Strangers Read Online Free Page B

which was one of Greater Manchester’s most deprived boroughs. It had been constructed in the 1950s, along with the rest of the district’s many council estates, though this was one of the largest, having been built on extensive brownfield land – a site formerly occupied by the long defunct Manchester Railway Company – and in so many ways it embodied the decline of the council housing dream in post-war Britain.
    Brand-new, spacious living accommodation for Crowley’s working class had soon turned sour for its residents as they’d found themselves isolated from the town centre and other amenities, and often from jobs. More to the point, this new community was broken from the outset, as its members had already sacrificed the old social networks they’d formerly built up in order to move. Follow that with decades of neglect, the gradual deterioration of cheaply built properties due to their having exceeded their expected lifetimes, and the increased and often twin ravages of drugs and crime, and you were left with a truly depressing environment. Years later, even with right-to-buy in force, Hatchwood Green still had the aura of desolation and menace.

    To PC Lucy Clayburn’s jaundiced eye – and she couldn’t help but see it this way as a copper – there was something inherently soul-destroying about these immense, sprawling housing estates: all the domiciles built from the same red brick, their doors existing in repeating patterns of pale blue, pale red or pale yellow; the patches of grass between them boasting no other distinguishing features – no trees, no bushes, no flowerbeds – though they occasionally hosted the relics of kiddies’ playgrounds. And of course, when they had dropped into disrepair, as this one had, with dilapidated housing and broken fences, their inhospitable aura reached a new low.
    So it was with the usual air of stoic boredom that, one Wednesday night, she and PC Malcolm Peabody, the twenty-year-old probationer she’d been puppy-walking for the past couple of months, drove their liveried BMW saloon onto the Hatchwood, to attend 24 Clapgate Road in response to a reported domestic.
    This house was in no better or worse state than those around it: a small front garden, which was mainly a trash heap (though it hadn’t used to be, Lucy recalled), a rotted gate hanging from its hinges and thick tufts of weed growing through the lopsided paving along the front path. They could hear the hubbub inside as soon as they pulled up. When they actually entered – the house’s front door having opened immediately to Lucy’s firm, no-nonsense knock – the interior looked as if a bomb had hit it, though it was difficult to tell whether this was a new mess or just the usual one. Dingy wallpaper and mouldering carpets implied the latter, but it was hard to make out whether the bits of strewn underwear, or the beer tins, dog-ends and other foul bric-a-brac, were recent additions. The atmosphere, of course, was rancid: a mingled fetor of sweat, cigarettes, booze and ketchup – which was sad as well as sickening, Lucy thought, because again, that hadn’t always been the case at this address.

    The occupants were Rob and Dora Hallam, he a displaced and unemployed Welshman, she a local lass who’d recently been sacked from her supermarket job for being light-fingered. They were both in their late thirties, though they looked older: ratty-haired, sallow-faced, gap-toothed. Rob Hallam was short, stumpy and overweight, Dora thin to the point of emaciation, her facial features sunken as though the very bone structure was decaying. At present he was wearing Y-fronts, a vest and a pair of dirty socks. She was in flip-flops, pyjama bottoms and a Manchester United shirt.
    Both were streaming blood, Rob from a split eyebrow and gouged left cheek, Dora from a burst nose, which as she sniffled into a handkerchief, continued to discharge itself in a constant succession of sticky crimson bubbles.
    The main set-to