What Came Before He Shot Her (83 page)

Joel stopped. The day’s cold seeped up his neck and closed around it like a fist. He said, “Where’re they taking my brother?”

“He’ll be looked after,” the constable told him.

“But—”

“You’ll have to come along. You’ll have to get into the car.”

Joel took a useless step towards his brother. “But Tobe’s meant to go—”

“Don’t fight us, lad.” The constable attached himself to Joel’s arm.

“But my auntie’ll wonder—”

“Come along.”

At this point, the driver of the panda car parked in front of the drop-in centre came to them at a jog. He attached himself to Joel’s other arm and shoved that arm behind Joel’s back. He brought out a set of handcuffs and, wordlessly, snapped them on his wrists. He hissed in Joel’s ear, “Fucking little half-breed
bastard
,” and he pushed him towards the car.

“Steady on, Jer,” the other constable said.

“Don’t bloody tell
me
,” the first replied. “Open the door.”

“Jer—”

“Fucking
open
it.”

The first cooperated. In front of Joel, the car door swung open, making an invitation that he could not refuse. He felt a sharp blow on his back, and a hand crushed down on his head, propelling him inside the vehicle. When he was inside, the door slammed shut. As the two policemen climbed into the front seat of the car, Joel peered out of the window, trying to see what had happened to Toby.

The panda car on the bridge was gone. In Meanwhile Gardens, board riders in the skate bowl had stopped to watch the police interact with Joel. They lined the lowest lip of the bowl now—their skateboards balanced against their hips—and they talked among themselves as the panda car pulled away from the kerb to make the turn into Great Western Road for the short drive to the Harrow Road station.

Joel craned his neck to search for a face in the park that would tell him—by its expression—what would happen from here. But there was no face. There was only his inevitable future that had begun playing out the moment the first constable had taken him by the arm.

Beyond Meanwhile Gardens—and this was what Joel could see as the car crossed the bridge over the canal—the back of Kendra’s house was visible. Joel fixed his gaze on it as long as he could, but it was only a moment before the first building on Great Western Road obscured his view.

KENDRA RECEIVED THE word from Majidah. The Pakistani woman was brief enough in her message to the charity shop, where Kendra was in the midst of making a sale to a refugee African woman in the company of an elderly man. Three cars had come from the police, Majidah informed her. Two of them had taken Ness’s brothers away. Separately, this was. And, Mrs. Osborne, the disturbing part comes now: One of the constables put the older boy in handcuffs.

Kendra heard this in silence because it seemed terribly important at the moment that she conclude the sale of table lamps, shoes, and yellow crockery to her customers. She said, “Thank you. I see. I do appreciate the call,” and left Majidah on the other end of the line thinking, Good gracious, it was hardly any wonder when children went so terribly wrong if the adults in their lives were able to receive deadly news without a single wail of horror. As westernised as she had become over the years that she had lived in London, Majidah knew that
she
would never have greeted terrible news such as this without taking at least a few minutes to tear at her hair and rip at her clothing before marshalling her forces to do something about it. So Majidah went on to phone Fabia Bender as well, but her message to the social worker was altogether unnecessary since the wheels of British jurisprudence were already turning, and Fabia was at the Harrow Road station in advance of Joel’s arrival.

Kendra felt herself floundering after the refugees left the charity shop and she was free to absorb Majidah’s message. She did not associate the message with murder. Naturally, she’d seen the story of the shooting in the paper, since, in the constant pursuit of the ever-more-sensational, the editors of all London’s tabloids and most of its broadsheets had made the quick decision that the murder of a cop’s-wife-who-was-also-a-countess easily trumped every other story. So she’d read the papers and she’d seen the e-fit. But like any other e-fit, the one of Joel came only moderately close to his real appearance, and his aunt had had no reason to connect the drawing to her nephew. Besides, her mind had been crammed with other concerns, most of which involved Ness: what had happened to her in years past and what was going to become of her now.

And now . . . Joel. Kendra closed up the charity shop and walked to the Harrow Road police station, which was not far. In her haste, she went without her coat and without her bag. She had with her only demands, and she made them to the special constable working in the tiny reception area where a bulletin board offered easy answers to life’s problems with announcements about Crimestoppers, Neighbourhood Watch programmes, Whistlestop Crime, and rules for Out and About at Night.

“Police picked up my nephews,” she said. “Where are they? What’s going on?”

The special constable—a police wanna-be forever doomed to be just that—looked Kendra over and what he saw was a mixed-race lady looking more black than white, shapely in a narrow navy skirt, with something of an attitude about her. He felt that she was making demands of him, in a way that suggested she’d climbed too far above herself, when she ought to be speaking respectfully. He told her to sit. He’d be with her presently.

She said, “This is a twelve-year-old boy we’re talking about. And an eight-year-old. You’ve brought at least one of them here. I want to know why.”

He said nothing.

She said, “I want to see my nephew. And where’s his brother been taken if he’s not here? You can’t snatch children off the street and—”

“Sit
down
, madam,” the special constable said. “I will be with you presently and what
is
it about this that you don’t understand? Do I need to call someone from within to explain this all to you? I can do that. You can be invited to step inside an interview room yourself.”

It was the
yourself
that told her what she needed to know. “What’s he done?” she asked hoarsely. “Tell me what he’s done.”

The special constable knew, of course. Everyone in the Harrow Road station knew because, to them, this was a crime of such enormity that no punishment was sufficient to mete out to the perpetra-tor. One of their extended fraternity had been struck down through the person of his wife, and a payment would be extracted for this crime. Thinking of what had happened in Belgravia caused blood to boil in the veins of individual policemen and women. Boiling blood produced the need to strike.

The special constable had in his possession the sharpened photo, which had at last been produced from CCTV footage in Cadogan Lane.

Duplicates of this picture were up now in every police station in every borough of the city. He took this picture and he shoved it at Kendra for what he thought of as her viewing pleasure.

“Talking to the sod about this little matter,” he told her. “Sit down, shut your mug, or get out of here.”

Kendra saw that the picture was unmistakably Joel. The dandelion puff of hair around his head and the tea-cake blotches on his face said it all. As did his expression, which was of an animal caught in the lights of an oncoming car. Kendra didn’t need to ask where the picture had been taken. Suddenly, she knew. She crumpled the photo to her chest and she bowed her head.

In the interview room, things were different this time, and Joel understood he was at a crossroads.

No one even questioned him at first. He sat for hours, sometimes with Sergeant Starr, sometimes with Fabia Bender, sometimes with a female constable who was called Sherry by the other two adults. The stringy-haired blonde duty solicitor was not present now—“I’ll be taking your part when the time comes,” Fabia had said to Joel—but the very large and very official-looking tape recorder was always right there, waiting to be switched on. No one pushed the relevant button on it, however, and no one said anything. Not a single word. Instead, they came and went and sat in silence. Joel told himself they were waiting for something or for someone to join them, but their silence unnerved him, making his bones feel rubbery.

He’d already realised that the position he was in—sitting there in the interview room—was likely to play itself out far differently from his earlier visit to the Harrow Road station. He’d drawn that conclusion from his last exchange with the Blade. Then, he’d finally put the pieces together, and he’d seen himself as what he’d long and unknowingly been: an actor in a drama of revenge. It was a drama whose plot he hadn’t understood until that moment of conversation with Stanley Hynds while Neal Wyatt lurked nearby, doubtless waiting for more rewards to flow in his direction, remuneration for what he’d managed to accomplish at the behest of the Blade.

At this precise moment, Joel saw the details only imperfectly. Some things he knew for certain; others he only intuited.

A large mirror hung on the wall opposite the table where he was sitting. Joel deduced quickly and correctly that it was a two-way mirror because he’d seen that sort of thing in police dramas on the television. He expected that people had come and gone on the other side, studying him and waiting for him to give a sign that would mark him as guilty, so he tried very hard not to give that sign, although he wasn’t sure what it was.

He reckoned that people were trying to unsettle him with the wait and the silence. This wasn’t exactly what he’d expected, so he used the time to study his hands. They were out of the handcuffs, and he rubbed his wrists because although there was no mark upon them from the re-straints, he could still feel the pressure and the chafing, through his skin to his bones. He’d been made the promise of a sandwich and he’d been given a can of Coke. He curved his fingers around this and tried to think of something pleasant, of anything but where he was and what was likely to happen next. But he couldn’t manage it. So he dwelt instead on questions and answers.

What did they have on him? he asked himself. A video image and nothing else. An e-fit that didn’t fit at all.

And what did a video image and an e-fit mean? That someone looking vaguely like Joel Campbell had been walking down a street not far from the spot in Belgravia where a white lady had been shot.

That was it. The long and the short of it. The alpha and the omega.

The black and the white.

But at heart Joel knew that there was more. There was the au pair who’d come face-to-face with him inside the house in Cadogan Lane.

There was the old woman who’d been walking her corgi around the corner from where the countess had been shot. There was his knitted cap, left behind in one of the gardens through which they had escaped.

There was the gun, lost in one of the gardens. Once the police had the gun in their possession—which really was only a matter of time, if they didn’t have it already—there would also be the small problem of fingerprints. For Joel’s prints were the only ones on that gun, and this had been the case from the moment that the Blade had wiped the pistol clean and handed it over, fresh as a baby newly born and newly bathed.

The thought of babies newly born and newly bathed brought unbidden into Joel’s mind the thought of the lady’s baby. They hadn’t known, because if they’d known, they’d never have . . . They
wouldn’t
.

All they’d done, he told himself, was just wait for someone to show up in that posh polished street of posh polished houses. That was it. And Joel had not intended her to die. He hadn’t intended her to be shot at all.

This was the point. The shooting of that woman—wife of a Scotland Yard detective, pregnant, returning from a shopping excursion, in hospital now, on life support—was the fulcrum on which Joel’s life was balanced. He was in a precarious and dangerous position, ready to slide in either direction. For Cal Hancock and not Joel had done the shooting and all Joel really had to do was to say the name and not only that name but another name, and this was what he sat there considering in the interview room.

He thought about what they did to twelve-year-old boys who found themselves in the wrong place, with the wrong companion, at the worst possible time. Surely, they didn’t put them in gaol. They sent them somewhere, to some detention centre for boys, where they were held for a while before they were released back into their communities. If their crimes were heinous enough, the authorities released them elsewhere, with new identities and the possibility of a future before them.

This, then, was what Joel saw as an option he could choose if he wanted to do so. For he’d had no knowledge of what was going to happen that day in Belgravia, and he could tell them that as well. He could say that he was just hanging with one Cal Hancock on that afternoon, and they’d got on the tube and ridden around on the circle line and got off where it seemed that they could . . . what? he wondered. Mug someone was the obvious answer, and Joel knew he would have to offer that much in whatever statement he finally made.

So he would tell them, he decided, that they’d intended to mug a rich white lady if they could find one, and things went bad in the midst of the mugging. Cal Hancock pulled out the gun to frighten her, and the gun went off. But none of it had been
meant
to happen, none of it was planned, none of it had been thought out.

Thus it seemed to Joel as he sat in the interview room, with the waiting and the silence growing heavier by the moment, that naming Cal Hancock would ensure his own release, sooner rather than later.
I
was wiv a blood called Cal Hancock
. Eight words and that would be it: The true guilty party would be named, someone old enough to be thrown into prison for a life sentence that would rob him of at least twenty years. Eight words. Eight words only. That was all.

But despite his thoughts, which were bouncing around in his skull like rubber balls, Joel knew that he could not grass. He also knew that everyone in the Harrow Road police station understood this as well, as did the Blade. There was simply no way. Grass and you were finished; grass and everyone whose life touched yours would suffer for your grassing as well.