Gallowstree Lane

by Kate London

  ‘Know owt about it?’

  Ryan shrugged.

  Steve had a face like crumpled paper. Ryan wondered how old he was. Old, anyhow. A microwave pinged. Steve moved over to it.

  ‘I’m having a korma. Fancy some?’

  ‘Nah, you’re all right.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Go on then.’

  There was a little table and a couple of wooden chairs, but Steve handed him the plate where he was. Steve sat at the table. Ryan liked that: bit of distance. Felt respectful. He hadn’t eaten since they gave him some dried-up cardboard shit in custody. Turned out he was ravenous. He wolfed the curry down, took off his sweatshirt.

  ‘It’s steaming in here.’

  Steve shrugged. ‘Can’t help you there. I had a problem with charlie about four years ago, and since then I can’t never get warm. Fucked something up inside, I reckon.’

  ‘You not got a jumper?’

  ‘Can’t be doing with that. Fiddle the electric, innit. Doesn’t cost me nothing.’

  ‘It’s like a sauna!’

  Steve laughed. ‘You fancy a brew?’

  ‘This heat? You’re joking.’

  He went to the noisy fridge and chucked Ryan a Coke. ‘Cool you down then.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Ryan pinged the can, sipped the sweet liquid. Even if it was too hot in here, he liked Steve. He wasn’t like Shakiel, not advancing, just staying where he was and happy with it. He was making the tea, back turned, and into the silence and privacy Ryan said quietly, ‘I knew him.’

  ‘Who’s that then?’

  He tried to just throw it out there – no big deal. ‘The boy that got shanked. I knew him.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Me and him ran.’

  Steve came back to the table and said nothing. He drank the tea. Then he said, ‘Sorry to hear that.’

  Ryan could feel himself filling up. He said, ‘You got any blow?’

  ‘Sorry, I’m out.’

  They sat and ate in silence. Steve wiped his mouth on his sleeve and started rolling a fag. He said, ‘Good friend, was he?’

  Ryan looked down. He couldn’t speak.

  Steve said, ‘Mate. I’m sorry.’

  He wanted Steve to change the fucking subject. And he did. He said, ‘You got something for me then?’

  Ryan nodded. He pulled the phone from his front pocket and handed it to Steve. Steve weighed it appreciatively. ‘Nice one. One of the new Samsungs. Off a girl, was it?’

  ‘Yeah, getting off a bus.’

  He turned the phone over. ‘Fuck a duck.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s engraved.’

  Ryan chewed his lip.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll still take it. Three Ayrtons.’

  ‘You what?’

  Steve laughed. ‘Too young for that?’

  Ryan shrugged.

  ‘Ayrton Senna: tenner. Thirty quid.’

  ‘Arite.’

  Steve felt in his jeans pocket and produced three notes.

  Ryan got up, because he felt he should, not because he wanted to. ‘I would stop, but it’s getting on.’

  ‘No worries, man.’

  He pocketed the notes, hesitated.

  Steve said, ‘You’ll see yourself out then?’

  Ryan clamped his jaw shut. ‘Yeah, thanks. You’re all right.’

  Steve brushed his hands down the front of his legs as if smoothing something away. He said, ‘Look, if you wanna talk about that thing, you know, your mate. Well, I’m here.’

  Ryan moved towards the door. ‘Yeah, OK. I’ll see you soon, yeah?’

  Steve waited until he heard the door shutting. He gave it another couple of minutes before he went into the bedroom. From a bottom drawer he pulled out an evidence bag and some plastic gloves. As he slipped the phone into the bag and filled out the label, he spoke aloud.

  ‘So that was Ryan Kennedy. He’s given me a stolen phone. I’m putting it in evidence bag B3429687. Says he nicked it from a girl by a bus stop. It’s a Samsung, engraved on the back: Julie, love always, Tom, and a heart. Should be easy to trace. And he says he knew the murder victim, Spencer. Said they were good mates. He seemed pretty cut up about it. I tried to get more info but I didn’t want to look too keen.’

  16

  After last night Lexi didn’t dare go to Gallowstree Lane. Looking out over London’s lights, she had a bad feeling. She had never meant to get caught up in other people’s business. She had dedicated herself to one thing. She had never meant to volunteer for anything else.

  Lexi was just a bit player, a walk-on part. When she was younger, she’d tried to fight that – gone to a drama school out west, even tried for the title role – but it was some years ago that she’d realized she didn’t want to play the lead after all. Being peripheral meant that what happened in your life was your own business, and she liked it that way.

  She passed her time mostly alone on the twenty-second floor of Burcote Tower, looking out over a grey wash of sky. If she leant her forehead against the cold window, she could see the edges of London, a sallow flatness of roads and train lines. Back and forth across the vast blank skies tiny white planes ferried the stag dos and the city-breakers and the eastern Europeans who were building and repairing London. The flat was dirty and bare. Changes of sheets and weekly shops are not things that bother you when you’re concerned with a different kind of food. She made the occasional foraging run – miniskirt, crop top, heels. It wasn’t really an outfit, more a kind of plumage that signalled her intention. God knows why they wanted to fuck her, but they drew up in their cars on Gallowstree Lane and she got in the back and opened her ever thinner thighs or knelt down before them behind the bins, a junkie at communion.

  For a long grey while she’d been stuck like a rat in a box hitting the feeder bar, moving between need and satisfaction. Their needs, then her needs: the long, satisfying blank she could find only when the smoke swirled around the bowl. Then back on Gallowstree Lane with her laddered tights. Sometime or other this would find its own way to an end. She was getting there. It takes a while to efface the body when it’s still relatively young and strong. The body: it’s got its own thing going on. You have to respect that. It made her sad sometimes to witness the slow eradication of the healthy vessel she had grown up in. She remembered her childhood self through a darkened glass. She’d been quite a good swimmer – had had strong legs and arms, feet with high insteps that left the perfect wet footprint on a changing-room floor. Now her body was haggard, veined, a crone before its time. Still it fought on, the heart beating, the lungs inflating. It was a private thing to do this to yourself, and all she wanted was to be left alone to do it in her own way. She was just a customer, for God’s sake. Fuck it. Can’t a woman change her service provider when she wants to?

  She had a bit to get her through the day, but now she was beginning to cluck. She’d try to stave it off as long as possible with Mars bars and cans. She pulled on some jeans and a T-shirt. Took the lift down the twenty-two floors. Inside the dirty silver-lined box she was shaking. A sound like lightsabers whistled up and down the shaft. She didn’t like to think of the cables on which her life hung, and then she didn’t care. She wrapped her arms around her body. She should have taken a jacket. She had a wrap of gum in her pocket and she started chewing. A family got in, jamming the lift door with their pram. What were they doing out at this time of night? A white woman in her sixties in tight drainpipes and a white T-shirt, her daughter in her twenties wearing a hijab and a long skirt. Four kids. One of them – a boy, about eight years old – couldn’t take his eyes off Lexi.

  She said, ‘No one ever told you it’s rude to stare?’

  The grandma pulled him to her, put his arm around his chest and gave Lexi the look.

  At the entrance to the flats, Lexi contemplated the windy space between the blocks. Not dark, but not light either. The family was setting off boldly towards the bus stop. It was only a short walk to t
he little shop with its bars on the windows and its night-time hatch, but Lexi was as frightened as if there was a sniper scoping the concourse.

  She’d been wary when the two boys had made the first approach a week ago. They were so obviously on the make. One of them tall in a long coat, trying to make like Henry Fonda. He had a tat and a huge car, a black BMW 4x4, shouting out to the road. All it lacked was a personalized number plate. DICKHEAD, perhaps.

  The other girls had moved away from them, but Lexi had stood her ground. ‘Go back to school,’ she’d wanted to say. But then they came over all friendly, joking with her. More for less, they kept saying. More for less.

  She didn’t recognize them, and when she asked them if they were with the Bluds, they laughed and swaggered and acted insulted. Were they from the opposition then?

  ‘Soldiers?’ she said.

  They exchanged looks between themselves. That seemed a more difficult question.

  ‘Not that neither,’ the tall one with the kingfisher tattoo on his neck said. ‘We are our own men.’

  No mistaking then, this was a land grab. She guessed they’d been running for the Soldiers and seen how much money flowed through their hands and into the hands of the top guys. They probably fancied keeping it. They were trying it out on the Bluds’ territory because they weren’t mad enough to take on their former crew.

  But she’d already got bored of the politics. They were offering Poundland prices and the hungry part had started whispering that it was none of her business and anyway what did it matter? Twenty pounds from a trick in the back of a car was burning a hole in her pocket.

  ‘Sure,’ she’d said. ‘Why not?’

  She rubbed her top lip with her index finger while they took the cash off her. In her flat looking out at London’s Tupperware skies, she was able to persuade herself she was making sophisticated decisions about life and existence, but on the street her poor primitive amygdala couldn’t help trying to survive. Gallowstree Lane belonged to the Bluds. She had her regular supplier, and as the new boys handed her the wrap, she looked over her shoulder just in case. She was regretting doing business with Mr Kingfisher already. One of the worst things was the feeling that she should have known better. These are the kind of bad decisions you make when you are on a pilgrimage and not really paying attention.

  They’d given her a number to call – next time you need to score, they’d said – and driven off in the flash car. She’d called them, asked them, please, to come to Burcote Tower, but they said no, they’d meet her on Gallowstree Lane. A point was being made, she’d understood that. The territory wasn’t just the road; it was the people. Not only was she owned, but they wanted the road to know. She’d had to say yes because she’d made the call. They dealt to her one more time on Gallowstree Lane, then she didn’t call them any more. It was back to Shakiel’s roadmen making the regular drops: baby gangsters on pushbikes, hands on hips instead of on the handlebars. Spencer and Ryan, those were their names. She kind of liked them.

  ‘We’ve not seen you,’ Ryan said, pulling the baggy from his back pocket. ‘You been sick?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, pocketing the wrap and suppressing the urge to check there wasn’t a black BMW 4x4 anywhere near. ‘Flu.’

  They cycled off doing wheelies, becoming what they were: teenage boys on bikes. Green as grass.

  She’d thought that was that, but then last night she’d seen Kingfisher through the spyhole of her front door. Of course she’d opened. What else could she do? He knew where she lived. She’d told him herself, stupid cow, when she’d asked him to deal to her here rather than on the road. Not opening the door would only make things worse. OK, he wouldn’t be happy, she told her shaking hand as she slipped the latch, but how cross could he be? Better to get it over with. Maybe he didn’t even know. She’d be needing a fix soon, but she was OK for now. A bit on edge, but OK. It was going to be fine. She could buy a rock and sort herself out. It was good, in a way.

  ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘You all right?’

  He pushed past her without speaking. His friend followed and closed the door softly. The way they moved into the room: it was like they’d watched too many gangster movies and were trying it on for size.

  The guy with the tat stood at the window and looked out across London. Contemplative, as if. His friend – short, narrow face, thin eyes like a rodent – sat in her only chair and fixed her in his gaze. She wanted to say, ‘You should be ashamed, treating a woman like this. At your age. Does your mother know you’re doing this?’ Saying that kind of shit out loud was as much a fantasy as the way they were acting. She would speak in a clipped Ealing accent, like she was in Brief Encounter. She was good at that accent. A hundred years ago she’d had a version of it on her answerphone, an imitation of the Queen broadcasting to children at the end of a distant war. ‘And when peace comes, remember it will be for us, the children of today, to make the world of tomorrow a better and happier place.’

  Something had come out of her mouth that sounded like a whimper.

  Kingfisher said, ‘What did you say?’

  There was that tremor in her hand. She hated herself for being afraid and hated herself for hating herself.

  ‘Nothing. You got a fag?’

  He handed her his box of Marlboro. The flame from her purple lighter flickered. Outside the window the city’s orange night reflected back the curve of the sky that wrapped them.

  He said, ‘You been buying from the Bluds.’

  She inhaled, her hand still shaking. ‘I been doing all right without.’

  He shook his head. ‘I hate a liar.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She did feel sorry, sorry to the point of crying.

  The rodent guy said, ‘What d’you think this is, Go Fucking Compare?’

  ‘I’ll come to you from now on. You got some for me now?’

  She wanted to see through them to the only thing that mattered, but they were getting in the way, like her father standing in front of the television screen shouting when all she’d wanted was to watch Rugrats.

  Kingfisher said, ‘Do me a favour first. Call him.’

  She’d been slapped quite a lot as a child so she knew she didn’t like it. One of the girls had shown her where her dealer had burned cigarette ends into her arm.

  She called the number immediately, trying not to think what the consequences would be.

  The voice on the other end of the phone was deep, slow, courteous. Shakiel. She’d only met him once, but he was the opposite of Mr Kingfisher. He didn’t flash a big car. It was always something classy but understated. What the fuck had she been thinking going to anyone else? If anyone was really frightening, it was this guy.

  ‘Yeah, don’t worry. I’m on this. I’ll send the mandem.’

  Lexi tried to recite the alphabet backwards in her head while they were making the arrangements. ‘Gallowstree Lane,’ she said, like the boys had told her. ‘By the shop.’ Every moment was only a deferment. All she wanted now was to get off her face. Kingfisher took twenty off her and left a baggy on the table and she’d been able to cook up. He told her to go back to calling him from now on.

  Usually she liked to wait till she was straight before she took another hit, but as soon as the door shut behind them, she chained it, loading the next one before she’d blown the last one out. There was no space even for craving. She had no idea how much time had passed. Only that when Kingfisher returned, it felt like the whole flat was crazy. She watched him from the chair, her face as numb as Novocain.

  He hadn’t seemed the same, not like a gangster in a movie any more. More like a frightened kid. He’d ranged around the flat with his skinny mate, told her to shut the fuck up although she hadn’t said anything. He kept checking his phone, got a knife out and flicked the blade a couple of times. It was all a bit time-lapse, and her eyes had travelled back to the pipe and she’d wondered whether he’d mind her smoking another one. Indifference, that was what a smoke would give her. Next th
ing he’d been looking out the window, at that view, at London sprawling out to where it became fields and rivers and the tiny planes coming in to land. She’d waited and he’d turned to her and looked down at the knife and nodded meaningfully. His nerves were more scary than anything he did. She’d looked at the knife and said, ‘Yes, I know. I would never say anything about anything to anyone.’ Then suddenly he’d seemed intent on something else and he’d walked past her quickly and out the front door, his short friend lagging behind him and giving her a look as he closed the door.

  So here she was in the corner shop. The fat Asian guy behind the hatch knew her. She felt his eyes on her in case she nicked anything. The sweets were right there. She wanted to go and get one of those value bags of chocolate bars but she wasn’t up to the walk, and anyway Tesco’s wasn’t 24/7. ‘Give me five Mars bars, please.’ As she fumbled for her change, her eyes fell on the pile of newspapers stacked in a metal rack to her right.

  Stabbing victim was promising footballer …

  She saw the picture only momentarily: a football strip, a smile, a small cup held at chest height. Spencer. The kid on the bike. She felt so sorry. She picked up the paper and glanced at the shopkeeper. ‘How much are these?’

  ‘They’re free.’

  She walked quickly back across the concourse, the newspaper tucked under her arm, Spencer smiling out blindly from the print.

  PRESSING ON

  TUESDAY 11 OCTOBER

  17

  Under the spell of the early morning, the station’s expansive CID office was silent and still. Lizzie, still wearing her coat, stood by the shelf outside the duty DI’s room and glanced quickly at the overnight occurrence book – eight prisoners in custody for main office, three for the domestic violence unit, a high-risk missing person outstanding. Anxiety bubbled up inside her. She really hoped she could dodge a prisoner. Today she simply had to get home on time.

  She moved towards a desk in the corner and logged on. The computer booted slowly. Around her the office was coming to life. People crossing the floor, hanging coats, throwing bags on desks. It was the usual chat, the usual early morning. Lizzie nodded and said her hellos, but her thoughts were elsewhere.