and I couldn’t find her in time.”

Sharpe was about to retort to all this when the woman’s gaze strayed past him. Her eyes widened and her face sank inwards from the mouth as she staggered backwards. She grew aware of the car full of boys, and her expression changed. Sharpe didn’t know whether she tripped on the kerb or deliberately stepped in front of the vehicle. She sprawled in the roadway in time for the front wheels to crush her legs and her head. Her body jerked as the rear wheels caught her, and then she was utterly still.

As the car put on speed Sharpe dashed into the road, then turned away hastily, clapping a hand over his mouth. When he was able to speak without choking he pulled out the mobile and dialled 999. “Woman run over,” he gabbled. “Boys on drugs in a car.” He gave the location and ended the call and fled into the tunnel.

He was suffering more guilt than he understood. He only knew he didn’t want to be linked with the woman’s death. The glow from the mobile tinged the walls green and made them quiver nervously as he ran towards the light at the far end. When he glimpsed movement at the foot of the wall midway through the passage, he was able to imagine it was caused by the shaky glimmer. Then the shape produced thin limbs like an awakening spider and floundered towards him. He didn’t know whether it seized his ankles with fingernails or needles or the tips of bones. It sounded barely able to produce a whisper that rustled like litter. “Yours now,” it said.