Read Online Nineteen Seventy-Seven: The Red Riding Quartet, Book Two by David Peace - Free Book Online Page B

still perched across the sofa.
I flew from the bed and, casting them aside, I flung open Oldman’s dossier:
Murders and Assaults Upon Women in the North of England .
I read and read till my eyes were blood-red and bleeding from all that I’d read.
And then I began to type, type as they chattered among themselves, wheeling around the room in dreadful disharmony, Carol taunting me, scolding me:
‘You’re late. You’re late. You’re always so late.’
One bitten finger in my ear, I kept typing, texts rewritten in a matching, fetching, fresh blood-red.
In the darkest part of the night, before the dawn and the light, I’d finished, just one last thing to do:
I picked up the telephone and pulled the numbers round the dial, my stomach turning with each digit.
‘It’s me, Jack.’
‘I thought you’d never call.’
‘It’s not been easy’
‘It never is.’
‘I need to see you.’
‘Better late than never.’
With the dawn and more soft rain, I woke again. They were sleeping, wilted across my furniture.
I lay alone, staring up at the cracks in the ceiling, the chips in the paint, thinking about her, thinking about him, waiting for St Anne.
I rose and tiptoed past them to the table.
I pulled the paper from the typewriter.
I held the words in my hand and felt my belly bleeding:
Yorkshire, 1977.
The heart absent, the door still locked from the inside.
She came up behind me, leaning over my shoulder, warm against my ear, staring at the words I’d written:
Yesterday’s news, tomorrow’s headline:
The Yorkshire Ripper .

    The John Shark Show
Radio Leeds
Thursday 2nd June 1977
    Chapter 5

    Spade work:
Twenty-four hours’ solid digging.
No sleep since we left Preston –
The drive back over Wednesday morning, Rudkin and Ellis as hung-over as fuck, passed out in the back.
Home, Millgarth still chaos and bodies, tips coming in one a bloody minute, no fucker free to follow them through. Me thinking, his name could be right here now in this room, right here now written in ink, right here now waiting for me.
Me, flying through slips, chasing up calls.
3.30 p.m. and I get the last call I want: another post office, another sub-postmaster.
Rudkin giving Noble shit: ‘Fuck’s it got to do with bloody Bob?’
‘We haven’t got anyone else.’
‘Neither have I.’
OT ban kicking in, Uniforms having voted to continue the ban while we were over the hills in Preston, Rudkin with his, ‘Who can fucking blame them?’ speech.
‘You’re getting to be a right whining bastard, John. It’s just for a couple of days.’
‘This is bollocks. We haven’t got a couple of days. He’s supposed to be Prostitute Murder Squad.’
But Noble’s gone and I’m back on the fucking post office jobs:
Hanging Heaton, Skipton, Doncaster, and now Selby .
Fuck-ups from start to finish.
Would be Robbery Squad and five years maximum if the dumb bastards had kept their fucking fingers off their bloody triggers in Skipton and didn’t insist on battering each of the old gits half to death.
Murder: life for a life .
Well done, boys:
Suspects believed to be four, gloved and masked with local accents.
Could be gypsies: surprise, surprise.
Could be black: no surprises.
Level of violence suggested white, late teens/early twenties, previous form and too much Clockwork Orange .
I speak to Selby on the phone:
Mr Ronald Prendergast, sixty-eight, closing up his corner shop sub-post office on the New Park Road when he’s confronted by three masked intruders, armed .
A struggle ensues, during which Mr Prendergast is clubbed repeatedly by a blunt instrument, rendering him unconscious with severe head injuries .
There by half-five and spend the evening between the crime scene and the hospital, waiting for Grandad Prendergast to come round.
Wife had been doing the flowers at Church, the lucky bitch. Eight o’clock on, I stalk the hospital corridors, phoning and phoning:
Calling Janice.
Zero –
Knowing she’ll be working, me desperate to crawl the streets, desperate to see her, desperate to stop her .
Calling