CHAPTER 3

Seeing the confident smirk flash on Tom’s face, Geoff thought cocky sod. Tom had just parried a weak left, right combination from his opponent Phil (the police officer). It was sparring night at the Shukokai karate club and Geoff circling the two combatants was acting as the referee and point adjudicator. The rest of the class, all having had their chance to fight, stood back in a line and watched avidly as the two most experienced students squared off against each other. Tom, the body builder and bouncer, wasn’t so much the technical fighter, and relied more on his brute strength. He liked to bully his opponents into defeat. Phil, on the other hand was much lighter in stature, and quick with his rapid-fire combinations. However, his main problem was that whenever he faced a bigger opponent, he tended to become a bit intimidated, and fought most of his fight defensively on the back foot. Geoff had always known this about him and was forever badgering him about it. But more importantly, his opponent, Tom, was also aware of it. And with that extra edge, Tom had that predatory glint in his eyes as he prepared to move in for the kill. As usual, Phil started to back pedal and Geoff eyed him impatiently.

‘Come on, Phil, don’t choke on me.’ Geoff bristled, but Phil just couldn’t pull the trigger.

Out of desperation, he threw a half-hearted front kick, and Tom bulldozed in with left and right punches almost knocking Phil over with the weight of his body. This wasn’t full contact sparring, but a tap-contact, just enough to know that if it was a real-life confrontation you would get hit.

Geoff shouted for them to stop, and Tom halted his attack, sniffing valiantly as he returned to the centre of the floor.

Phil shook his head at himself, and lumbered back to face Tom. Still seething with himself, he tugged hard at the tails of his brown belt. Geoff raised his arm in Tom’s favour signalling another point, and a five to one win.

‘OK, that’ll do for tonight.’ Geoff called an end to the session, and everyone formed into a line and bowed to their sensei. Geoff returned the bow, and the class dispersed with weary and accomplished sighs.

‘Bloody hell!’ Phil hissed as he followed Geoff back to their training bags.

‘Confidence!’ Geoff lectured him. ‘You’ve gotta have faith in yourself. Believe in yourself.’

‘I know, I know. Why the hell can’t I do it?’

‘Only you know the answer to that one I’m afraid, mate.’ Geoff shrugged helplessly. ‘That’s the only thing holding you back from getting your black belt, you know?’

Phil didn’t answer him, he just stood there grumpily towelling himself down.

Tom breezed in, and nudged his fellow student in the arm playfully.

Got you again, didn’t I?’

But Phil tried his best to ignore him.

Geoff began disrobing. ‘Perhaps you should go and do a bit of door work with Tom here to try and develop your nerve a bit.’

‘No thanks, I deal with enough morons out there in my own job thanks very much.’

‘You’ve just gotta learn to switch off and become an animal,’ Tom said, enjoying his hard- man image.

It wasn’t that Tom was a real bully, he just loved the hard-as-nails, burly-doorman reputation. For the best part of him, he was a disciplined student of the martial arts, but when things didn’t go his way on the sparring floor, his immediate reaction was to lose his temper. Sometimes when he and Geoff would spar together, Tom couldn’t help trying it on a tad, nothing serious. But when Geoff started picking him off with his short, sharp combinations, he would get frustrated and start trying to push Geoff about. That’s when Geoff had to go up a gear to put him back in his place, which usually involved sweeping his feet out from under him.

‘Maybe Geoff’s right about coming on the door with me.’ Tom settled down again. ‘I mean in my game nowadays you’re guaranteed a bit of physical at least once a week.”

‘Really?’ Geoff asked.

‘Oh yeah, these days people start a fight over next to nothing. Believe me. The other weekend this chap had a tear up with this guy outside Wetherspoons, and because he knew the guy’s family were inside as well, he went back in and attacked them too. Even the poor Granny got a smack.’

Geoff and Phil looked at each other repulsed.

‘And when we were dragging him out, all his mates who had been watching were cheering him because of what he’d done.’

‘Just what is the matter with these sick cretins?’ Phil scowled.

‘I hope you gave him a good sharp slap,’ Geoff added.

‘Oh, yes!’ Tom lit up. ‘Me and Charlie accidentally fell on him a few times. But that’s just it, you see, all these violent yobs love to put the hurt on people, but when they get a taste of their own medicine, they don’t like it at all. Bloody cowards, they make me sick.’

‘Squealed like a stuck pig, did he?’ Phil snorted.

Tom gave his impersonation of the pathetic yob. ‘That’s out of order that is. You’ve got no right to do that to me.’ Then back to his own voice in reply. ‘No, but it’s OK for you to do that to other people though, isn’t it? You stupid git!’ Tom slung his towel down into his training bag. ‘I’ll tell you, it’s getting worse out there, you know, you can see it every week.’

Geoff and Phil listened as they changed back into their tracksuits.

‘People just don’t give a shit about anything these days. Charlie, Nigel and I were talking about it at the weekend. I mean the three of us have been bouncing on and off now for the past five years, and during that time, you can see a steady decline in society. OK, people out on the piss are always gonna get into a ruckus at some point, but these days you can see it in people walking around, they’re like time bombs waiting to detonate. The way things are today, the social climate, the recession, the corrupt government. OK, I’m not making excuses for some of these idiots, but in a way you can understand why there is so much violence.’

‘Yeah, I agree,’ Phil chipped in. “All of us are feeling the pinch of the credit crunch, but it doesn’t mean we’re gonna go out and thump someone. You still have to maintain law and order, you can’t go and take it out on some innocent chap walking his dog down the street.’

‘Yes, I know that.’ Tom retorted. ‘There will always be the mindless gits out there who have no regard for anyone, and those are the ones who need sorting out. But this recession is turning normal decent law-abiding citizens into animals as well.’

‘All our Dr Jekylls are turning into Mr Hydes,’ Geoff commented, zipping up his training bag.

Tom continued. ‘But getting back to what I was saying, there are so many arrogant people out there now, the three of us I would love to go around cleaning up this town. Punishing all these bastards who have no respect for anything. Teach them respect, instil discipline back into society.’

‘Yeah, but what about the rest of the country, Wyatt Earp?’ Phil joked.

‘Yeah, OK, you can’t very well take on the whole country. I know that. But figuratively speaking, you can’t just check one bulb, you’ve gotta check them all.’

Geoff listened with interest.

‘Anyhow, sod the rest of the country!’ Tom growled. ‘Let each town or city look after their own, and we’ll look after our own.’

‘Yeah well, speaking of looking after one’s own, I’m out on the piss myself this weekend, so I may be relying on you to look after me.’ Phil said.

‘Oh, yes, got the weekend off have we?’ Geoff asked. ‘So what’s the occasion?’

‘Oh, the missus’s mate’s birthday, a few of us are going out for a bit of a pub crawl, that’s all.’

‘Yeah, we’ll keep a look out for you. For a small price,’ Tom joked zipping up his bag.

Geoff gave Phil the brow. ‘Yeah, well, just be careful. As a copper, I don’t need reminding you of the perils of late-night drinking.’

Phil picked up his backpack. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care.’

*

Friday night, Will was making his eagerly anticipated return to Stacey’s hotel. Talk about nervous, it felt like he was about to give birth to a baby elephant. After all, this was the moment of truth for him. For the last three years he had waited for this opportunity, and, in that time, he had gone through at least a hundred different scenarios of what might happen. Some turned out well, but most of them did not. Yet tonight, the atmosphere, the setting, seemed more welcoming, dark but not quite so chilly, and no hooligans festering in any of the prom shelters. Not at the present anyway.

Will tapped his duffel jacket pocket to make sure the new mobile phone he had bought that day was still in there. It was only a twenty quid pay-as-you-go Nokia. And the only reason he had bought the damn thing was that if things didn’t go quite as planned and Stacey wasn’t yet ready for a face to face, then at least she would be able to ring him. Maybe he was being a bit pessimistic, but at least he was preparing himself for the worst. Anything other than that could only be looked upon as a bonus.

Will checked his watch. Amazingly it was keeping the right time – he knew this because he had set it against his mobile earlier. Yeah, working now, aren’t you, he bristled, now you know you’ve got some competition.

It was eight pm, and once again he pressed the door-bell to the Birch Tree Hotel. For a moment, it felt like he was in a kind of vacuum. Nothing seemed able to penetrate that tiny space in the universe that he occupied. This was all completely new ground for him, and whatever may happen in the next few moments he had no control over whatsoever.

Nobody appeared to be answering. ‘Come on! Come on!’ He fidgeted anxiously. Was this a good or bad sign? She definitely knew he was coming. Was she punishing him by making him wait? Was she too nervous to answer the door? Did she still hate him?

At last, movement behind the frosted glass door; a shape, a short lumbering gait. Doesn’t look like Stacey, he thought. The door opened. It was Gary.

Will studied his face for any clue, any hint of encouragement, but his expression was a blank piece of paper.

‘She’s not in, Will. I’m sorry!’

Will’s body sagged. ‘Did she know I was coming?’

‘Yeah, I told her,‘ Gary replied, shifting uncomfortably from one foot to the other.

‘Doesn’t she even want to talk?’

‘She’s not ready to see you, Will. It was a bit of a shock when I told her you’d been, and the thought of you coming again so soon was a bit too much for her to handle.’

Will went out on a limb and sighed. ‘I’ll try one more time! Tell her we really need to talk. We can’t just leave it at that. I just need to know. I need to hear it from her lips. She owes me that at least.’

‘I know.’

‘Did she say anything else?’

Gary gave him an empty shake of the head.

Will reached into his pocket, and pulled out a piece of paper. ‘Can you give her this then? It’s my mobile number and the address where I’m staying.’

He handed it over to Gary who gave it a brief look before folding it over. ‘Course I will,’ he replied.

‘I’ll be staying here for another couple of weeks or so. Just got a few things to do, catch up with some old mates and that. Then I’ll be heading back to Warrington. Just to make it easier for her, if I haven’t heard from her in that time, she won’t ever have to worry about me turning up here again.”

Gary nodded that he understood, then Will offered his hand as if this might be the last time he would see him. Gary shook it, and watched Will walk away once again.

*

About a mile further up the north promenade, in a middle-class residential area stood the Washington public house. Inside the pub customers could either dine upstairs on the second floor, or enjoy a drink and a dance at the bar downstairs. Some nights, they even had Karaoke.

Phil, the off-duty police officer, lay a tray of drinks down on a table near the window and a quiet cheer rang out from his group. There were six in all, Phil and his wife, and two other couples, all of about the same age … fairly respectable folk, you might say.

‘I was just saying, Phil?’ Carol, Phil’s wife, shouted down his neck. She was a hefty woman in her thirties, who looked a bit like one of those seaside postcard fatties.

‘What’s that? He asked, straining his ears in the surrounding racket.

‘It’s not quite as bad where we are at the moment, probably because everyone knows you’re a copper. But Susan and Danny were saying that the anti-social behaviour is getting much worse where they live in the junction.’

‘Yeah,’ Phil nodded to them. ‘We’ve had quite a number of complaints from that area.”

Susan, a woman who strangely resembled a penguin with a slight arch to her features and a bit of a hook nose, chimed in, ‘these days you’re getting kids nine or ten years old throwing bottles at moving cars – absolutely disgusting behaviour.’ She gasped, then husband Danny, joined in.

‘And the parents are no better! If you happen to find out where the little sods live, and complain to their parents, all you get back is a mouthful of abuse. They make you feel as if you’re the criminal for accusing their precious child.’

In a hurry to get her words out, Carol almost choked on her vodka and tonic.

‘Is it any wonder all these kids grow up into yobs with parents like that? They just won’t accept responsibility for their own kids. It’s always someone else’s fault. They should damn well make these parents accountable. If they won’t discipline their kids, then fine them.

Phil tried to keep out of this debate. As a police officer, he knew the latest crime statistics only too well, and he was also aware what little could be done to combat it, especially with juvenile crimes.

An hour or so later, all six of them decided to make one last port of call, the Linx hotel. It was only a five minute walk, so they opted to get there on foot. Outside, Phil started to feel the effects from the six pints of ale he had consumed during the evening, and shook his head to try and dissolve the fuzziness. The route they chose was to turn off the prom, past the Broadway night club, straight on across the roundabout, and follow the road up to their destination. It wouldn’t take them very long, and the keen evening air would probably clear their heads somewhat.

Gaggling like geese, the ladies lead the way, and the men followed behind. Passing the nightclub, they scuttled across the road opposite the roundabout. Phil was gabbing to Danny about some leggy young woman he’d seen earlier in the Washington, when his mobile chirped in his trouser pocket. He stopped to see who the caller was, and saw Tom’s name. Phil told the others to walk on and he would catch them up.

‘Who is it?’ Carol enquired.

‘It’s OK, it’s only Tom the bouncer.’ He waved her on, and they left him to it.

As it happened, Tom was just calling to find out if they planned on going up town to the Wetherspoons? Because if they did, he wanted to warn him to be on the lookout as there were a lot of troublemakers out and about tonight. Phil told him not to worry as they were going home after the Linx hotel stop anyway. Phil ended the call with a laboured sigh, as a group of revellers from the nightclub breezed past him. He slipped his mobile back in his pocket and broke into a light jog to catch up to the others who were already down the other end of the road and out of sight. Overtaking the youths in front, he accidentally brushed the shoulder of one of the lads and quickly uttered a humble apology.

‘Yer clumsy git,’ he got back in reply.

Under normal circumstances, Phil would have simply brushed it off with a contemptuous shake of the head. Being a police officer, and regularly dealing with the general public, he was used to a bit of verbal every now and again. But maybe it was because of the alcohol, or the fact that at the moment, he was an aggrieved member of the public who didn’t deserve to be spoken to like that. He stopped to face the three lads in their early twenties, who were with two girls dressed up like hookers.

‘Pardon?’

‘You ‘erd.’

‘What’s the problem? It was an accident. I only brushed past and I said I was sorry, didn’t I, for Christ’s sakes.’ Phil turned away incensed by the yob’s arrogance. Ding, the ringing sound, and a brilliant white light. It took a second to realise he’d been hit. Phil spun around on unsteady legs, and saw the white shirt of one of the yobs, and smelt some exotic aftershave. His senses began to clear somewhat, and he began to protest, but when he did, his head rocked back with another blow. His back hit the tarmac, and his body started to get a right pummelling with kicks and punches. Phil instinctively tried to shield his head with his arms. His only remaining thoughts were that it felt like he was in a car tumbling over and over down a steep hill.

All three lads, and even one of the girls had a go at booting and stamping on Phil’s twitching body like they were trying to put out a fire. The sheer force of these blows shifted Phil’s body about six inches at a time. They kicked him everywhere, and when one of them hoofed him in the back, it gave out a hollow thud like the sound of snare drum.

One of the lads even took a step back as if he was lining up to take a free kick at a football. He aimed for Phil’s head, but the brunt of the kick was taken on the arms, although the impact still flipped Phil’s head up like a lid. Phil gave out a muffled ‘Humph’.

‘Oi!’ someone shouted.

The gang stopped as they saw three bouncers from the nightclub racing across the roundabout towards them. In panic, they left their prey, and fled down a side road. One of the bouncers stopped to tend to Phil, while the other two followed in pursuit of the yobs. There was no chance of catching the lads, but the bouncers soon caught up with the girls, who they quickly restrained and led kicking and screaming back to the scene of their crime.

Carol, Phil’s wife, and her friends were just about to cross the road to the Linx when they heard something of the commotion.

‘Where the hell is Phil?’ She frowned suspiciously, then she asked Danny and Rob to go back and check on him.

Minutes later, Carol and her friends were alerted to the full horror of what had happened. And after the paramedics had arrived to treat Phil, who was only semi-conscious, it was the turn of the police, who then gathered all the relevant statements. Of course when the two girls gave their versions, they both accused Phil of starting the fight, and to protect the identities of their boyfriends, they claimed they had only met them for the first time that evening.

Fortunately, one of the bouncers standing at this post on the doors of the nightclub had witnessed the white-shirted youth strike Phil first, and described how the rest of them proceeded to stick the boot in on Phil. This immediately refuted the girl’s false testimonies. After hearing this, Carol, Phil’s wife, tried to swing for one of the women for what she did to her husband and had to be restrained herself.

After everything had calmed down, Carol accompanied her husband to the hospital in the ambulance, and by the time they had reached A and E Phil was completely compos mentis. Unfortunately, that didn’t prevent him from puking buckets all over the interior of the ambulance. Thankfully though, the injuries he sustained weren’t serious, and he was just treated for minor cuts and some facial swelling, but for the rest of the night he would be nursing a thunderous headache. Lucky for him the bouncers intervened, or it could have been much worse.

*

Next morning, Geoff was pottering about in his garage trying to hunt down a tin of old emulsion to touch up his living room door. In between stubbing his toe on the lawnmower and knocking over some boxes, the theme tune to Mission Impossible chirped in his trouser pocket. Geoff took out his mobile and saw Tom’s name. He made an odd face and answered it. ‘Hello, Tom. To what do I owe this pleasure?’

Tom’s voice seemed somewhat highly pitched. ‘Have you heard from Phil yet?’

‘No, I haven’t. Why?’

‘He got a bit of a kicking last night.’

Geoff’s stomach churned. ‘No! What happened?’

‘Apparently he was on his way to the Linx when these bastards started on him.’

‘Is he alright?’

‘Yeah, spoke to him this morning. He’s just got a bit of a shiner and a swollen jaw. It could have been much worse though.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘A few of my bouncer mates, witnessed it from the Broadway, and they rushed over to help cause he was getting a right pasting. Even the girls were getting stuck in.’

Geoff’s head shook with anger and contempt. ‘What the hell did Phil do to deserve that?’

‘All he did was accidentally brush past one the lads and that was it. Bastards!’

‘What is the matter with these people?’ Geoff growled.

‘Well, the bouncers who went after them managed to catch the two girls, but the lads got away.’

‘So what about the police, were they called?’

‘Oh, yeah, police and ambulance, but when the two girls were questioned they tried to protect the lads, didn’t they.’

‘Oh, yeah, I bet, so the police can’t do anything about it, I suppose?’

‘Police? No, probably not, but I know someone who can.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘My mate, Charlie the bouncer, knows who these three lads are they pop into the Boulevards every Friday without fail. They’re well known for putting people in hospital. They even batter women as well. Really nasty pieces of work.’

Geoff sensed what was coming next, and the cocktail of fear, anger and adrenalin began to simmer in his stomach.

‘It’s got to be done, Geoff, an eye for an eye. Do unto others as they do unto you. The time has come to strike back and clean up. What do you think? Are you in?’

At first Geoff was numbed by the fear of a fight. That sudden rush of pure undiluted adrenalin that courses through the body, powering it ready for battle, or revving it up to do just the opposite – run for your life. Most psychologists call it the fight-or-flight syndrome.

‘Me, you, and Charlie and Nigel. Next Friday. Wait outside the Boulevards in a car. Are you in?’

Despite the fact that this breached the code of ethics held sacred to a martial artist, Geoff knew this was something he couldn’t refuse. No way could he let the side down, or more importantly Phil, his friend and student. If he was to refuse this task, how could he ever expect any of his students to have any faith or respect for a sensei who wouldn’t fight for the right?

‘Geoff, are you in?’ Tom repeated, and the reply simply rolled out of Geoff’s mouth as if he didn’t have any choice.

‘I’m in!’