What Came Before He Shot Her

Chapter

28 In the interview room, things were different this time, and Joel understood he was at a crossroads. No one even questioned him at first. He sat for hours, sometimes with Sergeant Starr, sometimes with Fabia Bender, sometimes with a female constable who was called Sherry by the other two adults. The stringyhaired blonde duty solicitor was not present now—“I’ll be taking your part when the time comes,” Fabia had said to Joel—but the very large and very official-looking tape recorder was always right there, waiting to be switched on. No one pushed the relevant button on it, however, and no one said anything. Not a single word. Instead, they came and went and sat in silence. Joel told himself they were waiting for something or for someone to join them, but their silence unnerved him, making his bones feel rubbery.

He’d already realised that the position he was in—sitting there in the interview room—was likely to play itself out far differently from his earlier visit to the Harrow Road station. He’d drawn that conclusion from his last exchange with the Blade. Then, he’d finally put the pieces together, and he’d seen himself as what he’d long and unknowingly been: an actor in a drama of revenge. It was a drama whose plot he hadn’t understood until that moment of conversation with Stanley Hynds while Neal Wyatt lurked nearby, doubtless waiting for more rewards to flow in his direction, remuneration for what he’d managed to accomplish at the behest of the Blade.

At this precise moment, Joel saw the details only imperfectly. Some things he knew for certain; others he only intuited.

A large mirror hung on the wall opposite the table where he was sitting. Joel deduced quickly and correctly that it was a two-way mirror because he’d seen that sort of thing in police dramas on the television. He expected that people had come and gone on the other side, studying him and waiting for him to give a sign that would mark him as guilty, so he tried very hard not to give that sign, although he wasn’t sure what it was.

He reckoned that people were trying to unsettle him with the wait and the silence. This wasn’t exactly what he’d expected, so he used the time to study his hands. They were out of the handcuffs, and he rubbed his wrists because although there was no mark upon them from the restraints, he could still feel the pressure and the chafing, through his skin to his bones. He’d been made the promise of a sandwich and he’d been given a can of Coke. He curved his fingers around this and tried to think of something pleasant, of anything but where he was and what was likely to happen next. But he couldn’t manage it. So he dwelt instead on questions and answers.

What did they have on him? he asked himself. A video image and nothing else. An e-fit that didn’t fit at all.

And what did a video image and an e-fit mean? That someone looking vaguely like Joel Campbell had been walking down a street not far from the spot in Belgravia where a white lady had been shot. That was it. The long and the short of it. The alpha and the omega. The black and the white.

But at heart Joel knew that there was more. There was the au pair who’d come face-to-face with him inside the house in Cadogan Lane. There was the old woman who’d been walking her corgi around the corner from where the countess had been shot. There was his knitted cap, left behind in one of the gardens through which they had escaped. There was the gun, lost in one of the gardens. Once the police had the gun in their possession—which really was only a matter of time, if they didn’t have it already—there would also be the small problem of fingerprints. For Joel’s prints were the only ones on that gun, and this had been the case from the moment that the Blade had wiped the pistol clean and handed it over, fresh as a baby newly born and newly bathed.

The thought of babies newly born and newly bathed brought unbidden into Joel’s mind the thought of the lady’s baby. They hadn’t known, because if they’d known, they’d never have . . . They wouldn’t. All they’d done, he told himself, was just wait for someone to show up in that posh polished street of posh polished houses. That was it. And Joel had not intended her to die. He hadn’t intended her to be shot at all.

This was the point. The shooting of that woman—wife of a Scotland Yard detective, pregnant, returning from a shopping excursion, in hospital now, on life support—was the fulcrum on which Joel’s life was balanced. He was in a precarious and dangerous position, ready to slide in either direction. For Cal Hancock and not Joel had done the shooting and all Joel really had to do was to say the name and not only that name but another name, and this was what he sat there considering in the interview room.

He thought about what they did to twelve-year-old boys who found themselves in the wrong place, with the wrong companion, at the worst possible time. Surely, they didn’t put them in gaol. They sent them somewhere, to some detention centre for boys, where they were held for a while before they were released back into their communities. If their crimes were heinous enough, the authorities released them elsewhere, with new identities and the possibility of a future before them. This, then, was what Joel saw as an option he could choose if he wanted to do so. For he’d had no knowledge of what was going to happen that day in Belgravia, and he could tell them that as well. He could say that he was just hanging with one Cal Hancock on that afternoon, and they’d got on the tube and ridden around on the circle line and got off where it seemed that they could . . . what? he wondered. Mug someone was the obvious answer, and Joel knew he would have to offer that much in whatever statement he finally made.

So he would tell them, he decided, that they’d intended to mug a rich white lady if they could find one, and things went bad in the midst of the mugging. Cal Hancock pulled out the gun to frighten her, and the gun went off. But none of it had been meant to happen, none of it was planned, none of it had been thought out.

Thus it seemed to Joel as he sat in the interview room, with the waiting and the silence growing heavier by the moment, that naming Cal Hancock would ensure his own release, sooner rather than later. Iwas wiv a blood called Cal Hancock. Eight words and that would be it: The true guilty party would be named, someone old enough to be thrown into prison for a life sentence that would rob him of at least twenty years. Eight words. Eight words only. That was all. But despite his thoughts, which were bouncing around in his skull like rubber balls, Joel knew that he could not grass. He also knew that everyone in the Harrow Road police station understood this as well, as did the Blade. There was simply no way. Grass and you were finished; grass and everyone whose life touched yours would suffer for your grassing as well.

That meant Toby. For Ness—and this was something that Joel had been a long and terrible time understanding—had already been dealt with.

Joel felt a hard bubble rising within him, one that grew as it climbed from his guts and worked its inevitable way to his throat. There, it wanted to burst from him in a sob, but he wouldn’t let it and he couldn’t let it and he had to avoid it no matter what. He put his arms on the table and his head in his arms.

He said, “Where’s Toby?”

“He’s safe,” the constable called Sherry told him.

“Wha’s that mean?” Joel asked. “Where’s Aunt Ken?”

There was no answer to this. The silence allowed Joel to work out the answers for himself, which he was quick to do: Toby had been hustled off to care—that nightmare place in which children entered the maw of a system that seemed fashioned to house them and then forget them—because with one Campbell locked up for a knife assault and another Campbell involved in a deadly shooting, the police, Social Services, and everyone else with a working brain had proof positive that the home of Kendra Osborne was no place for a juvenile to reside.

Joel wanted to demand to see Fabia Bender, in order to tell her that things weren’t like that. He wanted her to know that nothing that happened was down to his aunt at all. He wanted to tell her it was down to someone and something else. But he couldn’t say.

Everything within his mind then became a series of images. They played against his eyelids when he closed his eyes; they seemed present when he even held his eyes open. There was his father getting shot in the street one day. . . . There was his mother holding infant Toby out of the third-floor window. . . . There was Neal Wyatt coming after him in Meanwhile Gardens. . . . There was Glory flying off to Jamaica and the nighttime cold in Kensal Green Cemetery and Cal trying to tell him not to get involved with the Blade and George Gilbert and his mates doing Ness behind closed doors and Toby on the barge with the barge in flames . . .

There was too much to think about and not enough words in the world to explain things in such a way that he would not end up grassing. Say nothing and you had a chance to live. Name a name and you died by degrees.

So Joel told himself that the Blade would come for him. He’d done it before. He’d made that phone call when Joel had been brought in for attempting to mug the Asian woman in Portobello Road. It stood to reason that there was hope he would make a similar phone call now. But the thought of phone calls took Joel directly to the phone call that had brought the police directly to Meanwhile Gardens to pick him up. You scratch my back, I scratch yours.

Joel squeezed his eyes shut so hard that he should have seen stars, but all he saw were more images. He swallowed hard, and the noise he made sounded to him like a sonic boom that sent shock waves through the room. The constable put her hand on his back. He tried to take meagre comfort from this.

But she intended no comfort. She said his name. He realised he was meant to look up.

He raised his head and he saw that while his thoughts had done cartwheels through his head, three more individuals had entered the interview room. Fabia Bender was one of them. The others were a tall black man in a business suit, a knife scar tracing a route down the side of his face, and a dumpy-looking woman in a donkey jacket that looked like something from the charity shop. These two stared at Joel. Their faces showed nothing. He took them to be plainclothes detectives, which indeed they were: Winston Nkata and Barbara Havers from New Scotland Yard.

Fabia Bender said, “Thank you, Sherry,” to the constable, and the woman left them. Fabia took her place next to Joel, while the tall black man and the dumpy woman sat at the other two places at the table. Sergeant Starr, Fabia Bender told Joel, was fetching him a sandwich. They knew he was hungry. They knew he was tired. Things could, if he wanted, be over soon.

The black man spoke then, and while he did so, his companion kept her stony gaze fixed on Joel. He could feel the antipathy running off her. She frightened him, although she wasn’t very large.

The man had a voice that blended Africa, South London, and the Caribbean. He sounded firm. He sounded sure. He said, “Joel, you killed a cop’s wife. You know that? We found a gun nearby. Fingerprints on it that’ll turn out to be yours. Ballistics’ll show the gun did the killing. CCTV fi lm places you on the scene. You and ’nother bloke. What d’you got to say then, blood?”

There seemed no answer he could give to this. He thought of the sandwich, of Seargeant Starr. He was hungrier than they even knew.

“We want a name,” Winston Nkata said.

“We know you weren’t alone,” Barbara Havers added.

Joel’s reply to this was a nod. A single nod only, and nothing else. He gave it not because he agreed with anything the two detectives were saying but because he knew that what would happen next had been long determined by the unchanging world through which he moved.