What Came Before He Shot Her

to the backseat of the car. The shoulder bag was tossed into the front of the car, after which the two constables climbed inside. The driver turned on the roof lights to get the gathering crowd to disperse. Joel saw faces he did not recognise as the car pulled from the kerb. None of them were friendly. Heads shook, eyes looked sorrowful, fists clenched. Joel was unsure whether all this was directed towards him or towards the cops. What he was sure of was that Cal Hancock’s head, eyes, and fists were not among them.

BACK AT THE Harrow Road police station, Joel found himself in the same interview room he’d been in before. The same individuals danced attendance on him as well. Fabia Bender sat opposite him in the unmoving chair at the unmoving table. At her side was Sergeant Starr, whose black skin shone like satin beneath the room’s otherwise unforgiving light. A duty solicitor had joined Joel on his side of the table, and this was a new development. The presence of this lawyer—a stringy-haired blonde girl in shoes with foolishly elongated points and a wrinkled black trouser suit—informed Joel of how serious his present situation was.

August Starr wanted to know about the gun, for the Asian woman was a closed book to him. She’d been scraped up around the knees, but otherwise unharmed aside from the fact that a few years had been taken off her life by the terror of what she’d gone through. Nonetheless, she had her bag returned to her, along with her money and her credit cards, so her part of the equation was solved once she identified Joel as the boy who’d mugged her. She was a signed, sealed, and delivered matter in August Starr’s mind. The gun, however, was not.

In a society in which handguns had once been virtually nonexistent among the thieving and murdering classes, they were now becoming disturbingly prevalent. That this was a direct result of the easing of borders that came along with European unification—which was, to some, just another term for opening one’s arms to smuggling into the country everything from cigarettes to explosives—could have been mooted forever, and Sergeant Starr had no time for such mooting. The fact was that guns were here, in his community. All he wanted to know was how a twelve-year-old boy had got his hands on one.

            Joel told Starr that he’d found the gun. Back of the charity shop where his aunt worked, he said. There was an alley there with skips and wheelie bins, all over the place. He’d found the gun inside one of them while doing some bin diving one afternoon. He didn’t remember which.

            Where, exactly? Starr wanted to know. He was taking notes as well as recording Joel’s every word.

            Just in one of the bins, Joel told him. Like he said, he didn’t remember which one. It was wrapped up in someone’s rubbish, in a plastic carrier bag.

            What kind of carrier bag? Starr asked him, and he wrote those words— carrier  and bag—in a well-schooled script on a new page in his notebook, signaling the expectation that they were at last getting somewhere and triggering in Joel the determination to lead them nowhere at all.

            Joel said he didn’t know what sort of bag the gun had been in. It could have been a Sainsbury bag. It could have been a Boots bag.

Boots or  Sainsbury? August Starr made this sound like a fascinating detail. He wrote Boots  and Sainsbury  in his notebook as well. He pointed out that this was quite an odd detail since those bags were so very different from each other. They weren’t even the same colour and, even if that were not the case, you wouldn’t expect to find rubbish inside of a Boots bag, would you?

            In this, Joel could sense a trick. He looked at the duty solicitor in the hope she would intervene in some way, as lawyers did on the television when they talked assertively about “my client” and “the law.” But the solicitor said nothing. Her concerns—although Joel would never know this—revolved around the pregnancy test she’d administered to herself that morning, right there in the police station in the woman’s lavatory.

            Fabia Bender was the one to speak. Boots bags were too fl imsy to pack rubbish into, she explained to Joel. A gun would likely burst right through a Boots bag. So didn’t Joel prefer to tell Sergeant Starr the truth? It would be far easier if he did that, dear.

Joel said nothing. He would tough it out, he decided. The best thing to do was to keep his mouth shut. He was twelve years old, after all. What were they going to do to him?

            Into his extended silence, Fabia Bender asked if she might have a private word with Joel. Finally, his solicitor spoke. She said that no one was going to speak to her client—Joel was gratifi ed to hear her use that term—without his solicitor being present. Starr pointed out that there was no cause for anyone to be unreasonable about anything since all they were trying to do at the moment was sort out the truth. The solicitor said, “Nonetheless,” but was interrupted by Fabia Bender, who declared that all anyone wanted was the best for the boy, whereupon August Starr cut in on them both but was unable to make a complete statement since the door to the interview room opened before he said anything other than, “Let’s hang on and consider—”

            A female constable said, “C’n I have a word, Sergeant?” and Starr stepped out of the room. During the two minutes that he was gone, the solicitor gave Fabia Bender a short lecture on what she referred to as “the rights of the accused under British law, madam, when the accused is a juvenile.” She said that she’d expected Miss Bender to know all this, considering her line of employment, a remark that set Fabia Bender off. But before Fabia could complete a reply that put the solicitor in her place, the sergeant returned. He slapped his notebook onto the table and said without looking at anyone but Joel, “You’re free to go.”

            All three of them stared at the policeman in various stages of what could only be called gobsmacked. Then the solicitor stood. She smiled triumphantly, as if she’d somehow managed to effect this development, and said, “Come along, Joel.”

            As the door closed behind them, leaving the other two within the room, Joel heard Fabia Bender say, “But, August, what’s happened?”

            He also heard Starr’s terse reply. “I don’t God damn bloody know, do I.”

            IN VERY SHORT order, with a hasty good-bye from the duty solicitor and an unfriendly look from the special constable behind the reception counter, Joel was released from custody. He found himself out on the pavement in front of the station: no phone call made to his aunt or to anyone else, no request for someone to fetch the wayward youth home, to school, or to a remand centre.

            Joel couldn’t sort out what had happened. One moment he’d been seeing his freedom and his life going up in smoke. The next moment it had all been a dream. Without a slap on the wrist. Without a lecture. Without a word. It didn’t make sense.

            He headed up the road towards the Prince of Wales pub on the corner. He walked on psychological tiptoes, all the way expecting a cop to leap out of a doorway, laughing at the trick that had just been played on a very foolish boy. But in that, too, Joel found his anticipation went unfulfilled. Instead, he made it to the corner before a car pulled up along the kerb. It halted next to Joel. Its passenger door opened. Cal Hancock got out.

            Joel didn’t need to see who the driver was. He got into the back without question when Cal nodded at him. The car shot into the street. Joel wasn’t so foolish as to believe the Blade intended to drive him home.

            No one spoke, and Joel found this an unnerving state of affairs, far more unnerving than if the Blade had railed at him. He’d failed in his mission to mug the Asian lady, and that was bad. What was worse was that he’d lost the gun. But what was the very worst of all was that he’d lost the gun to the cops. They’d try to trace it. It probably had the Blade’s fingerprints on it. If the cops had the Blade’s prints on file for some reason, there would be enormous trouble for the man. And this didn’t even begin to address the money that was lost now that the gun could not be sold in the street.

            The tension in the car felt to Joel like a windless, tropical day. He couldn’t bear what it was doing to his stomach, so he said, “How’d I get out, mon?” and he directed the question to either of the two men in the front seat.

            Neither answered. The Blade turned a corner too quickly and had to swerve to avoid a colourfully garbed African woman who was using a zebra crossing. He swore and called her a fucking freak show.

Joel said, “Cheers, then,” referring to whatever the Blade had done to get him out of trouble. He knew that such assistance had to have come from the Blade, as there was simply no way he could have walked out of the Harrow Road police station otherwise. It was one thing to be caught trying to snatch a purse or trying to mug someone out on the pavement somewhere. That sort of thing resulted in an appearance in front of the magistrate followed by a spate of counseling with someone like Fabia Bender or a period of community service at a place