Chapter Seven
The air nipped at my cheeks as I stepped out through the sliding doors of A&E, and for a moment I stopped.
The smokers and vapers were in their usual places, clouds forming around them as much from conversation as the contraptions and sticks of death they put between their lips.
Even from this distance the smell always hit hard. A mix of memories, good and bad.
“Dr Mercer?” The man in the thick black jacket stepped from the hut at the front of the building.
The security guard greeted me for the third night as I stepped outside. The lights behind me caught in the reflective strips on his chest, the NHS sign on one side almost glowing in contrast where it sat over his left lapel. I nodded in acknowledgement.
“I’ll watch you to your car,” he mumbled, his voice low and thick.
“Thank you,” I started. “You know it’s not necessary. I can manage.”
“I know, Doc. But we’ve been instructed to escort you when it’s dark.”
The same response as last night, and the nights before that. I hadn’t reported the incident. Partly because I couldn’t face the paperwork. But also because something else had my attention.
The days after I saw Ryan had blurred together in a way I didn’t like. Nothing dramatic happened. No mistakes. No complaints. I didn’t miss a diagnosis or forget a drug chart. I turned up on time, drank bad coffee, did my job. On paper, everything was fine. But my concentration frayed at the edges.
I kept thinking of the way he’d said my name. Not Sophie. Not Doctor. Grey. Like it still belonged to me. Like it hadn’t been buried under a decade of rotas and responsibility and learning how to stand very still while everything inside you shook.
“Dr Mercer?” The voice beside me came again, piercing through the whirl of emotions and memories that cycled incessantly through my brain.
“I… I’m just over here,” I pointed behind him. To the back of the car park and the last remaining space I’d squeezed into, taking half a hedge with me.
I was on late shifts all week. Officially, anyway. The rota had shifted. A swap, a favour owed, a quiet reshuffle that happens all the time in A&E. It meant I finished just before eleven instead of drifting out sometime after midnight. And that was what I’d told myself when I didn’t see him again.
After thirteen years, seeing him, a different him, had rattled me.
Why I thought he’d turn up here again, I had no idea.
Some part of my brain wanted that moment the other night to mean something.
Not just coincidence. Another part of me wanted answers.
Thirteen years ago, he’d vanished. I’d waited for him for hours, watching out of my bedroom window, searching for the lop-sided headlights of his little motorbike coming down my street.
But that night he never came. And I never heard from him again.
The man walking beside me slowed. My car just a few strides in front of us.
“Thank you,” I said automatically, gazing around and realising I’d had no recollection of the last few footsteps.
He waited while I took my keys out of my backpack. Stood quietly as I pressed the button on the fob and the car lights flashed, deep orange falling amongst the shadows. Waited, as the engine started and the headlights lit up the tarmac in front of me.
My eyes searched the billowing darkness, tracking any movement, scouring for anyone hidden in the night.
The security guard stood still, not moving until I’d pulled away, his fluorescent strips pink in my taillights.
I tracked the entrance doors as I drove.
The security desk. The glass entrance. The blur of movement beyond the lights.
Every night, the same flicker of anticipation followed by the same hollow drop.
He wasn’t there.
*****
The trees standing sentry on either side of the road were still bare.
Tiny green buds swelling on skeletal branches.
Not enough to brighten the dark brown of the bark.
But enough that the first sign of better weather was on the way.
It had drizzled this morning. Again. A fine mist coated the road, glistening on top of parked cars that hadn’t moved for days.
I’d expected some change when I came home.
Something different. But in this street time had stood still.
Apart from the cars. Nearly every one of them was electric.
Tucked up on drives, life-source cables plugged in while a circle of blue neon light lit up the wall.
Teslas mostly, like someone had got a bulk deal.
I drove to the end of the road, to where I couldn’t drive any further.
It wasn’t coincidence that my parents had bought the house at the top of the cul-de-sac.
My dad’s vantage point. It was slightly uphill, and from there he could watch down the street, see who was coming and going. And no one could come from behind.
I parked my car across the drive, blocking in the Audi.
He wouldn’t be going anywhere yet, anyway.
The Audi wasn’t electric. And that was typical.
Because following the crowd was senseless in his eyes.
The only conforming he did was to the law and service.
Everything else was on his terms and his terms alone.
And that was going to be exactly the same with the cup of tea he would make me and that I would drink like I enjoyed it. Even though I preferred coffee.
“You’re late today, Soph,” he called from the armchair, dropping his newspaper just enough that he could peer over the top of it to look at me.
Even his favourite seat looked out down the road.
The chair had never moved. The carpet had been replaced around it many times but was still flattened at his feet.
I knew when he got up the seat would be sagging and soft.
The sofa on the dividing wall was as tight and pristine as when he bought it five years ago.
“I had a lie-in. Lots of extra shifts this week with the junior doctors’ strike.”
I watched him roll his eyes, then fold his paper.
He stood, saying nothing, moving past me and down the hall.
He didn’t need to give an instruction for me to know I needed to follow him.
The kettle didn’t take long to boil. He’d have been pushing down that switch every twenty minutes for the last hour.
I was only half an hour late, but in my father’s book, if you weren’t ahead of time, you were late anyway.
I inhaled. The house still smelled the same. Furniture polish and toast and the faint, permanent trace of cigarette smoke baked into the walls from a lifetime ago. He made tea. Two sugars in mine. He never forgot that.
We talked about nothing at first. The weather. His neighbour’s new fence. A burglary two streets over that he was certain the police had already fucked up. I let him fill the silence while I gathered my nerve.
“You’re going to see your mother today?” he asked casually.
He never said her name in front of me anymore. It was like she didn’t exist. Just an entity. I knew it was just his way of coping, that she no longer remembered him. That she would shrink from any approach from him.
“Yeah. Later.”
I would later. When I picked up the courage to get to the care home and go through all my introductions again. Dad visited her every day. And every day she didn’t know who he was. They’d been childhood sweethearts, though she was a couple of years older. But she was still too young for this.
“I had a patient the other night,” I said eventually, the subject now easier to change. “Biker.”
He stilled. Not much. Just enough that I caught it. The mug ascending to his lips taking a half second longer than normal.
“Yeah?” he said carefully.
“He was… part of a club. Northern Kings.”
Dad took a slow sip of his tea. I could see him thinking. But there were no tells. No furrow of his brow, no tick of a lip. A perfect poker face. His old work colleagues had joked that was why he’d made so many crack and confess. He was too calm. Too stoic.
“Dog on the Tyne,” he said, almost to himself. “Back of the Saltmeadows estate.”
He nodded once, as if confirming something already known. When he looked at me, his expression had shifted. Not angry, just watchful.
“They’re not your world, Soph,” he said. It wasn’t unkind. Or even patronising. Just final. “And they don’t come out of it clean.”
“I know,” I said too quickly.
His eyes stayed on mine. Measuring. “If one of them is sniffing round you,” he added, “you shut it down.”
I nodded. Of course I did.
Yet those words echoed in my head. Not a warning. A challenge. And for the first time since I’d said his name out loud, I stopped pretending I wasn’t already halfway in.
I wrapped my hands around the mug, heat seeping into my palms, playing my next move carefully.
“Dad… do you know anything about motorcycle clubs these days?”
He had in the past. For a few years, it had become an obsession. He knew every club. And the hierarchy in those clubs. He was diligent. Committed.
“Depends,” he said carefully. “Why?”
I shrugged, too casual. “We’ve had a few in A&E. Different patches. Same night. Felt… off.”
He hadn’t missed that, and now he searched my face.
“They bring trouble with them,” he said. “Always have.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
A corner of his mouth twitched. Irritated. I’d been too bold.
“You don’t need to worry about it,” he added.
My chest tightened. “Funny. You’ve always said if something doesn’t add up, that’s when you worry.”
Silence stretched between us. Thick. Weighted.
“Who was he?” he asked suddenly.
My heart stuttered. “Who?”
“The one you’re thinking about.” His gaze didn’t leave my face now. “You don’t ask about clubs unless someone made you look twice.”
I swallowed. “Just… a patient. Someone who caught my eye.”
That should’ve been the end of it.
“Be careful, Soph,” he said quietly. “Men like that don’t just reappear for nothing.”
The air left my lungs. Reappear. Men like that. Not people. Not bikers. Not patients. Men like that.
“I haven’t even described him to you,” I said. “You don’t know what sort of man he is.”
“Did he have a cut? A patch on the back? Top and bottom rockers?” He stared at me. I nodded. “Then I know enough.”
*****
The road behind the industrial estate was riddled with potholes, and I swerved as many as I could. The Mercedes crunched and lurched sideways as the tarmac crumbled away, and there was no way of missing that one.
“Fuck,” I breathed, scrunching my eyes shut for a moment and questioning why I’d decided this was a good idea.
It wasn’t. I’d known that the moment it had formed in my mind as I sat watching my mum stare at me blankly for the last hour. And maybe that was what this idea had been. Some way back to the past.
I’d never seen their clubhouse all those years ago. Ryan had never taken me there. I’d never seen any of his bike club members other than that friend he’d had, and his name I couldn’t remember.
Further down the road, the tarmac smoothed and trees lined either side like skeletal sentries in the dark, dull orange streetlights casting their shadows on the ground, twisted and angry.
The pub came into view, and I slowed the car to a crawl.
The sign was lit in a warm glow, soft, contradicting the men inside.
I knew bike clubs. My dad had talked about them all the time when I was young.
About what they were doing and how dangerous they were.
I’d been frightened the day Ryan had told me he was hanging around with an MC.
The car park to the side was packed. Cars. Bikes. A big purple pick-up truck. Some sort of function. Maybe a party. Light seeped out through the windows, but just around the edges, escaping as if whatever was going on inside was intense. Dangerous.
Dangerous. That’s what my father had always told me.
They don’t look dangerous because they’re angry, he’d said once, voice low, deliberate. They look dangerous because they’re organised.
And every bike in the car park was organised. Front ends facing outwards, back wheels pulled up almost to the side wall of the pub. Helmets hung on handlebars. The line went on and on. I’d need to get closer to see how many there were. But easily fifteen from this angle.
I sat there with my foot resting on the brake, engine ticking softly beneath me, watching silhouettes move behind the glass. Music flared and died. A door opened briefly, spilling noise and light, then sealed again.
Anyone can throw a punch. Clubs plan.
My fingers tightened on the steering wheel. I hadn’t even realised I’d done it.
They don’t drag you in, he’d warned. They let you step closer on your own.
And here I was. Close. Too close to something I knew nothing about. The pace of my heart elevated, a dull rhythmical thud at the bottom of my chest, vibrating through my diaphragm.
The ones smiling aren’t the ones you need to watch, my dad’s voice echoed. It’s the quiet ones by the door.
I glanced at the door. Nobody there. The lights over the sign didn’t reach the entrance, instead it was hidden in darkness.
Unwelcoming. Foreboding. I scanned the edges without meaning to.
Staring into the shadows. The stillness.
The way nothing here felt accidental. Black silhouettes moved inside, spectres of shapes, and yet, for the number of vehicles parked up in the car park and lining the crumbling road, there wasn’t a single person around.
And still, I felt like there were eyes on me. Like I was being watched.
Cameras. My eyes scanned over dark brick walls. One, two, three, more. Tiny red dots piercing the dark. The only sign of anyone watching.
If you ever feel watched around them, he’d said, almost gently, you probably are.
A chill slipped down my spine. I exhaled slowly, forcing my grip to loosen, telling myself I was being ridiculous.
A sharp tap.
My car lurched forwards, my fingers gripped the steering wheel, and for a second, I couldn’t remember where I was. Then I pushed my foot down on the brake, before the Mercedes rolled any further down the bank.