What Came Before He Shot Her (84 page)

That meant Toby. For Ness—and this was something that Joel had been a long and terrible time understanding—had already been dealt with.

Joel felt a hard bubble rising within him, one that grew as it climbed from his guts and worked its inevitable way to his throat. There, it wanted to burst from him in a sob, but he wouldn’t let it and he couldn’t let it and he had to avoid it no matter what. He put his arms on the table and his head in his arms.

He said, “Where’s Toby?”

“He’s safe,” the constable called Sherry told him.

“Wha’s that mean?” Joel asked. “Where’s Aunt Ken?”

There was no answer to this. The silence allowed Joel to work out the answers for himself, which he was quick to do: Toby had been hustled off to care—that nightmare place in which children entered the maw of a system that seemed fashioned to house them and then forget them—because with one Campbell locked up for a knife assault and another Campbell involved in a deadly shooting, the police, Social Services, and everyone else with a working brain had proof positive that the home of Kendra Osborne was no place for a juvenile to reside.

Joel wanted to demand to see Fabia Bender, in order to tell her that things weren’t like that. He wanted her to know that
nothing
that happened was down to his aunt at all. He wanted to tell her it was down to someone and something else. But he couldn’t say.

Everything within his mind then became a series of images. They played against his eyelids when he closed his eyes; they seemed present when he even held his eyes open. There was his father getting shot in the street one day. . . . There was his mother holding infant Toby out of the third-floor window. . . . There was Neal Wyatt coming after him in Meanwhile Gardens. . . . There was Glory flying off to Jamaica and the nighttime cold in Kensal Green Cemetery and Cal trying to tell him not to get involved with the Blade and George Gilbert and his mates doing Ness behind closed doors and Toby on the barge with the barge in flames . . .

There was too much to think about and not enough words in the world to explain things in such a way that he would not end up grassing. Say nothing and you had a chance to live. Name a name and you died by degrees.

So Joel told himself that the Blade would come for him. He’d done it before. He’d made that phone call when Joel had been brought in for attempting to mug the Asian woman in Portobello Road. It stood to reason that there was hope he would make a similar phone call now.

But the thought of phone calls took Joel directly to the phone call that had brought the police directly to Meanwhile Gardens to pick him up.

You scratch my back, I scratch yours.

Joel squeezed his eyes shut so hard that he should have seen stars, but all he saw were more images. He swallowed hard, and the noise he made sounded to him like a sonic boom that sent shock waves through the room. The constable put her hand on his back. He tried to take meagre comfort from this.

But she intended no comfort. She said his name. He realised he was meant to look up.

He raised his head and he saw that while his thoughts had done cart-wheels through his head, three more individuals had entered the interview room. Fabia Bender was one of them. The others were a tall black man in a business suit, a knife scar tracing a route down the side of his face, and a dumpy-looking woman in a donkey jacket that looked like something from the charity shop. These two stared at Joel. Their faces showed nothing. He took them to be plainclothes detectives, which indeed they were: Winston Nkata and Barbara Havers from New Scotland Yard.

Fabia Bender said, “Thank you, Sherry,” to the constable, and the woman left them. Fabia took her place next to Joel, while the tall black man and the dumpy woman sat at the other two places at the table.

Sergeant Starr, Fabia Bender told Joel, was fetching him a sandwich.

They knew he was hungry. They knew he was tired. Things could, if he wanted, be over soon.

The black man spoke then, and while he did so, his companion kept her stony gaze fixed on Joel. He could feel the antipathy running off her. She frightened him, although she wasn’t very large.

The man had a voice that blended Africa, South London, and the Caribbean. He sounded firm. He sounded sure. He said, “Joel, you killed a cop’s wife. You know that? We found a gun nearby. Finger-prints on it that’ll turn out to be yours. Ballistics’ll show the gun did the killing. CCTV film places you on the scene. You and ’nother bloke.

What d’you got to say then, blood?”

There seemed no answer he could give to this. He thought of the sandwich, of Seargeant Starr. He was hungrier than they even knew.

“We want a name,” Winston Nkata said.

“We know you weren’t alone,” Barbara Havers added.

Joel’s reply to this was a nod. A single nod only, and nothing else.

He gave it not because he agreed with anything the two detectives were saying but because he knew that what would happen next had been long determined by the unchanging world through which he moved.

Enormous thanks go to my fellow writer Courttia Newland in London, whose introduction to Ladbroke Grove, West Kilburn, North Kensington and the housing estates therein proved invaluable to my work both on this novel and on its predecessor
With No One as Witness
. I thank Betty Armstrong-Rossner for sharing her time with me at Holland Park School as well as for answering questions via email after my visit there.

As always I am so indebted to Swati Gamble of Hodder and Stoughton that I can’t hope to repay her kindness and generosity.

In the U.S., I must express my appreciation this final time—alas—to my wonderful assistant Dannielle Azoulay who could not be prevailed upon to move to the Pacific Northwest with me; to my husband Thomas McCabe for ceaselessly supporting the enormous effort that goes into completing a project of this nature; to my longtime cold reader Susan Berner for her early comments on the second draft of this novel, to my editor at HarperCollins, Carolyn Marino, and my editor at Hodder and Stoughton, Sue Fletcher, for their enthusiasm for the idea of turning the prism of Helen Lynley’s murder and looking at it from a different angle; and to my literary agent Robert Gottlieb, for doing his part so well so that I can do mine.

As an American writing a novel set in London, I will have made unintended errors in these pages. The errors are mine alone and not the product of anyone who assisted me.

Seattle, Washington

December 12, 2005

ELIZABETH GEORGE is the New York Times bestselling author of thirteen novels of psychological suspense, one book of nonfiction, and two shortstory collections. She lives in Seattle, Washington, and London.

www.elizabethgeorgeonline.com