Shooting in the Dark

would you promise to go away for ever? Walk off down the street and go ruin someone else’s life?’
    He smiled. ‘Here we go,’ he said. ‘Now we’re getting round to it. I knew you was interested.’
    ‘Would you? Go away?’
    ‘Maybe you’d want me to stick around, after you’ve had a sample.’
    ‘I’d want you to go away. That’s the whole idea.’
    He leaned back in the chair, stretched his legs out in front of him. ‘I’m sure we can come to some arrangement, darlin’. When was you thinking? Only I’m fairly busy today.’
    ‘Don’t worry,’ she told him, ‘it probably won’t take long.’ She watched him turn it over in his mind, but in the end he let it go. It sailed on past him. Ralph was all kinds of things, but he wasn’t an intellectual heavyweight.
    She’d do it, too. If she thought for one moment that she could trust him, she’d do just about anything to get her life back to normal. But Ralph would promise anything if he thought he’d get something out of it. After she’d done the deed with him he’d still be around, and he’d be expecting more.
    When she came back to it a second time, the thought of him fumbling his way around her body brought the taste of vomit into her mouth. She wondered if she’d ever be able to wash him off her skin, if for the rest of her life she would have recurring visions of the time she screwed
    Geordie’s brother to get him out of their lives. And she knew there must be another way. And she knew that she’d known that all along, only she still didn’t know what it was.
    Watch him, she thought. That’s all you can do. Track him. Dog his every footstep. Make sure there’s no area of his life that he can call his own.
    The trouble with keeping Ralph under surveillance was that he didn’t do anything. He collected his social security, he sat in various pubs, trying his luck with the barmaids; did a round of low-life cafés where he worked on the waitresses or any lone females who happened along. Sometimes he got lucky and was invited to a girl’s flat, the two of them with their arms wrapped around each other, their brains addled with vodka. Once he spent the afternoon in the Museum Gardens with a couple of truants, girls of no more than thirteen. He split a bottle with them before taking them into a derelict building down by the river.
    It was that day, when he was with the two truants, that Janet noticed the other guy. She’d been aware of him for some time, out of the corner of her eye, but had not completely registered him. When she’d followed Ralph into the park the guy had stationed himself outside the doors of the museum, the huge neo-classical facade of the building rendering him almost invisible.
    Later, she remembered seeing him sitting on a bench quite close to Ralph and the two girls when they were getting into the bottle of vodka. He was reading a book, raising his eyes occasionally to check they were still there. A rent-a-drool expression on his face.
    Another day he appeared again, this time in Whip-ma-Whop-ma-Gate. The street was named after the activity of whipping petty criminals in the Middle Ages, and Janet thought it was somehow right that she should be watching Geordie’s brother here. Ralph had been drinking heavily that day and had come to a stop by the cycle park. He was checking his way through the bikes, seeing if there were any easy pickings. The other guy came out of St Saviourgate and stood by the telephone box with his hands in his pockets. He watched Ralph and Janet saw him shake his head from side to side.
    Ralph’s life was like his chat-up lines: sad and boring and getting him nowhere. But what Janet did discover while she followed him around was that she was not the only one on his tail. Someone else was watching Ralph.
    The man was tall with fair hair, looked like a sportsman. Obviously fit but not muscular, the kind who would play cricket rather than football or rugby. The strange thing about him was that he looked perfectly respectable. His hair was short and neatly cropped and he wore a fresh shirt and tie under a two-piece suit. His overcoat looked like a Crombie or a good copy. Janet couldn’t understand it. If someone was watching Ralph, she would have thought it was because Ralph had ripped him off - a guy from the same side of the tracks as Ralph, petty criminal, or someone with gang connections. Maybe Ralph’s sticky fingers had upset some kind of drug syndicate and they were looking for