What Came Before He Shot Her il-14

by Elizabeth George

  The Blade didn’t even glance his way. His shook his head fondly and said, “You the mon, spee, ain’t you? Lord, I got to watch my back round you.”

  “You c’n watch whatever you wan’ to watch,” Joel said. “You helpin me or not?”

  “Did I say not?” the Blade asked him quietly. “You want him sorted, he gonna be sorted. But all t’ings considered dat been happening lately, he jus’ ain’t being sorted like you had in mind.”

  That said, the Blade straightened and turned to Joel. He held something in the flat of his hand, but it wasn’t a bag of cocaine that he extended. It was a gun.

  “Jus’ how much mon is mon?” he said.

  Chapter

  23 The Blade drove Joel back to Edenham Estate, and all the way there the weapon lay in Joel’s lap like a cobra coiled. He had no intention of using it. Touching it had been unnerving enough. The Blade had thrust it at him—handle first— and told him to get used to it: the heft and the feel, cold metal and power and everyone in the street from now on looking at him and seeing a real man. For a real man was capable of violence, so no one messed a real man about. Respect was the order of the day when someone had a decent pistol upon him.

  There were no bullets for the piece, and Joel was glad of that. He could only imagine what the future might have held had the weapon actually been loaded: Toby coming upon it no matter how well he had stowed it away; Toby thinking it was a toy and firing it without knowing it could kill; Toby shooting Joel by accident, shooting Ness, shooting Kendra, shooting Dix.

  The Blade reached across him and opened the door. He said, “We straight on dis, mon? Y’unnerstan how t’ings go down?”

  Joel looked at him. “Dis is all? You sort out Neal after? Cos I ain’t—”

  “You calling the Blade a liar?” His tone was hard. “Seems to me you do what the Blade wants doing, not th’other way round.”

  Joel said, “I did Kensal Green Cemetery like you wanted. How d’I know you ain’t just goin to ask for summick else, I do dis?”

  “You don’t know, bred,” the Blade replied. “You just show you trust. Trust and obey. Dat’s how it works. You don’t trust the Blade, the Blade got no reason to trust you back.”

  “Yeah. But if I get caught—”

  “Well, dat’s th’ point, Jo-ell. ’F you get caught, wha’ you going to do? You grass the Blade or you play dumb? Wha’ll it be? Anyway, see you don’t get caught. You c’n run, innit. You got a piece. What d’you ’xpect to happen you take some care?” He smiled, taking out a spliff and lighting it, watching Joel over a flame that made his eyes look as if sparks danced in them. “You a clever little sod, Jo-ell. Dat’s your whole family. Clever as hell. So I see you doing dis job jus’ fine. An’ look at it like another step, blood. Bring you one bit closer to who you meant to be. So take that piece now, and get going, mon. Cal’ll let you know when you meant to act.”

  Joel looked from the Blade to Edenham Estate. He couldn’t see his aunt’s house from this spot, but he knew what awaited him when he climbed the steps to her front door: what went for family in his world, as well as his responsibilities to them.

  He had his rucksack with him from Wield Words Not Weapons, and he unbuckled it, shoving the pistol as far down as it would go. He got out of the car and bent to have a final word with the Blade.

  “Later, mon,” he said with a nod.

  The Blade offered him a smile made lazy by weed. “Later, bred,” he said. “And tell that cunt sister of yours hello.”

  Joel shut the door smartly on the Blade’s laughter. He said to no one, “Yeah, I’ll do that, Stanley. Fuck you,” as the car shot off along the road in the direction of Meanwhile Gardens.

  Joel trudged to his aunt’s house. He was deep in thought and most of those thoughts involved telling himself that he could do what the Blade was asking him to do. There was little enough risk. With Cal there to help him choose the victim—because Joel knew that Cal would not stand by idly and let him make the choice on his own without advice—how much time and effort and risk were involved in performing a garden variety mugging? He could even make it easier on himself by simply snatching someone’s bag. The Blade hadn’t said he had to stand there while some Asian woman pawed through her belongings with shaking hands, looking for her purse to hand over. He’d just said he wanted Joel to take cash from an Asian woman in the street. That was the limit of what his instructions had been. Certainly, Joel thought, he could interpret them in whatever way he wanted to.

  For Joel, everything in that evening seemed to point to the ease with which he’d be able to accomplish this task for the Blade. He’d gone looking for the man, but the Blade had found him. Their entire encounter had ended just about the time that Wield Words Not Weapons ended as well. He was back at home unmolested and he even had notes from the critique to which he’d exposed his miserable poetry. All this could do nothing save improve his position in the eyes of his aunt. And if all that was not a sign of what he was meant to do next, what was?

  Joel expected Kendra to be sitting at the kitchen table with her eyes fixed on the clock, testing the veracity of his announced plans for the evening. But when he got inside, he found the ground floor empty and dark. Sounds came from above, so he climbed the stairs. In the sitting room, a video was playing: a gang of train robbers on horseback galloping away from a blown-up boxcar as money blew everywhere and a posse pursued them. But no one was there. Joel hesitated, listening and worrying, with his rucksack feeling heavier than it ought. He climbed the second set of stairs, where he saw a strip of light beneath his bedroom door and heard the sound of rhythmically creaking bedsprings from behind his aunt’s. The latter was enough to tell him why Kendra hadn’t been waiting for him. He opened his own bedroom door and found Toby awake, sitting up in bed, using marking pens to decorate his skateboard.

  “Dix give ’em to me,” Toby told Joel without preamble. He was referring to the pens. “He bring ’em home from the caff wiv a colouring book ’s well. Colouring book’s for babies, but I like the pens good enough. He brought a video dat I was meant to watch cos he want to do Aunt Ken.”

  “Why di’n’t you watch the video?” Joel asked.

  Toby examined his artwork closely, squinting at it as if this would alter its merit in some way. “Di’n’t like to watch it by myself,” he said.

  “Where’s Ness?”

  “Wiv dat lady an’ her son.”

  “What lady and her son?”

  “From the drop-in centre. They went for dinner someplace. Ness even phoned and asked Aunt Ken could she go.”

  This was a startling development, which caused Joel no little wonder. It marked change in Ness, and while the courtesy of a phone call to her aunt wasn’t an earth-shattering event, it gave Joel pause. Toby held up the skateboard for his inspection. Joel saw that he’d drawn a lightning bolt upon it, making it multicoloured and most of the time staying within the original lines he’d sketched out. Joel said,

  “Nice, Tobe,” and he set his rucksack on his bed, all too aware of what it contained and determined to put it somewhere safe as soon as Toby fell asleep.

  “Yeah,” Toby said, “but I’m t’inkin, Joel.”

  “’Bout what?”

  “Dis board. If I do it up nice and we take it to Mum, d’you t’ink it might make her better? I like it a lot and I wan’ to keep it, but if Mum had it from me an’ if you told her what it was an’ all dat . . .”

  Toby looked so hopeful that Joel didn’t know what to tell him. He understood what his brother was thinking: If he made the ultimate sacrifi ce for their mother, wouldn’t that somehow mean something to God or to whoever decided which person fell ill, which person stayed ill, and which person recovered? For Toby, giving Carole Campbell the skateboard would be akin to giving her the lava lamp. It would be a case of hand over something you love above all else and surely the recipient of this object would see that she counted so greatly in your life that she would want to be part of it.

  Jo
el doubted it would work, but he was willing to give it a try. He said, “Next time we go, Tobe, we take that skateboard. But you got to learn to ride it first. You get good on it, you c’n show Mum. That’ll take her mind off what’s botherin her and maybe she c’n come home.”

  “You t’ink?” Toby asked, his face bright.

  “Yeah. Dat’s what I think,” Joel lied.

  THE HOPE OF Carole Campbell’s improvement existed in varying degrees within her children. Its presence was largest within Toby, whose limited experience had not yet taught him to be leery of having expectations. In Joel it was a fleeting thought whenever he had to make a decision that involved the care and protection of his family. In Ness, however, Carole was a passing and summarily rejected thought. The girl was too busy to entertain fantasies in which her mother returned to their lives as the whole and functioning human being she had never been.

  Majidah and Sayf al Din were largely responsible for this. As were having a plan for the future and a route to follow in achieving that plan.

  Ness first paid a call upon Fabia Bender at the Youth Offending Team’s offices in Oxford Gardens. There, she told the social worker that she would be pleased and extremely grateful—these last two words, including the emphasis, were spoken at Majidah’s insistence—to accept the scholarship or grant or charity money or whatever it was that would allow her to take a single millinery course during the next term at college. Fabia declared herself delighted with this information, although she’d been brought into the picture by Majidah every step of the way to this destination. She allowed Ness to lay out the entire plan and she expressed interest, encouragement, and delight as Sayf al Din’s offer of employment was explained to her, along with Majidah’s loan, the manner of repayment, the schedule of work, the reduced hours at the child drop-in centre, and everything else remotely related to Ness’s circumstances. Everything, Fabia Bender told her, would be approved by the magistrate.

  Fabia used Ness’s visit to ask about Joel as well. But on this topic, Ness was not forthcoming. She didn’t trust the social worker that far and, beyond that, she didn’t really know what was going on with her brother. Joel had become far more watchful and secretive than he’d been in the past.

  Naturally, working for Sayf al Din didn’t unfold the way Ness would have liked it to. In her imagination, she descended upon his studio ablaze with ideas that he embraced, allowing her access to all his supplies and equipment. Her fantasy had it that he accepted a commission from the Royal Opera—or perhaps from a fi lm company producing an enormous costume drama—and that commission proved far too large for one man to design by himself. Casting about for a partner, he chose Ness the way the prince eternally chooses Cinderella. She expressed a suitable amount of humble doubt about her capabilities, all of which he brushed aside. She rose to the occasion, created one masterwork after another in rapid succession, earning herself a reputation, Sayf al Din’s gratitude, and a permanent creative partnership with him.

  The reality was that she began her tenure in the Asian man’s studio with broom in hand, far more like Cinderella’s earlier life than her later days post fairy godmother’s appearance on the scene. She was a oneperson clean-up crew, assigned to keep the studio in order via dustpan, cleaning rags, mops, and the like. She chafed under this assignment, but she gritted her teeth and did it.

  The day Sayf al Din finally allowed her to use a glue gun was thus one of celebration. The assignment was simple enough, involving beads fi xed to a band that was a very small part of the overall headpiece being fashioned. But even though the job was virtually insignificant, it signaled a step forward. So intent was Ness upon doing it perfectly and thus proving her superiority over the other workers, that it took her far longer than it should have done and it placed her in the studio far later than she should have been. There was no danger in her being there, since Sayf al Din was working as well. He even walked her to the underground station when she was finally ready to go home for the day, to make certain she arrived there unmolested. They chatted as they walked; he promised her work of a more advanced nature. She was doing well, she was catching on, she was responsible, and she was the kind of person he wanted working with him. With him, he said, not for him. Ness burned a little more brightly at the thought of the partnership that with implied.

  Once he’d seen her through the turnstile in the Covent Garden underground station, Sayf al Din returned to his studio to finish up his own work. He had no worries about Ness getting home, since she had only to change lines at King’s Cross Station—which could be accomplished in the light of the underground tunnels—and afterwards, the walk to Edenham Estate from Westbourne Park station was less than ten minutes and closer to five if she was brisk about it. Sayf al Din had done his duty as prescribed by his mother, whose interest in the troublesome teenager was a source of mystification for him.

  Because the delights of the day had been just that—delightful— Ness was full of future imaginings as she walked towards home from the underground station. Thus, she crossed over Elkstone Road with her mind somewhat fogged by her success. She walked along the edge of Meanwhile Gardens without the full consciousness required by a wintertime stroll along a dimly lit park in a questionable part of town.

  She saw nothing. But she was seen. From midway down the spiral stairs—and consequently sheltered from view—a group of watchers had long waited for just such a moment. They saw Ness cross over Elkstone Road, and a nod was all they needed to tell them this was the girl they’d been looking for.

  They moved with the silence and grace of cats, down the stairs and along the path. They hurried over the rise of land that marked one of the hillocks inside the garden, and by the time Ness reached the entrance to the place—never locked, for there were no gates—they were there as well.

  “Yellow-skin bitch gonna give us some or wha’?” was the question Ness heard coming from behind her. Because she was feeling good, capable, and equal to anything, she broke the rule that might otherwise have ensured her safety. Rather than call out for help, run, blow a whistle, scream, or otherwise draw attention to her potential danger—which behaviour, it must be admitted, had only a limited possibility of success—she turned. She could tell the voice was young. She thought herself evenly matched to youth.

  What she had not counted on was the number of them. What she did not realise was that this was no fortuitous encounter. There were eight boys behind her, and by the time she understood the extent to which she was outnumbered, they were upon her. One face emerged from the pack of them, genetically odd and further contorted by design and by loathing. Before she could put a name to that face, a blow on her back caused her to fall forward. Her arms were grabbed. She was dragged from the pavement into the park. She screamed. A hand clamped over her mouth.

  “You gonna like wha’ we give you, bitch,” Neal Wyatt said.

  NEITHER KENDRA NOR Dix was at home when three sharp raps sounded on the front door, followed by an accented male Asian voice. Had it not been for that voice, Joel wouldn’t have answered. As it was, he still hesitated until he heard the man say, “You please must open the door at once, as I fear this poor young lady may be seriously injured.”

  Joel fumbled with the dead bolt and jerked the door open. A familiarlooking older Asian with heavy rimmed glasses, wearing shalwar kamis topped by an overcoat, had both arms around Ness. She was sagging against him, clinging to his coat’s lapel. Her jacket and scarf were missing, and her jersey was torn at the right shoulder and otherwise splattered with filth and blood. Round her jaw were ugly marks, the sort that came from trying to hold someone’s mouth closed or fully open.

  “Where are your parents, young man?” the man asked. He introduced himself as Ubayy Mochi. “This poor girl was set upon in the gardens, I’m afraid.”

  “Ness?” was the only thing Joel could say. “Nessa? Ness?” He was afraid to touch her. He stepped back from the door and heard Toby coming down the stairs from above. He called over his shoulder, �
��Tobe, you stay upstairs, okay? You watch the telly? ’S only Ness, okay?”

  This was as good as an invitation. Toby descended the rest of the way and came through the kitchen. He stopped short, hugging his skateboard to his chest. He looked at Ness, then at Joel. He began immediately to cry, caught between fear and confusion.

  “Shit,” Joel muttered. He himself was trapped between soothing Toby and doing something to care for their sister. He didn’t know how to accomplish either. He stood like a statue and waited for something to happen next.

  “Where are your parents?” Ubayy Mochi asked again, more insistently this time. He urged Ness across the threshold. “Something must be done about this girl.”

  “We ain’t got parents,” Joel responded, and this seemed to produce a further wail from Toby.

  “Surely you do not live here alone?”

  “We got an auntie.”

  “You must then fetch her, boy.”

  That was impossible, as Kendra was out for the evening with Cordie. But she had her mobile with her, so Joel stumbled to the kitchen to phone her. Mochi followed with Ness, passing Toby, who reached out to touch his sister’s thigh. He sobbed only louder when Ness flinched away from him.

  Ubayy Mochi sat Ness in one of the kitchen chairs, and this revealed more of what had happened to her. She’d worn a short skirt that day, which was now ripped to the waist. Her tights were missing. So were her knickers.

  Joel said, “Ness. Nessa. Wha’ happened? Who hurt you? Who did . . . ?”

  But in truth he didn’t want her to answer him because he knew who had done it, he knew why, and he knew what it meant. When he heard his aunt’s voice on her mobile, he told her only that she had to come home. He said, “It’s Ness.”