Dead Air (21 page)

‘Well, do
you
ever look at the number of a cab when you get into one?’

‘Na,’ Craig admitted. ‘Who does?’

‘Phil, probably,’ I said. I’d called him on his mobile and home number but only got answer machines.

‘I still think,’ Craig said, ‘you should have gone to the police.’

‘Christ, man, I just wanted to get away.’

‘Yeah, but.’

‘Yeah but what? It was half eleven on a Friday night. The cops are going to be busy enough with fights and brawls and the usual weekend nonsense. And what exactly would I be ringing up to report, anyway? I
think
I was being kidnapped, I
think
somebody tried to spike my drink, but if you want any proof you’ll have to get another guy’s jacket and test it for the drug, if it’s still detectable. I
think
some violence was planned for me but I don’t know. I’m fairly sure I was chased but that’s not even illegal. Fucking hell, the only definitely criminal things that actually happened were the things
I
did; I smashed a cab window and I punched a woman in the face. I fucking hit a woman, man! Jesus Christ,
that
was something I had hoped to get through my whole life without doing, like breaking a major bone or changing a nappy.’ I sucked very hard on the J. I’d wanted a brandy or something but Craig had reckoned what I needed was a nice, mellow smoke.

My very first thought, once I’d got into the cab and told the guy to head for Basildon (this had to be east of wherever we were, so it meant we didn’t need to chuck a U-ey and go past the end of the road I’d been chased down), was to call Amy. She lived in Greenwich, which was feasibly in the area, and turning to her - and up on her doorstep - in an hour of need, on the run from heavies, might be just the sort of romantic ice-breaker required to shift our relationship onto whatever next phase might be on the cards (the last time I’d seen her had been on 11 September, when we’d all sat together in Kulwinder and Faye’s loft, watching the unbelievable unfold, until she’d been called away by her boss).

Then I thought of Celia. Christ; Merrial. Maybe he was behind whatever had almost happened back there.

I don’t know who I’d imagined might want to have me kidnapped and whisked off to the East End for … whatever, but of course Celia’s husband had to be a prime suspect. Why the hell hadn’t that been the
first
thing I’d thought of? Could this be anything to do with Celia and me? Had we been discovered? We thought we’d been so careful, but who really knew?

Oh shit. Should I use the mobile number she didn’t know I had, try to warn her?

But if it wasn’t anything to do with her, with us, and she discovered I’d taken her number without asking, without telling her …

Yeah, but if all this
was
about us then it was entirely possible a phone call could save her life.

‘I’m Ken, by the way,’ I said to the guy driving the mini-cab. He was a strapping white lad with a shock of red-dyed hair. I’d sat beside him rather than in the back. We shook hands.

‘Dive.’

‘Dave, I’ve a bit of a funny request.’

‘Yeah? Wossat?’

‘Can I use your mobile? I’ve got one of my own but I need to use a different one. Please? Add a fiver to the fare. It’s important. ’

‘Here you go.’

‘You are a saint, sir.’ I pulled out my own mobile, cursored through to Ceel’s entered but never used number, and clicked it into Dave’s Sony.

‘The mobile phone you are calling is switched off …’

Another couple of tries got the same response. No voice mail or message service available. ‘Thanks,’ I said to Dave the driver, handing him back his phone. ‘Never got through.’ I hesitated. ‘Listen, Dave; what I said about a fiver? Call it a tenner, but in the unlikely event a woman … anybody ever phones about a call made, like, now, just say you dialled the same wrong number or something.’

‘“You never saw me, I wasn’t here,”’ the lad quoted, grinning. ‘Used to work in a boozer, mate; lying to people on the phone looking for somebody they fink’s there is like second nature.’

‘Yeah, well, cheers,’ I said. I tried Amy next, on my own phone, but her mobile was switched to message and the land-line to her place in Greenwich was on answer, with a long beep-time of stacked messages before the tone. I sighed and rang Craig. He was in, sitting watching TV, about to go to bed.

‘Okay, Dave,’ I said. ‘Change of destination …’

I tried Celia’s mobile again from a phone box near Craig’s place in Highgate. Still nothing.

‘You should still go to the cops,’ Craig said again, looking down at the big old Geographia London Street Plan he’d spread on the kitchen table, to see if we could work out where it had all happened. Idiotically, I hadn’t thought to get the number or the name of the mini-cab company. The first thing I remembered from the drive was seeing a sign for Stratford station, off to our left as we’d headed in the general direction of Essex. ‘Report what happened,’ Craig insisted. ‘Because of what might happen.’

‘Because of what
might
happen?’ I echoed.

‘Supposing something else does, and it has to be something the cops get involved in; if what happened tonight comes out they’re going to want to know why you didn’t mention anything about it. You’ve got to report it, man. The cops might be able to find out if an old taxi gets its left window repaired over the next couple of days.’

‘I doubt that a kidnap that never really happened will be far up their list of priorities just now, plus I have said one or two unflattering things about the boys in blue, over the years,’ I observed. Dryly, I hoped. I was still shaking, and my leg hurt where I’d kicked the window out; I was going to have a splendid bruise in a day or two. There were various other mysterious aches, pains, grazes and likely bruises I couldn’t recall picking up in all the excitement, plus my hands and fingers were a little cut where I’d grabbed the window. Craig had handed me a bottle of TCP and some kitchen towel and told me to get on with it.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘But you still have to report it.’

‘What exactly is this stuff that might happen? What were you thinking of?’

‘I don’t know.’ Craig stretched his lanky frame back in the kitchen chair and put his hands behind his head. ‘You don’t have any idea who these people were?’

‘They were both white, south-east England, maybe London. There was somebody I didn’t see called Danny. The place I was being taken to was in the East End and the driver seemed to know the area. I’d guess he’s a proper taxi driver, done the Knowledge. It was …’ I gestured at the map in front of us. ‘There, somewhere.’

‘Suspects? Motives?’ Craig asked, grinning.

‘Stop enjoying this, you bastard.’

‘No, I’m being serious. Can you think of any suspects and what their motives might be?’

‘Oh, Jesus, do you want them alphabetically or in order of appearance? The world is basically composed of people who want me dead, and my close friends.’

‘I’m not sure those are mutually exclusive categories.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘That’s a tad paranoid, even for you.’

‘Craig, I’ve lost count of the death threats I’ve had over the years. We have to report each one to the local nick. They have a photocopied report form with my details already filled in. The people who open my mail get danger money. I’m not joking.’

‘You told me it was dirty money.’

‘Okay, it’s mostly shit, not bombs, but still. The point is lots of people have claimed to want me dead, and that’s just the ones who feel a burning desire to tell me. This could be fundamentalists of any persuasion, a corporate hit-job—’

Craig sniggered. ‘Oh, come on.’

‘Excuse me? I have affected the share price of large corporations. That’s a capital offence.’

‘Yeah, ha ha. Colour me chortle. But no, you haven’t. Not alone,’ Craig said. ‘You’re not an investigative reporter or anything, Ken. You’re a commentator. You comment on what others have dug up. If you didn’t, somebody else would, people who do dig stuff up.
Private Eye
, Mark Thomas … I don’t know; Rory Bremner, I mean … Shit, people have been trying to close down the
Eye
for decades. If Maxwell couldn’t and Jimmy Goldsmith couldn’t … I mean, why would anyone bother trying to kill
you
?’

‘Did any of that make sense even to you?’ I asked him.

‘I’m tired,’ Craig flapped one hand. ‘Mr Penfold and I have been in deep discussion most of the evening.’

‘Have you heard some of the things I’ve
said
about people? About fundamentalists in par-fucking-
ticular
?’

‘Fundamentalists don’t listen to your show.’

‘Khomeini didn’t read
The Satanic Verses
. So fucking what?’

‘Well, they don’t sound like fundamentalists, do they? White, man and woman, somebody called Danny.’

‘That I’ll give you.’ I put the dead joint into the ashtray. ‘They don’t sound like fundamentalist Muslims, anyway. Could be fundamentalist Christians; Aryan Nation militia types or something. They can’t all be wanking over pictures of Ayn Rand and polishing their Desert Eagles in South Dakota.’ My hand was still shaking. ‘Man, I really need a drink.’

‘I’ve got a box of red. Banrock okay?’

‘If it’s red and it has lots of alcohol in it, that’s all that matters.’

Craig rose. ‘Sounds like your blood, pal.’

‘You ruddy sod. My jacket stank of whisky.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t see it lying there,’ I lied. ‘D’you still have it? I mean, you haven’t washed it or anything, have you?’

‘Exhibit A is in a bin-bag in my kitchen,’ Phil said. He paused. He shook his head. ‘I still can’t believe you punched a woman.’

‘For the last time! I didn’t have a fucking choice!’

‘Well,’ Craig said. ‘As long as you didn’t enjoy it.’

‘About as much as I’m enjoying this,’ I muttered.

Phil had picked Craig and me up on Saturday morning and taken us to the
Temple Belle
. I’d been worried what I might find there; I’d wanted reinforcements. Phil and Craig knew each other so well they frequently had great sport with my insecurities, telling me they were actually better friends with each other than they were with me. This time they didn’t do that but they ganged up and made me swear that if they helped me here, I’d report what had happened to the police on the Monday morning.

The houseboat was fine. Nothing had been disturbed, no horses’ heads in the bed, nothing. There was a tool box in the cupboard under the stairs; I’d rummaged around in it until I found a hammer, which I suggested we took with us in case we were attacked, but the guys just stood there and shook their heads in unison, like they’d been rehearsing. I put the hammer back.

We went for a pint and a light lunch, then set off for the East End in search of the site of the previous evening’s fun.

I found the place eventually. Haggersley Street, off Bow Road, which was where the chip shop and the cab firm were. It all looked very different in the fresh, pale light of an October afternoon. Just past the rail bridge, by the traffic lights, there was still window glass on the road. I took a handful.

We mooched warily around the cul-de-sac on the far side of the lights, where Haggersley Street ended in a dead end off Devons Road.

‘I think your birds have flown, chum,’ Phil said, kicking at an old lager can. ‘If they were ever here.’

‘Yeah, thanks, Phil; cheers,’ I said. Phil was, compared to Craig, rather more sceptical about my account of what had happened the night before. Probably because he had seen how drunk I was. And maybe because of the jacket.

We were in a place of old, crooked kerb stones, peeling tarmac laid over ancient cobbles, windscreen glass that crunched under foot like gravel, burnt-out and abandoned cars with rusted panels and sagging plastic trim, and - framing it all on three sides - tilted lengths of desultorily graffitied corrugated iron topped by rusting angle iron strung with thin strands of barbed wire, jagged strands of sharp, spaced knots decorated by the greyed-out tatters of ruined black bin-liners, fluttering in a damp wind like the prayer flags of a half-hearted monochrome hell.

Some of the corrugated iron sections were crude gates, all strung with ancient padlocks and grimy chains.

I took a stirrup-step up - Craig made me take my shoe off, which would have made running away interesting - and looked over the corrugated iron walls. Concrete aprons in front of abandoned-looking light industrial units. Freight containers. Sheds. Puddles. Piles of wooden pallets. Waste ground. Weeds. More puddles. There was nobody about; not even any guard dogs came bounding out to greet me. The rain was coming on again.

‘I hate this place utterly,’ said Phil.

‘Seen enough?’ Craig asked me.

‘I can feel my life-force draining out through my soles,’ Phil muttered.

‘Nobody wears grey socks any more, Ken.’

‘Yeah, you’re right,’ I said, tutting and detaching one sleeve from a snag in the barbed wire. ‘Let us to fuck get.’

‘That’s you off the German beer until your grammar gets back to normal, pal.’

I tried calling Ceel at least twice a day from a variety of phone boxes throughout central London.

I now knew her number by heart.

She never answered.

Instead, on the Thursday, just after I’d finished my show, a package arrived, by courier. The package was slim and light, like Celia herself, but I didn’t dare hope. I signed for it, opened it, and there, glory be, was a key card.

My mobile rang. Something inside me melted and went south for the winter.

From the mobile’s tiny speaker, Ceel’s voice said, ‘One Aldwych. Dome suite.’

‘Are you—?’ I started to ask, but the line had clicked off. I let my head drop.

My phone burred again.

‘What?’ Ceel said.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked, almost choking.

‘Yes,’ she said, sounding puzzled. ‘Of course.’

I smiled into the middle distance. ‘I’ll see you soon.’

I couldn’t fuck. I just wanted to cuddle. Fully clothed. Ceel seemed more confused than annoyed, but also more confused than sympathetic.