In the Dark (25 page)

His part in it . . .

Clive said thank you and stood up. He walked across, leaned down and drove his fist into SnapZ's face. ‘That's for talking to me how you did earlier. Our conversation through the door.'

Billy watched the boy trying to stop the blood and laughed. ‘Fucking KFC . . .'

‘Take him through there.' Clive nodded towards the bedroom.

Billy hauled SnapZ from the settee and pushed him across the room, blood still leaking from his shattered nose onto the dirty green carpet. After a couple of uncertain steps, SnapZ veered right suddenly and threw himself into the bathroom, desperately trying to lock the door behind him. Billy shook his head. Clive walked calmly across the room, lowered his shoulder and eased aside the door.

Said, ‘No point.'

Billy stepped past him and leaned down to drag the boy out, then smacked him across the ear with the gun when he started screaming. For a few seconds there was only a low moan, and the bass-line from the next room, like a racing heartbeat.

Clive picked up the gun from the table. ‘Too young to be playing with one of these,' Clive said. ‘Too young to be a man when someone takes it away from you.'

Billy pushed SnapZ into the bedroom, then down onto the unmade bed. SnapZ pulled up his legs and buried his face in his knees, smearing blood across his jeans.

‘Lie down,' Billy said. ‘And turn over.'

‘What you going to do, man?'

Billy hit him with the gun again. ‘Don't be so disgusting.'

Clive stood in the middle of the living room and looked around. The place was a shit-hole, the worst he'd seen. He didn't understand why these people didn't use the money they were making to try and better themselves. Why they didn't do something about how they lived.

He didn't give a toss how they made their money; he wasn't judging. How could he? As it went, he liked a smoke himself at the end of the day to even himself out a little, but he still thought it was shameful that they didn't make more of an effort. That they wasted what they'd made on gold rings and training shoes.

Looking like rap stars and living like fucking tramps.

‘Are we going to get this done, mate, or what?'

Clive turned when Billy shouted. Saw him through the open bedroom door, standing over the bed. The kid face down.

‘It's just that I've got a Sunday roast waiting indoors.'

Clive nodded. He picked up the remote to turn down the music and flicked open his phone.

 
Theo's mum always drank a glass of wine with her Sunday lunch. She always got sentimental and talked about how Sunday had been his father's favourite day. How he used to say that it was a day for families. And after lunch, there was always cards.

They played gin rummy, and today Angela was thrilled with how many times she managed to beat her big brother, punching the air as she laid the winning cards down round after round. Theo usually let her win a few hands, but today she needed no help. He couldn't focus for more than a few seconds; found himself drifting away. Angela and his mother grew short with him, as time and again he sat there doing nothing when it was his turn.

Afterwards, he sat smoking while his mum cleared away, and Angela bounded over, still beaming. ‘Champion!' she sang.

‘You were lucky, man. You got all the cards.'

‘Pure skill.'

She sat at his feet, facing him; her thumbs flying across the buttons of her DS, murmuring to herself as she fired at monsters, collected treasure, whatever game it was. He looked down at the top of her head. His mum had done something different with her hair that Theo had never seen before; braided it in some new way.

‘How's school?' he asked.

‘OK.'

‘Only OK?'

She glanced up from her game. ‘It's great.' She dropped her eyes back to the screen, screwing up her mouth in concentration as she focused on the action. After a few seconds she looked up again and let out a long sigh, like she'd just been distracted from vital scientific research. ‘
What?
'

‘It's fine . . .'

She lowered the game. ‘I'm about to get killed by aliens anyway,' she said.

He wouldn't have
wanted
his sister to be miserable at school, but there was still that notion of getting away, of them
all
getting away; now becoming a fantasy into which he was escaping more and more. It would be that much more of a non-starter if it meant dragging Angela away from somewhere she was happy. Of unsettling her again.

It wasn't her fault that he'd got himself into this mess. Wasn't anybody's fault but his own, didn't matter what the papers or anyone else said.

‘Be good if you could come to school with me,' Angela said. ‘You're clever, so you could do all the things that are too hard.'

‘Sounds OK.' He nodded like he was thinking about it, said, ‘We've got a problem, though.'

‘What?' Dead serious.

‘I think people might suss me. I'm big for a ten-year-old, man.'

She shrugged, like it was a minor detail. ‘You're clever, so you can work that out.'

‘Right . . .'

‘I'll still do games and art and dinner-time, and you can do everything else, OK?'

Yeah, he was a regular genius. Clever enough to be wondering whether
his
mother would have anything to say when it was his turn; while the crew sent their serious text messages and Angela laid flowers on the pavement. Clever enough to be messing up everything with Javine and neglecting his baby son while his friends got shot down on the street.

He leaned across to stub out his cigarette, listening to the tinny melody from Angela's game playing over and over.

Were they ever his friends?

He thought about Ransford and Kenny. The football boys back in Chatham. Thought about them without feeling the tightness in his chest that came on whenever he went down to see the boys on the estate, out to earn his living.

They were more than friends; they always said that. Bredren. More than family even, that's what being in the crew means, but Theo never believed that shit for one minute, no matter how many times he touched fists and did the ‘look how serious we are' nodding thing. Not Mikey or SnapZ; not really. Certainly not Wave. Easy was the closest, the
oldest
at any rate, but things were strange with him now. Had been ever since they'd climbed into that Cavalier.

Clever enough to have killed someone to earn himself a promotion. Angela smacked him on the knee to get his attention. ‘You all right, Theo?'

He looked across to see his mother standing in the doorway, running a tea-towel across a plate. Watching him, with something in her eyes that made his chest tighter than ever.

Another smack. ‘
Theo
?'

He turned back to his sister and lied.

 
‘Billy all set then, is he?' Frank asked.

Clive looked into the bedroom. Billy was ready, but he couldn't say the same about the kid on the bed. He'd been thrashing about and shouting until Billy had indicated, rather forcefully, that he should keep quiet and stay still. Clive had heard the voice of a terrified child and seen the dark stain on the sheets beneath him. The kid had been well cocky before; on the other side of his front door with a gun near by. But that stuff usually fell away quickly enough near the end.

‘Yeah, he's keen to crack on,' Clive said. ‘Got roast beef waiting for him at home.'

‘Sounds good,' Frank said. ‘I've sent one of the builders out to pick me up a sandwich.'

‘How's it coming?'

‘They seem to be grafting hard enough, but I'm not sure if that's just because I'm here. That bloke doing the cornicing and stuff knows what he's doing, though. Looks lovely.'

‘Want me to come over, so you can get home?'

‘Meet me at the house later,' Frank said. ‘We can see where we are.'

It was only the slightest shift in tone, but Clive understood well enough that they weren't talking about the pub renovation any more. This was the way they always did it;
had
to do it. Frank wasn't stupid and knew how everything worked. High-tech monitoring systems, intercepts and all that. If anything was ever produced, transcripts or whatever, there was no way it would stand up in court. The only people doing well out of that sort of nonsense would be Frank and his brief.

It was second nature now, and it helped that they knew each other so well, that they had developed a shorthand.

‘I'll call before I come,' Clive said.

‘Fine. Just so we can sort out the rest of the schedule.'

Clive took a pride in how he went about things; same as he did with any job he was doing for Frank. He was businesslike and never took this kind of work lightly. At the end of a day like this there'd always be a stiff drink or two taken, didn't matter how long you'd been doing it. Maybe a smoke, too, if it had been more than just the one job.

‘I'd best leave you to get on then,' Frank said. That same little shift in the voice, like a cloud going over for a second. ‘OK?'

Clive closed his phone, crossed to the stereo and turned up the volume again. By the time he reached the bedroom the kid had started shouting again, and Clive had to sit down on his back to keep him from coming right off the bed. ‘Easy,' he said, reaching for the pillow and pressing it across the back of the kid's head. He leaned all his weight into it and gave Billy the nod.

Billy stepped across, light on his feet, and picked his spot.

There was a muffled thud and a scorch mark, not much bigger than the burn from a discarded fag-end; black and ragged at its edge. Clive had seen something like this a few times in films, American gangster stuff, and for some reason there were always a few feathers flying about afterwards. In slow-motion sometimes, like snow in a globe. The men who'd done the job always looked blank and strolled out of the room, while some kind of music came in, and the feathers floated down like they'd been shooting fucking chickens or something.

He'd never seen anything like that in real life; it was always just this. They probably did it that way for a nice effect. Or maybe, Clive thought, he simply never dealt with anyone who had feather pillows.

TWENTY-THREE

Helen helped her father clear away the lunch things, then dried while he washed up. When she and her sister were younger, they had enjoyed being part of a small production line while their mother put her feet up, with Jenny putting the dishes away and the three of them telling bad jokes or singing along with the radio. Today, Helen and her father went about their tasks in relative silence.

Her father had got a large steak and kidney pie in from Marks and Spencer and opened a can of beer. He'd talked her through his previous day's activities - the circling in the
Radio Times
of TV shows to be watched later, the lunchtime pint with the bloke two doors up, and the cup of coffee with the nice lady over the road - while Helen nodded and cleared her plate, the breakfast-time vomiting session having left her ravenous as usual.

‘And how was your Sunday?' he'd asked.

She'd said something suitably non-committal, not keen to answer the questions that were sure to follow if she mentioned the lunch with Roger Deering and the afternoon she'd spent at Sarah Ruston's. She told him that she'd had a quiet evening in.

Watching her father finish his lunch, she'd taken her cue to apologise for the argument they'd had two days earlier, when he'd been putting the cot together. It hadn't been her fault, but that had never really mattered where her dad was concerned. He was a sulker, same as Jenny.

He'd looked across the table at her, reddening. ‘Don't be so silly, love. It's me who should be saying sorry. I felt rotten all day yesterday.'

‘Oh . . .'

‘Miserable old bugger, I am.'

This was a first. She knew how badly he wanted to protect her, and she felt a twinge of sympathy for a man whose big hands did not fit easily into kid gloves.

Helen had caught on pretty quickly to the fact that her condition was something of a ‘get out of jail free' card. With anything from an argument in the Post Office to a spot of mild shoplifting, pregnancy gave you a certain amount of leeway. After all, it wasn't a good idea to argue with a pregnant woman, to let the poor thing get over-emotional, to stir up those unstable hormones. Throw in a recent bereavement and it was becoming obvious that you could get away with murder. Being up the duff
and
widowed meant never having to say you were sorry.

She said it again anyway - sorry that her father had been feeling rotten - while making a mental note to start being a damn sight nastier to people.

‘I
was
right about that cot, though,' he said.

Once the washing-up was done, her father turned away from the sink, drying his hands on a tea-towel. ‘You've still not had a good cry, have you, love?'

Helen laughed and rubbed at the last plate. ‘Are you kidding? I was blubbing at
Midsomer Murders
last night.'

‘You know what I mean.'

‘Drop of a bloody hat . . .'

‘For Paul,' he said. ‘You've not cried for Paul.'

Helen put down the plate as her father stepped across to her and she began to cry again, but for all the wrong reasons. He shushed her and rubbed her back, and she pressed her face into his shoulder, smelling his aftershave and moving her cheek against the soft material of his shirt.

‘Told you,' she sobbed. ‘Drop of a bloody hat.'

When she'd pulled away and put the plates into the cupboard, they talked about the funeral. There was still no news on the date, but Helen guessed that it wouldn't be too long before the body was released. She told him that Paul's mother was still being awkward. Helen did not want any flowers, being all for donations to a police charity instead, but Caroline Hopwood was as traditional on that score as she was when it came to the choice of music.