Twelve Days

by Mark Dawson

  Milton raised a hand and she came over.

  “Oh, my goodness,” she said as soon as she saw his face.

  Milton had looked in the mirror earlier: his jaw was one nasty, livid bruise.

  He stood for her and smiled. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Are you okay?”

  He flexed his jaw. “Really—I’m fine.”

  She reached across the table and touched the side of his face. “He’s such a hothead,” she said. “I tried to talk to him, but he said he didn’t have time.”

  “He didn’t know I was coming?”

  “I said you’d been in touch—there wasn’t time for anything else. He didn’t know you’d be there.”

  “It’s okay,” Milton said, understanding a little better why Elijah had reacted the way that he had. “He was surprised. And, anyway, I deserved it.”

  “You didn’t,” she protested. “He’s young. He’s had a difficult few years, and he still doesn’t know who to trust. What happened before—you know what he was like then. Mixed up. And we don’t talk about what happened that often. He gets angry.”

  “He still thinks I had something to do with what happened to Rutherford.”

  Sharon smiled thinly towards him. “I know you didn’t. You helped me. You helped Elijah. Your heart is good.”

  Milton didn’t reply to that. It wasn’t true.

  “I need to see him before Saturday,” he said instead, holding up a hand to stop Sharon from interrupting. “I know you don’t want him distracted.”

  “He won’t agree.”

  “He needs to know I’m on his side. I won’t be able to help him if he doesn’t trust me.”

  “You think he needs help?”

  “I don’t know,” Milton admitted, not sure of how much he should tell her. He decided that there should be no secrets between them. “I went to your old flat when I arrived. One of the boys from before was there—Little Mark.”

  “Edwin,” she said. “I knew his mother.”

  “They know about Elijah. You were right. They’re jealous about it.”

  “Pinky?”

  “Yes,” Milton said. “He was at the workout. Him, Little Mark, the others.”

  She shuddered. “Oh no.”

  “They’re just young lads, Sharon. I can help Elijah, but I do need to speak to him.”

  “Okay,” she replied finally after a few seconds of silence. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Part X

  The Third Day

  32

  M ilton’s jaw still ached the day after the workout. It wasn’t broken, but it still throbbed. The kid had power. Milton corrected himself: Elijah wasn’t a kid anymore. He was nineteen years old, a man, with all the responsibility and pressure that came with it.

  He took an Uber from the hotel to Plaistow. The city became less affluent the farther east they travelled; the houses were cheaper, the shops less ostentatious, yet there was more life here. There were open-air markets with stalls selling clothes, others offering batteries and household goods, refrigerated vans where traders offered cuts of beef straight out of the back. They passed into West Ham, and Milton told the driver to stop opposite the florist that he had noticed on the other side of the road. He hopped out, picked a path through the slow-moving queue of traffic on the other side of the road, and went inside the shop. The atmosphere was heady with fresh blooms; Milton pointed to a bucket of roses and asked for a bouquet. He paid the proprietor and made his way back to the waiting car.

  “All good?” the driver asked him.

  “All good.”

  They skirted the Memorial Playing Ground until they reached the East London Cemetery. He had been meaning to come here all week. Milton thanked the driver, taking out his phone to rate him and leave a tip. He passed between the double piers of an open gate and made his way along the central drive that led to the chapel. He looked left and right and saw thousands of graves.

  Milton had looked on Wikipedia during the drive across town: the cemetery had been established in the 1870s to accommodate the increasing demand for space from the city and the surrounding boroughs. It was the final resting place for Karl Hans Lody, the last person to have been shot as a spy in the Tower of London. That, he thought, and the death all around, seemed apt.

  He had asked Ziggy to find the grave that he wanted. Now he found the aisle that Ziggy had indicated in the northwest corner of the cemetery and walked slowly along it, his eyes cast down at the headstones. It took him ten minutes to find it.

  In Loving Memory of Son & Brother Dennis Rutherford.

  The simple marble headstone had been maintained, and Milton saw that a bouquet, still wrapped in plastic, had been left on the grave in the last few days. He knelt down and rested his hand on the cold stone, laying his own bouquet next to the one that was already there.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

  He stayed there for a moment, his eyes closed. He listened to the birdsong and, in the distance, the sound of someone tilling the ground. He stood, his knees creaking, and made his way back to the gates.

  33

  M ilton looked at his watch. It was ten o’clock. He looked back up and saw that a man was waiting by the gates.

  “Punctual as ever,” Milton said as he drew near enough to be heard.

  “That’s the army for you. Old habits die hard.”

  Alex Hicks grinned and put out his hand. Milton took it and allowed himself to be drawn into a hug. Hicks clapped him on the back.

  “Jesus,” Hicks said. “What happened to your face?”

  Milton instinctively reached up for his jaw. “Yes,” he said. “That. I’ll tell you about it in a minute. Want a coffee?”

  * * *

  There was a café a short distance from the cemetery, and Milton led the way there. It was empty, and Hicks took one of the Formica tables as Milton ordered. He looked back at his old friend. There was nothing particularly distinctive about Hicks’s appearance: short hair kept close to the scalp, medium build, athletic rather than muscular, average height. He looked just like a typical special forces operator, appropriate given that he and Milton had both been in the Regiment together. Hicks had been tapped as a possible recruit for the Group, and Milton had been responsible for assessing him. He was an outstanding soldier, but Milton had detected an underlying goodness running through him and had recommended that he be passed over. Milton had been in the depths of his own self-loathing then and had dismissed Hicks because he had seen something admirable in him. Milton had been unable to sully that. He couldn’t drag Hicks down into the blood and the dirt with the other killers who made up the Group.

  He put the coffees onto the table and sat down. “Thanks for coming.”

  “Not a problem.”

  Milton had helped Hicks extricate himself from an entanglement several years earlier, and Hicks had made it clear that he considered himself to be in his debt. Milton had told Hicks that he owed him nothing, but Hicks, apparently, did not agree.

  “It’s Christmas,” Milton said. “You have kids.”

  “They’re going to the cinema. They won’t miss me.”

  “Still, I appreciate it. What did you tell Rachel?”

  “That you need a hand with something. You know what she thinks about you, John. She would have killed me if I didn’t come.”

  Hicks’s wife had been fighting cancer for several years. A lack of money for her treatment was what had forced Hicks into the compromising situation from which Milton had extricated him, and then Milton had helped find the money to pay for the treatment.

  “How is she?”

  “Still in remission,” Hicks said. “She’s tested twice a year. We’re all over it.”

  “Good.”

  They sipped their drinks.

  “So,” Hicks said with a smile. “What’s so important that you needed to spoil my Christmas?”

  “Do you follow boxing?”

  “Not rea
lly.”

  “There’s a young fighter—Mustafa Muhammad.”

  Hicks frowned. “I’ve heard of him. Supposed to be good?”

  “He’s very good,” Milton corrected. “He’s fighting on Christmas Eve. Biggest fight of his career.”

  “And what does he have to do with you?”

  “I know him,” Milton said. “Met him a few years ago. His real name is Elijah Warriner. He was in trouble—got in with the wrong crowd, went off the rails. I tried to put him straight.”

  Hicks sipped the coffee. “And?”

  “And I nearly did. I got him into boxing, anyway. But this was when I was trying to leave the Group. Control sent one of the others after me. I was shot, and the man I introduced Elijah to was killed. I had to run. Elijah thought—probably still thinks—that I did it. I’ve never really forgotten about him, or his mother. They’re good people. They had a lot of bad luck that they didn’t deserve.”

  “And now?” Hicks said.

  “The kids he used to run around with are jealous. I think they’re going to cause trouble. There was a scuffle at a workout yesterday, and I think that was just the start. There’s one of them in particular—I had a conversation with him yesterday, and he made it very clear that he considers that they have unfinished business. I think something’s going to happen this week—either before the fight or after it.”

  “So can you look after him?”

  “I tried that.” Milton pointed to the side of his face again.

  “That was him?”

  Milton nodded. “He’s going to be hard for me to reach. And it’s just me. I don’t think I’d be able to do it alone.”

  “Fine. I’m in. What do you need me to do?”

  “Thank you.” Milton wasn’t surprised that Hicks had volunteered, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t grateful. “I need you to follow him. He’ll recognise me. He doesn’t trust me enough to let me get close.”

  “But he doesn’t know me.”

  “Exactly.”

  “For how long?”

  “The next couple of days. The fight’s on Christmas Eve. He’ll be out of the city after that.”

  Hicks nodded. “How observant is he?”

  “He’s no fool.”

  “So it’s just me on him?”

  “No,” Milton said. “We have backup.”

  “We do?”

  Milton gestured over to the door. A hunched figure pushed it open and stepped into the café. He had a hood over his head and a rucksack hooked over his shoulder.

  Hicks groaned. “Seriously?”

  “Be nice,” Milton said.

  “You’re that desperate?”

  The figure reached up and pulled down the hood.

  “Look at this,” Ziggy said. “The band’s back together.”

  34

  S ol had an apartment halfway up the old Centrepoint building. Pinky had texted him and said that he wanted to meet; Sol had told him to come over.

  Everyone recognised the old building, one of the first skyscrapers to go up in west London, and he had heard that Sol had bought an apartment just after the place had been converted from offices to residential. Pinky had googled for details in the back of the Uber and had gawped at how much the apartments were going for: they started at £1.8m for a small one-bedroom apartment and went all the way up to £55m for the penthouses on the top floor.

  Pinky gazed out of the car window as the building loomed overhead and shook his head in wonder: everyone knew Sol was smart, but there was smart and then there was million-pound-apartment smart. Bizness had never managed anything like this. Maybe his brother had got the brains in the family.

  Pinky went into the lobby. It was all glitz and glamour, steel and smoked glass with a weird-looking crystal chandelier suspended over a broad flight of stairs that went up to the first floor. He felt out of place here, like he was somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be. He guessed that was the point of it all: the people who lived here had the money to feel special, and they were happy to make it known that they were better than everyone else. Pinky reached down, hiked up his low-slung jeans, and slouched over to the desk.

  “I’m here to see Solomon Brown,” he said.

  The man looked down his nose at him, and, for a moment, Pinky thought that he was going to ask him to leave.

  “Name?”

  “Shaquille.”

  “Mr. Brown said you should go straight up,” the man said. He told Pinky to take the lift to the tenth floor and then make his way to apartment 1016.

  Pinky went across the lobby and pressed the button for the lift. He was sweating and his finger left a smear of grease on the polished metal. Good. He reached out with his hand, pressed all four fingers and thumb on the gleaming elevator door, and drew them down, five trails of grease spoiling the perfect shine.

  The elevator opened and he stepped inside. He pressed the button for the tenth floor and leaned against the wall as the car ascended. The walls and ceiling were mirrored; Pinky looked at his reflection, put his shoulders back and his chin out. His gold chain glittered in the artificial light. He looked good, he thought. He could imagine himself in a place like this. It was beyond him now, of course, but who would have thought he would rise so quickly through the LFB in such a short space of time? He wasn’t a fool: he had been no one before, a no-account younger just like all the others. He had worked hard to ingratiate himself with the elders, with Bizness and his bloods; he had taken their shit, gone to Maccy D’s to pick up their food, ran their errands, all so he could bring himself closer to them, inch by inch by inch. He hated having to suck up to them, to take their jibes and jokes, but he knew it was a means to an end, and that the end would be worth it. That was what had annoyed him so much about JaJa—how the little bitch had caught Bizness’s eye and got closer to him in days than Pinky had managed in months. Fuck that , he thought now.

  Fuck all this, he decided. It was taking too long. He wanted this now , not in five years.

  He hadn’t been ambitious enough. That was going to change.

  * * *

  The elevator reached the tenth floor, and Pinky found his way along the corridor to the door for 1016. He took a breath to settle his nerves and rapped his knuckles against the door.

  It opened. A woman was standing inside. She was fit, dressed in clothes that Pinky could tell were expensive, her skin smooth, her brows plucked into two neat diagonals.

  “Come in,” she said.

  “I’m here for Sol.”

  “I know. He’s just having a shower. Go through into the living room. There’s beer in the fridge if you want one.”

  Pinky went inside. There was an entrance hall, what looked like a bedroom and then a larger living area and kitchen. The floor of the hall was tiled in a pattern that Pinky guessed was designed to look like the outside of the building; he went through into the living room and gaped at the huge expanse of glass and the view outside, London laid out far below, its lights glittering magically.

  He sat down on a chair that looked more suited for display than comfort, took out his phone, and watched the footage again, unable to keep the smile from his face. Everything had gone just how he wanted it to. The youngers had done their job well, he thought. They’d caused mayhem, and, by the time the police had come to close it all down, fights had started between members of all the local gangs. They had instigated it, then let natural enmities take their course. Lots of brothers in the same place, amped up after watching the boys in the ring, a powder keg ready to explode. All he’d had to do was light the match.

  His thoughts ran to the old man and his mood soured. They’d put Little Mark in a cab and told the driver to take him to the hospital. Brother couldn’t put any weight on his right leg. Pinky watched plenty of football, and he knew there was all sorts of shit that could go wrong inside someone’s knee. Zlatan had torn up his ACL, and he had been on the shelf for months. He’d never been the same, not even on FIFA. Little Mark said that the old guy had know
n exactly what he was doing, dropping down out of the way and then hitting him with ‘kung fu shit.’

  Pinky thought of the conversation he’d had with the man on the phone. He remembered him from before. The man had broken into Bizness’s place on the night of the riot, shot him down, and then put a cushion over his face and suffocated him. Pinky had been hiding, pressed down against the floor behind a sofa as the bullets from Bizness’s machine gun tore up the place. The man had taken the cushion away from Bizness’s face and had looked up and seen him.

  Pinky remembered: his expression had been dead, as if what he had just done meant nothing to him at all. He was cold—a killer—and Pinky had thought about him a lot ever since that night.

  Pinky wasn’t scared. He was a killer, too. They had that shit in common, but now the man was back, putting his nose into other people’s business again, and there would be consequences.

  Pinky had decided before they had spoken on the phone: the man was going to have to get done.

  He looked at his watch. He had been waiting for ten minutes. He felt a twist of impatience in his gut. Sol was keeping him waiting to make a point. That shit was childish . He told himself not to get worked up about it.

  35

  T he weigh-in had been scheduled for York Hall with the public in attendance, but after what had happened at the workout, that had all been changed. It was now to be held at the hotel that had staged the press conference, and the audience had been restricted to the press.

  Milton had spoken to Sharon on the telephone earlier, and she had said that Elijah would meet him at the back of the hotel once the weigh-in was concluded. She said that she had managed to convince her son to speak to him for a few minutes. He would hear him out, but there were no promises. Milton didn’t know if it would be enough time, but he wanted to try.

  Milton made his way to the passage behind the hotel in plenty of time. He waited for over an hour before the back door opened and people began to leave. He stepped away from the wall he was leaning against and stood ready for Elijah to emerge.