The First Cut Page 24

  They parted once they were back in the living room and Nicky pushed her way through a crowd to the front door. She turned to look back at the throng around her and then, between the backs of two people by the kitchen, she saw Bea staring at her. She watched, horrified, as Bea traced a finger slowly across her throat.

  Nicky stuck two fingers up at her in return and slammed the door behind her as she left.

  45

  Liz had grown up with Greg. She’d seen him soil his pants as a toddler, lie on the floor screaming in a tantrum, pout through the awkward teen phase. She knew him very well, but she had never seen him panic like he was panicking now. ‘Calm down for Chrissake, Greg!’ She was in the street with him as he paced up and down the pavement, unable to coax him inside. Liz liked to think she was unfettered by convention; she was someone who had on occasion revelled in making a scene, making sure she was noticed. The biggest sin for Liz was to be a shrinking violet, something she had made sure she was never called. It was a badge of pride to be called a mad cow, an angry woman, but she glanced up at the neighbours’ windows, wondering if they were being watched. She was not used to her brother making a scene. And Greg had really lost it.

  ‘Nicky was at Hayersleigh! She’s been there! Why would she have gone there?’

  ‘She was taken there by Adam Thornton, I’m sure of it. I think that guy she drove off with was him. He’s the right age.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’

  ‘Calm down!’

  ‘I’ve got to find her right now—’

  ‘There are a million people in Notting Hill now. No phones will be working. The mood she’s in, she won’t answer you anyway. Don’t go on a wild chase round the carnival. It’s pointless.’

  ‘Liz, I don’t understand!’ He was rubbing his sore chin back and forth as he paced. ‘Some weirdo pretending to be a policeman came to the door and started asking questions about Francesca. Nicky arrived and claimed this bloke had been following her and then he decked me! He was claiming somebody phoned a hit man from my flat years ago . . .’

  ‘From your old flat?’ Liz narrowed her eyes, assessing her brother. ‘A hit man?’

  Liz saw Greg glance up and down the street before he came close and whispered in her ear. ‘Most people never knew I was even with Francesca! Most of our time was spent abroad, what with my work and Francesca living in California. How could he know about her?’ He started pacing again, dragging at his hair.

  ‘Phone the police.’ Liz crossed her arms and waited. ‘Phone them and explain.’

  Greg hissed in her ear. ‘You know I can’t! They’ll drag Grace’s death up again, try to link the two things – and then Hayersleigh! My marriage to Nicky won’t survive that.’ Liz stared at her brother. ‘Stop looking at me like that! Nicky took a photo of this bloke with her phone. He didn’t like that at all. We’ve got to find Nicky and get that photo.’

  ‘OK. I will go and look for Nicky; you stay here and keep phoning. She’ll come back soon, probably. Lock the door and wait. Take a Valium or something.’

  She turned to head off. ‘Liz,’ he called out to her. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

  She scowled. ‘I’ve got a pretty good idea.’

  Troy was getting edgy. He’d lost her, and every hour Nicky was alive with his picture in her phone meant danger to him. He would wait for dark and take her at the house. He was wondering which end of the street to cover when the phone rang. A minute later he was turning the car round and heading for Notting Hill. He’d just been told where she was. His client was keen. He thought about the photo she’d taken of him and the intensity of his thoughts and feelings cranked up. There would be no more mistakes. Nicky Ayers-cum-Peterson was out of time.

  46

  As Nicky pressed the buzzer to open the gates and come out of the mews into the swaying crowd streaming down the road to the carnival, she saw crash man coming towards her. In that split second Nicky wondered about the marvel that is the human brain, its capacity to scan thousands of faces and find each one uniquely individual. To be able to instantly recognize a face you’ve seen before. At that moment, as Troy bore down on her and his eyes locked on hers there was no mistaking their intent. He was coming to kill her.

  This time Nicky didn’t hesitate. She raced for the junction, realizing that after the next road down the crowd would be too big for her to really be able to run any more. At the first crossroads she risked a glimpse behind her. He was fifty metres away, but she could tell by the way he moved his arms that he was fit, with a long stride. He was a match for her and outrunning him in empty streets would be hard to do. The side streets were quieter but he was too close to risk going that way. One option was crossed off. She ploughed into the thickening crowd.

  A great thunderclap erupted above them and people shrieked. The weather wouldn’t hold; an English summer was finally upon them. Fat raindrops started bouncing off the awnings over the shops. Nicky started pushing aggressively against shoulders and backs, the pulsing sounds of samba wafting over the air.

  She was slim and agile and made good progress but she left a trail of complaints and tuts behind her. Her pursuer was tall and easy to see from twenty heads behind her. His eyes were always on her. People were beginning to put up umbrellas and hold them high above their heads as they swayed in time to the music. Far from running for cover, it was as if the long hot summer made people desperate for a change to the familiar, for the ability to groan and complain.

  Nicky glanced over her shoulder but he was still there, elbowing his way through. She pushed on, panic taking hold. She had no plan, no way of ending this absurd situation. She saw a grey, sweaty man with a whistle in his mouth and a look of a three-day party hanging on him. She shoved past and flicked his fedora off the back of his head into her hands, then ducked low behind a large striped umbrella.

  Troy didn’t take his eyes off the target ahead. He was calm, almost enjoying himself. He wished it wasn’t raining, but rain probably gave him an advantage. People would look around less as they tried to keep themselves dry. He could see the panic in her movements as she flailed through the crush ahead. He just needed to take his time; there was no hurry. He felt the knife in his jacket pocket. In a seething mass like this it would be easy. That hat she’d just picked up wasn’t fooling anyone.

  Nicky emptied her mind of everything bar getting away from crash man. Crowds of people were not her friend today. In a mass of thousands, no one can hear you scream. There were police on every corner and lining the parade route – there were probably thousands of police here today – but they were fixed on public order and keeping the peace, not trying to half listen as she stuttered out her convoluted story. She pushed on.

  The crowd was crushing tighter and tighter, as they were funnelled by crash barriers through a narrow section to allow space for a local radio station’s sound system. She was thirty metres from a junction. Two large black umbrellas were being waved in front of her. She saw a tall woman with blonde hair under one of them and she shoved towards her. A rasta wrapped in a Jamaican flag was on the other side of her. She got under his umbrella and grabbed the flag. The Rasta whipped round, surprised. ‘Sista, what you—’

  She shoved a ten-pound note from her pocket into his hand. He glanced at the money and shrugged, turning away. She popped the fedora on the blonde’s head and then held the flag up behind her and took two long strides for the corner.

  Troy saw two umbrellas tilt towards each other in time to the music and saw a flash of blonde hair beneath a black hat. The umbrellas parted and he stared at the black hat through the rain. It took him a few seconds to register that the woman wearing it wasn’t Nicky. He started tracking the crowd, fast. He reached the corner, where the swarm of people was wider and looser. He let out a low curse under his breath. He’d lost her.

  Nicky kept the flag extended above her and walked quickly away from the corner as the crowd began to thin. She risked a glance behind her as she walked. She couldn’t
see him. She broke into a run.

  Troy stood on the corner and scanned the masses. Crowds have their own rhythm, he decided. Here the flow was relaxed even in the rain; there was a slowing down, a discarding of the determined pace of the city. She was scared so her rhythm wouldn’t fit. He would see her. He glanced down Blenheim Crescent and saw a black and green flag pulling away at speed. He’d got her.

  Nicky reached the corner of Blenheim Crescent and Kensington Park Road to find a group of teenagers arguing in a doorway with a huge bouncer wearing sunglasses. From the upper floors of the four-storey building party goers hung out of windows, a thumping bass clashing with the sound system set up in the street. A crowd on the roof terrace was dancing and shouting at a party on the roof of the building opposite. She elbowed through the people surrounding the bouncer and tried to get inside.

  A massive hand landed on her shoulder. ‘Tickets only.’ She looked back down the street and swore. Crash man was bearing down on her again. He can’t get in, she thought. He’s too old, the wrong sex and the wrong colour. He was thirty metres away and gaining.

  She threw the flag over the bouncer’s face and ducked under his raised arm. She heard a shout as she dived for the gloom within. She hit the stairs and headed for the roof.

  Troy saw her go in and pulled up at the door. The bouncer was acting like Mike Tyson, growling as the crowd around him surged forwards and back in an unruly wave. Troy stepped up to him and held out his fake police ID badge. ‘What the fuck you trying to do to me, man . . .’

  ‘I’m only interested in that woman. There’ll be no trouble for anyone else – if you let me in.’

  Nicky reached the roof, stepping over metres of cable gaffer-taped to the floor. She ran to the end of the roof terrace where a wall of sea-grass matting acted as a fence between this building and the next one along. She hoiked herself over by pulling at an aerial fixed to the chimney. She ran across the roof to the next door along but it didn’t open. She vaulted a small fence and crossed a roof garden where tomatoes grew in a row of pots and a small shed had been erected to store this urban gardener’s tools. Could she hide here? No. She yanked at the door to the stairs: locked.

  Panic began to build again. She was practically at the end of the terrace – there was only one more doorway left to try. She threw aside a kid’s tricycle and pulled at the door, which thankfully opened, and she barrelled down the steps.

  Nicky only just had time to register that she was actually running through someone’s house when she hit the first floor and saw through an open door into a room where ten people were sitting eating lunch at a long table. They sat staring at her, some with forks to their mouths, while she stood frozen on their landing.

  Then she heard the bang of the door upstairs and the temporary spell was broken.

  ‘Emile!’ a woman shouted as Nicky flew down to the ground floor. Her hands reached the heavy brass lock and yanked it back. She heard shouts and swearing in French and felt bad at leading crash man into this house, but she was a desperate woman. She slammed the door behind her and ploughed on into the mass on the street.

  Her desperation increased. He wasn’t easy to shake off, and the thought tearing away at her was that she would never be rid of him. She would be for ever on the back foot, for ever living in fear of what was coming around that corner.

  She barged east again, back to Portobello Road. It had stopped raining now and a weak sun pierced the clouds for a moment before fading away. She moved north for a couple of blocks and passed under the raised Westway motorway that snaked away to Oxford, its giant concrete girders blocking the sun.

  Troy headed under the Westway flyover, the sound of music bouncing off the concrete undercarriage with renewed force. He was sick of running and he was getting tired of the crowds and the noise and the mayhem. He threw a twenty-pound note at a stall holder and grabbed a tasselled scarf that would have looked at home on a youth throwing rocks in Gaza. He tied it round his head. It was time to end this.

  Nicky followed the curve of the overhead motorway. The crowds were so thick here she could hardly move through them. She could see the tops of the carnival floats as they moved in procession down Ladbroke Grove, the brightly coloured tips of the dancers’ costumes bobbing like buoys at sea. She drew up next to a building covered in scaffolding and looked around, but couldn’t see crash man. She glanced up and saw the legs of a reveller hanging over the planking of the scaffolding. She jabbed at his dusty Doc Marten boots and he looked down at her. She held out her hands, pleading for him to lift her up, and he leaned down and grabbed her hands. She reached out with her leg for a foothold on the hectoring sign warning of a security firm’s instant response if the scaffolding was climbed and as she swung round to put her other knee on the boards to get up, she felt her phone slide from her pocket into the crowd below.

  Troy saw Nicky being pulled up on the scaffolding and – it couldn’t be – her phone actually fell out of her pocket to the ground. He barged through the crowd and grabbed it.

  Nicky lay flat on the planking one storey up and couldn’t move or cry out for someone below to hand her phone back, because at that moment she saw crash man right below her, looking around. Had he seen her? She cursed, long, hard and silently, for her lost phone. She saw crash man walk away from the scaffolding towards the motorway as she climbed an orange steel ladder to the second floor. The sheeting covering the scaffolding was wet and sprayed water on her as it flapped in the gusty wind. Could it be that he hadn’t seen her? She tried to force open the windows on the second floor. Nothing budged. She couldn’t throw anything through them, either; they were double-glazed against the roar of traffic from the Westway.

  Troy stood by the girders holding up the motorway and studied the scaffolding. He could see a dark shape on the second storey. Game over. He’d shoot her. A crowd and noise like this was perfect – if unconventional – cover. Troy began a thorough and methodical check of the buildings around him for CCTV cameras and faces at windows. The thousands of people were focused on the parade, not on what the bloke in the scarf was doing. The angle was perfect. He put his gun with its silencer inside a discarded plastic bag. He was free to take the shot.

  Nicky jumped as someone banged on the window behind her. An old lady in a dressing gown was making shooing gestures to her from the other side of the glass. Nicky knocked on the window, pleading with her to open the window, her arms in a praying position. The woman came to within two inches of Nicky’s face and banged on the glass. ‘Help me!’ Nicky sobbed. The bullet smacked through the window three inches above Nicky’s head and ricocheted off the ceiling of the woman’s bedroom. They both stared mutely at the hole, at the cracks in the glazing running crazily across the pane. It was the woman’s screams that shocked Nicky into action. She crouched low and tried to scurry to the other end of the scaffolding as another bullet pinged noisily off metal. Nicky raced up the ladder to the third storey and lay flat on the planking. She was out of room. There was nowhere to go and crash man was below, trying to pick her off.

  She watched the cars speed past on the Westway: normal people cocooned in the bubble of normal lives. How far removed she felt from them, how insuperable the chasm. She wanted to scream with the frustration of her predicament. How badly she wanted to cling onto life. She couldn’t see him below now; she didn’t know where he was. She crouched and began to pull at the planking. Now that there was a hole in the old lady’s window maybe she could smash her way through it. She hoped the woman’s heart was strong enough to take the shock. She pulled up a board. It was longer than she was expecting and more unwieldy to move. It was too long to swing and she dropped it, its end sticking out at right angles to the scaffolding. Then, worried in case it fell on people below her, she jammed the end of the board under the fixed piece of planking that she stood on. She looked up. Suddenly the concrete wall of the Westway didn’t look so far away from the end of the board.

  Grace came to her then. What she had suffered; th
e questions that were never answered; the fact that the architect of all this would get away with it. Justice would not be served. She backed up against the wall. And in that split second Nicky ran. She sprinted away from the building with all the explosive speed her muscles were capable of, out along the plank into nothingness.

  Troy was taken aback. He jerked his head a fraction too much and shot too high, firing over Nicky’s left shoulder into air.

  Nicky long-jumped off the end of the board and cartwheeled her arms to gain the maximum distance towards the grey cement of the motorway wall. She was so scared of not reaching it at all that she misjudged and her speed took her clean over the top of the motorway barrier onto the hard shoulder, where she landed with a sickening thud and rolled into the slow lane.

  Gemma Woodhead had one hand on the steering wheel and was picking at her nose ring with the other as she drove along the Westway. It was sore and she wondered if it was becoming infected. She should have made sure that Jezza had disinfected the needle properly. But then that was quite like Jezza, a bit slapdash, a touch too casual. It’s what she’d liked about him at the beginning. That seemed like a long time ago now. She was meeting him at Camden Market, T-shirts for sale in their plastic wrappers in the back of the car as requested. Make that demanded. The turquoise ones were better than the multicoloured ones. She’d tell him that when they went for ale later, not that he’d listen; he never listened to her, or took her advice, for that matter. She’d tell him a lot of things over the eight pints they’d sink. She was still mad about the timing, that their T-shirts were finally printed and packaged at the end of August. The hottest summer for years and they hadn’t been ready to capitalize on it.