Until Death

by Knight, Ali

  She stood up, heard the banging of boxes being moved further across the warehouse. A young man was stacking crates in a corner by himself. He was the only one wearing the regulation safety hat. ‘Do you have a copy of the reports that were done on this wood?’

  The two men looked at each other. ‘You’ve got those in the office, no?’ the first one said.

  ‘Can’t you find a copy here?’

  He shrugged. ‘I could, but …’

  You’re too bloody lazy to, thought Georgie.

  ‘You can get them when you go back upstairs.’

  The man sitting by the table yawned as he turned a page of his paper. Now Georgie got angry. Laziness was an unforgivable sin in her eyes. ‘You read that page already. Or can’t you read?’

  Both men looked at each other and burst into sniggers. ‘Feisty!’

  The man turned the Sun, held up page four, pretending to read. The topless Page 3 teenager grinned through newsprint at Georgie.

  ‘Why don’t you two just fuck right off?’

  Their smiles got broader, they held up their hands in mock surrender. ‘Can’t you take a joke?’

  ‘Yeah, don’t get so touchy …’

  ‘She’s a new recruit who likes smelly boxes.’ The two men roared.

  ‘You take orders from the office, right?’ Georgie said. ‘I want to see the dog handler’s report on this wood.’

  ‘It’s already been done.’

  ‘Do it again.’

  They weren’t laughing now. The one holding the Sun had turned deadly serious. ‘Run along back to the office, little girl, this is where the big boys work.’

  ‘And I want the density check done again. I’ll come back in three hours.’

  She left the warehouse, glancing briefly at the silent young guy by the crates. The word ‘bitch’ seemed to float on the drifting currents of air behind her.

  27

  It was strange for Ricky actually to talk to the woman who’d put him behind bars. He’d got her number from the London theatre and had just phoned her up. They were courteous with each other, amiable. Ricky found he quite liked lying, pretending to be someone he wasn’t. He’d had to act tough to survive the worst that jail threw up, but he hadn’t been forced to change who he really was. Dawn’s passion for make-believe had meant convincing Kelly that he was a prospective client had been straightforward. He could talk the talk without struggle.

  She didn’t offer to meet at her house, that would have been too much good fortune for Ricky, and he knew life wasn’t like that. She had a studio at the docks where she kept the large-scale pieces – a Chinese New Year dragon that was never used, a collection of Janus masks, two extra white rabbits from an Alice in Wonderland production. She talked a lot. Too much, Ricky thought. You revealed your weak spots if you talked a lot. Her location was interesting too; she couldn’t stay away from the big ships. Her husband had worked at Southampton docks before he died, along with her kid. A boating accident, his lawyer had said.

  The studio was bigger than he was expecting, next to a row of low offices and a car park. He sat in the car and watched the doorway. She came on time, wrapped up in a large black coat and wearing a black beret. She unlocked the door and it banged shut behind her. Fifteen minutes later the pay as you go phone on the passenger seat rang and then beeped with a message. She was wondering where he was. An hour later she came back out the door. She had waited a long time for him, but then maybe others had got lost trying to get out to the docks. She walked to an Audi and drove off and he followed.

  When she pulled into the underground garage at St Pancras he spent some time staring at the upper levels. She lived in a building with gargoyles on it. There had been a time when he had aspired to that, had felt that big and brash was how you judged worth. He had fancied himself a player, skimming off from deals at the docks, imagining his influence growing not steadily and slowly, but in leaps and bounds. Someone had plotted his fall, someone else had been there to move in when he was removed. That’s why he had been so full of rage, spouting about getting his contacts to kill the witness who had seen him, about getting his crook’s version of justice. How counterproductive. It had forced her into witness protection; they had obviously thought him dangerous enough to carry out his threats, and his shouty nature had cost the state a fortune and changed her life for ever.

  But he had changed, too. His rage had died. He had taken a long look at himself and it had been hard. What he had been doing was illegal, after all. A lot of people did get hurt. He had become a model prisoner, whatever that was, got educated, took down the tension among the long-timers, encouraged the youngsters to keep going. His years inside had been catastrophic for his finances and that used to make him angry, that Dawn had to scrimp. But now he was less interested in clock towers and gargoyles. He preferred to read, do his Open University courses, work with young offenders, walk the dogs, listen to talk radio.

  He had a greater capacity to change than he would ever have imagined. A life unexamined is a life unlived, he’d read somewhere. But he still had curiosity. He wanted to know, to understand why.

  He drove away.

  Kelly was alone in the flat. She was on edge; the man who’d rung about a potential job hadn’t shown or called, and she was nonplussed. She went into the bathroom and popped open her bottle of pills. She would take just one more today, just to keep the anxiety at bay.

  The bottle was empty. She actually saw herself, as if disembodied, turn the bottle over and shake it, trying to make the small white pills reappear. She felt panic begin to climb her spine. She forced herself to think. She took two yesterday. Was that why there were none left? She couldn’t remember. A total blank.

  She took a deep breath. Practical steps, think practically. She would go to the doctor’s, get a repeat prescription. She went down in the lift, five, four, three, two, one second. She opened the lobby door and stepped out into the street. The sun was struggling to break through the cloud cover, but she found it too bright none the less. She felt a headache beginning its rhythmic thump. She turned right and under a grand arch into St Pancras.

  The station was rammed with people pushing trolleys teetering with suitcases and holdalls to trains and away to taxi queues. The walls were lined with more bags, stacked high on top of each other. What was all this stuff that got carted through life? she wondered. The other day she had left with just a handbag for her and her two children; these people couldn’t last two days without baggage they couldn’t physically carry.

  In the main concourse a group of students was exploiting Halloween. There were ghouls and ghosts holding a high banner with a pumpkin drawn on it; two women dressed as witches danced and cackled nearby. They were shaking their charity collection buckets, and the chinking of the coins against plastic sounded like the grinding of heavy chains … Kelly took a deep breath and focused on walking forward. The crowd was large here; she turned this way and that, searching for a faster route. She looked over her shoulder and caught the face of a man in a fishing hat, who was staring at her as they moved past one another. Ten years fell away in an instant. He looked like Michael, was it Michael? Kelly whirled round, searching for the hat. She had to see him again, had to understand that her mind was playing tricks, that it wasn’t – that it couldn’t be – him. A ghoul was near her shoulder, the clanking of the charity bucket by her ear. ‘Hand over your pennies, or the dead will haunt you!’ One of the witches let out a mock scream. The ghoul put his hand on her shoulder as she saw the man in the fishing hat beyond the line of taxis outside the station. She ran after him, the hollering of a ghost chasing her out. She crossed the road and headed into King’s Cross Station. The concourse was being rebuilt, drills clamouring away unseen. A sign proclaimed that the enlarged and improved station could handle forty-five million passengers a year. There was a new roof soaring above her, making people look tiny in the huge expanse.

  She stood in the concourse of King’s Cross among the thousands of commuters, re
sidents, tourists and hustlers of a big city rail terminus. She saw the sign for Harry Potter’s Platform 9¾, the platform that didn’t exist, half a baggage trolley fixed to the wall as if disappearing into the brickwork. Two grinning children were having their picture taken beside it. She hunted with her eyes, scanning thousands of faces to find Michael, all similar and none of them the one she wanted. It seemed as if a tide of humanity were rushing past her, hundreds and hundreds of faces, and then the iron will she’d used to keep a lid on her emotions for all these years began to slide away. She started to look for Amber. She was rotating on the spot in the huge station, faster and faster she turned as the crowds pressed past her, little children everywhere, little girls with their hair in bunches, young girls with balloons, young girls dragging on their mothers’ hands. And the panic and the loss rose and rose until like a great wave it crashed over her and she was collapsing on the new floor of the station and she was screaming Amber’s name, screaming for her dead daughter and her lost husband, hollering for them, her voice louder and more insistent than the drills and the cranes and the cement mixers that were transforming the place into something she didn’t recognise. She sensed children being dragged away from her, bystanders gawping, people averting their eyes, lest she infect them with her madness and her grief.

  After a few moments a woman in a Network Rail uniform and a policeman came and hurried her away to wait for an ambulance.

  28

  Kelly sat on the back step of an ambulance parked outside King’s Cross. She was beyond calm now, deadened by her outburst, her tired limbs leaden, her throat sore. A paramedic was taking her blood pressure, checking her pupils. She rested her head against the hard metal of the door as he tapped her arm, trying to bring her round, like she was a faulty appliance that needed a nudge to get started.

  She stood up uncertainly, apologised for taking up their time and moved away. She headed for the doctor’s for a repeat prescription and an hour later had her replacement pills. She wanted nothing more than to get into bed and go to sleep, but when she got home and came out of the lift, someone was already there.

  Sylvie heard Kelly come back in to the flat – the mid-afternoon amble round doing nothing much must be over. She didn’t bother to call out, Kelly would find her soon enough. She continued to hunt through the bureau in the living room for the papers that Christos had ordered be found. Like now. She pushed one drawer shut and opened the one below it. It was an ugly piece of furniture that she would be glad to see the back of when she moved in here. She’d commission something special for this corner. She tried to sort through a heap of junk. Was there anything this wife actually did? She certainly didn’t clean out drawers. With pleasure, Sylvie heard Kelly’s high and reedy voice, pleading to know what Sylvie was doing in her house.

  She turned casually and saw Kelly standing at the top of the stairs clutching the banister, dark-eyed and wild-haired. She looked like she’d shrunk, even from when she’d last seen her. ‘Oh hi, Kelly. I’m just looking for something.’

  ‘Get out of my house.’

  The empty threats were tedious. Just a lot of hot air. ‘Don’t worry, I’m going.’

  ‘You think it’s OK to come into my house and start digging around in stuff?’

  ‘I’m picking up some papers for Christos.’

  ‘Where did you get the keys?’

  ‘Your husband gave them to me.’

  ‘You can give them back to me.’

  Sylvie shrugged and handed them over. She wasn’t interested in Kelly any more. In fact, she bored her. Kelly had put up a fight; her running with the kids and quite a stash of money had shocked her and Christos. He had been unaware of the money Kelly had collected and the passports. Sylvie had noted that he didn’t have the greatest eye for the details, but then she did, so it wasn’t an issue – and she had insisted they now watch Kelly a lot more closely – but that problem had been dealt with and it was nearly all over, bar a little unpleasantness.

  ‘He’ll never leave me, you know, never let me go. He’ll never give up the children.’

  Sylvie smiled. The wife was clutching at straws. She came towards Kelly and sighed. ‘Maybe that’s what you hope. Maybe you think I’m stuck in the mistress trap, hanging around to wait and please.’

  ‘I don’t care what trap you’re in.’

  ‘After all, why would he want to let you go? Tragedy has defined you, put you on a pedestal that no one can knock over. We always want what we can’t get, ain’t that the truth?’ She couldn’t resist, was close enough to Kelly to put out a hand and clasp her chin with her palm, as soft as a cat’s paw. Kelly didn’t pull away. Her eyes were large and brown and bloodshot, transfixed by Sylvie, as if she were seeing her for the first time.

  ‘Has he hit you?’ Kelly asked. ‘Tell me, has he ever?’

  ‘Jesus, Kelly, of course not! You need to see the doctor again—’ But she had clearly made up her mind, had the vanity to assume what befell her must happen to all of her sex.

  ‘You need to know what he’s like, what he does to women—’

  ‘Sshh.’

  People tended to do what you wanted, if you just told them in the right way. Kelly was silent as Sylvie ran a finger along her jawline, still so firm, the skin smooth. She had always been fascinated by skin, the way it held everything in – yet what festered inside tended to pop out now and again. Skin to skin with Kelly was as close as one could ever get. She felt as if her fingers were merging with Kelly’s face, the tiny hairs crushed by her palm. How she would love to have skin like that. For an intense second she wondered how much softer the skin on Kelly’s inner thigh would be, or in the crook of her elbow. ‘You’re fucking beautiful.’ Sylvie sighed. ‘Beautiful people are so alluring, don’t you think?’

  The spell was broken. Kelly staggered backward. Sylvie noted with detachment that she nearly fell down the stairs. ‘You sound just like him.’

  This angered her, Kelly’s misreading of where the power lay. ‘You got that wrong, honey. He sounds like me.’ She turned to pick up her bag, annoyed that she had been riled by her. She popped the handles of her orange bag over her shoulder and watched Kelly twisting with discomfort and outrage that she was here in her house. For the first time ever Kelly looked dishevelled and old, her padded black coat had a mud stain on the front, left from a clinging child’s rain boot or a football kicked in anger. How low women had to stoop to live the dream, how much children made you give. ‘Why do you have to wear those dark clothes?’ she snapped. ‘Can’t you mix it up a bit?’ She shook her head with frustration. She walked past Kelly, down the stairs, consoling herself by bouncing her fingers on the banisters as she went, in just the way she had seen Kelly do it.

  29

  Georgie was waiting for Sylvie to arrive at the Customs and Excise offices. She was late for their afternoon meeting, and Georgie was getting annoyed. It wasn’t like she had to come far, Malamatos Shipping offices were nearby. When she finally arrived she was ushered in and sat down on a swivel chair, swinging her legs slowly from side to side. The gaudy pattern on her tunic showed up the drabness of the surroundings.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ began Georgie. ‘This is an informal interview. Do you enjoy working at Malamatos Shipping?’

  ‘What is this? A happiness survey? It doesn’t matter if I love it or loathe it, it’s my job, and I do it the best I can.’

  ‘Would you say it’s a happy place to work? Are the staff contented?’

  ‘If they don’t feel lucky, they should. The recession is hammering shipping, like everything else. They should be thankful they have a job.’

  ‘How long have you worked there?’

  ‘Three years.’

  ‘As Christos’s PA?’

  She nodded.

  ‘So you work pretty closely with him, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You’re a director of his charitable foundation, is that correct?’

  Sylvie nodded, not taking her ey
es off Georgie. ‘I’ve been doing it for two years.’

  ‘It’s an extra responsibility on top of your job?’

  ‘Yes. It’s voluntary and unpaid.’

  ‘Did Mrs Malamatos ever want to get involved, that you know of?’

  Sylvie made a dismissive sound. ‘I doubt it. I’m sure it was just too much for her. After all, keeping house and looking after a couple of kids takes up so much time. Or maybe she just thought she was above it.’ The sarcasm was dripping from her.

  Georgie frowned. ‘So Kelly was never much involved in the charity?’

  ‘That pill-popping wreck’s no good to anyone.’

  Georgie glanced at Mo, who was twisting his watch strap round and round.

  ‘You’d think his wife would lift a finger, but in the end I did it. And I enjoy it.’

  ‘How often do you visit the charity offices?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘A few times a year, for meetings.’

  ‘Have you ever seen any trucks in the yard opposite the charity’s office? Any unhitched trailers?’

  ‘I wouldn’t remember.’

  ‘The thing is, the shipment of illegal Brazilian rosewood that has been found on your employer’s ship had a destination that has an address opposite your charity, Ms Lockhart.’

  ‘I know nothing about that at all. The charity helps disadvantaged children – Christos has donated a large sum of money over the years.’

  ‘Do you have the dates of when the meetings took place?’

  Sylvie wasn’t fazed. ‘Of course. I’ll refer to them myself, since I’m a meticulous record-keeper. I don’t have to get anyone else to look it up for me.’

  ‘If you could get that information to us, and let us know when Christos attended those meetings too.’