Dirty Old Town - Crime Fiction (Final Part)

---WARNING - ADULT CONTENT---

Part Four - Dead Man Rising

Terry paced the cobbles outside the school as the young mums eyed him suspiciously. Children streamed out of the school gates, a tide of blue-green uniformed madness.

“Why are you always answering questions in sciences Neets? Is it cause you fancy Dr. Banbury?” The girl punched her friend in the arm. “Shut up. I’m just interested in that stuff.” She slowed her pace as she neared the gate. Steel sky clashed with rusty iron railings as Terry caught her eye. Her stomach dropped to her knees.
“What does this creep want?” Her friend looked Terry up and down.

“Shut up you little toe rag.” Terry leaned in displaying his badge and grabbed her by the arm. “Your mother has been arrested again Antia, so you’re coming with me. Unless you’d rather I give social services a call?”

Her friend pursed her lips and turned away. “Whatever, I’ll see you tomorrow Neets. Bye officer wierdo.” She giggled as she ran through the gates, over sun-starved cobbles, down the piss stained lanes of Hackney borough. Anita watched her running, imagining Carlie arriving home to a plate of fish fingers and EastEnders on the TV.

“I want you to think about something important Anita.” Terry tugged her along to the Panda parked up by the traffic lights. “You need to seriously consider what you want to be when you’re older. Where do you want to go in life? D’you want to end up stuck in Hackney forever like your mum?”

He walked out into traffic. Badge held high like a moral clapper board, freezing the scene. He opened the car door and pushed her down into the back seat.
“I’m serious.” He turned to look at her, greasy mustache twitching. “You like to sing, right? Well, they can make that happen. Forget X-Factor, you can get straight into theatre school. Get an agent. You can sing on TV, whatever you want.”
Cigarette butts littered the car floor. An ashtray hung by a single hinge, dangling on a precipice after vomiting a belly full onto the carpet. She fidgeted, hands in pockets, playing nervously with what she’d thieved earlier. “But I like X-Factor.” She raised her head from the floor slowly, to meet his gaze.

“I could just tell.”

Pig eyes narrowed.

“I could tell a real police officer. Tell my mum. Tell my teacher.”

“And where the fuck do you think that would get you, hmm? Who would believe it?” He grabbed her wrist and twisted it. Pain jolted lightening along her cuts, burning intensity through paths she had chosen. She grinned at him to show what she thought of his pain.

“Right you little bitch, just like your mother, crazy. We are going to have to show you something to bring my point home. You do not mess with these people!”

He slammed the car into gear, jolting her arm as he thrust her back into the seat. “Put your seatbelt on. You’re a minor.”

The city raced past, blue neon streaks against a backdrop of pallid grey stone. Faces flashed by, caricatures in an emotional landscape.

An old woman. A lifetime of disappointment written in the lines of her face, there then gone.

A woman clutching a toddler by one hand shopping bag in the other. Drooping under the weight of responsibilities, there then gone.

Jackal-eyed youths on bikes, smoke from their cigarettes coalescing around them like musk. There then gone.

A ratty old man bent on a stick. Shouting at an equally ratty terrier yapping at a cyclist. There then gone.

Posters flashed by. Hammersmith Apollo, Beaconsfield warehouse rave, Soho escort services.

The car slowed with the traffic. Terry hit the siren, weaving through the jam, swearing under his breath. He lit a cigarette and cranked the window down. A blocked drain, wet-dog, mildew smell mixed with his Marlborough as he turned the panda down a small steep back street. The lapping wavelets of the Thames tickled Anita’s peripheral as she looked away from the window. The road ran right down to river level. Where the fuck was he taking her.

The tunnel stank of shit, damp and the ripe musk of rats, hundreds of rats going about their daily business. Vaulted arches stretched into the distance, slick with black mold from the rivers’ embrace. Anita shivered and squinted, something was swinging from a rope in a patch of light up ahead.

“Who is the person in Hackney with the most power do you think Anita?” Terry paused looking down at her and squeezing her hand, “Well? Who has the most street cred, who runs things?”

She could feel the river water permeating her flimsy school shoes as they got closer to the swinging object. It was a long brown burlap sack, suspended by a rope from the ceiling.

“Well? I’m not just speaking to hear my voice echo.” She jumped at his voice as they approached the object and stopped. “Who… is… the… most… powerful person on the streets?”

Anita stared at the sack again. “The drug dealers run the streets.” She stammered.

Terry’s eyebrows raised as he waved his hands as if wafting the scent of a nice Sunday roast. “Warm. Keep going, you’re nearly there. Who is the top boy, Anita?”

“Carlos.” She watched him as he bobbed his head and walked forward grasping the edge of the sack.

“Bingo! Red hot. Ten out of ten.” He pulled the sack up revealing a face.

Purple swollen plum flesh with a chessboard pattern of dark angry bruises. White dried liquid ringed the mouth. Terry pulled the sack away completely, revealing the corpse in its nakedness. Pain was written on the body in depraved letters, each mark telling a story. Thousands of dull white cuts crisscrossed the corpse’s torso, black char burn marks on the chest and down the legs. The ribs cascaded, strangely sunken, broken bones protruding in places. Starvation vied with degradation as the protagonist in this fleshy fiction.

Anita turned away and puked. Terry wrinkled his nose and punched the corpse in the ribs breaking a new one before turning round to stare at her. “You had to argue. You had to threaten things that you’re never going to say anyway. I didn’t want to bring you here. This is your fault.”

His piggy eyes narrowed, in an odd pleading and for a moment Anita thought he was about to cry. She felt her stomach heave again as she noticed the results of his violence. A jagged white bone breached the sea of the flesh, torn and flapping like sails in a dead wind.

Terry paced. His voice rising hysterically piercing her with its shrill madness. “See that white stuff around the mouth. That’s not saliva. Nothing to do with me but they like to do things to dead people. They call it stealing their power.”

His pacing became more manic. River water kicked up from the puddles as he danced in circles around the corpse.

“That was me.” He poked at a deep cut in the abdomen.

“That was me.” He jabbed his fingers at numerous burn marks on the legs.

“That was me.” He pulled the lips back to show a mouth with only a smattering of teeth left.

“He was choking on his own teeth Anita, we nearly had to give him the Heimlich maneuver.” His manic smile split his face, there then gone in a moment.

“But this.” His fingers traced the circle of white around the mouth. “I had nothing to do with.”

Terry’s voice had slowed, flattened out like white noise. He stared at her. “They did that. So, you see, when I say they can do anything, I mean it. They are capable of anything. Do not mess with them, Anita. If you say anything, this is where you’ll end up. In the king’s tunnels. I do not want to see that happen.”

She wiped the residual specks of vomit from her mouth with one hand while her other fumbled with something in her pocket.

The Panda car pulled up outside the Park Row Georgian townhouse. Black gloss painted railings jutted against the backdrop of golden light from the windows. Semi-translucent curtains rippled, causing winking motes of reflected glitter on the black gloss.

“Right, you know how to behave.” Terry straightened her hair. “They will give you clothes when you get in there, for fuck sake don’t give anyone any lip. Oh yeah, ask them for a toothbrush and toothpaste. You smell of vomit.”

“I know what I need to do.” The sickness rose in her again but she swallowed it down.

The door opened, light spilling out with the sound of music.

The end.