What Came Before He Shot Her

Chapter

26 Joel saw the dogs before Toby did: the enormous schnauzer, the smaller but more menacing Doberman. They were doing what they’d always done when he’d seen them in the past, lounging with their heads on their paws, awaiting instructions from their mistress. But where they were—on either side of the steps leading up into his aunt’s house—told him something was wrong. If Fabia Bender was inside the house, that meant Kendra was inside the house. At this time of day, she was supposed to be at the charity shop.

Toby murmured, “Lookit ’em dogs,” as he and Joel edged by them carefully.

“Don’t be touchin ’em or anyt’ing,” Joel warned his brother.

“’Kay,” Toby said.

Inside, they were safe, but only from the dogs. For in the kitchen, the boys’ aunt and the social worker sat at the table with three manila folders fanned out in front of them and an ashtray planted with cigarette stubs next to Kendra’s elbow. A zippered notebook spilling out paperwork lay on the floor next to Fabia Bender’s feet. Joel zeroed in on the manila folders. Three of them. Three Campbell children. The suggestion was transparent. He looked to his aunt. He looked from his aunt to Fabia Bender.

“Where’s Ness?” he asked.

“Dix is looking for her,” Kendra said. For a frantic phone call from Majidah had taken Kendra out into the streets to hunt for her niece, just as a phone call from Fabia Bender had brought her home, leaving Dix to continue the frenzied search. “Take Toby up to your room, Joel. Take a snack up with you. There’re some ginger biscuits, if you’d like them.”

If her language had not already done so, food in the bedroom did the trick. For food in the bedroom was a violation, so Joel knew from this that whatever had happened was bad. He didn’t want to leave, but he knew there was no point to staying. So he got the biscuits, climbed to their room, established Toby on the bed with his skateboard and the food, and returned himself to the stairs. He eased down them and sat, straining to hear the worst.

“. . . realistically look at your ability to cope . . .” was what he heard Fabia Bender saying.

“These are my niece and nephews,” Kendra responded dully. “They are not cats and dogs, Miss Bender.”

“Mrs. Osborne, I know you’ve been doing your best.”

“You don’t know. How can you? You don’t. What you see—”

“Please. Don’t do this to yourself, and don’t do it to me. This is no foiled mugging we’re talking about. This is assault with intent. They don’t have her yet, but they will soon enough. And when they have her in custody, she’ll go directly to a youth remand centre, and that’s the end of it. They don’t give community-service hours for what amounts to attempted murder, and they don’t let children go home to wait for the magistrate to deal with them. I don’t mean to be cruel by saying all this. You must know the reality of her situation.”

Kendra’s voice went low. “Where’ll they take her?”

“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 offi cial.

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 fi nished.

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 to 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, fi xing ’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 knitted 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.

Joel said, “Hey, mon. Hang on.” And when Cal did not, merely moving forward relentlessly, Joel caught him up and said tersely, “I ain’t doin anything on an underground train. No fuckin way, mon.”

Cal said, “You doin it where you get told, blood,” and he thrust a ticket into the turnstile’s slot, pushed Joel through, and then followed him.

Had he not deduced it before this moment, Joel would have understood then that he was with a Calvin Hancock whom he did not know. This was no longer the easy, doped-up bloke standing casual guard while the Blade did his business on Arissa. This was the blood that other bloods saw when they overstepped themselves in some way.

Clearly, Cal, too, had been sorted out by the Blade after the fi asco with the Asian woman in Portobello Road. “He does it right dis time, or I deal wiv you, Cal-vin,” was how the Blade would have likely put it.

Joel said, “Mon, why you stick wiv him?”

Cal said nothing. He merely led the way down the tunnels until they emerged onto a platform crowded with commuters and shoppers, with schoolchildren on their way home for the day.

Joel had no idea in which direction they were travelling when at last they boarded a train. He hadn’t paid attention to the signs posted at the entrance to the platform, and he hadn’t looked to read the destination that flickered on the front of the train as it roared into the station, disgorged passengers, and waited for other passengers to board.

They sat opposite a pregnant teenage mother with a baby in a pushchair and a toddler who kept trying to shimmy up one of the carriage’s poles. The girl looked no older than Ness, and her face was dully without expression. Joel said to Cal, “You ain’t like him, mon. You c’n go your own way if you want, innit.”

Cal said, “Shut up.”

Joel watched the toddler try to scoot up the pole. The train pulled out of the station with a jerk, the child fell and howled, and his mother ignored him. Joel persisted. He said, “Shit, bred. I don’t get you, Cal. Dis go off bad—wha’ever it is—and we both go down. You got to know dat, so why di’n’t you ever tell Mr. Stanley Hynds to do his own fuckin dirty work?”

Cal said, “You know what shut up means? You stupid or summick?”

“You been an artist f ’rever. You’re better’n dis. You c’n get serious if you want and even try—”

“Shut the bloody fuck up!”

The toddler looked over at them, wide-eyed. The young mother gazed at them, her face wearing an expression caught somewhere between boredom and despair. They made a tableau of living consequences: wrong decisions made stubbornly, again and again. Cal turned to Joel and said in a low, fierce voice, “You got warned, y’unnerstan? What you had you threw away.”

Something in Cal gave way then, despite the ferocity of his words.

Joel could see this: in the way a muscle moved in Cal’s cheek, as if he chewed on additional words to hold them back. In that moment Joel could have sworn that the graffiti artist wanted to be the Cal he really was, but he was afraid to go there.

Concluding this, Joel decided that in this situation he and Cal were compatriots, and this gave him a modicum of comfort as they hurtled towards an unknown destination while people boarded and debarked from the train when it came into stations and while Joel waited for Cal to rise and move towards the doors. Or to give him a sign that this or that person who boarded and rode with them was the person Joel was meant to mug. Not on the train—he could see that now— but following carefully at a distance when a station was reached and their unknowing target got out and began the short or the long walk home.

He tried to sort out who it would be: the turbanned bloke in patent leather shoes, his orange beard with its long grey roots making him difficult not to stare at; the two Goths with multiple piercings on their faces, who boarded at High Street Kensington, sat, and immediately began to suck hungrily upon each other’s tongue; the old lady in the dingy pink coat, easing her swollen feet from broken-down shoes. And there were others, many others, whom Joel studied and wondered, Him? Her? Here? Where?

At last Cal stood when the train began to slow yet another time. He grasped the rail running along just inches beneath the ceiling of the carriage, and he excused himself politely and worked his way along to the door. Joel followed.

On the platform, they could have been anywhere in London. For here on the walls were the same enormous advertisements for fi lms, the same announcements for gallery exhibitions, the same posters beckoning one to take a sunny holiday on a sunny beach. A set of stairs marked the route to the exit farther along the platform, and above it—indeed, spaced at intervals along the entire length of the platform—hung London’s ubiquitous CCTV cameras, documenting all action within the station.

Cal moved out of the way of the other commuters. He took something from his pocket. For a crazy sweat-inducing moment, Joel thought Cal meant him to do the deed right on the platform, in full view of the cameras. But instead, Cal pressed something soft into Joel’s hand, saying, “Put dis on. Keep your head down good.” It was a black knitted cap, similar to his own.

Joel saw the wisdom of this headgear. He pulled it down over his steel-wool mop of ginger hair. He was grateful for it and grateful that the time of year had him wearing a dark anorak that obscured his school uniform as well. Once the job was done and they were running off, it wouldn’t be likely that their mark would be able to identify them to the police.

They moved along the platform and when they got to the stairs, Joel could not resist a look upward, despite Cal’s injunction to keep his head low. He saw there were additional cameras on the ceiling here, catching the image of anyone climbing towards the street. Yet another camera was doing its business above the turnstiles going into and out of the station itself. There were, indeed, so many security cameras around that it came to Joel that he and Cal had journeyed to a place decidedly important. He thought of Buckingham Palace—although he didn’t know if there was a tube station anywhere near the royal residence—and he thought of the Houses of Parliament and he thought of wherever it was that they kept the crown jewels. That seemed the only explanation for the cameras.

He and Cal emerged from the station into everywhere bustle, before them a tree-lined square where at the distant end Joel could see the backside of a statue of a naked woman, pouring water from an urn into a fountain below her. The winter-bare trees were like a procession leading up to this fountain, and between them black iron streetlamps with perfectly clean glass shades stood next to benches of wood that were decorated with green wrought iron. Around the square, black taxis waited in ranks so gleaming that they reflected the late sun, while buses and cars navigated the many streets that poured into it.

Outside of programmes on the television, Joel had never seen anything like this place. This was a London he did not know, and if Cal Hancock decided to desert him anywhere in this vicinity, Joel realised that he would be done for. Thus, he took no time to gawk or even to wonder what two blokes such as they were doing in this part of town where they both stood out like raisins in rice pudding. Instead, he hurried to keep up with Cal.

The graffiti artist was striding off to the right along a pavement more crowded than any Joel had ever seen in North Kensington save on market days. Everywhere, shoppers hurried by with fancy carrier bags, some ducking into the underground station and others entering a largewindowed café where a burgundy awning bore a scroll of gold letters. “Oriel,” they spelled. “Grand Brasserie de la Place.” As Joel passed, he saw through the windows a trolley piled high with pastries. Whitecoated waiters carried silver trays. They moved among tables where men and women in fine clothing smoked, talked, and drank from tiny cups. Some of them were alone, but they spoke into their mobiles, with their heads bent low to protect their private conversations.

Joel was about to say, “Fuck! Wha’ we doin here, blood?” when Cal came to a corner and made a turn.

Here, suddenly, the atmosphere altered. A few shops operated near the square—Joel saw the gleam of cutlery in one window, modern furniture in another, elaborate arrangements of flowers in a third—but in less than twenty yards from the corner, a row of fine terrace houses sprang up. They were nothing like the dismal terraces Joel was used to. These were sparkling, from their roofs to their basement windows, and beyond them a block of flats stretched out, filled with windowboxes that were bright with pansies and green with great swags of thriving ivy.

Although this place, too, was altogether different from what Joel was used to, he breathed more easily, out of sight of so many people. While none of them had appeared to notice him, it remained true that he and Cal were an anomaly.

After a short distance, Cal crossed the road. More terrace houses followed a long block of flats, all of them painted white—pure white and absolutely unblemished—with black front doors. These buildings all had basements with windows visible from the pavement, and Joel glanced inside these as they passed. He saw spotless kitchens with work tops that were covered in stone. He saw the glint of chrome and open racks of colourful crockery. Outside, he also saw well-made security grilles, barring entrance to burglars.

Another corner loomed and Cal turned yet again. Here they entered a street that was as quiet as death itself. It came to Joel that this place was like a film set waiting for the actors to appear. Unlike North Kensington, here there were no boom boxes pounding out music, and no voices raised in argument. On a distant street, a car whooshed by, but that was it.

They passed a pub, the only commercial enterprise in the street, and even it was a picture like everything else. Forest etchings covered its windows. Amber lights glowed. Its heavy front door stood closed against the cold.

Beyond the pub, the rest of the street was lined with fine houses: another terrace but this one cream instead of white. Another set of perfect, gleaming black doors gave entrance to these places, though, and wrought-iron railings ran along the front, marking basements below and balconies above. These held urns, pots of plants, ivy spilling down towards the street, while overhead security alarms on the buildings warned off intruders.

At yet another corner, Cal turned again, leaving Joel wondering how they would ever find their way out of this maze when they’d done what they’d come to do. But this corner led to a passage that was just the width of a single car, a tunnel that dipped between two buildings, blindingly white and surgically clean like everything else in the area. Joel saw a sign that said “Grosvenor Cottages,” and he noticed that beyond the tunnel a row of little houses lined a narrow, cobbled street. But the street quickly trickled into a twisting path, and the path went absolutely nowhere but to a tiny garden in which only a fool would try to hide. At the end of that garden, a brick wall loomed some eight feet high. There was nowhere else. There was nothing else. There was one way in. There was one way out.

Joel panicked at the thought that Cal meant him to confront someone here. With only a single means of escape should things go badly, it came to him that he might as well turn the pistol on himself and shoot off his feet because it would be highly unlikely that he’d be going anywhere after he’d done what he was intended to do.

Cal, however, didn’t venture more than five feet into this tunnel. What he said to Joel was, “Now.”

Joel, confused, said in turn, “Now what, mon?”

“Now we wait.”

“Cal, I ain’t doin nuffink in dis alley here.”

Cal shot him a look. “The point, mon,” he said, “is you do wha’ I tell you when I tell you. Ain’t you got dat yet?”

That said, he leaned against the tunnel wall, just beyond a set of iron gates that hung open to admit cars and pedestrians into the vicinity of the cottages. Then, though, his face softened a bit and he said to Joel,

“Safe here, bred. No one’s on guard dis part of town. First person comes ’long . . . ?” He patted his pocket where the gun resided. That gesture—and the gun—completed his thought.

Despite Cal’s words of reassurance, Joel began to feel light-headed. Without wanting to, he thought of Toby patiently waiting to be fetched from school, confident that Joel would turn up in good time because Joel generally turned up in good time. He thought about Kendra, dusting off the shelves in the charity shop or straightening up the merchandise, believing that no matter what else happened to turn the world upside down, she was going to be able to depend on Joel now to be the man every household needed. He thought of Ness locked up and his mother locked up and his father dead and gone forever. But those thoughts resulted in his vision swimming, so he tried to stop thinking altogether, which made him think of Ivan, think of Neal Wyatt, think of the Blade.

Joel wondered what the Blade might do to him if he just walked off, saying to Cal, “No way, mon,” and made his way back to the underground station where he’d cadge enough money to get himself a ticket and get himself home. What would the Blade do? Kill him? That hardly seemed likely since even the Blade would surely draw the line at killing a twelve-year-old, wouldn’t he? The problem, though, was that defying the Blade now meant disrespecting him as well, and that made Joel fair game for some sort of discipline administered by the Blade himself, by Cal, or by anyone wishing to get into the good graces of Mr. Stanley Hynds. And that, Joel concluded grimly, was exactly what he didn’t need at the moment: a crew of wanna-be gangstas on the lookout for a chance to sort him or his family with guns, with knives, with coshes, or with fi sts.

Any way Joel turned the matter in his head, he was caught. His only hope was to run off permanently, never to return to North Kensington, never to be present for his brother, never to be around for his aunt. He could do that, he thought, or he could stay where he was and wait for Cal to give him the nod to perform.

Cal said suddenly, “Here, mon.”

Joel roused himself. He could see nothing near the tunnel, and no one had come out from one of the cottages along the little cobbled street. Nonetheless, Cal had taken the gun from his jacket pocket. He pressed it firmly into Joel’s hand and curved his fingers around it. It felt to Joel like one of Dix’s twenty-kilo weights. He desperately wanted to let it fall to the ground.

Joel said, “What—?” and then heard the brisk slam of a car door somewhere beyond them, out in the street. He heard a woman say,

“What on earth was I thinking, wearing these ghastly shoes? And for shopping of all things. Why didn’t you stop me, Deborah? At the very least, a decent friend would have saved me from my worst inclinations. Could you possibly park the car for me?”

Another woman laughed. “Shall I take it to the garage? You do look done in.”

“You’ve read my mind. Thank you. But first let’s unload . . .” Her voice grew fainter for a moment and then, “Heavens, do you have any idea how to open the boot? I pushed one of these gizmo things, but . . . Is it open, Deborah? Unlocked? Lord, I’m hopeless when it comes to Tommy’s car. Ah yes. It appears we have success.”

Joel risked a look. He saw two white women perhaps three houses along the street, lifting what looked like four dozen fancy carrier bags from the boot of a fine silver car. They carried them several at a time up the front steps of one of the houses and then returned for more. When they’d emptied the boot, one of the women—a redhead wearing an olive coat and a matching beret—opened the driver’s door. Before she climbed inside, she said, “I’ll take it to the garage, then. You go and take off your shoes.”

“Cup of tea?”

“Lovely. I’ll be right back.”

“Mind Tommy’s car, though. You know how he is.”

“Don’t I just.”

She started the engine—it was very nearly soundless—and she drove the car slowly past the tunnel where Joel and Cal were waiting. Unfamiliar with the vehicle, she was completely focused on the street before her, her hands high on the steering wheel in the manner of someone intent upon getting from point A to point B without damage. She didn’t look once in the direction of Joel and Cal. A short distance down the street, she turned left into a mews and disappeared from view.

Cal said, “Now, mon,” and he jerked Joel’s arm. He made for the pavement and for the other woman, who was still standing on the steps of the house. She was surrounded by her shopping, and she was rooting around in a leather shoulder bag for the keys to her front door. A curtain of her smooth jaw-length dark hair hid one half of her face, and as Joel and Cal approached her, she whisked this hair back behind her ear to reveal her earrings. They were gold hoops, delicately engraved. She wore a large diamond on her wedding finger.

She looked up, hearing something and perhaps that something was the approach of strangers, although she obviously didn’t know it was strangers and danger because she said, “I can not find my blasted keys. I am, as always, utterly hopeless of remedy. We’ll have to use Tommy’s if you—” She saw Joel and Cal, and she started. She followed this with a light, self-conscious laugh. She said, “Lord. I am sorry. You gave me a fright.” And then with a smile, “Hullo. May I help you? Are you lost?

Do you need—”

“Now,” Cal said.

Joel froze. He couldn’t. Do anything. Say anything. Move. Talk. Whisper. Shout. She was so pretty. She had dark warm eyes. She had a kind face. She had a tender smile. She had smooth skin and soft-looking lips. She looked from Cal to him to Cal to him, and she didn’t even see what he was holding. So she didn’t know what was about to happen. So he couldn’t. Not here, not now, and not ever, no matter what happened to him or his family as a consequence.

Cal muttered, “Fuck. Fuck,” and then, “Bloody fuckin do it, mon.”

That was when the woman saw the gun. She looked from it to Joel. She looked from Joel to Cal. She blanched as the gun exchanged hands when Cal grabbed it. She said, “Oh my God,” and she began to turn for the door.

That was when Cal fired.

Fired, Joel thought. Shot the gun. Not a word about handing over her bag. Not a word about money, her earrings, her diamond. Just the single sound of a single shot, which cannoned between the tall houses on either side of the street as the lady crumpled among her shopping, saying, “Oh,” and then fell silent.

Joel himself gave a strangled cry, but that was all because Cal grabbed him and they both took off running. They didn’t set off in the direction they’d come from because without speaking, discussing, or making a plan, they both knew that the red-headed woman had taken the car that way and would doubtless emerge from the mews on foot at any second and see them. So they ran towards the point where the street curved into another street, and they took this turn. But Cal said, “Shit!

Fuck! Shit!” because coming towards them at a distance was an old lady walking a doddering corgi.

Cal dashed into an opening on their left. It turned out to be a mews. He followed it as it made a dogleg to the right, where a line of houses stood. But this formed a cul-de-sac at the end. They were trapped, blind men caught in the maze.

Joel said in panic, “What’re we—?” but that was all he got out. For Cal shoved him back the way they’d just come.

Just before the dogleg in the mews, a high brick wall marked the boundary of the garden of a house in another street. Even at full speed and spurred by the terror of being seen or being caught, they couldn’t have hoped to leap over this. But a Range Rover—so common in this part of town—parked next to the wall blessedly gave Cal and Joel what they needed. Cal leaped onto the bonnet and from there he scrambled to the top of the wall. Joel followed as Cal dropped to the other side.

They found themselves in a pleasantly overgrown garden, and they made for the far side. They crashed through a low hedge and knocked over an empty copper birdbath. They came face-to-face with another brick wall.

This one wasn’t as tall as the first, and Cal was able to leap to the top of it easily. Joel had more trouble. He flung himself at it once, then twice. He said, “Cal! Cal!” and the artist reached down, grabbed him by his anorak, and hoisted him over.

A second garden that was much like the first. A house to the left with windows that were covered. A brick path leading to a wall across a patch of lawn. A table and chairs beneath a gazebo. A tricycle lying on its side.

Cal leaped for the far wall. He gripped the top. He lost it. He leaped another time. Joel grabbed his legs and shoved him upward. Cal reached back and pulled Joel along. Joel’s feet scrabbled against the wall and could gain no purchase. A ripping sound came from his anorak and he cried once in panic. He began to slide back. Cal grabbed him again, anywhere he could. Arm, shoulders, head. He knocked off Joel’s knitted cap and it fell, back into the garden from which they’d come.

Joel cried, “Cal!”

Cal heaved him over. “Don’t matter,” he grunted. They left the cap behind.

They said nothing more because they did not need to. All they needed was to escape. There was no time for Joel to question what had happened. He thought only, Gun went off, just went off, and he tried not to think of anything else. Not the woman’s face, not her single

“Oh,” not the sight and the sound and certainly not the knowledge. Her expression had gone from startled, to kind, to friendly, to terrifi ed, all in the space of less than fifteen seconds, all in the time it took her to see, to realise, and to try to escape.

And then there was the gun. The bullet from the gun. The smell and the sound. The flash from the pistol and the falling body. She’d hit her head on the wrought-iron rail that ran along the chessboard top step as she’d crumpled among her carrier bags. She was rich, very rich. She had to be rich. She had a posh car in a posh neighbourhood that was filled with posh houses and they’d shot her, shot her, shot a rich white lady—posh to her bones—next to her own front door.

Another garden loomed before them, this one like a miniature orchard. They charged across it, towards the opposite side where another garden was a torment of bushes, hedges, shrubs, and trees, all of it left to grow completely wild. Ahead of him, Joel saw Cal mounting the next wall. At the top he waved frantically for Joel to come more quickly. Joel was breathing heavily, and his chest was tight. He was soaked about the face. He wiped his arm across his forehead.

He said, “Can’t go—”

“Fuck dat shit. Come on, blood. We got to get out ’f here.”

So they fell to the ground and stumbled across garden number five, where they rested for a moment, panting. Joel listened for the sound of sirens, shouting, screams, or anything else from back the way they had come, but all was silent, which seemed a good sign.

“Cops?” he asked, gasping for breath.

“Oh, they coming.” Cal pushed off from the wall. He took a step back. He hurtled up it. One leg on one side and one on the other. Then he looked into the garden beyond and breathed a single word.

“Fuck.”

“What?” Joel asked.

Cal hoisted him up. Joel straddled the wall. He saw that they’d come to the end of the line. This was a final garden, but it had no wall that gave onto a street or a mews on the other side of it. Instead, the vast expanse of an external wall from a large old building—brick, like everything else they’d come to—served as this final garden’s far boundary. The only way in or out of the patch of lawn and shrubbery was through the house that it served.

Joel and Cal tumbled to the ground. They took a moment to assess their whereabouts. The windows on the house had security bars, but one set was pushed to the side, suggesting negligence or the fact that someone was at home. It didn’t matter. They had no choice. Cal went first and Joel followed him.

On a terrace outside the back door, a group of plants stood, thickly growing sculpted shrubs from lichenous clay pots. Cal grabbed one of these and advanced on the unbarred window. He heaved the pot through it, reached inside past the broken glass, and unfastened a bolt that was insignificant. He leaped through, and Joel followed. They found themselves in some sort of home office, and they landed on its desk, where they upended a computer terminal that was already covered by earth, broken glass, and most of the shrub, which had fallen from the pot.

Cal made for the door, and they were in a corridor. He headed towards the front of the house. It wasn’t a large building, and they could see the door that led to the street—a small oval window in it promising them blessed escape—but before they reached it, someone came clattering down the stairs to their left.

It was a young woman, the household au pair. She looked Spanish, Italian, Greek. She carried a toilet plunger as a weapon and she charged them, screaming like a heat-seeking missile, with the plunger raised.

Cal cried, “Fuck!” He ducked the blow and shoved her to one side. He made for the door. She dropped the plunger but regained her footing. She grabbed Joel as he tried to get past. She was shrieking unintelligible words, but she made her meaning perfectly clear. She attached herself to Joel like a leech. She reached for his face, her fingers like claws.

Joel struggled with her. He kicked at her legs, her ankles, her shins. He jerked his head to avoid the fingernails with which she intended to mark him. She went for his hair. She grabbed a handful: hair that was like a beacon and hair that no one would ever forget.

Joel’s eyes met hers. He thought—and it was a terror to him—Got to die, cunt. He waited for Cal to shoot her as he’d shot the darkhaired woman. But instead he heard the bang of the front door as it sprang open and hit the wall. The girl released her grip on him at the same moment. Joel dashed after Cal, out into the street.

He panted, “Cal. Gotta get her, mon. She saw . . . She c’n—”

“Can’t, blood,” Cal said. “Don’t have the gun. Le’s go.” He started walking rapidly up the street. He was not running now, not wanting to draw attention to themselves.

Joel caught him up. He said, “What? What? Where . . . ?”

Cal strode quickly. “Dropped it, mon. One ’f the gardens.”

“But they gonna know . . . You touched—”

“We cool. Don’t worry ’bout dat shit.” Cal held up his hands. He still had on the gloves he’d worn when he’d fetched Joel from the Holland Park School in what seemed to the boy like another lifetime.

“But the Blade’s gonna . . . And anyways, I . . .” Joel stared at Cal. His mind worked like a dervish because the last thing he was was a stupid child. “Oh shit,” he whispered. “Oh shit, oh shit.”

Cal’s gloved hand pushed him along the street. There was no pavement here, just cobbles and roadway. “Wha’?” Cal said. “We can’t go back. Jus’ walk and be cool. We gonna get out. Ten minutes and this place be crawlin with the bill, y’unnerstan me? Now le’s fuckin go.”

“But . . .”

Cal kept walking, head low, chin tucked into his chest, Joel stumbled after him, his head pounding with images. They were like still shots in the middle of a fi lm. They played back and forth in no particular order: the lady smiling as she said, “Are you lost?” Her little laugh before she understood. Cal’s arm lifted. The corgi’s waddle. The copper birdbath. A holly bush snagging his anorak.

He hardly knew where they were. He saw that they were on a street narrower than the others they’d been in, and had he understood architecture in this part of town, Joel would have recognised it as an old mews whose stables had long since been converted to houses, which were tucked behind the much grander residences whose horses and carriages they once had protected. To his left stood plain-fronted buildings of brick, owners of the back gardens through which they’d just crashed. They were three storeys tall and all identical: a single step up to a wooden front door with a simple stone pediment making a V above it. An inch of granite served as a front step. Garage doors were wooden, painted white. To his right, the picture was much the same, but there were also businesses planted along the way: a doctor’s surgery, a solicitor’s office, a car-repair shop. And then more houses.

Cal said tersely, “Keep your head down, blood,” but in unfortunate confusion, Joel did just the opposite. He saw that they were walking past the biggest house along the route, marked by black bollards with great swags of iron chains to keep cars away from the front of the building. But there was something more and he raised his face to it. A CCTV camera was mounted just above a window on the first floor.

He gasped and ducked his head. Cal caught him by the anorak once and pulled him forward. They fast-walked to the end of the street.

The first siren sounded then, wailing somewhere off in the distance just at the moment Joel saw that in front of them, two more streets branched off from the one they were in. The buildings here loomed like vedettes, unlike any others they’d passed. Outside of the tower blocks of North Kensington, they were the biggest structures Joel had ever seen, but they were nothing like the dour blocks of flats that he was used to. Umber brick created them—no dingy yellow London brick here—and leaded windows with pearl white moulding decorated them. Hundreds upon hundreds of fancifully shaped chimneys sprouted across their rooftops. Joel and Cal were antlike here, caught in a canyon of these structures.

Cal said, “Dis way, blood,” and, astoundingly to Joel, he began to walk in the direction of the sirens.

Joel cried, “Cal! No! We can’t! They been . . . They gonna . . . If they see . . .” and he remained rooted to the spot. Cal said over his shoulder, “Mon, come on. Or stay there and end up ’splainin to the bill wha’ you been doin in dis neighbourhood.”

Another siren howled its two-note warning, then, sounding from several streets away. It came to Joel that if they walked . . . if they looked like two blokes having business in the area . . . if they seemed like tourists—ludicrous though the idea was—or dopers with the BigIssue for sale . . . or foreign students . . . or anything . . . or what . . . ?

But there remained the fact of that au pair, her of the toilet plunger. She’d have gone for the telephone, Joel realised, and her shaking hands would already have punched in the nines, which was all it took to bring on the police. She would have shouted out her address. She would have explained and the cops would arrive. For this was a tony part of town where the cops came running when something went down.

So where were they? Joel asked himself. Where were they?

Wrought-iron balconies seemed to loom everywhere above him. No rusting bikes on them, no burnt-out furniture shoved out of doors and left to rot in the weather. No sagging line of grimy laundry. Just winter flowers. Just pot shrubs trimmed into the shape of animals. Just thick posh curtains hanging low on the windows. And those chimneys lining up just like soldiers, rank upon rank of them along the rooftops, etching their shapes against the grey sky: balloons and shields, pots and dragons. Whoever thought there could be so many chimneys?

Cal had paused at the corner of yet another street. He looked right and left, an act that assessed where they were and where they might go. Across from him was a building different from every other they’d seen so far: It was grey steel and concrete, interrupted by glass. It was more like what they were used to seeing in their own part of town, albeit newer, fresher, cleaner.

When Joel joined him, it was clear there was no safety here. People with carrier bags were emerging from shops, and the shops offered coats with fur collars, crisp bed linens, bottles of perfume, fancy bars of soap. A grocery displayed oranges resting individually in nests of green foil, and a flower seller nearby offered buckets of blooms in every imaginable colour.

It was posh. It was money. Joel wanted to run in the opposite direction. But Cal paused and looked at the display in the bakery window. He adjusted his knitted cap, pulling it low, and he turned up the collar of his donkey jacket.

Two more sirens sounded up ahead. A heavy white man came out of the bakery, cake box in his hands. He said, “What’s going on?”

Cal turned to Joel. “Le’s check it out, mon,” he said and he passed the white man with a polite, “’Scuse me,” as they headed onward. To Joel, this seemed a lunatic activity since Cal was walking directly towards the sirens now. He said fiercely as he strode by the young man’s side, “We can’t. We can’t! Cal, we got to—”

“Mon, we got no choice ’less you see one.” Cal jerked his head in the direction of the noise. “Dat way’s to the tube and we got to get out ’f here, y’unnerstan wha’ I say? Jus’ be cool. Look curious. Like ever’one else.”

Joel’s gaze automatically followed the way Cal had indicated with his head. He saw, then, that Cal was correct. For in the distance, he made out the shape of the naked lady pouring water into that fountain, only seeing her from a different angle this time. So he realised that they were coming up to the square where they’d emerged from the underground. They were five minutes or less from escaping the area.

He took a few deep breaths. He needed to look like someone curious about what was happening, but nothing more. He said to Cal,

“Right. Le’s go, then.”

“Jus’ be cool,” was Cal’s reply.

They walked at a normal pace. As they reached the corner, yet another siren sounded, and a panda car passed. They entered the square. It seemed to them as if hundreds of people milled around on the pavements that marked the perimeter. They’d come out of cafés. They hesitated in the doorways of banks, of bookshops, and of department stores. They stood as statuelike as the bronze woman in the middle of the fountain: Venus gazing tenderly down upon a life-sustaining substance that she eternally poured from her urn.

A fire engine roared into the square. Another panda car followed. Voices buzzed. Bomb? Terrorists? Riot? Armed robbery? Street demonstration getting out of control?

Joel heard all this as he and Cal wove through the crowd. No one spoke of murder or street crime, of a mugging gone bad. No one at all.

As they crossed over into the centre of the square and made diagonally for the station beyond, an ambulance shrieked up from the south, siren blasting and roof lights twirling. The ambulance was what finally gave Joel some hope, for an ambulance meant that Cal hadn’t actually killed the lady when the gun went off.

Joel only hoped that she hadn’t hurt her head too badly when she banged it on the wrought-iron railing as she fell.