11:59

by David Williams

  “If you call, it’s big trouble. I have to ring the police.”

  “Exactly.” Sam checks her own mobile, cues up my number and puts the phone back in her pocket. “I’ll keep it right here in my hand,” she says to me. “Just in case.”

  “The 999 thing’s a bit over the top, isn’t it? Nothing’s going to happen.”

  “Just in case.”

  Thus far Sam has trumped me on the ideas front, but I have one of my own as Oliver is sorting out what goes where in his coat. “Can I borrow your camera, mate?”

  Ollie is uncharacteristically reluctant, the merest trace of petulance starting on his mouth at the idea of giving over his prized possession, even to me. Sam joins in to coax him.

  “Don’t worry, you’ll get it straight back later.”

  The cloud disappears. “’Course, Marc, here y’are.” He’s happy to have an opportunity to please Sam and, once the camera is handed over, relieved to have one less thing to think about. Suitably prepared, he sets off towards Prince Albert Road, and a minute or so later Sam and I head in the same direction, one hand linking us together, the other nursing metal in our pockets as if we might be packing heat.

  Samantha from the agency answers our ring at the front door with a welcoming smile that segues into confusion as she tries to recognise this couple on the doorstep. I help out. “Tom Etherington, we met last week.”

  “Of course, Mr Etherington, sorry, I wasn’t quite sure... And this is...?”

  “My partner, Chrissie.”

  “Fantastic, so pleased you could make it as well. Come in, come in.”

  As she ushers us into the bare front room I can’t help a reflex jolt at the presence there. Not, thank god, the bullet-headed Emmanuel, but two figures hardly less alarming at first sight. In the centre of the room, watching our entry without stepping forward to greet us, a well-built Pakistani or Afghani male, perhaps fifty, impressively bearded under headgear that’s halfway between a skull cap and a turban, and dressed in a loose-fitting white tunic that would look casual except for a stiff band collar that seems designed to dignify, and for the fact that he’s standing so erect. Behind him and scarier still (am I xenophobic?), a smaller figure, female (I guess) draped from head to foot in black, wearing one of those veils that covers all but the eyes – the kind of clothing I’ve always associated with Arabs rather than further east - but surely this can’t be Amina Begum Khan, who I’ve seen, if only from a distance, in ordinary western dress. True, she was well covered up in her press photo after Hassan’s death, but not to this extreme.

  Samantha addresses the man rather than the woman, respectfully. “Here are our clients, sir. Excuse me, interested party.” The amendment is for my benefit and she adds brightly, “Clients soon, I hope.”

  The man nods solemnly and breaks his silence without introducing himself. “I believe you have already inspected the property?”

  “I have, yes, but not my... Sorry, Tom Etherington, this is my partner, Christine. And...??”

  He ignores my cue to make good on the introductions, turning instead to Samantha and, at the edge of brusqueness, announces, “The lady wishes to look over the house.”

  “I’ll come with you, one sec,” I say, holding up a hand to Samantha as she makes a move towards Sam, then extending it in an informal offer of a handshake to the woman in black. “Sorry, don’t mean to be rude. I’m Tom.”

  Behind her veil the eyes flick once to the right before a hand emerges from the darkness of her robes to shake mine briefly (timorously), and I sense that she’s concentrating hard as she says, like someone practising her vowels, “I am Amina.”

  The man seems primed to intervene, almost interposing his body between us as he says, “My niece has lived in this house for several years. I understand you have some questions about the area.”

  “Sure.” I stay focused on Amina, saying to her as casually as politeness allows, “Should we talk as we walk?”

  Again the party-pooper butts in. “We will wait for you here. Please go on with your tour.”

  Opening gambit repelled, we have no choice now but to leave Amina chaperoned while we tag along with Samantha as she whisks us through the rooms. At least it gives Sam a chance to see in reality what I’ve been describing, with me nudging her secretly every now and again to draw her attention to certain details like the outside light and the downstairs loo conversion. The one time her eyes meet mine is after I deliberately trail my fingers over the keyhole as we pass through the doorway at the top of the stairs, though I can’t tell if this means she agrees it’s significant or is warning me not to be so obvious.

  In what I’ve been calling the child’s room I take a look through the window at the scene outside. It’s currently deserted, with one exception. On the other side of the street I spot Oliver walking slowly back from dropping a leaflet through a letter-box. He’s gazing in the general direction of the house, and I notice he has his hand jammed firmly in his pocket where he must be holding my phone. That reminds me I have his camera in my pocket. I take it out and start snapping here and there as Samantha bustles through the rest of the upstairs rooms.

  Downstairs Amina and the man who claims to be her uncle don’t seem to have moved an inch from where we left them. Sam walks up to try her luck with Amina.

  “The house is bigger than it looks from the outside. Have you lived here long?”

  Uncle takes closer order as Amina starts her reply. “Nearly three years now. Since just before our baby was born.”

  “Right. So are you moving out of the area now? New job or something, like us?”

  The woman hesitates. Through the veil I can see her looking at her chaperone. He answers for her. “Unfortunately, there has been some sadness. Her husband recently died, and my niece is moving to be closer to her family.”

  Sam’s acting is sublime, or more likely she’s feeling real concern and sympathy for Amina, but still probing as she says, “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. Poor thing. Had he been ill a long time?”

  Uncle intervenes again. “It is best not to speak about this, it is too upsetting for us all. Do you have any more questions about the property?” He turns to me. “Do you wish to make an offer?” I shrug, redirecting him to Sam, who is still hanging in.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to upset anyone,” she says. “Can I just ask, Amina, is there a good playgroup nearby?”

  The woman answers quietly, with both Sam and her uncle bending their heads to listen, while I free the camera from my pocket and step back a few yards, intending to take a picture of the group under the pretext of photographing the room. As soon as the flash goes off the man turns, startled, in my direction, and bears down on me.

  “No photographs. Put your camera away.” He looks as though he’d rather seize it. “This is great rudeness.”

  “No, sorry, I wasn’t taking pictures of you, just to remind us what the rooms look like.”

  “I cannot allow.” He brings himself up to his full height as if to offer violence. I make a big display of stuffing the camera back in my pocket and presenting a baffled face to Samantha, who smiles blandly. Uncle moves back to his position next to the two women saying, “We must go. I have business to attend to.”

  “That’s OK, we’re done for now,” says Sam, which disappoints me since I’m sure we could have kept this going for a while longer and maybe got some more information from Amina. Sam does have one more trick up her sleeve when she says, “I have to say we’re really keen on the house. Could I just take a number from you, Amina, in case there’s something I’ve forgotten to ask?” A brave try, but there’s no getting round uncle.

  “Please direct all your enquiries to this lady here,” he says, pointing, not very politely, to Samantha, who nods at us eagerly. There’s seems not much more we can do, so, with promises to call Samantha before the weekend, we take our leave. Samantha sees us to the door, while the other two stay in the positions they were in when we arrived.

  “Pity about t
he uncle,” I’m muttering to Sam as we walk to the gate. “Kind of a missed opportunity there.”

  “We’ve got to catch up with Oliver quick,” says Sam, mysteriously. “In case he hits that phone.”

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “It matters. I gave mine to Amina. Didn’t get the chance to switch it off.”

  “What?”

  Without answering, she’s away on a sort of stuttering run down the road, interrupted every time she passes a garden hedge to check if Ollie’s behind it delivering another leaflet. We soon bump into him crossing the road to work his way up our side of the street, and Sam recovers my mobile before she says another word.

  “What’s going on?” from me.

  “Tell you when we get back to the car. Quick, I want away from here.”

  But even when we reach the car she can’t speak freely. There’s a young guy showing off his motor-bike to his mates right next to where the TT is parked. We climb into the car, and Sam’s cramped position in the back makes it virtually impossible to have any sort of serious conversation. “We’ll talk at the flat,” she says.

  Sam has transmitted an undefined sense of urgency to me. I over-rev out of the parking space, causing the trio of youths to look up from admiring the bike as we pass. I pick up acceleration on the side street and take the left into Springhill Gate with little consideration for the give way sign.

  “Hey, I don’t want to get there dead!” Sam yells from the back as I speed past traffic and open out on the clearway. She’s hardly finished her sentence when there’s a bang like a pistol shot. I duck instinctively, the car shudders and slews to the left. I grip the wheel hard, but there’s nothing in the steering. Some sort of debris thuds under the car. I slam down on the brake and cause a skid. Sam, thrown across the back seat, lets out a screech. My back end’s at forty-five degrees to the road, out of control. An oncoming car dives for cover at the verge. A horn blasts from behind. Desperate to stop, I wrench at the handbrake. The car whips further round and finally stops, pointing the way we came, and I’m staring through my windscreen through another windscreen at a face that must reflect mine in its look of shock.

  Fortunately the driver has managed to stop in time and there’s only pride injured as I step out of my door in front of a queue of traffic that’s already starting to build and will soon stretch all the way back to The Gate. I can see shreds of rubber strewn along the side of the road for several yards, so I’ve diagnosed the problem before I walk around the front of the car and find the evidence of a blowout on my front passenger wheel.

  Ollie and Sam clamber out of the TT and pretty soon, with the help of the relieved driver behind, we’ve shoved the car out of the way and the traffic can get moving again, though it’s slow enough past us while the people inside the vehicles enjoy a good view of our predicament.

  “We could’ve been killed there, eh, Marc?” Oliver burbles happily, his cheeks red with excitement and the effort of pushing.

  “I thought somebody was shooting at us,” says Sam. She wasn’t alone with that thought, but I say nothing about the image of Emmanuel and Stefan that sprang immediately to mind.

  In fact I discover that those two may well have been indirectly to blame for what happened. Once I’ve got over the difficulty of fitting the spare wheel I drop off Sam and Ollie at the flat, restraining my curiosity about Sam’s strange dealings with Amina while I hunt out a tyre services place to get the car sorted – I am a degree-level incompetent with anything mechanical so the odds of the spare wheel spinning off are short and I don’t fancy my chances of cheating death that way a second time. The guy who fixes me up with a new tyre takes a good look at the remnants of the old one.

  “Have you had a bump on this wheel?” he says. “I mean, before. Or a scrape?”

  “Mmm, not sure. Why?”

  “See here?” He rubs his finger at the edges of a hole in the rubber. “This has been distended, kind of blebby – looks like the blowout’s happened here, where the bleb has weakened the tyre. It’s the kind of thing that can happen if you mount a kerb too hard, or scrape against it maybe.”

  The memory of my race through the barriers on Drummond Road is still fresh. Banging the front wheel off the edge of the chicane as I looked for Stefan in the mirror. I nearly lost it then, and I’ve been fortunate to get away without injury again. I don’t believe in you, God, but thanks for everything. “Make sure you put those nuts on tight,” I tell the mechanic later while he’s fitting the new tyre. Whether it’s luck or divine intervention I don’t want to push it too far.

  I can see Sam watching from the window of the flat, anxiety personified, as I park the TT down below. Ollie, by contrast, is the picture of contentment indoors, his coat off, slurping a cup of tea Sam’s made him, clocking the details of the room so he can describe it to his mam later. He’d be taking pictures if it wasn’t for the fact that his camera is still in my pocket. My mobile phone is on the table.

  “What’s the story?” I ask Sam as soon as I get in. “Why did you give your phone to Amina? If it was Amina.”

  “So she can contact us.”

  “Well, I’m sure she’ll have a phone of her own. Besides, the interfering uncle says Samantha has to handle everything, so I don’t think she’ll be rushing to give us any more gen about the house.”

  “It’s not about the house. Listen, Amina’s not free to talk for some reason...”

  “That’s obvious.”

  “But she’s desperate to warn you about something.”

  “Warn me?”

  “Yes. As soon as that feller got distracted, trying to stop you using the camera, she came up close and whispered I have to warn Marc. There was no chance to say anything else, so all I could think to do was give her my phone. She hid it in her whadyacallit. Burqa. That’s why I wanted us to get away quick after that, just in case Oliver rang.”

  Ollie smiles at the mention of his name. “I kept the lookout, Marc. I kept the lookout, but there was nobody came.”

  “Thanks Ollie,” I say perfunctorily, my mind on Amina’s words. “She definitely said warn Marc?”

  “I have to warn Marc. That’s exactly what she said. Her eyes close up... They were intense. Frightened, really. I got the shivers.”

  “But how does she know my name is Marc? As far as she’s aware I’m Tom Etherington. And Emmanuel thinks I’m called Oliver. Presuming that’s who she’s warning me about.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she recognised you from your photo in the paper. She’s bound to have seen the piece, don’t you think, or somebody’s shown her, with it mentioning Hassan.”

  I rescue the Chronicle press cutting from where I’ve kept it folded under a corner of my laptop. I open it out on the table and stare at my infamous V sign picture, Sam studying it as well from behind my shoulder. “You look completely different there,” she says. “I’d be surprised if she made the connection just from that shot. Unless she knew it was you coming to the house today. That estate agent woman saw you before you got your hair done, didn’t she?”

  “Yeah, but she didn’t know me from Adam. I’m Tom Etherington as far as she’s concerned. That bloke today the same, the way he was asking if we were going to make an offer. It’s all he was interested in.”

  “That’s how it seemed,” says Sam, taking the press cutting from the table to examine it more closely. “Anyway, however she found out, Amina knows who you really are.”

  “Which probably means Emmanuel does as well. A wee bit disconcerting.”

  Sam replaces the cutting under the computer, stands tracing her finger aimlessly over the mouse in a state of quiet abstraction, then turns with a worried expression to say, “Do you think Amina could be in the same situation Edona was? A prisoner, basically?”

  “Dunno.”

  “It’s a possibility, isn’t it, if like you say that house is fitted up in a similar way to the other one, and this Emmanuel’s in the background somewhere?”

  “But she
’s a local woman, and married. Or was. With a baby. It hardly fits the profile of a sex slave, does it? Plus, don’t Muslims stone prostitutes and adulterers?” I’m suddenly highly conscious of Oliver sitting there on the sofa, listening to all this, and I feel like a parent who’s dropped his guard and talked dirty when his kids are in earshot. I slap him on the shoulder. “Hey, Ollie, I’d better take you home, your mam’ll be wondering where you are.”

  “Give me your car keys, I’ll do it,” says Sam, fetching Ollie’s coat. “I need you to stay here in case the phone rings.”

  “I’ll just take it with me.”

  “She might ring the landline. Your name’s under both numbers in my phone. I’ve got a feeling she’s not going to have many chances to call – don’t want you to miss it, cos I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to ring her back.”

  “Fair enough.” I hand Sam the keys to the Audi and thank Ollie again for his help as they’re going out of the door. It’s not until I’m watching them from the window that I remember I’ve still got his camera. I rattle at the window pane, but they’re already seated in the car, so I dash across to get the camera from my coat pocket and hare down the stairs to the street, only to see the car disappearing along the road. Without thinking, I run back up the stairs and bring up Sam’s number so I can ring her mobile and get her to come back for the camera. I’ve already pressed the dial button when I realise what I’ve done.

  “Oh, shit a brick!”

  I hit the red button to stop the call, sweat breaking out on me. I hold the phone to my ear, praying that I don’t hear a ring tone or, worse, the uncle’s voice. Or Emmanuel’s. Or Boris’s. Nothing. Does a mobile phone automatically ring as soon as someone’s pressed that green button? I don’t know. As an experiment I ring my own mobile from the house phone, but directly after I push to dial I hang up. I’m staring at my phone on the table, willing it not to ring. It doesn’t. Have I stopped the other call in time, or have I compromised Amina? I flop onto the sofa, worrying about this. Then I find something else to worry about. I’ve just let Sam go off in the Audi without considering that she might be spotted by the bad guys. What if they chase her, like they did me the other night? That’s infinitely worse than the Amina gaffe.