What Came Before He Shot Her (82 page)

In the meantime, the host said in a solemn voice, the victim of the shooting remained on life support, pending the weighty decision that her husband and family had to make about the fate of their unborn child.

Joel heard these last words like something spoken underwater.

Unborn child
. The woman had been wearing a coat. He hadn’t seen—

they
hadn’t seen or known—that she was pregnant. If they had seen, if they had even guessed . . . None of this would have happened. Joel swore this to himself. He clung to the thought of it, as he had nothing else to cling to.

He pushed himself off the settee and went to the television. He switched it off. He wanted to ask someone what was happening to him and to the world as he knew it. But there was no one to ask and at the moment what constituted his consciousness was what he could hear, which was, from above, the noise of Toby scooting about in the bath-tub.

JOEL PLAYED TRUANT from school to find Cal Hancock. He began his search for the Rasta by lurking around the block of flats in which Arissa lived, certain that Cal would turn up there eventually, standing guard for the Blade as always. As Joel did this, he tried not to think of the CCTV pictures. He also tried to drive from his mind other relevant details that boded ill for him: the flood of newspaper stories with that CCTV picture of him on their front pages; the au pair who’d seen him up close; the gun that was lying in someone’s garden along the way from Eaton Terrace to Cadogan Lane; his discarded cap at the base of one of those garden walls; a lady languishing on life support; a baby whose fate had to be decided. He did, on the other hand, think of Neal Wyatt who, along with his entire crew, was certainly making no attempt to harass Joel, Toby, or anything remotely Campbell.

From this, Joel took evidence that Neal indeed had been sorted by the Blade. No longer a supposition, this, no longer a belief he tried to cling to. There would now, he told himself, never again be trouble from Neal. The Blade had performed as promised because he’d been informed by Cal that Joel had performed as promised, and the Blade had no need ever to know that Cal Hancock and not Joel had been the one to pull the trigger on the lady in Eaton Terrace. Cal’s fingerprints weren’t even on the gun should the gun be found, so unless Cal told the Blade the truth, no one on earth would have a suspicion that Cal and not Joel had carried the mission to its conclusion. While there was no cash, handbag, or jewellery to show for it, there was enough notori-ety to prove that the Blade’s instruction had been followed to the letter.

“_Real_ mugging dis time, Jo-ell,” the Blade had told him when he’d handed over the gun. “You mon enough to do it right? Cos it better be right, and then you ’n me, we’ll be done. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. An’ one t’ing more, Jo-ell, listen good. Th’ gun got to be used.

I want to hear it been fired. More exciting dat way, y’unnerstan? More like you mean business when you tell some bitch to hand over her money.”

At first, Joel had thought the target would be a local woman, like the Asian woman he’d tried to mug in Portobello Road. Then he thought—considering the instruction that the gun was to be fired—

that the mark was a female who needed sorting. It would be, perhaps, a crackhead fleabag who was turning tricks for a fingernail’s measure of powder. Or perhaps it would be the tart belonging to a dealer who was trying to take over some of the Blade’s patch. It would, in short, be someone who would see the gun and cooperate instantly, and it would happen in a part of town and at a time of day where a gunshot would mean business as usual among the drug dealers, the gangsters, and the general flotsam and jetsam of the population and consequently would probably go unreported at the most and uninvestigated at the least. In any case, it would just be a gunshot, the weapon fired into the air, fired into the wooden frame of a window, fired into a door, fired anywhere but at a real person. Just fired. That was all.

This ill-founded belief was what Joel had clung to, even as they’d boarded the underground train, even as they’d trotted along through a part of town that, with every step he had taken, declared itself to be some place quite different from the world that he was used to. What he hadn’t expected was what he’d been presented with for the mugging and for the weapon firing: a white lady coming home with her shopping, one who smiled at them and asked if they were lost and looked like someone who believed that there was nothing to fear as long as she stood at her own front door and showed strangers kindness.

Despite what he did to reassure himself, Joel’s thoughts went feverishly among three points as he lurked about and waited for Cal. The first was the actual shooting of the woman who’d turned out to be not only a countess but also the wife of a Scotland Yard detective. The second was that he’d done what he’d been
told
to do—even if Cal was ultimately the one to fire the weapon—and no matter the means to get to this end, the end had been reached and that meant Joel had proved himself. The third was that there was a film of him in Cadogan Lane, there was an au pair who’d seen him up close, and there was a gun with his fingerprints on it, and all of that meant something which was not good.

Ultimately, Joel saw that his only hope lay in the Blade. If Cal did not show up the next time that the Blade chose to do his business on Arissa in her flat, it would mean that Cal was well and truly gone. And if Cal was well and truly gone, it would mean that Cal had been spirited off because it made no sense that the Blade might actually do
away
with Cal instead of just easing him out of London for as long as it took for the heat of the shooting and its aftermath to run its course. The way Joel looked at the situation—indeed, the only way he
could
look at the situation—was to decide that if the Blade could do all that for Cal, he could do it for Joel, and with a photograph of Joel in the process of being enhanced, that was something which had to be done, and soon.

He wanted shelter and he needed shelter. As things turned out, he didn’t have to wait long for the moment during which his request for sanctuary went answered . . . before he even made it.

On Portnall Road, he’d hidden himself on the porch of a building near Arissa’s, safely away from view. He’d been there an hour, hoping the Blade would show up to pay a call on his woman. He was shivering in the cold and had cramp in his legs when the Blade’s car finally pulled up. The man himself got out, and Joel stood, preparatory to making his approach. But then Neal Wyatt removed himself from the car as well, and as Joel watched, the Blade disappeared into the building and Neal established himself in what could only be called the Cal Position: bouncing a small rubber ball against one wall of the entrance to the building as he himself lounged against the other.

Joel ducked. He thought,
How . . . ?
And then,
Why . . . ?
He stared at nothing as he tried to puzzle out what he’d seen, and when he next ventured a look at the entrance to Arissa’s building, it was to see that he’d been noticed despite his efforts: Neal was gazing right back at him. He pocketed the ball he’d been bouncing. He sauntered down the path, crossed the road, and came along the pavement. He stood there, observing Joel in his inadequate place of hiding. He said nothing, but he looked quite different, and it came to Joel that
what
he looked like didn’t have much to do with having been sorted by anyone for anything.

Joel remembered in that moment what Hibah had said to him: Neal wants respect. Can’t you show him respect?

Clearly, Joel saw, Neal had done something to get it. Joel expected the outcome to be an attack—blows, kicks, knives, whatever—delivered by Neal to his own pathetic person. But no attack came.

Instead, Neal spoke, and it was only a single statement that he made, tinged with weary sarcasm. “You are one stupid redskin fuck.” Having said this, he turned and walked back to the entry to Arissa’s building, and there he remained.

Joel himself was Lot’s wife: the desire to flee but eternally absent the ability to do so. Ten minutes passed, and the Blade came outside, Arissa following, dog to master. The Blade said something to Neal, and the three of them moved in the direction of the Blade’s car. He opened the driver’s door as Neal got in on the other side. Arissa remained on the pavement, waiting for something that was soon in coming. The Blade turned to her, jerked her over, cupped one of her buttocks to hold her in place, and kissed her. He released her abruptly. He pinched her breast and said something to her and the girl stood before him, looking devoted, looking like someone who would never cross him, who would wait right there till he came for her again, who would be exactly what he wanted her to be. Precisely, Joel realised with a jolt of understanding, like someone who was
not
his sister, who did not act or think like Ness. Someone, in short, who gazed upon the Blade in a way that Ness was unlikely to look at any man.

Joel thought, then, about how many times he had heard the Blade mouth that unpleasant imperative about his sister, and a glimmer of light began to illuminate the darkness around him. But that glimmer of light was like ice against his heart and its incandescence radiated on the simple
confl uence
of events as they had occurred in his life. Joel saw that they’d all led to this precise moment: Neal Wyatt waiting in the car like someone who knew very well that he belonged there, the Blade showing Arissa what was what, and Joel himself watching the action, receiving a message he’d been meant to receive from the very first.

Cal didn’t matter. Joel didn’t matter. In the final accounting, Neal and Arissa didn’t matter. They themselves didn’t know this yet, but they, too, would learn once their purpose had been served.

What Joel did next, he did to acknowledge all the times that Cal Hancock had tried to warn him to keep clear of the Blade. He emerged from his useless hiding place, and he approached the car, the Blade, and Arissa.

He said, “Where’s Cal?”

The Blade glanced his way. “Jo-ell,” he said. “Looks like t’ings’re getting real hot for you, bred.”

“Where’s Cal?” Joel repeated. “What’ve you done to Cal, Stanley?”

Neal got out of the car in a liquid movement, but the Blade waved him back. He said, “Long time Cal’s been wanting to see his fam’ly, innit. Out there in Jah-may-ca land, wiv steel bands, ganja, and reggae all night. Uncle Bob Marley looking down from heaven. Cal scratch my back, so I scratch his.” He jerked his head at Neal, who obediently got back into the car. Then he kissed Arissa once again, and he pushed her towards her building. He said, “Anything else, Jo-ell?”

There was no hope, but Joel said it anyway. “That lady . . . I di’n’t . . .”

But he didn’t know how to finish what he’d started, so he said nothing further. He merely waited.

“Didn’t what?” the Blade asked him blandly, without curiosity.

A moment for decision, and Joel made the only one he could.

“Didn’t nuffink,” he said.

The Blade smiled. “Mind you keep it that way.”

T HE E -FIT CAME next, supplied courtesy of the au pair who’d wielded the toilet plunger. Typical of the London tabloids, she became the her-oine of the moment, and her past and present were explored thoroughly as, next to her own picture, was featured the e-fit of the ginger-haired young lout with whom she’d struggled.

“Is This the Face of a Killer?” was the headline that accompanied the e-fit in the
Daily Mail
, the front page of which Joel saw fluttering on the pavement outside Westbourne Park station. Like most e-fits, it didn’t look much like him, but the news story that accompanied it revealed that the enhancement of the video image was complete. Additional footage from the Sloane Square underground station had been analysed, the paper reported. The police had isolated more images. Scotland Yard indicated an arrest was imminent, as tips flooded the lines dedicated to the cause of tracking down the killer of the wife of one of their own.

Joel had taken Toby to Meanwhile Gardens when it finally occurred.

They were in the skate bowl, in the topmost and simplest of the arenas, and Toby was delighting in the fact that he’d managed to balance long enough to glide from one side to the other without falling off his board. He was crowing, “Lookit! Lookit, Joel” when the first of the panda cars slowed and then stopped on the bridge over the Grand Union Canal. A second panda car took up a position in Elkstone Road, just beyond the corner of the child drop-in centre, but visible enough that Majidah looked up from what she was doing inside the centre, frowned, and decided to walk outside into the play area to make certain the children were safe. A third car parked at the turn from Elkstone into Great Western Road. Out of each of these cars, a uniformed constable climbed. The drivers remained inside.

They converged on the skate bowl. It came to Joel as he watched their approach that, clearly, he’d been under observation by someone from somewhere—perhaps he’d even been followed for the past days since he’d seen the Blade—and when the moment had seemed appropriate, that person had placed a phone call to the Harrow Road police.

And here they were.

The constable from the car nearest the drop-in centre was the first to get to Joel. He said, “Joel Campbell?” and Joel said to his brother,

“Tobe, you got to go home, okay?”

True to form, Toby said “But you said I could ride my skateboard and you said you watch me. Don’t you ’member?”

“We got to do it later.”

“Come with me, lad,” the constable said to Joel.

Joel said, “Tobe? C’n you get home by yourself? If you can’t, I ’spect one of the cops’ll take you.”

“I want to skateboard. You said, Joel. You promised.”

“They ain’t lettin me stay here,” Joel said. “You go home.”

The constable from the bridge arrived next. He said that Toby was to come with him. When he heard this, Joel thought the constable meant that he would take Toby home so that the little boy wouldn’t have to go on his own, despite how close it was to the skate bowl, and he said, “Cheers.” He began to follow the first constable to his car at the kerb near the child drop-in centre—his head averted so that he didn’t have to look at the Pakistani woman watching from behind the chain-link fence—but then he saw that Toby wasn’t being led towards Edenham Estate at all, but rather towards the bridge.