Knight & Culverhouse Box Set - Books 7-9

Chapter 30

30

After meeting DCI Culverhouse, Tyrone had milled around in town for a bit longer to run some errands. He’d picked up some bits for dinner, bought a new tea towel to replace the yellowing once-white one in the kitchen in the flat and finally had the cracked screen on his mobile phone replaced.

He was still a little shaken after his chat with Culverhouse, so returning to the normal boring routine had helped him to keep calm and forget the threatening note he’d received earlier that day.

He hadn’t told Culverhouse about the note. He didn’t see how it was relevant, although deep down he knew it all had to be connected somehow. His life up until the last couple of days had been relatively quiet for years. What were the odds of someone finding out about his visits to Lenny within hours of John Lucas getting out of jail and Freddie Galloway being killed? Tyrone was no mathematician, but he didn’t fancy those odds. He knew what those sorts of people were like.

The weather was looking good, so he decided that rather than sit on a stuffy bus all the way back home, he’d walk some of the way back and catch another bus further along the way once he’d had enough of walking.

He was about to turn off the main road past the industrial estate and walk up Edgefield Avenue when his phone pinged in his headphones, the sound of a text message coming through, interrupting the new Stormzy album. He took his phone out of his pocket and read the message.

A dirty fuckin poof n a grass! U no wot happens wen u chat 2 law

He didn’t recognise the number, but he didn’t need to. He had his suspicions. He looked behind him, back towards the main road. Whoever had sent this message knew he had met Jack Culverhouse earlier that day, so there was every chance they could be watching him now. There was no-one behind him, though, so he quickened his pace and decided to take a shortcut across Edgefield Park rather than walking around the footpath outside the perimeter.

As he walked across the grass, he thought he heard a sound behind him. He turned round, but again saw nothing. Again, he quickened his pace, the gate on the far side of the park now in sight.

He estimated he was probably now about fifty metres from the gate, then it was another fifty metres or so down the road until he’d be back on another main road, where there’d be plenty of witnesses and CCTV. Then he’d be almost home and dry.

He knew he shouldn’t have come out today. Not while he was feeling like this, like he had to watch over his shoulder at every moment. Ever since Headache had been released from prison, he knew things were going to be different. He knew he was always going to be warier, that things weren’t the way they had been for the past few years. There was stability, a sense that things were in the past and were staying there. Until they inevitably all got dragged up again, that was.

Tyrone knew he couldn’t change his past. Who could? The best you could hope for was to deal with things in the only way you knew how. Either that or find a better way. Life didn’t tend to give you too many options on that front.

But stability had helped. Every day had been a day further away from those days, although it had always been at the back of his mind that it was also a day closer to the inevitable — to the day he knew the past would come back to haunt them all.

He’d been weighing up his options and quickly realised he didn’t have any. He didn’t have the money to move away and start somewhere new. And, in any case, why should he have to? He had no right to feel guilty about anything, to feel victimised. Even if he had, starting afresh somewhere else wouldn’t be as straightforward as it sounded. Where would he go? How would he start to lay down new roots? A black guy from a council estate couldn’t just fit right in on a strange council estate miles from home, and perhaps less so in a quiet country village somewhere. The way the world was, the way society operated, he was stuck exactly where God had dumped him the day he was born. Social mobility didn’t exist when you were one of the people society kept immobile.

As he went to walk around the outside of the empty kids’ playground and onto the path towards the exit from Edgefield Park, he became suddenly aware of a presence behind him — almost right on top of him, making him wonder how the hell he hadn’t spotted anyone.

He didn’t have time to think, though. He barely had time to put his hands out in front of him as he went crashing to the ground, a skull-splitting pain shooting through him as he tasted blood and tried not to choke on it, instinctively bringing his arms up to cover his head as the black boot swung towards him.

He felt the crunch of his nasal cartilage and the sensation of warm blood pouring down over his mouth as he curled tightly into a ball, his head ringing and orientation screwed, knowing he could do very little at this stage other than pray to God the beating ended soon.