What Came Before He Shot Her il-14

by Elizabeth George

  “Real mugging dis time, Jo-ell,” the Blade had told him when he’d handed over the gun. “You mon enough to do it right? Cos it better be right, and then you ’n me, we’ll be done. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. An’ one t’ing more, Jo-ell, listen good. Th’ gun got to be used. I want to hear it been fired. More exciting dat way, y’unnerstan? More like you mean business when you tell some bitch to hand over her money.”

  At first, Joel had thought the target would be a local woman, like the Asian woman he’d tried to mug in Portobello Road. Then he thought—considering the instruction that the gun was to be fired— that the mark was a female who needed sorting. It would be, perhaps, a crackhead fleabag who was turning tricks for a fingernail’s measure of powder. Or perhaps it would be the tart belonging to a dealer who was trying to take over some of the Blade’s patch. It would, in short, be someone who would see the gun and cooperate instantly, and it would happen in a part of town and at a time of day where a gunshot would mean business as usual among the drug dealers, the gangsters, and the general flotsam and jetsam of the population and consequently would probably go unreported at the most and uninvestigated at the least. In any case, it would just be a gunshot, the weapon fired into the air, fired into the wooden frame of a window, fired into a door, fired anywhere but at a real person. Just fired. That was all.

  This ill-founded belief was what Joel had clung to, even as they’d boarded the underground train, even as they’d trotted along through a part of town that, with every step he had taken, declared itself to be some place quite different from the world that he was used to. What he hadn’t expected was what he’d been presented with for the mugging and for the weapon firing: a white lady coming home with her shopping, one who smiled at them and asked if they were lost and looked like someone who believed that there was nothing to fear as long as she stood at her own front door and showed strangers kindness. Despite what he did to reassure himself, Joel’s thoughts went feverishly among three points as he lurked about and waited for Cal. The first was the actual shooting of the woman who’d turned out to be not only a countess but also the wife of a Scotland Yard detective. The second was that he’d done what he’d been told to do—even if Cal was ultimately the one to fire the weapon—and no matter the means to get to this end, the end had been reached and that meant Joel had proved himself. The third was that there was a film of him in Cadogan Lane, there was an au pair who’d seen him up close, and there was a gun with his fingerprints on it, and all of that meant something which was not good.

  Ultimately, Joel saw that his only hope lay in the Blade. If Cal did not show up the next time that the Blade chose to do his business on Arissa in her flat, it would mean that Cal was well and truly gone. And if Cal was well and truly gone, it would mean that Cal had been spirited off because it made no sense that the Blade might actually do away with Cal instead of just easing him out of London for as long as it took for the heat of the shooting and its aftermath to run its course. The way Joel looked at the situation—indeed, the only way he could look at the situation—was to decide that if the Blade could do all that for Cal, he could do it for Joel, and with a photograph of Joel in the process of being enhanced, that was something which had to be done, and soon. He wanted shelter and he needed shelter. As things turned out, he didn’t have to wait long for the moment during which his request for sanctuary went answered . . . before he even made it.

  On Portnall Road, he’d hidden himself on the porch of a building near Arissa’s, safely away from view. He’d been there an hour, hoping the Blade would show up to pay a call on his woman. He was shivering in the cold and had cramp in his legs when the Blade’s car finally pulled up. The man himself got out, and Joel stood, preparatory to making his approach. But then Neal Wyatt removed himself from the car as well, and as Joel watched, the Blade disappeared into the building and Neal established himself in what could only be called the Cal Position: bouncing a small rubber ball against one wall of the entrance to the building as he himself lounged against the other.

  Joel ducked. He thought, How . . . ? And then, Why . . . ? He stared at nothing as he tried to puzzle out what he’d seen, and when he next ventured a look at the entrance to Arissa’s building, it was to see that he’d been noticed despite his efforts: Neal was gazing right back at him. He pocketed the ball he’d been bouncing. He sauntered down the path, crossed the road, and came along the pavement. He stood there, observing Joel in his inadequate place of hiding. He said nothing, but he looked quite different, and it came to Joel that what he looked like didn’t have much to do with having been sorted by anyone for anything.

  Joel remembered in that moment what Hibah had said to him: Neal wants respect. Can’t you show him respect?

  Clearly, Joel saw, Neal had done something to get it. Joel expected the outcome to be an attack—blows, kicks, knives, whatever—delivered by Neal to his own pathetic person. But no attack came.

  Instead, Neal spoke, and it was only a single statement that he made, tinged with weary sarcasm. “You are one stupid redskin fuck.” Having said this, he turned and walked back to the entry to Arissa’s building, and there he remained.

  Joel himself was Lot’s wife: the desire to fl ee but eternally absent the ability to do so. Ten minutes passed, and the Blade came outside, Arissa following, dog to master. The Blade said something to Neal, and the three of them moved in the direction of the Blade’s car. He opened the driver’s door as Neal got in on the other side. Arissa remained on the pavement, waiting for something that was soon in coming. The Blade turned to her, jerked her over, cupped one of her buttocks to hold her in place, and kissed her. He released her abruptly. He pinched her breast and said something to her and the girl stood before him, looking devoted, looking like someone who would never cross him, who would wait right there till he came for her again, who would be exactly what he wanted her to be. Precisely, Joel realised with a jolt of understanding, like someone who was not his sister, who did not act or think like Ness. Someone, in short, who gazed upon the Blade in a way that Ness was unlikely to look at any man.

  Joel thought, then, about how many times he had heard the Blade mouth that unpleasant imperative about his sister, and a glimmer of light began to illuminate the darkness around him. But that glimmer of light was like ice against his heart and its incandescence radiated on the simple confluenceof events as they had occurred in his life. Joel saw that they’d all led to this precise moment: Neal Wyatt waiting in the car like someone who knew very well that he belonged there, the Blade showing Arissa what was what, and Joel himself watching the action, receiving a message he’d been meant to receive from the very first.

  Cal didn’t matter. Joel didn’t matter. In the final accounting, Neal and Arissa didn’t matter. They themselves didn’t know this yet, but they, too, would learn once their purpose had been served.

  What Joel did next, he did to acknowledge all the times that Cal Hancock had tried to warn him to keep clear of the Blade. He emerged from his useless hiding place, and he approached the car, the Blade, and Arissa.

  He said, “Where’s Cal?”

  The Blade glanced his way. “Jo-ell,” he said. “Looks like t’ings’re getting real hot for you, bred.”

  “Where’s Cal?” Joel repeated. “What’ve you done to Cal, Stanley?”

  Neal got out of the car in a liquid movement, but the Blade waved him back. He said, “Long time Cal’s been wanting to see his fam’ly, innit. Out there in Jah-may-ca land, wiv steel bands, ganja, and reggae all night. Uncle Bob Marley looking down from heaven. Cal scratch my back, so I scratch his.” He jerked his head at Neal, who obediently got back into the car. Then he kissed Arissa once again, and he pushed her towards her building. He said, “Anything else, Jo-ell?”

  There was no hope, but Joel said it anyway. “That lady . . . I di’n’t . . .”

  But he didn’t know how to finish what he’d started, so he said nothing further. He merely waited.

  “Didn’t what?
” the Blade asked him blandly, without curiosity. A moment for decision, and Joel made the only one he could.

  “Didn’t nuffink,” he said.

  The Blade smiled. “Mind you keep it that way.”

  THE E -FIT CAME next, supplied courtesy of the au pair who’d wielded the toilet plunger. Typical of the London tabloids, she became the heroine of the moment, and her past and present were explored thoroughly as, next to her own picture, was featured the e-fit of the ginger-haired young lout with whom she’d struggled.

  “Is This the Face of a Killer?” was the headline that accompanied the e-fit in the Daily Mail, the front page of which Joel saw fluttering on the pavement outside Westbourne Park station. Like most e-fits, it didn’t look much like him, but the news story that accompanied it revealed that the enhancement of the video image was complete. Additional footage from the Sloane Square underground station had been analysed, the paper reported. The police had isolated more images. Scotland Yard indicated an arrest was imminent, as tips flooded the lines dedicated to the cause of tracking down the killer of the wife of one of their own.

  Joel had taken Toby to Meanwhile Gardens when it finally occurred. They were in the skate bowl, in the topmost and simplest of the arenas, and Toby was delighting in the fact that he’d managed to balance long enough to glide from one side to the other without falling off his board. He was crowing, “Lookit! Lookit, Joel” when the first of the panda cars slowed and then stopped on the bridge over the Grand Union Canal. A second panda car took up a position in Elkstone Road, just beyond the corner of the child drop-in centre, but visible enough that Majidah looked up from what she was doing inside the centre, frowned, and decided to walk outside into the play area to make certain the children were safe. A third car parked at the turn from Elkstone into Great Western Road. Out of each of these cars, a uniformed constable climbed. The drivers remained inside.

  They converged on the skate bowl. It came to Joel as he watched their approach that, clearly, he’d been under observation by someone from somewhere—perhaps he’d even been followed for the past days since he’d seen the Blade—and when the moment had seemed appropriate, that person had placed a phone call to the Harrow Road police. And here they were.

  The constable from the car nearest the drop-in centre was the first to get to Joel. He said, “Joel Campbell?” and Joel said to his brother,

  “Tobe, you got to go home, okay?”

  True to form, Toby said “But you said I could ride my skateboard and you said you watch me. Don’t you ’member?”

  “We got to do it later.”

  “Come with me, lad,” the constable said to Joel.

  Joel said, “Tobe? C’n you get home by yourself? If you can’t, I ’spect one of the cops’ll take you.”

  “I want to skateboard. You said, Joel. You promised.”

  “They ain’t lettin me stay here,” Joel said. “You go home.”

  The constable from the bridge arrived next. He said that Toby was to come with him. When he heard this, Joel thought the constable meant that he would take Toby home so that the little boy wouldn’t have to go on his own, despite how close it was to the skate bowl, and he said, “Cheers.” He began to follow the first constable to his car at the kerb near the child drop-in centre—his head averted so that he didn’t have to look at the Pakistani woman watching from behind the chain-link fence—but then he saw that Toby wasn’t being led towards Edenham Estate at all, but rather towards the bridge.

  Joel stopped. The day’s cold seeped up his neck and closed around it like a fist. He said, “Where’re they taking my brother?”

  “He’ll be looked after,” the constable told him.

  “But—”

  “You’ll have to come along. You’ll have to get into the car.”

  Joel took a useless step towards his brother. “But Tobe’s meant to go—”

  “Don’t fight us, lad.” The constable attached himself to Joel’s arm.

  “But my auntie’ll wonder—”

  “Come along.”

  At this point, the driver of the panda car parked in front of the drop-in centre came to them at a jog. He attached himself to Joel’s other arm and shoved that arm behind Joel’s back. He brought out a set of handcuffs and, wordlessly, snapped them on his wrists. He hissed in Joel’s ear, “Fucking little half-breed bastard,” and he pushed him towards the car.

  “Steady on, Jer,” the other constable said.

  “Don’t bloody tell me,” the first replied. “Open the door.”

  “Jer—”

  “Fucking open it.”

  The first cooperated. In front of Joel, the car door swung open, making an invitation that he could not refuse. He felt a sharp blow on his back, and a hand crushed down on his head, propelling him inside the vehicle. When he was inside, the door slammed shut. As the two policemen climbed into the front seat of the car, Joel peered out of the window, trying to see what had happened to Toby.

  The panda car on the bridge was gone. In Meanwhile Gardens, board riders in the skate bowl had stopped to watch the police interact with Joel. They lined the lowest lip of the bowl now—their skateboards balanced against their hips—and they talked among themselves as the panda car pulled away from the kerb to make the turn into Great Western Road for the short drive to the Harrow Road station. Joel craned his neck to search for a face in the park that would tell him—by its expression—what would happen from here. But there was no face. There was only his inevitable future that had begun playing out the moment the first constable had taken him by the arm.

  Beyond Meanwhile Gardens—and this was what Joel could see as the car crossed the bridge over the canal—the back of Kendra’s house was visible. Joel fixed his gaze on it as long as he could, but it was only a moment before the first building on Great Western Road obscured his view.

  KENDRA RECEIVED THE word from Majidah. The Pakistani woman was brief enough in her message to the charity shop, where Kendra was in the midst of making a sale to a refugee African woman in the company of an elderly man. Three cars had come from the police, Majidah informed her. Two of them had taken Ness’s brothers away. Separately, this was. And, Mrs. Osborne, the disturbing part comes now: One of the constables put the older boy in handcuffs.

  Kendra heard this in silence because it seemed terribly important at the moment that she conclude the sale of table lamps, shoes, and yellow crockery to her customers. She said, “Thank you. I see. I do appreciate the call,” and left Majidah on the other end of the line thinking, Good gracious, it was hardly any wonder when children went so terribly wrong if the adults in their lives were able to receive deadly news without a single wail of horror. As westernised as she had become over the years that she had lived in London, Majidah knew that she would never have greeted terrible news such as this without taking at least a few minutes to tear at her hair and rip at her clothing before marshalling her forces to do something about it. So Majidah went on to phone Fabia Bender as well, but her message to the social worker was altogether unnecessary since the wheels of British jurisprudence were already turning, and Fabia was at the Harrow Road station in advance of Joel’s arrival.

  Kendra felt herself floundering after the refugees left the charity shop and she was free to absorb Majidah’s message. She did not associate the message with murder. Naturally, she’d seen the story of the shooting in the paper, since, in the constant pursuit of the ever-more-sensational, the editors of all London’s tabloids and most of its broadsheets had made the quick decision that the murder of a cop’s-wife-who-was-also-a-countess easily trumped every other story. So she’d read the papers and she’d seen the e-fit. But like any other e-fit, the one of Joel came only moderately close to his real appearance, and his aunt had had no reason to connect the drawing to her nephew. Besides, her mind had been crammed with other concerns, most of which involved Ness: what had happened to her in years past and what was going to become of her now.

  And now . . . Joel. Kendra closed up
the charity shop and walked to the Harrow Road police station, which was not far. In her haste, she went without her coat and without her bag. She had with her only demands, and she made them to the special constable working in the tiny reception area where a bulletin board offered easy answers to life’s problems with announcements about Crimestoppers, Neighbourhood Watch programmes, Whistlestop Crime, and rules for Out and About at Night.

  “Police picked up my nephews,” she said. “Where are they? What’s going on?”

  The special constable—a police wanna-be forever doomed to be just that—looked Kendra over and what he saw was a mixed-race lady looking more black than white, shapely in a narrow navy skirt, with something of an attitude about her. He felt that she was making demands of him, in a way that suggested she’d climbed too far above herself, when she ought to be speaking respectfully. He told her to sit. He’d be with her presently.

  She said, “This is a twelve-year-old boy we’re talking about. And an eight-year-old. You’ve brought at least one of them here. I want to know why.”

  He said nothing.

  She said, “I want to see my nephew. And where’s his brother been taken if he’s not here? You can’t snatch children off the street and—”

  “Sit down, madam,” the special constable said. “I will be with you presently and what is it about this that you don’t understand? Do I need to call someone from within to explain this all to you? I can do that. You can be invited to step inside an interview room yourself.”

  It was the yourself that told her what she needed to know. “What’s he done?” she asked hoarsely. “Tell me what he’s done.”