The tramp shuddered. He shook his head, shoulders hunched. ‘No,’ he whimpered. He struck the clip frame against the path and shattered it.
‘Mr Norris?’
When he turned to face her, he was holding a sliver of the clip frame glass in his hand. The broken edges were so sharp, and his grip on it so tight, blood dribbled out between his dirty fingers.
‘Oh shit,’ said Toshiko, backing away abruptly.
The tramp lunged.
TWO
Fat radials hissed as the SUV came to a halt. Jack and Owen got out into the rain. Jack tried his mobile.
‘No signal,’ he said to Owen.
Jack looked around. ‘Tosh? James?’ he yelled. There was no answer.
‘Let’s try in there,’ said Owen, making off towards the nearby pub. It looked bright and inviting, the frosted glass oblongs of its windows warmed from within by yellow light.
Jack followed him. Owen had gone a few steps when he paused and lowered his head.
‘What?’
‘Bastard of a headache I’ve got, all of a sudden,’ Owen groaned, his hand raised to his temple.
‘I thought you were going to have a quiet one last night,’ Jack said sourly, pushing past Owen towards the door of the public bar.
‘It’s not that kind of headache,’ Owen complained, his thin mouth more of a downward curve than usual. ‘Buggering Christ, can’t you feel that?’
‘Your headache?’ replied Jack. ‘Funnily enough, no.’ He hesitated. ‘But I know what you mean. I can feel something.’
He opened the pub door and went inside. Owen followed. It was as cheerfully grotty as any of Cardiff’s arse-end public houses, marinated in a smell of fags and malt. An aimless clatter-ping rang from the pinball machine and ‘If You Don’t Know Me By Now’ issued from the jukebox.
‘So where is everyone?’ Owen asked.
The public bar was empty. So was the saloon. Empty chairs loitered around Formica-topped tables on which a few half-empty glasses and the occasional open packet of nuts waited. There was no sign of disarray, and no sign of any bar staff. The drawer of the public bar’s cash register was open.
‘Not a robbery,’ said Jack, going behind the bar and lifting each of the drawer’s spring clips in turn. ‘There’s a couple of hundred in here.’
‘This is very wrong,’ said Owen. He pointed. Two full pints of lager sat side by side on the counter’s plastic drip tray. The glasses were sheened with condensation. ‘These have just been pulled. No one walks away from a fresh pint in a pub like this.’
‘Not in welsh Wales they don’t,’ Jack agreed.
They went back outside. The buildings beyond the pub and the little late shop formed an ominous silhouette against the lights of Cardiff Bay over the river.
They both heard the cry. Distant, robbed out by the heavy rain, but distinct. Not a scream, but a cry of alarm.
They both broke into a run.
Toshiko sprang back to avoid the slashing glass. The tramp was mumbling and blinking.
‘Mr Norris,’ she warned. ‘Put that down. You’re hurting yourself, and-’
The tramp stabbed at her again, and forced her to retreat further down the riverside path. Toshiko looked around for options. The overgrown embankment and the high chain-link fence against which Huw had died was on her right. To her left, a glistening black edge of curb-stones showed where the river wall dropped way. She could hear the river, and smell it, but it was invisible below her. It sounded a long way down.
‘Mr Norris…’
‘You can’t have it!’ he cried. ‘It’s not your go! It’s my go!’
He came at her for the third time, moving with alarming speed for such a dishevelled, unhealthy soul. The makeshift blade glittered as he swung it, and the motion whipped out a fan of blood from his lacerated fingers.
This time, despite the pain in her head, Toshiko managed to do more than evade. She side-stepped, pirouetted on one foot, and planted a heavy side-kick into the tramp’s sternum.
He woofed and jerked backwards, but the multiple layers of clothing he was wearing insulated against the bite of the kick. He surged back at her with a strangled cry, and drove the tip of the glass blade at her throat.
Toshiko ducked it, turned, and grabbed the extending forearm with both of her leather-gloved hands as it came over her. Hauling on his arm, she slammed her shoulder up into his armpit, and threw him right over her onto his back.
He landed with winding force, and lay twitching, face up in the rain, his mouth moving slackly behind his beard.
She kicked the shard of broken glass away.
‘Right then,’ she said.
Something that felt as big and heavy as a speeding bus slammed into her from behind without any warning at all.
‘Down here!’ James yelled. Gwen made a scrambling descent of the embankment after him towards the murky riverside. Wet cow-grass and rhododendrons slapped at her face. They came out on a cinder path along the dirty flood wall. A little way along, the body of a young man lay twisted against the fence.
‘James!’ she cried.
‘Never mind him!’ he shouted back, still running. ‘Fighter Command!’
Fighter Command. Thank you so much, Captain bloody Analogy, she thought, struggling through the headache to form any kind of coherent thought at all. Fighter Command meant ‘Scramble and drop everything’. Spitfire pilots sprinting in their flying jackets and Mae Wests the moment the field telephone started to jangle, cups of tea and faithful dogs and card schools left behind. The urgent call to action.
‘Sodding well wait up!’ Gwen yelled, and then shut up.
Twenty yards ahead of them, two figures were struggling violently on the path. One was Toshiko. The other was a big man in jeans and a lumberjack shirt. He had Toshiko by the throat, and was shaking her to and fro as if he wanted to work her head off. Toshiko was flailing helplessly. Nearby, an old, filthy tramp was crawling around on the ground, mewling to himself pitifully. Gwen could hear the horrible barks of pain being forced out of Toshiko.
James flew past the tramp and threw himself at the big man. Gwen was right behind him.
‘Oi! Bloody leave her be!’ she yelled.
The big man in the lumberjack shirt obliged, tossing Toshiko aside. But only, it turned out, so he could jerk around to get James off his broad back. The big man was six six, his neck as thick as his shaved head. He smelled of a beer-sweat that was showing no mercy to industrial-strength applications of Lynx. He roared something, and rotated so wildly that James’s feet left the ground altogether. A beefy, jabbing elbow did the rest. James yelped and fell off him onto the path, clutching his face.
Grinning, the big man was about to place-kick James in the ribs when Gwen tackled him like a full-back.
He went down on his face, felled like a tree, and cracked his teeth on the ground, biting the tip off his tongue into the bargain. Gwen struggled onto his back, and bent one of his meaty arms up behind his shoulder-blades.
‘That’s enough!’ she ordered. ‘Stop fighting me, or I’ll break your bloody arm off, so help me!’
The man beneath her hollered something through broken teeth.
‘Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all before!’ Gwen snapped. She cinched the twisted limb up beyond ‘pinned’ to ‘painful’ to make him shut up.
Running footsteps approached from the opposite direction. Jack and Owen appeared out of the rain, racing down the riverside path. Jack’s greatcoat was flying out behind him like wings.
He skidded to a halt, looking at Toshiko and James writhing on the ground, and Gwen straddling a blood-spitting thug.
‘Going well, I see,’ he remarked.
‘As bloody usual,’ snapped Gwen. ‘Give me a hand with this one, for Christ’s sake!’