The Fall (23 page)

Keisha couldn’t afford to cry like this so she didn’t cry at all. She went to work at six most nights, came home at four, slept till lunchtime. If Charlotte wasn’t in she felt as if she’d no right to be there, as if she had to creep about. Sometimes the phone rang, making her jump. Usually she ignored it, but one day it rang and rang until she had to pick it up just to get some peace. ‘Yeah?’

A posh woman’s voice. ‘Who’s that? That’s not you, Charlotte?’

‘No, er, she’s out.’

‘And with whom am I speaking?’

‘Eh – just a friend.’

‘You don’t have a name? Don’t you know how to answer a telephone?’

Keisha said nothing; she wasn’t sure how to respond to that.

‘Well, are you hard of hearing? Where is my daughter?’ Shit, it was Charlotte’s mum.

‘She’ll be back later, yeah?’

‘For goodness’ sake.’ The phone clattered down. Snooty bitch!

After that, Keisha just left it alone. You never knew who’d be on the other end. In the afternoons she’d just lie there and think about her mum and Ruby – and Chris, wondering where he was. That’s who she would have said was her family, those three people, and everyone else could go screw themselves. But they were all gone now, in their own ways.

The first night Keisha had turned up at the club, she was in her usual work mode, i.e. just waiting for them to give her grief. Tapping her foot for trouble, almost.

The manager was called Dario, a skinny black guy with a real Cockney accent. How the hell he was called Dario when he was from Dagenham she didn’t know. It was probably Darren. The first time he saw her, ‘Dario’ gave her this big look up and down. ‘Yeah, darlin’?’ She was fairly sure he was gay. Mercy would have been shocked.

She squared up to Dario, with his falling-down jeans and tight T-shirt. All the staff wore black work tops, but Dario seemed to have one of the girl ones. ‘Here to see Ronald,’ she said. The arched eyebrows went up. Did he pluck them? So she was put to work, stacking dirty glasses, shovelling ice until her hand froze, opening about sixty thousand bottles. They didn’t let her talk to customers the first night – mostly a black crowd there for the pounding reggae music, but the occasional white wanker with fistfuls of cash. She wasn’t allowed to work the big flashing till yet either. Everyone talked like you needed a bloody degree to go on that thing.

At the end of the night she was knackered, and she could see Dario looking at her with a bit of a smile. ‘Too much for you, darlin’?’

She slammed the fridge door shut. ‘Nope. Been cleaning up actual shit for months, so this is nothing.’

‘Hmm. Well, you’ll have to see if Ronald wants you to stay, babes.’

Babes
. He could fuck right off. It was the most annoying thing when people called you ‘darling’ and ‘sweetheart’, and you could see all the time they were hating you inside. Like lying, it was.

Ronald was walking across the club, rolling on his feet, as if he was thinking hard. He towered over everyone else and seemed surprised to see her. ‘How’s takings, mate?’ he asked Dario.

‘Not bad, picking up.’ She’d overheard that the club had been quiet since Anthony died, except for some weirdos who asked where ‘it’ was found. ‘Fucking coffin-chasers,’ Dario called them.

‘So?’ She looked at Ronald. ‘I did me trial, like you said.’

‘Oh.’ He scratched his shaved head. ‘She do OK, Dar mate?’

Dario/Darren smiled a bit. ‘Better than wiping shitty arses, I bet.’

‘Eh?’

He dumped a bag of ice in the sink. ‘She’ll do. Not as stroppy as your sister.’ That was what he thought then, anyway. Because pretty much everyone hated Rachel. She was always late, swanning in like Paris Hilton or someone, just ’cos her family owned the place. ‘Little Miss World-owes-me-a-living,’ Dario called her, though to her face he called her ‘gorgeous’. ‘All right, gorgeous? Looking a treat.’ And kissy-kissy on the cheek. Yuck.

Meanwhile Charlotte was getting up every day around about when
This Morning
came on, and going out to work in jobs Keisha’s agency found her. They didn’t really like Keisha there, not since she’d spilled gravy all over the bare shoulders of some posh bitch at a silver-service do. And shouted out, ‘MotherFUCKER!’ at the same time (well, some of it got on Keisha’s hand too). They must like Charlotte though, with her nice ways and blonde hair, because she seemed to be out most days at the nursing home or in staff canteens in big branches of Sainsbury’s or Tesco’s. What was surprising was how behind closed doors there was a whole city of crap jobs out there, and most of them meant you came home stinking of old burned coffee. It was a smell like vomit that you could never wash out of your hands; Keisha never drank coffee because of it.

The first night Charlotte worked a shift, Keisha heard her come in about five in the morning, and opened the door to see if she was OK. Charlotte had eyes like a zombie and her white shirt was stained all over with baked beans. ‘You survived?’

Charlotte was half-staggering. ‘Tired.’

‘But you did it? Served the toast and made tea and stuff? S’easy, yeah?’

Charlotte shook her head. ‘Dunno. I couldn’t find anything. Didn’t know how to work the urn. I felt like a div, to be honest. Have to sleep now.’ She went to bed and slept in her underwear, chucking the dirty shirt and trousers straight onto the floor. But fair play to her, next day she got up and went out again. Who’d have thought she had it in her, to serve up eggs for hours, surrounded by the smell of crap? The posh girl wasn’t as weak as she looked, in fact.

Once Keisha was settled in to work it was easy to find her way around. She hated being the new girl, always did in her jobs, people giving you funny looks and going, Oh no, we don’t do it
that
way. How was she meant to know? She worked hard, no one could say she didn’t, whipping the tops off bottles and crushing up the ice and chopping the lemons so everything was ready at their elbows for the bar staff. Rachel was very slow, she noticed, looking round her as if the bottles and glasses would magically dance up to her on their own.

‘Here,’ Keisha muttered sometimes, shoving mint at her, as Rachel stood gaping at a man who’d asked for three mojitos (wanker). The white customers always wanted stuff like that.

‘A mo-whato?’ Rachel said. Dumb cow. Keisha wondered what this university was like, where she was meant to be studying Business Management. ’Cos as far as she could see, Rachel was as thick as Bailey’s Irish Cream.

All the time Keisha worked, Dario/Darren was watching her with his eyebrows and his little smile. Noticing. ‘We chop the limes in wedges, not slices,’ he said. ‘We give the change on saucers – make sure there’s enough.’ Always something. She thought he was testing her, seeing if she’d blow up, so she did what he said. Even if sometimes she chopped the limes so hard it left big scores in the board.

She kept going. After a while it got better, Dario eased off, she saw him watching her still, nodding sometimes. But Rachel didn’t seem to get any better. When Dario spoke to her about giving the wrong change or putting in the wrong mixer, she threw a strop, shouting, ‘I’m trying!’ One night she flipped. She’d given some arrogant tosser Sprite instead of tonic, and he kicked up such a massive fuss Dario had to come over and say he could have more drinks for free. ‘Sorry, mate, so sorry, yeah?’ Under his breath he said, ‘Wanker. Rachel, babes, we need to talk. I’ll go over the buttons again with you.’

‘For fuck’s sake, I learned it like five times.’ Rachel looked tearful.

‘Yeah, but you still don’t know it, babes.’

Another customer came over, a black guy with dreadlocks, and he asked for two Coronas. That was easy – Keisha had them open and the lime wedges in before Rachel even went to the till. That was when the trouble started. Rachel put in the wrong price, and the till was making a beeping sound. ‘Oh, shit. What’d I do? Where’s the Coronas?’

‘Under “bottled drinks”,’ Keisha shouted, mopping up melted ice. Even though she wasn’t ‘till-trained’ (what a ponce) she knew that.

‘What? Where?’ Rachel was poking random buttons. ‘Shit.’

‘Hey, can ya get a move on?’ The customers were getting fed up.

‘Here.’ There wasn’t time to be nice. Keisha shoved Rachel aside and pressed some keys on the till. ‘Right. Seven-eighty, please, mate.’ She put his twenty-pence change on the plate with the napkin and he took it. Fair play, she’d have done the same herself. Seven-eighty for two beers was criminal.

Dario had been watching. ‘OK, Miss Keisha know-it-all, you’re on the till. Rachel, babes, go out back and clean your face.’

Once her break came up, Keisha went out to the staffroom. Rachel was curled up on the sofa clutching a tissue.

‘Hard work, that.’ Keisha was sweating. ‘You OK?’

Rachel sniffed loudly. ‘I hate it, you know. I wanted to be a student, like, and live in a flat, not serve beer all night. Some of them customers are wankers.’

‘Yep, they are that.’

‘It’s just . . . I’m so crap at it, and I hate it, then you come and you’re all good and shit and you just started.’

Keisha felt like being kind. ‘Well, I been doing shit jobs since I was fourteen. Working in the corner shop, Maccy D’s, the old folk’s home – after a while you just know how to do stuff.’ She saw Rachel was crying again. ‘If you don’t like it, can you not pack it in? Your mum wouldn’t mind, would she?’

‘No.’ Rachel gulped. ‘Ronald would. God, I miss our Anthony.’

So that was it. Sitting beside her, Keisha looked at the clock; her break wasn’t long. ‘Been about a month now, has it?’

Rachel nodded, mashing the manky tissue up in her fingers. ‘You met him that one time? He was always the life and soul, our Anthony. When he was young, Mum was so afraid for him she’d lock him in the house. ’Cos of gangs and stuff, you know? Mum used to say, That boy, he’ll come home in a coffin one day and break my heart in pieces.’ She blew her nose. ‘But then we thought he’d be OK. He meets Tanika, has the kids, gets this place . . . But look!’ She cried again a bit. ‘Got himself fucking killed after all.’

Keisha didn’t know what to say. This was dangerous. ‘I thought it was just like some banker dude lost his temper? Random, like.’

Rachel dabbed her eyes and looked round, lowering her voice. ‘Don’t say nothing, yeah, but Anthony, he sorta borrowed cash for this place. Losing money, see. So he needs cash, he goes back to his old mates in the gang, don’t he?’

Keisha pressed her nails into her hands. She knew more than she wished she did that once or twice, Chris had been involved in getting debts back. And not exactly for legitimate bailiffs. ‘What’re you saying?’

‘Oh, I dunno. Shit, they never told me nothing, Anthony and our Ronald. I’m just the little baby sister, aren’t I? But Ronald’s in there every night with the accounts, never lets anyone else near the computer, whatever’s on there. I know he was worried, Anthony. I know I was worried for him.’

‘But – you told the police it was the banker. He said racist shit, didn’t he?’

Rachel sniffed. ‘Mel said he did, and I thought I remembered . . . I dunno. I was upset, wasn’t I?’

Upset enough to knock Charlotte’s tooth out, yeah. Keisha decided Rachel might be annoying and up herself, but she knew a lot more than you’d think. ‘I’m sorry. Sucks, what happened.’

‘Ta.’ Rachel sniffled some more. ‘Thanks for doing the till. I’m crap at it.’

That was when Dario threw open the door and said it was nice they had time to chat and brush their hair or whatever, but he had a bar to run and could they get their arses out into it? Rachel gave Keisha a roll of the eyes as they got up, and after that they were sort of OK with each other.

People got used to her at the bar. When they did, it was easy to slip about and no one’d pay you a blind bit of notice. The door out to the back of the club opened with a code that all the staff knew. It led into a corridor that had the staffroom, the storeroom full of barrels and stuff, and at the other end, the office where Anthony Johnson had died choking on his own blood. At the end of the corridor was a fire exit, and that opened out into an alley where the bins and things were. Keisha’d seen it open when they got deliveries, and she couldn’t hear any alarm. You could hardly see the door when it was closed.

After watching for a few nights as people took in barrels and took out rubbish and stepped out for fags, she decided to test it out. Sneaking down past the office with a load of dirty glasses, she gave the back door a nudge with her foot and it opened. Nothing happened. But maybe it went off somewhere else?

She went into the staffroom, where Dario was smoothing down his hair. ‘Er, hiya? I knocked the back door open by accident.’ Accidentally on purpose, more like.

‘So?’

‘So, says it’s on an alarm. Did I set it off?’

He was looking in the mirror. ‘Nah, it don’t work. We lock it up last thing. S’OK.’

Well, that was a bit of a find, wasn’t it? She wondered had the police, so sure they’d got the right guy, figured out that any random person could get in from the
outside
. The side of the door facing into the alley had no handles, but she’d been around Chris long enough to know you could open that in a second with a knife or something. Keisha stood in the corridor, thinking hard. She thought of Chris leaving the club that night. Going home. What was he up to in between? She thought of Charlotte, standing outside waiting for Dan. What had she seen? There had to be something.

‘Not busy?’ She jumped. Fuck! Ronald was standing in the doorway of the office. He looked tired, like always, and pissed off.

‘Oh yeah, just doing the glasses.’

‘Are you done? ’Cos it’s rammed out there, you know.’

Her heart was racing. ‘OK, OK. Christ, you can be really arsey, you know that?’ Shit, she hadn’t meant to say that. He was her boss. She’d get sacked.

He looked sad for a moment. ‘You’re right. I am arsey. Wish I didn’t have to be.’ He went back in and she saw him sit down at the computer and put his head in his hands. His feet were right near where his brother’s head had fallen back, dead.

Keisha would have said to him, ‘What’s up with you, then?’ But she knew. Even without Rachel’s story of lost money and old gang connections, she knew. And Ronald thought, everyone thought – the police, the Johnsons, Dan’s family, even Dan, for Christ’s sake – they all thought they knew who did it. The only people who thought something else were herself – and what did she know, really? – and Charlotte, keeping her faith, not able to believe she’d been about to marry a killer.