What Came Before He Shot Her

Chapter

27 The worst was Toby, which was certainly some thing that Joel did not expect. But when he finally arrived at Middle Row School to take Toby home for the day, it was to find him huddled in the February darkness just outside the locked gates, having somehow escaped the notice of the school’s administrators and teachers, carefully hidden in the deeper shadows cast by a pillar box. He was staring at a jagged crack in the pavement, his skateboard clutched to his chest.

Joel crouched by his brother and said, “Hey, mon. Sorry, Tobe. I di’n’t forget you or nuffink. Did you think I forgot? Tobe? Hey, Tobe?”

Toby roused himself. “Meant to go to the learnin centre today,” he mumbled.

Joel said, “Tobe, I’m sorry. I had to do summick . . . Look it’s important you don’t grass me up on this. It won’t happen again. I swear. You c’n promise me, Tobe?”

Toby gazed at him blankly. “I waited like I was s’posed to, Joel. I di’n’t know what else to do.”

“You did good, mon. Waitin here like dis. Come on now. Le’s go. When I take you to the learnin centre next, I’ll talk to them. I’ll ’splain wha’ happened. They won’t be vex at you or nuffink.”

Joel urged his little brother to his feet, and they set off towards their home. Joel said to him, “Tobe, you can’t tell Aunt Ken ’bout dis. Y’unnerstan wha’ I say? She find out I di’n’t take you to the learnin centre . . . She got ’nough vexin her already, innit. Wiv Ness. Wiv Dix gone. And dat Fabia Bender woman jus’ waitin for a reason to take you and me away...”

“Joel, I don’t want—”

“Hey. Dat ain’t goin to happen, bred. Which is why you got to keep quiet ’bout me bein late. C’n you pretend?”

“Pretend what?”

“You went to the learnin centre. C’n you pretend you went today like always?”

“’Kay,” Toby said.

Joel looked at his brother. Toby’s brief lifetime rose up to declare how unlikely it was that he would be able to pretend anything, but Joel had to believe it would be possible to carry off a deception about the afternoon, for it was crucial to him that life should look to his aunt the way it always looked to his aunt. The slightest deviation and Kendra would be suspicious, and suspicion felt to Joel like the last thing that he could endure.

But in all his planning, Joel failed to take into account the concern of Luce Chinaka. He failed to realise that she might have been told by Fabia Bender to keep a closer watch on Toby, that she might take matters into her own hands when Toby did not turn up as scheduled, phoning Kendra at the charity shop and asking if Toby was ill and unable to keep his regular appointment. So when Kendra arrived home for the day, she first deposited a bag of Chinese takeaway in the kitchen and she then demanded to know why Joel had failed in his duty to see to Toby.

Here, however, a modicum of luck was on Joel’s side. He’d taken an unsettled stomach and a growing weakness in his arms and his legs up to his bedroom, and he’d deposited them upon his bed. There he curled in the darkness, and he stared at the wall on which he found— no matter what he did to try to get it out of his mind—the image of the dark-haired lady’s face floated, smiling at him, saying hello, and asking if he and Cal were lost. Thus, when Kendra flipped on the light and said, “Joel! Why didn’t you take your brother to the learning centre?” Joel spoke the truth. “Bein sick,” he said.

This altered things. Kendra sat on the edge of the bed and, motherlike, felt his forehead. She said in an altogether altered tone, “You coming down with something, baby? You’re a bit hot. You should’ve phoned me at the shop.”

“I thought Tobe could miss—”

“I don’t mean for Toby. I mean for you. If you’re sick and you need me . . .” She smoothed his hair. “We’re going through bad times round here, aren’t we, luv? But I want you to know something: You don’t have to take care of yourself alone.”

For Joel this was actually the worst thing she could have said, for the kindness in her words caused tears to well in his eyes. He closed them, but the tears leaked out.

Kendra said, “I’m going to make you something to settle your stomach. Why don’t you come down to the lounge and wait on the settee?

Have a lie down and I’ll fi x you up a tray. You can watch the telly while you eat. How ’bout that?”

Joel kept his eyes closed because he felt stung by her tone. It was a voice she’d never used before. Tears dripped across the bridge of his nose and onto his pillow. He did what he could not to sob, which meant he said nothing in reply.

Kendra said, “You come when you’re ready. Toby’s got a video on the telly, but I’ll tell him to let you watch what you want.”

It was the thought of Toby—and the thought of what Toby might say if Kendra questioned him—that got Joel up once his aunt left the bedroom. This, it turned out, was all to the good, for when he arrived in the sitting room, it was to find Toby blithely lying to their aunt about a supposed afternoon in the learning centre, just as Joel had instructed him to do but without the knowledge of Luce Chinaka’s phone call.

“. . . readin today,” Toby was saying. “Only I don’t ’member the book.”

Joel said, “Wa’n’t today, mon. What’re you on about, Tobe?” He joined Toby on the settee, his pillow in his hands and a blanket from his bed dragging along on the floor. “Today we came straight here from school cos I was sick. Remember?”

Toby looked at him, his expression puzzled. “But I thought—”

“Yeah. But you tol’ me all ’bout dat yesterday.”

“‘That’,” Kendra corrected him patiently. And then, miraculously, she dismissed the topic, saying, “Toby, move over and let Joel have a lie down. Let him watch the telly. You can help me in the kitchen if you’ve a mind to.”

Toby scooted over on the sofa, but his expression remained confused. He said to Joel, “But, Joel, you tol’ me—”

“You’re getting all your days mixed up,” Joel cut in. “I tol’ you we wouldn’t be going to the centre when I fetched you from school jus’ dis af ’ernoon. How c’n you not remember, Tobe? Ain’t they been workin on your memory an’ stuff?”

“‘Haven’t they been working,’” came the automatic correction from Kendra. “Joel, don’t be so hard on him.” She went to the television and removed the video from the old recorder beneath it. She turned to a channel arbitrarily and once the picture flickered on, she gave a nod and descended to the kitchen. In a moment she was banging about down there, fixing the promised meal for Joel.

Toby’s gaze hadn’t moved from Joel’s face, and what it showed was utter confusion. He said, “You said I was meant to say—”

“I’m sorry, Tobe,” Joel murmured. He moved his own gaze to the stairway’s door and kept it there. “She found out, see. They phoned her up and asked where you were, so I had to tell her . . . Look, jus’ say we came straight here and we been here ever since. If she asks or summick, okay?”

“But you tol’ me—”

“Tobe!” Joel’s whisper was fierce. “Things change, y’unnerstan wha’ I say? Things change all the time. Like Ness not being here and Dix bein gone. Y’unnerstan? Things change.”

But things didn’t easily change for Toby, not without some attempt at removing the fog from his brain. He said again, “But—”

Joel grabbed his wrist tightly and turned to him. “Don’t be so fuckin stupid,” he hissed. “Jus’ this once act like you got a brain.”

Toby recoiled. Joel dropped his wrist. Toby’s chin dimpled, and his eyelids lowered. The skin of them showed the delicate tracing of blue veins across a freckled, almond surface. Joel felt a tug at his heart at the sight, but he hardened it and he hardened himself because as far as he was concerned, Toby had to learn and he had to learn now. It was imperative that he memorise a story and get that story straight.

“Joel,” Kendra called from the kitchen, “I’ve brought Chinese, but I’m making you boiled eggs and toast. D’you want jam?”

Joel didn’t see how he’d be able to eat anything at all, but he called back weakly that jam was good, jam was fine, and whatever kind they had would be excellent. Then for the first time he looked at the television and saw what Kendra had switched on for him to watch. It looked like some channel’s nightly news because a female reporter stood in front of the entrance to a hospital, speaking into a microphone. Joel paid attention.

“. . . footage from the vicinity of Sloane Square is being examined by Belgravia detectives who have pulled out all the stops to apprehend the shooter. There was, apparently, at least one witness—and possibly What Came Befor

519

e He Shot Her

two—to the incident, which took place in broad daylight in Eaton Terrace. We’ve learned that the victim had just returned from a shopping trip, but that’s actually the extent of what we know about the incident itself. As far as we’ve been able to find out, the victim—thirty-fouryear-old Helen Lynley, Countess of Asherton—is under twenty-fourhour guard here at St. Thomas’ Hospital. But what, exactly, her condition is, we do not know.”

A man’s voice said, “Andrea, is anyone drawing a connection between this shooting and the serial killings currently under investigation?”

The reporter adjusted her earpiece and said, “Well, it’s a bit difficult to avoid making the connection, isn’t it? Or at least assuming there might be one. When the wife of the head of an investigation that’s the size and scope of this one is shot . . . Inevitably, there are going to be questions.”

Behind her, the hospital doors swung open. Camera lights began to fl ash. A man in doctor’s garb walked over to a bouquet of microphones while a number of other people in his company—a grim-faced group of individuals with plainclothes detectives written all over them—pushed through the reporters on their way to the car park.

“. . . life support,” were the two words that came to Joel from the man in hospital garb. “The situation is very grave.”

There was more—questions fired from all directions and answers given hesitantly and with a desire to protect the privacy of the victim and her family—but Joel could hear nothing of it. All he could hear was the windstorm in his ears as the picture on the television finally changed to show a montage of images with which he was only too familiar: the street in which he and Cal had found their mark; the crime scene tape defining a rectangle around the front of the chessboard front steps; a photograph of the lady herself with a name beneath it identifying her as Helen Lynley. What followed this were other shots of St. Thomas’ Hospital, on the south bank of the Thames, with a dozen panda cars flashing their lights outside; of a blond man and a dumpylooking woman speaking into a mobile as they stood outside a grimy railway tunnel; of a bloke in the uniform of a high-ranking cop talking into a bank of microphones. And then a series of CCTV cameras pointing this way and that, on this building and under those eaves, and each of them—Joel knew this and could swear to it—in the act of filming two blokes on their way to shoot the wife of a cop from New Scotland Yard.

Joel’s aunt was ascending the stairs. She brought with her a tray on which were boiled eggs and toast that gave off an aromatic smell that should have been comforting, but not for Joel. He flung himself from the settee and charged towards the stairs and the bathroom. He didn’t make it.

CAL DISAPPEARED. JOEL sought him out the very next day and the day after that in all the regular places where he ought to have been: the sunken football pitch, where an incomplete piece of art in Cal’s style suggested he’d decamped in a hurry; Meanwhile Gardens near the spiral steps and beneath the bridge and atop the knolls, where he smoked and occasionally dealt dope to the adolescents in the neighbourhood; the abandoned flat in Lancefield Court, where the drug runners went to pick up their wares; the building that housed Arissa’s flat in Portnall Road. Joel even paced through Kensal Green Cemetery in an attempt to find him, but Cal was nowhere. He might as well have evaporated, so decidedly was the Rasta gone.

To Joel, this made no sense. For who was to guard the Blade if not Cal Hancock?

Except, when Joel looked for the Blade, he couldn’t find him either. At least, not at first.

On the third afternoon, Joel finally saw him. He was on his way down the steps of the Westminster Learning Centre, having dropped Toby there for his appointment with Luce Chinaka. Across the street and some thirty yards away, he saw the Blade’s car, recognizing it from a stripe of black painted onto its light blue surface, from the piece of cardboard taped in place of one of the back windows. The car was parked illegally on double yellow lines at the kerb, and it was occupied, with someone bending from the pavement to speak to the two male figures inside.

The speaker straightened as Joel watched. It was Ivan Weatherall, and he placed his hand on the roof of the car, gave it a friendly tap, and then spied Joel. He smiled and waved him over, then bent back to the car once again to listen to something someone was saying from inside.

Had Ivan been alone, Joel would have made an excuse, for the last person he wanted to face was his mentor and his mentor’s good intentions. But the fact of the Blade’s being there and the fact of his needing to talk to the Blade about everything from Eaton Terrace to Ness . . . and the blessed fact that Cal was with him, which was going to make it safer to talk to the Blade in the first place . . . These considerations propelled Joel across the street.

He came at the car from the rear. Through the back windows he could see yet another person within, and he recognised the shape of her head. He fervently wished Arissa wasn’t with the Blade and Cal— they could hardly talk frankly with a snow freak around, he thought, trying to put her hand down everyone’s trousers—but Joel knew he could remain with the three of them until the Blade got tired of Arissa’s presence and threw her out of the car somewhere to find her way home. Then they could speak: about what had happened in Eaton Terrace and what they were going to do next. And about Ness as well because there was still and always Ness and her trouble and the fact that what Joel had done he had done as a first step in getting her out of trouble.

None of this took care of the problem of Ivan’s presence on the scene, however. Ivan would certainly wonder what Joel was doing, climbing into a car that belonged to the Blade, and he would defi nitely not forget it.

Ivan said, “Joel, how excellent to see you. I was just bringing Stanley into the picture about the project.”

So much had crowded into Joel’s mind over the weeks that he didn’t know at first what Ivan was talking about until he added, “The fi lm. I’ve had an extraordinary meeting with a man called Mr. Rubbish— which, of course, isn’t his real name but rather the name he goes by professionally, but I’ll explain all that to you later—and at last the fi nal piece of preproduction work is in place. We’ve the funding now. We’ve actually got the bloody funding.” Ivan grinned and made an uncharacteristic gesture of jubilation, thrusting one arm into the air. This allowed Joel to see that he was holding a tabloid, and that meant one thing only: coverage of the shooting in Belgravia, which meant bringing discussion of it into North Kensington, which was the last place on earth that Joel and Cal needed such a discussion.

Joel looked towards the car and Cal. Dimly, he heard Ivan say, “I knew we would get it if we made the right connection with someone whose background . . . ,” but the rest went the way of the wind. For in the car were indeed the Blade and indeed Arissa, but not Cal Hancock. Instead, riding in the front passenger seat, where Cal always sat, was Neal Wyatt, and he appeared to Joel to be someone who was perfectly comfortable there.

Joel looked from Neal to the Blade. Vaguely behind him, he heard Ivan saying, “You’re acquainted with Neal. I was just telling him what we’re up to. I’d like both you boys to be involved in the project because—and you simply must listen to me—it’s time you set aside your dislike of each other. You have far more in common than you realise, and working on the film will show you that.”

Joel barely heard any of this. For he was sorting through matters in his mind, and he was trying to work out what everything in front of him actually meant.

He arrived at the conclusion that the Blade—informed by Cal that Joel was decidedly his man now—was finally keeping his end of the Neal Wyatt bargain. He’d fetched the boy from wherever Neal hung about when he wasn’t vexing people in the area, and he’d told Neal he was meant to come with him. Neal wouldn’t say no—no one would— so he’d climbed into the car. The Blade had shared a spliff with him, which was why Neal seemed so much at ease, his guard lowered, his humour good. Now that the Blade had Neal where he wanted him, he was going to sort the lout once and for all. Joel made an attempt to feel good about all this, trying to apply it to his own situation. Sorting out Neal as promised, he decided, had to mean also protecting Joel from the aftermath of shooting the policeman’s wife.

What Joel didn’t go near was the why of that shooting. He didn’t touch upon why a mugging had become transformed into a bullet entering a woman’s body. Whenever he got close to that thought, he forced it away with the word accident. In his mind, it had to have been a terrible mistake, the gun exploding the world into violence by inadvertently discharging when Cal grabbed it from Joel, when Joel—seeing the white woman’s kind face—couldn’t bring himself to demand her money.

“. . . go over it with you,” Ivan was saying, sounding as if he’d reached the conclusion of his remarks. He bent back to the car, “And, Stanley, think about what I’ve offered you as well, won’t you, my man?”

The Blade gave Ivan a smile, his eyelids lowered. “Eye-van,” he murmured, “you are one lucky bugger, y’unnerstan wha’ I say? You been able to keep me ’mused for so long, I don’t ’spect I ever feel like killing you.”

“Why, Stanley,” Ivan said, stepping away from the car as the Blade started it up and revved its engine, “I’m deeply touched. Have you read the Descartes yet, by the way?”

The Blade chuckled. “Eye-van, Eye-van. Why don’t you get it?

More’n thinking’s involved in order to get to being, mon.”

“Ah, but that’s precisely where you’ve gone wrong.”

“Is it.” The Blade put his hand on the back of Neal Wyatt’s neck and gave it a friendly tug. “Later, Eye-van. Me and the mon here got some serious business to conduct.”

Neal sniggered. He wiped his upper lip with the back of his hand, as if this would smear the snigger away. He glanced at Joel. He mouthed the word fucker.

The Blade said, “Nice to see you, Jo-ell. And tell that cunt sister of yours the Blade says hello. Wherever she is.”

He stepped on the accelerator and the car slashed into the traffic heading towards Maida Vale. Joel watched it go. An arm—Neal’s arm— came out of the passenger’s window, and Neal’s fist appeared. It altered into a two-fingered salute. No one inside the car tried to prevent him from making it.

IVAN INSISTED THAT they go for a coffee. They had matters to discuss, now that Mr. Rubbish had stepped forward to put up the funding for the film that Ivan and his following of hopeful screenwriters had been working upon. Ivan said to Joel, “Come with me. I’ve a proposal for you,” and when Joel demurred, muttering vaguely about his aunt, his brother, homework to be done, Ivan promised they wouldn’t be long.

Joel saw that Ivan wasn’t going to accept a refusal. He would compromise again and again until he had what he wanted, which was to be of assistance. This was something that he could never be, not now at least, but as he didn’t know that, he was likely to keep cajoling Joel into having a cup of coffee or a walk or a seat on a bench, unwilling to let up. So Joel agreed to accompany him. Whatever Ivan wanted to say, it wouldn’t take long, and Joel didn’t intend to respond, which would only prolong an unwanted conversation.

Ivan led the way to a café not far along the Harrow Road, a grimy place of sticky-topped tables with a menu that bowed its head to an England that hadn’t existed in a good thirty years: beans or mushrooms on toast, fried eggs with rashers of bacon, fried bread, baked beans and eggs, sausage rolls, mixed grills. The scent of grease in the place was overpowering, but Ivan—happily oblivious to this—gestured Joel to a table in the corner and asked him what he wanted, heading to the counter to place the order. Joel chose orange juice. It would come from a tin and taste like something that had come from a tin, but he didn’t intend to drink it.

Mercifully, there was no one else in the place besides Drunk Bob, who was nodding off in his wheelchair at a table in the corner. Ivan placed their order and unfolded the paper he’d been carrying to have a look at its front page. Joel could see part of the headline of the EveningStandard. He was able to read “CCTV” and the word “Crimewatch” beneath it. From this, he concluded that the police had come up with the video footage they’d been looking for from the CCTV cameras around the square as well as from the cameras in the neighbourhood near the shooting. They intended to show that footage on Crime-watch.

There could be little to surprise in this. Any film that dealt with the shooting of a white woman standing on her front porch in a posh London neighbourhood was likely to find its way onto the television. The shooting of a white woman married to a New Scotland Yard detective working on a major case was guaranteed to get there. The only hope for Joel lay in two possibilities when it came to the video from those cameras: that the quality of the CCTV footage was poor and too distant to be of any use in identifying anyone, or that the television programme itself held little or no interest in a community like his own North Kensington neighbourhood.

Ivan brought their drinks to the table. He had the paper secured under his arm. As he sat, he tossed it onto an extra chair. He doctored his coffee and began to speak. “Who would have thought it possible to make a fortune on rubbish? And then to be willing to share that fortune . . . ?” Ivan curved his hands around his mug and went on to make it clear he wasn’t speaking about journalism. “When a man remembers his roots, my friend, he can do a world of good. If he doesn’t turn his back on those people he left behind . . . That’s what Mr. Rubbish has done for us, Joel.”

Joel tried not to look at the paper on the nearby chair but, folded in half, the Standard had landed upside down, with its headline now hidden and the rest of the front page in clear view, and this acted like the call of a siren, utterly compelling, and there Joel sat, without a ship’s mast to tie himself to. What he could see was a photograph now, with the beginning of a story beneath it. He was too far away to read any part of the story, but the picture was visible. In it, a man and a woman leaned against a railing, smiling at the camera, champagne glasses in their raised hands. The man was handsome and blond; the woman was attractive and brunette. They looked like an advertisement for Perfect Couple, and behind them the placid water of a bay sparkled beneath a cloudless blue sky. Joel turned his head. He tried to attend to Ivan’s words.

“. . . call himself Mr. Rubbish,” Ivan was saying. “Apparently, it’s a simple design that’s been snapped up by metropolitan areas all over the world. It’s operated by computerised conveyors or some such device that separates everything, so the entire populace doesn’t have to be educated about recycling. He’s made a fortune on it and now he’s willing to funnel some of it back into the community he came from. We’re one of his beneficiaries. We’ve got a renewable grant. What do you say to that?”

Joel had the presence of mind to nod and say, “Wicked.”

Ivan cocked his head. “That’s all you can say to two hundred and fifty thousand pounds? Wicked? ”

“It’s cool, Ivan. Adam an’ that lot’re gonna be ravin for sure.”

“But not you? You’re part of it. We’ll need everyone we can find to be involved in the project if we’re to carry it off.”

“I can’t make no fi lm.”

“What nonsense. You can write. You can use language in ways that other people . . . Listen to me.” Ivan brought his chair closer to Joel’s and spoke earnestly, the way he generally spoke when he believed that something needed to be conveyed with great urgency. “I don’t expect you to act in the film or stand behind the camera or do anything that you’re not already used to doing. But we’re going to need you on the script. . . . No, don’t argue. Listen. Right now, the dialogue leans too heavily towards the vernacular, and I need an advocate for broadening its appeal. Now, the vernacular’s fine if all we want is a local release. But, frankly, now that we’ve got this backing behind us, I think we ought to be aiming for more. Film festivals and the like. This is not the moment for keeping our aspirations humble. I believe you can make the others see that, Joel.”

Joel knew that this was rubbish, and he wanted to laugh at the irony of it: that he would not be sitting in this place at this moment having this conversation with Ivan had not rubbish on a very large scale made it possible. But he didn’t want to argue with Ivan. He wanted to get his hands on a newspaper so that he could see what the police were up to. And he wanted to have a word with the Blade.

Abruptly he shoved himself away from the table. He stood and said,

“Ivan, I got to go.”

Ivan stood as well, his expression altered. He said, “Joel, what’s happened? I can tell something’s . . . I’ve heard about your sister. I’ve not wanted to mention it. I suppose I was hoping that news of this fi lm would allow you to think of other things for a while. Look. Forgive me. I hope you know I’m your friend. I’m ready to—”

“Later,” Joel cut in. He said this past his need to fight off the useless kindness, to fight it off physically and not only with words. “Great news you got, Ivan. Got to go.”

He departed in a rush. It was ages before Toby would be done with his work at the learning centre, so Joel knew he had the time to get up to Lancefield Court, which was where he went once the café was behind him. He slipped through the opening in the chain-link fence, and he climbed to the first floor. No one was standing guard at the foot of the stairs, which should have told him that the flat from which the Blade distributed his wares to his runners was going to be empty. But he was desperate and his desperation compelled him to make his useless search anyway.

Joel decided then that the Blade had taken Neal Wyatt somewhere quite safe in order to deal with him. He thought of the abandoned underground station, of a tucked-away corner of Kensal Green Cemetery. He thought of large car parks, of lockup garages, of warehouses, of buildings about to be torn down. It seemed to him that London was teeming with places that the Blade might have taken Neal Wyatt, and he attempted to comfort himself with the thought that there—in any one of these thousand places—Neal Wyatt was currently being informed that his days of shadowing, bullying, assaulting, and tormenting the Campbell children were at an end.

Because that, Joel assured himself, was what was going on. Today. Right now. And once Neal Wyatt was finally and permanently sorted, they could get on to extricating Ness and bringing her home to her family.

Thinking about all this went a small distance towards comforting Joel. It also gave him something else to dwell upon so that he didn’t have to consider what he couldn’t bear to consider: what it actually might mean that Cal Hancock was nowhere to be found, that a white lady was shot, and that Belgravia, New Scotland Yard, and everyone else in the world intended to find the person responsible.

But despite his determination to keep his thoughts away from the unbearable, Joel couldn’t blind himself as well. On the route back from Lancefield Court to the Harrow Road, he passed a tobacconist, and outside on the pavement stood the sort of placards that advertise newspapers all over London. The words leaped out, bleeding black ink into the porous paper on which they were written: “Belgravia Killer on Crimewatch!” one declared, while another announced “Countess Killer TV Pix.”

Joel’s vision went to a pinprick in which the only thing visible was

“Killer.” And then even that disappeared, leaving behind a fi eld of black. Killer, Belgravia, Pix, Crimewatch. Joel held out his arm and felt for the side of the building he’d been passing when he’d seen the placards. He remained there until his vision cleared. He bit at his thumbnail. He tried to think.

But all he could come up with was the Blade.

He walked on. He was only vaguely aware of where he was, and he ended up in front of the charity shop without knowing how he’d got there. He went inside. It smelled of steam hitting musty clothes.

He saw that his aunt had an ironing board set up at the back of the shop. She was dealing with wrinkles on a lavender blouse, and a pile of other clothing lay waiting for her attention on a chair to her left.

“There’s no sense in not giving people an idea of what things are meant to look like when they’re taken care of,” Kendra said when she saw him. “No one’s going to buy a wrinkled mess of a thing.” She pulled the blouse off the ironing board and hung it neatly on a plastic hanger. “Better,” she said. “I can’t say I’m wild about the colour, but someone will be. Did you decide not to wait for Toby at the centre?”

Joel came up with an explanation. “Went for a walk instead.”

“Bit cold for that.”

“Yeah. Well.” He didn’t know why he’d entered the shop. He could put it down to a vague desire for comfort, but that was the extent of his ability to explain things to himself. He wanted something to alter how he felt inside. He wanted his aunt to be that something or, failing that, to provide it somehow.

She went on ironing. She laid a pair of black trousers on the ironing board and examined them from top to bottom. She shook her head and held them up for Joel to see. A greasy stain dripped down the front of them, elongated into the shape of Italy. She tossed them onto the floor, saying, “Why do people think poor equals desperate when what it really means is wanting something to make you forget you’re poor, not something to remind you you’re poor every time you put it on?” She went back to the pile of clothes and snatched up a skirt.

Joel watched her and had an overpowering desire to tell her everything: the Blade, Cal Hancock, the gun, the lady. Indeed, he had an overpowering need just to talk. But when she looked up, the words wouldn’t come to him, and he moved away from her, restlessly prowling the length of the shop. He paused to examine a toaster that was shaped like a sausage in a bun and next to it a cowboy boot that had been fashioned into a lamp. It was odd, he thought, the objects that people bought for themselves. They wanted something and then they un wanted it once they saw its effect on themselves and the rest of their possessions, once they knew how it actually made everything else look, once they realised how it eventually made them feel. But if they’d known in advance, if they’d only known, there would have been no waste. There’d have been no rejection.

Kendra spoke. “Did you know about them, Joel? I’ve wanted to ask you, but I didn’t know how.”

For a moment, Joel thought she was talking about the toaster and the cowboy boot lamp. He couldn’t imagine what sort of answer he was meant to give.

His aunt went on. “Afterwards . . . Could you tell something was different with her? And if you could tell, did you not think of going to someone?”

Joel looked from the lamp to the toaster. He said, “What?” He felt hot and queasy.

“Your sister.” Kendra applied pressure to the iron and it sizzled as some of the hot water within it came out upon the garment she was working on. “Those men and what they did to her and Ness never telling. Did you know?”

Joel shook his head, but he heard more than his aunt was actually saying to him. He heard the should of it all. His sister had been messed with by their gran’s boyfriend and all of his mates and Joel should have known, he should have seen, he should have recognised, he should have done something. Even as a seven-year-old or whatever he’d been when those terrible things had begun happening to his sister, he should have done something, no matter that the men always looked like giants to him and more than giants: potential granddads, potential dads, even. They looked like anything but what they were.

Joel felt his aunt’s eyes fixed on him. She was waiting for something seen, something heard, something felt, anything. He wanted to give that to her, but he couldn’t. He dropped his gaze. Kendra said, “Miss her?”

He nodded. He said, “What’d they do . . . ?”

“She’s in the remand centre now. She’s . . . Joel, she’ll likely be going away for a while. Fabia Bender thinks—”

“She ain’t going nowhere.” The declaration came out more fiercely than he’d intended.

Kendra set the iron to one side. She said kindly, “I don’t want her sent away, either. But Miss Bender’s trying to work things so she gets placed somewhere they can help her instead of punish her. Somewhere like . . .” She paused.

He looked up. Their glances met. They both knew where that explanation had been heading, and it brought no comfort. Somewhere likewhere your mum is, Joel. She’s got the family curse. Wave good-bye to her.

The edges of Joel’s world kept furling up, like a drying leaf detached from a tree.

He said, “Ain’t gonna happen, dat.”

“‘Isn’t,’” his aunt patiently corrected.

She picked up the iron again, applying it to the skirt spread out on the board. She said, “I’ve not done right by any of you. I didn’t see that what I had was more important than what I wanted.” She spoke with great care. She ironed with great care. The task did not require the concentration and attention she was giving to it. Joel said, “You miss Dix, innit.”

“’Course,” she replied. “But Dix’s something separate from what I’m talking about here. For me, this is how it was, Joel: Glory dropped you on me, and I decided okay, I’ll cope ’cause you’re my family, but isn’t anything going to change the way I’m leading my life. Because if I change the way I’m leading my life, I’ll end up hating these kids for making me change things round, and I don’t want to hate my brother’s children ’cause none of this is their fault. They didn’t want their dad getting shot and they sure as hell didn’t ask to have their mum flitting in and out of the nuthouse all their lives. But we all still got to— have to—follow our separate paths. So I’ll get ’em in school, I’ll feed ’em and put a roof over their heads, and when I do that, I’ll be doing my duty. But there was more ’n duty that needed to be involved. I jus’ didn’t want to see it.”

Joel realised at the end of all this that his aunt was apologising to him, to all of them, really, through the person of him. He wanted to tell her that she didn’t need to. Had he been able to put it into words, he would have told her that none of them had asked for what they’d had handed to them, and if they bollixed things up as they tried to cope, whose fault was it, really? His aunt had done what she’d thought was right at the time.

He said, “S’okay, Aunt Ken.” He ran his finger the length of the cowboy boot lamp and then took it away. Like everything else in the charity shop, it was clean and dustless, ready to be purchased and taken home by someone who wanted something quirky to act as a distraction from the rest of their lives. Toby, he thought, would have loved the lamp. Simple, quirky things were enough for him.

Kendra came to his side. She put her arm around his shoulders and she kissed him on the temple. She said, “All of this is going to pass. We’ll get through it. You and Toby and I. Even Ness. We’re going to get through it. And when we do, we’ll be a family to each other the way we’re meant to be. We’ll be a proper family, Joel.”

“Okay,” Joel said in a voice so low that he knew his aunt couldn’t possibly hear it. “That’ll be real nice, Aunt Ken.”

JOEL FELT DRAWN to Crimewatch like a spectator to the scene of a roadside disaster. He had to watch, but he didn’t know how to watch without drawing attention to what he meant to do.

As the time for the programme drew near, Joel tried hard to think how to wrest control of the television from his little brother. Toby was watching a video—a young Tom Hanks involved with a mermaid—and he knew that he could not switch off that fi lm without Toby raising the roof in protest. Minutes trickled by. Ten, then fifteen, with Joel racking his brains to come up with a way to separate Toby from his video. It was Kendra’s commitment to improved parenting that finally gave him the opening he needed. She decided that Toby’s bath needed supervising and she told the little boy he could watch the rest of the fi lm once he was bathed and in his pyjamas. When she took his brother off to the bathroom, Joel dashed to the television and found the proper channel.

Crimewatch was nearing its conclusion. The host was saying “. . . a look at that footage a final time. As a reminder, it was taken in Cadogan Lane, and the individuals in it are suspected of having been involved in the shooting that occurred in Eaton Terrace a short time earlier.”

What followed—just as Joel had hoped—was some five seconds of very grainy footage, typical of the kind from a CCTV camera that loops the same film through its system every twenty-four hours. This depicted the narrow street that Joel and Cal had burst upon when they’d crashed through the house attached to the last garden on their escape route. Two figures approached, one of them made featureless by virtue of what he wore: knitted hat, gloves, markless donkey jacket with its collar turned up. The other figure, however, was more memorable, a function of the hair that sprang around his face as he walked.

When he watched this, Joel felt a moment of blessed relief. He could see that the hair—even uncovered as it was—would not be enough, con sidering the quality of the film. His anorak was like so many other anoraks in the streets of London, and his school uniform, which would have narrowed the field considerably, was not visible aside from the trousers and the shoes. And these told no tale at all. So since Cal’s face was completely hidden from the CCTV camera, it stood to reason that—

Even as Joel was thinking all this, his world tilted violently on its axis. At the moment they passed beneath the camera, the ginger head lifted and Joel’s face was framed in the picture. It was still grainy and he was still several yards away from the camera, but as Joel sat transfi xed in front of the television, he learned that “the miracle of computer enhancement” was at that very moment being brought to bear upon the image, and within a few days the video fi lm should be greatly improved by specialists at the Met, at which time Crimewatch would present it once again to the public. Until that moment, if anyone recognised either of the individuals shown on the film that evening, they were to phone the hotline printed on the bottom of their television screen. They could depend upon the fact that their call and their identity would be held in the strictest confidence.

In the meantime, the host said in a solemn voice, the victim of the shooting remained on life support, pending the weighty decision that her husband and family had to make about the fate of their unborn child.

Joel heard these last words like something spoken underwater. Unborn child. The woman had been wearing a coat. He hadn’t seen— they hadn’t seen or known—that she was pregnant. If they had seen, if they had even guessed . . . None of this would have happened. Joel swore this to himself. He clung to the thought of it, as he had nothing else to cling to.

He pushed himself off the settee and went to the television. He switched it off. He wanted to ask someone what was happening to him and to the world as he knew it. But there was no one to ask and at the moment what constituted his consciousness was what he could hear, which was, from above, the noise of Toby scooting about in the bathtub.

JOEL PLAYED TRUANT from school to find Cal Hancock. He began his search for the Rasta by lurking around the block of flats in which Arissa lived, certain that Cal would turn up there eventually, standing guard for the Blade as always. As Joel did this, he tried not to think of the CCTV pictures. He also tried to drive from his mind other relevant details that boded ill for him: the flood of newspaper stories with that CCTV picture of him on their front pages; the au pair who’d seen him up close; the gun that was lying in someone’s garden along the way from Eaton Terrace to Cadogan Lane; his discarded cap at the base of one of those garden walls; a lady languishing on life support; a baby whose fate had to be decided. He did, on the other hand, think of Neal Wyatt who, along with his entire crew, was certainly making no attempt to harass Joel, Toby, or anything remotely Campbell.

From this, Joel took evidence that Neal indeed had been sorted by the Blade. No longer a supposition, this, no longer a belief he tried to cling to. There would now, he told himself, never again be trouble from Neal. The Blade had performed as promised because he’d been informed by Cal that Joel had performed as promised, and the Blade had no need ever to know that Cal Hancock and not Joel had been the one to pull the trigger on the lady in Eaton Terrace. Cal’s fingerprints weren’t even on the gun should the gun be found, so unless Cal told the Blade the truth, no one on earth would have a suspicion that Cal and not Joel had carried the mission to its conclusion. While there was no cash, handbag, or jewellery to show for it, there was enough notoriety to prove that the Blade’s instruction had been followed to the letter.

“Real mugging dis time, Jo-ell,” the Blade had told him when he’d handed over the gun. “You mon enough to do it right? Cos it better be right, and then you ’n me, we’ll be done. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. An’ one t’ing more, Jo-ell, listen good. Th’ gun got to be used. I want to hear it been fired. More exciting dat way, y’unnerstan? More like you mean business when you tell some bitch to hand over her money.”

At first, Joel had thought the target would be a local woman, like the Asian woman he’d tried to mug in Portobello Road. Then he thought—considering the instruction that the gun was to be fired— that the mark was a female who needed sorting. It would be, perhaps, a crackhead fleabag who was turning tricks for a fingernail’s measure of powder. Or perhaps it would be the tart belonging to a dealer who was trying to take over some of the Blade’s patch. It would, in short, be someone who would see the gun and cooperate instantly, and it would happen in a part of town and at a time of day where a gunshot would mean business as usual among the drug dealers, the gangsters, and the general flotsam and jetsam of the population and consequently would probably go unreported at the most and uninvestigated at the least. In any case, it would just be a gunshot, the weapon fired into the air, fired into the wooden frame of a window, fired into a door, fired anywhere but at a real person. Just fired. That was all.

This ill-founded belief was what Joel had clung to, even as they’d boarded the underground train, even as they’d trotted along through a part of town that, with every step he had taken, declared itself to be some place quite different from the world that he was used to. What he hadn’t expected was what he’d been presented with for the mugging and for the weapon firing: a white lady coming home with her shopping, one who smiled at them and asked if they were lost and looked like someone who believed that there was nothing to fear as long as she stood at her own front door and showed strangers kindness. Despite what he did to reassure himself, Joel’s thoughts went feverishly among three points as he lurked about and waited for Cal. The first was the actual shooting of the woman who’d turned out to be not only a countess but also the wife of a Scotland Yard detective. The second was that he’d done what he’d been told to do—even if Cal was ultimately the one to fire the weapon—and no matter the means to get to this end, the end had been reached and that meant Joel had proved himself. The third was that there was a film of him in Cadogan Lane, there was an au pair who’d seen him up close, and there was a gun with his fingerprints on it, and all of that meant something which was not good.

Ultimately, Joel saw that his only hope lay in the Blade. If Cal did not show up the next time that the Blade chose to do his business on Arissa in her flat, it would mean that Cal was well and truly gone. And if Cal was well and truly gone, it would mean that Cal had been spirited off because it made no sense that the Blade might actually do away with Cal instead of just easing him out of London for as long as it took for the heat of the shooting and its aftermath to run its course. The way Joel looked at the situation—indeed, the only way he could look at the situation—was to decide that if the Blade could do all that for Cal, he could do it for Joel, and with a photograph of Joel in the process of being enhanced, that was something which had to be done, and soon. He wanted shelter and he needed shelter. As things turned out, he didn’t have to wait long for the moment during which his request for sanctuary went answered . . . before he even made it.

On Portnall Road, he’d hidden himself on the porch of a building near Arissa’s, safely away from view. He’d been there an hour, hoping the Blade would show up to pay a call on his woman. He was shivering in the cold and had cramp in his legs when the Blade’s car finally pulled up. The man himself got out, and Joel stood, preparatory to making his approach. But then Neal Wyatt removed himself from the car as well, and as Joel watched, the Blade disappeared into the building and Neal established himself in what could only be called the Cal Position: bouncing a small rubber ball against one wall of the entrance to the building as he himself lounged against the other.

Joel ducked. He thought, How . . . ? And then, Why . . . ? He stared at nothing as he tried to puzzle out what he’d seen, and when he next ventured a look at the entrance to Arissa’s building, it was to see that he’d been noticed despite his efforts: Neal was gazing right back at him. He pocketed the ball he’d been bouncing. He sauntered down the path, crossed the road, and came along the pavement. He stood there, observing Joel in his inadequate place of hiding. He said nothing, but he looked quite different, and it came to Joel that what he looked like didn’t have much to do with having been sorted by anyone for anything.

Joel remembered in that moment what Hibah had said to him: Neal wants respect. Can’t you show him respect?

Clearly, Joel saw, Neal had done something to get it. Joel expected the outcome to be an attack—blows, kicks, knives, whatever—delivered by Neal to his own pathetic person. But no attack came.

Instead, Neal spoke, and it was only a single statement that he made, tinged with weary sarcasm. “You are one stupid redskin fuck.” Having said this, he turned and walked back to the entry to Arissa’s building, and there he remained.

Joel himself was Lot’s wife: the desire to fl ee but eternally absent the ability to do so. Ten minutes passed, and the Blade came outside, Arissa following, dog to master. The Blade said something to Neal, and the three of them moved in the direction of the Blade’s car. He opened the driver’s door as Neal got in on the other side. Arissa remained on the pavement, waiting for something that was soon in coming. The Blade turned to her, jerked her over, cupped one of her buttocks to hold her in place, and kissed her. He released her abruptly. He pinched her breast and said something to her and the girl stood before him, looking devoted, looking like someone who would never cross him, who would wait right there till he came for her again, who would be exactly what he wanted her to be. Precisely, Joel realised with a jolt of understanding, like someone who was not his sister, who did not act or think like Ness. Someone, in short, who gazed upon the Blade in a way that Ness was unlikely to look at any man.

Joel thought, then, about how many times he had heard the Blade mouth that unpleasant imperative about his sister, and a glimmer of light began to illuminate the darkness around him. But that glimmer of light was like ice against his heart and its incandescence radiated on the simple confluenceof events as they had occurred in his life. Joel saw that they’d all led to this precise moment: Neal Wyatt waiting in the car like someone who knew very well that he belonged there, the Blade showing Arissa what was what, and Joel himself watching the action, receiving a message he’d been meant to receive from the very first.

Cal didn’t matter. Joel didn’t matter. In the final accounting, Neal and Arissa didn’t matter. They themselves didn’t know this yet, but they, too, would learn once their purpose had been served.

What Joel did next, he did to acknowledge all the times that Cal Hancock had tried to warn him to keep clear of the Blade. He emerged from his useless hiding place, and he approached the car, the Blade, and Arissa.

He said, “Where’s Cal?”

The Blade glanced his way. “Jo-ell,” he said. “Looks like t’ings’re getting real hot for you, bred.”

“Where’s Cal?” Joel repeated. “What’ve you done to Cal, Stanley?”

Neal got out of the car in a liquid movement, but the Blade waved him back. He said, “Long time Cal’s been wanting to see his fam’ly, innit. Out there in Jah-may-ca land, wiv steel bands, ganja, and reggae all night. Uncle Bob Marley looking down from heaven. Cal scratch my back, so I scratch his.” He jerked his head at Neal, who obediently got back into the car. Then he kissed Arissa once again, and he pushed her towards her building. He said, “Anything else, Jo-ell?”

There was no hope, but Joel said it anyway. “That lady . . . I di’n’t . . .”

But he didn’t know how to finish what he’d started, so he said nothing further. He merely waited.

“Didn’t what?” the Blade asked him blandly, without curiosity. A moment for decision, and Joel made the only one he could.

“Didn’t nuffink,” he said.

The Blade smiled. “Mind you keep it that way.”

THE E -FIT CAME next, supplied courtesy of the au pair who’d wielded the toilet plunger. Typical of the London tabloids, she became the heroine of the moment, and her past and present were explored thoroughly as, next to her own picture, was featured the e-fit of the ginger-haired young lout with whom she’d struggled.

“Is This the Face of a Killer?” was the headline that accompanied the e-fit in the Daily Mail, the front page of which Joel saw fluttering on the pavement outside Westbourne Park station. Like most e-fits, it didn’t look much like him, but the news story that accompanied it revealed that the enhancement of the video image was complete. Additional footage from the Sloane Square underground station had been analysed, the paper reported. The police had isolated more images. Scotland Yard indicated an arrest was imminent, as tips flooded the lines dedicated to the cause of tracking down the killer of the wife of one of their own.

Joel had taken Toby to Meanwhile Gardens when it finally occurred. They were in the skate bowl, in the topmost and simplest of the arenas, and Toby was delighting in the fact that he’d managed to balance long enough to glide from one side to the other without falling off his board. He was crowing, “Lookit! Lookit, Joel” when the first of the panda cars slowed and then stopped on the bridge over the Grand Union Canal. A second panda car took up a position in Elkstone Road, just beyond the corner of the child drop-in centre, but visible enough that Majidah looked up from what she was doing inside the centre, frowned, and decided to walk outside into the play area to make certain the children were safe. A third car parked at the turn from Elkstone into Great Western Road. Out of each of these cars, a uniformed constable climbed. The drivers remained inside.

They converged on the skate bowl. It came to Joel as he watched their approach that, clearly, he’d been under observation by someone from somewhere—perhaps he’d even been followed for the past days since he’d seen the Blade—and when the moment had seemed appropriate, that person had placed a phone call to the Harrow Road police. And here they were.

The constable from the car nearest the drop-in centre was the first to get to Joel. He said, “Joel Campbell?” and Joel said to his brother,

“Tobe, you got to go home, okay?”

True to form, Toby said “But you said I could ride my skateboard and you said you watch me. Don’t you ’member?”

“We got to do it later.”

“Come with me, lad,” the constable said to Joel.

Joel said, “Tobe? C’n you get home by yourself? If you can’t, I ’spect one of the cops’ll take you.”

“I want to skateboard. You said, Joel. You promised.”

“They ain’t lettin me stay here,” Joel said. “You go home.”

The constable from the bridge arrived next. He said that Toby was to come with him. When he heard this, Joel thought the constable meant that he would take Toby home so that the little boy wouldn’t have to go on his own, despite how close it was to the skate bowl, and he said, “Cheers.” He began to follow the first constable to his car at the kerb near the child drop-in centre—his head averted so that he didn’t have to look at the Pakistani woman watching from behind the chain-link fence—but then he saw that Toby wasn’t being led towards Edenham Estate at all, but rather towards the bridge.

Joel stopped. The day’s cold seeped up his neck and closed around it like a fist. He said, “Where’re they taking my brother?”

“He’ll be looked after,” the constable told him.

“But—”

“You’ll have to come along. You’ll have to get into the car.”

Joel took a useless step towards his brother. “But Tobe’s meant to go—”

“Don’t fight us, lad.” The constable attached himself to Joel’s arm.

“But my auntie’ll wonder—”

“Come along.”

At this point, the driver of the panda car parked in front of the drop-in centre came to them at a jog. He attached himself to Joel’s other arm and shoved that arm behind Joel’s back. He brought out a set of handcuffs and, wordlessly, snapped them on his wrists. He hissed in Joel’s ear, “Fucking little half-breed bastard,” and he pushed him towards the car.

“Steady on, Jer,” the other constable said.

“Don’t bloody tell me,” the first replied. “Open the door.”

“Jer—”

“Fucking open it.”

The first cooperated. In front of Joel, the car door swung open, making an invitation that he could not refuse. He felt a sharp blow on his back, and a hand crushed down on his head, propelling him inside the vehicle. When he was inside, the door slammed shut. As the two policemen climbed into the front seat of the car, Joel peered out of the window, trying to see what had happened to Toby.

The panda car on the bridge was gone. In Meanwhile Gardens, board riders in the skate bowl had stopped to watch the police interact with Joel. They lined the lowest lip of the bowl now—their skateboards balanced against their hips—and they talked among themselves as the panda car pulled away from the kerb to make the turn into Great Western Road for the short drive to the Harrow Road station. Joel craned his neck to search for a face in the park that would tell him—by its expression—what would happen from here. But there was no face. There was only his inevitable future that had begun playing out the moment the first constable had taken him by the arm.

Beyond Meanwhile Gardens—and this was what Joel could see as the car crossed the bridge over the canal—the back of Kendra’s house was visible. Joel fixed his gaze on it as long as he could, but it was only a moment before the first building on Great Western Road obscured his view.

KENDRA RECEIVED THE word from Majidah. The Pakistani woman was brief enough in her message to the charity shop, where Kendra was in the midst of making a sale to a refugee African woman in the company of an elderly man. Three cars had come from the police, Majidah informed her. Two of them had taken Ness’s brothers away. Separately, this was. And, Mrs. Osborne, the disturbing part comes now: One of the constables put the older boy in handcuffs.

Kendra heard this in silence because it seemed terribly important at the moment that she conclude the sale of table lamps, shoes, and yellow crockery to her customers. She said, “Thank you. I see. I do appreciate the call,” and left Majidah on the other end of the line thinking, Good gracious, it was hardly any wonder when children went so terribly wrong if the adults in their lives were able to receive deadly news without a single wail of horror. As westernised as she had become over the years that she had lived in London, Majidah knew that she would never have greeted terrible news such as this without taking at least a few minutes to tear at her hair and rip at her clothing before marshalling her forces to do something about it. So Majidah went on to phone Fabia Bender as well, but her message to the social worker was altogether unnecessary since the wheels of British jurisprudence were already turning, and Fabia was at the Harrow Road station in advance of Joel’s arrival.

Kendra felt herself floundering after the refugees left the charity shop and she was free to absorb Majidah’s message. She did not associate the message with murder. Naturally, she’d seen the story of the shooting in the paper, since, in the constant pursuit of the ever-more-sensational, the editors of all London’s tabloids and most of its broadsheets had made the quick decision that the murder of a cop’s-wife-who-was-also-a-countess easily trumped every other story. So she’d read the papers and she’d seen the e-fit. But like any other e-fit, the one of Joel came only moderately close to his real appearance, and his aunt had had no reason to connect the drawing to her nephew. Besides, her mind had been crammed with other concerns, most of which involved Ness: what had happened to her in years past and what was going to become of her now.

And now . . . Joel. Kendra closed up the charity shop and walked to the Harrow Road police station, which was not far. In her haste, she went without her coat and without her bag. She had with her only demands, and she made them to the special constable working in the tiny reception area where a bulletin board offered easy answers to life’s problems with announcements about Crimestoppers, Neighbourhood Watch programmes, Whistlestop Crime, and rules for Out and About at Night.

“Police picked up my nephews,” she said. “Where are they? What’s going on?”

The special constable—a police wanna-be forever doomed to be just that—looked Kendra over and what he saw was a mixed-race lady looking more black than white, shapely in a narrow navy skirt, with something of an attitude about her. He felt that she was making demands of him, in a way that suggested she’d climbed too far above herself, when she ought to be speaking respectfully. He told her to sit. He’d be with her presently.

She said, “This is a twelve-year-old boy we’re talking about. And an eight-year-old. You’ve brought at least one of them here. I want to know why.”

He said nothing.

She said, “I want to see my nephew. And where’s his brother been taken if he’s not here? You can’t snatch children off the street and—”

“Sit down, madam,” the special constable said. “I will be with you presently and what is it about this that you don’t understand? Do I need to call someone from within to explain this all to you? I can do that. You can be invited to step inside an interview room yourself.”

It was the yourself that told her what she needed to know. “What’s he done?” she asked hoarsely. “Tell me what he’s done.”

The special constable knew, of course. Everyone in the Harrow Road station knew because, to them, this was a crime of such enormity that no punishment was sufficient to mete out to the perpetrator. One of their extended fraternity had been struck down through the person of his wife, and a payment would be extracted for this crime. Thinking of what had happened in Belgravia caused blood to boil in the veins of individual policemen and women. Boiling blood produced the need to strike.

The special constable had in his possession the sharpened photo, which had at last been produced from CCTV footage in Cadogan Lane. Duplicates of this picture were up now in every police station in every borough of the city. He took this picture and he shoved it at Kendra for what he thought of as her viewing pleasure.

“Talking to the sod about this little matter,” he told her. “Sit down, shut your mug, or get out of here.”

Kendra saw that the picture was unmistakably Joel. The dandelion puff of hair around his head and the tea-cake blotches on his face said it all. As did his expression, which was of an animal caught in the lights of an oncoming car. Kendra didn’t need to ask where the picture had been taken. Suddenly, she knew. She crumpled the photo to her chest and she bowed her head.