“F’r what?” Joel asked.
“What you wanted, dependin on if you still wan’ it.” Cal looked away from him, down the street where two old ladies walked arm in arm, each supporting the other. Cal’s breath steamed in the icy air. When Joel didn’t reply, he turned back to look at him. “Well? You in or out ’f dis business?”
Joel was in, but he hesitated, not because he was worried about what the Blade would ask of him but rather because there was Toby to consider. He was meant to fetch his brother from school to the learning centre, and that was going to take another hour. Joel explained this to Cal.
Cal shook his head. He told Joel in short order that he couldn’t pass that information along to the Blade. It would disrespect the man by indicating that something else was more important than fulfilling his wishes.
“I don’t mean to disrepeck him,” Joel said. “It’s only dat Toby…Cal, he knows Toby i’n’t right in the head.”
“Wha’ the Blade wants, he wants tonight.”
“I c’n do what he wants. But I can’t let Toby try to get home on his own from school. It’s already getting dark, and only time he tried to get home alone, he got set on.”
Joel would have to solve the problem, Cal said. If he couldn’t solve this one, he wasn’t going to be able to solve any others. He would have to go his way; the Blade would have to go his. Perhaps that was all for the best.
Joel tried to think what he could do. His only option seemed to be the age-old excuse used by every child who doesn’t want to do what he is meant to do. He decided he would feign illness. He would phone his aunt, tell her he’d sicked up at school, and ask her if she thought he should still fetch Toby. She would say no, naturally. She would tell him to go straight home. She would lock up the charity shop for a while and herself dash out to fetch Toby from school to the learning centre. She would then keep Toby with her till it was time for them both to go home for the evening. All things being equal, by the time she returned to Edenham Estate, Joel himself would be there as well, having demonstrated to the Blade loyalty and respect.
He told Cal to wait and he went for a phone box. In a few minutes, his plan was in motion. What he failed to take into account, however, was the nature of what the Blade wanted him to do. Cal made it clear soon enough, although not before trying to give Joel an oblique warning about what was to come. When Joel returned from the phone box, having made all the arrangements, Cal asked him if he’d thought things through.
“I ain’t stupid,” was Joel’s reply. “I know how t’ings go. The Blade does summick for me, I owe him. I got dat, Cal. I’m ready.” He hiked up his trousers as a means of emphasising his readiness. It was a let’s-go gesture: ready for anything, ready for it all, time to show the Blade his mettle, time to show commitment.
Cal examined him somberly before he said, “Come wiv me, den,” and began striding towards the north, in the direction of Kensal Green.
He walked without conversation and without pause to see if Joel was still with him. He didn’t stop walking until they came to the high brick wall that enclosed the crumbling, overgrown ruins of Kensal Green Cemetery. Here, at the large gates leading into the place, he finally looked at Joel. Joel couldn’t imagine what he was going to be asked to do, but robbing a grave came to mind and it didn’t hold much appeal.
An arch comprised the entrance to this place. It gave way to a square of tarmac and a keeper’s lodge where light shone through a curtained window. The tarmac itself marked the starting point for the cemetery’s main road. This veered off towards the west, strewn with the decomposing leaves of the many trees that grew scattered and untrimmed in the grounds.
Cal set off down this lane. Joel tried to see the delicious adventure of it all. He told himself it was going to be a bloody good lark, carrying out an assignment in this creepy place. He and Cal would attack some grave in the fast-coming darkness, and they’d jump behind a lopsided tombstone should a guard stroll by. They’d take care not to tumble into one of the collapsing grave sites that signs along the lane warned them about, and when they were done, they’d hop the wall and be on their way with whatever prize the Blade wished them to unearth. It was, he decided, like a scavenger hunt.
In the growing early darkness of winter, however, the cemetery was a grim location, not conducive to the sense of adventure Joel wished to feel. With enormous wing-spread angels praying on monuments and mausoleums shrouded by swathes of ivy and every inch of space overgrown with shrubbery and weeds, the cemetery was more like a ghoul town than it was a resting place for souls. Joel half-expected to see ethereal spirits emerging from broken-down tombs and headless ghosts flitting above the undergrowth.
Unpaved muddy tracks led off the main lane, and in the dying light, Cal took one of these. Some fifty yards along, he disappeared altogether through a thick stand of Italian cypresses, and when Joel ducked through them a moment later, he found himself facing a large and lichenous tomb. This had long ago been fashioned to resemble a chapel, but masonry filled in where its three stained-glass windows had been, and the door that once gave access to the little structure was buried by junipers so densely planted that only a machete could have hacked a way through them.
Cal was nowhere to be seen, and the idea of ambush came upon Joel with a rush. His previous consternation grew in proportion to his realisation that no one knew exactly where he was. He thought of Cal’s words of warning, of his own bravado. He muttered, “Shit,” and listened as hard as a frightened boy can listen. If someone was going to jump him now, he reckoned that he could at least try to sort out from what direction the danger would come.
It would come from above, it seemed. Joel heard a rustling that appeared to emanate from the cypresses, and he backed away. An old wooden bench stood some three yards from the chapel-shaped tomb, and he made for this and climbed upon it, as if this action would somehow protect him. But there he noticed what he could not see when he stood at the base of the chapel itself: Although its gabled roof had at one time been fashioned from large rectangles of slate, a number of them were missing, leaving a gaping hole that opened the tomb’s interior to the elements.
The noise Joel heard was actually coming from inside the tomb and as he watched, a shadowy form rose from within. It lifted head and shoulders above the wall and then a leg followed. All of it was black except the feet, which were dingy white and dressed in trainers.
Joel said, “What the hell you doin, blood?”
Cal heaved himself over and dropped lightly from the chapel wall to the ground, a distance of some ten feet. He said, “You ready, mon?”
“Yeah, but what’re you doin in there?”
“Seeing.”
“What?”
“Dat t’ings all right. C’mere, den. You’re inside.” Cal jerked his thumb at the tomb.
Joel looked from him to the opening in the roof. “Doin what?”
“Waiting.”
“For what? How long?”
“Well, dat’s it, innit. Dat’s wha’ you don’t know. The Blade wants to know do you trust him, spee. You don’t trust him, he don’t trust you. You stay till I fetch you, blood. You not here when I fetch you, the Blade knows who you are.”
Despite his youth, Joel saw the ingenious nature of the game. It was contained in the simplicity of not knowing. An hour, a day, one night, a week. One rule only: Put yourself into someone else’s hands entirely. Prove yourself to the Blade before the Blade was willing to prove himself to you.
Joel’s mouth was drier than he would have liked. “What ’f I’m caught?” he said. “Ain’t my fault ’f some guard comes by and hauls me out, innit.”
“What guards you t’ink stick their heads in tombs if they don’t got reason to do it? You quiet, blood, no one comes looking. You in or out?”
What choice was there? “In,” Joel said.
Cal made a stirrup of his hand and Joel mounted. He felt himself hoisted onto the wall, where he straddled the top and looked down into the well of da
rkness below. He could see dim shapes only, one of them looking like a ghostly body under a pall of decomposing leaves. He felt a tremor at the sight of this and he glanced back at Cal, who was watching him, silent. Joel drew a deep breath, closed his eyes, and with a shudder dropped into the tomb.
He landed on leaves. One of his shoes sank through to a sodden depression and the cold rose around him as his foot hit water. He cried out and jumped back, half expecting a skeletal hand to reach up, begging for rescue from a liquid grave. He could see virtually nothing inside the rectangular chamber, and he only hoped his eyes would adjust quickly from the muted light of the graveyard to the darkness in here so that he might know with whom—or with what—he would be spending his time.
Cal’s voice came like a whisper from the distance. “All right, bred? You in?”
“S’okay,” Joel said, although he hardly felt that way.
“You hang till I come.” Then Cal was gone, in a rustle of branches that indicated he was making his way back through the Italian cypresses.
Joel smothered the protest that he wanted to give. This was nothing, he told himself. This was just proving to the Blade that he had the bottle to gut something out.
His hands felt clammy, so he rubbed them along the sides of his trousers. He remembered what he’d made out from the wall of the tomb just before he dropped down to its interior base. He steeled himself to the sight of a body, telling himself it was dead, long gone, and improperly buried, and that was all. But he’d never really seen a body before, not one that was out in the open, exposed to the elements, decomposing, with rotting flesh, grinning teeth, and worms eating out its eyeballs.
The thought of that body just behind him somewhere made Joel’s lips quiver. He became aware that his own body was shivering from head to toe, and he understood that in this place the cold of the night intensified because of the damp stone walls around him. Like Dorothy in Oz, he thought of home. He thought of his aunt, his brother, his sister, his bed, eating dinner around the table in the kitchen and watching a cartoon video with Toby afterwards. But then he made himself stop such thoughts because his eyes were filling. He was acting like someone who couldn’t bloody even cope, he thought. He remembered how easily Cal had appeared to climb out of the tomb and he understood that he wasn’t trapped in this place. He didn’t have to do something for which he might get into trouble with the law. All he had to do was wait, and he surely had the bottle to do that.
Thus reassured, he made himself take an action. Since he couldn’t exactly stand there forever with his face to the wall simply because he shared space with a body, he forced himself to turn and confront it. He pivoted with his eyes squeezed shut. He balled his fists and slowly raised his eyelids.
Adjusted to the darkness, his eyes picked out what they hadn’t been able to see earlier. The body was missing a nose; part of its cheek was caved in. The rest of it was dressed in some sort of flowing gown whose folds surged through the fallen leaves. All of it was white: the body itself, the head of hair upon it, the hands folded on the abdomen, the gown that clothed it. It was merely stone, Joel realised, an internal effigy that decorated the tomb.
At one end of this, he saw that a tartan blanket was folded over the effigy’s feet. It bore no leaves, which meant it had been placed there recently, and probably for him. He picked it up and beneath it found two bottles of water and two packaged sandwiches. He’d be there for a while.
He unfolded the blanket and wound it around his shoulders. He boosted himself up to the legs of the effigy and settled in for a lengthy stay.
CAL DIDN’T RETURN for Joel that night. Nor did he return the next day. The hours crawled by and the low winter sun never once warmed the inside of Joel’s place of waiting. Still, he remained. He was invested at this point. While it was true that he was cold and—despite the sandwiches—growing hungrier by the minute, that more than once he’d had to relieve himself in a corner beneath a pile of rotting leaves, that he’d barely dozed off during the night and every sound had startled him into wakefulness, he told himself that a payoff was coming and the payoff would make this waiting worthwhile.
He started to doubt this on the second night. He began to think that the Blade meant him to die in Kensal Green Cemetery. He understood how easily that could happen: He was in a tomb already; it hadn’t been opened in years and probably wouldn’t be opened again. He and Cal had come to the spot in near darkness, and if anyone had seen them sauntering along in the direction of the entrance to the cemetery, what would they have thought of it? There were many places they could have been heading: the underground station, a superstore across the canal, even all the way to Wormwood Scrubs.
He considered climbing out at this point. When he examined the interior walls of the tomb, he saw that it would be easy enough for him to scale the ten feet. But the list of what-ifs that accompanied the idea of departure stopped him. What if he climbed out just at the moment Cal was coming for him? What if the Blade was nearby, watching and waiting, and saw his disgrace? What if he was seen by a groundsman or a security man? What if he was collared and hauled into the Harrow Road police station again?
As to his family and the what-ifs they were conjuring up as this second night approached, he did not think of that. His aunt, his brother, and his sister were merely blips on the screen of his consciousness.
The second night passed slowly. It was terribly cold, and a soft rain fell. It became a long and windy rain that soaked his blanket, which in turn soaked his school trousers. He had only his anorak left as protection from the weather, but it would be useless by morning if the rain did not cease, and Joel knew that.
The sky was turning light when he finally heard the sounds he’d been waiting for: the swooshing of cypress branches and the sucking noise of trainers falling on saturated ground. Then Cal’s voice came softly, “You there, blood?”
Joel, crouching in the inadequate shelter of the damaged slate roof, got to his feet with a grunt. “Here, bred,” he said.
“Have it knocked good, den. You make it out okay?”
Joel wasn’t sure, but he said that he could. Hunger made him dizzy, and cold made him clumsy. It would, he thought, be a sodding hell of a thing if he broke his neck trying to get out of this place.
He tried several times. He had success on his fourth attempt. By that time, Cal had climbed the wall and was straddling the top, extending a hand to him. But Joel wouldn’t take it, so close was he to passing the Blade’s test completely. He wanted Cal Hancock to carry a message back to Mr. Stanley Hynds: He did it all, and he did it by himself.
He lifted his leg over the wall and straddled it, mimicking Cal’s posture there although, unlike Cal, he was forced to cling to the stones like a shipwreck survivor. He said, “You tell him, mon,” before he was out of strength. He toppled from the top of the wall to the ground.
Cal hopped down and helped him to his feet. “Okay?” he asked earnestly. “Noise goin down ’bout where you been.”
Joel squinted at Cal, with his head feeling weak. He said, “You rampin, mon?”
“Hell no. I been by your drum and there’s been cops wiv your aunt. I ’spect you in for it when you get home.”
“Shit.” Of all things, Joel hadn’t thought of this. He said, “I got to get home. When c’n I talk to the Blade, den?”
“He ain’t takin your part wiv the cops. On your own f’r dat, blood.”
“’S not what I meant. I got to talk to him ’bout dis bloke needs sorting.”
“He’ll sort him when he’s ready,” Cal said.
“Hey!” Joel protested. “Di’n’t I just—”
“Don’t work like dat.” Cal led Joel through the cypresses then, and along the muddy path towards the cemetery’s central lane. There, he took a moment to clean the bottom of his trainers on a spot in the tarmac where the fallen leaves had blown away during the night. He looked around—in the manner of a man searching for eavesdroppers—and said in a low voice and without looking up f
rom his shoes, “You c’n stop dis, bred. You got dat power.”
“Stop what?” Joel asked.
“Blood, he mean you harm. Y’unnerstan?”
“Who? The Blade? Cal, I gave him the flick knife. And you weren’t there when we talked. We got t’ings sorted between us. We’re cool.”
“He don’t sort t’ings, spee. He i’n’t like dat.”
“He was straight wiv me. Like I said, you weren’t there. And anyways, I done what he asked. He c’n see I’m straight wiv him. We c’n go on.”
Cal, whose eyes had been cast down on his shoes during this, raised his head. He said, “Where ’xactly you t’ink you’re going? The Blade sort dis bloke, you owe him, y’unnerstan? You got family, bred. Whyn’t you t’ink ’bout dem?”
“Dat’s what I am doing,” Joel protested. “Wha’ you t’ink I’m doin dis for?”
“Dat’s a question you best start asking,” Cal returned. “What you t’ink he doin dis for?”
Chapter
22
When he made the turn into Edenham Way, Joel saw that Dix D’Court’s car was parked in front of his aunt’s house. He was cold, wet, tired, and hungry, and all he wanted was to fall into bed, which made his ability to fast-talk his way through the coming encounters sadly reduced. He took a moment to duck behind a wheelie bin and there he stayed for several more minutes, trying to work out what he was going to say to his aunt when he finally faced her. The truth would hardly do.
He thought at first that he might stay there behind the bin until Kendra left the house to go to work for the day, which would be sooner rather than later. She’d have to get Toby off to his school and Ness would be off as well, which would leave the house empty at that point, since Dix surely wouldn’t hang about once Kendra was gone. Joel would have the day, then, to cook up something…if only he managed to wait.
But waiting was exactly what Joel was not able to do. Seven minutes behind the wheelie bin was enough time to tell him he could remain outside in the cold no longer. He eased his way out and trudged to the front door. He hauled himself up the four steps like a dead man walking.
What Came Before He Shot Her Page 48
