Binks’ gun has gone skidding across the floor like a delayed reaction. I run over to it and pick it up. It’s heavy like a hammer. I walk over to Binks who is clutching his leg. There is blood spurting out of it and his screams are filling the air. I have to shut him up or who knows what is going to walk through that door next.
I pistol-whip him across the head and I’m expecting him to go out cold but instead he starts screaming louder and suddenly he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. They go up to his head from the pain of the whack and then the blood from the leg comes squirting out again in jets and they come back down again to stop the blood. I hit him again. Harder. This time though he goes proper out.
Curt starts calling out for tape and I run to the kitchen to get the parcel tape we been using to tape up the windows. Curt starts winding it round Shilo’s arms and legs and then he starts on his face. At first I think he’s taping up just his mouth but then I see that he’s taping up his eyes too. He throws over the tape to me and I start by taping up the bleeding leg. I ain’t trying to save him. I just don’t want blood everywhere. Then I copy Curt and tie up the legs the arms and then the face. It’s not till I have finished off the last of the tape that I suddenly remember the girls. Curt starts walking towards the room as if he has read my mind but then just before he opens the door there is the sound of a gunshot.
I get up and start running to the back room. I can hear Ki screaming. I get there just as Curt has walked into the room. That’s when we see it. Ki is holding the hot Baikal and Jamil is on the floor. Dead.
Long adjournment: 16:45
IN THE CENTRAL CRIMINAL COURT T2017229
Before: HIS HONOUR JUDGE SALMON QC
* * *
Closing Speeches:
* * *
Trial: Day 33
Monday 10th July 2017
APPEARANCES
For the Prosecution: Mr C. Salfred QC
For the Defendant: In person
Transcribed from a digital audio recording by
T. J. Nazarene Limited
Official Court Reporters and Tape Transcribers
21
10:15
That picture of Ki. That look on her face. That is going to be something that I ain’t ever going to be able to forget. Her face had lost all its blood and her wide-open eyes seemed just blank. Like the life was all gone. Like when that boy’s life was draining out of him, hers was draining out of her too. I took the gun from her hand and felt its heat burning. That fucking gun. I knew what happened. It had been whispering at her like it had whispered at me. Shoot. Shoot.
I asked her what had gone down.
‘He, I don’t know. He woke up and he went for my gun,’ she says crying. ‘I kept shouting for you. But you didn’t hear me.’
I look at Curt and he shrugs his shoulders at me.
I hold her close to me. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, babe. I didn’t hear you with everything else that was happening’
I take the gun from her hands and put it in my pocket. It’s still warm. I take her by the hands and lead her out of the room. She says nothing. I don’t even think she blinks. As we walk into the main room I remember the two men taped up on the ground and spin her back round to the bedroom again. I hold her face in my hands.
‘Ki. Listen to me. Curt is going to go out now and get you a cab. Then in a minute I’m going to walk you both outside. Listen to me though. I want you to keep your eyes shut till I say. Okay? Curt?’ I say to him and he turns and leaves straight away.
I look around to find Bless. She is turning round in circles and mumbling to herself.
‘Bless. Bless! It’s going to be cool. You too. Hold on to me and keep your eyes shut.’
Bless suddenly snaps back into herself and seems calmer and turns to Kira.
‘Kira, it’s going to be f-fine. I’m going to be with you all the way. Come on now. Let’s get you out of your c-coat and into your clothes. Come on baby.’
I turn my head away as they dress and then wait another two minutes before taking them both by the hand and rushing out of the flat as quickly as I can. The scene is like a thing from a movie. Two men out cold on the floor. Blood in places it had no business being. Door with cracks all through it. Shit everywhere. Binks looks like he’s asleep but he’s moaning like he’s having a nightmare. Shilo is knocked the fuck out though, face to the sky.
By the time we get to the street Curt is already standing by a waiting car in the dark. I help the girls in and give a twenty pound note to the driver and give him the address, just trying to sound normal. I nod to the girls at the back and say to the driver, ‘Just split up from her boyfriend,’ and he nods back to me like he’s seen this a lot.
Curt and I run back up to the flat. Shilo and Binks are still there on the ground but they are both coming to now and making noises. The blood around Binks’ leg has changed colour and seems to be drying. That tape must have stopped it. Curt and I nod at each other and then go to where Jamil’s body is waiting for us. That’s the immediate problem, not the two boys groaning in the other room, with their faces taped up like mummies. We had to move him out of there before his mans woke up and realized he was dead.
It was already late at night which was a good thing because it meant that we could move him without being spotted or whatever. Curt and I agreed we would take him one arm each and walk him to his M3, which we knew was probably nearby. Jamil had a gunshot wound in his chest. There was a bit of blood but not nearly as much of it as Binks who’d been shot in just his leg.
‘His heart’s still pumping, that’s the reason,’ explained Curt. ‘Fuck though bruv, you look like you been shot too. You can’t go out again like that. You better hope that driver didn’t see that.’
I look down and realize that Binks’ blood is all over my clothes from when I was taping him up. It was dark outside though so the driver probably didn’t see anything.
I look at Curt who is pacing the floor as if he was trying to work out what to do next.
‘Listen,’ I say, ‘I’ll tape JC up to stop the blood. You don’t need no blood on you and I’m already covered. Then we can zip him up in his coat and drag him out.’
‘Plan bruv,’ says Curt and I get to work.
It’s pretty messy work taping up a bloody dead man. A little bit of blood makes a lot of fucking mess. I can’t tell you how many times I scrubbed myself clean when I got back home, but however many times it was, it wasn’t enough to get rid of the tiny speck they found under my nails when they arrested me more than a month later. And when I say I scrubbed, I mean I scrubbed until my own skin was beginning to bleed and then I couldn’t tell whether it was his blood on me or my own. I basically soaked myself in bleach that night but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get the feeling or the smell of the dead boy off my skin.
Once I had taped him up and wiped him down with bleach, I went into the main room and scooped up a handful of baking soda that’d been laid out everywhere and covered all the wet bits on him with it. I more or less covered him in powder until he was dry. The smell of it helped to cover the smell of the blood too. Anyway, I finally zipped up Jamil in his coat and to my mind, I thought, if you didn’t get up too close, he didn’t look too bad. For a dead boy. I pulled his hat over his eyes and called Curt over.
‘Good,’ says Curt. ‘Now you better get that shit off you.’
I take off my top, which is bloody and covered in powder at the same time and throw it in a bin liner. Just as I am wondering what I am going to wear, Curt hands me his hoodie. It was his hoodie, you get me. An XXL black hoodie with Chinese-style writing on the back of it. You remember. The number three evidence the prosecution has been going on about. That hoodie. I put it on without giving it a second’s thought. The same one Curt had been wearing three days before when we had met up with Jamil on the block. The witness that saw me that day, must have seen Curt and me and confused who was wearing what. I don’t know
how that shit can happen but apparently it can.
‘Gloves man,’ says Curt and hands me a pair of them yellow washing-up gloves. He also puts on a pair and together we stand there for a second looking at each other, wearing these ridiculous gloves. Then without saying anything we take him by an arm each and stumble down the two flights to the ground floor main entrance.
Just before we open the front door, I look at Curt. He is breathing heavy but other than that he seems like he’s okay. Calm in a ways.
‘What about those two upstairs?’ I go.
‘They ain’t going nowhere. That tape’s not coming off any time soon,’ he says and heaves the body out into the cold air.
It was the hardest thing man. It was like dragging a bag of cement and trying to keep it upright at the same time. We dropped him a couple of times on the way down it was that bad. Every time we did I kept expecting him to scream out. But he never did. Like for once he was taking his licks like a man.
Once we were at the bottom Curt held him up while I stuck my hands in his coat pocket and waded through used tissues until I found his car keys. Then we stepped out into the cold air, and looked for his wheels.
‘Where the fuck are his wheels at?’ I say looking around.
‘Just press the button, maybe it’s got one of them bleeper things.’
I did and suddenly two amber lights wink at us from the other side of the street. There it was, his gleaming M3 right under a tree. Don’t know how we missed it.
Now what I really should have checked if I had been thinking straight was his phones. I really should have got rid of them. But I ain’t got a murdering kind of a mind, you get me. This wasn’t planned or nothing. This was just supposed to be taxing, end of story. Get Ki safe. That’s all it was about. Anyway that was my bad luck really. Doesn’t matter now though does it? You know the whole story now innit? Oh shit and the hair. My hair in his car. I just never even thought about it. Who would think of hair when you practically ain’t even got none on your head? Maybe I should have put plastic on the seats before I sat down, or fucking hoovered the car up afterwards but I just didn’t think of them things with all the other things that were crowding my mind. That’s how they find you though. What’s that thing people say. You can think of some things. You can think of nearly all the things. But nobody can think of all the things all the time. Whatever. You know what I mean.
Anyways we parked up round the back of one of the estates we knew and dragged him out of his car and round the back to like a shed thing where they keep all the bins. We had no clue what to do with him so we just proper dumped him. Like he was just another bag of rubbish. And when he landed on the ground, the thing I remember most is how he made a muffled kind of a sound like he wasn’t even really there, like he was far away from his body already. That’s the only thing that kept me able to even do it. That I knew it weren’t even him there any more. It was just his past.
We put a bin liner over his taped-up body so he didn’t stand out and looked back at him. I said a kind of prayer under my breath and tried to make it real but all I could see was rubbish lying there. I remember thinking then about that dust to dust thing and I knew that he was gone.
After we left him, we had to lose the wheels. We didn’t want to go too far though because we had Shilo and Binks to deal with still. So I drove a little bit until we saw another council estate and then parked up.
‘Here?’ says Curt.
‘Why not here?’ I say getting out.
‘This whip? Here? It’ll get jacked for sure,’ he says, heaving himself out from the seat.
‘Exactly,’ I say and head towards the main road, making sure I leave the doors unlocked and the key in the ignition.
We dash the gloves into a nearby bin and jump on the bus and back to the trap. We walk up slowly to the big front doors, looking at everything. Just in case. You never know what can come at you. But it all looked cool to us. Everything like it was. We bounced up the stairs and listened at the door for any sounds. Last thing we want is to be jumped by two very fucking vex boys, you get me. I have my ear pressed to the door but all I can hear is Curt’s breathing. I give him like a thumbs up and he puts in the key and turns it. As we open the door I half expect them to be gone. But Shilo and Binks are still there, fully awake now moaning and squirming in their taped suits. We ignore them and start cleaning the place up. We basically threw bottles and bottles of bleach around the place until the whole place smelled like a swimming pool. Nothing can survive bleach apparently. Kills ninety-nine per cent of all known shit, everyone knows that. It was only once we had washed the place down that Curt finally looked at me and then at the groaning men on the floor. He pulled me into the back room out of earshot.
‘What the fuck do we do with those two clowns?’
‘Cut ’em loose,’ I say. I just wanted the thing to be over right there and then. I wanted them out. I wanted Curt out. I wanted me out.
‘What if …?’
‘They don’t know fuck all. They was out cold,’ I say.
‘Well, eventually they will start to wonder where the fuck their bossman is at though.’
‘We tell ’em we delivered him up to Glockz. They might even drop the word to the Olders and start the war themselves.’
‘True say,’ he says and then walks back into the room and starts to pull the tape off their faces. They scream like girls. Then Curt leans his big face right into theirs and gives them this look.
‘Listen you motherfuckers, next time I see your ugly faces, they’ll be chewing steel you get me,’ he says and drags them to their feet. One under each hand.
‘Where’s JC?’ says Shilo rubbing his head.
‘He got some business with Glockz innit. They took him. Now if I was you, I would maybe want to get the fuck out of here before Glockz comes back for your arses.’
Binks is coming to life now and starts getting all jumpy again. Then he looks down at his leg and screams out. ‘You fucking shot me man,’ he goes to me, crying like a baby.
‘Yeah man,’ I goes, ‘I fucking shot you.’
They make as if to leave but Curt grabs each of them, by the collar.
‘Wait the fuck up boys. Curt got some questions for you. And you better think before you give me any bullshit or you gonna follow JC up North.’
Even I am afraid when I hear Curt talking about himself as if he’s some next man. I look at him and he nods like he’s saying, ‘Yeah I know.’
Break: 11:00
22
11:15
So the rest is just details really. We were pretty surprised that Jamil pulled that shit in the first place you get me. It weren’t even one of them things. It was like, yeah we expected him to think about trying it on but we thought even he wasn’t stupid enough to cut off a supply chain at less than half the price of what he was paying the Olders. It was like he hadn’t even thought this shit through.
The thing that amazed us most of all though was that the bag he brought with him had actual money in it. Not the full sixty grand but half of it. It was like he weren’t even that bothered about losing the cash. Why risk taking all that cash if all you was planning on doing was taxing the drugs in the first place? It didn’t make sense to us at first. It couldn’t have been as a just-in-case kind of thing, because there was only half the cash there.
We found out from Shilo that there was no plan to tax the drugs. The plan was to hand over the thirty gees. Shilo and Binks would start banging on the door causing a commotion and Curt would be too para to count it all out and would just hand over the drugs. They had apparently been actually shouting out ‘There’s police here!’ or some shit, just to hurry the shit up. Anyway then Jamil would be gone with what he thought was a kilo of white and we would be left short. Short but not so shafted that we might want to go to war with the Olders over it. It wasn’t a bad plan. But they hadn’t counted on Curt. He weren’t there to hand over anything without getting his paper first. And when Curt didn’t get shook like
he was supposed to, JC uploaded his shooter and started a thing which no one could control.
So it was Ki who did it. Now I realize that this shit is all new information as far as you are concerned. I know this, and I know that is not allowed. My QC told me this. He told me again and again. ‘You can’t say new information. It’s against the rules of evidence.’ That is why you can see the prosecution QC squirming in his seat. He don’t like it. And I don’t like it really and truly. I know there is going to be consequences at the end of my speech. Shit is going to happen. But I can’t help it. It is the truth. I can’t keep you in the dark. These things need light. No matter if it hurts me or Ki.
And I tell you the last person I wanted to get into this is Ki, but since she is far away by now, I figured it was safe to tell you lot about it.
Okay the prosecution might say, why did I not tell the police all this stuff about Jamil in my interview and they could have checked it out. But the truth is that I did not want it coming on top of Ki. This whole thing was for her benefit and I wasn’t going to be putting her in the frame for it no matter what. Especially not while there was a chance they could arrest her for it, you know what I mean.
In fact at the time we was doing our best to make sure none of this shit came up at all. We wanted to bury it good and proper. Who the fuck would believe my story anyway? What? Honest officer, we was setting up this drug dealer who was giving it about my girl who some next drug dealers were looking for and we were going to rip him off so that next man’s dealers would kill those first dealers and rah rah rah. Besides even if they had turned the place over, although they would have found a lot of shit, they wouldn’t have found what they were looking for. They wouldn’t have found any evidences. We ended up making that impossible.
After we cleaned the place up, Curt dumped all the shit, the powder, the bleach, the clothes and whatever, while I went back to my yard to see about the girls. I had no idea what sort of state they was in, so we made a plan that I would go straight there in a cab with the cash and Curt would meet us once he’d got rid of what he had to, including JC’s silver Browning. We looked all over the place for my Baikal but it was nowhere to be seen. At the end, we figured maybe Shilo or Binks had taken it, somehow. Or maybe it got caught up in the other shit we had bundled together for dumping. Either way it didn’t matter to us as long as it was gone. Sure I had touched it. And sure Kira had touched it but neither me nor her had any criminal records so the Feds didn’t have our prints anyway. So whilst they might pick up some marks from it, if they found it even, unless they had us, they wouldn’t be able to do no matches. Just as long as we didn’t leave nothing that could lead them to us. And we didn’t think there was. We was being careful. Or you know, we thought we was.
You Don't Know Me: A BBC Radio 2 Book Club Choice Page 14