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

by Imran Mahmood

  ‘Fuck,’ I say, ‘we can’t do this.’

  ‘Why? Why can’t we do this? We can’t not do this,’ says Ki keeping her eyes on me till I can’t look at her no more.

  Break: 15:00

  34

  15:35

  People talk about crossroads moments. You have probably spoken about crossroads moments, I don’t know. But whatever you have heard about them and whatever you think your crossroads moment was, truth is, that weren’t no crossroads you were at. That was more like a bend in the road or a place where the tarmac has come off. Mine, mine was a crossroads moment, right there, right then.

  I don’t know whether if I had done something different maybe what happened afterwards would not have happened. If I had spoken some different words even, maybe that could have changed something. But what I remember about that day is that I could see the roads crossing in front of me. Every way I could take pointed to somewhere I didn’t want to go. They were all pointing to one hell or another hell. And these roads were the one-way kind. What I know is that if there’s at least one place in four that you want to go or could even live with going, you ain’t at no crossroads, trust me.

  ‘Okay,’ I say at last, ‘we do this, we do it my way.’ I look at their two faces and there’s no resistance in them so I carry on. ‘First of all I don’t know where my gun is at. I ain’t seen it since the whole Jamil-in-the-trap-house thing. Second of all, Ki, you ain’t going in no front door, you staying put here. Thirdly –’

  ‘No. No. No,’ says Ki. Something in her eyes shows me that she is not backing down. ‘You cannot do this without me. You will be killed. Are you hearing me? You need me there to get into the club and you need me there to call you to let you know when he’s alone. If you go walking into that club at any time and he sees you, any one of twenty guys will be queuing up to put you down.’

  ‘Yeah well that’s where your brain needs to catch up with mine for a change Ki, because ain’t no way no phone is going to be working in that club. No phone Ki, no need for you.’

  ‘Do you even know me at all?’ she says smiling out of the corner of her mouth. She goes into her handbag again and throws Curt and me each a lump of black plastic.

  ‘What the fuck are these?’ I say.

  ‘Two-way radio. Got them from the bouncers. They use one channel, we use the second.’

  ‘When? When did you get these?’ I say. This is all surreal still and I still haven’t caught up with her. Right then I don’t know whether I can ever catch up with her. ‘And what about a gun?’ I ask. ‘Where we supposed to get one from now?’

  ‘Curt,’ she then says looking over at him. He is by the window looking out on to the street, his hugeness making shadows on the floor. ‘Can you do something about a gun too?’

  ‘It’ll be dirty but I can probably get one by Friday,’ he says.

  ‘There we are then,’ says Ki. She has it all worked out.

  ‘Just one more question,’ I say. ‘How the hell you know Face is going to be there?’

  ‘I just do,’ she says and as far as she was concerned that was the end of it.

  As soon as Curt left, whatever life was in those eyes of hers went again. The shutters went down and every time I tried to engage her she just looked through me. Of course I knew that all of this stuff was proper stressful for her. It was stressful for me but if you peeled back my layers I could pretty much guarantee that you’d still have found the same old me. A little more wired, yes, but basically the same guy. Ki had changed. Don’t get me wrong. I know she had a right to change after all this shit. But she was changing before my eyes in a way that I couldn’t keep up with. It was Spooks, I was sure of that.

  She changed most after seeing Spooks. That time when she came back for the first time in that burkha and gave me the fright of my life. That is when it happened. The change. Not change in a way that would have been obvious to anyone looking from a distance, but I could see it. It was subtle at the beginning, almost like all the colours she was painted in started to change just in tone. The greens were not so alive. The blues were less vibrant. Everything was muffled like one of those 1970s’ photographs where the colours are what they should be, just not sharp enough or bright enough to look real. Now, though, the colours on her were all wrong.

  I was worried about her and I tried to talk to her after Curt went but the thing about Ki if you know her, is that she’s not a person to be talked round. That was not anything new. She was always like that. It was one of the things I hated about her.

  For any other normal person you could maybe pull them out of their bad moods with a joke or something. Even if not straight away, you could eventually crack most people. Ki though, she was not somebody you could talk round. It was like she considered it an insult to her own mind. As if you were saying to her, ‘Whatever you’re feeling, it’s not the right feeling so change it.’ So talk to her all you like. There was no way you could bust her out of whatever she was feeling. I know, I tried it enough times. The best thing to do in those times was to just let the feelings ride themselves out. Let them just be until they did the job she wanted them to. My way was to just change the subject.

  I tried that of course but she wouldn’t even really talk to me. It wasn’t one of them moods that she was having where she looked like she hated me. It was just blanks. Her mind was somewhere else, and with Ki if her mind was somewhere else, all of her was there with it. Ki was her mind. The whole of the rest of that day went by with almost zero conversation. She grunted a ‘no’ when I asked her if she wanted a sandwich but sat with me as I ate. Later though, when I switched on the TV that night she went to the bedroom and just lay there staring at the ceiling and mumbling to herself, working something out. I didn’t feel like going to bed right then so I called Mum.

  ‘Mum,’ I go, ‘did I wake you?’

  ‘Of course you will wake me up if you call at this kind of hour.’

  ‘Sorry. I just –’

  ‘I am just joking you, foolish boy. How can I go to sleep with the two of them downstairs?’

  ‘The two of who?’ I say suddenly worried.

  ‘Your sister and that boy.’

  I ask her, ‘What boy, Mum? Who is there?’ I can’t believe I haven’t been more careful and I can’t believe Mum doesn’t seem scared at all.

  ‘The horse boy. Your friend.’

  ‘Oh,’ I go, ‘Curt.’ Then after a second I go, ‘Curt? What’s he doing there?’

  ‘You are asking me? How should I know what you and your horse friend are up to all of the time? He says he needs to speak to your sister so he is speaking to your sister. That is all I know.’

  I end the call and decide I need to go to sleep myself. Thank God for Curt though. It’s just like him to look in on Bless and Mum. I felt safe knowing that he was there.

  I go and lie next to Kira. She is still awake, looking up at the lights, muttering quietly. I put my head next to hers and I try to think about nothing and before I know it I have fallen asleep.

  The next day she was a little more with it you could say but truth be told I think that was more to do with the fact that she was on the phone for most of it. She would step out into the corridor, the communal one on our landing and take these calls. They were proper weird calls too. I didn’t know who they were from but I did get that they were not normal calls. Mostly she just nodded with the handset held against her ear. Occasionally she said, ‘Yes. Yes. Okay,’ but that was about it. Really quick calls. No hellos no goodbyes. Like I say, weird. When I asked her about them she told me it was the bouncers at the club and how they were old friends of hers from time back. Or someone else that had something to do with how we could get in or get out. ‘It’s just details,’ she said, ‘leave it to me.’

  I should have maybe guessed what was going on, but I swear down, my mind don’t work on them kind of levels. This kind of thing is just out of my radar. I feel stupid now, but that time, I swear I had no idea. When I think back I sometimes think I p
robably should have known something was going on. Because I followed her to the mosque again the next day. I mean actually followed her. This time I left within a minute of her leaving so I could see where she went. Actually see exactly where she went. I should have known then.

  Long adjournment: 16:20

  IN THE CENTRAL CRIMINAL COURT  T2017229

  Before: HIS HONOUR JUDGE SALMON QC

  * * *

  Closing Speeches:

  * * *

  Trial: Day 37

  Friday 14th 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

  35

  11:10

  I followed her. That was the time when I should have known that everything weren’t on the level. I mean I knew it weren’t on the level but I should have seen more. I blame myself for that. But this was some mad sideways thing that I didn’t see coming at me. It was like when a car pulls out straight into you and you don’t know it’s happened until you hear the crunch. And you say to yourself over and over, I should have seen it man. I should have seen it.

  So anyway like I said I followed her, the very next day. I wasn’t buying that whole Faisal crap. I wanted to see with my own eyes what I could. Maybe it would all check out no matter what I thought. Don’t get me wrong I was hoping it would check out. I thought maybe I could have a quiet scout around this time and see whether there were any guys hanging round who might be Face’s boys. Because if this shit Ki was telling me was actually happening then maybe what I thought was right, that she was being set up. So I justified it to myself like that. I ain’t following her following her. I’m following her, looking out for her.

  I got to the ground floor of the block and quickly scanned the road to see where she was. I couldn’t see her at first, but that was because I was looking the wrong way. She was walking in the opposite direction from the mosque I had been going to. No wonder I never saw her there whenever I went. She was going to a different mosque. Anyway my ride was parked just there on the corner so I quickly jumped in even though I knew it was risky to be taking it out on the road. But truth be told this whole thing was really getting to me and I needed to find out if the place she was going to was safe. I pulled out of the road just in time to see her getting on a bus and then I followed it.

  My mind was racing even then but really and truly I weren’t that surprised she was going to a different mosque, there’s more than one mosque in London. But what did surprise me was that she took the bus all the way to Elephant and Castle. That seemed a long way to go for one. And for two it didn’t really fit to me. Wasn’t it Curt who took her to the mosque that first time? Surely he would have said if he’d taken her all the way to Elephant? I kept meaning to check this with him but didn’t know how to do it without sounding like I didn’t trust her – or him.

  I kept the bus in view but stayed a couple of cars behind. I just needed to be close enough to see when she got off. Just after the roundabout I saw her. There she was. All in her Darth Vader kit. Once she got off the bus I knew I had to be more careful because even if no one else recognized my ride, there was no way Ki would miss it if she saw it. So I decided to park up and follow on foot. In the end it wasn’t that hard to follow her because with her wearing that burkha thing she probably couldn’t hardly see anything but her own feet. She turned down into a side street and I followed.

  What surprised me though was that she didn’t stop at no building that looked to me like any mosque. She was outside a building with nothing to see but a black door. I saw her then check her phone and then ring the bell.

  I waited hidden in a doorway and watched. My heart was going for some reason I couldn’t explain. A few seconds later the door opened and she walked in. I was a blank. I couldn’t even guess what the hell she might be doing there. Maybe this was where the girl lived? Could it be that? Could it actually be a mosque? I know that sometimes a mosque is just a person’s house that has been like converted. I waited a couple of minutes and then made up my mind to knock on the door. If she was there, this girl, then maybe I had a few questions of my own to ask her. I walked up to the door that Ki had just walked through and took a breath. I pushed at it but it was locked. I looked up at the building to see if there was anything interesting about it but I couldn’t find anything that stood out. It just looked like one of those places that you could walk by without even noticing. That was the weird thing about the place. There was nothing about it told you what it was. It definitely didn’t look like no mosque. And then there was the people. There weren’t any. The place was deserted. There was nobody queueing up to get behind this door.

  It didn’t feel right to me. So I walked past and decided to wait at the bottom of the road. Maybe it weren’t such a good idea to go into a place without knowing what is inside it. I keep watching for twenty minutes or something but nobody walks in or out the whole time. Just then I see right at the end of the road, squeezed between a silver VW Golf and a black BMW X5, almost out of view, is a thing I recognize. That ice-blue Alpina. I just have time to register it when the door to the building opens again and I see Ki. She steps out, sorting out her burkha, and goes back up to the main road. She doesn’t even turn back so I don’t even have to hide. I ain’t even sure whether I even would have hid to tell you the truth. I was so confused. This couldn’t be no mosque that she’d just come out of, and that ice-blue Alpina, what was that about?

  I can’t work it out. It’s too weird to make any sense. Anyway I am about to go and follow her when I see the door open again. I half expect another burkha to walk out. But I’m wrong about expecting that. What comes out is some white man. Six-foot-odd. Short blond hair. Grey suit. He turns the same way that Ki has gone but then stops halfway up the road and fishes for something in his pocket. The lights on the Alpina flick twice and he gets in and drives away. It must have been this fucker that had dropped her off to that other estate. But why? And who was he?

  I should have realized then. But I didn’t. I swear. I didn’t even have a clue.

  Look I know that this speech is long. It is bare long. But I feel like I need to tell you all the details of the thing so that you can feel me. And so now this Judge is telling me with his huffing and what have you and the snide looks he is giving me that I need to speed this shit up. It was the one thing my QC says to me just before I sacked him. He said keep the speech short enough to keep the jury’s interests up. An average speech, he goes, should be like two hours max. But I can’t do no two-hour speech for this. Even he couldn’t do a two-hour speech if he was being charged with murder himself. It’s like a thing you only get to know when you are in it. So I take it all on board. And I will speed it up. But it’s not a kind of thing like I want to skip stuff out. I don’t. But I don’t want to lose you either.

  But what I will tell you is that I did have it out with her when I got back to my yard. I looked at that Alpina pull away, and my head was full with just this one repeating thought. What is going on? What is going on? I walked back to where my ride was parked up and got in. I drove back to the flat in a daze. What could she even say to all this? This was not a thing she could lie her way out of. Too much needed explaining.

  I went in and waited for her. She wasn’t even that long behind me and when she came in she had that smile for me that she had shown me before and which had stopped me then from saying what I wanted to say. But this time, I wasn’t having it. She shut the door quietly behind her and whipped her burkha off and hung it on a chair by the table.

  ‘Hi,’ she goes, ‘everything alright? Any food going?’ She is cool as she has ever been and I don’t know how she can do it.

  ‘What the fuck is going on Kira? I know about the other guy,’ I say from behind a cup of tea I am drinking.<
br />
  She freezes in the middle of rooting around in the fridge. I see her take a breath like she is considering her options. Finally she goes, ‘It’s not what you think.’

  ‘How do you know what I’m thinking?’ I say standing up so I can look right at her face when she turns around.

  ‘You ain’t thinking this,’ she says her head still facing the fridge.

  ‘Thinking what?’ I go, trying to keep the volume out of my voice.

  ‘I can’t tell you. But you have to trust me,’ she says turning to me at last. Her face is calm. Not like I expect it to be at all. There’s no nervousness. She ain’t acting caught out. She seems, I don’t know, kind of relieved.

  ‘How?’ I shouted. ‘How the fuck am I supposed to trust you after this Kira? Especially when you won’t tell me what’s going on?’

  ‘Just – I promise. I will tell you everything. After. Tomorrow.’

  And at the end of the day what choice did I have? She was going to tell me and right then that had to be good enough. But I was an idiot. I should have made her say. I should have maybe worked it out. It was all there. All the pieces were there, I just didn’t know how to make them fit inside each other.

  So, now I can tell from the Judge’s face it is time to get to the main point. And what you need to know about that most of all is the plan, innit. So Friday night came, the night that Face was going to be in the club, and Curt swung by early so we could go over the details of the plan again. We were all a little bit wired and the conversation was quite minimalist. He had managed to get his hands on a nine mil that wasn’t too dirty. It had been used in some robberies here and there but as far as he knew there weren’t any murders on it. He had brought it over in a McDonald’s bag and set it down on our round kitchen table.