The Calling l-1

by Neil Cross

  Y2K Cleaning is run out of an office between a newsagent and a dry cleaners on Green Lanes.

  Ripley badges the elderly receptionist. He and Delpy wait for ten minutes, sipping cups of water from the cooler and reading trade magazines — Cleaning and Hygiene Today, Cleansing Matters — until the owner appears: a short, bearded, fat man in a plaid tank top.

  He shakes Ripley’s hand, asks what the problem is.

  Ripley asks about Tom and Sarah Lambert’s current cleaner.

  The owner comes back in five minutes. ‘Her name’s Sheena Kwalingana. I can show you a file copy of her visa if you like.’

  Ripley declines. ‘How long has Sheena Kwalingana been working for the Lamberts?’

  ‘Three years, four months. No complaints.’

  Ripley thanks the owner and drives to Finsbury Park Road, where Sheena Kwalingana has a weekly appointment to clean a graphic designer’s basement flat.

  He parks on the corner of Queen’s Drive.

  The hookers are still out, pale girls with corned-beef legs offering blow jobs to men on their way to work.

  Ripley and Delpy walk to the door of number 93, ring the bell and wait. Inside, they can hear the sound of vacuuming.

  Delpy rings the mobile number the Y2K owner gave them.

  No answer.

  They wait until the vacuuming’s stopped, then ring the doorbell again. There’s a change in the quality of the silence; a sense that someone inside the flat has become aware of their presence.

  There’s more silence, then footsteps in the hallway, the shiny black door opening.

  Behind the door is Sheena Kwalingana, a short, elderly black woman with very high hair. She wears an old-fashioned nylon tabard with her firm’s logo embroidered on the breast. She’s wearing flip-flops; she’s laid her shoes outside the flat, neatly arranged next to the welcome mat.

  She’s brought the vacuum cleaner to the door with her. She stands in the doorway holding the hose.

  Ripley badges her. ‘Sheena Kwalingana?’

  ‘I don’t live here, son. I’m just working.’

  She’s got an accent, pleasantly sing-song. Ripley has to strain a little in order to understand it.

  ‘I know you don’t live here,’ he says, endlessly polite. He badges her again. ‘I’m DS Ripley, from the Serious Crime Unit at Hobb Lane. This is DC Delpy.’

  ‘I’m sorry, what?’

  ‘I wonder if we might step inside?’

  Sheena Kwalingana looks at Ripley with great anxiety, glances back over her shoulder. ‘It’s not my house,’ she says. ‘So no. No, you can’t come in. It’s not my house.’

  ‘Well, we could talk out here…’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘Mrs Kwalingana, you’re not in any trouble.’

  This only seems to increase her vigilance.

  Delpy sighs. Less polite than Ripley. ‘We’re investigating a burglary-’

  ‘I don’t burgle people.’

  ‘We’re not suggesting you do. You’re honestly not in any trouble here, Mrs Kwalingana. Really.’

  Sheena Kwalingana nods, but says nothing. Her hand is palpating the ridged tube of the vacuum hose; squeezing it, loosening it.

  Ripley says, ‘You clean for Tom and Sarah Lambert of 25, Bridgeman Road.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Ripley says nothing for a while, waits for Mrs Kwalingana to speak.

  Eventually, she says, ‘Why?’

  ‘As my colleague mentioned, we’re investigating a break-in at that address.’

  Kwalingana squeezes the hose.

  Ripley says, ‘Mrs Kwalingana, would you be more comfortable speaking to us at the police station? It’s more private there.’

  She stares at Ripley for a long time. ‘Can I have two minutes to finish off?’

  ‘Two minutes,’ says Ripley. ‘No problem.’

  Mrs Kwalingana makes a move to close the door. Very gently but very firmly, Delpy pushes out a hand to hold it open. ‘We’ll wait here.’

  Sheena Kwalingana turns her back, mutters to herself.

  Then she goes back inside to finish doing the bathroom.

  Henry’s son Patrick is twenty years old. He’s lean and delicate-looking, half wild in jeans and a drab, olive combat jacket.

  He’s caught eight rabbits in the park. They’re in his special backpack now, writhing and squealing. Leave them long enough, they’ll chew through their bags and start biting on each other like baby sharks in the womb.

  Patrick passes through the electric gates and into the huge, overgrown garden. The gates close behind him.

  In the quiet there’s the nice sound of drizzle on leaf-fall, fat water dropping from heavy trees, distant traffic. Under it all he can hear the low, miserable squall of a crying baby.

  He walks round the back of the house, to the most sheltered part of the garden. He opens heavy corrugated iron doors and steps into the twilight of the long, concrete-floored garage.

  He passes the treadmill on which they exercise the dogs, increasing their cardiovascular fitness and their endurance.

  He arrives at the wire kennels. The silent dogs wait; stocky, muscular terriers with broad heads, exaggerated occipital muscles and frog-wide mouths. Each has a heavy chain wrapped around its neck. The chains build neck and upper-body strength.

  The dogs greet him in excited silence. Henry has excised tissue from their vocal cords.

  The dogs worship Henry as a capricious God, but they know it’s Patrick who feeds them — and that in the morning he often brings live bait; sometimes puppies or kittens advertised as ‘free to a good home’. Sometimes rabbits or rats caught in the park.

  As he lifts the bag of rabbits, the dogs follow him with eager, idiot eyes.

  Patrick upends the bag into a wire cage and watches the carnage that follows. The rabbits are smarter than the dogs, possessed of glinting intelligence and a self-evident desire to live.

  He’s watching the dogs rip them to moist wet rags when the garage doors scrape across the concrete and Henry enters, looking baffled.

  ‘Emma won’t take her bottle,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  Patrick follows Henry into the house and upstairs.

  He washes his hands in the sink, using liquid soap that makes them smell of oranges.

  Then he goes through to the infant’s bedroom. Once again, he’s struck by her toad-like ugliness.

  Once, Patrick found a tangle of baby rats. This was in the days when he was a young boy and sleeping in the soundproof basement. The rats were crammed between a loose chunk of plasterboard and Henry’s bodged soundproofing; blind and mewling pups, a pink fist of them plaited and knotted by their reptilian tails, tugging each other through all points of the compass.

  Patrick had wailed in panic and hammered at the solid door with his little fists. He cried and cried, but of course nobody came. Henry didn’t come down until teatime. He had Patrick’s bowl of warm milk and a couple of slices of white bread.

  Seeing the rat king, even sleek, rapacious Henry stepped back in horror.

  Sometimes Patrick chuckles to remember how he and Henry had reacted, that far-off day. If Patrick were to find a rat king behind the baseboard these days, he’d consider himself fortunate. They’re a rare phenomenon.

  He’d scoop it up with a shovel — still blindly mewling — and deposit it into a demijohn of alcohol. He’d keep it on a shelf in his bedroom.

  Part of him feels hate for this angry helpless creature wriggling on a plastic mattress decorated with teddy bears. But he feels pity, too.

  ‘She’s coughing,’ Henry says.

  ‘Then take her to a doctor.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Have you tried feeding her?’

  ‘Of course I’ve tried feeding her,’ Henry says. ‘For fuck’s sake.’

  ‘Is the milk too hot?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Too cold?’

  ‘No. She’s just — she seems weak. And she’s sl
eeping a lot. Do you think she’s sleeping too much?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘She should wake long enough to eat, shouldn’t she? Babies get hungry.’

  ‘Is she hot?’

  Henry reaches into the cot, arranges Emma’s limbs so that he’s able to take the temperature under her armpit. Patrick is revolted by how lifeless and doll-like she seems.

  ‘Ninety-four,’ says Henry. ‘It’s low. Fuck.’

  ‘She seems really shaky.’

  Henry has noticed Emma’s quivery chin and shaky hands. But now her entire body seems to be shivering.

  ‘A bottle isn’t the same,’ Henry says. ‘We need a wet nurse.’

  There is a silence.

  ‘Could you do it?’ Patrick says.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Please, Dad. Yeah.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Because I’d be embarrassed.’

  Henry’s not a big man but he’s well-groomed and vicious as a mink. ‘And how do you think it would look if I did it, eh? You chinless little spastic. How would that fucking look?’

  ‘Please,’ says Patrick.

  Henry shushes him through his teeth, then shoves him onto the upstairs landing.

  He gently shuts the bedroom door.

  Then he grabs Patrick’s hair and rams Patrick’s head into the wall.

  Patrick staggers around. He’s confused. Henry cuffs him round the face a few times, then tosses him to the floor.

  ‘Just take some of the money,’ he says, ‘and fucking do it.’

  CHAPTER 8

  Zoe and Mark met just over a year ago. He works for Liberte Sans Frontiere; he was her designated liaison on the Munzir Hattem case.

  Mark’s handsome; slightly bohemian in tweed and cords; laid-back and sincere; a little earnest sometimes.

  The fourth time they met, he offered to buy her lunch. They sat somewhere outside, watching people go past.

  She talked about John.

  She always talks about John.

  In the end, Mark gave up and joined in. ‘So how did you two get together?’

  ‘How does anyone get together?’

  ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘My ex-wife and I were childhood sweethearts.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘That’s so sweet.’

  ‘We went to primary school together,’ Mark said, ‘Stockwood Vale Primary. Emily Edwards. She had a ponytail. She could climb trees. All of it. The full package.’

  ‘So she was your first and only?’

  ‘Oh, God no. No, no, no. We went out for about, I don’t know, three years? Four years? Split up when sixth form came along. She got a bit political. Ban the Bomb, Socialist Workers. Greenham Common.’

  He laughed to remember it.

  A flicker of shared sadness passed between them. Zoe wanted to reach out and touch the back of his hand, to give comfort and to take it.

  Instead, she flicked back her hair, stirred her latte. ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Oh, we met again. This is years later. By coincidence really, some New Year’s Eve bash in Brighton. And when we saw each other it was just like old times. She’d gone through her phase and out the other side. And I’d gone through mine.’

  ‘And what phase is this?’

  He shrugged, sheepish. ‘Echo and the Bunnymen, basically.’

  ‘Echo and the what now?’

  ‘Bunnymen. You don’t know the Bunnymen?’

  ‘To my knowledge, I’ve never even set eyes on a Bunny Man.’

  ‘You ever hear of Eric’s?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It was a club,’ he said. ‘In Liverpool, this was. Elvis Costello, I saw him there. The Clash. Joy Division. The Banshees. The Buzzcocks. You never heard of the Buzzcocks?’

  She shook her head.

  He sang her a few bars of ‘Ever Fallen in Love With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve’.

  Realizing, he trailed off. There was an awkward moment.

  ‘It’s a good song,’ he said.

  Zoe got the bill and they stepped into the autumn, bundled up in their coats.

  Mark said, ‘I don’t feel like going back yet.’

  She said, ‘Nor me.’

  So they walked to the park, found a bench and sat down. She perched on the edge, spine straight. Mark sprawled, took tobacco from a flat tin in his pocket and began to roll a cigarette. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Not at all. Blow the smoke my way.’

  ‘You a smoker?’

  ‘Occasional.’

  ‘I can roll you one, if you like.’

  They sat in silence while he rolled her a cigarette, then passed it to her. She placed it in her mouth. The faint burn of unlit tobacco.

  He produced a lighter and she leaned into him, smelling him, then sat back, puffing on her first roll-up since she was a student. She liked the taste and the smell of it, wondered how it went with these clothes, these shoes, this hair.

  ‘So how long did it last?’ she said, picking a thread of tobacco from the tip of her tongue, aware that he was watching her do it.

  ‘What, me and Emily? Eleven years, all in.’

  ‘Kids?’

  ‘There’s Stephen. He’s sixteen. Chloe’s nine. They live with their mum. You?’

  ‘Me and John? God, no.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘What does what mean?’

  ‘That tone.’

  ‘I don’t know. Did I use a tone?’

  ‘You definitely did. There was definitely a tone in use.’

  She snorted, then covered her nose with the back of her hand, embarrassed. Mark was grinning at her.

  She said, ‘The thought of it. Me and John with kids.’

  ‘What’s so mad about that?’

  ‘We agreed not to. Back when we were kids ourselves.’

  ‘Really? How long have you known him?’

  ‘Since the Big Bang.’

  It was supposed to sound funny, but it came out sad. She watched the pigeons for a while. Then she said, ‘We met at university.’

  ‘Same course?’

  ‘No. I was doing law, obviously. He was postgrad in English.’

  She tucked her chin into the warmth of her coat and smiled to think of it, just as she sometimes did when flicking through old photographs.

  ‘We only met because we were both doing this elective course in comparative religion. I sat next to him in this tiny little lecture theatre. Everybody there already knew each other except me and John. I knew him by reputation.’

  ‘And what reputation was that?’

  ‘He’s very tall,’ she said, self-conscious as a schoolgirl. ‘Very strong. Very handsome. And very, very intense.’

  She laughed out loud, delighted and liberated to be talking about it. ‘And it was like, all the girls fancied him and he didn’t even notice them, y’know? And the more he didn’t notice them, the more they fancied him. He used to make girls do the stupidest things around him, really clever, brilliant young women who should have known better, behaving like idiots to get his attention. And he never noticed.’

  ‘Everybody notices.’

  ‘Swear to God. It wasn’t even arrogance. It was a kind of… myopia.’

  ‘And you liked that?’

  ‘I thought it was endearing.’

  ‘Not, like, a challenge?’

  ‘God, no.’

  This time, they both laughed.

  Mark said, ‘So how did you… y’know. Get together?’

  She smoked the roll-up to its last quarter-inch, then squeezed it between her fingernails.

  ‘There wasn’t like a moment,’ she said. ‘We met in that lecture and kind of drifted out for a coffee afterwards. Neither of us asked the other. Or that’s how I remember it. We just sat in the cafe and chatted. I told him everything there was to tell about myself — which at the time wasn’t all that much.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Twenty? So girls’ school, sixth
form, gap year, university. It felt like a lot of life experience at the time. So I tell him this, all about myself. Then I ask him about himself and he tells me about books. As if he’s made up of all these books he’s read, or was going to read. And later on, he walks me home. I didn’t question it for a minute. And I’ll tell you one thing about John: if you’re a twenty-year-old girl and you’re not that knowledgeable in the ways of the world and you live in a dodgy area, walking home with him, you never felt so safe. And he stops outside my door and says, This is you, then? And I say, This is me. And I’m thinking, Kiss me you arsehole, kiss me or I’m going to die on the spot.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘No. He just slouches and gives me this nod — he’s got this shaggy-dog nod he does sometimes. Then he digs his hands in his pockets and walks off.’

  ‘Well played, that man.’

  ‘Except it wasn’t,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t a tactic. I swear! It was just him. That’s who he was. Is. Whatever.’

  And then a melancholy descended on her — as it always did when she thought of that boy and that girl. The thought of John Luther, twenty-two, slouching off without kissing her. And the lightness in her heart that night; how she couldn’t sleep and couldn’t believe herself: serious, level-headed, hard-working Zoe, who’d slept with two men in her entire life, one long-term school boyfriend, as a kind of parting gift, and one slightly older man she met on her gap year.

  It wasn’t in her nature to lie in bed wondering what a boy might be doing right now, right this second. But she spent the whole night like that.

  And she spent the next few days pretending she wasn’t trying to manufacture ways to bump into him in the corridor, the English department, the refectory.

  Sprawled on that park bench, looking at the pigeons, Mark said, ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Zoe. ‘Sorry. Miles away.’

  He stretched his arms. ‘Best be getting back.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to work,’ she groaned, stretching her neck. ‘I want to take the day off. I’m tired.’

  ‘We could play hooky,’ said Mark. ‘Go to the pictures or something. I haven’t been to the pictures for ages. Especially not in the afternoon.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘We should totally do it,’ he said. ‘Say we’re in a meeting. Go to the pictures. Grab a Chinese afterwards.’