The remand time I coped with. Because it’s remand and not convicted status it means that I get more or less as many visits as I want. Bless and Mum come as much as they can. In fact I seen them more in the last year than I had before. At first I didn’t want them to come. Being in that visitors’ centre with all them other prisoners is dirty, you know what I mean? You can’t even properly have time together. They should give you like a room or something so there’s a place you can, like, cry. Not me, obviously, but them. But they had to hold it all in and save it up till they left. So believe me a few times I thought about not sending them a visiting order. But then it’s been kind of a good thing I guess. It helps prepare a person. Gets them ready for prison. Not me. Them.
I did ask the Governor once why can’t we have like private rooms and shit but he said there was too many problems with that. ‘But we’re working on it,’ he said, ‘and you’re not the first person to mention it. It’s a good idea.’ It is a good idea. Maybe that’s something you lot can write to your MP or whatever about after this.
Anyway. This next bit is, well, you could say is like a really important piece of the jigsaw as the prosecution have been saying. Like the whole thing is a jigsaw that you can’t really understand what it is until the last piece goes in and then the whole thing is clear. I think that is a bullshit example, personally. I don’t know nobody who didn’t know what the picture was when the last piece ain’t gone in yet. Everyone can already see what it is. It’s just a bit annoying. So I guess this next bit ain’t a jigsaw piece. It is like an engine piece. It is like a spark plug. Without this, the engine don’t run. It don’t even start.
So I have to take you back to the start and that thing with my brief. You lot probably still think what a stupid thing to sack my brief for the speeches. He was so good in the trial, wasn’t he? Why would I sack him? I told you that it was partly because I wanted to tell the whole truth and he didn’t want me to. Well, what he didn’t know is what I am about to tell you.
Right before that meeting with my QC – the night before, in fact – prison staff told me I had a visitor. And instead of leading me to the visiting room he took me off to some small room in some different part of the prison. I never even been to this part of the block before, I thought it was all staff areas.
When I went in, the first thing I thought to myself was, shit, they did my suggestion. Private room. So I sat down and waited for Mum to come in or Bless. The guard locked the door and said he was just coming back with my visitor and I waited. Nothing to do but wait in this place. The walls even were boring. Just bricks painted white. Just one window, looking in not out. Just one table. Just two chairs. Just this concrete floor. Still, man, a private room, I thought, then I thought, shit, it’s going to be all tears.
A few minutes go by and I am getting a bit vex because all them minutes come off your visit. Screws like to delay everything so an hour’s visit becomes like twenty minutes by the time everyone’s ready. Some people don’t even get told of their visits. Screws can fuck with you like that. But at least I’ve been told about mine. And this is what I am saying to myself when the guard comes back. Keys go in the door and it opens. That’s when I see her.
Kira.
Shit the look on your faces! Trust though, that ain’t nothing to what my face must have been like. It wasn’t just that I had been waiting for long to see a girl that I loved. Or a girl that I risked my whole life for and who just disappeared on me. Or even a girl I didn’t even know was alive or dead. She was my life, blood. And later, when she left and I didn’t know whether I would even ever see her face again, I felt like what a drug addict must feel like to be told there will never ever be no more drugs for you. And then when I saw her, there after a full year, in front of me, my life just changed again.
‘Ki!’ I almost shout it. I can’t believe what I am seeing. It’s really her. They say about a person who is beautiful that she is like a picture. Kira right then was like a picture but not in them kind of ways. Yes, she was beautiful still. Those eyes were as dazzling as ever. And even standing there in just jeans and a white cotton shirt she was stunning. But she was like a picture – like she wasn’t real. Like you look at a picture and know that it’s a person in there but you also know it’s not a real person whose face you can touch or whose warm breath you can feel. It’s just like a imagining of a person. That was what she looked like to me.
‘You got twenty minutes. No more,’ goes the screw and he’s gone. The door’s locked again but he can see through the windows.
‘Hi,’ she says. Just that. Her eyes are safely behind the lids.
‘You come now?’ I ask.
I am halfway between tears and screams. I am so angry and confused and vex and all them things that I can’t even order my thoughts.
‘Sorry,’ she says and sits down opposite me and unfolds her hands. It’s been a year since I saw that face and the reality of it sitting in front of me with them eyes staring at me feels unreal.
‘I hope you got better than sorry. Where the fuck you been Ki?’
‘Away.’
‘Away?’ I go. ‘I know away! But where away? And how the fuck you get in here anyway? What’s going on?’
For a moment I’m not sure whether she is going to get up and leave and it sends a panic to my heart. She picks up her handbag and then puts it back down again. I’m surprised they even let her have it in here.
‘They arranged it,’ she says looking down at her hands.
‘They?’ I go. My heart is beating blood to my temples and I can feel my face throbbing. I don’t know if I can control myself.
‘Well, James,’ she says looking at the ceiling. ‘James organized it.’
‘Who the fuck is James?’ I say.
‘The guy. You know at the place with the black door,’ she says looking down.
‘James? You have to be fucking with me Ki, James?’ I say and laugh but it’s one of them laughs.
‘That’s his name,’ she says and folds her arms tight across her chest.
‘I don’t give a shit about his name. Who the fuck is he?’
‘He’s the one who arranged it,’ she says now looking at me. ‘He watched you when you followed me to the place, in Elephant and Castle.’
‘Watching me? Why?’ I shout out. I am vexed at the thought of this James guy watching me following her. Badly. Like I’m some kind of child.
‘Listen I am so sorry –’
‘Fuck sorry, yeah. We can chat about sorry laters. For now though, what the hell is going on? Was this the shit you was going to tell me after the shooting?’ I say getting up. The table is cemented into the floor and so cannot move when I go to stand and so I sit back down again and stare at her in anger.
She doesn’t say anything. She looks at me and then looks down at her hands again like there’s nowhere else for her eyes to go. It looks like she is wiping away a tear but right then it’s the last thing that I am concerned about.
‘Why did you shoot them Ki?’
‘What?’
‘Why did you shoot Face and that other one in the club?’ I say to her looking around to make sure no one is hearing this.
‘I had to,’ she says. ‘You weren’t going to were you?’
‘What you think I was there for fun? With a gun in my hand?’ I say.
‘You were out of it. Your eyes had glazed over. I thought you were going to pass out,’ she says and then she sighs out the next words in a half-breath. ‘I had to do it.’
‘But I still might have,’ I say but I know by then that it’s a lie. She was right. I had choked. I look down at the table. There are still questions I need to ask. I don’t know how to ask the next one because I don’t know what the answer is going to be. I just know whatever it is it’s going to change everything. But then, everything had already changed hadn’t it?
‘What about Jamil? Why him? You didn’t need to do it. Face was out of the picture. Jamil was just a boy. He weren’t no danger to nobody.�
�
Ki sweeps her hand across her face as if she can make it new again. Take away the pain in it or maybe the lies in it.
‘James wanted him, too.’
I almost laugh out. ‘What?! What has James got to do with all this shit?’
‘He’s an agent.’
‘An agent? What you chatting about Ki?’
‘MI5.’
‘MI5?’ And I laughed then, so hard water came out of my eyes. I knew that reading all them books was going to fuck with Ki’s head one day. But M, I, fucking 5?
‘You know what you even sound like?’ I say, but even as I am saying the words, it hits me. It comes at me like a fist into my face. It was true.
‘He wanted Face. But he said he’d take as many as we could give him.’
‘Wanted them what, dead?’
‘James uses a different word. Disconnected.’
Long adjournment 16:20
IN THE CENTRAL CRIMINAL COURT T2017229
Before: HIS HONOUR JUDGE SALMON QC
* * *
Closing Speeches:
* * *
Trial: Day 38
Monday 17th 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
39
10:05
So you lot have had a weekend to think about what I said on Friday. And to tell you the truth, I been thinking about it too and I been thinking about you too. Trying to work out what you are thinking.
But I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I’m making this all up. Or, if you even believe me, maybe you think she was making this all up. Believe. I have been turning this around in my head ever since she came to see me. It’s been distracting me when I should be concentrating on you. But now that you know maybe you can see why some of what I was saying weren’t exactly right. And why I had to do this speech on my own.
But like you probably are, I did wonder if Ki was maybe playing me. If there was something to call her out on, trust me I would have. But I know that girl. I mean I know her know her. Not just the grey eyes and the smiling Kira or the books and the plans Kira. I know this Kira. The dark hidden places Kira. And whether I wanted to believe it or not I knew it was true.
So for the next twenty minutes she broke it down for me. It started with the time she had been to the prison to see Spooks. That was when they got hold of her for the first time. Spooks had been getting more and more heat from inside and was now proper panicking about what might happen to him. Lately a few close shave things had happened to him and the boy was sweating. He tried to get some people to cool out the Glockz boys but they weren’t listening no more. If anything they just turned up the heat.
Eventually, when he ran out of choices, he went to the Feds to try his luck with them. He said he’d do anything if they could get him out of his mess. Anything at all, he said, just move me somewhere safe. The police weren’t that interested but when he started mentioning the names he knew, suddenly they got interested. When anyone said ‘Face’, someone somewhere was interested.
Feds had their eyes and ears on Face for some time and they wanted his crew for all kinds of shit from murders and guns to armed robberies and drugs.
They weren’t the only ones though who had their eyes on Face. Some of the high-up people had been watching too, so Ki says to me. Once they heard that Spooks knew about Glockz’ beef with Face, the MI5 boys got wide-open eyes. They had picked up some shit on their vine that tied Face in to some big drugs shipment. Ki didn’t really say what, but from what she did tell me, it was something to do with maybe ten tons of class A being smuggled into the UK in ships. That’s what they told her anyway but it sounded like bullshit to me.
They had been planning some kind of operation for long apparently, but they just couldn’t get close enough to Face. The man was like a ghost. As soon as they thought they had him, he made a move. Made it so quick they could never catch him actually at it. That weren’t surprising really because Face was the kind of guy who was always one step ahead. And you got to remember that they were using shit like phone taps to pick up his chatter or intercepting emails and stuff like that. But Face ditched his sim every other day and he didn’t have no email. He would blip up on their radar like one time if they were lucky and then he would go dark for weeks until they were lucky enough to link him to another number. That is why he was a ghost. And also why they needed a ghost of their own. Someone who could drift in without attracting notice.
Then one day they got lucky. Somehow they got a hard-line into his crew. An informer. This grass they had told them about the shit that was going down with Guilty. Then from there they made the short walk to Spooks.
What they needed though was someone to give them vine and someone to make the hit. They didn’t have time to do what Ki tells me they call ‘planting a seed’ and waiting for it to grow into a tree or some shit probably. They needed someone ready-made. They didn’t have time to embed someone because they were sure it was only a matter of time before their contact was dried out.
So in no time, Spooks had his own Secret Service handler. This weren’t like no police handler where you tell them some shit and the police writes some of the shit down and maybe looks at some of it later. Nah these MI boys did their work and did it quick.
Once Ki had got her visiting order from Spooks, he went straight to his new handler and told him. ‘My sister – she knows Glockz. Can you use her?’ he had said. ‘She’s clever, man. You can use her. Trust me.’ Fucker hadn’t even told her about it. Just sold her out like he sold her out before. These guys just nodded and in a day they knew shit about her that she probably didn’t even know herself.
Once the MI boys met her, they knew she was perfect. She was smart. She knew who the players were. And she could follow a plan. It made sense to them and best of all she could move quickly.
I know from your faces that you be thinking I’ve gone. Ping, like that, my mind’s gone. Or you probably think that I’m making this shit up. But I swear down this is the truth. This was the thing that I couldn’t say and my QC didn’t want me saying. Coz how can I blame MI5? That’s just proper mad, crazy. And no one can believe crazy. But just stop for a minute. Think about it.
It explains some shit.
All this vine she was getting on Face. The whole mosque thing always seemed pretty fucking sketchy to me. Anyway that day they dropped her off round the back of the estate was the day they broke it down for her. ‘You help us and we’ll get your brother out. Witness protection protocol.’
‘If I don’t?’ she had said.
‘Then we can’t guarantee what’s going to happen to him.’
They weren’t really expecting her to do it herself. In fact they couldn’t allow her to do it herself. That wasn’t in like their pay grade. It was me that was supposed to pull the trigger, which hurts like a bitch. That she was setting me up to save her waste man brother, Spooks. She just had to get me there. They supplied the plan. They took care of the door staff. They got the two-way radios. All she had to do was make sure I pulled the trigger. Or Curt. Didn’t even fucking matter to them who it was. When it was all done they were going to take care of her. And Spooks. Both of them together. Gone.
And JC? That idiot wasn’t even supposed to be there. I still don’t really know why she shot him. He saw us I guess and that kind of fucked everything up for Ki. She couldn’t have no loose end going to the Feds and lining us up for the murders in the club. Putting us at the scene. Maybe she thought it was karma. Maybe she panicked. Maybe she didn’t panic but saw it all laid out. Saw how it had to play out. Truth be told, if JC had been some other place, I wouldn’t even be here. The club murders would disappear. Spooks would be hidden and me and Ki? Well we would have th
e chance just to be us again.
I don’t know why she’s come to see me now, after all this time. Probably got a guilty conscience.
Shit. I get it now, standing here talking to you, telling you everything. She came because I’d done my evidence bit. You see what I’m saying? She came only after I got in that witness box and said my piece. Can’t stop the trial now, is it? It’s too late. She knew that. It’s too late to touch her. Thing I don’t get though is why she came at all then. Clean her conscience or something? Maybe that’s it. Maybe she felt guilty. She should. She is.
I been here in front of you all these days taking her murder on my own head for what? For what? For love? You think so? I thought so. But I also know that if I knew then what I know now that she could sell me out for her brother, for herself, I ain’t sure I would have kept her name out of it. I would have told you straight. She lined me up for it to get herself out of it. Simple as.
But – she did come at least. And it weren’t no easy thing either. She was in protection apparently. She weren’t even supposed to exist any more. It was only because she threatened to fuck the whole thing up in the open that they allowed her to see me at all. She wasn’t even Kira any more. She was some other person altogether.
But still. She came. You get me. And here we are now.
‘So you can make this thing disappear? Get them to say “Not Guilty” and tell the truth?’ I’d said to her when it was nearly twenty minutes up and the guard was knocking on the door.
‘I can’t,’ she said.
‘So what now?’ I said looking at those eyes again. They were brimming wet but still crazy beautiful.
She stopped and looked at me for a moment and then said softly, ‘Why didn’t you go away? I thought you would have gone.’
‘Gone? I was waiting for you. Not even a telephone call Ki.’
You Don't Know Me: A BBC Radio 2 Book Club Choice Page 25