by GJ Minett
‘That’s unfortunate,’ said Cunningham, in the same measured tones that were definitely starting to get on Danny’s nerves. ‘Mick does get a bit concerned when voices are raised. I think he sees it as threatening. Anyway, as I was saying, I really admire your Evie. Nice girl, if a bit too trusting. I mean, leaving all the family finances in the hands of someone who thinks there’s such a thing as a system that will allow him to win big on Betfair – I mean, I ask you. You’d have to say that’s asking for trouble. Does she know you maxed out the credit cards recently?’
‘How in God’s name do you –?’ This was like a subtle variation on the old Chinese water torture – one piece of information after the other, working away at his defences, drip, drip, drip.
‘Or that you squirrelled five hundred pounds out of the savings account which is why you had to go to Jimmy V in the first place? I mean, maybe she thinks the world of you but there have to be limits, wouldn’t you say? What’s the plan, anyway? Have you already blown the money you borrowed from us?’
‘No.’ None of your business is what he wanted to scream but he wasn’t sure which part of his body Mick might work on next and wasn’t keen to put it to the test. ‘I used that to get the savings account back to where it was before.’
‘Ah . . . did we know that, Marshall?’
‘No.’
‘No. Well, that’s good news anyway. Nice to know you’re finally embracing a modicum of financial responsibility, Danny – even if it is rather late in the day. And you’re still working at Estelle Roberts, I take it. That’s something, I suppose. Fancy jeweller like that – pity they don’t pay you a little more, isn’t it? Ah, the sun-drenched holidaymakers wending their weary way home,’ he sighed, turning away as the lights at one of the innumerable pedestrian crossings on the seafront brought them to a temporary halt. ‘You ever had a Butlins holiday, Danny? Can’t imagine anything more ghastly, can you?’
Danny interpreted the question as rhetorical and said nothing.
‘Anyway, I assume, since you say you’ve topped up your savings account and presumably don’t have any other cash to hand, that you won’t be going for option one and paying off your debt this evening. Am I right?’
Danny nodded, shoulders slumped in defeat.
‘And just out of interest, on a scale of one to ten, how likely do you think it is that you’ll be in a position to settle your debt in full on the fifteenth?’
He shook his head.
‘The original deal, I might have come close. A grand? I don’t know.’
‘We’ll call that a two then. Ah well, it’s not a problem from our point of view if you need another month,’ said Cunningham, ‘but I’m sure you’ll understand that it’s not going to come cheaply. These APRs . . . never can get my head round them but Marshall here just laps it up and he’ll be happy to let you know exactly what that would mean. Could probably do it without even using a calculator.’
‘I’ll get the money, OK?’ snapped Danny, careful not to raise his voice at the same time. ‘You’ll have it.’
‘Maybe a six then? Yes, well, I think that would be your best bet . . . if you’ll excuse the unfortunate choice of words. Ah, here already,’ he said, with all the cheerful bonhomie of a tour guide announcing that they’d reached their destination. ‘And there are TJ and Sonia with your bicycle, just as I promised. You see, Danny – we always keep our promises. It’s always worth remembering that.’
Mick slid out of the back seat to allow Danny out of the car.
‘You mind how you go now,’ said Cunningham. ‘And make sure you look after that good lady of yours, yes?’
TJ held out the helmet for him to take and kept hold of the bike while he fastened the strap under his chin. All smiles. So helpful. No way anyone passing could possibly imagine what he’d been through in the last quarter of an hour.
‘Enjoy the ride home, fuckwit,’ whispered TJ before clambering into the Mercedes with a smirk that simply begged to be scraped off his face.
Danny watched as they drove away, the girl pedalling furiously after them.
PHIL
Quarter past nine in a deserted Arun Valley Shopping Centre, empty corridors echoing to their footsteps. Two hours done and dusted, another ten to go before the end of their last evening on nights. Seven o’clock couldn’t come soon enough – there was something intensely liberating about stepping out of the twilight zone and back into the real world for a few weeks. He could almost imagine he was connected somehow.
‘Your turn,’ Anna said, as he held the door open before stepping through after her. He started to climb the stairs, switching on his lapel mic as he did so.
‘Sierra 5 to Mic 2, Sierra 5 to Mic 2 – over.’
Pause. Click.
‘Mic 2 here,’ came the tinny reply in his earpiece. ‘Go ahead Sierra 5 – over.’
‘Ground Floor clear. Moving to Level 1 – over.’
‘Roger that, Sierra 5. Over and out.’
‘Roger that,’ she mimicked, shaking her head. ‘Dick!’
Phil grinned. ‘You really don’t like him, do you?’
‘Nice work, Sherlock.’
‘Any reason in particular?’
‘You want a list? The guy’s like . . .’ She gave an exaggerated shudder. ‘I dunno, he’s . . .’
‘Oh. Well, that clears that up.’
‘He’s a dick.’
‘So what’s he done to upset you – apart from getting promoted?’
‘Got nothing to do with it,’ she said, slapping his arm. ‘He was a dick before. Sticking a badge on him isn’t going to change anything. Just makes him a dick with a badge. If they’re stupid enough to make him Assistant Head of Security, why should I care?’
‘Yeah, well, you sound like you’ve taken it pretty well.’
She rattled the door to one of the clothing outlets, a little more vigorously than she needed to.
‘Some people, you know? They get a bit of responsibility, mainly because there’s no one else prepared to take on the shitty job in the first place, and all of a sudden they’re off on some power trip like Hitler or something. It’s pathetic.’
‘You didn’t go for it yourself, then?’
She stopped in her tracks and glared at him.
‘Ha ha. No I did not, thank you very much.’
Pushing open the door to the women’s toilets, she peered inside to check no one was in there while he did the same next door.
‘You know he tried to friend me the other day?’ she said as they continued to work their way round the shops on the first floor.
‘Tried to what you?’
‘Friend me.’
He shook his head. ‘I thought friend was a noun.’
‘Not on Facebook, it isn’t.’
‘Ah. Facebook!’
‘And don’t start on that old dinosaur routine. You’re on Facebook like the rest of us.’
‘Nope.’
‘Seriously?’ She stopped and looked up at him, shining her torch into his face to check whether this was another of his wind-ups.
‘Seriously.’
‘Jesus,’ she said, pausing in a doorway as he held the door for her. ‘Your social life must be something else.’
‘I have my moments. Your turn.’
She switched on her lapel mic.
‘Level 1 clear, Shaun. Moving up to Level 2.’
Pause. Click. Then the tinny voice started up again.
‘Please identify yourself, Sierra 2. Over.’
She rolled her eyes and gave a deep sigh. ‘Shaun, you know who it is. You just identified me yourself.’
‘I know it’s you, Sierra 2, but you’re supposed to use the proper call signs. Over.’
‘It’s the night shift, for f—’ She took a deep breath. ‘We’ve been doing this for the past three weeks. There’s only you, me and Phil on duty and only one of us is female. That’s not a big enough clue for you?’
‘Sarcasm’s not cool, Sierra 2.
Doesn’t matter how many people are in the building. You have to follow the correct procedures. I’ve told you before. Over.’
‘It’s Arun Valley Shopping Centre, Shaun. It’s not the Pentagon.’
‘You follow the correct procedures or I’ll have to report you. Is that what you want? Over.’
‘Trust me, you don’t want to know what I want.’
‘I’m still waiting, Sierra 2. Over.’
She rolled her eyes.
‘Sierra 2 to Mic 2 – over.’
‘Mic 2 here. Go ahead, Sierra 2 – over.’
‘Level 1 clear. Moving up to Level 2 – over and out.’
She held up one finger and began to count. She’d reached four when the tinny voice returned.
‘OK . . . ah, roger that, Sierra 2. Over and out.’
‘Jesus,’ she said, switching off the lapel mic. ‘Are you seriously telling me that doesn’t piss you off?’
‘Clearly not as much as it does you.’
‘Seriously – it doesn’t bother you at all that he’s in a position of authority over you?’
Phil smiled, his head tilted to one side. ‘Well, maybe it’s not the most convincing argument in favour of natural selection.’
‘I don’t know how you just accept things like that. I’d be spitting bullets if I was in your shoes. You had how long with the police – thirty years? He’s barely had thirty days on solids. You should have put yourself forward for the job. With your experience you think they wouldn’t have bitten your hand off? All the contacts you’ve got as well? They’d have begged you to take it.’
He shook his head. ‘Yeah, well, thanks for the vote of confidence but I’m still the new boy around here, remember? Besides, I’m happy doing what I do now.’
‘What, patrolling round a shopping centre day and night? Taking orders from someone who thinks UNESCO is one of the stores on the ground floor? How can you be?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. You get to fifty, maybe it takes a bit of the edge off your ambition.’
Anna snorted. ‘Your problem is you don’t push yourself forward enough,’ she said. ‘Anyone ever tell you that?’
There was a long pause – long enough for her to wish she could snatch the words back before they really dug deep. The silence seemed to amplify their footsteps as they echoed down the empty corridor.
‘Yeah . . .’ he said eventually. ‘Sally used to say it all the time.’
And the clang as the shutters came down was loud enough to shake the building to its foundations.
CALLUM
And it had all been going so well.
I’ll get badges made up, he thought to himself, as he kicked a stone into the gutter. Story of my life.
So much for good intentions. The best joke was, he hadn’t really wanted to go to the Kowalskis in the first place. He’d got a totally legitimate excuse for once and this arty-farty sort of affair usually bored the pants off him, so he was pretty sure Abi would have been relieved rather than annoyed if he’d tossed in his Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card and left her to go on her own.
But this business of doing things separately was happening more and more lately – in danger of becoming the norm. He knew most of the blame for that lay at his feet and maybe that was what brought on these random impulses to do something that would take her by surprise. So he’d changed his mind at the last minute, taken a rain check with the Lannier group, caught an early train back from Victoria and arrived home in time to walk with her to the book launch. And he’d felt good about himself, even if it was just for the one evening. It was nice sometimes to imagine they might somehow drift back to those uncomplicated times when their first thought was always for each other.
So he’d been on pretty good form for most of the evening as he wandered from group to group, turning on the charm which had always come as naturally to him as breathing. Whatever else he did with his life, he’d always have that to fall back on. He’d even managed to win over Mary Kowalski for once by pledging a couple of grand to some charity for refugees she was heading up. A couple of grand! He suspected he’d probably regret it like a hangover the next morning but what the hell – Nick would find a way of writing it off and besides, the way Abi squeezed his arm and rested her head on his shoulder made it more than worthwhile. For a moment there, it was like the old days – only with money to burn.
It hadn’t lasted.
Now they were walking home and she’d retreated into one of her distant moods. Lovely evening, warm enough to let you imagine you were in the Med somewhere rather than strolling through the lanes of Bosham. All it needed was a few cicadas and a zither playing in the background. There was a time when they’d have been all over each other during the ten-minute walk back to their four-bedroom detached house in Walton Lane; only it wouldn’t have been a ten-minute walk – one of them would have dragged the other off into a field somewhere, they were that horny for each other back in the day. But tonight they’d barely brushed hands since they left the Kowalskis.
And all because of Owen Hall. Owen Fuck-all, the ultimate in ugly ducklings if Mary Kowalski and her sex-starved ramblings were anything to go by. Not that long ago – twelve, thirteen years, maybe – he was a big, fat numpty everyone took the piss out of at school. Retard of the first order. King Blobby. Used to sit there in class with his thumb in his mouth and saliva dribbling down his chin. Bright enough – Christ, what he couldn’t do with numbers. Obsessed or what? The maths teachers used to get him to recite all the prime numbers and he could keep going into the thousands. Wasn’t bullshit either. They never caught him out once. And that thing with turning letters of the alphabet into numbers: a = 1, b = 2, etc. He could take any word and tell you the total before you’d got past the first couple of letters. Nowadays they’d probably say he was Special Needs, on the autistic spectrum or some such crap. Back then it was simple – he was just a complete and utter mong. Never should have been in a school with normal kids in the first place. His mother wised up eventually and took him out altogether – home schooling, they called it. One big doss, more like.
And now, if the country’s greatest living novelist, in her own mind at least, was to be believed, Owen Fuck-all had somehow transformed himself into Monty Don, turning wastelands into the Garden of Eden, like water into wine wasn’t good enough. Well, he might just about buy into that, as it happened, having seen the evidence for himself. Everyone at the book launch had been practically press-ganged into wandering round the Kowalski estate and he’d oohed and aahed along with the rest of them because he had to admit, it did look pretty good in a kitschy sort of way. So if she was to be taken at her word and it was all his own work, then maybe Owen Fuck-all had made some sort of progress along the food chain, in which case fair play to him.
But all that crap about Owen the Stud, Owen the Hunk? He wasn’t having any of that. Max must be some letdown in the bedroom if Mary had been reduced to drooling over someone who, not so long ago, was drooling over himself. The guy was a freak. Could you really go from that to a normally functioning member of society? Could you fuck!
And now, best joke of all, Abi was talking about hiring him to do their garden. He’d laughed out loud when she suggested it at the party, hence the stiff, slightly remote Stepford Wife who was sharing the walk home with him now. Because there were rules governing that sort of thing – he could say what he liked to her, behave like a bigoted arsehole of the first order in the privacy of his own home, but God forbid he should say or do anything to embarrass her in public. There were no histrionics – exaggerated displays of emotion weren’t her style. But that didn’t mean you got away with it. She had a way of withdrawing that was like a work of art. Perfectly pleasant, even bordering on affectionate at times and certainly not offering anything substantive you could hang your hat on and use as evidence against her, but you knew somehow that however much appearances might suggest the opposite, she just wasn’t there anymore. Not for you. Not in any way that mattered. And that was how she�
��d been for the last hour or so.
Well, to coin a phrase . . . fuck you, Abi. He’d gone out of his way to make this evening all about her and this was how she thanked him. OK then! If she wanted to do her bit for Care in the Community and free up a bed for some other basket case by keeping Owen Fuck-all meaningfully occupied, good luck to her but she’d better start making a helluva lot more cakes in the next few weeks because he sure as hell wasn’t about to throw hard-earned moolah at someone who would probably start chewing it. And if she wanted a bit of distance, she could have that too. No one-way streets here, lady.
Monday night couldn’t come soon enough as far as he was concerned.
OWEN
He goes to bed around ten o’clock. Gets up again at midnight. Can’t sleep. Two hours lying there, thinking about the phone call. Figures flashing through his head the whole time.
Abi: total = 12, multiple of 3. Owen: total = 57, multiple of 3.
Safe. Happy.
Abi Hall: total = 45, multiple of 3 and 5. Owen Hall: total = 90, multiple of 3 and 5.
Safe. Happy.
Abi Green: total = 61.
Prime number. Keep away. How many times has he tried to tell her?
He decides in the end to make a cup of tea and take it into the conservatory. No need to turn the light on. Cloudless night, moonlight, lots of stars. Fox slinking across the middle of the lawn – fifteen yards away and he can see it, clear as day.
Might as well get it over with.
You’re going to do it, aren’t you? says Willie.
‘Do what?’
Do what? Do what, he says. Think I’m stupid or something? You’re going to say yes. Sort their garden out for them.
‘Don’t know yet.’
Like fuck you don’t know. You’ve already decided. The moment you realised it was that bitch on the other end of the phone –
