Kendra said, “I’m going to make you something to settle your stomach. Why don’t you come down to the lounge and wait on the settee?
Have a lie down and I’ll fi x you up a tray. You can watch the telly while you eat. How ’bout that?”
Joel kept his eyes closed because he felt stung by her tone. It was a voice she’d never used before. Tears dripped across the bridge of his nose and onto his pillow. He did what he could not to sob, which meant he said nothing in reply.
Kendra said, “You come when you’re ready. Toby’s got a video on the telly, but I’ll tell him to let you watch what you want.”
It was the thought of Toby—and the thought of what Toby might say if Kendra questioned him—that got Joel up once his aunt left the bedroom. This, it turned out, was all to the good, for when he arrived in the sitting room, it was to find Toby blithely lying to their aunt about a supposed afternoon in the learning centre, just as Joel had instructed him to do but without the knowledge of Luce Chinaka’s phone call.
“. . . readin today,” Toby was saying. “Only I don’t ’member the book.”
Joel said, “Wa’n’t today, mon. What’re you on about, Tobe?” He joined Toby on the settee, his pillow in his hands and a blanket from his bed dragging along on the floor. “Today we came straight here from school cos I was sick. Remember?”
Toby looked at him, his expression puzzled. “But I thought—”
“Yeah. But you tol’ me all ’bout dat yesterday.”
“‘That’,” Kendra corrected him patiently. And then, miraculously, she dismissed the topic, saying, “Toby, move over and let Joel have a lie down. Let him watch the telly. You can help me in the kitchen if you’ve a mind to.”
Toby scooted over on the sofa, but his expression remained confused. He said to Joel, “But, Joel, you tol’ me—”
“You’re getting all your days mixed up,” Joel cut in. “I tol’ you we wouldn’t be going to the centre when I fetched you from school jus’ dis af ’ernoon. How c’n you not
“‘Haven’t they been working,’” came the automatic correction from Kendra. “Joel, don’t be so hard on him.” She went to the television and removed the video from the old recorder beneath it. She turned to a channel arbitrarily and once the picture flickered on, she gave a nod and descended to the kitchen. In a moment she was banging about down there, fixing the promised meal for Joel.
Toby’s gaze hadn’t moved from Joel’s face, and what it showed was utter confusion. He said, “You said I was meant to say—”
“I’m sorry, Tobe,” Joel murmured. He moved his own gaze to the stairway’s door and kept it there. “She found out, see. They phoned her up and asked where you were, so I had to tell her . . . Look, jus’ say we came straight here and we been here ever since. If she asks or summick, okay?”
“But you tol’ me—”
“Tobe!” Joel’s whisper was fierce. “Things change, y’unnerstan wha’ I say? Things change all the time. Like Ness not being here and Dix bein gone. Y’unnerstan? Things
But things didn’t easily change for Toby, not without some attempt at removing the fog from his brain. He said again, “But—”
Joel grabbed his wrist tightly and turned to him. “Don’t be so fuckin
Toby recoiled. Joel dropped his wrist. Toby’s chin dimpled, and his eyelids lowered. The skin of them showed the delicate tracing of blue veins across a freckled, almond surface. Joel felt a tug at his heart at the sight, but he hardened it and he hardened himself because as far as he was concerned, Toby had to learn and he had to learn
“Joel,” Kendra called from the kitchen, “I’ve brought Chinese, but I’m making you boiled eggs and toast. D’you want jam?”
Joel didn’t see how he’d be able to eat anything at all, but he called back weakly that jam was good, jam was fine, and whatever kind they had would be excellent. Then for the first time he looked at the television and saw what Kendra had switched on for him to watch. It looked like some channel’s nightly news because a female reporter stood in front of the entrance to a hospital, speaking into a microphone. Joel paid attention.
“. . . footage from the vicinity of Sloane Square is being examined by Belgravia detectives who have pulled out all the stops to apprehend the shooter. There was, apparently, at least one witness—and possibly
519
two—to the incident, which took place in broad daylight in Eaton Terrace. We’ve learned that the victim had just returned from a shopping trip, but that’s actually the extent of what we know about the incident itself. As far as we’ve been able to find out, the victim—thirty-fouryear-old Helen Lynley, Countess of Asherton—is under twenty-fourhour guard here at St. Thomas’ Hospital. But what, exactly, her condition is, we do not know.”
A man’s voice said, “Andrea, is anyone drawing a connection between this shooting and the serial killings currently under investigation?”
The reporter adjusted her earpiece and said, “Well, it’s a bit difficult to avoid making the connection, isn’t it? Or at least assuming there might be one. When the wife of the head of an investigation that’s the size and scope of this one is shot . . . Inevitably, there are going to be questions.”
Behind her, the hospital doors swung open. Camera lights began to fl ash. A man in doctor’s garb walked over to a bouquet of microphones while a number of other people in his company—a grim-faced group of individuals with
“. . . life support,” were the two words that came to Joel from the man in hospital garb. “The situation is very grave.”
There was more—questions fired from all directions and answers given hesitantly and with a desire to protect the privacy of the victim and her family—but Joel could hear nothing of it. All he could hear was the windstorm in his ears as the picture on the television finally changed to show a montage of images with which he was only too familiar: the street in which he and Cal had found their mark; the crime scene tape defining a rectangle around the front of the chessboard front steps; a photograph of the lady herself with a name beneath it identifying her as Helen Lynley. What followed this were other shots of St. Thomas’ Hospital, on the south bank of the Thames, with a dozen panda cars flashing their lights outside; of a blond man and a dumpylooking woman speaking into a mobile as they stood outside a grimy railway tunnel; of a bloke in the uniform of a high-ranking cop talking into a bank of microphones. And then a series of CCTV cameras pointing this way and that, on this building and under those eaves, and each of them—Joel knew this and could swear to it—in the act of filming two blokes on their way to shoot the wife of a cop from New Scotland Yard.
Joel’s aunt was ascending the stairs. She brought with her a tray on which were boiled eggs and toast that gave off an aromatic smell that should have been comforting, but not for Joel. He flung himself from the settee and charged towards the stairs and the bathroom. He didn’t make it.
CAL DISAPPEARED. JOEL sought him out the very next day and the day after that in all the regular places where he ought to have been: the sunken football pitch, where an incomplete piece of art in Cal’s style suggested he’d decamped in a hurry; Meanwhile Gardens near the spiral steps and beneath the bridge and atop the knolls, where he smoked and occasionally dealt dope to the adolescents in the neighbourhood; the abandoned flat in Lancefield Court, where the drug runners went to pick up their wares; the building that housed Arissa’s flat in Portnall Road. Joel even paced through Kensal Green Cemetery in an attempt to find him, but Cal was nowhere. He might as well have evaporated, so decidedly was the Rasta gone.
To Joel, this made no sense. For who was to guard the Blade if not Cal Hancock?
Except, when Joel looked for the Blade, he couldn’t find him either. At least, not at first.
On the third afternoon, Joel finally saw him. He was on his way down the steps of the Westminster
