Capital Punishment (30 page)

Mercy was thinking about Isabel. She liked her, but she was scared by her, too. For the first time in twenty years, she’d met a woman who could take Charlie from her. She’d never feared any of the others. Even the supermodel types with legs that went on forever.

Charlie was the only person in her life who’d ever made her feel safe. And now he was going to give his undivided attention elsewhere. Her insecurity shivered through her like the cold waves of a viral attack as she saw herself on the brink of losing everything. Her daughter hated her and the only man she’d ever loved—and yes, still loved—had fallen for someone who was more than her equal.

And that was the other thing: Isabel was everything she wasn’t. Or was it just that Isabel had the ability to show what she never could?

She had a vision of herself as a lonely person, which gave her a desperate need to put things right with her daughter. She didn’t call Esme to see if this was all right and it was close to eleven at night when she pulled up outside the old Consumption Hospital on Mount Vernon. She rang the buzzer, stood in front of the video camera.

‘Jesus, Mercy, is that you?’ said Esme through the intercom.

‘I need to see Amy.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Will you let me in, please, Esme?’

Esme buzzed her in. She went up to the first floor. Esme was waiting and smoking outside her flat.

‘What’s all this about, Mercy?’

‘I want to see my daughter, that’s all.’

‘It’s late.’

‘I’ve been working and she won’t be asleep yet.’

‘I’m not sure it’s such a good idea,’ said Esme. ‘She’s still in a rage at you.’

‘I don’t give a shit,’ said Mercy. ‘I want to see her.’

‘Look, I can see you’re upset, Mercy,’ said Esme. ‘Is this really the best time to be doing this?’

‘I’ve just seen something terrible in my work and I don’t want ... I want to ... I need to see...’

‘Yes, OK, it’s all right, Mercy. Let’s go in. Have a cup of coffee.’

Esme took her into the kitchen, sat her down. Mercy was craning her neck to see the room where she knew Amy would be sleeping. Esme put a coffee down on the table in front of Mercy’s clenched hands. Mercy leaned over and rested her forehead on her fists as her body was wracked with shuddering sobs. She leaned back, tears streaming down her face.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m losing it.’

Esme was transfixed, had never seen Mercy in such a state.

Mercy got up suddenly, wiped her face and walked across the living room into Amy’s bedroom. The girl was sitting on her duvet in her pyjamas with an MP3 player plugged in. She glanced up, yanked the buds out of her ears and a look of such scowling meanness crossed her face that Mercy reared back.

‘What do
you
want?’ she said.

And Mercy didn’t know. She didn’t know what she wanted. Except for it to be all right. But not how to make it so.

‘I just...’ she started.

‘What?’

‘I just wanted to tell you how much I love you.’

‘Now you’re all at it,’ said Amy, mocking.

Mercy turned, left the room, straight past the smoking Esme and out of the flat.

‘Are you sure you’re not a poof?’ asked Skin, standing in the middle of the room with its new blinds drawn, thumb hooked into one pocket, and a can of Stella hanging from his hand.

‘You mean, just because I’m doing the hoovering?’ said Dan, shunting Skin’s foot so he lifted it, and then the other.

‘There’s that, and all the fancy ready-cooked meals you’ve bought, new sheets on the bed, a new blanket,
lah-vely
blinds
and
you’ve spent half an hour cleaning the crapper and putting a new bog seat on. The other fucker’s keeping her stripped down to her undies on a bare mattress with hardly any food and pissing into a tin bucket. And here we are in the Colville Estate Hilton with room service.’

‘Hyatt,’ said Dan. ‘For fuck’s sake, the
Grand
Hyatt.’

Skin laughed wheezily into his Stella. ‘It’s cutting into my profit margin,’ he said.

‘For a start, it’s coming out of the money we didn’t give to the cabbie; second, we’re living here, too; and are you really going to give a shit about a couple of hundred quids’ worth of stuff when you’re sitting on a million?’

‘We’re not sitting on it yet,’ said Skin. ‘And if this fucks up, we’re down the rent, your seafood linguine times ten, whatever the fuck the blinds and bog seat cost
and
the hoover.’

‘If this fucks up, we’ll be finding out if there’s a God or not,’ said Dan. ‘Anyway, the hoover’s yours after the event. Whatever happens. It’s a deal.’

‘Don’t use them,’ said Skin grumpily.

‘You put this end over your knob and it’s great.’

‘Never been that desperate.’

‘Right. I’ve seen you fighting the girls off with a pitchfork,’ said Dan.

‘What do you know?’

‘The shaved head and the tat probably don’t help. What was the big idea behind that fashion statement?’

‘I was called Gabriel at school.’

‘Gabriel?’

‘The angel,’ said Skin. ‘I had blond curly hair.’

‘Sweet,’ said Dan. ‘Did you get the part in the nativity play, too?’

‘Fuck off, Nurse,’ said Skin, eyes gone dead.

‘And the tat?’

‘Then they called me Baby-face.’

‘Can’t win, can you?’

‘The tat shut those fuckers up,’ said Skin. ‘And I stabbed a teacher in the leg.’

‘What’s the time?’ asked Dan, thinking: that’s enough history.

‘Just gone quarter past midnight.’

‘We’re on at one.’

‘Everything ready?’ asked Skin. ‘Restraints? You were going on about restraints as if, you know, you were into them.’

‘Didn’t want to get her back here and find we can’t even tie her to the bed,’ said Dan. ‘Look like amateurs on our first night.’

‘You got your knock-out juice?’

Dan took out the syringe from its box, flicked it so the liquid shook.

‘Weapons?’

They took out their guns, racked the slides, showed each other they were loaded. They headed out to the van.

‘You remember to put that carpet in the back and some cushions?’ asked Skin.

‘Now who’s looking after her welfare?’

‘Once she’s in our hands, she’s worth money. I don’t want her knocking about like a piece of old furniture.’

Dan opened the back, showed him. They got in the front, looked at each other.

‘What could possibly go wrong?’ said Dan.

Skin looked up into his head as if performing an enormous calculation.

‘All right,’ said Dan, starting the engine. ‘No need to go into it.’

‘Thank fuck for that,’ said Skin, foot up on the dashboard, ciggies out.

They headed south through the Rotherhithe Tunnel, then east following the curve of the Thames. They came into Deptford and some abandoned buildings around Convoys Wharf.

‘Talk me through it one more time,’ said Dan. ‘Make sure we know what we’re doing.’

‘Do everything as normal. Park in the same place. Go in through the same entrance. Have a chat and a laugh with the previous shift. Check in with Jordan and his mate. Take up our positions. Me inside. You out. Everything as we’ve always done. The only difference is that I won’t close the inner door to the refrigeration unit.

‘I won’t make a move in the first half hour so you can relax. Only after 1.30 will anything happen. You do nothing until you hear from me. Then you come in with the roll of carpet. We hood up. We go into the room and you sedate the girl. We roll her up in the carpet. We take as much of Jordan’s set-up as we can. You go out and bring the van into the warehouse like you did when we first delivered her. We put her in with any equipment we’ve lifted. I drive the van out. You close up. We head back to the Colville Estate Hyatt. Couldn’t be simpler.’

‘You ever got anything out of Jordan and his mate?’ asked Dan.

‘Like what?’

‘Who the fuck they are? What they’re doing with the girl? Why the mock execution?’

‘That was too fucking much,’ said Skin. ‘That Irish fucker, I could tell he was enjoying it. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of him, or any side for that matter.’

‘What if the Irish guy is backing up Jordan tonight?’

‘We don’t do it. I wouldn’t be able to work it,’ said Skin. ‘He sits there cradling his gun like it’s a newborn baby. Reecey is all right. He thinks I’m thick, but that’s fine by me.’

‘Do you hear any of what Jordan says to the girl?’

‘Nothing. He speaks very quietly into a microphone and all her replies come through his headphones. The only time I’ve heard anything is when I’ve been in the room with her when she wants to pee or for that fucking business yesterday. And from that I can tell you all Jordan wants to do is break her down.’

‘That should make it easier for you to deal with them then.’

‘Did I tell you Reecey’s armed?’

‘No, you didn’t.’

‘Didn’t I?’ said Skin. ‘I wonder why.’

‘Come and talk to me when you’ve worked the weekend shift in A&E in a London hospital.’

‘I know you can do blood and gore, Nurse, but this is different,’ said Skin. ‘I know Reecey carries because he’s shown me, just as he’s shown the other shift. He’s letting us know he’s no pushover if we start getting ideas. Yeah, exactly, now you’re understanding it. He doesn’t trust the situation he’s in. He’s trained, and in more ways than one.’

‘Why are you telling me this just before we go in there?’

‘Just so you know it’s not going to be a piece of piss,’ said Skin.

‘Is Jordan armed?’

‘Don’t think so. Can’t tell.’

‘Your shoulder all right?’ asked Dan, wanting to think about something else.

‘It’s fine and it’s my left arm, not my shooting arm.’

Silence. All the new problems stacked up high in Dan’s mind.

‘Don’t worry, I get on with Reecey,’ said Skin. ‘He showed me the laser device on his gun. So when the red dot falls on you, Nurse, you know when to run.’

‘Thanks for the advice. I’m not sure I’ll have time to register when the red fucking dot falls on me.’

‘Look, Nurse, I’m the one in the front line, not you,’ said Skin. ‘Just try to keep calm. If I don’t call you in by twenty-five to two, you can run like fuck.’

‘With the red dot falling on my fucking back.’

‘At least you won’t see it coming,’ said Skin, chuckling.

He tossed his cigarette butt out of the window and something cold settled in the pit of Dan’s stomach.

‘Tell me about your father,’ said the voice. ‘How did your relationship with him develop in this new world? You left England under a cloud. What happened in Mumbai? Tell me from the top.’

‘One thing I noticed about conversations with my father: we never talked about the past. His or mine. In England, my friends’ parents quite often talked about the past, you know, in a nostalgic way. That was something else I hadn’t quite grasped at the time. They were, by comparison to the Indians I met on arrival, complacent. It was as if they’d done it all and were coasting into a life where they would do less and less and benefit more and more. They saw the future through their children. Whereas my father, and all those around him, were relentlessly moving things forward, looking to the future, imagining this new world they were in the process of creating. It was exciting. It was liberating. You didn’t find any Indians sitting around reminiscing about the village and homespun. It was all about the latest shopping mall or the new cinema complex. So the past was out, which was fine by me.’

‘You admired your father?’

‘Yes, I was grateful to him for what he’d done for me in England and I was impressed by what he was achieving in India.’

‘Were you happy?’

‘I didn’t have time to know what I was. I moved into a flat. My father said he wanted me to be independent from the beginning. I started work, being shown every aspect of the steel business by various expert guides.’

‘But not Deepak Mistry?’

‘No. I only saw the things that he was involved in after he’d moved on.’

‘And when you weren’t working?’

‘I was invited to all the parties. I had a mad social life in Mumbai high society. I had no time to myself for the first six months. It was calculated. My father wanted to put a gap between my time in the UK and this new life in India. It was also his way of bringing me into his sphere of influence. He managed my work and the people I met, but always at a distance. To start with it was a blur, but gradually a pattern emerged. I was being directed to families where my father had little or no influence, but who he considered important for the trajectory of Konkan Hills Securities. Sharmila was complicit in this and, as we became more friendly, she would question me about my likes and dislikes and report back.’

‘He must have found your attitude very frustrating.’

‘I told him I wasn’t interested in a new relationship. I told him through Sharmila, who he didn’t believe. Then I told him to his face. He seemed to take it well, only because he thought I wasn’t serious. It was just a question of finding the right guy.’

‘That was true, though, wasn’t it?’ said the voice. ‘It just wasn’t somebody Frank expected.’

‘Something happened before that,’ said Alyshia. ‘Something terrible and I needed somebody. Someone I could trust absolutely and he gave me that and more, which was why I fell so deeply in love with him.’

Dan parked the van where he always did, just in front of the previous shift’s old BMW. They got out, walked back to the door to a small office in the side of the building. Skin unlocked the door and locked it behind them. He tapped on the door to the warehouse, looked up into the camera, waited. The previous shift opened the door.

‘Everything all right?’ asked Skin.

‘Yeah, no probs.’

‘Still haven’t found the tunnel then?’

‘You what?’ they said, dull with lack of sleep or entertainment.

‘The Great Escape.’

‘No. Yeah, right. Don’t think she’s had much time for tunnelling. They’ve kept at her. See ya.’

They handed over the walkie-talkies. Skin took one and went into the refrigeration unit. Dan let the previous shift out and waited until their BMW took off before going back in. He heard faint voices from inside the refrigeration unit as he closed the main door and sealed it with the handle. Now there was no sound except for the faint rush from the air conditioning. He pulled on a pair of latex gloves, took a bottle of ethyl alcohol and, in a fit of obsessive/compulsive behaviour, methodically wiped down every door handle and surface he could possibly have touched.