It Was You

by It Was You (retail) (epub)

  It Was You

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Two

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Part Four

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Part Five

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  It Was You

  Adam Baron

  For Janice Franklin Baron

  My son, my executioner

  I take you in my arms

  Quiet and small and just astir

  And whom my body warms.

  Sweet death, small son, our instrument

  Of immortality,

  Your cries and hungers document

  Our bodily decay.

  We twenty-five and twenty-two

  Who seemed to live for ever

  Observe enduring life in you

  And start to die together.

  Donald Hall

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Josephine Thomas tries to stand. It’s the second time she’s tried but again she can’t make it. Instead she starts to drag herself along the cement floor towards the street end of the alley, the way she’d come. The alley is dark, the stained concrete walls seeming to close in on her. Jo is scared. She calls out but her voice doesn’t make it to the top of the alley walls let alone through or over them. No one responds and she begins to feel cold, colder than she ever has. Her fear grows but she knows that if she can get back out to the street she’ll be fine. Someone will see her, even though it’s after midnight. She thinks about her mother. She has to get out of there, for her. This wouldn’t be fair, not after Dad. She pictures her mother, at home, early in the morning. Next morning. She’s standing on the step outside, chatting to Blonnie Watkins.

  Jo didn’t even know she’d been stabbed. Not at first. When the guy grabbed her and wrapped a hand over her mouth all she wondered was why he’d sprayed liquid ice into her side. It was only when her assailant dropped her and fled up towards the mouth of the alley that she realized. She felt: her hand came back warm and sticky. Blood. She didn’t even see him. Just a dark shape waiting in the bend. Then a flurry and pain and footsteps running away.

  Jo drags herself along, stops, and does it all again. That alley, it usually stank of piss but there’s something else now. It’s her, her blood. She starts to cry but stops herself. She curls up and pushes forward, like a caterpillar. Moving hurts more than anything she’s ever known but she’s close now, only thirty feet from the street. She feels a flood of relief. Not far and actually, if she’s still, the pain slackens. In spite of the blood it can’t have been anything much after all. Jo feels fine except for the tiredness. Tiredness drags at every cell in her body. She can’t help it. She closes her eyes and then wakes, suddenly. It’s later, she can tell. No. She shouldn’t do that. She has to keep going. She curls her fingers into a drain grille and pulls, groaning at the effort. She gains another foot.

  She sees her mother again, on the step, still chatting to Blonnie, shaking her head at the latest mess her boys have got into. Then she sees him. Her mother sees him: PC Evans, cycling along the top lane. Blonnie is in full flow and Gwen has to nudge her.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ Blonnie says. ‘What the hell have they done now? Well they’re not here, I can tell him that. I don’t know where they stayed last night.’

  Jo’s mother doesn’t respond because she’s frowning. The PC, young Rhodri, his face is deathly pale. She wonders what’s up and swallows, before laughing to herself. Poor Rhod, only twenty-two. It’s not the boys, it’s Blonnie’s big Dave he’s come for. Blonnie sees it too and braces herself, looking up towards the muffled snoring above their heads. But once the PC has propped up his bike he ignores Blonnie. He asks Mrs Thomas if she will go inside.

  Jo wills herself on. She can’t let this happen. Rhod Evans, he kissed her once. His dad came, on the same bike, to tell her and Mum what the swing bucket had done. Jo gains another few feet. Her mother had gone mad, wrecking the kitchen before running down the street. Jo tells herself again that she has to get out of there. But she feels a bit dizzy. She just needs a second, only a second, then she’ll make it. Right to the end. It’s late, that’s why she’s tired, but she’ll be OK when she wakes. She woke last time, didn’t she? Her eyes close. She’s moving faster now. She can see Blonnie, standing next to the bicycle with its worn, sprung leather seat.

  Blonnie’s arms are folded. She’s thinking no, it can’t be, not again the poor woman. Jo sees Blonnie gasp. From inside the cottage comes a sound, like a table being pushed over. It’s followed by a scream.

  A shrill, loud and horrible scream.

  Chapter Two

  That autumn London was about as beautiful a place as it can ever be. The country had been spared the weeks of rain that had left whole counties underwater the previous year, and in their place came crisp clear days that were tailor-made for a man whose job mostly entailed walking around the city looking for people. Watching shivering fourteen-year-old girls slouching on street corners near Brick Lane was no less depressing, and neither was checking cardboard constructions behind the Strand for ten-year-old boys. Peering through the smeared windows of runaway kids’ lives was never going to be a happy task, whatever the time of year. But with the air tasting cleaner with the cold, and the trees lit with a thousand shades of orange and red, I felt that I was a lucky man to be living in London then, and to be doing what I was doing.

  It wasn’t just the weather. Things seemed to be going right for me that October. The immediate future looked clear and simple for the first time in years. It may sound strange but I put it down to the fact that the girl I was seeing was working abroad. It wasn’t that I was glad she was away, the opposite was true, but the huge hole of her absence had shown me what a presence she had been. It was like gradually emerging from a fog I’d never properly realized I was surrounded by. So while the world was gradually closing down, drawing the sap back into itself, I felt powered by a full and growing energy.

  But then, suddenly, London stopped being such a beautiful place to be. Just like those people the autumn before who had thought they were living on dry land, everything I had in the world was underwater. The banks had burst, the torrent had risen, and all I could do was cling onto the wreckage.

  * * *

  It was a cold bright Monday morning and I was driving up th
rough Islington to my office, squinting against a low sun that was squeezing out the last drop of juice from its summer recharge. The traffic was like a giant jigsaw puzzle and when I say I was driving what I really mean is that I was sitting very still for what seemed like lifetimes on end before edging my car forward a couple of feet. Strangely enough, though, it didn’t bother me. Sometimes the mere mechanics of moving around the city I live in get me as frustrated as a colour-blind man with high blood pressure trying to do a Rubik’s Cube. Wearing mittens. But that morning it was as if I was floating above the traffic, not sitting right inside it.

  I was still in a good mood as I turned away from Highbury Fields into the car park of the Lindauer Building. I raised a hand to Ron in his booth and the barrier was raised in front of me. I brought my Louis XIV Mazda to a halt and put the engine out of its misery but didn’t bother locking up. I wasn’t planning on staying in my office for long. I’d only driven up to check the mail, not having been to my office for two or three days. That and put some photographs in the post to a woman whose son I’d found the day before. The woman’s voice had given away how much she cared about the confused young boy who had decided that the delivery bay of a furniture store behind Tottenham Court Road was a better place to live than a three-bedroomed house in the suburbs of Plymouth. I didn’t imagine that the pictures I was going to send her would be of any real comfort but I wanted to give the woman what news I could.

  I walked across the car park towards the huge, land-bound ocean liner that is the Lindauer Building, filling my lungs with cold air tinged with the scent of leaf mulch from the park. I used the side entrance and stepped into the waiting lift. The Lindauer is a former carpet factory, split up into a maze of design studios and business units. Any later in the day and it would be alive with the distant and close clatter of drills, printing machines, sanders and other unidentifiable machinery, making you feel as though you were rising up through the belly of a giant beast. But as it wasn’t yet nine the place was quiet but for my whistle and the deep, slow drawl of the lift. When the plastic number three lit up I yawned, waited for the doors and stepped out.

  After walking down the empty, school-grey corridor, I opened up my office. I slid the photographs I’d brought with me into an envelope, which I addressed before putting it on the edge of my table, where I’d probably forget it when I went out again. I then bent down to the three-day accumulation of mail that my letter box had seemed to regurgitate onto my office floor in my absence. The first thing I came across was a catalogue from a mail-order design company offering to rush me some genuine beech light-cord pulls with the urgency of a UN airlift. I went through the rest quickly, and after discarding the very kind offer of a million pounds from the Reader’s Digest people, I dumped the entire pile in the bin. I then spent five minutes standing, very still, by my window.

  In the middle of winter I get quite a good view from my window. Any other time of the year, however, and the high-rises of Hackney and neatly laid-out gardens stretching out towards them are obscured by the leaves of a huge oak tree. The tree is the curse of my textile-designing friends in the studio next door, who yearn for the light it keeps from them, but I have always enjoyed the company it provides, the leaves that sometimes stroke my window like a lover’s fingertips. What I have also come to appreciate is that the oak is not just a tree, but a home.

  To birds.

  OK. I’m going to admit it. Birds. Not just birds, but looking at them. I’m going to say it: watching them. I never meant to be a, oh, Christ, birdwatcher. A year ago and I’d have laughed at you, but ever since someone I once knew pointed out the array of wildlife right outside my office window I’ve been hooked by my jittery, feathered neighbours. I even bought a little book so I’d know my coal tit from my pied wagtail, another signal that time is beginning to run through me faster than a bag thief through a shopping mall.

  Today all I could see was a solitary chaffinch. I was trying to decide whether it was male (pinkish chest) or female (bully crown) when a knock on my door interrupted me. I stuffed the book into my desk drawer, where no prospective client looking for a hard-nosed private investigator would see it, and sat down.

  ‘It’s open.’

  When I saw the petite figure of Jemma in my doorway I relaxed. Jemma and her friend Cass have rented the studio next door for over a year now. I’ve always liked both girls but I took to Jemma more, probably because of the bright smile she always seems to find for everyone. Jemma has long hair the colour of butterscotch, round grey eyes and a small nose that wrinkles when she laughs. Her light, friendly disposition usually transforms her from girl-next-door pretty to very nearly beautiful, but right then she looked serious. Her expression confused me for a moment but then I nodded to myself. I knew, of course, what the cause of it was, and the fact that I’d forgotten it, even for a split second, didn’t make me feel very good.

  Jemma stood in my doorway without moving, her eyes fixed on my table.

  ‘I guess you know why I’m here,’ she said after a second or two.

  ‘I think so.’ I filled a smile with compassion, hoping she hadn’t seen my previous cheeriness. ‘I thought you might drop by sometime. Come in.’

  Jemma moved forward but stopped.

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘Shall I get us some tea first?’

  ‘Why not? Though can my tea be coffee? Ally knows how.’

  ‘Of course. Yes. And thanks, Billy.’ The cloud covering Jemma’s face lifted for a second. ‘Thanks a lot. I knew you’d care, even if not many other people seem to.’

  Jemma’s footsteps disappeared down the hall to the cafe and soon the wolf howl of an espresso machine filled the air. I took a long, deep breath, the light mood that had carried me in that morning having vanished into the air. It had been replaced by a solid lump of guilt. I couldn’t believe that I’d managed to forget the event that had snuffed out the usual light behind Jemma’s eyes so effectively. A death. A sad, lonely, pointless death. Jemma had said that I cared, but I’d hardly given it any thought at all since it had happened. I’d tossed it out of my mind like an apple core out of a car window. I’d let it bounce off into the past.

  * * *

  Two weeks before I’d driven up to the Lindauer much as I had today, marvelling at the trees in Highbury Fields, the madly coloured leaves rioting at the prospect of being evicted from their branches. I’d turned into the gate only to find three patrol cars sitting outside the building, taking up half of the visitors’ spaces. After resisting the impulse to back straight out and head to the nearest airport, I parked up myself. I went round to the side door, where a tired-looking WPC was standing with a clipboard in the crook of her arm. I asked what was up in as casual a voice as I could but, instead of answering me, the WPC asked me a question: did I recognize the following name?

  ‘Josephine Thomas,’ she said, looking down at her clipboard.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Jo,’ she insisted. ‘Most people called her Jo.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I thought about it. ‘Yes. Or, at least, I know of a Jo but it might not be her. A Welsh girl?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Then I do know her, or at least who she is. Three cars? What did she do, park in a red zone?’

  ‘No. Josephine Thomas is dead I’m afraid, sir.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She’s dead. She was murdered last night. A mugging we think. We’re pretty sure. She was stabbed, and she bled to death.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said again. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘What for? It wasn’t you who did it was it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well then. You weren’t to know, sir, were you?’

  I shook my head and I said Christ and the poor girl and I asked the WPC what, exactly, had happened. Apparently Jo had been working late the night before. She’d taken the last bus but never made it home. Instead she was attacked, in an alley leading to the estate she
lived on, only yards from her flat. It wasn’t known whether she had resisted her assailant but as well as being robbed she was stabbed. The WPC asked me if I was a friend of the girl.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve only seen her a couple of times. I think we only ever spoke to each other once. On the way out.’

  ‘You didn’t see her yesterday?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t here. Who found her?’

  ‘I think I’m supposed to be asking you the questions.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s OK. I probably shouldn’t say much but it’ll all be in the paper by this afternoon, so why not? I can’t see what difference it’ll make.’

  I listened quietly as the WPC ran through what else was known at that stage. She told me that the victim’s body had been found at four that morning by a young couple who’d been out clubbing. The police had arrived shortly after. Because Jo had been stabbed and robbed, the initial feeling was a smackhead, too long since his last bag. Dalston’s the place for them all right, though most settle for burglary and car crime as a means of paying the dream seller. If it was an addict, and he’d shot up immediately after killing Jo, then he’d probably be coming down from it about now.

  ‘That’s going to be one hell of a hangover,’ the WPC agreed.

  I asked if a murder weapon had been found but that was one thing the WPC wouldn’t tell me. What she did say was that Jo hadn’t died instantly after being stabbed. There were indications that she might have lived for anything up to an hour. I didn’t ask what those indications were because I knew what happened to a stab wound when a heart was still beating. And I didn’t ask how the WPC knew this detail. There was a look on her face that I hadn’t encountered for some time but which I instantly recognized. She’d been at the scene. She’d looked under the tent they would have gotten up and her eyes had fallen on the motionless form lying there. She’d have seen the huge sheet of blood Josephine would have been lying on.