Gary hovered from one foot to the other until I'd double-zipped the bag and clipped it down. “So what's happening to the old place then?” I asked, tucking my scarf round the neck of my leather jacket. “They going to pull it down and build yet more luxury flats that nobody wants?”
“Nah, this new bloke, he's dead switched on,” Gary said, relieved enough to be chatty. “He's going to turn this old dump into a nightclub. I've seen the plans. It's going to be absolutely excellent. Couple of bars, split-level dance floors, bit of food. The business. You'll have to come. Opening night. I'll get you in free, no trouble.”
I raised an eyebrow and he looked hurt at my scepticism. “I will,” he repeated. “I'm going to run the bars for him. It's all been agreed.”
I didn't say anything as I swung my leg over the bike and kicked it into life. Gary sometimes lets his enthusiasm run away with him. He looks too wide-eyed to ever be put in charge of anything more than asking the next person in line if they want fries with that.
I gave him a cheery wave as I circled out of the car park, ignoring his shouted assurance that he'd give me a call when they were about to re-launch.
It's a good job I wasn't holding my breath.
***
The New Adelphi Club opened about six months afterwards, just after Christmas. In record time if the murmurs in the building trade are to be believed. It seemed Gary had been right about the new boss being a mover and shaker.
At night the neon on the outside of the building lights up low cloud with an eerie violet glow and is visible from halfway across Morecambe Bay. It's become quite a local landmark.
I learned from the local paper that Gary did, indeed, become the bar manager for the new enterprise, but he never called to offer me those free tickets. I must admit I hadn't really expected him to.
It came as quite a surprise to myself, then, that I ended up at the place only a month or so after it opened.
That was my friend, Clare's fault, not mine. She'd dropped it on me over the phone a few days before. “There's this karaoke competition on at that new club in Morecambe this Saturday,” she'd said, out of the blue. “I fancied giving it a whirl, but Jacob won't go, so will you come along and lend some moral support?”
I hesitated. Clare's a mate. I've known her and her feller, Jacob, ever since I first moved to Lancaster, but I thought such a request was stretching a friendship too far. “I didn't know you were into that sort of thing,” I said cautiously, playing for time.
She laughed. “Well, Jacob says I haven't much of a voice. He says my strangled mewlings make the nocturnal warbling of our elderly tomcat sound like Pavarotti, but I reckon he's just too much of an old fogey to want to go to a nightclub.”
I vaguely heard rude mutterings by someone at the same end of the line as Clare, and she laughed again. Jacob must be in his early fifties, his dark wavy hair streaked through with grey, but he's one of those men who oozes sexual attraction. Always laughing behind eyes the colour of expensive plain chocolate, and just as tempting. If he could reproduce that kind of chemistry in a lab he'd be a millionaire.
Clare is twenty-five years his junior, more my own age. Tall, slender, she has endless legs and a metabolism that means she can binge peanut butter straight out of the jar without putting on an ounce. I recognised years ago that food was not going to be one of my indulgences in life if I wanted to stay under a size twelve.
I envied Clare the ability not to gain weight more than I envied her her looks, which were stunning. She had long straight hair to go with the legs, golden blonde without bottled assistance, and a sense of style I guess you just have to be born with.
She also rode a ten-year-old Ducati 851 Strada motorcycle like a demon and had the distinction of once having outrun a bike copper through the local Scarthwaite bends at well over a hundred. He'd pulled her over out of curiosity and his chin had bounced off his toecaps when she'd taken off her helmet. Where anyone else would have had their licence taken away for three months, she didn't even get a producer.
“So, Charlie, what do you say?” Clare prompted now. “I don't really want to go by myself,” she admitted.
I heard Jacob in the background again, loudly this time. “You're not going alone until they've caught that bloody rapist!”
“Yeah, that too,” Clare said. “You've heard about that, I suppose?”
I agreed that I had. It was a vicious attack that had only happened a few weeks previously. I'm not the morbid type, but I took a professional interest in the crime. Enough to keep tabs on the progress – or lack of it – in the news reports.
When you make your living teaching people, mainly women, how to avoid potentially ending up in the same situation, you tend to notice anything that affects business. When new pupils turn up at my classes with a sudden burning desire to learn how to reduce a large, hairy would-be mugger to a jellied heap on the pavement, you tend to ask what sparked off their interest. You don't come out of it looking too good if you haven't heard all about the latest stabbing, rape, or murder. Particularly if it took place on your own doorstep.
In this case, the victim was just turned eighteen, walking home along a gloomy footpath near the River Lune late one Thursday night and not smart enough to take a taxi. When she'd regained consciousness two days later she was only able to give a hazy description of her attacker.
He'd raped her with a knife held at her throat, then beat her savagely around the head. The police announced piously that it was a miracle she wasn't dead. As it was, the doctors predicted that she was going to need months of physio, speech therapy, and counselling. The surgeons had managed, after a fashion, to save her right eye.
Lancaster may have its share of violence, but it's still not the kind of town where things like that happen on a regular basis. The local paper was having a field day with tabloid-style headlines it never normally got to air. Public figures expressed their outrage. Worried citizens wrote to their MP.
Prominent policemen promised early results. It was a brutal and senseless attack, their spokesman said. The culprit must have been covered in his victim's blood. He must have been spotted arriving or leaving along the busy main road which shadows the river. He must have got home in a dishevelled and excited state. He would, they prophesied, soon be under lock and key.
As it was, several weeks had now gone past. Nothing happened. Appeals were made on the television and would-be witnesses obligingly came forward by the dozen. Unfortunately, none of them had anything of real value to tell. It appeared that the only witness of any sort was a derelict wino called Jimmy.
Jimmy thought he might have seen a car, and he even thought it might have been on that evening, but through the fog of his perpetual alcoholic stupor, he couldn't quite recall the registration number. Or the model. Or the colour.
There was an air of fear in the city that you could almost reach out and touch. I'd noticed it in my students, seen it on the street. Even over the distortion of the telephone system I could hear it now in Clare's voice – and in Jacob's, too.
I sighed.
“OK,” I said. “I'll come with you. Just don't expect me to sing!”
Which was how, a few days later, I came to be waiting for Clare in the car park of the New Adelphi Club, twiddling my thumbs and rapidly having second thoughts about the whole exercise.
It was partly because the noise level belting out of the place was so high I feared permanent hearing damage if I ventured any closer. The bass could be physically felt across the other side of the tarmac. I could well imagine that at closer proximity the high frequency would qualify as an offensive weapon.