What Came Before He Shot Her

who would never cross him, who would wait right there till he came for her again, who would be exactly what he wanted her to be. Precisely, Joel realised with a jolt of understanding, like someone who was not his sister, who did not act or think like Ness. Someone, in short, who gazed upon the Blade in a way that Ness was unlikely to look at any man.

            Joel thought, then, about how many times he had heard the Blade mouth that unpleasant imperative about his sister, and a glimmer of light began to illuminate the darkness around him. But that glimmer of light was like ice against his heart and its incandescence radiated on the simple confluenceof events as they had occurred in his life. Joel saw that they’d all led to this precise moment: Neal Wyatt waiting in the car like someone who knew very well that he belonged there, the Blade showing Arissa what was what, and Joel himself watching the action, receiving a message he’d been meant to receive from the very first.

Cal didn’t matter. Joel didn’t matter. In the final accounting, Neal and Arissa didn’t matter. They themselves didn’t know this yet, but they, too, would learn once their purpose had been served.

What Joel did next, he did to acknowledge all the times that Cal Hancock had tried to warn him to keep clear of the Blade. He emerged from his useless hiding place, and he approached the car, the Blade, and Arissa.

            He said, “Where’s Cal?”

            The Blade glanced his way. “Jo-ell,” he said. “Looks like t’ings’re getting real hot for you, bred.”

            “Where’s Cal?” Joel repeated. “What’ve you done to Cal, Stanley?”

            Neal got out of the car in a liquid movement, but the Blade waved him back. He said, “Long time Cal’s been wanting to see his fam’ly, innit. Out there in Jah-may-ca land, wiv steel bands, ganja, and reggae all night. Uncle Bob Marley looking down from heaven. Cal scratch my back, so I scratch his.” He jerked his head at Neal, who obediently got back into the car. Then he kissed Arissa once again, and he pushed her towards her building. He said, “Anything else, Jo-ell?”

            There was no hope, but Joel said it anyway. “That lady . . . I di’n’t . . .”

            But he didn’t know how to finish what he’d started, so he said nothing further. He merely waited.

            “Didn’t what?” the Blade asked him blandly, without curiosity. A moment for decision, and Joel made the only one he could.

            “Didn’t nuffink,” he said.

            The Blade smiled. “Mind you keep it that way.”

            THE E -FIT CAME next, supplied courtesy of the au pair who’d wielded the toilet plunger. Typical of the London tabloids, she became the heroine of the moment, and her past and present were explored thoroughly as, next to her own picture, was featured the e-fit of the ginger-haired young lout with whom she’d struggled.

            “Is This the Face of a Killer?” was the headline that accompanied the e-fit in the Daily Mail, the front page of which Joel saw fluttering on the pavement outside Westbourne Park station. Like most e-fits, it didn’t look much like him, but the news story that accompanied it revealed that the enhancement of the video image was complete. Additional footage from the Sloane Square underground station had been analysed, the paper reported. The police had isolated more images. Scotland Yard indicated an arrest was imminent, as tips flooded the lines dedicated to the cause of tracking down the killer of the wife of one of their own.

Joel had taken Toby to Meanwhile Gardens when it finally occurred. They were in the skate bowl, in the topmost and simplest of the arenas, and Toby was delighting in the fact that he’d managed to balance long enough to glide from one side to the other without falling off his board. He was crowing, “Lookit! Lookit, Joel” when the first of the panda cars slowed and then stopped on the bridge over the Grand Union Canal. A second panda car took up a position in Elkstone Road, just beyond the corner of the child drop-in centre, but visible enough that Majidah looked up from what she was doing inside the centre, frowned, and decided to walk outside into the play area to make certain the children were safe. A third car parked at the turn from Elkstone into Great Western Road. Out of each of these cars, a uniformed constable climbed. The drivers remained inside.

            They converged on the skate bowl. It came to Joel as he watched their approach that, clearly, he’d been under observation by someone from somewhere—perhaps he’d even been followed for the past days since he’d seen the Blade—and when the moment had seemed appropriate, that person had placed a phone call to the Harrow Road police. And here they were.

            The constable from the car nearest the drop-in centre was the first to get to Joel. He said, “Joel Campbell?” and Joel said to his brother,

            “Tobe, you got to go home, okay?”

            True to form, Toby said “But you said I could ride my skateboard and you said you watch me. Don’t you ’member?”

            “We got to do it later.”

            “Come with me, lad,” the constable said to Joel.

            Joel said, “Tobe? C’n you get home by yourself? If you can’t, I ’spect one of the cops’ll take you.”

            “I want to skateboard. You said, Joel. You promised.”

            “They ain’t lettin me stay here,” Joel said. “You go home.”

            The constable from the bridge arrived next. He said that Toby was to come with him. When he heard this, Joel thought the constable meant that he would take Toby home so that the little boy wouldn’t have to go on his own, despite how close it was to the skate bowl, and he said, “Cheers.” He began to follow the first constable to his car at the kerb near the child drop-in centre—his head averted so that he didn’t have to look at the Pakistani woman watching from behind the chain-link fence—but then he saw that Toby wasn’t being led towards Edenham Estate at all, but rather towards the bridge.

Joel stopped. The day’s cold seeped up his neck and closed around it like a fist. He said, “Where’re they taking my brother?”

            “He’ll be looked after,” the constable told him.

            “But—”

            “You’ll have to come along. You’ll have to get into the car.”

            Joel took a useless step towards his brother. “But Tobe’s meant to go—”

            “Don’t fight us, lad.” The constable attached himself to Joel’s arm.

            “But my auntie’ll wonder—”

            “Come along.”

            At this point, the driver of the panda car parked in front of the drop-in centre came to them at a jog. He attached himself to Joel’s other arm and shoved that arm behind Joel’s back. He brought out a set of handcuffs and, wordlessly, snapped them on his wrists. He hissed in Joel’s ear, “Fucking little half-breed bastard,” and he pushed him towards the car.

            “Steady on, Jer,” the other constable said.

            “Don’t bloody tell me,” the first replied. “Open the door.”

            “Jer—”

            “Fucking open  it.”

            The first cooperated. In front of Joel, the car door swung open, making an invitation that he could not refuse. He felt a sharp blow on his back, and a hand crushed down on his head, propelling him inside the vehicle. When he was inside, the door slammed shut. As the two policemen climbed into the front seat of the car, Joel peered out of the window, trying to see what had happened to Toby.

The panda car on the bridge was gone. In Meanwhile Gardens, board riders in the skate bowl had stopped to watch the police interact with Joel. They lined the lowest lip of the bowl now—their skateboards balanced against their hips—and they talked among themselves as the panda car pulled away from the kerb to make the turn into Great Western Road for the short drive to the Harrow Road station. Joel craned his neck to search for a face in the park that would tell him—by its expression—what would happen from here. But there was no face. There was only his inevitable future that had begun playing out the moment the first constable had taken him by the arm.

Beyond Meanwhile Gardens—and this was what Joel could see as the car crossed the bridge over the canal —the back of Kendra’s house was visible. Joel fixed his gaze on it as long as he could, but it was only a moment before the first building on Great Western Road obscured his view.