I left the party shortly after one o’clock. Anne and Angus were dancing to "Thank you for the music" and it was obvious that the other guests were all planning to happily outstay their welcome, even the ones with proper jobs to go to in the morning. William and Hannah saw me out and as the door closed behind them it was like a door closing on a glimpse into my life as it might have been. A life of company cars, wine bars and office gossip; flats in town and weekends in the country. In to the office by 8:00 o’clock, and home in time to kiss the kids good night. A parallel life, one that I had always known could have existed but that I had never been forced to confront before.

I turned away. It was a beautiful September night. A warm, almost Mediterranean wind stirred the plants on the upper balconies. Over Hampstead Heath the London nightglow was sufficiently subdued to see the stars faintly twinkling. I had left my play bike padlocked to a sturdy streetlight. I unlocked it and straddled it while buckling on my crash helmet. For work I ride a Suzuki GSF600 Bandit. It is old and simple and robust which means it is easy to maintain and spare parts are cheap. It is light enough to weave in and out of heavy traffic but it still has enough acceleration to beat anything on four wheels from a standing start. It also has a relatively upright sitting position which, as a large-framed man, I find more comfortable for a whole day in the saddle; it is better for seeing and being seen. There is a theory that Honda do not make bikes for real bikers. Hondas, the theory goes, are designed for commuters and weekend, fair-weather, born again bikers. I have driven most makes of bike over the last four years and when I wanted something for just the pure exhilaration of riding I had bought a second-hand Honda Blackbird. My play bike. Not too flash but fiercely fast. I rolled her forward off her stand, pressed the starter button, and felt the thrill as the 1100cc engine purred into life. The sheer power which was leashed under my right hand always made me want to whoop out loud. I gunned the motor in neutral just to hear it roar, twitching my right wrist lightly on the grip. Then I engaged the clutch, kicked the engine into first gear, looked instinctively over my right shoulder, and drew smoothly away from the curb.

Riding through London at night is a wonderful experience. Sometimes, after eight hours riding the Bandit for work, three hours gruelling rugby training, and a curry of vast proportions, I take out the Blackbird and ride through the West End as the pubs and clubs are closing up. The whole human condition is portrayed all round me; a Rolls Royce picking up the key note speaker from a Dorchester gala evening, black cabs ferrying home the drunk and disorderly, ladies of the night waving hopefully, the homeless bedding down under the arches. On a motorbike your surroundings are much more immediate than from inside the cocoon of a car. You are aware of the state of the tarmac, wary of manhole covers greasy after the rain, the smell of a late night bakery preparing the morning bread, the sound of shouting from inside a 24-hour convenience store.

Even in light traffic a bike rider needs to concentrate unceasingly. Anticipate everything; assume nothing. Just because the car in front is indicating left do not assume that it is actually going to turn left, rather than right, or speed up, or stop completely. And your mindset has to be that if it does, and you don’t allow for it, it is your fault. I know that sounds melodramatic. It feels melodramatic. Every time I start up a bike I say out loud "concentrate or die", and every time I say it I feel melodramatic. But I am still alive. In the four years in which I have been riding for a living I have seen one of my colleagues die and watched another one somersault down the road who will never walk again. Neither of the accidents had been directly the rider’s fault but as the most vulnerable party on the road the biker has to take responsibility on behalf of everybody else as well as themselves. It is no good thinking "he didn’t follow the highway code" as the cold steel of a car bonnet slams into your thigh. So: "concentrate or die". Not only melodramatic, but arrogant, and suspicious, and superior. Amen. Concentrate for every second of every minute of every hour. And even then it might not be enough.

So as I rode home I pushed thoughts of the party, of my old friends and my old life, of Anne, to the back of my mind. I was grateful for the ingrained discipline of "concentrate or die" which prevented me from dwelling on them now. I detoured via Shaftsbury Avenue and Trafalgar Square just because I could, but so many half-glimpses of couples kissing in doorways threatened my ability to banish all distractions whilst riding. I suddenly just wanted to get home and to bed as quickly as possible.

I crossed over Waterloo Bridge and headed down Kennington Road. All the roads south of the river were deserted but I was forced to stop at the traffic lights at the T-junction with Kennington Park Road. In the park ahead of me, through the narrow railings, I watched a small group of revellers making their way home. The streetlight did not penetrate far into the park but I could make out five youths, all of Asian origin, all dressed in some variation of the oriental youth uniform of jeans and denim jackets. As the lights changed to green I noticed that the smallest figure was actually a woman, her arms linked through the arms of the two men next to her. A car draw up behind me, forced to stop because I had not yet reacted to the green light. The car driver tooted his horn half-heartedly, knowing that it would not hurry my actions but impatient to be on his way. The woman in the park looked up, twisting her head round, and looked straight at me. She tried to shout something but the man on her left pulled her to him. The car behind me pulled out round me and headed south down Clapham Road. I shifted the weight of the bike onto my right leg, freeing up my left foot to kick the bike into gear so that I could follow him. I also wanted to get home. Across the road the kids had disappeared into the trees. I squeezed in the clutch handle to engage first gear and pull away but my visor had steamed up. I let out the clutch again, centred the bike, and flicked open my visor.

‘Fuck’, I said out loud. She was just fooling about, right?

‘Fuck’. I said again. She wasn’t shouting for help, was she?

‘Fuck’.

To add my light to the sum of light. That’s what I’d said, wasn’t it?

I left my visor open, kicked the bike into gear and pulled slowly across the junction. The park in front of me was bounded by a low concrete wall above which black vertical railings were topped by ornate spikes which looked sharp enough to dissuade all but the most drunk of merrymakers from climbing over. I turned right and drove slowly down the road with the park on my left looking into the trees for some sign of the Asian party. After a hundred yards I came to a crossroads. To my left Camberwell New Road continued to flank the park and at the corner where the two roads met there was a pair of large metal gates blocking a service road into the park. The gates were locked.

They had not scaled the railings so there must be a way in somewhere. I looked down Camberwell New Road. I could see no other entrance that way. I gunned the engine. I was so nearly home. But I hadn’t imagined the plea for help in the girl’s face. I backed the bike up awkwardly, turned, and bumped it up onto the curb. I rode back the way I had come, but this time up on the pavement beside the park fence, and faster. I passed Kennington Road again on my left. At the furthest end of the park I found a pedestrian entrance. A footpath emerged with a metal bollard in its middle to prevent unwanted vehicular access. By playing the throttle very carefully I managed to inch the Blackbird through the gap.

My headlights, which had been swamped in the bright city street lights, picked out the path in the darkness of the park. I switched them on to full-beam and everything outside of their arc was thrown into even deeper shadow. I followed the path back to the spot where I had first seen the youths and then I turned off and rode slowly over the soft grass between two flowerbeds in the direction that I had seen them go. I didn’t know what I was doing. They would be long gone by now. Then suddenly they were in front of me: two men holding the woman between them by her outstretched arms. She was naked. Her head lolled forward listlessly. There was a gag in her mouth. Blood was running from her nose and from a cut on her hip. Ripped clothing lay all around her. An older, thickset man was standing in front of her with his back to me. He spun round, his pockmarked face squinting in surprise in the full glare of my headlights. A knife glinted in this hand.

For a second no one else moved. Then I revved open the throttle and pressed my thumb onto the horn button and held it there. The only modification I had made to the Blackbird against the odd days when I was forced to use it for work when the Bandit was ill, apart from fitting a top box and side panniers, was to supplement the paltry factory-fitted horn for an illegally-loud mini-beast air horn. The noise shattered the quite of the night as I bore down on the group in front of me. The men fled. The girl, suddenly released, staggered forward. She nearly fell but finding her balance she tore the gag from her mouth and bent forward to wretch violently onto the ground. I skidded to a halt beside her and took my thumb off the horn.

‘Get on the back,’ I shouted. I was shaking. I had seen four men in the group but there were only three of them here in the trees. Had they all run? Did they know that I was alone? My headlights only lit up a narrow tunnel ahead of me in the darkness. If they should rush me from the side, push the bike over….

The girl seemed to understand. She straightened up and took a stepped towards me but looked down at her own nakedness.

‘Get on!’ I shouted at her, even louder. ‘And keep your legs away from the exhaust pipes or you’ll melt your feet.’ She wavered. Then, putting one hand onto my shoulder, she swung a leg over the saddle and hopped onto the seat behind me. I had no idea which gear the bike was in and the last thing I wanted to do was to stall the engine. I forced myself to methodically kick down through the gears into first and then clicked back up into neutral so that I could release my clutch hand. I felt for the girl’s hands on my shoulders and lowered them so that she was hugging my chest. I kicked the bike into first gear. The rear wheel spun on the soft ground as I opened up the throttle, and then bit in.

My only thought was to get away. I wove through the trees, expecting at any moment to see someone come charging out of the darkness. The only exit I knew was the way that I had come in. As I edged the bike through the pedestrian entrance I felt pathetically vulnerable, but there was no ambush. Kennington Park Road was still deserted and it seemed incredible that I had been sitting at those same traffic lights just ten minutes before. I shot straight across the road, turned left, right, and left again down some anonymous side street and stopped the bike.

The girl behind me was sobbing quietly but she was still holding me tightly. I unclasped her hands and waited as she dismounted awkwardly. I got off and without looking round rested the bike on its side-stand. I took off my leather jacket and passed it over my shoulder. I felt a slight tug as she took it from me. I took off my helmet.

‘Can I turn round now?’ I asked.

There was no answer. After a pause, I turned. I was surprised by how tiny she was. My jacket came down to her knees and the cuffs completely covered her hands hanging slackly at her sides. Blood was still oozing from her broad, flat nose. Her jet-black hair was bunched into a ponytail; her fringe fell into almond-shaped eyes which looked back blankly at me. Her brown face was expressionless.

‘How badly are you hurt?’ I asked. The question sounded trite even as I asked it.

There was no response. No flicker of understanding. Did she even speak English?

‘Do you need an ambulance or can you ride to the hospital?’

‘No hospital. No police.’ She spoke quietly, but steadily. She pronounced the ‘l’s with an oriental breathiness.

I looked around. I had driven less than half a mile from the park, conscious of the spectacle of driving through London with a naked pillion passenger behind me. Suddenly I felt scared again. Where were all the normal people tonight?

‘We have to go to the police.’ I said. ‘They have to catch those bastards. Jesus. Just look at you.’

‘No police.’

I looked at her. Her bare legs. The bruising on her face was already beginning to swell. I tried to imagine the fear that she must have felt, must still be feeling standing humbly before a complete stranger.

‘Where do you want to go?’ I asked.

No answer.

‘What do you want me to do? Is there someone I can call?’

Nothing.

I thought for a long time before saying quietly, ‘I have a spare room where you can stay tonight.’

All houses are a compromise between location, facilities, and cost. Conventional wisdom insists that of these parameters location should be ranked first, second and third, so when I was looking for a place of my own I looked for the least fashionable location I could find. My price ceiling was fixed so I reasoned that by minimising my location I could maximise my facilities, and you couldn’t then have got a much less sought-after location than Brixton Road. I bought a two-bedroom house conveniently sandwiched between a laundrette and a Chinese takeaway for half the price of William Searle’s garage in Hampstead. Admittedly it is virtually underneath the railway bridge but the noise of the trains is mainly drowned out by the incessant noise of the traffic on the arterial road outside my front window. On the plus side there is a small backyard where I can hang out my clothes, freshly laundered from one neighbouring establishment to absorb the deep fried aroma from the other, and it is only fifty yards to the lock-up under the railway arches where I keep and maintain my motorbikes.

I rode slowly by the back roads and pulled up round the corner from my house; having made the offer of sanctuary I did not want the complication of explaining to anyone why my half-clad passenger was riding through the streets of London without a crash helmet. Brixton never sleeps. Even on a Tuesday night Jimmy’s "Best Chinese Fish and Chip shop" stays open until after two o’clock and a large group of party-goers had spilled out from Jimmy’s onto the pavement outside his shop clutching their portions of chips. My barefooted companion provoked some wolf-whistling and suggestive banter as I unlocked my front door but she was so swamped by my jacket that she was modestly attired compared to many others wandering home from the clubs that evening. I ushered my new-found waif into my home and closed the door behind us.

I turned and found her watching me warily. I suddenly felt inappropriately close to her in the confined space of my tiny hallway.

‘There is a shower-room downstairs, but it is full of motor-bike clobber at the moment.’ I pushed past her and started the up the stairs. ‘There should be a first-aid kit of sorts in the bathroom up here. And a spare toothbrush. Do you want me to search it out, or are you happy to just root around and see what you can find?’

I turned on the landing and watched her climbing up the stairs to join me. She was holding my jacket tightly wrapped around her, lifting the hem carefully so as not to trip on the steps. She looked very small and very vulnerable.

‘This is the bathroom. Sorry about the state of it. The door on the left is my room. The door on the right is the spare room. I used to have a lodger in there so there is a lock on the inside of the door’.

‘You are very kind,’ she said. It was the first words she had spoken since Kennington Park. She looked up at me and held my gaze briefly before walking into the bathroom and closing the door.

I dug out some grey jogging bottoms, my smallest tee-shirt and an old dressing gown and took these through to the spare room. I hadn’t changed the sheets since my Mum had come to stay the month before, but it was too late to do it now. Fortunately my Mum’s visit had forced me to throw out most of the junk which had accumulated there since the departure of my last lodger had provided me with the luxury of a spare room. I laid the clothes and a clean towel on the bed and ostentatiously clomped back downstairs in my heavy riding boots.

I filled the kettle and switched on the radio while I washed up the previous day’s dirty dishes so that I didn’t hear her again until I noticed her hesitating nervously outside in kitchen door. I beckoned her in and she came uncertainly into the kitchen. The swelling round her nose still looked very sore but she had washed the caked blood out of her hair and it now hung straight and wet down to the small of her back. My jogging bottoms were rolled up almost to their knees, held up by my dressing gown cord tied tightly round her waist. My white tee-shirt made her arms look very dark, almost black, and as thin as sticks.

‘You saved my life,’ she said simply.

‘Maybe.’

‘No. Definitely. They would have raped me. And then they would have killed me.’ Her English was heavily accented but her sentences were formally structured by the straight-forwardness of her statements rather than any limitation of vocabulary.

‘You don’t know that.’

‘I do. I know those people. And I know that you will have many questions that you want to ask me. I owe you my life. I owe you your answers. I will repay you anything else you ask but I cannot answer your questions.’

‘You don’t owe me anything,’ I said forcefully. ‘Anybody would have done what I did. But look, I don’t even know how badly you are hurt. Did you find what you needed upstairs? I have got some diazepam somewhere from my current rugby injury habit if you need something stronger than paracetamol? And here, I have made some tea. Do you want anything to eat?’

She smiled. Her cracked lip made her wince, but the smile remained. ‘You see, you do have questions. But thank you. I just need to sleep.’

She pressed the palms of her hands together in front of her as if in prayer and bowed to me. I copied her gesture and bowed back self-consciously. She stayed bowed as she walked slowly backwards out of the kitchen. It was an exotic gesture which should have looked completely out of place in my scruffy Brixton kitchen but she moved with such self-assured grace that it seemed the most natural thing in the world.

‘Just one question,’ I called after her.

She halted on the stairs.

‘What’s your name?’

I didn’t think that she was going to answer me but after a short pause she said, ‘You can call me Abbie.’

I drank my tea and let the banality of late night radio wash over me before going back outside to move the Blackbird into the security of my lock-up under the railway. When I got back the light was off in the spare room.

I woke once in the night. Soft footsteps paused on the landing outside the bathroom door and then padded quietly down the stairs. I heard the faint chirp as the telephone receiver was lifted from its cradle and one side of a short conversation in a language which was so unfamiliar that I did not even recognise the phonetic sounds let alone any individual words. Abbie crept back up the stairs and I heard the key turn in my spare room lock.