The Fall (11 page)

He pushed in, noting the flutter of an old bit of police tape. ‘The boss here?’ he called. Anthony Johnson’s brother was back, apparently, and had taken over the place.

The skinny black guy behind the counter squared up to him. ‘You the police again? You not catch the guy who did it?’

‘Is he here, please? Ronald Johnson – he’s in charge now?’

The man was slowly polishing a glass. ‘Sorry. He’s out.’

‘Really?’

He shrugged. ‘Not here.’

‘Right. Can you ask him to ring me, please?’ Hegarty placed his card on the bar, in a puddle of beer.

‘I’ll ask,’ the man said, but it was clear from his tone that Hegarty shouldn’t expect a call anytime soon.

On his way out Hegarty paused and saw someone open the back office door and peer out, a tall black man. The door quickly shut again and the guy at the counter said loudly, ‘See ya, Officer.’

So Ronald Johnson didn’t want to talk to the police who were trying to find his brother’s killer. Interesting.

Checking no one was around, Hegarty walked along the wall of the club, the windows blind with shutters. By the side of it was a small alley, easy to miss, blocked up with bins. He slipped into it. It was only a few metres long, and so narrow he couldn’t hold his arms out wide in it, but there, set in the brick wall, was the outline of a metal door.
Alarm in use
, it warned. He looked at it for a long time, wondering, and then turned to walk to his home in Kentish Town.

She didn’t know what she was doing.

She was on her old street, walking towards what was still partly her flat. She paid the bloody rent, didn’t she? But when she passed the burger shop and turned into the concrete building, after that she had no clue. Maybe he’d be at home. Of course she wouldn’t go in if he was there – would she?

The last time they met he’d beaten her up, yes. She knew that. She wasn’t one of these stupid women they always had on episodes of
The Bill
, and they’re all like, ‘oh no, I walked into a door’. He’d hit her. Yes. But it wasn’t
that
bad. She didn’t need to go to hospital or anything. They’d just got pissed off with each other – who didn’t? Sometimes she’d have liked to slap him round the face, too.

What was she doing? There was no sound in the concrete stairwell, so maybe he wasn’t home. Unless he was asleep. She’d just go in and get her clothes, look for more cash, eat something – it was her fucking stuff, after all. Then she’d go – somewhere. Do something. Deffo.

She reached her door, or her old door, feeling like a burglar. She breathed in all the air she could get, cold and smoke-smelling on the draughty stairs, and she knocked. If you pressed your ear up to the door you’d hardly have heard it, so no surprise no one came. She knocked a little bit louder: nothing.

She reached up on her tiptoes and felt along the dusty doorsill for the key she’d stuck up there. After Ruby got taken away, Keisha’d had a run of losing hers when she went out, pissed, trying to forget. But the key wouldn’t go in. She was just standing there like a retard, pushing at the door. He’d fucking changed the locks. She was so shocked by this that she just stared for a moment. Then she heard a noise and her heart went crazy – he was here!

But no, it was a woman’s voice, raspy with smoke, belting out, ‘Liam! Watch the bleeding stairs!’ It was Jacinta from upstairs trailing her boy by the hand, while trying to lift her little girl’s pushchair down the stairs at the same time. No lift in this building and they put the family on the fourth floor. Sometimes Keisha thought these men who ran things could do with trying to lift a baby and shopping and a kid and a buggy up four flights of stairs. ‘Want a hand?’

Jacinta gave her a suspicious look through red-rimmed eyes, then jerked her chin, making her high pony-tail fly up. ‘Get the wheels.’

Keisha picked up the spinning bottom wheels, and panting, the little boy all the while about to fall and crack his bloody head, they got downstairs.

‘You seen Chris?’ she said as she put the buggy down, quickly, ashamed to have to ask.

Jacinta paused to take a packet of Silk Cut out of her pink cropped combats. ‘Kicked you out, did he?’

Keisha shrugged. ‘Had a row.’

‘Me and my Keith, we fight like cats and dogs some nights. But he don’t ever do that to me.’ She nodded to Keisha’s cracked face. ‘Listen, love. We all heard the racket – whole building did. Nearly called the boys in blue. So Keith up and asks him next day, Is your missus OK?’ She lit the cigarette, inhaling. ‘And he turns round and says, Ain’t got a missus. Then he comes up real close to Keith, all scary, and he goes, If she comes round, you better fucking tell me. Else I’ll come after you too.’ She dragged deeply on her fag. ‘If I were you, love, I’d get off sharpish. He’s bad news, that fella.’

Keisha’s stomach was heaving. What was she, thick? He’d banged her head off the table and she came back for more, thinking they could just go back to Happy Families or whatever it was they’d been.

Keisha turned to leave, almost running to get away, but Jacinta called her back. ‘Oi,’ she said. ‘Where’s that little ’un of yours. She safe?’ Everyone in the building knew what had happened to Ruby.

Ruby
. Suddenly Keisha’s feelings sank down to an even worse level, and it felt like something heavy was sitting on her chest. She couldn’t breathe for a minute. She’d never thought of it, ’cos he was never interested in the kid. But if he wanted to get back at Keisha . . . What if all the time she’d been hiding in the fucking hostel, he was . . . Oh, fuck.

Setting off at a run to the bus stop, she fumbled for the blonde girl’s purse and took out the Oyster card. Surely the girl wouldn’t mind her using a bit for the bus. Not when it was this big a fucking deal.

She had to admit she was grateful her mother and Phil had come, if only because they’d left her enough food to eke out for nearly the whole first week. But eventually she’d eaten even the manky Bran Flakes and all the food in the freezer and she’d been having her tea black for days. It suited her mood, dark and bitter.

On the Friday – the day before what would have been her wedding – Charlotte was going crazy. She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t focus on the stupid burbling TV, hadn’t so far dared to pick up the phone or go online. It was only hiding from that onslaught of pity, that tsunami of sorry, that was keeping her on her feet, and she knew it. Her thoughts were sliding back and forth like a low-slung pendulum – eat, TV, sleep – and that was where they needed to stay. But now she was twitching with loneliness, standing up, sitting down, waiting for the kettle to boil, then coming to and realising she’d been there for ages and the water had cooled. To make matters worse she knew there were hundreds of things to do. She had already started four different letters to Dan’s parents, asking them to help her find a lawyer, and abandoned them all. They weren’t answering the phone.

Charlotte pulled her laptop over to her, the tiny silver case light as a box of chocolates. Desperate for contact, any human contact, she clicked on to Facebook, and the white-and-blue screen came up. Photos, names –
Alison is watching
Britain’s Got Talent,
oo-er. Pete thinks lemon cheesecake is yum
. So many words spilled out to say more or less nothing.

She took a deep breath and clicked on her own wall.

Hey Mrs Stockbridge how was the wedding?
Someone who hadn’t heard, idiot.

Charlotte r u ok? Saw the news honey wtf?

From the rest, some kind of shocked silence. If Dan was dead, messages would pour in, she didn’t doubt it. There was no grief so deep as to be wordless any more –
RIP, miss u mate, your a great guy
, the usual misspelled rubbish. But what did you say to this? What did you say when someone you knew fell so far and so irrevocably? Maybe it made you look down at your own feet and see how far you could slip, too.

She clicked on and there it was, what she’d dreaded. Messages from people she didn’t know. A different sort of hate mail but just as bad. She clicked feverishly to delete, trying not to see them.
Racist. Bitch. You should die
. Dan didn’t have a Facebook page, said it was a waste of time. She was glad, now.

It took Charlotte half an hour to work out how to do it, clicking bewildered from screen to screen, but eventually she turned off her profile, so no one could send her messages. She left her relationship status as
engaged
– it was still true, wasn’t it? Alone with the tick of the clock, she slowly turned the diamond ring on her finger. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t how it was meant to be.

At eight it was growing dusky and she pulled on her trainers and got ready to go to the shops. It took an unbelievably long time to find her keys, run a brush through her hair, and then she had to go back because she’d forgotten her phone and didn’t want to provoke another visit down the M6 from her mother thinking she might be dead. She had lost her purse in the attack, but luckily Phil had been on the case and ordered her new cards.

The sun was setting over the rooftops outside, the sky bright but the pavements already darkening to shadow. It was a sad night, woodsmoke on fading bright air, or maybe it wasn’t and everything just seemed sad to her.

She trudged towards the shop in the same clothes she’d worn all week. She probably smelled, but still, it was only Finchley Road. There was a shop in Belsize Park ‘Village’, as people liked to call it, but she needed cash, so she went the other way, down the hill. It was a mistake.

Charlotte only realised afterwards that the man in the shop had been staring at her. Normally they didn’t look at customers at all, just carried on talking very loud and very fast in what she assumed was Arabic. She wandered the aisles, desolate with choice. She didn’t want any of this, Pot Noodles, Pringles, Diet Coke. What she wanted was not to be here at all. She wanted none of this to have ever happened.

When she went outside there was a gang of teenagers hanging about the station, so she walked past quickly with her head down. As she was waiting to cross the road past Waitrose – going in there would have been too cruel – something hit her softly, and she put up a hand to her head and brought it back, red. For a second she wobbled – not again! But nothing hurt. They’d thrown something at her, and red syrupy filth was all over her blonde hair.

The group was a sea of faces under caps and hoods. Boys, girls, mostly black. All shades, in that nonsense way of describing colour, so some were paler than she would be with a tan. They were staring at her.

‘Do you mind?’ she said, haughtily, and one of them, a boy, threw another carton, some kind of drink. As it flew at her and she put up her arms, she heard him hiss: ‘
Fucking Nazi
.’

One of the girls, emboldened, whooped up. ‘Yeah, racist bitch. Your fella’s a killer, inee?’

Charlotte just stared at them. The carton had bounced off her arms and spattered her face with more red goo. ‘But – I . . . I . . .’

‘Gonna fucking kill us too?’ The boy threw again, this time something harder, green, spinning. It was a beer bottle. Like the one that had killed Anthony Johnson. She ducked, and it shattered on the pavement, and with a high thrill of panic, Charlotte turned and ran, her pathetic dried goods rattling in the thin plastic bag. When she got home she bolted the door fast, and sank down against it, panting. Gloop slid down her face.

It was the hair that did it. She had lovely hair, everyone said so. Now it was the night before what should have been her wedding day, and instead of a conditioning mask, her hair was full of acid-red ooze. It was too much to bear.

Keisha’s mum had lived in Gospel Oak ever since she got up the duff at the unusual age of thirty-five to a mystery white man. Mercy had arrived from Jamaica with a course booked at London University and big plans for her future, but it hadn’t exactly worked out that way. Keisha’d always thought her mum liked the area because of the name, because it made her think of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and all those fellas. She stood out, Mercy. In the same way a massive ship on the water did, tilting with each slow step. No one had ever walked as slow as Mercy shuffling down the street, pausing at every okra and plantain.

Keisha didn’t even try to phone – her mum wouldn’t get a landline, never mind a mobile. She went to a phone box if she needed to make calls, holding up half the world as she fiddled round for her change. Keisha just got on the bus and willed it to go as fast as possible, hanging on tight to the orange railing. If she didn’t sit down maybe it’d go faster. But lots of people got on and an old man gave her a death-stare. ‘Can I get past, please?’

‘I dunno, can you?’ Keisha had a lip on her. It always got her in trouble, but she never learned.

Finally the bus ground to the slowest stop ever, and she got out, jostling past old ladies and buggies to jog down her mum’s street. It was why she always wore trainers – you never knew when you’d have to get out, sharpish.

She rattled the letter box of the little terrace house. ‘Mum! Mum! Are you there?’ At this time where would Mercy be? At home watching TV, an open packet of Maryland cookies in reach of her hovering hand, or at church, or at the shops buying more food. Keisha had a key, but she’d left it at the flat, hidden in a mug at the back of a cupboard. He’d never look there, would he? He wouldn’t know what it was for. No, he wouldn’t.

‘Mum!’ She rattled even harder. Through the net curtains the house looked the same as always, tidy, dark, stuffed with the smell of old furniture and boiling food.

Keisha heard a click and the door of the house next door opened an inch. Mrs Suntharalingam peered out from the chain. Sri Lankan by birth, she had massive glasses like Deirdre out of
Coronation Street
. ‘You here?’

There was no love lost between Keisha and Mrs S – it went way back to one time Keisha had puked blue WKD over the garden wall onto some stupid purple flowers, and apparently they’d died. Mercy was always leaning over the back fence to moan to her neighbour about Keisha, blah blah blah, can’t look after her own kid, rubbish boyfriend, got kicked out of the good school, works in a nursing home. Of course the Suntharalingams were all accountants or doctors and living in massive houses in Wandsworth.