She dropped the huge knife in the sink, turned off the taps and the gas under the pan of sweating onions. Wiping her eyes on the back of her hand, she opened the door to see Jay Smith, with a baseball cap crammed low over his forehead and his hood up over it, staring at the floor.
‘C’n I talk to Dave?’ he said in a voice so deep and strangulated she could barely decode it.
‘He’s gone swimming. Was he expecting you?’ she said, knowing he hadn’t been.
Jay’s bent head swayed from side to side. A thin trickle of blood oozed out from under his cap and spread down the side of his round face. His skin was the colour of oatmeal, much paler than usual, so his spots stood out even more clearly.
‘You’d better come in. They’ll be back in about half an hour. d’you want some juice? Or a cup of tea?’
‘Yeah. OK. Tea. Three sugars.’ His voice was a little easier to understand as he slowed it down, but nothing like as clear as it could be.
He slopped across the floor and she checked the trainers. These were old and very dirty. There was blood on them too, but darker, older. Only when she’d shut the door securely behind him, did Trish say, ‘I’ll put the kettle on, Jay. But tell me: are you hurt?’
‘Nah.’
‘There’s blood on your face.’
‘Fuckin’ hell,’ he said, wiping the back of his hand against it, then rubbing his hand up and down his jeans.
‘Jay, what’s happened.’
“s nothing.’ He shook his head with such vigour that the blood flow increased. The more he tried to wipe it away, the faster it came. Soon there was blood all over his hand and the hood. He pushed it back. With the shadows gone, she saw the swelling in his lip, where David had hit him. That didn’t look nearly as bad as she’d feared, and it wasn’t bleeding any longer.
‘Jay, I need to do something about that cut. Will you take off your baseball cap?’
She saw he’d been crying and knew she mustn’t comment. ’Look, I’ve got a first-aid kit here. Let’s go into David’s bathroom and I’ll clean it up for you and put on a plaster. That way you won’t drip blood everywhere.
When he took off his cap, she had to fight hard not to gasp. There was a growing bruise just above his temple and a pattern of dents, along with a slash that had not only broken the skin but gone quite deep. To her unaccustomed eye, it looked as though someone had given him a tremendous, back-handed blow with a hand that wore a heavy ring with several sharp edges. It was far too fresh to have been part of David’s attack.
She pulled down the loo seat and its lid. ‘Why don’t you sit there, in the light, and I’ll have a go. It looks nasty, but I think you’ll be able to manage without a stitch. Look, I’m going to use antiseptic wipes, just to be sure the cuts are properly clean, and they will sting. OK?’
He nodded. The tears had stopped. She hoped she was doing the right thing in not taking him to hospital. As gently as possible, she tipped his head to one side and began to wipe the edges of the wound with the Dettol-soaked tissue.
‘Who did this to you, Jay?’
‘Me fuckin’ bruvver of course.’
‘Does he often hit you?’ She tried to keep all expression out of her voice so that she didn’t rev him up even more.
‘Yeah. They call it “justified chastisement”.’
‘What?’ All her good intentions disappeared in a rush of outrage on his behalf. ‘Who does?’
‘It’s what my social worker said once when she was talking to Darren. He tells me to do stuff, ’n if I don’t he hits me. Not always. But us’y.’
Trish was working out what to say next, how to express her absolute condemnation of Darren’s violence without making life at home even harder for Jay.
‘Today he telled me to watch Kimberley. My sister. ’n I was playing with David’s PSP and I didn’t see when she run off. So Darren hit me.’
Trish stopped what she was doing. She couldn’t trust herself to be gentle enough while she was trying to work out the whole story.
‘David’s Play Station Portable? Did he give it to you?’
‘He give me a lend of it. That’s why I come this morning. When Darren hit me, it broke.’ He looked up at her.
His blue-grey eyes were huge and worried beneath the unattractively short fringe. They looked honest, but that didn’t mean anything.
‘I had to tell him. Cos I haven’t got no money to buy him another one. I was goin’ to, like, say—’ He let his head sink down again.
At last Trish could see something of what must be making David cling to the friendship. Jay wasn’t just an exotic stranger with an occasional talent for wicked humour; he was generous-minded and brave. And he obviously cared about David. It would have been so easy to pretend someone had stolen the broken Play Station, but he’d come to confess.
She went back to cleaning the wound. There wasn’t a sound from him as she worked, but he couldn’t stop himself flinching when the pressure of her fingers hit the tenderest bits of his forehead. It took nearly five more minutes before she had his face clean and dry enough to fix on a large, waterproof plaster. He was lucky, she thought, that the blow had missed his temple.
‘D’you feel dizzy?’ she asked. ‘Or sick?’
‘Hungry,’ he said with a shadow of his old gleeful grin.
‘That’s a good sign. But lunch won’t be ready for another hour. d’you want to come and help me cook?’
He shrugged, perhaps not wanting to admit he didn’t know anything about cookery, but he followed her out of the bathroom and past the fireplace to the kitchen.
‘We’re having a kind-of chicken-crumble thing,’ she said, pointing to the glass square in the oven door, where the chicken was roasting so that she could tear the meat off the bones and add it to the sauce. ‘Baked potatoes and broccoli. Then cheesecake. I should’ve made that yesterday, but I was too tired. I think it’ll set in time.’
She assembled her modest ingredients and the quiche dish that would hold the finished pudding. As she started to bash a bagful of biscuits with the rolling pin, Jay said:
‘What’re you doing?’
‘Making the base. When the biscuits are reduced to crumbs, they’ll be bound together with melted butter and smoothed into the dish. It’s instead of pastry. d’you want to do this bit while I do the butter?’
He accepted the rolling pin and went at it so vigorously he split the bag. Trish contained her laughter and found another bag. Later, she showed him how to smooth the sticky crumbs up the sides of the dish, then explained how the mixture of condensed milk and cream would be turned by the lemon juice into a cheese-like substance.
‘I’ve never seen anything like that before,’ he said, as he watched the thickened pale-yellow mixture flop out of the bowl. ‘How d’you learn it?’
‘From my mother,’ Trish said, noticing that he was back to using standard English and glad of the opportunity to open real communication with him. ‘She was a single mum, too. My dad ran away when I was seven, so I know a bit about—’
Jay looked at her with such clear disdain that she both rejoiced at his intelligence and quailed at her misjudgement.
‘Yeah,’ he said after an uncomfortable pause. ‘But you didn’t have no brothers, did you? Not like me ’n George.’
‘George? George Who?’
‘You know: your George.’
‘He hasn’t got any brothers,’ Trish said, picking up a large broccoli tree to break into florets.
‘Course he has. One anyway.’ Jay’s contempt for her lack of knowledge was as nothing to her own surprise. ‘Henry. The one he won’t have even at his own funeral.’
‘Oh, him,’ Trish said, as the only way of stopping this uncomfortable conversation. ‘Can you lay the table for me while I deal with the veg? Oh, and you’d better put the cheesecake in the fridge. OK?’
He did as she asked but kept coming back to ask questions about the table laying, which seemed to be wholly new to him. Each time he interrupted her own s
ilent questions: had George been exercising his imagination as a way of helping Jay talk about his experiences at home? Or did he really have a brother he hated so much he’d never said a word to her in all the years they’d had together? She knew about his two sisters and had met them often, but there’d never been any mention of a brother called Henry.
That evening when they’d taken Jay back to the estate and David was asleep, George was leafing through the newspapers for an article he wanted to keep.
‘Jay told me something odd today,’ she said, putting out a hand for the rejected sections so that she could stuff them in a recycling bag.
‘Odder than usual?’ George was clearly distracted by his search.
‘He talked about someone called Henry; your brother?’ Trish let her voice turn up at the end of the sentence to make it a question.
George kept his broad back to her.
‘Hmm. It’s somewhere, this piece about a money-laundering case that ended in the organised crime gang’s murder of their cash-carrying stooge.’
‘Try the business section,’ she said without thinking.
‘It’s not there,’ he snapped. ‘Which is why I’ve already dumped that bit.’
‘Sorry.’ She let a moment pass, then tried again. ‘And I felt a bit of a clot because it was obvious I’d never heard of Henry. Is he—?’
‘Still alive?’ George’s voice was still clipped, almost harsh. ‘As far as I know.’
He turned at last. His face looked held in, as though he was fighting to keep all possible clues out of his expression.
‘He wasn’t in fact half as bad as Jay’s Darren clearly is, but he made my life a misery. I don’t want to think about him. OK? Ah, thank God. It’s here.’
The tearing sound of the newspaper being ripped between his big hands seemed horribly appropriate. Trish knew she had to keep her mouth shut this time.
Chapter 9
Angie woke in the night with an astonishing sense of well-being. For nearly a minute it held and she lay, listening to the cars’ engines pause and rev as they changed down for the corner and watching the pattern of headlights sweep across the ceiling. Then she remembered: John was dead; not, as in the dream, powerful and in charge, driving them to where they needed to go, and making everything come right.
Nothing was going to come right now. However she reworked the evidence, it got worse. Nothing Trish Maguire had made her listen to since the first day had been as important as the revelation of John’s depression.
She hadn’t noticed it. She’d loved him; she’d believed the feeling between them was like superglue and felt it made all his irritability and the privations and anxieties bearable; but she hadn’t noticed he was on the edge of despair. He hadn’t even told her he’d been to the surgery.
What else had she missed? She still didn’t believe Maguire’s shitty insinuations about suicide. No farmer would need to create a toxic fire to kill himself. Not when he had guns and ropes and all sorts of ordinary, swallowable poisons to hand. And no sensible, responsible man would take a risk with something as dangerous as reformulated benzene.
But day after day Maguire’s questions were making it sound as if the fire had to have been caused by blocked vents, and they were what John was paid to prevent. Could he have become so bogged down in misery that he’d lost all sense of responsibility?
Angie turned over again, bashing her pillow and thinking about Maguire’s first expert witness, who’d given evidence on Friday, with that story about how John must have been in the tank enclosure when the explosion happened. Greg had long ago explained that, if the judge believed the story, it would give him a reason to cut their damages and so they had to make it sound incredible in her cross-examination. But she was beginning to wonder whether it could have been true.
Greg had given her a list of questions to put to the expert, and she hadn’t really thought any of them through. Which was why she’d added one of her own: ‘Was there any evidence of cypress bark or needles on the deceased’s back?’
She’d assumed that would prove the explosion had happened when he was beyond the tank enclosure. But the expert had pointed out, in the tone of one explaining the obvious to a child, that it wouldn’t make any difference; there were cypress trees all round the enclosure, so the traces could have come from any of them, whether he’d been inside or out. Of course he was right. She’d felt such a fool and Greg had been vociferously angry. Maguire had looked at her with pity, which was worse.
Then there’d come CWWM’s contracts man, who’d explained to the court that he’d laid out for John precisely what risks they’d face if they had the tanks next to their land, and how important it was for him to monitor the filters every single day. If he’d done that, the man had said, there could never have been an explosion.
Why hadn’t he checked? What had been going on in his mind? Why hadn’t he talked to her about what he was feeling? Had he thought she wouldn’t want to help him?
She closed her eyes, as though that could stop the thoughts and let her sleep. It didn’t even block out the cars’ headlights.
‘Are you coming with us to collect Jay, Trish?’ David called up the spiral stairs as she emerged from the shower on Sunday morning.
No one hearing his casual voice would suspect the constraint and misery that had been building up in him last week. Trish thought of the quickly changing expressions on his face yesterday when he’d found Jay in the flat on his return from swimming. First there’d been suspicion, then hope, then a kind of letting-go, followed at last by his best smile: happy and so confident it was almost cocky.
‘We’re off in five minutes,’ David added. ‘So you’d better hurry if you are coming.’
Trish was tempted to suggest he and George should go off without her while she wrote to the head teacher to warn him about what Jay suffered at Darren’s hands. But she didn’t want to look as though she was sulking after George’s irritable response to her probing of his hidden life last night. She could always write her letter this evening and drop it in at the school on her way into chambers tomorrow.
‘I’ll come with you,’ she called back, ‘so long as you don’t mind if I have wet hair.’
She moved quickly on to the bedroom to dress and was at the foot of the stairs before George had finished clearing breakfast. His smile was tighter than usual, but it was real. So long as she didn’t say anything more about Henry for at least today, all should be well.
The three of them made for George’s comfortable Volvo, which was parked in his favourite place under the nearest of the streetlights. He couldn’t leave it here during working hours because of the residents’ parking rules, but there was no problem in the evenings or at weekends.
‘Southwark has changed,’ he said, bleeping the locks open. ‘When I started staying with you, I never came out without expecting to find broken windows or graffiti.’
‘Considering the flat round the corner’s up for sale for a million quid,’ David said, shooting a prideful smile at Trish, ‘I should think it has.’
But bits of the borough are the same as they always were, she thought, as George drove down towards Peckham and the miserable estate where Jay’s family had their flat. Geographically it was almost next door, but it could have been in another country. It reminded Trish horribly of the place where David and his mother had lived for the first eighteen months of his life, after Paddy Maguire had abandoned them.
David’s mother had been a teacher, who’d believed she could help her pupils only if she understood everything about their lives. Trish often wondered what she’d thought about that decision after she and her toddler son had seen the savage killing that had taken place on their doorstep.
She still hoped David had been too young at the time to have any real memories of what he had witnessed or of the estate where it had happened. He certainly seemed to have no problems with coming so close to it now, but he so rarely talked about his past she couldn’t be sure.
As
soon as George had parked, just under the sign that gave the estate’s name and a map of the various tower blocks and rows of low-rise maisonettes, David was out of the car, shouting:
‘I’ll give him a call. Won’t be long.’
He’d gone before Trish could remonstrate. She turned to George, who smiled again, looking as polite as a friendly stranger.
‘D’you think we’re mad?’ she said.
‘Probably. In what particular respect?’
‘Letting David more or less revisit his own past like this.’
George had both hands on top of the steering wheel and leaned forwards so that his chin was resting on them as he stared out of the pristine windscreen.
‘I don’t know. Some people think it’s necessary to go back and face the horror in order to heal, don’t they?’
Trish was silent. This wasn’t about David.
‘And others,’ he went on, sounding tougher, ‘think it’s safer to live in the present and avoid tearing oneself apart with memories of a time that can’t be changed.’
‘You’re right. And—’ She flinched as a heavy fist banged down on the outside of George’s window. ‘What the hell?’
A hooded figure was bending down, peering in. She couldn’t see much of the face. The fist banged on the window again. She looked around for David and Jay. There was no sign of them.
George activated the central locking, then wound the window down a little way.
‘Yes?’ he said, at his most detached and authoritarian. He sounded almost as bad as Robert.
The hooded face came closer. Trish saw the man couldn’t be much more than seventeen or eighteen, but he looked hostile enough to make her palms sweat. Beneath the hood, his head was shaved.
‘You’re the wanker messing about with me bruvver, ain’t you?’
Trish looked at his hand and saw an ugly great ring with a hideous black stone set in rough-edged metal. She thought of the marks on Jay’s forehead and lost most of her fear. ‘Are you Darren Smith?’
‘Yeah. And he’s the wanker who keeps taking Jay and sending him back with money and presents. I know what you’re up to. And I know how to pertect him. So you can fuck off now, the pair of you, fucking preverts.’
A Poisoned Mind Page 11
