But was it strength? For years her first thought on waking and her last thought before sleeping had been of lost Lucy. And then it wasn’t. Did a day pass when she didn’t think of her daughter? She couldn’t swear to it. That first time she’d given herself to Mick, she’d pendulum’d between joy and guilt. But later, when they holidayed together in Spain, she recalled the extremes as contentment and ecstasy with never a gap for a ghost to creep through.
Perhaps this meant that Alex had loved so much he could only survive the loss by losing himself, whereas she…
She pushed the thought away. She could do that.
Was that strength?
Alex couldn’t. The thought pushed him away.
Was that weakness?
These were questions beyond her puzzling.
Maybe that portly figure two rows ahead, sitting as still as the statues on the tomb above him, would have the answers.
08.25-08.40
Fleur Delay watched her brother disappear into the cathedral then opened her bag and from it took a small pack of tablets. She slipped one into her mouth and washed it down with a swig of water from a bottle in the door pocket.
Letting Vince loose in a cathedral was not normally an option, but it had seemed marginally better than collapsing in the car park.
She took another tablet. After a while she began to feel a little better. All the car windows were wide open to admit the morning air. Now she closed them and took out her mobile phone. There was no one in hearing distance but minimizing risk was an instinct so deep ingrained it had ceased to be a thought process.
She speed-dialled a number. It took a long time for it to be answered.
‘Buenos dias, senor,’ she said. ‘Soy Senora Delay.’
She listened to the response for a while then interrupted in English.
‘Yes, I know it’s Sunday and I know it’s early, but I don’t know where it says in our very expensive agreement that you stop working for me at weekends or before nine o clock. I’ll write it in if you like, but I’ll cut your fee by half, comprende usted?’
She listened again, cut in again.
‘OK, no need to grovel. I just want a progress report. And before you start on with the crappy reasons why things move so slowly over there, you ought to know I’m looking to move in a bit earlier than planned. Four weeks, tops. That means not a day longer than four weeks, OK?’
After she’d finished her call, she opened the windows again and took another drink of water.
This had not been a good idea, but turning down The Man could have been a worse one.
She leaned back in her seat and relaxed. She didn’t fall asleep but drifted into a state of waking reverie that was becoming more and more common as her medication increased proportionately to her illness. The past would come and sit next to her. She could see the world as it was at present with the great cathedral towering over her, but it floated on her retina like a mirage. It was the images nudging her memory that felt like reality.
Among them she could see her father quite clearly, his eyes a shade of blue that was almost green, his lips permanently curved into the promise of a smile, his forefinger flicking his nose as he said, ‘Cheerio, my darlings, keep your noses clean,’ that last sunny day when he strolled out of the house and never came back.
She’d been nine, Vincent twelve.
It had taken her five long years to accept that her father was gone for good.
Their feckless mother had done her poor best, but as she slid down a spiral of substance abuse and bad partner choice, she had little time or will to give her children the attention they needed. Vince readily came to accept that it was his young sister he had to look to for the basics of hot food and clean clothing. And once he got launched on what to a neutral observer looked like a dedicated effort to become the most inefficient criminal of the age, it was Fleur, masquerading as his elder sister, who visited him inside and was waiting for him outside the many prisons he spent a large proportion of his young manhood in.
At sixteen Fleur left school. She could have stayed on. She was a bright girl with a real talent for mathematics, but she’d had enough of classrooms.
Her mother’s current boyfriend, a small-time pimp, offered to find her a job. He and the girl got on quite well, so instead of telling him to take a hike, she thanked him politely and explained she would prefer to earn her money on her bum rather than on her back. He became quite indignant and assured her that he wasn’t inviting her to join his team; her brain was too sharp and her body too shapeless for that. Instead he recommended her for a clerking job in the office of a local finance company.
That sounded almost as dull as school. But she knew the company he referred to and she knew it was run by The Man.
On the appointed day she went along to the company offices, located in what had once been a pet shop in a dingy street north of East India Dock Road. Determined to make a good impression she got there nice and early. The shop space still smelled of animal piss, but there was no sign of human presence. Then she thought she heard voices beyond a door at the back.
As she pushed it open, the voices died or rather disappeared beneath a loud crash and a louder scream.
She was looking into a small office occupied by three men, two black, one white. Or rather, grey.
The grey-faced man was sitting on a chair before a desk. The reason for the greyness and for the scream was that the older of the two black men, standing beside him, was holding his hand flat on the desktop, while the other black man, seated behind the desk, had just smashed the knuckle of his right forefinger with a claw hammer.
She knew who the black men were. The older one was Milton Slingsby, known as Sling, a small-time pro boxer who’d found more profitable employment for his skills as the chief lieutenant of the younger black man who was of course Goldie Gidman, The Man.
Gidman regarded her expressionlessly then made a gesture with the hammer.
Slingsby pulled the grey man upright and dragged him towards the door. As he passed Fleur, he turned his gaze upon her, his eyes wide in pleading or maybe just in pain. She realized she knew him too, at least by sight. His name was Janowski and he ran a small tailoring business just a couple of streets away. Then Slingsby thrust him through the door and heeled it shut behind them.
‘Why’d you not run, girl?’ asked The Man.
He was probably in his thirties but looked younger till you saw his eyes. Good looking, slim, medium build, he wore a pristine white shirt that accentuated the deep black of his skin against which glowed a heavy golden necklet, gold rings on his fingers and a gold bracelet on either wrist.
‘I’m Fleur Delay,’ she said. ‘I’ve come for the interview.’
The hammer made another gesture, and she subsided on to the grey man’s seat. Her eyes took in the desk’s nearer edge. A series of small craters suggested that grey man was not the first to have sat here. She didn’t feel safe, but she felt safer than she would have done running.
The craters vanished beneath a sheet of paper bearing a column of about twenty sums of money ranging from the teens to the thousands.
‘Add it up,’ said The Man. The hammer, she was glad to observe, had vanished.
She took her time. Something told her that accuracy was more important than speed.
‘Nineteen thousand five hundred and sixty-two pounds fourteen pence,’ she said.
‘So you can add up,’ said The Man, pulling the sheet out of her fingers. ‘But can you shut up? The guy who was sitting there when you came in-’
‘What guy?’ she interrupted.
He stared at her with a blankness that could have concealed anything.
‘You know who I am?’ he asked after a while.
