Hag Fold. Paul Finch

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СКАЧАТЬ on the children through the planks in their back gate.

       By this time he’d found out who they were, or rather what they were.

       Orphans. Or kids who might as well be orphans. The Social Services owned that house, and all the children living there were ‘in care’. They’d either been neglected by their real parents, abused in some way or just kicked out. The first time he heard about this, Timmy felt a unique thrill of horror. His own home life, strictly regimented by the awesome figure of his mother, often left him desperately miserable, but, frequent though the strappings were, not to mention the nights without tea or TV, he could never imagine reaching the situation where his parent grew so irate with him that she’d actually show him the door.

      So he watched the children through the cracks in their back gate with a new, morbid wonder. At first he’d expected to see them in rags, the way the paupers had been on that film his mother had taken him to see at the cinema, Oliver! But in this respect he was disappointed. Apparently, they dressed much the way other children did; the girls in sandals, socks and flowered dresses, the lads in short pants and t-shirts. Their very ordinariness was the thing that surprised him most. Their hair was always neatly combed and cut; they didn’t seem especially unhappy – the girls skipped cheerfully with their ropes, the boys played football or with toy soldiers.

       However, there was one thing slightly different about them – their age-range.

       Timmy was at infant school now, and finally starting to associate with other kids. But these were his classmates, and all were of a similar age to him. The children in the yard next door seemed to be all kinds of different ages. There were six of them in total, three boys and three girls, and they ranged from the youngest boy, who could only have been about three, to the eldest girl, who was ten at least.

       That eldest girl was of particular interest to Timmy. He’d only been peeping on them for a couple of weeks when it struck him that she was the real object of his attention. She was tall and slim, with short dark hair, bright eyes and cherry-red lips. She was, Timmy would come to realise in later life, extraordinarily beautiful for one so young, but it wasn’t just this that attracted him. To the other children this girl was clearly the older sister they’d never had. She was the centre of every game, the decider of every issue, the giver of all instructions – though not in the harsh, threatening way that Timmy’s mother was. The rest of the children adored this girl, flocking around her in play, taking their cuts and bumps to her if they fell.

       Timmy watched with envy at the love she showed them. But he’d long ago learned not to ask questions in which words like ‘why’ and ‘not’ featured – why did he not have that?, why did he not have this? As far as his mother was concerned, he already had too much – so he mutely accepted that the girl was no part of his life, and felt increasingly hostile to the rest of the children because she was so much a part of theirs. The thought that they were only in the care home because they’d suffered in some way, or had been abandoned, became a source of pleasure to him. He’d gloat to himself as he watched them, wondering excitedly about the things they might have experienced.

       The idea that the older girl had also gone through something bad occurred to him as well. He didn’t gloat in her case, but it gave him a funny feeling all the same. A feeling that wasn’t totally displeasing.

      *

      The first person I came close to killing after the Falklands War was the sort of arrogant bastard who thinks it’s never going to happen to him but has it coming nonetheless.

      Liam John Barlow was the type of bloke who thought that, when he’d had a drink or two, he could do anything he wanted to anyone and then go home, have a good night’s sleep and wake up in the morning without the slightest qualm. I don’t know what his background was. I don’t care. He was a habitual criminal and I was a new copper looking to make a name for myself, and that made him fair game.

      It was early on in my service and I wasn’t entirely sure how to go about things, so in the end I went about them in the old army way and that, apparently, in the pre-PACE era, was good enough for my bosses.

      I was six months into my probation at the time and working foot-patrol through the drab rows of tenements down Spitalfields. During my first half-year in the job I’d made thirty-six arrests – an impressive figure for a new boy, but most of them had been legless drunks or shoplifters who’d already been nabbed by store-detectives.

      Barlow was a different kettle of fish. His record for violence was mainly against property – other people’s property it goes without saying – but, as he was nearly seven feet tall, his colossal rages inspired terror in his victims. At the time when I arrested him, he was persecuting a young woman called Milly Turpin, who lived with her widowed mother in a terraced house near Shoreditch station. Milly was an ex-girlfriend of Barlow’s, but now wanted nothing to do with him. Barlow, never a man to forgive when his ego had been bruised, had only grudgingly accepted this and, whenever he got drunk, which was most Fridays and Saturdays, went round to her house to bang and kick the door and throw the dustbins all over the street.

      On the night in question, he met me there.

      It was slightly off my usual beat, but my section sergeant had posted me there specifically after repeated complaints from Mrs. Turpin. It was likely to be a dangerous job as Barlow could “go a bit”, but the skip reckoned that if an ex-squaddie couldn’t handle it, no-one could.

      The first thing I remember is being impressed by Barlow’s size. It was a cold, wet night, and he came lumbering up like something from a Frankenstein movie. He even had the square head to go with it, the barrel body and the great clodhopping feet. I was watching from an entry across the street, well concealed as I didn’t want to dissuade him from doing whatever it was he was planning to do. Not that I think he’d have seen me anyway; he wore thick, bottle-lensed glasses, suggesting restricted vision (which encouraged me all the more). First of all, he knocked on the door. I checked my watch – it was close on twelve. After that he began to shout. Soon he was pulverising the wood with his ham-like fists. I still hung on. I certainly had grounds for a breach-of-the-peace arrest, but, if possible, I wanted something better – a criminal damage or threatening behaviour.

      It came to that two seconds later. Barlow ran to the nearest parked car, twisted off its wing mirror and hurled it up at a bedroom window, which duly spider-webbed with cracks. A light came on and Barlow guffawed.

      That was when I tapped him on the shoulder.

      He sort of gawped at me, blinking through his rain-spattered specs. When I snatched his wrist and began to caution him, he jerked his arm back and launched a massive right hook, which I ducked with ease.

      “If some fucking shithead hits you,” I remember being unofficially told at Hendon, “it doesn’t matter how soppy the blow, you hit him back as hard as you can. You’re fully justified. And even if you’re not, we’ll back you to the hilt. We’re not losing any more bobbies just because the likes of the London fucking Students’ Union says we mustn’t fight back!”

      That’s what I did. I hit him as hard as I could. Well, first of all, I kicked him in the gonads. A real up-and-under, it was. He went down to his knees, choking. That brought him within fist-in-the-face range. The first shot smashed his glasses. And his nose. The second connected with his left temple, toppling him into the gutter, where he lay groggily, drooling blood and snot. As he tried to lever himself up, I drew my staff and walloped him across the elbow. He went down again hard, his face cracking on the corner of the kerbstone – I so love kerbstones. Blood welled from the resulting wound like blackcurrant jelly.

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