The Fall (12 page)

‘Where’s Mum?’

‘For days we are calling you. All weekend.’ The chain rattled.

‘What? No one called me.’ She fumbled in her bag, catching her fingers on the ripped bits from where Chris had torn it up. The phone hadn’t rung in days.

‘Not in service, is saying. Over and over we call.’

‘What – oh, shit.’ The screen was blank – no network. ‘Fucking bastard!’ Of course he had, he’d cut her off. Mrs S was making loud sucking noises of disapproval. ‘Look, where is she?’

Mrs S took on a great expression of triumph and disgust. ‘She at the hoss-pital. Her heart, it just go right out of her body.’

‘What? She had a heart attack? Christ, is she OK?’

Mrs S flapped her hands behind the still-chained door. ‘Very bad, oh, very bad. We call and call you. After he come round, she cry and cry – then she shout out, she clutch herself – drop her samosa on carpet. Oh, Mrs Suntharalingam, she say.’

‘I don’t get it. Who came? What are you on about?’

‘The boy, you cheeky miss. The
bad
boy.
Your
bad boy.’

‘My – oh, shit. Do you mean – you mean Chris? Ruby’s dad?’

‘Yes, yes, the bad boy. Upset her very much. She cry and cry, then she clutch.’

‘Oh, fuck.’ Keisha grabbed on very hard to the door handle. ‘Where’s Ruby? Mrs S, please, please, where is she? Did he take her?’ Oh fuck! Oh fuck!

‘Lady took her. I cannot keep her here, you see, I have the arthritis.’ One gnarled hand came out from the frosted glass.

‘You mean the Social took her?’ Fuck. Well. That was better than Chris, at least. ‘Where’s Mum then?’

‘Hoss-pital.’

‘What hospital?’ Daft bitch.

Mrs S sniffed and pointed towards Hampstead. ‘That one, Royal Free one.’

Keisha set off again running, until she stopped being able to hear Mrs S muttering, ‘Cheeky miss, language she used to me . . .’

Something was going to have to change, that was obvious. It couldn’t go on this way. On the morning of what should have been her wedding, Charlotte slept as late as she could, even getting up to rummage in the chest-of-drawers for an old airline sleep mask, stubbing her toe and shouting, ‘Fuck!’ to the empty air. But the buzzer going over and over woke her, and trailing into the living room she answered it before she remembered what had happened the night before. Four washes seemed to have cleaned out the gunk; her hair was still damp.

‘Charlotte? It’s Mrs Lyndhurst from number two. You need to come down to the lobby.’

‘But . . .’

‘Now, please.’

The old biddy! Charlotte stomped downstairs in her pyjamas to where a little crowd had gathered on the front steps. Mrs Busybody, Mike and Susie from downstairs with their immaculate baby in a sling, the odd techie guy who lived in the basement with a million DVDs.

Mike spoke. ‘I’m sorry, Charlotte, but we think this is aimed at you.’ He was squirming with middle-class discomfort.

‘It worries us, you see, for Harry,’ said Susie earnestly, arranging the baby. Charlotte remembered that she found her annoying.

On the doorstep, it was etched out in red paint, messily done and misspelled – MUREDER. ‘Oh.’ Charlotte stood and looked at it, and then without meaning to sank down on the doorstep in her pink pyjamas. Her feet were bare and the ground cold.

Mrs Lyndhurst sighed. ‘Really, I was only trying to shop for supper. This ought to be dealt with.’ She departed, and Mike said he and Susie had to take Harry to Baby Movement.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said wretchedly. ‘You should really call the police.’

‘Come on,’ Susie chided, hurrying her child away from Charlotte’s contamination.

Basement Guy slunk away, he’d only come to see what was interrupting his playing of
FIFA 11
.

Charlotte sat on the cold step and wondered if she was going to cry. Was there any point? No. There wasn’t. She was in a place beyond, where tears weren’t going to make any difference, melt any hearts, remove any paint from stone. She went upstairs, leaving the front door wide open. Charlotte hardly ever looked inside her rammed hallway cupboard, but now, for the second time that week, she went through it half-mad, pulling out dusters and cans of polish and tennis racquets and Dan’s hiking boots, all the junk of a shared life, the things that have no real place. There was a chisel in Dan’s toolbox – untouched – and a stiff wire brush for cleaning shoes. His shoes were always so lovely, shining like mirrors.

She took the chisel and brush downstairs and began to scrape and pick at the red paint, kneeling in her pyjamas and bed hair as if she wanted everyone to see.
Penance
, that was the word that came to her unreligious mind. But what she was penitent for, she couldn’t have said.

Much later, only the ghostly outline of the word stayed. But she would always know it was there, every time she opened the front door. Washing her stained, ruined hands, wincing at the little cuts on her fingers, she thought maybe it was right that she wouldn’t forget. Maybe while she was consumed with sorrow for herself and for Dan she should remember that someone else was dead.

You should call the police, Mike had said, the standard middle-class trust in those people to bring justice. He’d said it in a kind way, with a keep-your-mess-away meaning. But she had the number of a policeman on a card in her kitchen. Maybe she would take that kindly but judgemental advice, after all.

Everywhere she went there was some bitch of a woman up in her face. ‘Look, I’m fucking sick of this,’ she shouted in the end, to the black nurse behind the hospital desk, giving it all that with her Sawf London accent. ‘S’not visitin’ hours, you gotta come back lay-ta, yeah?’

But when Keisha said
fucking
to her, the nurse moved back like someone’d tried to whack her. ‘Why’d you say that? Oh!’ Keisha saw she was crying.

Keisha could actually see her mum behind a glass partition in the ward beyond, it was why she’d gotten so pissed off. She breathed in. ‘Look, I’m sorry. S’just really important, yeah? Like life or death, you know?’

Still with her shoulders heaving, the nurse waved her in. Keisha heard her blow her nose noisily and mutter something about being effing sick of it, too.

Mercy was asleep in the third bed down. There were three other women, two fat and asleep, and the third a wizened Chinese lady like a scrap of bark. The only one awake in the humming quiet, she smiled at Keisha with no teeth. She remembered being here for Ruby, how mental she’d been on the painkillers and adrenaline, how she wanted to talk and talk to everyone and wouldn’t put the baby down to get some sleep. ‘Christ, give it a rest,’ Chris had said when they’d finally found him down the pub.

‘Mum,’ she whispered. Mercy had a tube up her nose and in her arm, and she was giving out her usual snores, like bloody earthquakes. ‘Mum.’ Keisha prodded her a bit and Mercy’s eyes shot open. She gave a snort. For a second Keisha was afraid, she was so fucking afraid that maybe her mother wouldn’t know who she was any more.

But Mercy clicked and gummed with her dry mouth. ‘Shush your noise. People sick here.’

‘
You’re
sick here.’

Mercy rearranged her IV tube, just like when people came to her house and she tidied away her teacups. ‘My goodness, such a fuss. I’m in rude health!’

Where she got these words from, Keisha had no idea. ‘Are you OK? Like really?’ She didn’t look OK. Her face was a sort of plum colour, like bits of fruit that ended up on the pavement under the high-street stalls.

Mercy waved her hand. ‘Just a little turn.’

‘They said you’d had a heart attack. I saw Mrs S. She said . . .’ Keisha couldn’t say it. ‘Mum, was he there?’

Her mother said nothing, but fiddled with the IV tube again.

‘Mum!’ Keisha couldn’t breathe when she realised there was a glassy sheen on her mum’s bruised-plum face. In all her life she’d only seen Mercy cry like this one time, and that was when Ruby had her accident. Except it wasn’t an accident, was it? ‘Mum, please! What happened? Where was Ruby?’

Mercy wiped pathetically at her eyes, but couldn’t reach with all the wires.

‘Oh, here.’ Keisha pulled some tissues out of a box on the bedside and dabbed at her mum’s face. ‘He came, didn’t he? Did he try to take her?’

Slowly, Mercy nodded.

‘And you stopped him?’

Mercy blew her nose with a big honk and, disgusted, Keisha chucked the tissue in the bin. She’d probably catch swine flu or something.

‘He tried to take her. The baby. I keep the door closed. She’s watching what’s it called, that programme? Strange name.’

‘
Balamory?
’

Mercy nodded. ‘She saw him banging on the window. Very bad. I said I will call the police. He went away. But then – well. I had a little upset.’

Keisha said dully, ‘I’ve left him.’

Her mother gave her an I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see-it look.

‘No, really. Look.’ She leaned over so Mercy could see her healing eye. ‘That’s what he did to me. I swear, Mum, I swear to God – sorry – I just never thought. I didn’t think he’d come to you. He never looks near her, does he?’ She was so stuck up in shame now there was no point in pretending any more. ‘Mum, I’m sorry. You were right.’ Saying it was so bitter that tears almost burst out her nose. ‘You were right, OK? He’s a fucker. I’m sorry for everything. I never meant to get kicked out of school, it was just all those posh kids and— God, Mum, I’m sorry, OK?’

Her mum sucked in air through her dodgy teeth. ‘Don’t take the good Lord’s name in vain.’

‘S-sorry.’ Keisha sat gulping by her mum’s bedside. ‘Is she OK? Ruby?’ She felt so ashamed to be asking, when she was Ruby’s mum. People should be asking that question to her.

Mercy honked again, this time choking on a wad of phlegm. ‘The Social lady come. They have to take her, they say, if no one’s at home.’

Because Ruby was officially in care, wasn’t she? It was called ‘kinship caring’, and it meant they didn’t pay Mercy half as much as a non-related foster carer would get. Not that she ever made a word of complaint.

Keisha felt overwhelmed by it. It was as if they’d both disappeared, her mum into the mouth of this huge hospital, down endless squeaky corridors, and her kid somewhere similar. Was Ruby at someone’s house, playing with strange toys, eating different food? She couldn’t imagine her at all. It was as if she had vanished completely.

Hegarty didn’t often make arrests in homes that had what he could swear was a genuine Eames chair in the corner. He was a secret design freak, a fact kept well-hidden from his station mates. Sometimes on weekends he went to furniture shops, the kind of places where he could never have afforded to buy even an ash tray, and just looked and looked for hours.

‘Hello?’ The front door to the flats had been left ajar, and now he pushed the unlocked flat door open, too.

Charlotte Miller was crumpled on the sofa, wearing tracksuit bottoms and a sweatshirt that was far too big for her – Stockbridge’s, he guessed. Her eyes were red and swollen. He felt a surge of annoyance. Didn’t she know, sitting there with the door open, did she not understand about the weeping women he saw all the time, attacked, bruises on their thighs, mascara running down their faces?

‘Miss Miller? I’m DC Hegarty – remember?’

She nodded dully.

‘Can I come in?’ Her face was a mess of bruises. He could hardly look at it.

‘You
are
in.’ She didn’t look up.

‘You want to tell me what happened then?’ He’d seen the step on the way up.

She sighed. ‘Is there any point? Some kids threw stuff at me, and someone painted my step. I guess it doesn’t matter that much.’

‘What about this court attack? That’s an open case, you can make a statement.’

She seemed to think about it, and then shook her head back and forth very slowly. ‘I don’t remember enough.’

‘But if you told me something, we might be able to find them. It was two girls, was it? Can you think of any reason you might have been targeted – maybe something you saw at the club that didn’t seem important, or . . .’

Something in her face closed up. ‘Please. I can’t remember. I don’t want to talk about it.’ She shuddered, as if remembering. Was she afraid, was that it?

‘You have been in the wars, haven’t you.’ He looked round the flat; a week on, it was dirty and smelled stale. ‘I know today must be tough – it was today, wasn’t it?’

She still didn’t look up, but glassy tears were sliding down her face. ‘I just can’t believe it, you know. Really can’t. I’m in shock, I think.’

He hated seeing women cry. ‘Er . . . I’ll get you a tissue.’ He looked round frantically and she laughed, wiping her sleeve over her lovely, battered face. ‘I’ve used them all. None left.’

He perched awkwardly on the side of her chrome and leather sofa. It was a strange mix, this flat, the minimalist lines you’d expect from a macho twat like Stockbridge, but here and there bowls of pot pourri, flowery cushions, a pink dish on the table. Small traces of this girl in front of him. ‘Didn’t you want anyone with you, your mam or someone?’

She laughed again. ‘God, no. She’s doing my head in. I can’t stand it, you know, them all looking at me and saying, Oh, it’s ten o’clock, we were meant to be in the hairdresser’s; Oh, it’s one, you were meant to be walking down the ai-aisle . . .’ Fresh tears rolled out of her eyes and down her creamy cheeks. She even looked good when she cried, this girl. ‘Sorry. It’s the shock, I think. I’m supposed to be perfect today – that’s the thing. Do you know how much that dress cost? Four grand. And it won’t get wo-o-orn!’

Hegarty was at a loss. What did you say to a girl on what should have been her wedding day? ‘Can I make you a cup of tea or something? It’s nearly dinnertime.’ Crap, he should have said
lunchtime
to her.

To his surprise she wiped her face and said, ‘Yes, please. I haven’t been able to get up.’

He went to the kitchen and opened various shiny red cupboards, found her expensive tea – cotton bags! There was no teapot so he couldn’t make it proper; in the cups would have to do. ‘Got any milk?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Does it matter?’