Geoff Nicholson - Bleeding London

His room was as oppressive as ever. He didn’t want to be there, yet he felt becalmed. He knew he ought to be out in the city tracking down rapist number six, the final victim, a feeling that was only confirmed when Judy arrived at his door.

“The landlady sent me up,” she said. “I don’t think she likes me. I don’t think I pass her high standards of racial purity.”

“Not many do.”

He was embarrassed by Judy’s presence. His awkwardness and diffidence sat uneasily with his bulk and strength but Judy knew she had the upper hand.

“I’m sorry I had to come back,” she said. “I realize you don’t want me here.”

He found himself denying that, found himself saying he did want her there, that he was pleased to see her. The words sounded unfamiliar in his mouth but they were undoubtedly true.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m here about something else. About work.”

“Work?”

“I want to offer you a job.”

For an uncomfortable moment he thought she had been so horrified to discover what he was doing in London that she was trying to straighten him out by offering him a job in her bookshop.

“You know what I do,” he said.

“Oh yes, although I still don’t know why. But that’s all right too. I suppose it doesn’t really matter. I don’t need to know.”

She was thoughtful, preoccupied, and for a moment she seemed to be a million miles away, a long way from job offers and rooms in Hackney, in some distant suburb of the mind where the tubes didn’t run and where the taxi drivers wouldn’t go.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said, and her speech slowed with the awkward weight of what she had to say. “Your list of names, could I add a name to it?”

“No,” he said loudly.

“Just one name. Just one man.”

“Oh, come on!” he said.

“Why not? I’ve helped you. Why won’t you help me?”

“It doesn’t work like that.”

“Why not? It’s what you do. You’ve said so. What difference does one more make?”

“You want me to beat somebody up for you?”

“That’s it.”

“I can’t beat someone up just because you ask me to.”

“Why not? Whatever these men on your list did, this man did something worse.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t know anything about it.”

“This man broke my heart,” Judy said.

The words sounded so small, so delicate. They seemed so old — fashioned, so fragile and out of place in the world Mick was inhabiting, like a china cup in the hands of meths drinkers.

“I thought I was over him but I was wrong. I thought I didn’t care any more but now I realize I still do. And I want revenge.”

“You don’t beat somebody up just because they broke your heart,” Mick said.

“I would if I could.”

“Then maybe you should go ahead and do it. Maybe it’s your job not mine.”

She wasn’t listening.

“What do I need to give you to make you help me?” she asked. “Money? Sex? Japanese lunches? What’s your motivation here, Mick?”

He wanted to say it was all to do with love. He wanted to say he was punishing these six men because they had hurt somebody he loved. Rape was a special, virulent form of hurt, but it was a matter of degree not of quality. But he didn’t say that because he knew it would sound fake. He wasn’t sure that he still loved Gabby and if he didn’t, then when had he stopped? Come to that, when had he even started? If Gabby had told him that a man in London, maybe even six men, had broken her heart what would he have done to them?

“What I really want,” he said, “is to stop beating people up altogether.”

“But you’re having trouble stopping, is that it? Like giving up cigarettes?”

“Look, Judy, in other circumstances, a month ago, six months ago, maybe I’d have been the man you’re looking for. But right now I’m not.”

“His name’s Stuart London,” she said.

“Why do I need to know that?”

“Stuart London. It’s an easy name to remember.”

“I don’t want to know his name.”

“Maybe you’ll come across him.”

“No.”

“Maybe you’ll change your mind. Maybe you’ll find a reason to do what I ask.”

He didn’t argue. He felt there was no need. He felt safe in the knowledge that London was too big a city to allow chance meetings with Judy Tanaka’s old lovers.

“London may bring you the very thing you need,” Judy said.

“Hey, don’t go all inscrutable on me.”

She smiled and she went up to him and kissed him.

“You’d better go,” he said.

She kissed him again, more persuasively this time, and he didn’t need so very much convincing.

“Or I could stay,” she said.

“Yes, you could,” he admitted.

He felt feeble and powerless, and just as he had been too weak to stop himself beating up Dr Graham Pryce, he was too weak to stop himself making love to Judy Tanaka. As he was taking the clothes off her, he said, “You realize none of this is going to make any difference?” And she said, “If you say so,” and she smiled, and she seemed to him more inscrutable than ever.

Some men expected strippers to be complete slags, to be anybody’s and everybody’s, to be usable and disposable. However, in Cabby’s experience strippers were no different from any other group of women. Some of them were slappers, but some of them were professional virgins. Some were happily married, some were practising long-term celibacy. Some were desperately looking for love, others were looking for instant gratification.

Gabby would always have said that she occupied the middle ground, but she’d admit that faithfulness didn’t come easily to her. If a man liked her, flattered her, was nice to her, bought her dinner and a few drinks and then asked nicely for sex, well, how could she say no?

She’d wanted to be faithful to Mick, she really had. In fact she’d wanted to be faithful to all her men, but there’d always been a reason why she’d failed in the end; sometimes it was boredom, sometimes it was too much drink, sometimes it was because a better prospect had come along, and that was partly the case here. A good-looking man with money, a flash car and some high-quality drugs had come along and he’d treated her decently and it had all just sort of happened. What was a girl to do?

His name was Ross McLennan and Gabby first met him at the agency that handled her bookings. Most of her dealings were with a chubby, motherly former stripper called Pat.

McLennan was there in the office when Gabby called in one day to pick up some money and Pat introduced him as though he was an old friend, maybe even part of the business, maybe a sleeping partner. There was talk of him wanting to hire a few girls for a party he was throwing, but he never mentioned hiring Gabby.

She knew immediately that he wasn’t a good man. He looked difficult and dangerous, and though he smiled at her a lot, she knew it wasn’t a smile she could trust. He was older than Mick and usually that wouldn’t have been attractive to her, but he wore his age lightly, he dressed young, he looked like a somebody and she fancied him like mad.

Not that it seemed to matter at the time. She thought she’d probably never see him again. Then one night he was in the audience at a club in Rotherham where she was stripping. He watched her do the act. He looked out of place in the smoke and crush of the club and he didn’t appear to be enjoying himself very much and he certainly didn’t bother to applaud when she’d finished. Neither did he try to go backstage or try to speak to her as she was leaving. Mick was there and maybe his presence had scared him off, although he didn’t look like a man who was scared of much.