The Rule of Fear

‘You didn’t tell me,’ Sara smiled uncomfortably.

‘That’s because Scott doesn’t like me talking about him to other people,’ he explained.

‘He didn’t tell me you’d visited him,’ Graham said, suspicion thick in his voice.

‘What Scott and I do is no one else’s business.’

‘Christ,’ Graham laughed. ‘You’re not schoolboys any more keeping silly secrets. For God’s sake, it’s not bad enough Scott got himself shot in Afghanistan – you manage to get yourself stabbed in the police. What sort of an idiot almost gets himself killed walking the beat?’

‘It can be a difficult job, Mr King.’ Sara had forgotten his father’s instructions to call him by his Christian name. ‘Policing London is dangerous. You can never be sure what you’ll walk into round the next corner.’

‘Nonsense,’ Graham dismissed her. ‘Joining the army in this day and age was always going to present certain risks. Scott knew that and so did your mother and I, but almost getting yourself killed walking around East bloody London. I mean …’

‘Which is exactly why I didn’t join the army,’ King fought back. ‘What’s the point of doing a job where you’ve got a good chance of being blown up or shot? Sounds like a pretty stupid thing to want to do to me.’

‘Which is probably why you got injured in the first place,’ Graham accused him. ‘A touch of karma, I think. You spent so much time avoiding joining the army because you were afraid of being injured, you got injured anyway.’

‘I don’t think so,’ King replied, just about holding it together.

‘The police,’ Graham held his arms out dramatically. ‘There’s no future in it.’

‘He’s on accelerated promotion,’ Sara reminded him.

‘Accelerated promotion,’ Graham scoffed. ‘He’s a sergeant. Now if he’d joined the army he would have started at lieutenant – the equivalent rank of inspector. None of this playing around in the other ranks nonsense. It’s not too late, you know,’ he continued down a familiar track. ‘I could still pull some strings and get you into Sandhurst. You’re still young enough, just.’

‘It’s not for me,’ King insisted. ‘I’m not like you or Scott.’

‘And what exactly is wrong with being like me or Scott?’ he demanded.

‘Nothing,’ King looked for a way to escape the conversation.

‘Then at least think about it.’

‘No,’ he answered bluntly.

‘Why not?’ his father demanded.

‘Because the army’s for fools,’ he couldn’t stop himself from blurting out.

His father breathed in deeply, preparing to attack before his wife finally stepped in to bring matters to an end. ‘That’s enough, you two,’ she insisted with a smile, as if the argument had been nothing more than friendly jousting. ‘We’re just glad that both you and Scott have fully recovered. You gave us quite a scare.’

‘Indeed,’ her husband forced himself to agree – the redness in his face and his slight trembling betraying the anger he still harboured.

‘It wasn’t intentional,’ King told them, happy to continue with the fight until he felt Sara kick him under the table. ‘But at the end of the day Scott’s going to recover and that’s all that matters.’

‘Good,’ his mother finished it for this occasion at least. ‘Now eat your dinner. You’re getting too skinny.’

Kelly Royston walked to Susie Ubana’s maisonette and reached through the metal grid to knock on the front door. After a few seconds the door opened slightly and Ubana peered through the gap, relaxing when she saw it was only Kelly – someone she’d known for years, having watched her growing up on the estate. She opened the door fully, but kept the metal grid firmly closed. Their meeting looked like a prison visit in an American jail.

‘You gonna open this … barricade?’ Kelly asked.

‘No,’ Ubana answered bluntly. ‘D’you want something?’

Kelly sighed and opened her clenched fist, revealing a crumpled five-pound note and a handful of loose change. ‘I need an eighth of Lebanese red,’ she told her. ‘It’s all there,’ she assured Ubana as they both looked at the mess of cash in her palm. Kelly saw the look of distaste on Ubana’s face at her offering. ‘What d’you expect?’ she asked. ‘Brand new tenners out the cash machine?’

‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ Ubana answered, awkwardly holding out both her hands through the grid and cupping them as if she was holding water. Kelly tipped the banknote and coins into her hands and watched them retreat back beyond the grid. ‘Wait there,’ Ubana told her and disappeared inside.

Kelly leaned against the wall and looked out over the estate as the night grew ever darker, its silence punctuated by the occasional scream of a child, shout of a drunk or bark of a dog. Her mind wandered to the young cop who’d arrested her mother’s boyfriend earlier in the day. She knew she’d affected him in a way she could affect pretty much any man she chose to, but he was different. Very different. He was a policeman. The men and boys on the estate were largely desperate fools she could manipulate like putty, taking whatever she liked from them with just the promise of intimacy with her at some distant, unspecified point in the future. At seventeen she already knew that to them she promised the chance of escape to a better world where they could have something wonderful and beautiful. Even if it only lasted for a few minutes, it would be the best thing that would ever happen to most of them. But would the young policeman be so easily enthralled by the drug of her beauty?

After a couple of minutes Ubana returned and ended her daydreaming.

‘Here,’ she told Kelly, easing her clenched fist through the grid. Kelly pushed herself off the wall and took hold of Ubana’s fist as if they were shaking hands in a slightly strange way until she felt Ubana’s well-practised fingers push the small parcel wrapped in clingfilm into the palm of her hand. Quickly she slipped it down the front of her skintight jeans and nestled it in her public hair, but she didn’t then scamper away as Ubana had expected. ‘Don’t wait around here long,’ Ubana warned her. ‘Not with that on you. One of them new coppers might be hanging around.’

‘Think they’ll want to search me?’ Kelly smiled mischievously, but her charms were wasted on Ubana.

‘They’ll want to arrest you,’ Ubana told her grimly. ‘And me.’

‘I wouldn’t mind being searched by one of them,’ Kelly ignored her.

‘Oh yeah,’ Ubana looked her up and down. ‘And which one would that be?’

‘The one in charge,’ Kelly answered, moving from hip to hip.

‘That’ll be the sergeant then,’ Ubana said sarcastically.

‘Yeah. Him,’ Kelly agreed. ‘The one with the stripes. The good-looking one – well, good-looking for a cop.’

‘What you got in that young mind of yours?’ Ubana asked suspiciously.

‘Nothing,’ Kelly lied, blinking her wide almond-shaped eyes and for once looking younger than she was. ‘I was just saying …’

‘I’d get those crazy notions out your head if I was you, girl,’ Ubana cautioned her. ‘I’ve spoken to the man. He ain’t interested in the likes of you, unless he’s arresting you. He’s pure, you know. He’s here to bring the bad times to us. Sure, he’s starting with the local thugs and fools, but what d’you think he’s gonna do after they’re all gone? He’s gonna come after people like me and that will not be good. Where would you get your puff from then, Kelly?’ The girl just shrugged disinterestedly. ‘Yeah, exactly,’ Ubana told her. ‘I’ve seen his type before. Best thing for us is he gets his promotion or joins the CID or whatever it is he’s after and fucks off and leaves us alone, before he has a chance to do any real damage. He’s already been here too long.’

‘You shouldn’t be so afraid,’ Kelly dismissed her fears. ‘You just need to know how to control him.’

‘Really,’ Ubana replied patronizingly.

‘Really,’ Kelly continued. ‘There isn’t a man on the planet I couldn’t control.’

‘What do you know about men?’ Ubana asked. ‘You’re too young to know anything much. Too young to even know that.’

‘We’ll see,’ Kelly answered, walking backwards and smiling before elegantly spinning on her heels, never looking back as she strolled away. ‘We’ll see.’

King nursed their car through the light evening traffic as Sara sat in the passenger seat still talking relentlessly about the evening they’d just spent with his parents – continually shaking her head and groaning with frustration. He listened to her many complaints as his head throbbed from the stress of being in the company of his parents, while his back and shoulder ached as if the knife was still buried deep in his body. But he said nothing to her as she continued to list the crimes against his parents and even managed to smile and appear amused by her ranting.

‘Honestly,’ she told him, ‘I don’t know how you got through the night without a drink. Jesus, your dad. How did you put up with that growing up?’

‘I told you,’ he explained. ‘I was never at home or almost never. I went to boarding school.’

‘Yeah. I remember,’ she replied, rolling her eyes. ‘Nice parents – sending you away for your entire childhood.’

‘They’re not that bad,’ he half-heartedly tried to convince her. ‘Just a bit military, I suppose.’

‘Oh, God,’ she reminded him, ‘and all that crap about “it’s still not too late to go to Sandhurst”. Is he serious?’

‘Yes,’ he sighed. ‘I think he probably is.’

‘Christ,’ she complained. ‘You’d think he’d have had enough of his sons being in the army after what happened to Scott.’

‘Don’t drag Scott into this,’ he snapped at her.

‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘It’s just after what happened to him and everything, you would have thought the last thing your parents would want is for their other son to join the army too. It’s not like you haven’t already been through enough.’

‘He just doesn’t know what else to say,’ he told her. ‘Doesn’t know what else to do.’

‘Well, he could help Scott for one thing,’ she argued, ‘instead of having a go at you.’

‘As far as he’s concerned, Scott’s all fixed,’ he explained. ‘Dad only sees the physical wounds.’

‘He doesn’t know Scott has post traumatic stress?’

‘No,’ he answered, ‘and Scott doesn’t want him to know.’

‘Why?’ she questioned.

‘Do you really need to ask?’ He looked at her quizzically.

‘Fair point,’ she conceded and allowed a silence to settle in the car for a while before breaking it. ‘Do you ever think you might have it?’ she asked a little nervously.

‘Have what?’ he smiled.

‘PST,’ she told him.

‘No,’ he managed to laugh it off, praying that the tightening in his stomach and the deafening sound of blood rushing around inside his head weren’t somehow manifesting themselves in a form Sara could see. He’d convinced the psychiatrists he was fine, not that any of them had dug too deep, each seemingly in a rush to move on to the next patient – teenagers with eating disorders and suicidal housewives. Sometimes he even fooled himself he was fine, but never for long. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me other than a stiff back and a sore shoulder. I passed my psychs – remember?’

‘It wasn’t a test,’ she corrected him. ‘They were just trying to find out if you needed help.’

‘And they found out I didn’t,’ he reminded her.

‘So long as you were truthful with them.’

‘Course I was,’ he assured her.

‘I doubt it,’ she accused him. ‘I know what you blokes are like – especially cops. You’d admit to anything before you admitted to struggling emotionally. You’re such a bunch of macho losers.’

‘If I was struggling I’d tell you,’ he lied. ‘But I’m not, so that’s the end of it.’ He dug his fingers deep into his aching shoulder, trying to ease the pain.

‘I’m sorry,’ she apologized. ‘I wasn’t trying to—’

‘I know,’ he cut her off, making her turn away. ‘Look,’ he softened. ‘It’s just my parents. They have a knack of pissing me off. But I’m fine,’ he insisted. ‘I’m absolutely fine.’

They shuffled through the front door of their small flat together feeling deflated and tired. They both kicked off their shoes and Sara threw herself into the inexpensive but comfortable sofa, before immediately jumping up again.

‘I’m exhausted,’ she told him. ‘I need to go to bed. If I fall asleep on that sofa you’ll never get me out of it. You coming?’

‘In a minute,’ he answered. ‘I need some painkillers and a drink first.’

‘I bet you do,’ she said without smiling. ‘Don’t be too long.’

‘I won’t be,’ he assured her, although in truth he had no idea how long he’d be.

‘See you in a minute then.’ She headed towards their bedroom while he went to the kitchen, turning on the under-cabinet lighting that only dimly illuminated the room. He pulled a beer from the fridge and popped the top off the bottle, placing it carefully on the small kitchen table before crossing the room and beginning to search for painkillers. Even in the poor light he found the buprenorphine easily enough. He pressed two tablets from the tinfoil and headed back to the table where he slumped in a chair, quickly throwing the pills in his mouth and washing them down with a long drink. The racing thoughts about his parents, his brother and Sara slowed to a flickering procession of still pictures in his mind, until finally they were pushed aside by the memories of the day he’d accepted a seemingly innocuous call to deal with a domestic dispute.

He shook his head, trying to expel the images from his mind, but they remained strong and vivid – the young girl walking like a ghost from the house, the crimson spreading slow and steady through her pristine white dress, collapsing into his arms as her father, her would-be killer, burst through the door. He winced as he once again felt the knife bury deep into his back and shoulder – his memory fast-forwarding to the point where he was beating the father unconscious and then he was inside the house and moving up the stairs to the room where he found the twelve-year-old girl lying face-down on her bed. He saw himself in the room standing over her, but not touching her as he had in reality – just standing there looking down at her dead body before walking backwards out of the room.

And then he entered the other room – the scene of bloody slaughter – the mother lying stabbed over and over on the bed with her brave teenage son on the floor next to her, his failed attempts to save his mother costing him his own young life. Only now, in his conscious nightmare, there was even more blood than there had really been. So much more that it pooled around the soles of his shoes as he walked slowly into the room – his feet sinking into the blood-saturated carpet as thick maroon liquid still poured from every wound on the mother’s body, yet more pouring from her son’s mouth, ears, nose and eyes.

King fled from the room in a panic, stumbling into the hallway and somehow becoming lost and disorientated in the small house, leaving bloody fingerprints on the walls as he used them to try and steady himself before he finally fell through a door and into another bedroom – the bedroom where he’d found the youngest girl lying peacefully on her back, pale and lifeless. Only in the terror of his waking dream she wasn’t lying, but sitting on the bed, her dead eyes staring at him, now wide and crystal blue – not closed as her father – her killer had left them. He inched towards her, his hand rising slowly and reaching out to her as her pale lips parted, her tongue garishly red in contrast. Words formed in her mouth before finally escaping, although they took an age to reach him, as if he was watching a badly lip-synched film. But eventually he could hear what she was saying – her voice soft and broken, but more terrifying than the loudest screams. Why didn’t you save me? Why didn’t you save me?

‘Fuck!’ He jumped to his feet, grabbing his shoulder as he instantly became aware of the pain in his body. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he pleaded as he shook the last remnants of the day-terror away. He drained the rest of his beer in one and took several deep breaths to steady himself, his pulse rate slowing as he recognized his surroundings and realized the girl wasn’t real – not any more.

He headed for the fridge, pulling the door open before immediately closing it and resting his head on the cold metal. ‘There was nothing I could do,’ he whispered to the ghost of the little girl. ‘You were gone before I got there. There was nothing I could do. Fuck,’ he said a little louder and yanked the fridge open, taking another beer from inside. ‘You were gone before I got there.’

6

King and Brown were tucked away in a large shed-like building used to store some of the estate’s many giant communal bins, keeping watch on the comings and goings from Micky Astill’s flat in a particularly bleak part of the estate known as The Meadows, despite the fact it contained not a single blade of grass.

‘Fucking stinks in here,’ Brown complained in his sour Glaswegian accent, his face screwed up against the stench from the over-full bins. ‘How much longer we gonna waste our time in this hole?’

‘You wanna be a rat-catcher, you have to be prepared to go into the sewer,’ King told him.

‘What?’ Brown pretended not to understand. ‘Don’t see why we don’t just get a warrant and do the door.’

‘Firstly,’ King explained, ‘by the time we got through the grids anything and everything would have been flushed. Secondly, what’s the point? We take out Astill, it’s only a matter of days before another dealer replaces him. Where there’s a demand there’ll always be someone to provide the supply and there’s plenty of demand on this estate.’

‘Fucking crack-heads and heroin addicts,’ Brown grumbled. ‘Let them kill themselves on it if that’s what they want. Why should we care?’

‘Because they steal to buy their shit with,’ King reminded him, ‘and that is our problem.’

‘Well,’ Brown still argued, ‘at least if we put his fucking door in he’ll get the message we’re after him. Put the pressure on him, eh?’

‘No,’ King insisted. ‘We leave him alone for now – pick off his customers on slow days to keep our arrest figures ticking over. If we can turn the odd informant, all the better.’

‘Informants,’ Brown scoffed at the idea. ‘Nothing but trouble. Dangerous bastards. If they’re happy to sell out their own friends and family then what d’you think they’d do to you given half a chance?’

‘Quiet,’ King suddenly told him, holding up his hand for emphasis. ‘Looks like we’ve got a customer.’

Brown peeked through a spyhole in the rotting wood. ‘Aye,’ he admitted. ‘We do indeed.’

‘You know him?’ King whispered.

‘Aye,’ Brown smiled as he looked at the tall, skinny figure loping towards the flat. Even from a distance his drug-induced acne and sickly, deathly pallor was clear to see, his hair badly shaven by his own hand to save money that could be better spent on hard drugs. ‘That there’s Dougie O’Neil. Well-known lowlife, thief and scaggy crack-head of this parish. Dougie doesn’t care what drugs he’s pumping into his system, just so long as they’re class A.’

They watched O’Neil gently knock on the door before turning and checking the walkways below and above, as well as the forecourt littered with cars – always alive to danger, constantly alert, like an antelope on the Serengeti; prey to all and predator to none, except when he was engaged in acts of petty theft. O’Neil understood his lowly role in life to the point where he’d even had ‘Born to lose’ tattooed on the side of his neck. After what seemed a long time, the door finally opened, although, as per the usual modus operandi for house-bound dealers, the metal grids riveted to the walls across the doors and windows remained secure and unopened. They could clearly make out Micky Astill standing in the doorframe looking like a clone of O’Neil – his body and skin ravaged by years of getting high on his own supply.

They watched as a short conversation took place before O’Neil handed something as surreptitiously as he could to Astill who disappeared back inside, closing the door behind him.

‘Paranoid fucker,’ Brown whispered.

‘Yeah,’ King agreed. ‘Heroin and crack’ll do that to you.’

‘Aye,’ Brown nodded as they continued to watch O’Neil waiting outside the flat, on edge the whole time – needing his fix – fearful he’d either be arrested or mugged before he got the chance to get as high as a kite and, for a time at least, escape the utter meaningless of his life.

Eventually the door opened, causing O’Neil to stand close to the grid, bobbing up and down like an excited puppy waiting to be thrown its favourite toy. Astill quickly put his hand through the grid and waited a split second for O’Neil to hold his own hand under it. Momentarily the two hands appeared to touch, causing Astill to immediately close his door and O’Neil to scamper away towards the stairwell.

‘He can’t see us once he’s in the stairwell,’ King said, watching O’Neil as he disappeared behind the brick wall. ‘Now,’ he told Brown and they both slipped silently from their hiding place and moved quickly across the car park to wait for Born to lose to appear from the bottom of the stairs. A few seconds later, O’Neil duly obliged, walking right into their arms as he stepped from the entrance.

Without warning Brown grabbed him one-handed around the throat and squeezed hard on his trachea to stop him from swallowing any drugs he had in his mouth, while King pulled his arms behind his back and forced him to bend slightly forward.

‘Spit it out,’ Brown demanded. ‘Spit it out or I’ll fucking choke you.’ O’Neil spluttered and gagged as he tried to swallow, but Brown’s grip made it impossible. After a few more seconds of struggling, O’Neil succumbed to the inevitable and allowed a small yellowish rock, no bigger than a child’s fingernail, to fall from his mouth.

Brown snapped on a pair of latex gloves while King kept hold of the panting, gasping O’Neil and recovered the crack cocaine. Brown held it up to the light as if examining a diamond before dropping it into a small plastic evidence bag. ‘That’s you fucked then, Dougie,’ he told the luckless prisoner and slid the bag into his trouser pocket.

‘Leave it out.’ O’Neil coughed as he tried to talk. ‘It’s just one rock. Just a bit of personal. Come on, man. Let me off.’

‘We might think about it,’ King told him, giving him renewed hope, even if the rock and therefore the chance of escaping to the paradise of oblivion was lost to him. ‘But first I think we’d better search your flat. What d’you say, Dougie? Got anything to hide?’

His shoulders slumped at the prospect. ‘Fuck,’ he declared, closing his eyes and shaking his head in disbelief. ‘I just wanted to get stoned for a while,’ he told them.

‘Never mind, Dougie,’ Brown told him condescendingly, patting him on the shoulder. ‘You know what they say – Life’s a bitch, then you marry one.’

As soon as they entered O’Neil’s squalid flat the smell of decaying humanity, burnt heroin, crack cocaine and hopelessness assaulted them. It was a devil’s brew of a scent neither of them had ever experienced until they’d joined the police, but now they knew its signature all too well – a self-inflicted torture caused by the addict’s fear of opening a window and risking attracting the attentions of a passing policeman. Better to live in a putrid, airless hovel, again and again breathing in recycled air that had passed through diseased lungs a thousand times before. They pushed O’Neil along the short hallway ahead of them and into the pit of a sitting room, sparsely furnished with items donated to charity and others pulled from the skips of the more fortunate. The battered coffee table was littered with burnt-out homemade crack-pipes and tinfoil that had been used over and over to chase the dragon. O’Neil had made no attempt to hide it away.

Filth was everywhere. King doubted they’d find a single cleaning product no matter how hard they searched the flat. The old, rancid carpet stuck to the soles of their shoes as they walked around, pushing the still handcuffed O’Neil onto the threadbare sofa riddled with burn holes and stains while the surviving flies repeatedly crashed into the opaque windows above the many bodies of their dead comrades who now lay unburied on the window sill.