So I stayed put. The MR2 revved enough to attract the envy of the chip-van gang, then shot off leaving a couple of hundred miles’ worth of rubber on the road. Ten minutes later, the door opened again. This time, the hall light snapped off. Two men emerged. In the dimness, it was hard to see much, except that they both looked paunchy and middle-aged. They walked towards my van, near enough for me to see that they both wore Sellafield suits — those expensive Italian jobs that virtually glow in the dark. Surprisingly, they got into an elderly Ford Sierra that looked perfectly in keeping with the locale, and drove off.
I carried on with my vigil. There were no lights on that I could see, but I figured there might still be someone in the bathroom, or the bedroom at the rear of the house. The chip van packed up at midnight, and the gang wandered off to annoy someone else. By half past midnight, it had started to drizzle and the street was as quiet as it was ever going to get. There was still no sign of life at the house. I unlocked the strongbox in the floor of the van, and helped myself to some of the essential tools of the trade. Then I pulled on a pair of latex surgical gloves.
I got out of the van and walked towards the narrow alley that runs up the back of Oliver Tambo Close so the bin men have more scope to strew the neighbourhood with the contents of burst black rubbish sacks. As nonchalantly as possible, I made sure I wasn’t being watched before I nipped smartly down the alley. The house on the corner had a solid fence about seven feet high, with a heavy gate about halfway along. Luckily, one of the neighbours was trusting. A couple of doors down was a dustbin. I retrieved the bin and climbed on top of it.
The rear of the house was in darkness, so I scrambled over the fence and dropped into a tangle of Russian vine. Come the holocaust, that’s all there will be left. Cockroaches and Russian vine. I freed myself and stood on the edge of a patchy lawn staring up at the house. There was a burglar alarm bell box on the gable end of the house, but I suspected it was a dummy. Most of them round here are. Even if it was for real, I wasn’t too worried. It would take five minutes before anyone called the cops, and by the time they got here, I’d be home, tucked up in bed.
The back door had two locks, a Yale and a mortise. The patio doors looked more promising. You can often remove a patio door from its runners in a matter of minutes. All it takes is a crowbar in the right place. Only problem was, I was fresh out of crowbars. With a sigh, I started in with the lock picks. The mortise took me nearly twenty minutes, but at least the rain meant nobody with any sense was out walking curious dogs with highly developed senses of smell and powerful vocal cords. When the lock clicked back, I stretched my arms and flexed my tired fingers. The Yale was a piece of cake, even though I couldn’t slide it open with an old credit card and had to use a pick. Cautiously, I turned the handle and inched the door open.
Silence. Blackness. I slipped into the carpeted hall and left the door on the latch. Slowly, painstakingly, I inched forward down the hall, my right hand brushing the wall to warn me when I reached the living-room doorway. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I made out a patch of lesser blackness on the left. The stairs. As I drew level, I paused and held my breath. I couldn’t hear a thing. Feeling slightly more relaxed, I carried on.
The living-room door was open. I moved through the doorway tentatively, scared of tripping over furniture, and closed the door softly behind me. I switched on the big rubber torch I’d taken from the van’s glove box and slowly played it over the room.
It was like two separate rooms glued together in the middle. In the far end of the room, the walls were painted cream. There was a cream leather armchair, a pair of school desks with child-sized chairs, and a pair of bunk beds complete with satin sheets. Where there should have been a light fitting hanging from the ceiling there was a microphone. At the midpoint of the room, a camcorder was fixed on a tripod, flanked by a couple of photographer’s floodlights.
The other half of the room, where I was standing, was like the distribution area of a video production company. There was one of those big video-copying machines that do a dozen copies at a time, a desk set up for home video editing, boxes of Jiffy bags and shelf upon shelf of videos, one title to a shelf. Titles like, Detention! Bedtime Stories and You Show Me Yours…There were also sealed packets of photographs. Now I began to understand why kids were being handed free drugs that would smash their inhibitions to smithereens and make them see the funny side of being exploited to hell. I could only come up with one explanation of what was going on here, and the very thought of it was so sickening that part of me didn’t want to hang around checking the evidence. The only thing that forced me to do it was the thought of some smartass from the Vice Squad doing the ‘so if you didn’t look at these videos, how do you know they weren’t Bugs Bunny cartoons?’ routine on me.
I picked a title at random and slotted it into the player on the editing desk. I turned on the TV monitor. While I waited for the credits to come up, I slit open a packet of photographs. Twelve colour five-by-sevens slid out into my hand. I nearly lost my fish and chips. I recognized the blond man who’d left earlier in the Toyota, but the children in the shots were, thank God, strangers. I’d have been fairly revolted to see adults in some of those poses, but with children, my reaction went beyond disgust. At once, I understood those parents who take the law into their own hands when the drunk drivers who killed their kids walk free from court.
If the photographs were bad, the video was indescribably worse, all the more so because of the relentlessly suburban locations where these appalling acts were taking place. I could barely take five minutes of it. My instincts were to empty a can of petrol on the carpet and raze the place to the ground. Then common sense prevailed and reminded me it would be infinitely preferable if those bastards ended up behind bars rather than me. I switched off the video and ejected the tape. I picked up the photographs and stuffed them inside my jacket. I grabbed another couple of videos off the shelf. The night relief at Longsight police station were in for an interesting shift.
I stood up. I heard a sickening crunch. My eyes filled with red, shot through with yellow meteors. A starburst of pain spread from the back of my head. And everything went black.
Chapter 24
Mosquito. Unmistakable. High-pitched whine circling my head, in one ear and then in the other. Bluebottle. Low, stuttering buzz mixing in with the mozzy. You wouldn’t think two little insects could make enough noise to give you a splitting headache, I thought vaguely as I surfaced.
Then the pain hit. You know when you catch your finger in a door? Imagine doing that to your head, and you’ll start to get the picture. The sharp edge of the agony snapped my brain back into gear. In the tiny gaps between waves of pain and nausea, I started to remember where I’d been and what I was doing when something seriously brutal put my memory on pause.