Mark Pearson - Death Row

‘How the hell does he even know who I am? What does he want from me?’

‘What am I suddenly, the oracle of fucking Delphi? Go and speak to him, Jack. Find out.’

*

It was Jennifer Hickling’s fifteenth birthday that morning, but if she was at all pleased or excited about it then it didn’t show in the brown eyes that looked back at her from the mirror. She was dressed in a quasi-goth style, with dyed black hair and black make-up around her eyes but not her lips. Her lips were ruby, thick with lipstick. She looked about twenty-two and felt half a century older. She put down a plastic hairbrush matted with different-coloured hair and practised a smile. Her face felt waxen somehow, its muscles not quite under her control, the corners of her mouth twitching downward. A reflex that she couldn’t control, like a knee being tapped with a hammer.

She smoothed down the front of her short dark denim skirt and held her Doc Marten-booted foot up, looking at it along the line of her dark stocking leg, and felt like kicking it straight into the man sleeping on the sofa. His mouth was open, drool gumming the corner of his mouth, and Jennifer felt like slamming the boot straight into his head. Breaking his teeth. Stamping on his face so it looked like raw hamburger. He was twenty-eight years old, with long greasy hair, two days’ worth of stubble on his pockmarked chin and stains on his jeans where he’d pissed himself during the night. The sight of him made her almost physically sick.

A wet sigh escaped from the lips of the sleeping man and Jennifer curled the corner of her own lip again. The guy was a pig. She picked up a short-bladed knife which she had put on top of the sideboard moments earlier and not for the first time thought about slicing him from ear to ear across his scrawny throat. Slaughtering him like the hog he was.

She looked back across at him, the knuckles on her hand whitening as she gripped the knife, and a younger girl’s voice cut across her dark imaginings.

‘Jennifer?’

Smoother than a seaside conjuror, she palmed the knife into the side pocket of her skirt and turned to smile at her nine-year-old sister Angela.

‘Wassup, kidder?’

‘I’m hungry.’

‘Come on, then. Let’s get you breakfast.’

She put her arm around her sister’s shoulder and steered her towards the kitchen.

‘Are you coming to school today?’

‘No. I’ll take you there, then I’ve got some things to take care of.’

‘You going up Camden again?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you do up there?’

Jennifer looked down at her sister without replying, her gaze hardening and then softening again in a blink. She ruffled her fingers through Angela’s curly hair and smiled.

‘You want toast or cereal?’

‘Toast.’

Jennifer led her through to the kitchen and opened the fridge. Inside was a can of lager and half a pint of milk. She closed the door and smiled at her sister again. ‘How about an egg McMuffin? My birthday treat.’

*

Jennifer stood in the queue, looking at the menu to the side of the counter. Everything was so complicated — what about a simple list of burgers?

‘Help you?’

Jennifer looked at the bored eighteen-year-old who was addressing her. His face was slack, his eyes lifeless until she turned round and he saw her. Then they became mobile with interest. His dirty blond hair looked like it had been cut by his mother with a pair of garden shears and there was a faint whiff of body odour coming off him, almost but not quite disguised with cheap aftershave. He looked familiar somehow — Jennifer was sure she had seen him around the estate. Maybe she’d given him a hand job. He looked the type and the way he was shiftily looking at her, not meeting her gaze, made her suspect as much. Just another loser from the estate ending up in a dead-end job with no future, no life ahead of him. Shit, she thought, was this going to be her in three years’ time? Not if she could help it, she knew that much. But what options were there for her? If you were born on the Waterhill estate there weren’t a lot of prospects ahead. Drug dealing, petty crime, prostitution seemed to be the careers of choice for many. She’d had enough of two of them and had no intention of trying the other. She saw where it ended. Dead. One way or another.

‘Give me an egg McMuffin and a quarter-pounder with cheese and two large fries to go.’

‘You want to go for a meal deal and get a-’

Jennifer cut him off. ‘Just get me what I said!’

The youth nodded and scuttled away to fetch the food. Men, Jennifer thought. They were all arseholes. Every fucking one of them. She looked back at her sister, who was sitting quietly at a table. She remembered a time when Angela hadn’t been so quiet. She remembered her running around laughing, squealing, enjoying life. Before her mother met him and everything changed. She realised the burger boy was saying something to her and as she turned back he was holding out a bag of food for her. She reached into her pocket for the money but the boy leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially: ‘On the house. You know. Old time’s sake, Jennifer. Maybe see you around.’

He winked at her and the smell of his body odour once again assaulted her nostrils and for the second time that morning she felt like being physically sick,

Men. Every one of them pond scum. Jennifer slipped her hand into her pocket and closed her hand around the comforting handle of the knife. It had already killed one of them — maybe there was time for one more before she made her move. One more for luck.

*

Kate Walker stifled a yawn as she walked along the corridor, past the geriatric ward and up to the intensive-care unit. She nodded to Bob Wilkinson, who was standing outside one of the rooms looking in through the window. Kate joined him and watched as a doctor and a nurse inside checked the patient’s vitals, took the readings of the machines that were keeping him alive, made sure the drips were still connected properly and functioning.

‘No change, then?’ Kate asked.

‘No,’ said Bob Wilkinson. ‘Still touch and go.’

‘And the prognosis?’

Bob shrugged, a world-weary who-can-tell gesture that he had spent most of his life on the force perfecting. ‘Doctors. They ever tell you anything you want to know?’

Kate gave him the bent eyebrow.

‘Sorry, present company excepted …’ He paused for a moment. ‘Some of the time, anyway.’

‘Who caught the case?’

‘DI Bennett.’

Kate looked at him blankly.

‘DI Tony Bennett. I kid you not.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘A flashy-tied immigrant from up north somewhere.’

‘Immigrant?’

‘To London. Just transferred down.’

‘He around?’

Bob Wilkinson shook his head. ‘Been and gone. Early hours.’

Kate cast a critical gaze over him, seeing more than the usual world-weariness in his eyes. ‘You been here all night?’

‘Yeah. Three more stabbings came in after this one.’

‘You know what I think they should do?’

‘Go on.’

‘Ban knives.’

Bob laughed dryly. ‘Why not? Sure as shit worked for drugs.’

Kate turned and held her hand out to the intern who was coming out of the high-dependency room. He was in his twenties with a face still shy of the pessimism she imagined he would soon learn to develop. Hospitals boiled the optimism out of you as powerfully as they tried to wipe out germs. The nurse in her forties behind him looked as though she could eat him and three more like him for breakfast.

‘Doctor Kate Walker. I’m a police surgeon.’

The doctor shook her hand with a surprisingly powerful grip, glancing back at his comatose patient. ‘I’m Doctor Hake.’ He smiled slightly self-consciously. ‘Timothy. You were the first person attending at the scene?’