by Paul Read
‘Where’s she gone?’ Sarah asked.
The window was closed now, but unlocked.
He watched as Sarah pulled out the contents of a chest of drawers, deposited it in a heap on the carpet.
‘Perhaps under the bed?’ Patrick suggested.
Sarah sunk to her knees and began extracting random folders and boxes. Patrick was bracing himself for the finding as she screamed.
She’d unearthed not the shoebox full of papers, diary and grass, but something far more odious and adult.
Patrick didn’t know the first thing about makes of guns. It was a dirty-grey colour, with an odd metal loop at the rear and a snub-nosed end giving it a squat, unbalanced appearance. The trigger was large compared to the hexagonal barrel, and the handle was chunky with gangland runes scratched on one side. Something tugged at Patrick’s memory; it was unmistakably the pistol from the video he’d watched with Christophe.
Sarah cast the gun to the carpet as though it burned her fingers.
Slowly, Patrick lifted the bed and pulled out the two bags of grass, dumped them down beside the weapon. Sarah wept.
‘I’m calling the police,’ she said, before jabbing the phone back and slumping on the armchair beside it. ‘I don’t know what to do… Will there be repercussions if she loses someone’s stash? Will she be accused of… snitching?’
‘I think snaking is the term nowadays.’
Patrick sunk into the sofa and willed the clock to move at a normal speed. In the company of Sarah’s hysteria the present was everlasting, a Dali-like stretching of the clockface. Patrick had been as good as dismissed from the home already but didn’t feel he could leave while she paced, kicked furniture, stared with rabid eyes at Millie’s photograph on the mantel.
Sometime later, there came the sound of breaking glass and shouting. Being nothing unusual, Sarah ignored it, but curiosity led Patrick to draw back a curtain. Across the road, a second-floor flat rippled ablaze.
‘Sarah… Look at this.’
She came to join him, angry flames reflected across her face. ‘Do you think there’s anyone in there?’ she gasped.
By way of reply, the burning flat’s front door exploded in a burst of copper sparks. Two figures flew from the flat and hit the balcony walkway coughing. No locals ran to drag them free, which Patrick thought bizarre. Instead, many seemed to shrink from the spectacle. The pair, a half-naked man of large build and a slightly older woman of mixed race, spluttered their lungs of noxious fumes.
The man, now raging at the fire which cast long, inconstant shadows across the quadrangle, looked familiar. In fact, he looked a lot like an older version of Matthew. Was it Sean Keane’s apartment in flames?
Music started again. Sarah ran to Jenna’s bedroom and smashed her way in.
‘What are you doing?’ her daughter shouted. ‘Have you gone completely mad? Look at the state of my room!’
Patrick followed to find the drugs and gun gone, and Sarah on her knees sweeping her arm under the bed. The window was open and cold air set the curtain in a sail. Patrick strode over, looked down. Using an overflow pipe, three window ledges and rudimentary mountaineering skills, the route up from the alley could be traversed. The blue lights of a fire engine sprayed the brickwork, its accompanying siren yowl dying as the unseen vehicle handbraked to a halt. What truly frightened Patrick was the knowledge that those sirens, those livid flames, were neither the culmination of a series of events nor the start of something bigger. It was life. It was ‘just how it is round here’.
‘Where are they?’ Sarah demanded from her daughter.
‘Where are what?’
Sarah turned. ‘What do I do, Patrick?’
He looked blankly at the space the illegalities used to occupy on the floor.
‘We should tell the police.’ The determination in Sarah’s voice was probably intended to scare Jenna, rather than allude to her own resolve.
‘Are you crazy?’ Jenna exploded, indignation creasing her face. ‘There’s nothing here.’
‘Jenna, we both saw it.’ Patrick hated himself for wading in.
‘We’re having all the locks and windows changed. As of tomorrow,’ Sarah said. ‘This ends. That… stuff never comes back, okay? Ever.’
Jenna persisted in her defence. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘You could go to prison for this, Jenna. Oh God. Do I report my own daughter? What do I do, Patrick?’ She continued to use ‘I’ and not ‘we’. His involvement was officially acknowledged as that of a bystander. ‘Whose was it, Jenna?’ she pleaded, shaking her daughter. ‘Whose was it?’ She slapped a stinger across Jenna’s cheek.
Jenna held her mother’s gaze with defiance, condescension. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
With so much anger and disappointment in the home, a stoic daughter remaining tight-lipped in the face of a mother’s rage, it would have been impossible for him to stay. When the debris settled, questions answered or not, Sarah might well have wanted a man about the place, for support, for protection, but they’d coped for a long time without him.
He took a few paces backwards as they quarrelled, then turned and left.
Outside, the fire-fighters had managed to douse the flames and most onlookers had returned to their homes. There was little now to see; only faint curlicues of smoke dimpling the night on their way to obscure the stars.
When Sarah’s landline number flashed on his phone at two in the morning he pounced, but the voice on the other end was unfamiliar and otherworldly. ‘Please come over,’ it begged, in-between gulping silences, the catarrhy lacunae of distress. ‘It’s an emergency.’
‘Jenna? What’s happened?’
‘Please. Straight away.’ She hung up.
Panicked, he tore that day’s clothes back over his body. His mind was blank as he hurried to the main road in search of a taxi. Convinced something terrible had happened to Sarah, fear and adrenaline synthesised into primal shutdown, an urge merely to arrive at the side of his summoner in as little time as possible.
It didn’t take him long to locate a taxi, the twenty-four-hour ubiquity of minicabs being one of London’s only certainties, and persuade the driver to slalom his way to Union City. He was dropped off a couple of blocks short of Bateman, for reasons now clear to Patrick, and once the money had changed hands the cab skidded off without pause.
Lightning in the distance, sweeping closer. And ‘Danny’s Tune’ repeating, repeating. A majestic melody from G to A, from A to D, from D to…
It was so familiar to him now, this tune. He’d been gestating it for what seemed his entire life. The most transcendent melodies always seemed as though they’d always been ‘out there’, demanding plagiarism royalties on behalf of the universe.
…E minor, from E minor to G, from G to A, from…
‘Bollocks.’
It came to him, finally. ‘Danny’s Tune’ wasn’t his. It was Adam’s ‘Find the Ocean’, ‘the worst kind of mainstream, sub-Beatles singalong crap’ Patrick had allegedly ever heard in his life, the song they’d famously argued about in the dying days of their tense studio time together. He’d never uttered the quote attributed to him on their Wikipedia page but, still, of all the tunes on Earth, how had that one managed to invade him so commandingly?
Patrick hurried past a weaving circus of 50CC bikes, child riders yelling at each other with broken voices. The smell of burning fuel, caustic and metallic, like spent matches. A car alarm squealing. An estate map being pissed against.
Bateman block, by contrast, was silent. As was the block opposite. Hours earlier, the fire had set ablaze the community, but not one fire-fighter now remained and the building across from Sarah’s had been reduced to little more than a blackened husk, a charred, glassless stacking of bricks and beams.
A black shape was sitting on the west staircase, three steps shy of the third floor. Jenna had her arms curled protectively around her knees and looked up, dog-eyed, as he approach
ed.
‘What’s…?’
He was immediately shushed. ‘Follow me,’ she said, her words brittle.
Jenna had never been like the other kids, had always seemed to carry baggage, and even in Year Eight had possessed nothing like the nonchalance of other twelve-year-olds. But this was different. Something was very wrong. The girl was as beset and brow-beaten as any adult could ever be.
She led him into the flat. ‘Keep quiet. Mum’s asleep.’
Patrick was taken aback. ‘Asleep?’
Even before the door closed, she collapsed into shivers. ‘I didn’t know who else to call… I found your number on Mum’s phone.’ A long line of grey mascara had etched itself from her left eye to midway down her cheek and at its tip hung a tiny tear. He watched it roll, picking up speed on its way to the chin. The soft pink buds of her lips drew back, revealing a gnawing of white teeth. The light bulb bathed her in ugliness.
Patrick, in dread anticipation, felt water pooling on his breastbone. No teacher training had prepared him for this.
Surrealism poured from Jenna’s mouth. ‘…He was here… They’ll know it… oh God oh God oh God…’
Uselessly, he tried to comfort her with an aged and inappropriate arm on the shoulder. She walked to her bedroom, indicating he ought to follow, and then pushed the door almost closed behind them.
The hairs on Patrick’s neck stalked. Standing with Jenna in her bedroom, as her mother slept through the wall, felt nothing short of treacherous. He wondered whether Sarah had taken one of her sleeping pills, if she’d be passed out for hours.
‘What’s happened?’
‘I…’ She steadied herself against the end of her bed, all traces of youth pulled from her face.
‘Tell me.’
‘He was at my window. He kept knocking. I was worried Mum might hear, so I opened up…’
‘Who? Who was at your window?’
‘…Denis.’ She could barely say the name.
‘Was it his gun you were keeping?’
She looked at him askance. ‘What do you think, Patrick?’
Her use of ‘Patrick’ startled him. In that moment, there was something like understanding between them. He wasn’t the teacher and she had stopped being the pupil. And then she collapsed in tears on the bed and the understanding dissipated. But it had been enough. Enough time for her to suspect Patrick knew more than he was letting on. Enough time for him to realise he didn’t know the half of it.
Why had she contacted him? Why not a friend? Why not her father?
‘He was…’ she sobbed into the pillow, drawing the duvet around her.
In an attempt to coax the story from her, he crouched by the bed, offered a tissue. ‘Why did you call me? What is it you think your mother can’t help you with?’
For a long while they remained in their places. A gentle rain auditioned at the window.
‘I killed Denis,’ she said.
SEVEN
Jenna ran a glistening nostril along her sleeve and attempted to garland her pronouncement with some detail. ‘He’d climbed up to my window. It’s how we… I… come and go. When I don’t want Mum to know.’
‘I guessed that much.’ Patrick waited as patiently as he could while the story unfolded in staccato, tearful fashion, fingernails cutting into his palms, ashamed of his own fascination. ‘And he… tried to…?’
‘He wanted his gun. Said he needed protection.’
‘But… where was the gun when your mum confronted you in here? And the cannabis?’
She indicated the small of her back, implying she’d stashed at least the gun under her clothes.
‘Did your mum call the police in the end? I’m guessing not.’
With obvious difficulty, she swallowed. ‘I felt like if I gave him the gun I was going to regret it. I tried to shout for Mum but he put his hand over my mouth and… made him tell me where it was. He stank of petrol. I heard him laughing as he followed me out the window…’ Jenna spoke like a girl possessed; perhaps the action of recounting helped foster the pretence that these were already memories, events she could outlive. ‘I ran round the estate, in a kind of circle, and when I thought I’d lost him I hid by the recycling bins at the end here. Then, like all of a sudden, he had the gun at my head.’
Patrick awaited the grim climax as Jenna mined inside herself for the confidence to finish. She muttered, in a quieter voice, ‘He’s under the stairwell at the end of the block, between the bins.’ She lashed out and grabbed Patrick’s arm at the wrist. The level of her distress went some strides to convincing him she spoke the truth.
But information was missing. ‘Jenna… How did you kill him?’
‘I was trying to push the gun away.’
‘And you shot him?’
‘The gun… My prints are on it for sure. I thought about going back and… cleaning up. No one will find him until the morning. You probably walked past him just now and didn’t even realise…’
Patrick saw the reason he’d been summoned. He was no shoulder to cry on.
Of course, it wasn’t really as simple as collecting the gun from the corpse; there would doubtless be more proof of her presence at the scene. Footprints, lint, skin cells under the boy’s nails.
‘There are many things to consider here, Jenna. If it was self-defence, you might…’
‘Get away with it?’ She sat, wiped her face on the pillow. ‘I killed someone. I killed someone.’
‘Are you sure he’s…?’
Jenna appeared to genuinely consider this; her unblinking eyes swivelled top left, her shoulders minutely contracting. ‘Maybe… you should go down there, just to check things out? And get the gun?’
It would kill her mother, if Jenna were to be sent away for this. And hadn’t he promised Sarah earlier that day he’d look out for her daughter? He stared up at Jenna’s face, her skin smooth and clear, features soft despite the tears and re-pieced with hope into innocence. Denis’ scarred face flashed into his mind, the boy’s strong hands creeping up Jenna’s skirt. Despite her attempts to use him, Patrick felt deeply sorry for her.
‘Jenna. I’m not going down there. I’m sorry. This is a police matter. You have to explain to them what happened. Wake your mum and let her know everything immediately.’
‘No one will see you.’ In her hysteria, she hadn’t heard him. ‘You’ll be careful, won’t you? In fact, why don’t you change your clothes?’ She grabbed a black bin liner from under her bed, and he caught again the scent of damp. ‘This was stuff Denis left here. It might be useful.’
She tipped the bag’s contents out onto the bed. Grey tracksuit trousers, a dark hoodie. Almost funereal, Patrick thought. At the bottom of the bag were several empty wallets and a couple of de-SIMed mobile phones. A Morrison’s shopping bag hid a pair of sweat-smelling gold trainers and a white cap. It was the same apparel pulled from the victim in the video he and Christophe watched; Denis clearly liked to safeguard his gang’s ill-gotten gains here. ‘You could take the window?’ Jenna suggested.
‘You must be joking.’
She slumped back on the bed, her face contorted in desperation. ‘You have to get that gun. Please.’
‘There’s no way I’m wearing those clothes and there’s no way I’m going to forage in the dark and collect your murder weapon. Even by telling me about this I’m complicit. If you don’t inform the police, I will.’ He spoke louder, in the hope of waking Sarah. Was she so terrified about retribution from Denis’ gang that she’d chosen to confide in him rather than someone her own age? ‘The police can give you protection, Jenna.’
She actually laughed. ‘You must collect that gun for me.’
‘No.’ He backed from her, angry now, his stomach knotting in autonomic fight or flight response. ‘If you wanted to cover this up, you should’ve collected it yourself. I can’t believe you’re even involving me. Now I’ve no choice but to let the police know.’
‘Please, Patrick.’
‘Stop. I won’t d
o it. I know what’s happened is… truly horrible, but I can’t get that gun. Surely you can see that?’
Jenna’s nostrils flared. ‘Patrick…’ There was a new steel in the girl’s voice, a mature hiss which belied her youth, and he was struck by how much she resembled her mother. ‘You’re going to get that gun for me. I know you are.’ She crossed to a drawer, pulled out a black, slimline torch, and held it out to him.
Patrick set his eyes on the door handle. ‘There’s nothing you can say which will convince me to do this.’
‘Nothing?’
He paused, but not without confidence. ‘Absolutely nothing.’
He descended the stairs and entered the rain, taking pains to avoid the cold gaze of slowly swinging CCTV the way a neurotic avoids cracks in the pavement. He took another left, then another, electing to find Denis via a circuitous route in case he’d been seen leaving Sarah’s flat. Less than half the streetlights were working but it wouldn’t have been hard for onlookers to spot his hunted gait as he searched the night for his courage.
When he saw the shadow approach he ducked into an old, unloved phone box which smelt of urine and featured Tremor10 and GalDiamondz inked across pimpled steel behind a shattered phone. The ominous outline of Bateman block reared tall outside as he waited for the shadow – now identifiably a man, walking with the agonising slowness of a drunkard – to pass. The figure splashed by without even looking, legs carrying their sleepwalking owner home via the routes of memory.
Patrick left the box and walked up a flight of unlit stairs. There were no cameras there, and no occasion to be seen from neighbouring flats, but he was no longer following a conscious resolution to hide; he was putting off his task. On the balcony he stopped and gathered what remained of his thoughts. His hands were translucent with shaking. He was soaked to the skin and it wasn’t due to the downpour.
When he emerged from the darkness, he was faking the teenage walk he so hated, figuring that if he’d been forced to wear such ridiculous garb he might as well go the extra mile and conduct his journey with an arrogant, swinging limp. It was slow going, walking like an idiot and wearing a pair of large gold trainers filled around the toes with toilet paper.