The prayers were still in progress when I got there so I hung back outside and waited close by in a doorway to avoid the rain. I didn’t really want to be interrupting no prayers. You know you don’t want to be fucking wid no Muslims breders when they in the middle of praying. They don’t take to that kind of shit well from what I hear.
Ten minutes or so later the people started pouring out. Hundreds of them. Made you wonder how they could get so many people in one small place. I mean literally, there were hundreds of them. There were even more people in here than in my mum’s church and trust, her church packs them in on any given Sunday. This mosque though must have been rammed with three times the numbers I even saw in a church. I didn’t go in but I had a sneaky look in through the windows of the double doors.
It’s just like it is on TV. Rows and rows of people, not an inch between them, all praying. I have to tell you, for a second I started to wonder whether there was maybe something in this religion thing. That many people all cramming into one tiny space, all praying? It’s not like they even got chairs you get me. It’s all just floor. You didn’t go to a place like that just to get some quiet time or because your mum made you go but you could still doze off and think about at least getting a Sunday lunch after. And there weren’t even no singing you get me. This was more like the gym. The kind of place you go to do your thing and then leave.
So anyway, I waited to see if I could see Ki when I realized that the only people coming out were men. I don’t mean mainly men. I mean all men. Every single one. So when the last few stragglers were coming out I stopped one of the younger guys.
‘Hey, is there ladies in this place?’ I said keeping my eyes low.
‘Sisters’ entrance round the back,’ he says as he’s slipping his shoes on and then mingles in with the rest of the crowd heading out.
Who knew there was a ladies’ entrance? Shit. I ran round the back just in time to see the door open. And then slowly at first, they start to come out, until there’s maybe sixty of them out there. And then slowly it hits me. I’m a idiot.
Every second one of these ladies is in a black burkha. There are dozens of Kiras. All star-bursting into different directions to get out of the rain. Shit. I can’t follow all of them so I decide I got no choice but to get back. Quickly.
I kept it on the low, head down, hoodie zipped up, eyeballed no one. In less than ten minutes I was racing back up the stairs to my flat. Breath heavy with all the no-exercise I was doing at that time. I know to look at me with all these prison muscles I look like a superhero but in them days, cooped up in that flat, I was more Fatman than Batman.
The thing that messed me up though when I got back in was that Ki still wasn’t back. Maybe she was still inside hanging with a few of the sisters until the rain stopped, I thought. It was possible since I didn’t actually go into the building. And anyway she weren’t going in there to pray so maybe she was up in some room somewhere where maybe people go to meditate or whatever.
So when she did turn up an hour later, I didn’t say anything. Nobody wants to be one of them type of guys who stalks his own girlfriend innit?
She breezed in holding her burkha over one arm and came into the kitchen bit where I was heating up some soup for lunch. She gave it a jokey, ‘Honey I’m home,’ draped her burkha over one chair and sat on another by the table.
‘Hey come sit, we need to talk,’ she says and smiles at me.
I sit next to her and I can feel the heat coming from her body. Then she puts a hand on my leg and suddenly a waterfall opens in my mind. The thoughts come crashing out just like that. Her face close to mine. Her eyes locking me into her. The scent of her skin. My head begins to spin from the memory of her, of us. Of how we were before it all became messed up. It has been so long since she touched me at all that I have almost forgotten that we were a living thing once. A fire-breathing thing. I look at her and she smiles that smile of hers. A smile from before.
For a second it makes me forget that anything was wrong. Then something niggles me and I snap back into reality feeling like when you fall asleep and then you are awake.
‘Those things waterproof?’ I say, indicating the burkha.
‘What? Erm no.’ Then she realizes what I’m getting at and adds, ‘Oh I got a lift. Anyway shut up about that and listen for a second. I think I’ve worked it out.’
I stare blankly at her for a second until her look reminds me. We have more serious stuff to worry about than this.
‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Yeah well I think I worked it out too,’ I add and pull up a chair next to her.
‘Oh yeah?’ she says, ‘Fire away genius,’ she says still smiling. ‘And while you’re at it pour me a bowl of that delicious-looking soup you got going on there.’
This was one of those moments where the old Ki seemed to materialize. It was almost as if she was back to how she used to be. If I could only hold on to her and keep her here I knew everything would be okay.
‘Well,’ I say as I pour her soup into a mug, ‘the way I figured it yeah, is there ain’t no way Guilty going to be taking down no twenty-man crew, all of them carrying. Nothing we can do going to fix them numbers you get me?’
‘Go on.’
‘But –’
‘Yeah?’ she says, curious.
‘Can a mouse eat a snake?’
She looks at me like I have lost my mind. ‘Are you feeling alright?’ she says with a kind of half-smile.
‘Look Ki, what if the snake had no head?’
‘Err – what?’
‘What if the snake had no head?’ I say and realize that I am sounding a bit crazy even if I know what I mean.
‘Then sure,’ she says slowly but you can see from her face she thinks she’s talking to a retarded person.
‘Then that’s what has to be done. We need to find a way to take the snake’s head off.’
‘What are you talking about?’
So then I explain it to her. All about how I was asking myself how can a mouse beat a snake, and how he couldn’t unless maybe the snake had no head. And then even as I am saying it, it sounds stupid so I stop midway.
It takes a minute but then she smiles to herself and says, ‘You are a genius after all.’
‘No need for sarcasm,’ I say.
‘No. I’m serious. That is just what I have been thinking.’
And that’s when she says them words that change our lives. Once a thing like this is said, it can’t be unsaid. It gets a life of its own. Like planting a seed. All you can do is step back and watch it grow.
‘We have to take out Face. Once he’s gone it’s game over. And we can get some normal back in our lives. Stop all this hiding. Living like we are fugitives.’
‘That’s it! That’s what I was getting at!’ I say amazed that for once I’m not completely stupid. Then it hits me what she just said. ‘ “We”? I never said nothing about we,’ I say suddenly not liking what I think she means.
‘Who then? Guilty? You think he can do this?’ she says looking right at me.
‘Yes I do. We can set Face up somehow and let Guilty take him out. One on one. Element of surprise.’
‘Guilty?’ she says with her eyes all wide. ‘From what I hear about Guilty, he can’t even take the bins out. No babe. We can’t risk leaving this to him.’
‘I don’t know what you’ve heard Ki or who you been speaking to, but Guilty ain’t a person to fuck with. Mans is brutal.’
‘It’s not about that. I don’t care if he’s brutal. I care about if he’s smart enough to make a move on Face. And even from what you told me, he is not,’ she says and I know she is right.
‘Who then?’ I say. ‘Who’s going to do it?’
‘Us. We have to do this,’ she says and leaves the room.
Long adjournment: 16:05
IN THE CENTRAL CRIMINAL COURT T2017229
Before: HIS HONOUR JUDGE SALMON QC
* * *
Closing Speeches:
* * *
<
br /> Trial: Day 36
Thursday 13th 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
31
10:15
This plan of Ki’s I was telling you about yesterday, the plan to take out Face. I don’t really know when it was that we basically started taking our lead from Ki or why. It might have been just that she was smart or it might have been that we didn’t have any ideas. But what you could say was right about then, Ki was directing ops. She was the General in our little three-man crew.
I still wasn’t sure what Ki meant about ‘us’ having to deal with Face. I mean I didn’t think she meant like we literally had to do it ourselves. Just maybe you know put things in place so some next crew member from Glockz could do it. Or something anyway. Something that didn’t mean that we physically had to do the thing.
Yeah I meant killing him. Straight up. But I was saying that I didn’t think that she meant that we had do the killing ourselves. So you know, you ain’t catching me out on that.
So yeah, I’ll say it again, it makes me look guilty. But like I said I didn’t think she actually meant that we kill him. So the next day, we arranged for Curt to come by so we could chat it out with him. We couldn’t raise him on his phone and we figured that he was ditching sims as usual. But Ki tracked him down in the end by phoning Mum’s, where he just happened to be.
‘Come round,’ I said, ‘we need to chat,’ and I put the call down. Ki gave me another one of them smiles that I am supposed to be able to decode but can’t.
When he came Curt was proper on edge.
‘Shit is going down,’ he says as he pulls his coat off and slings it over a chair.
‘Before we get into that,’ I say handing him a beer before he takes one, ‘what you doing round my mum’s?’
‘You mean round at Bless’s,’ says Ki smiling like this is a joke.
Curt nearly drops his beer.
‘Nothing man. Just making sure they safe innit,’ he says going kind of purple. ‘Anyway, word on the street is –’ he starts when suddenly Kira laughs out.
‘What you talking like that for?’ she says.
‘Like what?’
‘Like you’re a seventies pimp from American TV?’
For some reason that makes me laugh too. ‘Yeah man. What’s with the jive talking?’
‘Whatever,’ he says, ‘but shit is going down.’
‘Like what kind of shit?’ I say.
‘Like the smelly kind. Face shot at Guilty this morning.’
‘What? Is he dead? What the fuck man?’ I say my eyes wide open and serious now.
‘Nah man. He shot at him not shot him. Well not Face exactly but one of his Tinies. Four of them came on bikes. They rode past the club just as he was coming out and one of them fired off like a hundred shots at him. Not a fucking one of them hit him if you can believe it.’
‘Shit,’ I say and look at Ki.
I know to you this sounds weird. Gangsters on bikes. But as I said before the whole drug thing is like an army. You know Generals, Lieutenants, Soldiers. Well, Generals and Lieutenants and some Soldiers drive cars. Other Soldiers, younger ones, the ones we, I mean they, call Tinies, they ride bikes.
You might have seen these young kids on bikes tearing your streets up. And to you it might seem like they just schoolkids. But what you should know is that that shit ain’t always random, and these kids ain’t always just school kids. These are drug dealers. They are soldiers-in-waiting, at ten years old. And when they ride, they ride in formation. Depending on how many there are, a couple might ride up front and scope out the territory. The man with the gun will be back a little, flanked on each side by another couple of out-riders. They shield him. They scope their target. They ride past. Boy with the gun shoots and rides off. The rest take whatever drugs and money they find and bang – they’re gone.
And the chaos that follows afterwards with all of them riding off in different directions, that’s not random either, it’s thought out. Spread out. Don’t get caught. If there’s heat around, the gun will get dumped. No prints on it either since these boys are wearing latex gloves. These little boys, they are smart.
So anyway Curt tells us that some Tinies just tried to kill Guilty. And Ki goes mad.
‘We need Face gone. Like now,’ she says her eyes narrowing at us both. ‘If we leave this much longer Guilty will be dead and we will be next. We have to move on this.’
‘Is that all? Why didn’t you just say so? Hang on a second while I call fucking rent-a-hitman,’ I say. Ki gives me a look.
‘Nah man it’s okay,’ Curt says after a while. ‘We can do this.’
‘How?’
‘I’ll let Guilty know that he’s being set up and he can organize a trap,’ says Curt, ‘and then, you know, ambush Face. Or something.’
Ki and I both look at Curt and whatever it is we are trying to say to him he understands and looks down at his feet.
‘Look we all know even though he is a bad man and whatever, Guilty couldn’t even spell ambush. No. We need to do it,’ says Ki.
‘No fucking way,’ I say. ‘No fucking way’.
‘We got no other choice,’ she says and folds her arms into a tight knot.
I suddenly felt like she was slipping out of my hands. All I wanted was our life back again. I wanted days where we went together to Barnardo’s while she picked out books. Evenings where we could just lie on the sofa and watch a film without having this weight on our minds. I wanted to be able to look in those eyes of hers and see myself in them. I wanted to recognize her again.
Look I knew that there weren’t no way that Guilty was going to be able to take out Face using his own wits. Face was just too smart and would have outmanoeuvred him in a second. And I also knew that there was no question that Face had to be taken out, if we wanted to live. I knew from a theoretical point of thing that this was all true. But I still couldn’t make the jump from what seemed logical on paper to reading about it in the papers. It seemed mad to me. Mad that we had to actually be talking about killing a person. Fuck we had already nearly killed one boy. By accident I mean. But this was some next shit.
For one I wasn’t that happy about dragging Ki into yet another situation. She had had enough drama to last her a dozen lifetimes. She didn’t need a planned killing to add to it. And as unbreakable as she seemed to be, I knew that even she had her limits. She might have seemed to the outside world like she was solid. Like a V8 engine. But you know you put any engine under pressure and it’s going to break. You can red-line it every now and then but you don’t want to be red-lining all the time. And she had been in the red for some time. Anyway, I didn’t want to be driving her to her limits again. And the way that I saw it was that I was responsible for this whole thing. I couldn’t get her into another thing.
Then there was the risk involved. Face wasn’t just smart enough to outwit Guilty, shit a five-year-old could outwit Guilty. Face was too smart, even for Ki, maybe. Sure she had skills, but I knew the limit of her skills, high as they were. What I didn’t know were the limits of his. How high did he go? And if this shit went sideways, it wasn’t a game where we could reload and get another life and try again. If this went wrong and Face dried us out, we would die. No question. He would ice us in a second.
And then. And then there is the simple fact of life. It was a life after all was said and done. His life was still a life. I know that Ki had put a bullet in Jamil and nearly killed him and I know that we then dumped him as if he was dead but that was just more like an accident kind of thing. Ki shot him by accident. She never meant to kill him. I don’t think she even meant to shoot him. And yes I can see that he survived her bullet and that was an accident too. They say I maybe helpe
d him survive by taping up his bullet hole and that it stopped the blood loss. I don’t know about any of that for real but what I do know for sure is that if I helped him live, that was an accident too. I didn’t plan on saving his life, but I didn’t plan on shooting him either.
But this thing was different. I knew that this guy would kill me, kill Ki, kill Curt, kill our families in a heartbeat. Did that make it okay to kill him? I don’t know man. But still, unless he was there in front of me, holding a gun to me, I didn’t feel right about killing him like this. You know, like planned. It was like shooting a dude in the back. It didn’t feel right to me. To plan a killing of a living breathing human being ain’t like an accident kind of thing. It ain’t like causing a war so that someone else pulls the trigger. If you plan to do it, that is next level shit. That in my book is a murder.
Break: 10:45
32
11:20
Curt left later that day and we all agreed that we would think about what had to be done and meet up again the next morning. The more I looked at it, though, the more it looked as if this had to be done. But I still couldn’t get my head around it. Why did I feel so bad about it? He was going to kill me if he ever saw me. And here I was feeling guilty about it. Was it that much different from shooting that guy under the bridge when I took Ki? Would I feel okay about it if the man was in my face waving a gun at me? Could I shoot him then? Did I have to wait for that to happen? Is it still like a self-defence kind of a thing if you know a person will definitely kill you if he gets half a chance? But you take your chances before he does? I don’t know, truth be told. It’s proper confusing me.
That night Ki and I sat up and talked some more about it. She had spent a couple of hours writing down some details about the plan in a notepad and made me read them. But the more I read them the crazier it all sounded to me. We needed a gun. We needed to know where Face would be at. We needed an exit strategy. And we needed more luck than a human being could expect to get in ten lives. Suddenly I couldn’t hold it down any longer.
You Don't Know Me: A BBC Radio 2 Book Club Choice Page 20