What Came Before He Shot Her (81 page)

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 film 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 field 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 thumb-nail. 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 prowl-ing 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 like
where 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 film 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 supervis-ing and she told the little boy he could watch the rest of the film 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 film 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 confi dence.