‘You know what this is?’
‘It’s an absolutely terrible novel.’
Stefan sniffed the cover. ‘Couldn’t you smell anything?’
‘I thought it was musty, all that dirt.’
‘It’s not dirt, Mrs. English Lady. It has been soaked in heroin. A common transportation method used through the Afghanistan-Pakistan smuggling routes. Cheap paper absorbs a lot of liquid. All you have to do is soak the pages in water to recover the full amount of the drug. If you’re travelling illegally, it’s better than wearing a money belt.’
‘I thought she was keeping it for sentimental value, as a family memento.’
‘Westerners,’ Stefan snorted. ‘Your charming romantic notions about the East never cease to amaze me.’
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ I said stubbornly. ‘The street price of heroin has fallen through the floor. I saw it on Channel Four. It isn’t reason enough for a company to take the risk of killing someone, not in this city. Can you talk us out of here?’
Stefan turned to me. ‘If they get difficult I will have to give them the book.’
‘Tell them to take the bloody thing,’ I told him, ‘just get us out in one piece.’
‘All right. They will see us if we walk back into the lobby. But there is no other way.’ He pushed open the door to the concrete staircase. ‘You must stay quiet and let me do the negotiating.’
At first I thought we were in luck. The lobby looked deserted. Then I realised there was someone leaning against one of the pillars. Silhouettes split as he moved into the light from the street.
‘Stefan, what are you doing?’ A young man who looked alarmingly like David Beckham approached him. Slim featured, smart coat, with a pleasant if peculiarly high voice, he was entirely lacking mean-spiritedness or a sense of threat.
‘Hello Josh, what are you doing down here? I thought you were going home after you finished filming.’
‘I am. Just clearing up a few odds and sods, nothing very interesting. Can you walk away for a few minutes? I need to speak to the lady.’
‘She cut herself. Took a bit of a fall. She’s going to need stitches. I was just helping her out of the building.’
‘You don’t need to do that. Mr. Rennie’s on his way over, and he won’t want anyone to leave. Not even you, mate.’
‘She’s had a hard time, Josh. She’s got no quarrel with you. Let her go home.’
I started to move away from Stefan, but he gripped my hand and pulled me closer. I didn’t want him to end up at the bottom of the burning shaft with the others.
‘I wish I could, Steff, but we can’t have every fucking housewife in London nipping round the shops and telling the neighbours what goes on. We’re trying to run a legitimate business.’
‘What’s your plan, then? Take her off somewhere? That will still leave me.’
‘Not a problem, mate. We can sort that out as well. Please, just walk away from her.’
‘Come on, what’s she going to do? Who’s she going to tell? Look at her. She’s not worth the trouble.’
Stefan released my hand and started to close in on Josh, who was becoming noticeably agitated, shaking out his hands like a gunfighter preparing for a showdown. Stefan was distancing himself from me, charting a course according to some map in his head.
‘Nobody’s under my radar, mate. Everyone gets attention. There aren’t any exceptions to the rule. I don’t want to get trouble from my boss.’
When Stefan released a burst of movement it caught me by surprise even though I had somehow expected it. A moment later he was locked in a ridiculously awkward scuffle with the other man. He and Josh looked like they were dancing. I noticed the others arriving at the entrance doors just as he did. Then Stefan fell down so hard that I heard his skull crack on the floor.
‘Run, June,’ was the last thing he said, but I hesitated, and the opportunity was lost. I was forced back in the direction of the central staircase, taking the steps three at a time, heading for Malcolm’s flat, the one place they still had no idea about.
It was harder to keep count of the floors without light, but I’d had plenty of practice by now and smoothly hit the landing, the corridor and Malcolm’s front door, running into the kitchen praying that they would never find me. I would have made it, too, if two of them hadn’t followed me straight into the flat.
They behaved methodically and rather gently, as though they were in a profession that required an absence of panic, like zookeepers intent on catching an escaped snake. They were armed with powerful, sensible torches, and asked politely if I kept candles. I pointed to a cupboard beneath the sink and they thanked me. I wondered how much they knew, how much I could bluff. I hoped they thought I was a resident of the block, nothing more than a nosy neighbour.
They asked me to sit on a high-backed kitchen chair, to be still and wait. I couldn’t stop myself from fidgeting, so after a couple of minutes they tied my wrists and ankles to the chair-back with plastic tags. Obviously they’d bought a job lot.
My captors, whose names I was too frightened to catch but whom I had come to think of as Friends of Stitch-Head, or Foshes, checked their watches and talked to each other across me, discussing some kind of sports quiz on television, and a problem with the ignition on one of the cars. Actually, being held prisoner was as boring as it was frightening.
I wondered if the lone policeman had spotted something wrong and decided to send out an alarm, but the more I thought about it the less faith I had. After all, I was in one of nearly a hundred locked apartments, in a building everyone thought was empty.
All in all, it was the wrong time to get a nosebleed. They panicked a bit when they saw my shirt suddenly turning scarlet, but found a damp J-cloth and managed to smear it around, making it look like someone had committed an axe murder.
As I sat there, I tried to arrange the weekend’s events in order, to work out how I ended up being tormented by a man with the charm of a drain. Some time later, as I watched Raffles the gargantuan skinhead fleshpod wedging a half-pounder with cheese into his mouth with the flat of his thumb, I remember thinking I’d prefer to meet a noble end at the hands of someone with manners, a surgeon with Parkinsons or a pissed Bentley driver.
I thought about dying. With so few people ready to miss me, I started thinking about reincarnation instead. I knew that we were supposed to come back in a lesser form if we disappointed our maker, but even so I decided that putting Beethoven into Doris Stokes was a bit of a jump, so at that point I stopped thinking altogether, and sat mesmerised as a Fosh unwrapped a second sweating burger from its foil and munched it at the window, peering out with his greasy hands cupped around his eyes, complaining that he couldn’t see anything.
The other Fosh tried his mobile and swore when he couldn’t get a signal, but kept doggedly trying. It annoyed me that they had the upper hand, considering they were so incredibly stupid, but then I decided that this was probably what really made the world go around, stupid, dangerous people acting violently behind the backs of ordinary folk. It was so obvious when you thought about it – why had I ever thought it would be otherwise? They acted as though I was just another customer, like nurses talking over a dying patient or Cassandra’s prostitute friends in the pub chatting over the shoulders of their punters. After a few minutes, one of them went out into the hall and returned with Mr. Rennie.
I knew it was him because he perfectly looked the part: old money in a neat new format. Polished black shoes with pale leather soles, blue woollen overcoat, fine-striped Marc Jacobs shirt – new season, not a sale item – slim blue Armani tie, wavy brown hair just touching his collar, a hint of the young Rio Ferdinand about him.
Rennie immediately began to berate his staff. ‘I’ve been wandering around in the dark for the last ten minutes trying to work out where you’d gone,’ he complained. ‘I thought I told you to put some lights on the stairs.’
I wondered what had happened to Stefan – it sounded as if he had fractured his skull. I shifted uneasily on the chair as Rennie approached. The tag cut into my wrist when I fidgeted and I could feel blood on my back from the wound on my shoulder.
‘So you’re the infamous Mrs. Cryer,’ he said, finally turning his attention to me. ‘I’ve been hoping we would get to meet.’
‘I have what you’re after, and you’re welcome to it,’ I told him, feeling no guilt about surrendering the drugs. ‘Did you know it’s in a book?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She soaked a book in a solution of some kind. All you have to do is soak it again and get the residue, apparently.’
‘Thank you for clearing that up. Nice of you to be so helpful,’ said Rennie. He didn’t sound too bothered. ‘But then you did cause the problem to begin with. It’s what she owes us, nothing more. I don’t steal from people.’
‘The girl is dead.’
‘Whose fault is that? Not mine.’ He raised his hands, questioning, then tapped at his front teeth. ‘So, what to do, what to do? How are we going to resolve this matter?’
‘I want to know what will happen to me.’
‘Oh, bargains now, is it? We don’t do bargains. Sorry.’
‘Then I won’t tell you where the book is.’
‘I’ll let you in on a little secret.’ Rennie pulled over a chair and turned its back, sitting astride it to face me. ‘I don’t care about the book,’ he whispered, smiling. ‘Dealing drugs is an old-fashioned, high-risk way of making money, and to be honest it’s tacky, a bit too Essex these days. The boys can have it. I’m more concerned with you. You’re not helping this city. You’re just someone’s wife, you clean, you shop, you do the lottery and tut over things you read in the newspaper. You’re not productive. Us here –’ he indicated the others, ‘–we’re little power stations, working night and day to keep London running smoothly. Why do you think the police leave us alone? We’re public servants, providing essential services, clearing up the mess, making everything tick over. Raising profits, employing staff, rebuilding, reinvesting. If that dim little constable who’s wandering around this place had to choose between the two of us right now, just judging us by our usefulness, he’d lock you up and let me go. We have a sense of corporate responsibility. That way we can be selfish and civic-minded at the same time.’
I didn’t buy his line because I had to believe that people in public service had a better value system than his. Even so, it would have been nice if a crowd of them had burst in at this point to save me. Surely they should have called
someone
by now.
Rennie scraped his chair a little closer and smiled pleasantly. ‘I’m not doing a macho number on you, Mrs. Cryer, I’m just trying to explain the difference between us. The law works on two levels. There are the written words, which are just scratchmarks on a wall, something to keep the public from fretting, something people like you obey, and there are the actual rules, like smoke in the air, the ones aimed at us, where practical deals are struck without court intervention.’
‘That’s not right,’ I ventured.
‘Things don’t look right because you never see the other part of the picture, but we’re always there, putting in the hours twenty-four seven, hard but fair, working for London, just like our mayor. So that you can have an easy life. Do you want a cigarette?’
‘I don’t smoke.’
‘No, of course not. Whose flat is this, by the way?’
‘It belongs to a friend.’
‘Malcolm somebody,’ said one of them, talking to his boss. ‘Little bald bloke. He did the Marylebone clinic deal.’ There were now three Foshes in the apartment, standing around with their hands in their pockets, as bored as bouncers on a quiet night in Swansea. Five men had arrived altogether. That left another one with Stefan, and I had to assume that the police officer had wandered off unseen.
‘Right.’ Rennie turned his attention back to me. ‘Well now, let’s see. The book is here in the building, because you couldn’t have found out about it very long ago and you haven’t been anywhere else. You can save these boys the trouble of taking the place apart.’
‘I don’t care what you do with drugs or anything else, I just don’t want to die. I’m not important, you said so yourself. I’m even less interested in your life than you are in mine. So let me give these gentlemen the book and get the hell out. I’ll go home and that’s the end of it.’ I was sure he had no intention of letting me go, but it was worth a try.
‘Oh, go on then. Show them what you’ve got and I’ll think about it. It’s not the money, it’s the principle.’ Rennie couldn’t be bothered to go rooting about in the gloom. He nodded to one of the Foshes, who snipped the tags from my wrists and ankles and let me rise from the chair. He had underestimated me. Trying to act as calmly as possible, I went to the kitchen drawer, but my heart was quivering. I turned back to them.
‘You say I’m not worthy of attention, but I think I’m potentially dangerous. Do you know why?’ I asked, digging noisily among the utensils, stalling for time.
‘No, Mrs. Cryer, why are you dangerous?’ asked Rennie, vaguely amused by my bravado.
‘Because I’m a housewife with a gun.’ I meant to pull up the stainless steel automatic in one smooth move but the trigger got caught in an egg-whisk. Shaking it free, I pointed the barrel at Rennie. ‘I may be running low on estrogen, but I’m not out of bullets.’ I flicked off what I hoped was the safety catch and squeezed the trigger.
The detonation was simply astonishing. It made my ears ring and nearly broke both my arms. There was a hole the size of a saucer in the wall next to Rennie’s shoulder.
This,
I thought dazedly,
is empowerment.
I was amazed that I’d been able to miss at such close range, but then I realised that I’d been too nervous to actually take aim before firing. Rennie and the Foshes were looking at me in total bewilderment. One of them had dropped his burger on his shoe. Another had bent his knees and put his hands over his ears.
‘That’s my gun,’ said Rennie, ‘what the hell is it doing here?’
‘I locked it in the safe,’ the tallest Fosh explained.
‘You fucking plimsoll-brain, the power’s off,’ said Rennie, taking a step forward as I held the gun at arm’s length, closed my eyes tight and fired again.