She stopped, bent double, panting. ‘Someone’s firing into the street.’
I looked back up the road. ‘Is anyone hurt?’
She nodded and wiped her eyes.
‘I saw a man on the floor, blood on his face.’
I turned away. I had all I needed. I didn’t wait to say goodbye, and when I looked back around, she had gone.
I thought I heard sirens. The Armed Response Team was on permanent standby in London and I wasn’t far from major terrorist targets. They would be here in no time and this would be as near as I would get. I saw it was getting busier ahead, the streets full of people getting away from the shooting. If there was anything in the story, the news agencies would get the official releases, the CCTV footage. I would have to feed on the scraps I could pick up here, something different. As I saw the crowd, the running, the panic, I knew I had the angle: the reaction of the people who had been there, the human story.
I pulled out my camera and set it to telephoto, squashing the spread of heads. As I took pictures, the tide kept on coming, some running, some walking. I saw a young family, a couple of children just under ten with an anxious young mother. She was panting, shaking, clutching her children tight. I got some pictures of the children. The first rule of journalism: always get the children.
All the time, their mother was talking. ‘We were just shopping, you know, just walking around. People around us ducked, like out of instinct, then there was a second shot.’ She waved her hand in the air, breaths short and panicky. ‘Then people started running.’ The woman straightened herself as if to emphasise her point. ‘Someone was shooting into the street.’
I tried to concentrate on the children, but all the time I was making mental notes of what she was saying. She had tears in her eyes when she said, ‘… and what about my children? A daytrip to town isn’t supposed to happen like that.’
I blinked. There was my line. I thanked her and set off again.
I didn’t get far before I realised how close I was to it. I could see the bob of police helmets, silver glints reflecting sunlight. They were pushing people back, away from the scene. The crowd was getting thicker, but as I pushed I was able to get to the door of my apartment building, not much more than a door squeezed between two shops. I ducked inside and rushed upstairs.
As soon as I got in, I went to the window. I could see a crowd of police around a man on his back. There was a dark patch on the pavement next to him, spreading into the cracks. He had his arms by his side, a funeral pose. He was in front of the Cafe Boheme, green awnings keeping the inside in shade, but I could see frightened faces looking out. Soho had always been a brave place, always done its own thing. This was the outside coming in, and people looked scared.
I lined up the body in my viewfinder, ready to start clicking, when I paused. There was something about the face which was familiar. I zoomed in, and when I did, I felt my hands go slick. I had something big.
I zoomed in close on his shattered head, his face blood-red, his cheeks sinking, hollow. I pulled back to put it into context, the deserted pavement littered with a body, napkins blowing against his ankles. I saw the faces in the Cafe Boheme looking at me, half of them hating me, the rest looking for an answer. I didn’t have one.
I heard a shout from the street below my window. I recognised it straight away. It was the police. My dad was a policeman, up in the frozen north. One thing he always told me was that if a policeman shouts at you to stop, you make sure you stop, because he’ll only ask once. And I knew I couldn’t get busy with my hands. I didn’t know if the armed unit had arrived yet, but they were only human. They would only get a pinprick of time to decide if the shine in my hands was a gun. If they decided wrong, I’d be dead.
I relaxed and looked down, nice and slow, my camera now slack in my hand.
‘Jack Garrett,’ I shouted. ‘I’m a reporter, freelance. I live here.’
As I held out the camera, I saw the policeman relax.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘How long have you been taking pictures?’
‘Not long enough to help. How is it over there?’
He didn’t say much, and I could tell he was unsure. Was I the shooter? He didn’t know. He was young, maybe younger than my own thirty-two. ‘Quiet,’ was all he said.
‘Have you got the shooter hemmed in?’
He smiled warily. ‘This is turning into an interview.’
I smiled back, wider, more teeth. ‘Oh, come on, officer. It’s all going to come out.’
He looked like he was going to start talking, like he was fighting an urge to help, to tell a story, but the conversation was broken up by the chop-chop of a news helicopter buzzing the scene for footage. We both looked up, but when I looked down again he had straightened himself, set his pose.
‘Vultures, aren’t they,’ he said, flicking his eyes to the sky.
I shrugged. ‘Freedom of speech,’ I said, giving it one last try. ‘It’s a human right.’
‘And so is the right to silence,’ he replied, and then turned away.
I said nothing. I just wanted to keep my camera, not have it seized as evidence. I knew what was on there was valuable. The encounter with the policeman was already part of the story.
I looked at the pictures I had taken, I knew I was right. There it was, a small splash of colour on the back screen of my camera, the biggest story of the week. I zoomed in, just to make sure, but I knew. I had recognised the body as soon as I had seen it. Henri Dumas, the Premiership’s top scorer, last seen wearing the big money blue.
I was stunned, too surprised to do anything at first. I took a deep breath and rubbed my eyes, weighing up the need for sleep against the need for the big story. I was freelance. I could go to bed, or have another beer. Let the big guys have their day.
I smiled to myself. Maybe it was my turn for the big time.
Turners Fold, Lancashire, is a small slate town on the edge of the Pennines, an industrial template, surrounded by scrap grass hills and the shadow of Pendle Hill, green at the base, bracken brown at the top, barren, always dark with cloud.
Turners Fold, ‘the Fold’ to the locals, is typically northern: tough, proud, and hard-working. The colour is dark. The grass around it grows short and clings to the hills like stubble, broken only by grey stone walls. The towns and villages are all close by, but the hills intervene, and at night they sit like shadows, topped by the orange glow from the next town.
Like most mill towns, there was nothing before cotton. It breathed life into the town, built its buildings, shaped its people.
But it made the people tough, smothered the town in smoke and scarred the green hills in strips of terraced housing, lined up like computer memory, gutters zigzagging like saw-teeth, doors and windows right onto the streets, dots and bumps in the smooth lines. Cotton owned the town and owned the people, gave them a living, a bond.
The mills have gone now, the land left behind filled with prefab community centres and self-assembly superstores. Some tall chimneys are left, redbrick, out of keeping with the blackened millstone grit that makes up most of the town, reminders of what had once been. A canal runs through the centre, low metal bridges connecting the two sides of the town, weekend barges now the visitors. A hundred years ago the children went to work, their nimble hands good for the machines. Now, they hang around in packs, their faces hidden, living off cheap lager and stolen diazepam.
Just as cotton built the houses, the cotton kings sought a legacy in the civic buildings in the small triangular centre of town, large and impressive against the strips of Victorian shopfronts, dusty and dark, faded glory fighting against the superstores in the next town. Banks, pubs and estate agents cluster around the triangle, spilling onto nearby streets, spreading out like the points on a compass. In the middle of it all is the