The Concrete Ceiling

by Peter Rowlands

  “Yes.”

  “Meet at Camden Lock. 15 mins.”

  “OK.”

  Immediately I was in a panic. Fifteen minutes was barely enough time to get to the designated spot, even if I left instantly. I called to Ashley, “I know this is terrible timing, but I’ve got to go out. It’s for a story I’m working on. Sort of. It’s urgent. I might not get another shot at it.”

  She came to the kitchen door. “Go! I can’t blame you for not knowing I would be around.”

  “Will you still be here when I get back?”

  “I was planning to take the train down to Cornwall tomorrow morning.”

  “So you’ll stay here for the night? I probably won’t be gone long.” I grabbed my jacket from the hook and picked up my phone. “See you later.”

  Camden Lock was where the Regent’s Canal passed under Camden High Street – at least half a mile away from the flat, probably more. I skipped down the stairs two at a time, then set off at a jog.

  The northern stretch of the High Street was like one long market – not street stalls, but shops that looked like stalls, plus genuine indoor markets behind some of the storefronts. I’d heard that in high summer the area was one of the busiest tourist spots in London. Today was a day for jackets rather than T-shirts, but the autumn sunshine had drawn out plenty of shoppers, and I had to fight my way through them.

  I jogged along between the three- and four-storey Victorian buildings, brick-built in plain Georgian style. Some had outlandish promotional reliefs affixed to them – a snarling dragon here, a giant boot there. Under them, visitors were being beguiled by cheap fashion goods, jewellery, tourist knick-knacks.

  Eventually I was approaching the summit where the road crossed the canal – once a freight waterway, now a tourist attraction in its own right. Drinkers at pubs around the canal basin leaned on parapets, chatting as they gazed out over the water.

  I glanced at my watch. It had taken me nearly twenty minutes to get here. Was Chico still around? How would I know him? I typed out a message on my phone: “At canal bridge. Are you here?”

  For a while there was nothing. I leaned on the steel girder side of the bridge, catching my breath. Had this been a waste of time?

  Just as I was considering abandoning the exercise I felt a tap on the shoulder. A figure in dark trousers and a grey hoodie leaned against the girder beside me. “Are you the man who’s texting me?”

  “Yup.”

  “OK, follow me.”

  Chapter 60

  He led me back in the direction I’d come from, walking briskly and weaving his way adroitly among the shoppers. I thought I’d lost him at one point, but he turned and called, “Come on!”

  Not far down the hill he veered off left into a small shop. I followed him inside. T-shirts and jackets hung everywhere, and at a lower level there were racks of low-cost jewellery and tourist trinkets. We made our way through them, passing a balding man with a Middle Eastern complexion. Chico waved at him as we passed, and the man made some unintelligible comment in reply. Chico swivelled on his heel and called back, “Won’t be long!”

  To me he said, “Through here.” He parted a bead curtain across a doorway at the back of the shop, and I followed him into a space that was evidently half kitchen, half storeroom. The beads clattered back into place and Chico turned to me.

  “I sometimes help out in the shop.” He glanced around the room proprietorially. “So what did you want to say?”

  I said, “Let me get my breath.” I looked at his face, which was partly hidden under the grey hood. “You’re Christopher Lawler, right?”

  He peeled his hood away, revealing pleasantly rounded features, brown eyes, and dark hair sculpted into spikes. His cheeks had a slightly reddish tinge, and there was a hint of wispy stubble along his jaw line. One side of his head had clearly been shaven until recently. The hair was now growing back, but it was thinner there than everywhere else.

  “What if I am?”

  “I wanted to talk about Ellie’s father.”

  “How did you get my number?”

  “I know a forensic IT specialist.”

  “Whatever that is.” But I could tell he knew.

  He said nothing for a moment. He seemed to be weighing me up. Finally he said, “You’re the guy they arrested.”

  He was affecting a black south London accent, but it was mingled with a broader estuarial youth-speak, and there was an unmistakable middle class undercurrent somewhere in there.

  I said, “That’s right. Mike Stanhope.”

  “But you got off, and now they’ve arrested this other guy.”

  “Correct.” I waited a beat. “But he didn’t do it either, did he?”

  He shrugged. “I dunno. You’re the guy with the answers.” He glanced around nervously, clearly not as coolly relaxed as he wanted to appear.

  Taking another chance, I said, “Ellie killed him, didn’t she? By accident. But the way things are going, you’re likely to end up taking the blame.”

  “Me? The fuck I am!” He glared at me.

  So there it was – confirmation, more or less, of what I’d guessed. Either Ellie had killed her father or they’d done it together. I said, “So give us all a break – including yourself. Tell the truth”

  “How is that going to help me?”

  “No one is going to blame you for Ellie’s bad temper.”

  “Oh yeah? And you know this because … ?”

  “I’ve got friends in the police.”

  “Good for you. Why should I say anything? They don’t have anything on me.”

  I took a deep breath. It was hard to see beyond the edgy and faintly intimidating figure in front of me. I needed to remember I was dealing with a frightened youth here. I ought to be able to appeal to his conscience. I said, “That other guy, Graham, has confessed. He really believes he killed Ellie’s father. If you don’t speak up, he could spend years in prison for something he didn’t do.”

  There was an old office chair in a corner, with stuffing spilling out from under the faded leather. Chico sat down on it and swivelled from side to side, studying me. “Ellie wants to be a good person,” he said eventually. “Her parents treat her like shit. You can’t blame her if she’s angry.”

  “So she didn’t mean to kill her father. It just happened.”

  “Yes she did!” He glared at me. “That’s what’s doing my head in.”

  This was new. Almost holding my breath, I said, “What actually happened?”

  He looked at me for a long time without answering, then seemed to come to a decision. He said, “We came in the back way, over the fence. We used to do that when we didn’t want Mr Openshaw to know we were there. He always had his head down, working in that front room, so he never heard anything.”

  “But on that day?”

  “We go into the kitchen, and fuck! There he is on the floor, leaning against the breakfast bar and groaning.”

  “He was definitely alive when you got there?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Ellie says to him, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ But he doesn’t reply, he just keeps on groaning. So Ellie, like, jabs at him, as if to say, ‘Come on, wake up.’ But he doesn’t wake up, so she goes at him again. And again.” His face crumpled at the memory. “She ends up hitting him like it’s his own fault he’s lying there.”

  “So how did you leave him?”

  “He toppled over like a dummy.” He shook his head. “You could hear the crack when his head hit the floor. You could literally hear it. Fuck.”

  “Then what?”

  “Ellie tells me to piss off. She says she’ll call the ambulance or whatever.”

  “So you left?”

  “Yeah, I left. Then later Ellie turns up at my house and asks my sister to say she was there the whole afternoon. My sister couldn’t care, so she just says yeah, whatever.”

  My mind was racing. Randomly I said, “I wonder why the police didn’t track her phone. It would have showed that she went t
o the house with you.”

  “She doesn’t use her phone much. She leaves it at mine. She thinks her dad put a tracker app on it so he could see where she was all the time. She uses a cheap pay-as-you-go phone instead.”

  I said, “I suppose you’re keeping your head down in case someone works out that you were there?”

  “Fucking right I am. I never thought she would kill the guy. Jesus! Ellie’s all right, but when she loses it she’s a fucking lunatic.”

  “Yet you’re willing to let my friend Graham go to prison even though he didn’t do it?”

  “He must have knocked Mr Openshaw down in the first place, mustn’t he?”

  “But he didn’t kill him.”

  He glared at me again.

  I said, “You can put the record straight. You can make sure the wrong people won’t get the blame.”

  “But if I say I was there, they’ll blame it on me. Bound to. Ellie will say, ‘Jeez, officer, he just wouldn’t stop hitting my dad. I didn’t know which way to turn.’” He made a fairly convincing stab at Ellie’s voice.

  “If that’s what you think of her, why are you protecting her?”

  He gave a cynical shrug. “They’ll pin it on me, and she’ll get off with a slap on the wrist.”

  “But they’re not even looking for you, so why are you hiding?”

  He shrugged. “I’m waiting to see how the shit lands.”

  “And when Graham goes to prison, you’ll just head home as if nothing had happened? Is that the plan? What kind of person are you?”

  “A wise person.” He started to get up.

  “You wouldn’t be talking to me if you didn’t want to put this right. I can help you.”

  He gave me a belligerent stare. “You said that before. So tell me exactly how you can you help me.”

  “I know people. I can get you a cop who will listen to you. I can put you in front of people who will know you’re telling the truth.” I hoped fervently it was true.

  He looked carefully at me, perhaps weighing what I was saying against his innate scepticism. I felt certain now that he wanted a different outcome. That was surely why he’d agreed to talk to me at all. But I was an unknown quantity: much older, resolutely middle class, and with an avowed agenda to exonerate Graham. I was trying to convince him with nothing more than the power of my personality.

  The sound of voices drifted through from the shop. Chico jumped to his feet and glanced through the bead curtain. He whispered, “Shit! It’s a cop.”

  I peered through myself. A uniformed policeman was laughing with the man I’d seen in the shop. I said, “He’s not here for you, he’s just jawing with the owner.”

  He gave me a dark look. “This is your doing, isn’t it?”

  “Of course it bloody isn’t! How could I even know we were coming here?”

  “Fuck this! I’m not waiting around to find out.” He tiptoed over to a door at the back of the room and eased it open. A moment later he had slipped though it.

  The door led out into a tiny yard. There was no sign of Chico by the time I’d rushed over to it, but the only exit was a gate at the side. I pulled it open and found myself in a narrow alley. To the left it ended in a wall, to the right it led back to the street. I sprinted along it, emerging amongst a throng of shoppers.

  I glanced around wildly for Chico – but was I looking for his spiky dark hair or his grey hoodie? For a moment it seemed like a lost cause, but then I spotted him no more than twenty feet away, pausing to draw the hood over his head. I shouted, “Chico! Wait!” A dozen heads turned to look at me.

  He glanced back at me, then lunged off, crossing the narrow strip of roadway between the pedestrian areas. I more or less elbowed my way through the crowd, but a double-decker bus was nosing its way up the street, and I had to pause to let it pass. By the time it was gone there was no sign of him.

  Chapter 61

  Ashley was sitting at the table when I arrived back at the flat, tucking into the remnants of the bread and cheese I’d bought earlier. She said, “I appreciate the food you’ve laid on.” A quick smile. “These long flights always leave me starving.”

  “You’re welcome.” I slumped down on the sofa.

  “Not a good meeting then?”

  “Ha! You couldn’t really call it a meeting.” I shook my head in wonder. “I’ve just solved a murder case all on my own.” I thought about that. “Well, with the help of a rather clever IT man.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah, I think I am. It’s the murder of Rob Openshaw, the book promotion man. His own daughter killed him. I don’t know if she really meant to, but she certainly didn’t do anything to save him. So the police are blaming the wrong man.”

  Ashley was staring at me in amazement. “And you’re telling me you’ve worked this out by yourself? The police don’t know about it?”

  “Not yet, no. I’ll need to tell them.”

  “And in the end it had nothing to do with those people you saw in Los Angeles?”

  “Not really – but what they told me about the daughter made me realise she might have done it. If I hadn’t spoken to them, I wouldn’t have followed this up.”

  “So where’ve you just been?”

  “I arranged to meet the girl’s boyfriend at Camden Lock. He was actually in Rob Openshaw’s house when it happened. He’s frightened that the police will point the finger at him, so he thinks he’s on the run. But if he speaks up, they’ll know what really happened. They can go after Ellie instead.”

  “And will he?”

  I sighed. “I hope so. He obviously wants to, but in the end he ran off.”

  “The police will be able to find him.”

  “I know, but it would have been better if he’d come forward of his own accord.”

  “That makes sense.”

  I sat up and turned to her. “So why are you over here in Britain?”

  “Partly it’s for a strategy meeting. Bob Latimer might want me to come back to GB at the end of the year. I’m due to see him the day after tomorrow.”

  “But you’d rather stay on in America for a while longer?”

  “Maybe.”

  I didn’t know how I was supposed to react to that. Did she want me to commiserate with her? It certainly felt like that. I couldn’t think of a response that would sound both honest and positive, so I decided to change tack. “You said partly you’re here for a meeting. What’s the other part?”

  She gave me an awkward glance. “I thought we should talk. I mean face to face. I never expected I would have to rush off when you were over in California. It was ridiculous.”

  So we were cutting to the chase already. Was I ready for this? I decided I would have to be, and I needed to plunge in before she took the initiative away. I said, “We can’t go on like this, can we?”

  She took a while to reply. I felt she already knew the answer, but she didn’t want it to sound hasty or glib. Finally she said, “No, we can’t.”

  I gave her a pained look. “That means we’re breaking up, doesn’t it?”

  She shook her head sadly. “We broke up a year ago, Mike. More. We just didn’t notice.”

  To my surprise, I felt tears pricking at the backs of my eyes. Our relationship had started out with such certainty. In the early days, the idea that it might end so soon would have been inconceivable. And it wasn’t that any of the initial attraction had gone; it was just that the surrounding paraphernalia had solidified, emphasising our different trajectories.

  I said, “You’re right. I’m not going to deny it.”

  Now I saw a hint of tears in her eyes too. She said, “It’s a fucker, isn’t it?”

  “Yup.” I didn’t trust myself to say more.

  We sat silent for a while. Perhaps stupidly, I said, “This thing with Sam … ”

  “You don’t have to say anything, Mike. I know what it is. It’s the evidence that things have gone wrong. You don’t have to explain it or excuse it.”

 
“OK, I won’t.”

  There was another long pause, then Ashley started to gather the plates together on the table. She said, “If it’s all right with you, I’ll stay here tonight, then I’ll get the train to Truro in the morning. That’s more or less what I was planning.” She hesitated. “I can sleep on the sofa.”

  I was stung by the irony of a different woman sleeping on my sofa for a very different reason. I said, “There’s no need for that. We haven’t turned into enemies overnight.”

  “I know that, but I’m hardly up for some kind of passionate parting fling – not after an eight-hour flight from California.” She managed a wry smile.

  “Give me some credit.”

  “Just kidding.”

  “We’ll always be mates. I hope you know that. What does it matter if we share a bed one more time?”

  “It would be too sad.”

  “So would sleeping on the couch.”

  Her tears were more evident now. She lifted her hands in defeat. “As I said, it’s a fucker, isn’t it?”

  * * *

  Ashley slept on the sofa in the end. She said, “We’ve made a decision, so we might as well stick to it.”

  I lay awake for what seemed like hours, feeling utterly miserable. When I rose in the morning Ashley looked as if her night had been even worse than mine. “The jet lag always gets you when you fly east,” she said. I decided I’d better leave it at that.

  As she gathered her things together she said, “You won’t really need your flat in Truro any more, will you? You could just move in here full time.”

  She was endowing my presence in north London with a permanence it didn’t have, but I decided to let it go. I merely said, “I’d miss Truro. I’ll hang on to the place until I decide what I’m doing.”

  “Fair enough. I’m sure Bob Latimer will keep on asking you to do editorial work for him, so you’ll still have a reason to visit.”

  Her leaving was swift in the end. I offered to help carry her bags downstairs, but she insisted on doing it herself. “I got them up here, so I’m sure I can get them down again. I’ll grab a taxi as soon as I see one.”