Free Nineteen Seventy-Seven: The Red Riding Quartet, Book Two by David Peace

home:
Zero –
Louise and Bobby in one hospital, me in another, the wrong one .
Calling Millgarth:
Less than zero –
Craven picking up, no sign of Noble or Rudkin, all them slips full of tips and no-one to work through them. Craven hanging up, seeing him limping back to Vice, thinking they must have invented it just for him and that fucking sneer .
Nine and it doesn’t look like Mr Ronald Prendergast will be saying much, just drooling and looking like warmed-over-death-in-waiting, me praying and praying that he hangs on so it won’t turn into a double-murder and knowing now, knowing now how much I want this:
Prostitute Murder Squad .
And knowing now, knowing now why:
Janice .
Two hours later all my prayers pay off, answered:
‘Sergeant Fraser, would Sergeant Fraser please come to reception.’
Down the corridor, out of Intensive Care, back into Intensive Hell – Rudkin in Leeds, calling me home: ‘We found Barton.’
Foot down into town, the whole of Millgarth humming, buzzing, burning. The Midnight Briefing:
BRING HIM IN.
The radio spits into life: ‘Right, now,’ cackles Noble’s voice across the night: Thursday 2 June 1977.
Ellis is howling, ‘Thank fucking Christ for that.’
And we’re out the car and walking across Marigold Street, Chapeltown, Leeds.
Rudkin, Ellis, and me:
A shotgun, a sledgehammer, and an axe.
Up the top end of the terrace I can see Craven’s boys coming down the street, the rest of them round the back.
We’ve got the front door.
Ellis raises the sledgehammer.
Rudkin looks at his watch.
We wait.
4 a.m.
Big John gives Ellis the nod.
Tick-tock, no need to knock:
He heaves it up over his head and yells, ‘Rise and fucking shine you black bastard,’ and brings it crashing down into the green door and there’s splinters everywhere, and he pulls it out and does it again and then Rudkin sticks the boot in and in we go, me shitting it in case the fucking shotgun goes off, but half cracking up when we see one of Prentice’s lads with his fat arse stuck in the fucking kitchen window, neither in nor out and us with the jump up the stairs where Steve Barton, Mr Sleepyhead himself, is standing in his blackest birthday suit, rubbing his gollylocks and scratching his knackers and shitting them, all in the five seconds it takes him to clock me and my fucking axe as I hit the stairs screaming at the dumb cunt, Rudkin and Ellis and the two barrels of the shotgun right behind me, giving full fucking voice to the four hours we’ve been sat in that car, sat in that unmarked pitch of hell, no phone, no Janice, no nothing, sat waiting for the bloody word, and I wind Barton straight off so he doubles over and topples down the stairs straight into Rudkin and Ellis who help him on his way with a kick and a punch and then they’re back down there after him cos they don’t want Prentice or Craven to beat them to it, and I’d be right behind them but Barton’s cousin or his aunty or his mother or whatever part of his huge extended fucking tribe’s been sheltering him, they go and put their head out the door of one of the bedrooms and I give her a quick squeeze on the tit and grab a feel of her cunt and push her back inside the bedroom where a baby’s started crying and the woman’s too scared to go to it cos she’s too busy flunking about hiding, thinking she’s going to get raped, which is what I want her to think so she’ll stay in the room and leave us be, but I want her to shut that bloody baby up, to stop it sounding like Bobby and making me hate it and hate her and hate Bobby and hate Louise and hate everyone in this whole fucking world except Janice, but mainly because it’s making me hate me.
I slam the door.
Back down the stairs they’ve got Barton outside, naked in the road, lights going on up and down the street, doors opening and then there’s Noble, Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Noble standing there, bold as the fucking brass he is, standing in the middle of the street like he owns the place, hands on his hips like