Something to Declare by Cyclist

Chapter 48

This is not a pleasant episode. There is strong language and particular nastiness.

I immediately called Geoff and Jan in, and we managed to calm her down. I had never imagined Sally could fall apart like that, and I was profoundly shocked. Jan just held her tight until the sobbing eased. Geoff offered her a cuppa.

“No, vodka. I want to get pissed tonight”

Dave brought her a glass. She looked up at me from red eyes. “All those times I talked you out of drinking as a solution to your problems…..”

Her voice trailed off. She sat unnaturally still, tears rolling down her face. Suddenly she spasmed, and threw her glass at the wall.

“Fucking cunts!” she screamed, and this time she really collapsed into her sobbing. Jan and I wrapped her up; rocked her, kissing her cheek, as she almost silently screamed in truly awful distress. It was twenty minutes before she was stable enough to start talking, and I had a horrible flashback to Geoff on a Pembrokeshire clifftop. She had that same dead delivery, the same thousand yard stare past me.

“This is going to be a massive breach of confidence, but it doesn’t fucking matter any more. I have more than one client, that’s fucking obvious, and you know I have a thing for helping people like you, Steph…”

Her voice trailed off, but eventually she got the story out. Another client, another girl like me, but whereas I could just about pass this girl was eighteen stone and six foot four. After years of treatment, both psychiatric and medical, she had embarked on her real life test, despite being disowned by family and ‘friends’ and abused by her neighbours. As Sally told it, with immense courage she had pushed ahead with her need to become the person she knew she really was, despite the way life had screwed her body beyond any conventional idea of femininity.

Finally, she had been given her date for surgery, and that night she had gone out to celebrate. The wrong pub, the wrong clientele, a beating in a back alley, the nightmare made real.

“She rang me from a bridge over the M23……”

Four cars and an articulated lorry went over her body before the traffic stopped.

I couldn’t help agreeing with Sally. Fucking cunts. At that moment I could have killed. Geoff broke the mood.

“Sally, what family does she have available to arrange a proper send off?”

Sally looked at him, and my skin crawled at her expression, and her delivery when she said “I rang the family, and told them, and they said ‘Who?’”

There are moments when my problems evaporate in the light of those who really suffer. This time it was Jan who broke the mood.

“Then we need to sort it.”

I put Sally to bed in the box room. She was completely drained, and there was no way I was letting her go home. I pay my debts. The mood of the party quickly soured as the word got around, and some now almost sober people said their good nights and left their wishes for me at the door. I bedded the teens down on mats in the living room, with a promise of good behaviour that I actually trusted Kelly to keep, and seven of us, that is the family with Albert, Naomi and Dave, settled at the dining table. I was still trembling with anger. Albert spoke softly.

“There’s a strong possibility that we will have some clients near the pub. When Sally is a little stronger, I’ll get the details and we will see if we can’t get any CCTV footage. This is not something I want to let rest”

“I’ll have a word at the local station” said Naomi, “If we can find out where the body has been taken, I’ll let them know the score and we will go from there. I want blood”

It was agreed in an unsurprisingly short time that we would arrange a funeral between us, if there was no claim from what passed for her family. I felt that after all of my incredible good fortune I did indeed have debts to pay, and something like this could not be left below the public horizon. People sometimes need to have their faces rubbed in what they can achieve with simple bigotry.

‘Simple’. It’s never ‘simple’, not in the repercussions for its targets. They learn to live with a perpetual eye over their shoulder for the next slight, the coming attack. A walk down a street has to be a planned event, as my early bike rides as myself were, and despite my best efforts it seemed they had been spotted by every curtain-twitcher in the village.

We wound up about one thirty, leaving the party debris for later, with the beginnings of a plan. I wanted to be held that night, and Geoff obliged. Both of us slept badly, but each time I awoke he was there to soothe me back down. I realised once more how lost I would be without him.

Sally spent a long time in the shower that morning. I had lent her a nightie and a dressing gown, and as the seven of us sat down to a simple breakfast I explained what had been decided at the council of war. She had an idea which pub had been involved, and later I passed the word next door. Thankfully, the pub itself was a customer, as were the kebab, video and shoe shops opposite. Naomi was off like a rat up a drainpipe.

Poor, poor Sally. She had always seemed so utterly in control, but now I understood why she had felt the need to take a step back from my case. She was clearly one of those people who are not just a professional person, but who see that profession as a vocation. Simply, she cared. I had picked that up years before, and when our ways parted I had done my level best to keep her as a friend. I had been absolutely right in my faith in her, it seemed, and now it was my turn.

“I was on my way here when I got the call” she said, “and I ended up at the police station instead. They want me at the hospital today to see what I can do to identify the body”.

I shuddered. Four cars and a lorry.

Tom was good to me, asking no questions beyond how much time I wanted off and then catching himself with a “Sod that, take what you need”

I took the van to run Sally up to the hospital while Geoff and the family attacked the party debris, and took a seat in the Hospital Friends’ café with a cuppa, until she returned about half an hour later. She looked green, and was shaking. I got her a tea without asking.

“It was her. Recognised a couple of tattoos, and she had left her handbag on the bridge when she jumped. Please don’t ask any more.”

She was silent for a while.

“Steph, I know this s a lot to ask, and you already have a house full, but could I please stay a few days? I don’t think I can do this on my own. I need some good people around me, but I’ll understand if you can’t…”

I just hugged her. I think she already knew my answer.

We went back by way of the supermarket, just to inject a hint of normality into the day, and sorted some bits and pieces for a buffet lunch. Something delivered would do for the evening, but I wanted to try and busy her in the kitchen just now. We were just washing and chopping some salad bits when I heard Naomi pull into the drive, and she came in clutching a number of CDs.

“We have pictures. We have faces. We have working copies here, and the originals have been sealed and deposited with a statement from me and the various shop owners at the nick, and I have given that cunt of a landlord notice of termination of contract.”

I still get a shock when she speaks like that, but then remember that despite her Surrey Lady chic she was once a senior detective dealing with some particularly unpleasant crimes. I asked about the pub.

“He said that he didn’t care what happened to a bender, and I couldn’t have the footage. I pointed out that the cameras and discs are rented from us and that he would either let me take them or I would rearrange his face. Can’t be arsed with idiots today, we want those responsible while they still think they are clear and free and before any forensics disappear.

“Sally, you don’t have to watch this, but it would be useful if you can stand it. Want to see if anyone familiar is in this”

Naomi had already vetted the discs, and cut straight to the relevant footage. From each of the shops we got a slightly different angle, but they all showed the same jerky sequence.

A large girl in a far-too-small skirt almost running out of the pub and turning sharply into an alley. Four men in T-shirts following, spreading out. One entering the alley, coming back out and waving. All four then entering, and five minutes later coming back out, this time with one of them holding his ribs and another his eye.

There was something about one of them.

“Now, girls, this s the footage I had to fight for.”

A view from above and behind the glass racks. The back of a barman’s head, and a big, masculine woman in a cheap wig. Two customers behind her. One of them pushes her, and I recognise the T-shirt from the street. He grabs her collar, and pulls her down to snarl something into her ear. I say snarl, and snarl it is, all teeth and narrowed eyes. The barman turns away and I see two of the faces.

One of them is Alfie Smith.