What Came Before He Shot Her

            “I pay you back,” Joel said. “I got fifty pounds and I can—”

            “Oh, you pay me back. You pay me back.” With each word the Blade thrust the gun upward, harder.

            Joel went with it, rising on his toes. “I will. Jus’ tell me.”

            “I’ll tell you, fucker. I’ll God damn  tell you.”

            The Blade dropped the gun to his side as quickly as he’d raised it. Joel nearly sank to his knees: both with the sudden movement and with his own relief. Cal came up behind him. He led Joel to a crate and pushed him down upon it. Cal’s hands held him there, by the shoulders. They weren’t harsh hands, but they were far from friendly.

            “You,” the Blade said, “are going to do exactly  like I tell you to do. And if you don’t, Jo-ell, I find you and I deal wiv you. I deal wiv you one way or th’ other. Before the cops get to you or after. Don’t make no difference. You get me, mon?”

            Joel nodded. “I get you.”

            “An’ I deal wiv your family next. You get dat as well?”

            Joel swallowed. “I get you.”

            He watched, then, and saw the Blade wipe every vestige of his fi n gerprints from the pistol. He extended it in Joel’s direction. He said,

            “You take this piece and you listen good, then. You cock dis one up, and there’s going to be real hell to pay.”

            Chapter

      24 Ness remained alone, secretive and sullen. She fulfilled her obligation to community service, but she ceased journeying to Covent Garden.

            This seemed reasonable at first: She’d been attacked upon her return from Covent Garden. It wasn’t out of the question that she’d harbour certain fears about travelling on her own to and from the place. But when she refused to join Sayf al Din and his helpers even during the height of business hours—when anyone’s comings and goings on the underground would have been made in the company of millions of other commuters and even the walk home from the Westbourne Park station would not have been made in solitude—then it seemed that the girl’s fears needed to be addressed.

            Majidah tried. “Do you not see you let them win, Vanessa, when you give in in such a manner?”

            To which Ness replied, “F’rget it, okay? I’m doin my community service, innit. I got one stupid course at college, an’ I don’t got to do nuffink more ’n dat.”

            This was true. The fact of it tied everyone’s hands. But the additional fact was that Ness was bound by order of the magistrate to attend school full time as well, so if she didn’t enroll in some programme or another at the college—which working for Sayf al Din was preparing her to do—then she was going to find herself standing in front of the magistrate once again, and this time there would be no leniency. There had been exceptions enough made for her already.

            Fabia Bender held the whip hand in this matter. When she called upon Kendra, she had done some preparation for their meeting. She had separate files on each of the children. Her possession of them and the fact that she laid them out on the kitchen table were designed to impress upon the children’s aunt the gravity of the situation.

Kendra needed no metaphor for this. Both the social worker and Sergeant Starr had put her in the picture about Joel’s attempt at mugging a woman on Portobello Road as well as his possession of a weapon and his subsequent and mysterious release from custody. Although she told herself it had likely been a case of mistaken identity—for how else could he have been released so summarily?—in her heart she wasn’t so certain. This, then, in combination with the change in Ness was sufficient to draw her full attention back to all three of the children.

            “Social worker’s coming to the house to talk to me,” she told Cordie after Fabia Bender’s phone call to the charity shop. “She wants it to be just the two of us, ’cept Dix c’n be there if he’s round just then.”

            Cordie nodded in sympathetic silence, listening to the sound of her two girls peacefully playing with paper dolls in the lounge while the rain beat on the windows outside. She thanked God: for her daughters’ innocence, for her husband’s solid presence despite his maddening desire for a son, and for her own good luck. She had a gainfully employed man in the house, a fully functioning family, and a job she enjoyed with colleagues who shared her passion.

            “Did I do wrong phoning up the cops wiv dis Neal Wyatt’s name?”

            Kendra asked her.

            Cordie couldn’t say. In her experience nothing good ever  came of involving the police in any aspect of one’s life, but she was willing to make an exception to that belief. So she said, “’S all gonna work out, Ken,” which was the truth, although whether it was going to work out well or work out disastrously was something she didn’t predict. To Cordie, life was better if it was lived off the radar screens of the myriad arms of governmental institutions. Since Kendra and her relations had placed themselves fi rmly onto  these radar screens, it was hardly likely that there was going to be a happily ever after involved.

There seemed only three options when Kendra thought everything over: going on as they had been for the last year, creating a radical intervention to effect an immediate change that would shake up Ness and Joel and bring them to their senses—provided Joel even needed that, which she still didn’t want to admit to—or hoping for a miracle in the person of Carole Campbell and her sudden, complete, and permanent recovery. The first was clearly not working out, the second seemed to involve care and was thus unthinkable, and the third was unlikely. A final and potentially efficacious option was marriage to Dix and the semblance of permanence and family that such a marriage might offer. But marriage to Dix was precisely what Kendra did not want; indeed, she wanted marriage to no one at all. Marriage was a form of giving up and giving in, and she could not face this, even as she knew it might be the only solution available.

            Fabia Bender had no intention of making things easy on the children’s aunt. This was a runaway train she was attempting to halt, and she meant to use whatever means were available to put on the brakes. She could tell that Kendra Osborne wasn’t a bad woman. She knew the children’s aunt meant well by all of them. But with Joel in possession of a firearm—not to mention identified as a mugger and still  somehow escaping prosecution for these offences—and with Ness the victim of a street assault and the street assault’s aftermath, the children’s jeopardy was fast reaching what could only be described as critical mass. An explosion was imminent. Years of experience told the social worker that.

She began with Ness, whose folder she opened and studied with an apparent need to refresh her memory on the details, although she knew them well enough and did this only for effect. Across from her Kendra sat, joined by Dix, who’d turned up smelling of oil and fried fi sh from his parents’ cafe, anxious to get to the gym for his workout but eager to be of support to Kendra and thus a bundle of warring energies.

Ness was doing her community service, which was to the good, Fabia told them. But she’d ceased her work for Sayf al Din, which was substituting for her required full-time schooling. Fabia was—at this time—interceding with the magistrate in respect of Vanessa Campbell’s meeting her obligations under the terms of her probation. But if something didn’t change quickly, Ness was going to face the magistrate and things were not going to go smoothly when she did.

            “He knows about the assault, however, and he’s agreed to counselling in place of full-time school,” Fabia told Kendra. “We have someone in Oxford Gardens she can see, if you can guarantee she gets there. As to Joel—”

            “I got him sorted,” Kendra said quickly, not because this was the truth but because she hadn’t told Dix about the mugging and the gun. Why should she? was what she asked herself. It was all a mistake, wasn’t it? “He hasn’t gone truant since that one time—”

            Dix looked at her sharply and frowned.

            “—and he knows he was lucky with the way things turned out.”

            “But there’s more involved here than meets the eye,” Fabia said.

            “That he was released so quickly—”