You Don't Know Me: A BBC Radio 2 Book Club Choice

by Imran Mahmood

  When I got home, only Ki was there. Bless had finally agreed to go home to Mum’s after Kira had convinced her she was feeling better. Ki did seem better truth be told, in the way of not being so shell-shocked. But something else was in her now. She was talking a hundred miles an hour and making lists in her head and then spilling them out of her mouth.

  ‘What did you do with him?’ she says at one point.

  ‘Better for you not to know,’ I say and start looking around for something strong to drink.

  ‘What about the others? Did you do something else to them?’ she says. Her body is shaking as she is talking. But like a nervous energy thing rather than a fear thing so I feel a bit more okay about her. Kind of.

  ‘Nothing, babe. They fine.’ I find some rum and pour out a shot for us both into some mugs. She takes a sip and makes a face.

  ‘What about your clothes?’ she says clocking the massive hoodie I’m wearing.

  ‘Ki. It’s fine. Curt took care of it. Just. I don’t know. You got to just park all that shit away babe. Nothing going to link you to this thing. I swear down.’ I take her hands and she looks down at mine.

  ‘Blood,’ she says.

  I look at her blankly. She never calls me that.

  ‘Your hands. Nails. There’s blood. You have to wash it. Wash it all off. There’s a nailbrush there under the sink. Do it. Do it now!’ she goes getting all frantic again.

  ‘Okay,’ I say, and swallow the rest of the rum and head to the bathroom. I spend the next twenty minutes scrubbing as much as I could of the whole night into the plughole. But the shit just clung on. All around me all I could see was shreds of that night.

  Anyway I had just got out of the shower when the doorbell went. Ki went and let Curt in. I dried myself off and then joined them in the kitchen. Curt was a bit wired but the spliff he was toking was getting the better of them nerves. Ki still looked white.

  ‘Shit I am worried about the yard man. If those boys let on about the place to anyone, we are fucked. Especially you,’ Curt says passing me the spliff.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The place is dripping with blood man.’

  ‘But we bleached the place down,’ I say getting up from my chair.

  ‘Don’t matter that we washed the fucker down. Blood and DNA has a habit of hanging about.’

  ‘You’re watching way too much CSI man. Anyways they don’t have my DNA on record innit? Or Kira’s.’

  ‘Sure enough. But they do have mine. And if those jokers Shilo and Binks get caught up in something and they name you for this murder? Any DNA in that place that matches yours or Kira’s is going to get them out of a hole and you in one.’

  ‘Fuck,’ I say and sit back down. I hadn’t thought about that at all. It wasn’t just what DNA the police had on record it was also about if anyone lined me up for the murder. Then I would be fucked. It was Curt’s place so he could explain his own DNA. But mine wouldn’t be so easy and I didn’t fancy having to say that I was anywhere near it. Let alone that Ki was.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ I say.

  Ki then gets up from her chair to go and open a window to let some of the spliff smoke out. As she comes back to the table she looks at us both with something like fear.

  ‘There must be something you can do,’ she says.

  ‘What like?’ goes Curt.

  ‘For a start,’ I say, ‘we need to get out of London. Maybe even out of the country. I’m thinking like Spain even.’

  ‘And do what there? Live on what?’ says Ki raising her voice at me. ‘What are we, the Great Train Robbers?’

  ‘Well, we got that bag of cash that Jamil brought,’ I say. ‘Should help us all to just keep low for a few months. Just till we know that they ain’t looking for us.’

  ‘Which brings us back to the DNA, fam. What the fuck we going to do about that?’ says Curt taking a long drag of his spliff.

  Then I get a brainwave, or half of one.

  ‘Get your mandems back in the flat,’ I say.

  ‘What the fuck for?’

  ‘You want it to be occupied if the police ever turn up there. If it’s empty, it’s just going to look like a crime scene. If there’s people there, it just adds more shit into the mix,’ I say.

  Curt considers this for a second and then nods slowly at me.

  ‘I’ll get on it,’ says Curt and picks up his phone.

  ‘Wait. There is a better thing you can do,’ says Ki, the edges of her eyes white again.

  ‘What?’ we both say.

  ‘In a way it’s what you just said,’ she says looking at me. ‘Add more shit into the mix.’

  We look at her puzzled until she makes it clear.

  ‘Drown the place in DNA.’

  Everyone has a mate round my ends who either is a barber or who knows one, so getting hair clippings was easy although I did get some strange looks. But barbers are weird anyway so you have to be doing some proper bare weird shit before they draw the line. Anyway, once we got enough of it together, Curt and I went up to the flat the next day with a bag of clippings and scattered it around everywhere. It was disgusting, true. But if there was hair DNA to be found, there would be strange results coming up from any test you get me? Sure the police might find my DNA if they happened to look, but if there’s DNA from a hundred boys in that place then no way would they get a case to stick. I mean I ain’t no lawyer or nothing but it sounded tight to me.

  Getting blood was obviously a bit more difficult but we did. At first we spent the afternoon getting bits of meat from the halal meat shop and smearing the walls with it but you can’t get much blood from butchered meat it turns out. Then Curt remembered that he knew someone who used to work in a chicken slaughterhouse and later that evening we had a gallon of chicken blood in a bucket. I asked him what he told the guy he needed it for but all he said to me was, ‘You don’t wanna even know blood.’

  I tell you what though, that shit smells like dead chicken blood should smell. But we took it and even as it was gelling up, we rubbed the whole place down with it. Then, once that was done, bleached the place all over again. Trust, whatever any CSI or whatever found there, it was going to confuse the shit out of them. That was for real.

  We spent the next day on edge. I can’t even tell you. It hadn’t really hit us at the beginning that somebody had ended up, you know what I mean, dead. Even when we was dumping the body on the estate, it still didn’t hit us. It was only once all the work was done, all the hair and blood and cleaning up, it was only then that it hit home. I remember it vividly.

  We was sitting at my yard round my table, Ki was still in the zone. A hundred things to do. Number one on the list of which was booking tickets for us all to Spain. We could only get two tickets out straight away, the third one had to wait for another couple of days. We agreed that Ki and Curt needed to get away the quickest. Ki because she was now in the frame for this as the shooter and Curt because he had no other place to go. His yard here in South, the one we had made into the trap, was way too hot. His yard up in North London was being banged on every hour by Glockz who were now starting to get on top. His phone had been ringing off the hook with threats and even his mum was chasing him down. So they needed to jet urgently.

  ‘The shit is getting hot on top, fam. I can’t even tell you. Glockz chasing me down every two minutes,’ Curt says after ditching yet another call.

  ‘How the fuck those boys nail you for this so quick?’ I say.

  ‘Probably them two innit. They must have gone running straight out of the trap to the Olders. That was the plan though,’ he says walking to the fridge and picking out a pasty before dropping it whole into his mouth.

  ‘But so soon? And not knowing your name. I mean,’ I say turning to face him.

  ‘Yeah you think you need to know my name to pick me out?’ he adds holding his arms out so that he looks twice his normal size. ‘We should have fucking iced them bruv.’

  ‘Fuck man,’ I say. ‘That ain’t us. We ain’
t about all that shit. Sure a boy got merked but that was not something we like aimed for. That shit just went wrong. And I know you Curt. You’re not a gangster no matter if you linked in with this crew.’

  He throws himself into a chair next to us at the table.

  ‘Yeah man, I know. I’m just prang innit bruv. Glockz is heartless and I don’t want to know what they got planned for me.’

  ‘It’s okay bruv. We getting you out of here soon. And for as long as you need. Or as long as thirty gees can keep you in meat.’

  The cash weren’t exactly straightforward though. We couldn’t just stick it in a suitcase and jump on a plane with it. It needed chatting out properly. Then, as we were physically handling the money, counting it up and dividing it up, the whole thing hit us. One by one. Bang. Bang. Bang.

  ‘He’s dead,’ says Curt.

  I look at him like he’s gone mad. ‘We know,’ I say slowly.

  ‘Nah man. I mean he is dead,’ he says, rubbing his face. ‘I mean he was alive one moment. Now he is just gone. Everything that he knew is still here. But he himself, he is just gone. This money here, was here and it’s still here. He was here with this money. Now the money is here and he ain’t. He’s just like disappeared. He is like proper gone, you get me?’

  At first I carried on looking at him as if he had lost his mind. Of course he was dead. We had just spent the whole of yesterday covering the flat with hair and chicken blood. Did I get him? No. I didn’t get him. And then just as I was about to say all that, I did. For the first time I got it. It just slotted into place like a piston into a cylinder bore.

  Weirdly it was Ki that got it last. Then again, the shit she had been through kind of turned the world on its head. You have to forgive her a bit for that. Also, she was the one who was doing all the follow-up shit. She was the one booking the flights. She was the one getting the passport details. She was the one watching the news for updates and trawling the net for any information on Jamil aka JC, R.I.P., and whatever. I suppose for her brain, the thing hadn’t properly finished happening yet. It was still going on. Then when she made the final flight confirmation and sat back and looked across at us. She got it too. Bang. Those white lights in her eyes were gone and suddenly she was sobbing. Crying enough tears. Enough tears. Enough for all of us I reckon.

  But then this next strange shit happened that changed everything.

  Ki and Curt were going to be flying off the next day. It had to be quick. So quick that we was happy to pay nearly four times the normal cost of the ticket. Anyway I planned to go with them to the airport to see them off. We were all pretty on edge still and I don’t think that we maybe had three hours’ sleep in three days.

  In fact those three days felt like three weeks. Every second seemed to stretch out so that you could fit a hundred thoughts into every one. Thinking was the thing we did mainly. Nobody spoke if they didn’t have to. It was like if you did, you somehow were bringing Jamil into the room. It was bad enough he was in my head twenty-four seven. All taped up. Covered in bleach and powder and bin liners, sitting by those bins like a sack of cement. But I couldn’t bring him into the room. None of us could.

  Nothing in those three days had any, like, innocence to it. If someone switched the TV on it was like we were looking for news. If anyone went for a shower it was like they were washing the blood off. Even the washing up felt like we were doing some wrong shit. It was like the more we were skirting round it the more it just came up and slapped you in the face. Once it just got too much and I came right out with it.

  Curt and Ki were sitting with the TV on. No one was watching it really, it was just background. Ki was looking like someone had died. Which weren’t really surprising but I couldn’t handle seeing her like that.

  ‘It ain’t your fault Ki,’ I say into the air.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she says staring at the TV.

  ‘It could just as easily have been me.’

  ‘But it wasn’t you. It was me,’ she says turning to look at me.

  ‘Yeah but what I’m saying is it could have been. And at the end of the day he pulled out a gun and if you do that you got to be prepared to be shot.’

  ‘Is it really that easy for you?’ she says, eyes blazing in her pale face.

  ‘For real. I’d have shot him if I had to.’

  ‘But you didn’t. I did. And you haven’t even asked me why I shot him.’

  ‘I don’t care why. He deserved it.’

  ‘It’s all so black and white for you isn’t it?’ she says standing up. ‘It isn’t for me. A man is dead because of me.’

  ‘Nah, Ki. A man is dead because of him.’

  ‘I killed him though. Do you understand that? That’s the bottom line.’

  ‘It ain’t that black and white either though is it?’ I say standing up too and taking hold of her elbows to pull her near.

  ‘No it’s not,’ she says breaking free, but the heat is all gone from her voice suddenly, ‘but you don’t seem to believe in grey areas.’

  I start getting angry now myself. I don’t understand why she thinks like this. ‘Why though? Why didn’t he deserve to die? Did Curt deserve to die when he was going to shoot him?’

  ‘That’s my point. Nobody deserves to die for what they done. They might deserve something but not that,’ she says slumping back into the sofa. She pulls her bare knees into her chin and closes her eyes.

  ‘So then what did he deserve? What did he deserve for all that crack that he’s been pushing on people? Slapped arse?’

  ‘Fuck you,’ she says softly as if her battery is all but dead.

  ‘Nah, Ki. Fuck you. He never paid for that shit that he did. Now he’s paid.’

  It stayed pretty tense after that. Truth be told we were all winding each other up. It was too small a flat for that many people to be living in twenty-four seven. Let alone after one of them had just killed someone.

  So when the day came to leave the house, we were all relieved in a way. We were on edge, true, but we would still rather have been out. The shit was just claustrophobic.

  We still hadn’t really heard anything about the murder, just rumours really but no police and nothing on the news. Anyway Ki had booked an early morning flight so there was less risk of being spotted just in case.

  Ki woke me and Curt up with some coffee and then put some toast under our noses for breakfast. But it was early, man, and besides no one was in no mood to eat really. The bags were already packed and waiting all fat by the front door ready to be picked up. We had decided that we would leave the cash with me for now since they couldn’t exactly take it as hand luggage. Later on when they had settled down we would think about how we could maybe get it over. The best we could come up with was that maybe I could send money over to them like Mum did with her fam back in Nigeria, through one of them money shop places. A bit at a time until some better idea came to us. Ki looked it up and it seemed like we could send something like two grand over without any questions.

  When they were dressed and ready they both gave me this look like maybe they wouldn’t see me again. Even though I was going with them to the airport, Curt gave me a giant’s hug and says simply, ‘Bruv, soon.’ I swear down I nearly start crying but then I turn to look at Ki. She just has jeans and a sweatshirt on but she looks so clean and beautiful that it makes me die on the inside for a reason I can’t understand. I look at her hard and try and remember what she looks like right then so I can keep it with me and bring it when I need it.

  ‘Ki,’ I goes and then she runs up, squeezes me tight and starts sobbing. She cries and cries till my shirt is wet at the neck. If I could have carried her out of there and away to somewhere secret, trust, I would have.

  She was so small at that time. I felt her just crying and shaking in my arms and it was like she was just a child. The shit she had been through in her life. For what? For just trying to survive and be a – and be a good person?

  You people man. Looking at me like – like
that. What do you know? Sh-shit she had been through.

  I don’t even know why I’m crying in front of you. Do I think it is even going to make a difference to you? Talking to you like I’m ever going to convince you? What, so you can listen all polite while I go on and then at the end of the day send me down? F-fuck you all man. I can’t do this no more, Judge. They can do what they going to do innit. Guilty if they want.

  Long Adjournment: 13:15

  (Short day. Juror personal commitment)

  IN THE CENTRAL CRIMINAL COURT  T2017229

  Before: HIS HONOUR JUDGE SALMON QC

  * * *

  Closing Speeches:

  * * *

  Trial: Day 34

  Tuesday 11th 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

  23

  10:15

  So, like, I just want to say sorry. I don’t know why I went off like that yesterday. It was just remembering Ki in my arms – it’s just – anyway.