The Fall (16 page)

Sneaking back upstairs, she saw there wasn’t much – her phone bill, which she’d have to pay somehow, a flyer for a pizza takeaway place, and under that, a battered brown envelope with her name on the front in Dan’s clear blocky writing. It was postmarked
HMP Pentonville Prison
, just in case anyone didn’t know everything that had happened to her.

She was really going to be late for work, but she knew she had to sit down right there, while the kettle cooled, and read what it was Dan couldn’t say to her in person.

Charlotte
, it started.

I can’t think what else I can call you now. I wish I’d never had to write this letter, but I do. There’s no way around it
.

He had written the rest in bullet points.

•
The mortgage is due on the 25th of the month. I can’t access my account, so you will need to go in and set up the direct debit from yours instead. The password to my account is your name. The PIN is in another letter I will send you today, you’ll know to destroy it
.

That was typical of Dan, he had to be correct saying PIN and not PIN number like everyone else.

•
As you know, there are bills outstanding. I don’t know what you’ll do for money. I’ll write to my parents and ask them to help you, but I used one of my phone calls to ring them and they wouldn’t speak to me
.

Of course, Dan’s parents were
Telegraph
readers, anti-immigration, ‘life means life’ fans. And now their only child was in prison for murder. There was a chance it was even harder for them than it was for her. At least she’d been there, she knew it wasn’t true. Dan’s father, ex-Justice Stockbridge, didn’t entirely believe in miscarriages of justice.

The letter was typically concise, setting out what bills needed to be paid when and how to access their savings account.
Clear out the money
, he said.
You’ll need it
.

At the end of the bullet points he’d written,
I must make sure you understand one thing. Please don’t put your life on hold ‘waiting for me’, or some other romantic idea. Don’t even wait for the trial. There is no point at all
.

You should keep working, you’ll need the money coming in. That flat is large just for you. Think about selling or getting a flatmate
.

A flatmate! Charlotte threw the letter down. How dare he! How bloody, bloody dare he send her this letter, as if she was his secretary or something, for God’s sake, and tell her to think about leaving her home? Or living with some stranger and measuring out the milk, when she was supposed to be married by now?

She looked back to the letter, a PS:
Remember to hide those things like I said
.

‘Piss off, Dan!’ she said to the empty kitchen, then felt the burn of the day’s first tears behind her eyes. By the time she’d cried and cleaned herself up, she was going to be so late for work they’d think she wasn’t coming.

Keisha sat back on her heels and groaned. How in the name of fuck had her mum got so much crap? The old box room above the stairs was totally wedged out with junk, the whole place stinking of damp. Her hair was so full of dust it looked like she’d gone grey overnight, and Mercy had never got round to having a proper shower put in. Her mum didn’t understand that you had to actually wash white hair regularly. As a teenager Keisha had been greasy enough to fry chips on until she worked that out.

She was totally sick of tidying, but she couldn’t let all Mercy’s things go to a skip, even if it was all shit, china plates with Princess Diana on them, every issue of the church newsletter since about 1800, a million Tesco bags that fell out every time you opened a cupboard. Mercy had been poor when she was little – eleven kids living in what wasn’t much better than a shack – so she saved. She saved everything.

Keisha had nearly finished now, piled all the tat up into bags for the bin, bags for the charity shop down the road, which was going to get a real bonanza of crap. Since she actually had nowhere to go once the house was given up, there was a small black rucksack she was filling with things she just couldn’t leave. Like her mum’s awful glasses. Who else was going to remember how Mercy had rootled around for them any time she had to read a label in a shop? Then she would take them off to show how shocked she was by the price.

The hardest room to empty was Mercy’s bedroom. It was stuffed full of her mum, her smell of talc, her fluffy cardigans and old wrecked shoes that she shuffled down the street in. Keisha was on her knees in front of the wardrobe, and had to drop onto her stomach to get the last shoes out, when she noticed it. There was something pushed under the wardrobe, stuffed against the lime carpet, some sort of folder like you might get at school. She pulled it out, looking for a distraction.

In the folder were essays. Handwritten, of course, her mum’d never been near a computer in her life, and they were about law, it looked like. Things like jurisprudence and legal process. Who’d have thought her fat old mum knew these kinds of things? Smiling a bit to herself at Mercy’s hidden depths, Keisha leafed through the folder and found a course booklet:
Introduction to Legal Practice
. She remembered Mercy saying a few times that she could have been a paralegal: ‘I could have a good job now, if not for you, cheeky Miss Keisha.’

The start date of the course was 20th September, 1984, the year before Keisha was born. Mercy was always going on and on about education. ‘You lost your chance at the good school, miss, now what will you do?’ And when Keisha would say cheekily, ‘Mum, you wipe people’s arses, what do you know?’ Mercy would whack her round the head with that big hand and the rings, and say, ‘I came to this country to study, you know that? But then you come along and I have to stop.’ So it was all Keisha’s fault. Like everything.

She was just folding it away again, thinking this would maybe be squeezed into the ‘keep’ bag, when something caught her eye.

Course Tutor
, it said, and beside it the name was typed in bold capitals:
IAN STONE
. She’d seen that name before somewhere, she was sure of it. She’d seen it typed like this, a long time ago. Where?

Suddenly she knew, and she was running downstairs, slipping in her socks on the worn carpet. ‘Stop runnin’!’ she could almost hear Mercy shout after her.

In the hallway, under ten huge bin bags, there was the ‘keep it’ bag, an old Adidas rucksack with fraying straps. Now she stuck her hand into that warm plastic interior and rummaged for a big brown envelope, the sides shored up with tape. It was marked in Mercy’s writing:
important tings
. The ‘h’ had been written in below; it was just a mistake, but it made her hear in her head her mum’s voice.

She shook it out – gas bills, savings book, NHS card. And a folded-over bit of green paper that Keisha remembered from the time she had to apply for her provisional driving licence (so she could get into pubs). Her mum had insisted on filling in the form, so Keisha couldn’t see her own birth certificate, but she’d prised open the envelope and snuck a quick look, so quick she almost didn’t take it in, as if she didn’t want to see what it said.

There was her mum’s name, and in the grid beside it, it said,
Occupation: student
. Her mum had called herself a student? Her mum, who wiped people’s arses all day? But she didn’t have time to be surprised, because then she saw the name. Under
Father
, it said:
Ian Stone. Occupation: Lecturer
.

Hegarty glanced down at the address in his notebook again. Yes, this was the right place. He hadn’t expected a thug like Jonny McGivern to be living in this neat West Hampstead terrace. But when he’d looked up Chris Dean’s associates on the system, this was the address thrown up.

It took a long time for the door to be answered, and eventually a tall, heavy guy in just his pants came to the door, scratching his head.

‘Sorry to wake you, sir,’ said Hegarty pointedly. It was nearly two in the afternoon.

The man looked confused, glancing past Hegarty to the quiet street outside. Then he stiffened. ‘You the police?’

‘Top marks. How about a quick chat – Jonny, is it?’

Once Jonny had reluctantly let him into the living room, Hegarty stood by the door. Every chair was covered in clothes, pillows, an Arsenal duvet bunched up on the sofa. The place stank of weed and booze, and through the door to the kitchen he’d glimpsed plates piled up in the sink. Which reminded him – when had he last done the dishes at his own place? These side-investigations made it hard to get time at home.

Hegarty nodded to the sofa. ‘Someone been staying here?’

‘Er – nah. Er, I mean, yeah, me. This is my mum’s place.’

‘And where’s she?’

‘Eh, she’s away. Gone to Spain, like.’

Hegarty decided to ignore the drugs paraphernalia Jonny had stupidly left littered round the room. That wasn’t why he was there. ‘You seen your mate Chris Dean recently?’

‘Who?’

He laughed at this poor attempt at lying. ‘Come off it, you and him go way back, don’t you? When was it, 1999 that you two got nicked for shoplifting? Literally thick as thieves, eh?’

Jonny looked confused, wrapping the duvet defensively round his bare chest. ‘Ain’t seen him.’

‘I see. Just yourself here, then, if your mam’s away?’

‘Er – yeah.’

‘But you’re still kipping on the sofa.’

Again the look of confusion and deep pain, as if trying to lie actually hurt the guy’s brain. ‘Yeah.’

‘Tell me this, Jonny, you know anything about this Kingston Town club murder?’

‘Thought you got the fella for that.’

Hegarty wandered round the room, prodding aside takeaway cartons with his shoe. ‘Wrapped up in gangs, wasn’t he, Anthony Johnson? Thought you might know a thing or two about that.’ He turned and fixed Jonny with a stare. ‘Or are you gonna tell me you don’t know nothing about that either? Didn’t join the Parky Boys before you cut your teeth?’

Jonny just sat there, and Hegarty sighed. ‘Well, if your mate comes back, you tell him DC Matthew Hegarty wants a word. Think you can remember that? It’s very important.’ On his way out the door he called back, ‘Oh, and you better clean your act up, Jonny. You might be getting a visit from the Drugs Squad in a few days, and your mam won’t like it if she comes back and her door’s kicked in.’

Charlotte stood in front of her office building, taking deep breaths. She’d crumpled Dan’s letter into the bin in anger, but she knew she’d pull it out again. The words seemed to have leached into the skin of her hands, as if written in acid.

It was time to go in, she was very late. Going the good way from the tube always took longer, but she definitely couldn’t cope with the other way now. She’d dressed up today, in heeled shoe-boots and a plain shift, but thanks to Dan’s letter she’d left it far too late to do her hair, which hung round her shoulders in a damp frizz.

She blipped her key card over the door and it slid open as if nothing had changed. Getting into the lift with her head down, and reaching up to press the number four, in that movement she remembered something Dan had said weeks before, when declining a second cup of coffee on his way out: ‘Sometimes I have to sit in Costa for twenty minutes before I can push that lift button.’

And she hadn’t really listened – had she ever? And now it was her turn to feel terrible, heart-clenching fear, as the lift rose and the doors opened silently onto the hubbub of Floor Four, the sleek red curves of the reception desk.

‘Charlotte!’ Kelly, the Essex-girl receptionist, stopped filing her nails to stare. ‘You’re here! Er, just a sec.’ Calling Simon, no doubt.

Charlotte pasted on a wavering smile and picked her way across the open-plan office, careful to meet no one’s eyes. Except that someone was in her desk, a girl in leggings and a wide tutu skirt. Charlotte couldn’t believe how young she looked.

Trying to keep down the up-chuck of anger that was suddenly in her throat, Charlotte said, ‘Oh, sorry, that’s my seat?’ As if she was on a train, politely moving on the chancer who’d sat down in her reserved place.

The girl looked her up and down. ‘Are you Charlotte?’ As if she was famous – but not in a good way.

‘Yeah, hi.’ Charlotte tried to put on her work face, smiling over the snarl.

‘I’m, like, covering for you?’

‘Charlie!’ That plummy voice, pimped with East London vowels, made her wince.

‘Hiya, Simon. I’m a bit late, er – tube problems.’ An accepted London excuse that could mean anything from
I slept through my alarm
to
I woke up last night in Ealing
.

‘Well, here was me thinking we wouldn’t see you.’ He looked over her frumpy outfit and ravaged face. ‘You OK, darling? That’s a nasty bruise.’

His
darling
was the camp twist of lime in the Soho man’s G&T, and a sore red herring to any girl dumb enough to think he might actually be gay. Far from it, as she knew only too well.

‘Oh, I’m all right, I suppose.’ The lie of the century, but she suspected he didn’t really want to hear about it.

‘Good, good. The lovely Fliss here has stepped into the breach with your Snax account –’ he flashed a toothy grin at the younger girl – ‘so if you’d plonk yourself down somewhere else for today. You can sit in on this meeting later though?’

‘Oh, sure.’ Meeting? What meeting? She was supposed to be in Jamaica right now, not in the traffic-clogged hell of Central London. She needed to get up to speed, but once set up on the temp’s desk, all she could think about was Googling appeals, miscarriages of justice, solicitors – anything that might help Dan. It was a mammoth struggle to remember all the perky little ideas she’d had for the Snax campaign a week ago – forever ago. She’d just have to throw round some buzz words like ‘social networking’, ‘digital viral marketing’, ‘user-generated content’ and the like.

All morning people passed by her desk, rushing on in their towering heels. She saw Tory dart behind the water-cooler to avoid her, and her best work friend Chloe rushing to a ‘tampon brainstorm session’. Chloe was thirty-two and single, so usually Charlotte felt pleasantly lucky round her, but today Chloe had on some rocking new harem pants and Charlotte managed to feel both stuffy in her dress, and scruffy with her damp hair round her shoulders.