David Peace - 1977

‘Eric, come on.’

And I slap him across his pink fat cheeks with the bits of car park stuck there between the broken blood vessels and fucked-up blood pressure.

‘Eric…’

He’s coming back, the nodding slowing.

‘Eric, I know what you were doing, so just tell me where she is?’

He looks at me, the whites of his eyes red-streaked nicotine, the blacks wide in the blue, and through the spit he says:

‘I pimped her before. She asked me…’

My fists clench, he flinches, but I stop:

‘Eric, the truth…’

There are tears running down him.

‘It’s the truth.’

I pick him up, the pair of us falling about like a couple of ballroom drunks.

I lean him against the bonnet of his Miami-blue Granada 2000:

‘So where is she?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen her in over six months.’

I dust down his coat, knocking the gravel and scraps of paper off him:

‘You’re a liar, Eric. And not a very good one.’

He’s breathing heavily, sweating worse in that sheepskin coat of his.

I tell him:

‘She got picked up on Friday night.’

He swallows, shaking.

‘Here. In Manningham.’

‘I know.’

‘I know you know, cunt. Because she called you, didn’t she Eric? Wanted to meet you.’

He’s shaking his head.

‘What did she want, Eric?’

I pick a piece of shit off his collar and wait.

He closes his eyes, nodding:

‘Money, she wanted money’

‘And?’

‘Said she had some stuff, information.’

‘What kind?’

‘She didn’t say?’

‘Eric…’

‘Robberies, she didn’t say anything else. She was on the phone.’

I stroke his cheek:

‘And you arranged to meet her, didn’t you?’

He’s shaking his head.

‘But you sent the Van, didn’t you?’

He’s shaking that head, faster.

‘And they picked her up, didn’t they?’

Faster.

‘Thought you’d teach her a lesson, didn’t you?’

Side to side, faster.

‘And she told them to call you, didn’t she?’

Faster.

‘So they called you, didn’t they?’

And faster.

‘You could have made them go away, couldn’t you?’

He’s shaking.

‘Could have made them stop it, couldn’t you?’

And I grip that fat fucking face and an inch away I scream:

‘So why the fuck didn’t you, you piece of fucking fucking fucking shit!’

His eyes, his weak watery eyes, they frost over:

‘She’s yours, you took her.’

I have him now, in my hands, I have him, and I could kill him, batter his skull into the tarmac until it shattered, tip him into the boot of his brand new Miami-blue Granada 2000 and drive him up on to the Moors, or down into a quarry, or off into a lake, or over the edge and into the sea.

But I don’t.

I push the fat fucking cunt off the bonnet of his car and I get inside.

And he just stands there, in front of his Miami-blue Granada 2000, staring through the windscreen at me sat behind the wheel, his wheel.

I start the car, his car, thinking, move or I will kill you with your own car .

He steps to the side, his mouth moving, a black slow-motion hole of threats and promises, treats and curses.

I put my foot down.

And I’m gone

In hell in a stolen car, the lights all red, the world lost.

Straight out of Bradford, the A650 Wakefield Road into Tong Street, Bradford Road, King Street, under the M62, under the Ml and into Wakefield, out on to the Doncaster Road, out to the one place left, the last place left:

The Redbeck Cafe and Motel.

I sit there, in another lonely car park, Heath Common before me, three big black unlit bonfires against the clearing evening, waiting for their witches.

I reach into my pocket and take out my keys.

And there it is, Room 27.

In hell in a stolen car, the lights all red, the world lost like us.

In my dream I was sitting on a sofa in a room. A nice sofa, three seats. A nice room, pink .

But I’m not asleep, I’m awake

In hell.

The John Shark Show

Radio Leeds

Tuesday 7th June 1977

It was pissing it down.

Real fucking sheets of the stuff, across six lanes of empty Jubilee motorway.

Over the Moors, across the Moors, under the Moors:

Fuck you then you sleep .

Kiss you then you wake .

No-one; no cars, no lorries, nothing:

Deserted spaces, these overground places.

The world gone in the flash of a bomb.

But if there’s no-one here, no-one left, how is it I wake so bruised from sleep?

I switched off Twenty-five Years of Jubilee Hits and put my foot down, just the tapes in my head playing full blast:

DIARY MAY BE CLUE TO KILLER

A diary thought to be in her missing bag could hold the clue to a woman’s killer .

Twenty-six-year-old Clare Strachan was found battered to death in a disused garage a quarter of a mile from Preston town centre, and last night police toured public houses in a bid to trace her killer .

Miss Strachan was last seen at 10.25 p.m. on Thursday when she left a friend’s house .

A woman noticed her body as she passed the open doors of the garage in Frenchwood Street, Preston .

At a press conference today Detective Superintendent Alfred Hill said robbery was the likely motive behind the killing. He said a diary thought to be in her lost bag would hold a vital clue .

He said: ‘I am anxious to hear about anyone who has been missing from Preston since Thursday .’

Det. Supt. Hill, second in command of Lancashire CID, is leading a team of eighty detectives hunting the killer .

Miss Strachan, originally from Scotland, lived in the Avenham area of Preston and also used the surname Morrison .

Hard bloody crime reporting from the wrong side of the hills, from the wrong year:

1975:

Eddie gone, Carol dead, hell round every corner, every dawn .

Dead elm trees, thousands of them .

Culled from clippings, torn from tape.

Two years going on two hundred.

The History Man.

Bye Bye Baby.

Start at the finish.

Begin at the end:

I slowed on Church Street, crawling up the road, looking for Frenchwood Street, looking for the garages, her garage.

I stopped by a multi-storey car park.

The car stank, my breath rank from no sleep, no breakfast, just a bellyful of bad dreams.

The clock on the dashboard said nine.

Rain, buckets of it drenching the windows.

I pulled the jacket of my suit over my head and got out and ran across the road to an open door swinging in the piss.

But I stopped before it, dead in my tracks, my jacket down, the rain in my face, flattening my hair, sick with the stench of dread and doom.

I stepped inside, out of the rain, into her pain.

Under my feet, under my feet I felt old clothing, a blanket of rags and paper, bottles brown and green, a sea of glass with islands of wood, crates and boxes, a workman’s bench he surely used for that piece of work, his job.

I stood there, the door banging, everything before me, behind me, under me, over me, listening to the mice and the rats, the wind and the rain, a terrible soul music playing, but seeing nothing, blind:

‘Your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.’

I was an old man.

An old man lost in a room.

‘You look like a drowned rat. How long you been out here?’