What Came Before He Shot Her (78 page)

She wore a large diamond on her wedding finger.

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

Do you need—”

“Now,” Cal said.

Joel froze. He couldn’t. Do anything. Say anything. Move. Talk.

Whisper. Shout. She was so pretty. She had dark warm eyes. She had a kind face. She had a tender smile. She had smooth skin and soft-looking lips. She looked from Cal to him to Cal to him, and she didn’t even see what he was holding. So she didn’t know what was about to happen.

So he couldn’t. Not here, not now, and not ever, no matter what happened to him or his family as a consequence.

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

That was when the woman saw the gun. She looked from it to Joel.

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

That was when Cal fired.

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

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

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

Cal dashed into an opening on their left. It turned out to be a mews.

He followed it as it made a dogleg to the right, where a line of houses stood. But this formed a cul-de-sac at the end. They were trapped, blind men caught in the maze.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joel cried, “Cal!”

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

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

“Oh,” not the sight and the sound and certainly not the knowledge.

Her expression had gone from startled, to kind, to friendly, to terrifi ed, all in the space of less than fifteen seconds, all in the time it took her to see, to realise, and to try to escape.

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

Another garden loomed before them, this one like a miniature or-chard. They charged across it, towards the opposite side where another garden was a torment of bushes, hedges, shrubs, and trees, all of it left to grow completely wild. Ahead of him, Joel saw Cal mounting the next wall. At the top he waved frantically for Joel to come more quickly.

Joel was breathing heavily, and his chest was tight. He was soaked about the face. He wiped his arm across his forehead.

He said, “Can’t go—”

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

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

“Cops?” he asked, gasping for breath.

“Oh, they coming.” Cal pushed off from the wall. He took a step back. He hurtled up it. One leg on one side and one on the other.

Then he looked into the garden beyond and breathed a single word.

“Fuck.”

“What?” Joel asked.

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

The only way in or out of the patch of lawn and shrubbery was through the house that it served.

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

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

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

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

Cal cried, “Fuck!” He ducked the blow and shoved her to one side.

He made for the door. She dropped the plunger but regained her footing. She grabbed Joel as he tried to get past. She was shrieking unintel-ligible words, but she made her meaning perfectly clear. She attached herself to Joel like a leech. She reached for his face, her fingers like claws.

Joel struggled with her. He kicked at her legs, her ankles, her shins.

He jerked his head to avoid the fingernails with which she intended to mark him. She went for his hair. She grabbed a handful: hair that was like a beacon and hair that no one would ever forget.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But the Blade’s gonna . . . And anyways, I . . .” Joel stared at Cal.

His mind worked like a dervish because the last thing he was was a stupid child. “Oh shit,” he whispered. “Oh shit, oh shit.”

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

“But . . .”

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

A holly bush snagging his anorak.

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

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

camera was mounted just above a window on the first floor.

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

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

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

Joel cried, “Cal! No! We can’t! They been . . . They gonna . . . If they see . . .” and he remained rooted to the spot.

Cal said over his shoulder, “Mon, come
on
. Or stay there and end up

’splainin to the bill wha’ you been doin in dis neighbourhood.”

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

But there remained the fact of that au pair, her of the toilet plunger.

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

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

Wrought-iron balconies seemed to loom everywhere above him. No rusting bikes on them, no burnt-out furniture shoved out of doors and left to rot in the weather. No sagging line of grimy laundry. Just winter flowers. Just pot shrubs trimmed into the shape of animals.