by Knight, Ali
Georgie turned round. ‘You’re kidding, right?’
Kelly’s laugh came out as a high-pitched squeal, bordering on hysteria. ‘No, I’m not.’
Georgie was obviously someone who found laughter contagious because she joined in. ‘That’s very revealing,’ she said, shaking her head. Georgie had a warm, open face; you could chat to her if she sat next to you on a bus. Kelly saw Georgie watching her before her attention was taken by something else. She cocked her head. ‘What’s that noise?’
Kelly looked up at the beamed ceiling. ‘It’s pigeons. They’re in the roof. This building was derelict for nearly fifty years. When they began the renovations, there were thousands of them living up there and in the clock tower at the end of the building. They had to get a specialist team in to remove their droppings. Pigeon shit is highly toxic.’
Georgie was nodding. She tapped her chest. ‘I heard it’s bad for the lungs.’
‘They cleared them all out, mended the roof, but they wouldn’t stay away. It drives Christos mad. If even a small hole remains, they get in.’ She paused. ‘Once they’re in, they can’t find the way out. They’re there till they die.’
There was a small pause. ‘Trapped,’ Georgie said, almost to herself. ‘Dying, trying to escape.’
Kelly looked at her and felt something pass between them. She watched as Georgie’s smile faded and a frown appeared in its place.
Georgie made a movement to come towards her and then stopped, uncertain. ‘Can I help you? Are you OK? Here.’ She pulled out a business card and handed it to Kelly. Kelly put it on the arm of the chair, staring down at the mobile number.
No one can help me, Kelly thought, no one at all. I’m all alone. She heard the heavy tread of her husband on the stairs. She turned away from Georgie and stared out of the windows at the teeming life of the city below her.
5
Georgie was standing in Angus Morton’s office waiting for the big boss to arrive. She was on her feet because the piles of paper on his desk had mated with those on the shelves and produced more piles that now occupied the two chairs this side of the desk. She saw that the wastepaper bin was now on top of a further pile. She wondered if Angus was turning into a hoarder; she’d seen a TV programme once where a house owner had to crawl through a two-foot gap to get into any room, such was the level of clutter. She was imagining Angus digging through layers of paperwork when she heard him walking down the corridor, the sound of more papers slapping against his thigh.
He had rolled the pile in his hand into a tube and as he said hello and sat down behind the desk he used the papers as a baton to thump out a finale to the tune in his head. ‘How did it go this morning?’
‘Good, good,’ Georgie lied, feeling like one of those idiots in The Apprentice. Angus had recently promoted her and she sometimes wondered if he’d done it for his own amusement – to see her grey-haired, pot-bellied colleagues mutter into their pints of bitter. She’d only joined the force a year ago, and still felt she had a lot to prove.
Angus was in his late forties with attractive salt and pepper hair. He was a big, tall man but moved with a surprising grace that she found mesmerising to watch. She hated herself that she fancied him, that she was an office cliché – he was nearly twice her age, married and with kids. It was so inappropriate it was laughable, which was exactly why she wanted it so much. She felt the familiar blush beginning to creep up her neck and forced herself to control it. She would die a thousand deaths if he found out how he populated her night-time thrashings in her tiny single bed back home.
She turned round as Mo arrived.
‘Here, Georgie, I got you a coffee.’ Mo handed her a take-out from the café near their offices. ‘And a side order of sausage.’ He laughed and handed her a paper bag.
She stood there with the items in her hand and glanced at Angus. He was making no effort to hide his smirk.
‘You know you can take it further if you want,’ Angus said kindly. ‘Make a complaint against Christos Malamatos.’
Mo was getting into the swing of it. ‘I mean, it was huge! Down to his knees!’ He made a gesture with his hands like he’d caught the biggest fish of his life. Angus’s smile was broadening. She heard a snigger from over her shoulder and Preston entered. Preston had a perma-tan and a suit that was a lot too shiny for Georgie’s taste. ‘You don’t see one that size every day—’
‘I do,’ said Preston, and laughed at his own joke.
‘It’s not a problem, really, let’s just forget it,’ Georgie said. Fat chance. She felt her cheeks begin to flame again. The story of how she’d had an eyeful would be round the force like food poisoning round cousin Gary’s wedding. They would rib her about this for years to come, undermining her struggles to be taken seriously and left to do her job. At that moment she hated Christos Malamatos.
There was a long pause as they waited for Preston to pick up a pile of paper from a chair and put it on the floor, wipe the seat with his hand and sit down, unbuttoning his jacket carefully as he did so.
‘So, impressions?’ Angus asked.
Mo took the lead. ‘The flat’s unbelievable, like a fancy Fort Knox. You can see the whole of London from up there. There’re video cameras everywhere. You can’t get out of the flat without typing in a code and you can’t let anybody in without doing the same. You can’t get in or out of the flat unless the person who programmes it wants you to.’
‘Are the offices the same, Preston?’ asked Angus. Preston had led the team that had gone to the Malamatos shipping offices.
He kept them waiting a good while as he thought about an answer. ‘No. They have standard office security, that’s all.’ He paused, a sly grin widening across his tanned cheeks. ‘Ooh. What’s he hiding?’
Georgie spoke up. ‘The office at the house was locked, but there was only standard security on the laptop we took.’
Angus thumped his paper baton on the desk. ‘OK, so what have we got? An anonymous phone tip-off about illegally harvested Brazilian rosewood which is shipped to London using fake export licences. We’ve got a whole can of it impounded here that came off the ship mentioned by the source. We’re looking for patterns, we need to know how much we’re dealing with and what the scale of his operation is. Now, before you think this is only wood, it’s not girls or guns or drugs—’
Preston let out a sarcastic cheer and Georgie wished that Angus hadn’t smiled. His flashes of childish inconsistency punctured her fantasies of him. She didn’t think he’d like to know that behind his back they called him Anguish. Preston added insult to injury by looking across at her and winking.
‘The margin on illegal tropical hardwood is better than drugs – think about that,’ Georgie added, giving Preston her best dagger stare.
‘Indeed,’ added Angus. ‘This guy’s not a pusher on a street corner, but he could well be making more money than one.’
‘Jungle hardwood is called green gold, I heard,’ Georgie added. ‘For all we know we might have ourselves a rosewood kingpin.’
‘We know the rep this guy’s got, right?’ said Preston. ‘He’s a proper wrong’un.’ He exchanged a look with Mo. ‘There was that allegation about GBH that was made by someone working here last year, but then the guy dropped the charges and left the docks. Word was that he had been leaned on.’
‘You think that’s bad?’ Mo began. ‘About three years ago, there was that potentially huge case involving the Ecuadorian government, wasn’t it? And the whistleblower ended up drowned at Gallion’s Reach?’ The men in the room nodded as they remembered. ‘An open verdict was recorded, but you know the bar talk—’
‘Well, you don’t,’ interrupted Preston with a grin.
‘No, I don’t personally, since I never go in pubs, but you get my drift. We’re dealing with a right fucker here, pardon my French.’
‘You need to make sure you follow proper procedure on this,’ said Angus. ‘I don’t want him wriggling off the hook with his clever lawyers if we find anything that can implicate h
im. This “Deep Throat”’ – Angus raised his fingers in a quote mark – ‘also claimed that Christos was moving other stuff. So if there is something else coming in in those cans, we need to know about that too, and I suggest we try to find out who this tip-off is and get him some protection; he’s going to need it. Oh, and by the way, the line was so garbled we think the tip-off was using a voice changer, so it could in fact be a woman.’
The team nodded and Angus thumped his desk with the rolled-up paper, as if bringing the meeting to a close.
‘Sir, there’s something weird at that house.’ Georgie sensed them stilling as they turned towards her. She feared they were waiting for her to say something ridiculous.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Angus.
‘Well, I mean … Just hear me out. It’s a hunch, I guess.’ Damn, that had come out all wrong. She could see Preston leaning back in his chair, luxuriating in her every fuck-up so soon in her new job. ‘They’ve got two kids and lots of money, but they live in a flat with no garden, right on a busy road. The windows don’t even open, there’s an air-conditioning system. Why aren’t they living in a nice house with a garden in … I don’t know, Chelsea, St John’s Wood?’
Angus shrugged, flicking through a pile of paper to find something he needed. ‘Maybe they like city living.’
‘OK, well, that’s my point really. She works at home, does the artsy thing and makes masks, yet they’re right next to King’s Cross, one of the biggest construction sites in Europe. It’s all noisy and chaotic. Fine behind the double glazing, but once outside, not a place for kids. I’ve got a friend who’s an estate agent, and he says that it’s women who choose houses, you’re always selling to the wife. But my point is he chose that flat – he’s the boss. And you can grow to hate your boss.’ Angus frowned and looked alarmed. ‘No offence, but maybe our anonymous tip-off came from the wife.’
Preston made a sucking sound on his teeth. ‘Don’t overstate it. These wives are up to their necks in it, just like their husbands. They’re always family affairs.’
Georgie was about to argue this point vehemently with Preston but her eye was caught by the receptionist outside Angus’s office gesticulating at her.
The receptionist opened the door. ‘Sorry, Georgie, but there’s someone downstairs for you.’
Georgie frowned. ‘Who is it?’
The receptionist looked stricken. ‘I think it’s your dad.’
‘Are we quite finished?’ Angus was staring at her.
‘Sorry, sorry.’
‘The only way to find out for sure about the wife is to talk to her,’ Angus continued, ‘find out if there’s something about her we can use—what’s all that shouting?’
‘Excuse me,’ said Georgie, leaving the room in a hurry.
Georgie was already at a near run as the sound of shouting rebounded off the stairwell. She flew down the stairs two at a time, finding her dad beginning to tussle with a security guard in the entrance. ‘Thank you, I’ll take it from here.’ She grabbed the back of her dad’s jacket and pulled him through the swing doors and up against the side of the building, panic beginning to build. She didn’t want him further out in the car park or her colleagues would have a stadium view from the windows upstairs. ‘It’s eleven thirty in the morning, what the hell are you doing?’
‘I kept telling them that I needed to … why were you not here?’
‘Where’s Ryan?’
‘That fucker has gone off and I couldn’t get the fire started, it’s freezing in the house, why weren’t you here?’
He was leaning heavily on her, the sharp tang of spirits clinging to him.
‘Tell me you didn’t drive, please tell me …’
‘Drive? I couldn’t find the bloody keys, could I? Where did you put the keys?’
She tried to lead him down the side of the building, painfully aware that if anyone saw them it could be ammunition loaded and stored by her colleagues such as Preston to use against her in the months and years to come. She needed to get her dad to the road and into a taxi as soon as possible.
‘Where are you taking me? I’m alone on the bloody anniversary, no one thought about that, did they?’
Georgie stopped and stared at him. ‘It’s October, Dad. Mum died in April—’
‘See, six months. Your brothers didn’t remember …’ He started to keen and stagger about as she pulled out her phone. Three dockers walked past, ogling her tawdry domestic mess.
She made a call. ‘Ryan, where the hell are you? Dad’s here at work, I need you to come and get him, or get Karl or Matt to come. Right away.’ How ironic. She was the only one in the family to have a job, but she was the one left to pick up the pieces, the one Dad fell apart with. The only woman left in the Bell family, the family of bloody bell ends.
‘I feel sick.’ He burped loudly. ‘She wouldn’t have left me like this, no she wouldn’t.’
‘You’re not really going to be sick, are you?’ Oh, please God, not here, not in front of the new life she was trying to forge. She felt shame for her father’s weakness and sorrow for the grief and injustice he still felt so acutely. Thirty-two years of happy marriage before cancer dragged her mother from him. ‘Dad, today is difficult I know, but I have a job, I have to work, you can’t keep turning up like this. It doesn’t help me. Dad? You listening to me?’
He was quiet now, staring at the side of a large warehouse as men in yellow reflective jackets reversed a fork-lift truck. ‘You done well, girl, getting a job here.’
‘Dad!’ He had turned to look at her now, the usual feral glint back in his eyes. She leaned in close to him, squeezing his arm. ‘Don’t even think about it. This is where I work. There will never, I mean never, be any knock-offs, any special deals …’
He smiled at her, his grin crooked. ‘But you’re a Bell.’
Georgie heard the squeal of brakes on a badly driven car behind her. She faced round to see Ryan’s Rav 4 swerve to a stop. Her brother opened the door and got out. He was five years older than her and three times as big. The day was cold but he wore only a tight black T-shirt and jeans. No point in spending all those hours body-building in the gym if no one could see the results of your efforts.
‘Ryan, get him home and get him a coffee. Honestly, he can’t come here—’
‘What’s got into you two? I thought someone had died from all the messages I got.’
‘Someone has bloody died – your mum.’
‘It’s six months today,’ Georgie added.
Brother and sister looked at each other. ‘Dad, you can’t do this every month,’ began Ryan. ‘You can’t mourn—’
‘I do this every minute of every day, I’m mourning every second.’
‘Dad, I didn’t mean that …’
Georgie looked at the ground to stop the tears. Her dad’s grief, still so raw, was painful to witness. Conflict chewed at her. She loved her family, but she felt the familiar pull of disappointment and frustration with them. She had chosen to tread a different path, and she had never told them what a battle it had been. She had wanted to be a police officer, but that would have been a step too far, a betrayal they wouldn’t have tolerated. She had settled on customs instead. She was aware that her family was all she really had; no job was worth alienating all of them.
‘Look at all this stuff, Ryan.’ Her dad was nudging his first-born, nodding in the direction of the miles of warehousing and stacks of containers, egging him on. Ryan winked at Georgie, who swore under her breath. Here they were, sniffing round her job, wondering if there was an angle they could exploit.
‘Take him home.’
Ryan groaned. ‘I’ve got to go to the gym, see Shelley, I’m so busy today.’
‘Busy!’ Ryan had never had a job, not a legal one anyway, yet he always claimed to be busier than her. Georgie saw Mo coming out of the entrance to the office. ‘I have to go, Dad, you dragged me out of a meeting. You can’t come here when I’m at work. You have to phone first.’
‘At least Ryan thinks of the family. Family’s important to him.’ His voice was rising, the drink setting him off again. ‘He knows when the heart’s been ripped from a family.’
‘Please, Ryan, take him home.’
Mo came up to them. ‘Georgie, Angus is asking for you.’
‘Mo, this is my dad and my brother Ryan.’
Georgie was acutely aware of the miasma of spirits clinging to her father. She hoped Mo was standing upwind. Mo smiled and said hello and the two Bells stared at him, her dad swaying uncertainly as the silence stretched.
‘OK, I’ll see you tonight, Dad.’ She turned and walked away with Mo. The silence was so painful she had to break it. ‘Sorry about that.’
‘Sorry about what?’
‘My useless fuck-up of a family. I’ve got two more brothers who are even worse.’
Mo turned round as the Rav 4 roared off and up the ramp to the road. He smiled at her. ‘Your bro’s got a sick car.’
6
It was the middle of the afternoon, the dead time before Kelly’s evening rush dealing with kids and chores. Medea had come round to cook Greek dishes in Kelly’s kitchen, spattering flour across the floor and leaving trails of honey on the surfaces which the kids got on their sleeves. Now her mother-in-law was sealing a series of Greek dishes in clingfilm, mummifying them in layers to be freed at suppertime. Their remains sat in the fridge for days afterwards, staring up aggressively, demanding to be eaten. Normally Kelly was irritated by Medea’s thoughtless intrusion but today they had had an OK chat and had even laughed with each other. She felt emboldened. Maybe she could use Medea to get Christos to change his mind about letting her leave. She watched her mother-in-law wipe the kitchen surfaces and miss a large drop of honey, making Kelly wonder how bad her eyesight was becoming.
‘There’s a special bond between a mother and her only son, I can see that.’
Medea nodded, lifting the toaster to clean underneath.
‘You love him very much, don’t you? You want only the best for him.’ Kelly moved closer to Medea, the two of them side by side, working in the heart of the home. ‘He deserves a life with someone else, someone who can make him happier than I can.’