What Came Before He Shot Her

by Elizabeth George

  “As I said, there are youth remand centres…She won’t be mixed in with adults.”

  “But you’ve got to see and they’ve got to see, there’s a reason. She’d been attacked by that boy. He’s got to be the one who went after her that night. He and his mates. She wouldn’t say, but he did it. I know this. He’s been after all three of the kids from the first. And then there’s what happened to her before. At her grandmother’s house. There are reasons.”

  Joel had never heard his aunt sound so broken. Her tone made his eyes prickle. He put his chin on his knees to stop its trembling.

  The front-door buzzer went. Below, Kendra and Fabia turned as one to the sound. Kendra scraped back her chair, and she hesitated only a moment—a woman gathering courage for the next terrible event—before she crossed over to open the door.

  Three people stood crowded on the top step, with Castor and Pollux still motionless on the ground, sentinels marking the changing circumstances in Edenham Way. Two of the people were uniformed constables: a black woman and a white man. Between them was Ness: coatless, shivering, her jersey stained with blood.

  When Kendra said, “Ness!” Joel clattered down the stairs and into the kitchen. He stopped short at the sight of the police. They said, “Mrs. Osborne?” Kendra said, “Yes. Yes.”

  It was a moment of tableau: Fabia Bender still at the kitchen table, but half risen now; Kendra with both hands extended to take Ness into her arms; the constables openly evaluating the situation; Joel afraid to make a move lest he be told to return to his room; and Ness with her face a hard mask that said, Do not approach, and do not touch.

  The female constable was the one to alter the hesitation among them. She put her hand on Ness’s back. Ness flinched. The constable didn’t react to this. She merely increased the pressure till Ness moved inside the house. The police moved with her. All of them lifted their feet at once, as if they’d rehearsed this moment of reunion.

  “This young lady had some trouble with a bloke in Queensway,” the female constable said. She introduced herself as PC Cassandra Anyworth and her partner as PC Michael King. “Big black bloke. Strongman type. He was attempting to get her inside a car. She put up a good fight. Marked him up, which is to her credit. I’d say that’s why she’s standing here right now. The blood’s not hers. Not to worry about that.”

  It came to everyone simultaneously that these constables had no idea what had happened between Ness and Neal Wyatt in Meanwhile Gardens, which meant they were not local police. That alone would have been evident when they said they’d found Ness in altercation with a black man in Queensway. For Queensway was not in the borough monitored by the Harrow Road police. Instead, it was monitored by the Ladbroke Grove station, but this was in itself not happy news.

  The Ladbroke Grove station had a rough reputation. Someone taken there was not likely to be received with dispassion, especially someone of a minority race. Black man seemed to echo in the room.

  “Dix found you?” Kendra asked Ness. “Dix found you?” When she didn’t answer, Kendra asked the constables, “Was the black man called Dix D’Court?”

  PC King spoke. “Didn’t get his name, madam. That would’ve been handled at the station. He’s in custody, though, so there’s no worry he’ll be coming after her again.” He smiled, but it was a smile without warmth. “They’ll know who he is soon enough. They’ll have his details and everything he’s done for the last twenty years. No worries on that score.”

  “He lives here,” Kendra said. “With me. With us. He went looking for her. I asked him. I was looking for her as well, but Fabia wanted to see me, so I came home. Ness, didn’t you tell them it was Dix?”

  “She wasn’t in condition to tell anyone anything,” PC Anyworth said.

  “But you can’t hold Dix. Not for doing what I asked him—”

  “If that’s the case, madam, it’ll all be sorted out in due course.”

  “Due course? He’s in gaol, though? He’s locked up? Being questioned?” Getting banged about if he didn’t answer to their liking was what she didn’t say but thought, as did the rest of them. Such was the reputation of the station. Rough treatment followed by the ritualised excuse: Walked into a door, he did. Slipped on the tiles. Knocked his damn head into the cell door for reasons unknown, but he’s probably a claustrophobe. Kendra said, “My God.” And then, “Oh, Ness,” and nothing more.

  Fabia intervened. She introduced herself and offered her card to the PCs. She was working with the family. She would take Vanessa off the constables’ hands. Mrs. Osborne had told them the truth, by the way. The man who appeared to be assaulting Vanessa was merely trying to bring her home to her aunt. The situation was rather complex, you see. If the constables wished to talk further about it…? Fabia gestured to the table to indicate they were welcome to sit. There, the folders containing the children’s pasts, presents, and futures were laid out and one of them was open. Fabia’s notebook was still on the floor with its paperwork scattered. It was all so official.

  PC King turned the business card over in his hands. He was overworked and tired and just as happy to hand the silent teenager over to other responsible adults. He gave PC Anyworth a glance in which they communicated wordlessly. She nodded. He nodded. Further talk would not be necessary, he said. They’d leave the girl with her aunt and the social worker, and if someone wanted to go down to Ladbroke Grove to identify the man who’d been trying to force Ness into his car, that should take care of matters.

  For Kendra, the emphasis on should underscored the urgency of getting Dix out of the clutches of the police. She said thank you, thank you to the constables. They left, and the matter seemed finished.

  Except it wasn’t. The Ladbroke Grove police station may not have received word of the assault upon an adolescent boy in Meanwhile Gardens and the search for the girl who’d carried out the assault, but they would eventually. Even if that had not been the case, and even if no one in Ladbroke Grove ever connected the dots in this matter, Fabia Bender now had a duty that went beyond calming the troubled waters of this household.

  She said, “I’ll have to phone the Harrow Road station,” and she took out her mobile.

  Kendra said, “No. Why? You can’t.”

  Fabia said, the mobile pressed to her ear, “Mrs. Osborne, you know there’s no alternative. Harrow Road know who they’re looking for. They have her name, her address, and her past offences in their records. If I leave her here with you—which I can’t do and you know it—the only result is prolonging the inevitable. My job is to see that Ness moves through the system smoothly at this point. Yours is to get Dix D’Court out of the Ladbroke Grove station.”

  Joel gave an involuntary cry at this, which was when the two women finally noticed him. Kendra, feeling broken, told him harshly to go back to his room and to stay there until further notice. He gave his sister an agonised glance and fled back up the stairs.

  Kendra said to Fabia, “At least give me time to get her cleaned up.”

  “I can’t…Mrs. Osborne…Kendra.” Fabia cleared her throat. Involvement with the families of her clients was inevitable, but it always cost her in the end. She hated to say what she had to say. But she pushed forward. “Evidence,” was the word she used, and she hoped that her gesture towards Ness and the blood upon her would be enough for Kendra to understand.

  As for Ness, she merely stood there. Drained, spent, scheming, wondering…It was impossible for the other two women to tell. What they both knew—in fact, what they all knew—was that matters were finished for the foreseeable future when it came to possibilities for Ness.

  GETTING DIX OUT of the Ladbroke Grove police station was no easy matter. It involved several hours of waiting, consultations with a duty solicitor who was none too happy to have to assist, conversations with Fabia Bender via phone, and communication with the Harrow Road police. His impounded car would take several more days to disentangle from the bureaucracy. But at least Dix himself walked out of the custody area, free t
o go.

  He’d never before had an interaction with the police. He’d never even been stopped for a traffic offence. He was shaken and trying not to be governed by hate and the need for vengeance. This required him to breathe calmly and to try to remember who he’d been before he’d seen a drunken girl in the Falcon pub and had decided to drive her home for her own safety. That had begun things: concern for Ness. It was an irony to him that concern for Ness had ended things as well.

  What he said to Kendra, he waited to say until they were back in Edenham Way. Inside the house, he climbed the stairs to her bedroom. She followed him and shut the door. She said, “Dix, baby,” in a tender voice. But it was also a voice that had always acted as a prelude to sex between them, and he couldn’t face sex, he didn’t want sex, and he was sure Kendra didn’t want it either. He went to the bedroom door and propped it open.

  “Boys?” he asked.

  “In their room,” she said. Which meant they’d hear if they were listening, but that didn’t seem to matter any longer.

  Two of the drawers in the bedroom chest were his, and Dix eased them out and dumped their contents onto the bed. He went to the wardrobe and removed his clothes. He said, although the saying of this was entirely unnecessary, “Can’t do it, Ken.”

  She watched him pull a duffel bag from beneath the bed, the same duffel bag that he’d brought into her house, hanging over his shoulder, and smiling smiling smiling with hope about what it meant—or rather, really, what he wanted it to mean—that he was taking up residence with the woman he loved. Then, he’d carried it up to this room and flung it into a corner because there were more important things than unpacking and making the requisite spaces in drawers and wardrobe. Those things were his woman, loving his woman, showing her, having her, and knowing the way only a twenty-three-year-old boy-man can know that this was so right, so meant to be, so here and now.

  But too much had happened and among that too much were Queensway, Ness, and the Ladbroke Grove police and how a man could even feel their thoughts wash over him in a cesspool tide whose waters left a stench upon him that a hundred thousand steaming showers could not wash away.

  Kendra said as he began to stuff his belongings into the duffel bag, “Dix, it wasn’t you. Your fault. Anything. Things happened to her. She’s been that angry. She’s felt betrayed. Abandoned. You got to look at it, Dix. Please. Her dad gets murdered in the street, Dix. Her mum goes into the crazy house. My mum fails her and I fail her next. Dix, she was little. My mum’s bloody boyfriend and his filthy mates, they took her. They did things to her. It was over and over they did things to her and she didn’t tell because she was afraid. So she’s got to be forgiven for finally snapping like she did. In Queensway. With you. Whatever she might have said to the cops about you. There’s a reason and it’s horrible and I know you know that. I know you understand. Please.”

  She was pleading with him, but she was beyond feeling the humiliation of having to plead. She was like one of those gypsy women one saw occasionally on the pavement, a baby at the breast, a paper cup extended for coins from strangers. Part of her—a proud woman who’d coped with a difficult life on her own—was insisting that she’d said enough, that they didn’t need Dix, that if he wanted to leave, he had to be released with a quick surgical incision directly through the heart. But the other part—frightened and out of her depth for so long that drowning seemed like the only future she had—knew that she needed him, if only to act the part of man of the house in a family that had been cobbled together by death, madness, and misfortune.

  Dix finally said, “Ain’t wha’ I want, Ken, y’unnerstan? Ain’t wha’ I set out to have. I tried for a while—you got to know dat—but I can’t do it.”

  “You can. This only happened because—”

  “Ain’t listenin to me, Ken. I don’t want it no more.”

  “You mean me, don’t you? You don’t want me.”

  “This,” he said. “Can’t do it, won’t do it, don’t want to do it. Thought I could. Thought I did. Found out I was wrong.”

  Desperation made her say, “If the kids weren’t here—”

  “Don’t. You i’n’t like dat. And anyways, it ain’t the kids. It’s everyt’ing. Cos I want kids. Family. Kids. You always known dat.”

  “Then—”

  “But not like it is, Ken. Not kids I got to backtrack wiv, fixing ’em up where someone went wrong. It ain’t wha’ I want. Not like dis, anyways.”

  Which meant, it seemed, that with another woman, with different children, with circumstances in which there appeared to be even a modicum of hope, the situation and his feelings about that situation would be different. He’d be what that woman wanted, what the children needed, and what Kendra herself had sworn she did not need, desire, or wish to have in her life.

  And if she wanted all of that now—the package represented by Man Presence in her home—was the truth that the desire grew more from panic and fear than real love? It was not a question she could either ask herself or answer in that moment. She was reduced to watching him thrust his belongings helter-skelter into his duffel bag. She was transformed into the sort of hand-wringing woman she would have otherwise despised, one who followed her man from bedroom to bathroom and watched—as one might watch emergency workers wrest a dead body from a twisted vehicle—while he scooped up his shaving gear and all the lotions and oils that he used to keep his body smooth and glistening for his competitions.

  When he turned back to face her, he looked beyond her. Joel had come out of the second bedroom, Toby standing just behind him. Dix met the boys’ gazes, but then he dropped his because there was the duffel bag to be seen to. He zipped it, and the sound it made was different from the earlier sound of unzipping because it was full now, stuffed right to its seams, heavy but not so much so that a man of his strength would have trouble carrying it. He raised it to his shoulder.

  He said to Joel, “You take care round here, mon. Y’unnerstan? Mind you watch out for Ken.”

  “Yeah,” Joel said. His voice was dull.

  “Dis ain’t down to you, blood,” Dix told him. “You got dat straight? It’s everyt’ing, mon. Lots ’f shit you don’t unnerstan. You remember dat. It ain’t down to you. It’s just everyt’ing.”

  WHICH WAS WHAT landed on Joel’s shoulders once Dix D’Court left them: everything. Households needed to be headed by a man in order to function, and he was the only man available to keep Toby safe and to get Ness out of the trouble she was in.

  That this latter challenge was insurmountable was something Joel did not intend to face. “She tried to kill him,” Hibah told him fiercely when their paths crossed near Trellick Tower. “I was there, innit. So was that lady from the drop-in centre. So were maybe twenty little kids. A bigger knife and she would’ve killed him. She’s mad, tha’ girl. She’s going to get it. They got her locked up and I hope they throw ’way the key.”

  Hope lay in the fact that Ness was locked up. For locked up meant the police, the police meant the Harrow Road station, and the Harrow Road station meant a chance still existed that what seemed to be part of Ness’s future didn’t necessarily have to happen. There was still a means of extricating Ness from the quagmire, and Joel had access to that means.

  Thus he saw the road he had to take, and this road was the one that led to becoming the Blade’s man completely. No mere temporary arrangement to acquire a favour, but the real thing: proving himself as signed, sealed, and delivered to the Blade in such a way as to leave no doubt in anyone’s mind where Joel Campbell’s loyalties lay. This meant he had to wait to be called to action, which was not easy.

  When the day arrived, he came out of Holland Park School and found Cal Hancock waiting for him at the end of Airlie Gardens, on the route he would take to catch his bus. Cal was leaning against the seat of a black-as-death Triumph motorcycle that Joel thought for a moment belonged to him. He was heavily bundled against the damp February cold; his garb was head to toe a match for the Triumph: black knitt
ed hat, black donkey jacket closed to the throat, black gloves, black jeans, heavy-soled black boots. His expression was sombre, not mellowed by weed and not tanked up by anything else. That and the clothes—so head-to-foot different, so head-to-foot hidden—told Joel the moment had finally arrived.

  “Le’s get goin, mon,” was what Cal said. Not “It’s time,” and certainly not “Fetch the piece,” because Joel had been instructed to have the gun on him at all times, and he’d obeyed that instruction in spite of the risk.

  Joel said automatically, “I got to fetch Toby from his school first, Cal.”

  “No you ain’t. Wha’ you got to do is come wiv me.”

  “He can’t get home on his own, mon.”

  “Dat ain’t my problem, and it sure ain’t yours. He can wait there, innit. Wha’ you’re doin ain’t going to take long anyways.”

  Joel said, “Okay,” and he tried to sound collected. But fear came to him in the palms of his hands where he had the sensation of ice chips being deposited.

  Cal said to him, “Give us the piece,” and Joel set his rucksack onto the pavement. He looked around to make sure there were no watchers to the exchange that was about to be made, and when he saw there were none, he unfastened buckles and rooted to the bottom of the bag where the pistol lay, wrapped in a towel. He handed over the entire package. Cal unwrapped it, checked out the gun, and then put it into the pocket of his jacket. He dropped the towel to the ground and said, “Le’s go.” He set off up the street, in the direction of Holland Park Avenue.

  Joel said, “Where?”

  Cal said over his shoulder, “You ain’t got to worry ’bout where.”

  He led Joel up the street, and when they got to Holland Park Avenue, he headed east. This was the direction of Portobello Road, but at the corner where he might have turned to get there, he did not. Instead he went straight, and Joel followed him to the Notting Hill underground station, where Cal descended the stairs and walked along the tunnel to where the tickets were sold. He bought two from a machine. They were returns. Without glancing Joel’s way, Cal headed for the turnstiles that would take them to the trains.