Gatecrasher
by Robert Young
Copyright 2015 Robert Young
I
The morning after.
1
Sunday. 8am.
The truth must be delivered in parcels, small and separate.
He knows that when he tells him what he must, that a drip feed of information might spare him the worst. He knows not to deny him what he asks, but also that not to tell is not to lie.
The drab morning gathers about them, London struggling out of the mist. It acts as a sort of second curtain, such a morning, not to be drawn, but turned from, sleep reclaimed.
They stand out these two men, in their attempt to blend in. They are not joggers or dog walkers and they are incongruous in both dress and demeanour. The obvious tension, the close huddle would catch the eye of any that cared to see it but there is no reason that anyone would. Not yet.
There is a dynamic at work that is hard to miss, a hierarchy of power that diminishes down the line. The one in charge, the one who knows his place.
'Don't waste my time with conjecture please. Don't use the word maybe again,' says the one in charge, he is taller, thinner, better dressed, better groomed. The other man stares at the floor, nods. 'You assured me it would be dealt with. I believed you.'
He knows better than to duck responsibility, even that which is not technically his. It won't make this any quicker.
'It's in hand. Last known sighting was in Fulham.' He didn't mean to stop there and the tone of his voice had suggested that this might mean something. It was met with a glare.
'Fulham?'
'I mean... What I mean is, it wasn't as though he was having a coffee with a Telegraph journalist or wandering around Whitehall knocking on doors,' he said as the glare intensified. Nothing to do but plough on. 'It was being dealt with in Fulham. They were dealing with it.'
A hand shot up in reprimand. 'No specifics Drennan, you know the drill.' Drennan, the one who knew his place, raised his hands in acknowledgment and surrender. 'Anyway. That sounds a touch disingenuous. If they were dealing with it, it would be done, no? What they appear to have been doing rather, is fucking it up.'
Drennan nodded again. It was not a point to be contested. Not least because it was correct.
'I think we can assume that he is out of our hair and I think that we have our friends in the east to thank for that too.'
'We have our friends in the east to thank for a lot Drennan,' he said with heavy sarcasm. 'And whilst I am extremely eager to share in your mindlessly optimistic worldview, I am more concerned with knowing what actually happened rather than what might have happened. Because I really do not want to start thinking about what could happen. So please, reassure me. Justify my occasional faith in your ability.'
'I don't have any definites at the moment but I am confident that there is no cause for concern ? at present...' he faltered as the other man sighed loudly but continued regardless, '...and in an hour or so will have answers for you.'
The man in charge wore an expression of disdain.
'The right answers,' added Drennan.
'Mr Drennan, I rise at five o' clock in the morning. I shower, take breakfast and dress and I leave my home at six o'clock for the office. This gives you a window of one hour in which to call me and give me the answers I require. If I have to leave my home for work without this information I will become really rather agitated at the uncertain prospect of what might await me.' As he spoke he inspected his fingernails and then looked briefly into the other man's eyes. 'I am, of course, understood.'
He did not wait for confirmation and he turned and left the park at a brisk walk.
Drennan watched him leave in silence and then turned and began walking in the opposite direction. It was several minutes before he lifted a mobile phone to his ear and began to speak.
The night before.
2
Saturday. 10pm.
The room was loud and lively, voices raised above the music and people laughed and danced in the dark, stuffy space. Nobody was sitting. That was a good sign.
Daniel Campbell pulled a bottle of wine from the rack behind him and began twisting a corkscrew into the neck. He offered the bottle to the three people grouped around him and then topped up his own glass.
'So how long have you been here?' asked one of the group, a short blond haired girl that had turned up with a friend of his.
'About six months,' he replied.
'Six months? It's taken six months to organise a flat warming?' said a tall, skinny man with a goatee as he slurped noisily at his wine.
Campbell shrugged.
'So how can you afford to buy a place in Fulham? You must be minted.' The tall skinny man again. Campbell looked at him and winked as he noticed how interested the girl suddenly looked in hearing his answer.
'You know, the usual. Couple of enormous drug deals, bit of people-trafficking.' He grinned as the three others laughed. 'Sold a kidney,' he added.
They laughed louder and the blond girl flashed a smile at him that Campbell thought he could grow to like.
'No, Daniel's actually landed gentry,' said the other young man who had until now remained silent. 'Father owns most of Leicestershire.'
'Yeah. You can tell by the accent how posh I am.'
He began to drift around the room, greeting people and shaking hands, kissing cheeks. Campbell guessed that he knew probably only two-thirds of the people here but he had decided to make the invitation an open one rather than end up with a half-hearted party and a half-empty flat.
A few unfamiliar faces were par for the course anyway and as far as he could tell, anyone he didn't know, seemed to know people that he did and had tagged along with them. In any event, most of the guests that he spoke to seemed more than happy with their host and Campbell was enjoying his new-found popularity.
At one point he was drawn into a round of tequila shots, salt and lemon fetched from the kitchen, the bottle from his own cupboard. Everybody grimaced and groaned as they sucked on the sour fruit. Someone's barely suppressed retching draw great amusement from the others.
More than once he spotted the short blonde girl that he had been talking to earlier, looking across the room at him. More than once he made sure that he returned her eye contact.
After chatting with a couple of work colleagues who he'd invited the week before after a few post-work drinks and then regretted it the next morning, he resolved to work his way back through the crowded living room to the blond girl. He turned to look for her, raising his glass to his mouth, trying hard to look distracted.
Suddenly he froze. The brutal, jarring sound of breaking glass and the thud of something heavy hitting the floor burst through the flat and silenced everyone, leaving just the sound of the music in the background, pounding like a heartbeat. His head snapped around to the source of the sound from the end of the hallway, toward the kitchen and something surged and slammed in his chest.
He could hear it in his head again like an echo as he ran and hairs danced on his neck. The shattering of the glass was almost to be expected, several hours into a drink-soaked party. But that other sound. A sort of crunching, thudding noise: of dropping. Of falling.
Slumped face down across the floor of his kitchen lay the figure of a man, his head surrounded by broken glass and, it seemed to the stunned Campbell as he stood there aghast, by a pool of blood that looked positively black in the soft light. Someone behind him screamed. He might have done so himself had the shock not knocked the wind from his lungs.
Rooted to the spot in the doorway he could hear the clamour of people behind him trying to look into the room, asking each other who it was, what had happened.
Campbell stared dumbly at the scene before him, not quite able t
o grasp what he was seeing.
'Did anyone see?' he asked of no-one in particular. When no answer came he turned to the group of people arranged in the hallway around the kitchen door. 'What happened here?' he asked again but his question met only with blank stares.
'Nobody saw anything? No one was in here with him?' A note of incredulity touched his voice as he turned back again to look at the motionless form sprawled across the floor. Campbell had not yet crossed the threshold of the doorway, his toe making it no further than the metal carpet rail that separated his hall carpet from the kitchen lino and formed a barrier that seemed now somehow impossible for him to breach.
Turning slowly he stepped into the room and as he did so, the crowd at his back pressed forward. There were more screams, gasps, more talking and he span and began to usher them back out of the room and close the door but a blonde woman arrived at his side and moved forcefully through the door and then closed it for him.
'I know a little first aid,' she said and then looked from him to the figure on the floor.
'OK,' he nodded blankly. Campbell's head was still swimming and he blinked hard twice to try to clear his vision. It failed. He tried to think about how much he'd drunk, then tried not to.
He stepped forward and reached his hand out toward the man's neck. A hooded top obscured all but the back of his head, the hair there dark and matted with blood. Neither of them spoke; not when Campbell had drawn back the hood to expose a number of vicious gashes in the man's neck, blood flowing freely from the wounds. Not when Campbell took up the man's wrist and rolled his eyes in relief when he found a faint pulse.
Shards from a wineglass lay broken in the blood and the long thin stem rocked gently back and forth on its circular base next to the man's head. Campbell guessed that he had fallen and somehow the glass had ended up between the floor and his throat as he landed. He speculated about this aloud and they both winced at the thought, picturing it as they stared again at the deep, jagged wound.
'Pass me a dishcloth or something,' Campbell instructed trying to sound decisive, but she was kneeling now and rolling her sleeves up. Campbell grabbed clean dishcloths from a drawer and tossed them about in the pooling blood, pressing firmly on them as they began to colour a deep, deep red.
'How's that first aid looking?' he said. She looked up at him with a pale face and red hands.
'All I can think is that you're supposed to stop the bleeding by applying pressure. But I'm not exactly sure how we do that without strangling the guy.'
'Shit? Ambulance.'
She nodded and he pulled his mobile phone from his pocket and began dialling.
'Where's the nearest A and E?' she asked looking back at the motionless figure and his pallid looking face.
'Not far. Five minutes up the road maybe,' he said and then started talking into the handset, fighting to keep the panic and the booze from his voice, trying not to look at the prone figure next to him.
When he finished he looked up at her and nodded, exhaling noisily. 'Who the hell is this guy?'
After a protracted silence she spoke. 'Party's over then.'
Campbell was staring at the blood. So dark, he thought. He nodded but said nothing.
3
Saturday. 11.30 pm.
He shifted his backside on the thin cushioning of the waiting-room seat and looked again at his watch and then the clock on the wall. Both seemed frozen, both in league against him.
Campbell shook his head. Where was this guy? he thought. How long was this going to take?
He had been sitting waiting a little over an hour. Half past eleven on a Saturday night in the waiting room of an A&E. The last place on earth he wanted to be and he wasn't allowed to leave. The identity of the man he had brought in had yet to be established and he had been asked to stay until some official people asked some official questions.
Campbell squirmed in the seat and tried to stay calm, something not helped by all the booze he'd had. And the cheap machine-coffee in the plastic cup was worse than useless.
He tried hard to count up the number of drinks that he had got through that evening, recalling numerous glasses of wine, a couple of beers early on as he milled about on his own waiting for guests to start arriving.
Then there were the tequila shots. A Sambuca? Had there been anything else? He couldn't remember exactly but one thing was for sure; no amount of shock or black coffee was going to change the fact that he was drunk. He'd tried to remain as composed as possible with the ambulance crew but had become so conscious of slurring his words that he had then tried hard not to say anything at all. That only made him worry that in clamming up he might seem suspicious or uncooperative.
Then they'd asked him to stay. Asked him if he'd mind answering a few questions about the man, about what had happened. He'd nodded dumbly and taken a seat, trying hard to fight down the clamouring sense of fear and panic.
But that wasn't it.
His short term memory had been swilled away earlier that evening and already he was struggling to recall the scene in his kitchen. He was alarmed that the details evaded his recall when so little time had passed since it happened. He tried to piece it together. The blonde woman had said 'Party's over then' or something and he'd nodded. You can say that again love.
And then he'd ushered her out into the hallway, told them all that an ambulance was coming and that it was probably best if people headed off now. Nobody needed asking twice and he went back into the kitchen to the man lying there in his own gathering blood hearing the noise outside drop until it was silent. It had taken no more than five minutes to clear his flat as he sat wishing that he could go too, thinking about what would happen, what he would say to the paramedics. Soon the keening of the ambulance siren rose in the background and he felt the panic growing again as it drew closer. Homing in on him, seeking him out.
Which was when the man moved.
And spoke.
What had he said? Campbell frowned as he tried to remember, tried to blink his vision clear - to focus - but the memory just wasn't there. Just a fleeting image of the head rising from the floor, something mumbled. Something. What?
Campbell slid further into the uncomfortable chair, the seat back digging into his shoulders. He looked toward the far side of the room where a tall, well dressed man was walking slowly and deliberately toward the reception desk, blood streaked down his face from his hairline and across his brow where a large cut traced a line to his eyebrow. Campbell winced and squirmed in his chair, the train of thought abruptly derailed. Another thirty minutes passed, the room began to fill with more unfortunates; cuts and burns. Twisted ankles, broken bones. Still no-one came to him.
He racked his foggy brain again and again but all he could summon was that same fleeting image like a blurred instant-replay on loop.
As the waiting room filled he began to feel as though he had been forgotten entirely and began to doze off before finally a suited gentleman in rimless spectacles called his name and ushered him through into a small office. Brisk and efficient he sat him down and offered him a drink in a tone that made it quite clear that to accept would have been an inconvenience. He seemed irritated by Campbell's obvious inebriation.
'Sorry to have kept you waiting for so long. Terribly busy out there as you can see and there are always a million other things to do to keep a place like this running. Hope its not too much trouble,' he said with rehearsed sincerity.
'No, no problem,' said Campbell politely. Whilst he didn't mean it he was careful not to say so. 'Can you tell me anything?' he asked, his words slow and deliberate.
'Well we're rather been hoping that you might be able to do that for us actually...' he replied and pushed his glasses up his nose.
Campbell's irritation was already simmering after nearly two hours on a cheap plastic seat, tired and paranoid. 'Look, I'm sorry mate, but I've already said that I don't know who he is, where he came from or what happened.' Campbell was aware as he spoke that he was still slurring h
is words and he became instantly self-conscious about it again.
'Of course, of course. Its just difficult to deal with when we have no identification, no-one to contact... I'm sure you understand.'
Campbell shrugged, said nothing.
'Well unfortunately he's not in a good way, I'm afraid. He's lost a lot of blood already and he lost consciousness completely more or less as soon as you arrived with him. It's impossible to say at this stage what will happen, very touch and go. We're doing all we can for him of course but his injuries...' he trailed off and looked at Campbell, seemingly watching for a response. 'Did he speak to you? Were you able to find out anything at all?'
Campbell was careful not to let his expression betray him. He thought for a moment, saw again the briefest flash of memory, of that dark, blood-matted hair raising itself up?
'Nothing,' he said flatly and hoped that his slow wits would be put down to drunkenness.
The gentleman scribbled and Campbell tried to read his writing upside-down but couldn't. He seemed to contemplate the words he had written there for a moment, as though he might conjure an answer from them. Campbell thought that the man was probably far less important than he was making out and was playing this up for effect.
'Right. OK,' he said with a mournful shake of the head. 'Well, we have no desire to inconvenience you further. Of course we appreciate you trying to help out.'
'That's it? I can go?' That was fast, he thought, after so much waiting.
'I think the best thing is that we take some contact details from you so we can get in touch if needs or if the police need to talk to you-'
'The police?' Campbell asked startled.
'Yes. Well? given the circumstances?'
Campbell tried hard to hide the fear from his face as he realised that the idea was a perfectly sensible one. It rattled him nonetheless. The police.