Mark Pearson - Blood Work

© 2009

The woman's muscles spasmed and as she floated towards consciousness she heard a man's voice, and what she heard made her want to scream and kick and thrash her arms. But she couldn't move. She had been drugged, she knew that. And the drugs held her paralysed. She could barely open her eyes a millimetre but it was enough to see what the man held in his hand and if she had been able to scream she would have ripped her lungs apart doing so.

The blade in the man's hands dipped and she could feel the flesh and muscles of her stomach parting. No pain. But she could feel it. She could see his head bending lower, his other hand reaching forth, reaching into her. Violating her. Then he stood back, holding a mass of tissue in his hand, blood dripping from it as if he was squeezing what he held. And she closed her eyes, willing it to stop. Suddenly she could feel the cool air, feel it lift the heat from her skin. As she sank deeper inside herself, she could picture that heat like a fine cloud of particles swirling up into the black inkiness of the night sky, separating, dissolving and lost to the universe.

And then she didn't feel anything at all.

A group of noisy, enthusiastic young men gathered around one corner of the bar of the Unicorn, a mock- Tudor pub. A large-screen TV was commanding their attention. England was playing South Africa in a friendly and the atmosphere in the pub was rowdy, but not aggressive.

Detective Inspector Jack Delaney stood at the other end of the bar and waited patiently for the young man, with short cropped hair and arms like strings of rope and the word 'WRATH' tattooed in big, black letters along the length of one forearm, to get around to serving him. Any other day he would have been simmering with barely contained fury as the barman flirted with a couple of South African girls with hair as yellow as corn and strong, bright teeth. But Jack Delaney had other things to occupy his mind that night.

All things coalesce somewhere. All things come together in a pattern. He couldn't see it yet, but he knew it was there. Finding patterns was his job, after all, seeking what linked seemingly disassociated events. What Delaney did know just then, as he waited at the bar, with dark images flashing through his memory, was that he had a focus again. Something to help concentrate all the hurt and pain and anger he had lived with for four years into a single point of energy and use that to move forward out of the wreckage of his past, annihilating anything that got in his way. Jack Delaney didn't do standing still very well.

The barman's casual smile died as he approached Delaney.

'Help you?'

'Pint of Guinness and a pint of lager.'

Delaney threaded his way back through the crowd, smiling almost imperceptibly at the pair of blonde women, who were straining quite noticeably the yellow and green fabric of their 'Boks' rugby shirts, happy to draw attention to themselves. He put the drinks down on the table in front of his erstwhile boss who held a cigarette, as ever, in one hand and a lighter in the other.

Chief Inspector Diane Campbell looked up at him, a devil-may-care smile dancing in her puppy-brown eyes. 'Fifty-pound fine, it's almost worth lighting the bastard up.'

She held the cigarette aloft as if there may have been some doubt as to the identity of the illegitimate object.

Delaney pulled out a chair and sat down. 'True.'

'Meanwhile the fat cats of Westminster can smoke in their bar at the Houses of Parliament. Never mind their bleeding expenses, that's the real problem.'

'Not going political on me, are you, Diane?'

Campbell whipped her neck, flicking her bobbed hair left and right. 'Not in this lifetime.'

'Good to hear.'

Campbell looked at him for a moment, the mischief still in her eyes. 'I saw Kate Walker talking with you at the cemetery.'

'And?'

'Anything you want to tell me about that?'

Delaney took a long pull on his pint of Guinness and thought about it. Thought about Kate and her dark hair, her haunted eyes, her beauty. Her fragility. Remembering the hurt in her eyes as he had stood beneath the naked sky of a west London cemetery and told her that they had no future. He knew the damage that had been done to her as a child by her uncle, his ex-boss Superintendent Walker, knew that damage had scarred her as an adult, knew that that same uncle had tried to kill her because she was helping Delaney rescue his own child, Siobhan, from his clutches. Kate Walker had suffered enough, but he had made her suffer more. He'd already buried one wife, had carried the guilt of it for four years, and when it came to making a choice between the living and the dead…

He had chosen the dead.

He took another swallow of Guinness before putting the glass down and looking Campbell in the eye. 'Not a thing.'

'Wouldn't blame you if there was. She's got a fine figure on her for a brunette.'

Delaney didn't smile. 'We're about to put her uncle away for a long, long time, Diane. That's all I care about.' He leaned across the table and gripped his ex-boss's hand. His grip was firm, uncompromising, but she neither flinched nor sought to release herself from his hold. 'Just tell me what you've heard about my wife's death.'

She nodded, and Delaney released his grip. She resisted the temptation to rub her hand but held Delaney's gaze as he took another long pull on his pint of Guinness.

'Kevin Norrell.'

Delaney put his glass down, his voice arctic. 'What about him?'

The water fell like hard rain. The kind of powerful, punching rain you get in a tropical downpour. Kevin Norrell put his hand against the cool white tiles of the prison shower and felt it pound his body, the jets of water like needles. He bared his teeth. If he had his way the man who had put him in this prison was very shortly going to get him out. The water sounded like rain too as it spattered and puddled around his feet. He'd never liked the sound. It reminded him of his father, Sean Norrell. The memory, as ever, making his hand form involuntarily into a hamlike fist as his mind wandered back to his childhood, the summer of 1977 and the first time he was ever incarcerated.

The Hunter's Moon was a spit-and-sawdust pub halfway between West Harrow and Harrow on the Hill, set in a concrete housing development built in the sixties, complete with a small, built-in shopping precinct. The pub was at the end of a row of shops including a laundromat, a convenience store, an off-licence and a chemist. Three floors of council flats rose above the shops and pub, and were echoed on the opposite side of the street by four floors of similarly grey, utilitarian boxes. The Labour government's vision of utopian, urban living on the architect's drawing board may well have looked like a sunny vision of an ideal future; but whereas his green ink had imagined trees and benches and contented people, the stark concrete reality was inked in far more abrasive colours. The graffiti, though distinctly urban, certainly wasn't art, and couldn't be considered political, unless 'Jane fucks Ted' counted. You could lay money on the fact that the romantic dauber wasn't referring to Edward Heath and Jane Fonda.

It was raining. The kind of constant, wind-blown, swirling, miserable rain that clogged up drains and sewers, and it went with the soulless, plastic signboards above chain-link shutters, the sick, yellow light that leaked from the street lamps, and the garbage that floated on the street like rats go with sewage, or pigeons go with shit.