Lose this Skin

Roscoe had been shot as he had stepped out of the Echo Barn, one of his favorite bars on Chalk Farm Road, the main road that led from Camden Town up to Hampstead and all points north. He had decided to call in for a drink and a spot of lunch before heading off to see his father down in Camden Town. It had been a warm afternoon and, like most of the other bars and cafés on the street, the Echo Barn had tables in front of the premises to catch the lunch trade. But Roscoe had gone inside where the bar had been quiet, and he had spent the time chatting to the barman, a student at UCL who thumped the drums in a band that rehearsed in the basement, about the bands he had seen at the Borderline the night before. Roscoe had eaten a plate of pasta and drunk a couple of beers to help ease the tension that always appeared in his shoulders whenever he planned to visit his old man. Just before one o’clock he had drained the last of his beer and stepped out onto the pavement, pulling up short at the sudden flash of brilliant sunshine that bounced from the side of the Roundhouse across the street. He had raised a hand to shield his eyes, and that’s when the blue Metro had cut out from the line of traffic in front of him and screeched to a halt at the kerb. He had not reacted at first, but then a white face and a gun had been thrust out of the back window, and on blind instinct he had tried to turn and run back into the bar. But the shooter had fired before his limbs could react, and the bullet had punched a hole through his ankle, dropping him to the ground as sure as if it had pierced his heart. Three more shots had been fired in rapid succession, but the gunman had panicked after the first one and the bullets had ended up buried in the stone front of the building beside the Echo Barn.

Three detectives from Camden Town CID had been put on the case as soon as the call came into the station, and within a couple of hours one of them had come up with a piece of CCTV footage from outside a bar fifty yards up the street from where the shooting had taken place. The tape had been of poor quality. One of the barmen explained that although the tapes were rotated on a weekly basis, the same tapes had been in use for almost three years. Most of the faces had been little more than monochrome sketches, but later, from the brittle depths of sedation in his hospital bed, Roscoe had been able to make out the shooter’s car as it had parked outside the bar and a man in a baseball cap had climbed into the back seat. He could not be sure about the slice of face on the tape, but the profile was familiar. The clock in the top corner of the screen read 12:43 p.m., ten minutes before the incident. The boffins had been able to unscramble the tape and make out the registration number, but it turned out the car had been reported stolen from an office block in Harlesden earlier that morning and was found burned out in a car park at the back of Euston Station later the same night.

After the operation, Roscoe had spent two weeks flat on his back in the hospital, another two months up to his knee in plaster, housebound, and then a further three months on crutches. It had been just two weeks since he had been able to put aside the crutches and walk unaided, albeit with a strong limp, and he still felt the occasional shot of pain and a stiffness in his ankle. It had been a difficult time for him, and back at home he had become more and more withdrawn. As a natural loner, the close friendships of his twenties and thirties had long since foundered as those friends had drifted into marriage and parenthood, their hours and habits at odds with a single man working strange shifts that cut across the hours of darkness and light. It had been some time since he had been in a relationship, and all that remained of his blood relations was his father, Jack Roscoe, and an elder brother, Phil, who came and went on an unpredictable tide. Roscoe had never been able to work out the reason his father felt the need to keep everyone at arm’s length, but he had always been that way, even with his own family, and his lukewarm response to the attack on his son had done nothing to bridge that gap.

When the small squad turned up no other significant leads, and the last of the three detectives had been taken off the case a month after the incident, the Chief Constable had sent out a car and called Roscoe into his office. Told him that he could no longer authorise the use of personnel, but if Roscoe had the strength and the inclination, he could continue to look into the case himself and make use of all the facilities he needed. And so Roscoe had sat at the scarred oak table he had purchased in Camden Market, his plaster-encased foot balanced on a mountain of cushions, and put in serious time on old paper files, computer disks, and his own personal notebooks. He had asked a couple of his colleagues at the station, Sam Fletcher and Brian Dineen, to help out and, despite an initial reluctance on their part, in the end both had provided valuable and discreet legwork on his behalf. He had been grateful for their help, but he had not seen either of them for a few weeks apart from the time Fletcher had called and asked him for his help on a case he was working—a drug dealer who had been pushed from the roof of a building on the Castle Estate—and he was starting to feel isolated. And so far each lead that had been unearthed turned out to be no more than another dead end.

His instincts told him that he would find his assailant buried in the files stacked beside the TV in his front room; he just had to take the time and look deeper into it. Or perhaps he just needed to take a break and then come back to it fresh. But the fact that he had so far come up blank filled Roscoe with a deep sense of fear and apprehension. The shooting had altered him, made him more focused, less patient. In the past, he had lived for the most part in some emotional place buried deep inside himself, but now he lived out there on his skin, susceptible to all the vibrations that London had to offer. He could see the difference, too, and most of the time he was able to keep it in check. But in his darkest hours he knew that a fundamental part of him had been destroyed, and to balance the equation he needed to destroy a part of someone else.

* * * * *

Roscoe left the hospital and stepped out onto the street, headed up past the car park to Haverstock Hill. Dark clouds had bunched in from across the heath, and he could smell rain on the air. He turned up his collar and pushed his hands deep into the pockets of his jacket. The rumble of dance music leaked from a dark red Taurus stuck in the traffic on the far side of the street, and the crackle of talk show DJs that streamed from the open windows of black cabs sounded like a roomful of drunken strangers.

Roscoe looked around as he strolled down the hill, past the restaurants and the print shop, Starbucks and the florists, and found himself projecting the blurred mask of his assailant onto the faces of the people that he passed: a tall black kid in a hooded anorak; a bloated drunk on a bench, a can of cider clenched in his fist; a kid in a denim jacket and jeans that chafed around his knees, fat trainers that trailed black laces.

On the far side of the street stood the old Hampstead Town Hall. Long abandoned, it had now been restored into an arts centre. He remembered an occasion before the restoration when he had been called to the rear of the building after the corpse of a woman in her late forties had been found there. She had been beaten about the head and her left hand had been hacked off. After the killer had been tracked to a flat in the cheap end of Highgate, Roscoe had been sent out to pick him up, and the man had threatened to hack his balls off with a kitchen knife. The man had repeated the threat when he was sentenced to ten to fifteen in Belmarsh. Roscoe strode on, nearing the tube station, and crossed the path that led to a small council estate, a pair of tennis courts, and the reclaimed nature reserve that backed onto the Isokon flats on Lawn Road. Some summers back, a charred corpse had been found dumped in the long grass on the reserve. A couple of teenagers had robbed a man of his cash and credit cards as he had stepped out of the tube station one afternoon, and when he had threatened to call the police, the kids had forced him into the shadows at the side of the station, knocked him unconscious, pulled him into the woods, and set him on fire.

Roscoe had suffered these flashes of past violence a thousand times since he had first joined the force, and for the most part they had never bothered him in the slightest. But since his shooting, he had started to look at them afresh, almost as if they had become premonitions of his own violent end, as if his own death could be just as random, pointless, and premature.

Any one of these, he told himself as he looked once more into the faces of the people that he passed, any one of these.

© Jerry Sykes 2007 All Rights Reserved

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