by Mark Dawson
“How are you both doing?” Mack asked as she led the way through the gate to the Range Rover.
“Can I play on the iPad when I get home?” Sebastian asked.
“If you’re a good boy.”
“I want to FaceTime my friends,” Daisy said.
It was clear that neither child was going to answer her question. Mack got the children into the car and made sure that they were strapped into their seats, ignoring Daisy’s observation that the car was filthy. She was right. The exterior was plastered in mud and dirt from the excursion on the Plain, and Mack had never been particularly good at keeping the inside neat and tidy. She started the engine and pulled away, ignoring Daisy’s commentary about how it was so humiliating for her to be picked up in something that was so disgracefully dirty. Mack smiled as she continued her tirade, happy to be back with the kids and looking forward to spending some time with them.
Mack parked on the drive and told the kids that they needed to get changed and do their homework before they played on their iPads or spoke to their friends. She helped Sebastian to hop down to the drive and took out her key to unlock the door, pausing when she found that it was already open. Sebastian wriggled around her and dashed inside.
“Daddy!”
Mack took off her shoes as her husband, with Sebastian in his arms, put his head around the living room door.
“Hi,” Mack said. “Have I made a mistake?”
“No,” he said.
“You’re supposed to be at work.”
“They let me out early.”
“Why? It’s my evening with the kids.”
“I wanted to have a chat with you.”
“You could’ve called.”
“I tried that last week,” he said. “You said you’d call me back, and you didn’t.”
Mack remembered the series of texts that he had sent her. He had been vague about what he wanted to discuss, but Mack was worried that it wouldn’t be good and had decided that if she ignored him, then perhaps the conversation—or whatever he was percolating—could be avoided.
“Okay,” she said. “We can talk. Shall we wait until they’re in the bath or in bed?”
“I think we should do it now. Kids—go up to your rooms and get changed, please. Mummy and I need a little bit of time to have a chat about something. Okay?”
The children clattered upstairs, and Andy led the way into the dining room. He looked nervous, his face pinched and bloodless, and Mack could see that, whatever it was that was on his mind, it was going to lead to an unpleasant conversation. Mack sat down, but he remained standing. Mack looked at the table and saw a letter on the headed notepaper of a firm of family solicitors in the city.
Mack knew what Andy wanted to talk about.
“No,” she said. “No. We’re not talking about that.”
“We have to, Mack. There’s no point in pretending that we can get back to how things were before. I’ve tried, and it’s no good. I just can’t get past what you did to me. To the kids.”
“How many times do I have to say it? I’m sorry, Andy. It was a mistake. I regret it more than I can say.”
“I know,” he said. “I believe you, too—I believe that you’re sorry. But it doesn’t make any difference. I can’t get what happened out of my head, and I know that’s not going to change. It ruined everything, Mack. I know you don’t want to hear it, but you can’t pretend that it’s not happening. I want us to get divorced.”
“What about the kids? Have you thought about them?”
He frowned. “I have. I think about them all the time, and I think we’ll end up doing more damage to them if we pretend that everything is okay when it obviously isn’t.”
“I don’t agree,” she said, her temper flaring just as she felt the weight of reality pushing against the hope that she had spent so much time nurturing: that they might be able to put their problems behind them. “You’re not thinking about them at all. They need a mum and dad. You’re being selfish.”
“Please,” he said. “Let’s not talk about selfishness.” Mack thought he was going to rage at her, but, instead, he took a breath, and when he continued, it was with a calm detachment that killed what small residue of hope remained. “I’ve spoken to the lawyers, and they’ve drawn up the papers. They’re on the table—you should take them and read through them.”
“No,” she said.
“You said we should think of the kids. I agree—we should. The best way to make this easy on them is to do this like adults. I don’t want sole custody, and I don’t want you to come out of this looking bad. I’ve spoken to John at work, and he said he got through his divorce with a good relationship with his ex and with his kids both fine about what happened. That’s what I want. No aggravation—let’s just accept it’s got to happen and get it done.”
“No,” Mack said.
She got up, perhaps a little too quickly; she felt a wave of dizziness as the blood rushed from her head, and she reached out for the back of the chair to steady herself.
“Are you all right?” Andy said, taking a step toward her.
“I’m fine,” she snapped.
She turned her back to him and went back out to the hall. Both children were standing there, both wearing expressions of confusion and concern.
Mack crouched down in front of them. “Mummy needs to go.”
“Aren’t you making our tea?” Sebastian asked.
“I can’t tonight, darling,” she said. “I’ve had a change of plans. Daddy will look after you, and I’ll see you both on Thursday. Come on—give me a cuddle.”
They both stepped into her arms and allowed themselves to be drawn into a tight hug. Mack held onto them until she was sure she had mastered the urge to sob and then let them go. She was aware that Andy was watching, but she ignored him as she opened the door and hurried outside. She blinked back the tears, holding herself together until she had reversed off the drive and was on her way down the road, back to the hotel.
19
It was dark by the time Atticus came outside again. The sun had slipped down beneath the terraces, and the street lights had come on, some of them flickering as the bulbs warmed up, others dead. He looked over to the nearest tower block on Bentham Road and saw that the collection of young men had grown smaller, with just two of them left. He zipped up his jacket and crossed the road, passing between the stone bollards and making his way toward the metal bench where they were standing.
“Excuse me?”
The two men looked at him without bothering to hide their hostility. They were younger than Atticus had initially thought—late teens or perhaps early twenties—and dressed in bulky jackets, loose jeans and statement trainers. They were both wearing caps and hoodies, too, their faces cast in shadow.
One of them had a red bandana around the lower part of his face. He pushed himself away from the bench and squared up to Atticus. “What you want?”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“What kind?”
“I’m trying to find someone.”
“So, what? You a fed?”
“Sorry?”
“Po-lice.” He enunciated each syllable slowly and with sarcasm. “Are you a police officer?”
“No,” Atticus said. “I’m not.”
This one, with the bandana, was evidently the senior of the two, or at least the one with the most confidence. His body language was obvious: he had his head up, his posture was good—shoulders back, chest out—and his feet were planted in an open, wide stance. The second man behaved with deference to the first, and, although he was confident enough to hold Atticus’s eye for a moment, his attention was fixed on his friend.
The man with the bandana took a step toward Atticus. “What you want, then?”
“Are you LFB?”
“Man’s asking about LFB.” He laughed, and the second man followed suit. “What you know about the LFB?”
“I don’t really know anything.”
“So?”
“I heard that the gang runs things around here. Is that right?”
The man with the bandana shrugged.
“I’m looking for someone who I think might be in the LFB. He’s not in any trouble, at least not from me.”
More caustic laughter. “Like we’d care about trouble from you, man.”
“Exactly.”
“So what do you want?”
Atticus had no clever line and concluded that he might as well just tell the truth.
“I’m a private investigator.”
More laughter, harder this time. “Like, what—some kind of Sherlock Holmes shit?”
“Something like that,” Atticus said with a self-deprecating smile, happy to laugh at his own expense if it led him a little closer to the answer that he needed. “I’ve been asked to find a girl, and I think she might be with a guy who lives around here. I’ve got a picture of him. Would you have a look?”
“You want us to grass for you?”
“You’re not grassing. I just need to find the girl he’s with.” He made a show of reaching into his pocket and taking out his wallet. He knew that waving money around was perhaps not the most sensible thing that he could do in a place like this, that the two of them might just as easily take his wallet from him as listen to his offer, but he knew that he wouldn’t get anywhere unless he appealed to their mercantile instincts. “I’m happy to pay you for your help. And it wouldn’t go any further.”
Atticus opened the wallet and took out a wad of twenties. He peeled off one, and then a second and a third, folded them and held them between thumb and forefinger.
The man with the bandana put out his hand. Atticus held out the money, and the man took it.
“Show me the picture.”
Atticus took his phone and found Shayden Mullins’s Facebook profile.
“Here,” Atticus said. “His name’s Pepsi.”
He turned the screen so that the two of them could see it and watched their faces for a reaction.
“Nah,” the man with the bandana said. “Never seen him.”
His lie was obvious. Atticus had seen the minute nod of recognition as he had looked at the photograph, a subconscious reaction of which he wouldn’t even be aware.
Atticus took out his wallet again and counted out another three twenties, reminding himself not to forget to include the expense on his invoice to James York. He held the notes up. “I know you know who he is,” he said. “Where can I find him? That’s all I want to know—tell me, and the money’s yours.”
“Make that a ton.”
Atticus took out another two twenties and added them to the three between his fingers.
“There’s a trap house on Amhurst Road. Pepsi’ll be in there.”
“What number?”
“162.”
“How can you be sure?”
“You don’t need to know why. But we was in there an hour ago, and he was there.”
“Did he have a girl with him? Seventeen, white, dark hair?”
“No idea,” he said. “Didn’t see no one like that, but we weren’t there for long.”
“Thank you.”
“Money.”
Atticus handed him the money.
“Now—piss off.”
20
Atticus walked to the address that the corner boy had provided. It was a mile to the northwest, in an area of Hackney that had not yet been airbrushed to the same extent as some of the other streets nearby. Progress was coming—some of the terraced houses were in the process of being converted into flats, with scaffold clinging to their façades and builders smoking roll-ups in the street as they finished off for the day—but, for the most part, it was much as it would have looked twenty years ago. The gardens were overgrown with bushes and trees, wheelie bins had been left on the street, and satellite dishes from the nineties were still fixed to the walls.
Atticus found number 162 and continued down the street, crossing over to the opposite side and a spot from which he could watch the house without drawing undue attention to himself. It was a busy road, with traffic passing in both directions. Pedestrians made their way, too, many no doubt arriving from or going to Hackney Downs station at the south-eastern end of the street. Atticus observed as one pedestrian—a man in jeans and a military-style parka—opened the gate to the house, climbed the steps to the ground-floor door and disappeared inside. He came out again shortly afterwards—Atticus timed it at a minute—and joined the pavement again, stepping aside at the gate to let a woman climb the steps. The woman had arrived in a taxi, and the driver waited by the side of the road as she went inside, returning just as quickly as the first person Atticus had seen.
Atticus assessed them both. The man was down on his luck, judging by the state of his clothes and his shoes, which looked as if they were falling apart. The woman was more prosperous, with shoes that matched her bag, and hair that had recently been cut and styled. They might have been from different social strata, but they had one thing in common: both were anxious. The man walked stiffly, and as he passed beneath a street light, Atticus saw that his face was frozen; the woman stood at the gate for ten seconds before she went up to the door, transferring her weight from one foot to the other with the result that she rocked from side to side.
Atticus didn’t need any more evidence that the property was being used to sell drugs.
He crossed the street, pushed the iron gate aside and walked along the short path that led from the pavement to the flight of steps that ascended to the front door of the ground-floor flat. The path was cracked by weeds that had forced their way through the concrete over time, and fractured by the weather and the weight of the people who had used it over the years. There was a second set of steps to the left of the path; these, more vertiginous than those ahead of him, wound down into a tiny courtyard from where a door to the basement could be accessed. The courtyard was full of cardboard packaging that had been dumped there—Amazon deliveries, pizza boxes, juice cartons, broken bottles—together with debris that had been blown off the street. There was a black recycling bin that had been filled with too many bottles for the lid to close. The basement windows were covered with a blanket, with just a sliver of light visible where there was a gap between the blanket and the window frame. Atticus squinted down at it, but the gap was not wide enough for him to discern anything inside.
He climbed the stairs to the front door. It was painted a lime green, but the last coat had evidently been applied years ago, and the weather had been allowed to batter it unimpeded, peeling strips of it away like dead skin. There were two glass panels in the door, but the view through each was blocked by squares of newsprint that had been stuck on the other side.
Atticus knocked on the door.
He heard the sound of voices inside, and then footsteps. The door was unlocked—Atticus heard three separate locks disengaging—and opened a crack.
“What?”
“I’m looking for some gear,” he said.
“You what?”
“I want blow.”
“Sorry. Can’t help you.”
The door was closed in his face.
Atticus sucked his teeth, looked back to the street, then back at the door. He knocked again.
The rigmarole was repeated.
“Piss off!”
“Come on, man, hook me up. I’m desperate.”
“Wait.”
The door was closed, but, this time, it was not locked.
Atticus waited on the doorstep, a little anxious that he was very visible to anyone who might be passing along the street. They weren’t making a very good attempt to be discreet, and if the police happened to have the house under observation, then he might end up with some difficult questions to answer.
The door opened again, wide enough this time for him to come inside. The place was in a dreadful condition, much worse than the flat in Salisbury. The hallway was long and narrow, with stairs leading up to the first floor to the right and two doo
rs on the left that, Atticus presumed, were for the kitchen and sitting room. The wall bore faded posters with Rastafarian imagery, including the Lion of Judah and portraits of Haile Selassie. One of the photos was of the emperor meeting the queen. The air was heavy with the smell of cannabis and the sound of hard reggae.
The man who had opened the door was young—Atticus guessed in his late teens or early twenties—and had a sheen of sweat on his skin. Atticus recognised him at once: it was Shayden Mullins.
“How much you want?”
“A couple of grams,” Atticus said. “How much is that?”
“Eighty.”
Atticus took out his wallet. He withdrew four twenties and handed them over. Mullins pocketed them.
“Stay here.”
He turned and went through the first door on the left.
Atticus waited a moment and then stepped forward enough so that he could see through both doors. The second door opened into a bedroom that looked as if it was used by customers who had just purchased drugs. Four people were lounging on the bed, one of them missing an eye and another with prison tattoos inscribed across his naked chest. They were passing around a glass pipe, and Atticus could smell the harsh chemical tang of crack. The floor was covered with plastic sheeting that had been left there, Atticus guessed, so that blood and vomit and excrement could be more easily cleaned away.
Atticus looked into the other room. It looked to have been used as the sitting room at some point, but now it had been taken over by whoever was selling out of the house. Atticus saw a leather sofa that was piled high with electronics that had almost certainly been pilfered and exchanged for drugs. He took a step to his left so that he could see more of the room. Mullins was crouching down next to a fireplace, pulling up on a piece of string that appeared to run down the chimney to the flat below. He gave the string a final yank, and a Coke can clattered out of the grate; the top of the can had been sliced off and the string looped into it; Atticus watched as it was upended and two small clear packets fell out into the young man’s hand.