Michael Robotham - Lost

Bermondsey is one of those areas that has been raped twice—once by the Luftwaffe and then by architects in the seventies who put up Stalinesque tower blocks and concrete council estates. It's like seeing a set of healthy teeth riddled with fillings.

We pull up outside a big old white place, veiled in foliage. Beneath a pelmet of ivy, I see a small balcony supported by ornate brackets and above that a steep slate roof as dark and wet as a washed blackboard.

I look at my watch. It's just gone seven in the morning.

“Rise and shine, Princess.”

A girl of about nineteen with tousled hair peers from the partially opened door. She's wearing a rugby sweater and a pair of cotton briefs. A tattoo peeps from beneath the waistband.

She looks at Ali's badge and unlocks the chain. Then we follow her down the hallway to the living room. Ali admonishes me silently for checking out the swaying arse.

Two more girls are asleep on the floor wrapped in each other's arms. Someone else of indeterminate sex is cocooned in a bedspread on the sofa. The air stinks of hash and stale cigarette smoke.

“Heavy night?”

“Not me, I don't drink,” she says.

“We're looking for Gerry Brandt.”

“He's upstairs.”

She sits on a dining chair and rests her bare foot on the table to pick at a scab on her knee.

“Well maybe you'd like to go and tell him that we'd like a word,” Ali replies.

The girl ponders this and then slides her foot off the table. She makes the stairs seem very steep. The dining room is plastered with cheap flyers for pub bands and there is a padded bench in the corner beneath a bar and weights. Through the door in the kitchen I see last night's takeout curry spilling out of the trash can.

The girl has returned. “Grub says he'll be a minute.”

She goes into the bathroom and without bothering to fully close the door, sits on the toilet and urinates. After finishing, she brushes her teeth, watching me in the mirror. Another toilet flushes upstairs followed by the sound of a window opening. A few seconds later a figure drops past the kitchen window and lands in the yard.

I get a glimpse of his face and see pure unadulterated fear in his eyes.

By the time I reach the back door he has vaulted the fence and is sprinting up the rear lane. He is barefoot, wearing a cotton undershirt and faded track pants.

I do a stomach roll over the fence and land heavily on cobblestones. He's thirty yards in front of me, heading for a gate. I figure Ali has gone out the front, trying to cut him off.

The bastard leaps the gate almost without breaking his stride. My approach is to demolish it because it's slippery underfoot and I can't stop in time. He turns left, dodges an overflowing Dumpster and crosses the road, leaping a hedge as he cuts the corner into an adjoining road.

Give me twenty years and two good legs and I still couldn't catch this guy. I'm dropping farther behind, coughing up phlegm and seeing dots dance in front of my eyes.

A British Gas crew is digging a trench down one side of the street. The red clay is piled up next to the open pit. I make the jump easily enough, but I haven't looked for traffic. The silence of the electric motor is what deceives me. The milk truck has pulled out of a parking space and is only traveling a few miles per hour, but I'm in full flight and still in midair. I clip the front corner nearside mudguard and it feels like the entire New Zealand rugby team has driven me into the tarmac.

Rolling half a dozen times, I collide with the gutter and know my thigh is corked. What is it about my legs? People are just picking on me now!

Gerry is at the end of the road. He turns his head to look over his shoulder and at that moment is upended. Ali has driven her shoulder into his stomach, wrapped her arms around his waist and used his momentum to lift him up and throw him down. She drops her knees into his back and I can almost feel the air leaving his lungs.

She is sitting on him, trying to drag his arms behind his back to handcuff them. As she reaches to her belt for the cuffs, Gerry snaps his head back slamming into her chin. She almost loses her balance but she keeps her knees locked to his sides, trying to hold him down.

I'm on my feet, loping toward them. My leg is numb and next to useless.

Ahead of me Gerry has dragged himself up on all fours. Ali has her thighs locked around his waist and is riding him like a kid playing horsey with her father. She wraps her forearm around his neck, trying to compress his windpipe. Gerry is on his haunches, trying to stand. Now he's up. He's six one and more than two hundred pounds.

I can see what's going to happen. I can hear myself screaming at Ali to let go, but she's clinging tight. There is a low brick wall fronting the yard. It's only a foot high, with a straight edge.

He lines Ali up, holding her legs now. Then he looks directly at me. A strange noise, an animal sound comes from inside him. Then he falls backward. Every bit of their combined weight comes to bear across Ali's spine and the edge of the wall. She bends and she breaks.

No sound reaches me. I hear my own voice calling her name. The gas board workers are transfixed, standing in their cement-colored overalls as if suddenly turned to stone. I focus on one of them, yelling at him until his eyes shift from Ali and lock onto mine.

“Get an ambulance. Now!”

The pain in my leg is forgotten. Ali's body is draped over the wall. She hasn't moved. Fragments of light leap from the chrome on the parked cars and the tears in her eyes.

Kneeling beside her, she stares upward and I can see myself reflected in her corneas.

“I can't feel my legs,” she whispers.

“Just stay where you are. Help is coming.”

“I guess I fucked up pretty good.”

“That was some tackle. Where did you learn to tackle like that?”

“Four brothers.”

“What ever happened to Home Economics?”

She takes a ragged breath. God knows what's broken. I want to reach inside her body and hold her together.

“I wouldn't ask you normally, Sir, but can you brush the hair out of my eyes?”

I push the hair across her forehead and tuck it behind her ears.

“Maybe I'll take tomorrow off,” she says. “I could catch the Eurostar and go shopping in Paris.”

“Maybe I'll come with you.”

“You hate shopping and you hate Paris.”

“I know, but it's good to get away sometimes.”

“What about Mickey?”

“We'll have found her by then.”

There are no soft blankets to tuck under her chin or canteens of water she can sip. She isn't crying anymore. Her eyes are as serene as a deer's. I can hear the ambulance siren.

Gerry Brandt has long gone. He has left behind a trampled flower bed and a torn scrap of his undershirt trapped in Ali's fingers.

I hate hospitals. They're full of horrible diseases that end with “ia” and “oma.” I know what I'm talking about. My first wife died in one of them, eaten away by cancer. Sometimes I wonder if the hospital didn't make her sicker than the disease.

It took two years for her to die but it seemed longer. Laura celebrated every day as a bonus but I couldn't do the same. It was like a slow torture, the endless, repetitive round of doctors' appointments, scans, drugs, bad news and cheerful smiles to hide the truth.

Claire and Michael were only thirteen but they handled it well enough. It was me who went off the rails. I disappeared and spent eighteen months driving aid trucks into Bosnia Herzegovina during the war. I should have been at home looking after my children instead of sending postcards. Maybe that's why they've never forgiven me.

They won't let me see Ali. The doctors and nurses move past me as if I'm a plastic chair in the waiting room. The triage nurse, Amanda, is plump and composed. When she speaks the words tumble out like paratroopers.