The Hollow

There was an empty space across the street where the girl once stood. It wasn't a particularly interesting piece of pavement, squeezed between a pub and a betting shop, sticky with old chewing gum and cigarette butts. An ordinary London street. It had been the girl who'd made the space beautiful, but now she was gone and the pavement was just a pavement again.

Every day for a year she'd stood there, raven curls protected from the rain by a yellow knitted hat, her slim figure wrapped in an army coat two sizes too big. She'd played her guitar for money. From mid-morning to mid-afternoon, the sounds of Flamenco filled the narrow street and Vadis, sitting outside his favourite coffee shop had listened and dreamed. There was a tube station a few hundred feet away and he'd wondered at first why she didn't play there, but commuters lived in a world of their own, with their headphones and their distant stares. Her music was wasted on them. The drunks and the gamblers were her audience instead, unlikely appreciators of the sublime.

No-one knew her name. He'd asked around but no-one could recall talking to her. She was just the girl with the guitar, the girl with green eyes, the girl whose mystery had captivated him. Perhaps she didn't speak English. On the few occasions Vadis had plucked up the courage to cross the street and drop a few coins into her guitar case, she'd merely smiled shyly and played on. It was a smile he would have emptied his bank account for. He'd followed her home one evening. Even in a London crowd she was easy to track for a man with his skills. Her guitar case, strapped to her back, bobbed back and forth as she dodged through the crowds. Her hat acted as a beacon in the winter twilight. He'd been curious to know where she lived. Even the generosity of betting shop winners couldn't be enough to pay rent, not anywhere safe, not in London. He'd been right. A neglected squat above an abandoned car salesroom had been the roof over her head, a sullen group of pasty faced teenagers her only company. There was no lover, no man waiting for her to come home.

He'd wanted to take her away, out of this dull inner city to another place he knew, where the grapes grew heavy on the vines and the evening air was laced with the scent of jasmine. She would have liked it there, he thought. He should have told her as much, but how could he? He was forty-eight; she was no more than twenty. The awkwardness of adolescence still lingered in her movements. He was greying, scarred, no longer the toned youth of his army days. She would have been appalled, slapped his face, called him a dirty old man in whatever language she spoke. So instead of talking to her he'd returned to work, taking a job in Hong Kong. The Asians were not his favourite clients but it was an easy hit for silly money and he'd hoped that time and distance would bring him back to his senses. He didn't think that the space on the pavement might be empty when he returned. He hadn't expected the rage that had boiled up with the news of her murder.

"Her funeral is tomorrow." Vadis had not noticed Michel arrive at his table. The bill he'd asked for five minutes ago was clasped in the café owner's hand.

"Will you be going?" Vadis asked.

Michel pursed his lips and nodded.

"You?"

"I have to leave tonight. Moscow. Business."

Michel grunted. Vadis despised himself and said nothing. A van sped past, whipping up the street litter in its wake. The breeze ruffled the pages of the newspaper anchored beneath his coffee cup.

"Scum," Michel spat at the story on the front page. "We're better off without them."

It hadn't taken Vadis long to track him down, the man who'd killed the girl. The people who knew the truth didn't talk to the police, but a few banknotes slipped in to the right pockets and he'd had the answer within hours.

Now that man was just another dead street thug. He'd had it coming. That was what the police thought. They didn't realise the connection to the girl with the guitar. Vadis had found the instrument under the young man's filthy bed and had taken it home. It was all he had left and the police wouldn't need it. They wouldn't be wasting too much time on their investigation anyway. The dead man was a drug dealer and a thief. A mugger of vulnerable young women, walking home alone. Like Michel said, they were better off without his kind.

Vadis got to his feet, wincing at the pain in his ribs. He was getting old, slowing down, and the young man had got in one good punch before Vadis had regained control of the situation. The fracture would heal badly but he would live with the discomfort. It would be a reminder of his vengeance, of the look of terror in his victim's eyes as he'd gutted him.

"Why are you surprised?" Vadis had hissed into the man's ear as the blood welled over his gloved hand. "Did you think no-one would care?"

Yes, the pain in his chest would match the hollow in his heart where the girl once stood and played Flamenco. Ignoring the bill for his coffee, he dug a twenty pound note from his wallet and pressed it in to Michel's hand.

"Buy something for your grandson," he said. 

Michel folded the note neatly into his apron. "And flowers? For her?"

"Yes," Vadis agreed. "I think she would have liked jasmine."