Pierce watched shards of colour spread
across the café tabletop as he pushed and prodded his glass through
small puddles of spilt beer. The prismatic colour was weirdly at odds
with the cracked varnish and swollen beer-stained wood of the table.
Light and dark. Two sides of a coin. A chance meeting. Fate.
Condensation was pooling into rivulets
on the cracked café windowpane by his elbow and flowing down like
tears. Perhaps, he thought, it was weeping for the crime of allowing
light to spill out into the darkness.
“Hi, Pierce, thought I’d find you
here. How’re you doing?”
Pierce looked up at the young woman
pulling a chair from his table and making herself comfortable. She
threw her coat over the chair and sat down, hitting him full in the
face with ‘that’ look.
“Hi Connie. Take a seat why don’t
you. You haven’t changed a bit.”
“Hey, I’ve missed you too,
sweetheart.”
“You want a drink?”
“Sure, Pierce - why not?”
“Beer?”
“Jesus. A glass of wine, I think.”
Pierce shrugged and brought the drinks
over, placing them carefully in the dry spots between the puddles on
the table.
“You never called me, Pierce.”
“Was I supposed to?”
Connie shrugged and sipped her wine
before answering.
“Hey, you weren’t under no orders,
but I would’ve appreciated it.”
“Hell, I was going to, and I
would’ve,” Pierce hesitated, waving a hand towards the darkness
outside and the bridge spanning the Thames, “after tonight.”
Connie sighed. “Listen, you dick,
you’ve been inside for four years and the first thing you do is
come back here.”
“How could I not?”
Connie stared at him without much
sympathy. Pierce closed his eyes; the memory of a young face smiling
up at him, innocently taking his hand. Just thirteen. She had trusted
him. That trust was severed. Killed within the shadows beneath that
bridge. Her last glimpse of her once carefree life the mad glow in
the eyes of her rapist, bathed in the light of a crummy café. This
café.
“Pierce!”
Connie’s voice snapped him back from
his thoughts.
“You have to break this obsession,
Pierce.”
“I don’t think I can.”
“Stop this, Pierce. Right now. You do
anything again and they’ll throw away the key.”
“I can’t help myself, Connie. You
know that. I have to look for them. I can recognise them.”
Pierce stared at Connie, desperate for
some understanding. Her expression was hard, but at least she hadn’t
walked out on him. Yet.
Connie was special. They had some
shared kinship. She was one of the many girls who earned their living
from this very bridge. Not many things shocked Connie. At first she
had tried to entice him, considering him a potential punter as he
wandered the area where she worked. Then she had ignored him. But
gradually she discovered what drove him. Then she began to help him.
They became friends. Then lovers.
Pierce buried his face in his hands as
images again flared into his mind. A terrified girl pleading as
brutal hands beat her into submission, using her cruelly.
Connie drew his hands away from his
face.
“Come home with me, now. Leave this
place. Let me help you.”
Pierce snorted. “They tried to help
in stir, but what can they do? What do they really know? Nothing.”
“You did what you had to, Pierce. I
know that. We all do what we have to.”
Pierce slumped back in his chair and
stared out towards the bridge and nodded.
A silence built between them. He
wondered if Connie would wait, or lose patience and walk out. He
wouldn’t blame her. Part of him even wanted her to walk. But Connie
reached over and touched him and Pierce felt her warmth infuse him.
Watching slender fingers entwined with his, Pierce found he could
appreciate the beauty of what he saw. He looked up at her.
“What’s going on beneath that
bridge right now, Connie?”
“You can’t stop it happening again,
Pierce. You can’t be everywhere.”
“She was so young, Connie. Nobody
deserves that. She trusted me. Where was I when he took her? Why
wasn’t I there to stop it happening?”
“But you caught the bastard. Those
months you spent watching for him eventually paid off. Yes, they sent
you down, but it was all they could do in the circumstances. Do it
again, and you’ll go down big time. And you might be wrong the next
time. Come on, come home with me. The world can do with one less
vigilante on the streets tonight.”
Pierce downed his beer and put the
empty glass down in the middle of the largest puddle. He nodded
almost imperceptibly. They left the café, the darkness and the
bridge behind.
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