What Came Before He Shot Her

KENDRA RECEIVED THE word from Majidah. The Pakistani woman was brief enough in her message to the charity shop, where Kendra was in the midst of making a sale to a refugee African woman in the company of an elderly man. Three cars had come from the police, Majidah informed her. Two of them had taken Ness’s brothers away. Separately, this was. And, Mrs. Osborne, the disturbing part comes now: One of the constables put the older boy in handcuffs.

            Kendra heard this in silence because it seemed terribly important at the moment that she conclude the sale of table lamps, shoes, and yellow crockery to her customers. She said, “Thank you. I see. I do appreciate the call,” and left Majidah on the other end of the line thinking, Good gracious, it was hardly any wonder when children went so terribly wrong if the adults in their lives were able to receive deadly news without a single wail of horror. As westernised as she had become over the years that she had lived in London, Majidah knew that she would never have greeted terrible news such as this without taking at least a few minutes to tear at her hair and rip at her clothing before marshalling her forces to do something about it. So Majidah went on to phone Fabia Bender as well, but her message to the social worker was altogether unnecessary since the wheels of British jurisprudence were already turning, and Fabia was at the Harrow Road station in advance of Joel’s arrival.

            Kendra felt herself floundering after the refugees left the charity shop and she was free to absorb Majidah’s message. She did not associate the message with murder. Naturally, she’d seen the story of the shooting in the paper, since, in the constant pursuit of the ever-more-sensational, the editors of all London’s tabloids and most of its broadsheets had made the quick decision that the murder of a cop’s-wife-who-was-also-a-countess easily trumped every other story. So she’d read the papers and she’d seen the e-fit. But like any other e-fit, the one of Joel came only moderately close to his real appearance, and his aunt had had no reason to connect the drawing to her nephew. Besides, her mind had been crammed with other concerns, most of which involved Ness: what had happened to her in years past and what was going to become of her now.

And now . . . Joel. Kendra closed up the charity shop and walked to the Harrow Road police station, which was not far. In her haste, she went without her coat and without her bag. She had with her only demands, and she made them to the special constable working in the tiny reception area where a bulletin board offered easy answers to life’s problems with announcements about Crimestoppers, Neighbourhood Watch programmes, Whistlestop Crime, and rules for Out and About at Night.

            “Police picked up my nephews,” she said. “Where are they? What’s going on?”

            The special constable—a police wanna-be forever doomed to be just that—looked Kendra over and what he saw was a mixed-race lady looking more black than white, shapely in a narrow navy skirt, with something of an attitude about her. He felt that she was making demands of him, in a way that suggested she’d climbed too far above herself, when she ought to be speaking respectfully. He told her to sit. He’d be with her presently.

            She said, “This is a twelve-year-old boy we’re talking about. And an eight-year-old. You’ve brought at least one of them here. I want to know why.”

            He said nothing.

            She said, “I want to see my nephew. And where’s his brother been taken if he’s not here? You can’t snatch children off the street and—”

            “Sit down, madam,” the special constable said. “I will be with you presently and what is  it about this that you don’t understand? Do I need to call someone from within to explain this all to you? I can do that. You can be invited to step inside an interview room yourself.”

            It was the yourself  that told her what she needed to know. “What’s he done?” she asked hoarsely. “Tell me what he’s done.”

            The special constable knew, of course. Everyone in the Harrow Road station knew because, to them, this was a crime of such enormity that no punishment was sufficient to mete out to the perpetrator. One of their extended fraternity had been struck down through the person of his wife, and a payment would be extracted for this crime. Thinking of what had happened in Belgravia caused blood to boil in the veins of individual policemen and women. Boiling blood produced the need to strike.

            The special constable had in his possession the sharpened photo, which had at last been produced from CCTV footage in Cadogan Lane. Duplicates of this picture were up now in every police station in every borough of the city. He took this picture and he shoved it at Kendra for what he thought of as her viewing pleasure.

            “Talking to the sod about this little matter,” he told her. “Sit down, shut your mug, or get out of here.”

            Kendra saw that the picture was unmistakably Joel. The dandelion puff of hair around his head and the tea-cake blotches on his face said it all. As did his expression, which was of an animal caught in the lights of an oncoming car. Kendra didn’t need to ask where the picture had been taken. Suddenly, she knew. She crumpled the photo to her chest and she bowed her head.

            Chapter

      28 In the interview room, things were different this time, and Joel understood he was at a crossroads. No one even questioned him at first. He sat for hours, sometimes with Sergeant Starr, sometimes with Fabia Bender, sometimes with a female constable who was called Sherry by the other two adults. The stringyhaired blonde duty solicitor was not present now—“I’ll be taking your part when the time comes,” Fabia had said to Joel—but the very large and very official-looking tape recorder was always right there, waiting to be switched on. No one pushed the relevant button on it, however, and no one said anything. Not a single word. Instead, they came and went and sat in silence. Joel told himself they were waiting for something or for someone to join them, but their silence unnerved him, making his bones feel rubbery.

            He’d already realised that the position he was in—sitting there in the interview room—was likely to play itself out far differently from his earlier visit to the Harrow Road station. He’d drawn that conclusion from his last exchange with the Blade. Then, he’d finally put the pieces together, and he’d seen himself as what he’d long and unknowingly been: an actor in a drama of revenge. It was a drama whose plot he hadn’t understood until that moment of conversation with Stanley Hynds while Neal Wyatt lurked nearby, doubtless waiting for more rewards to flow in his direction, remuneration for what he’d managed to accomplish at the behest of the Blade.

At this precise moment, Joel saw the details only imperfectly. Some things he knew for certain; others he only intuited.

A large mirror hung on the wall opposite the table where he was sitting. Joel deduced quickly and correctly that it was a two-way mirror because he’d seen that sort of thing in police dramas on the television. He expected that people had come and gone on the other side, studying him and waiting for him to give a sign that would mark him as guilty, so he tried very hard not to give that sign, although he wasn’t sure what it was.

            He reckoned that people were trying to unsettle him with the wait and the silence. This wasn’t exactly what he’d expected, so he used the time to study his hands. They were out of the handcuffs, and he rubbed his wrists because although there was no mark upon them from the restraints, he could still feel the pressure and the chafing, through his skin to his bones. He’d been made the promise of a sandwich and he’d been given a can of Coke. He curved his fingers around this and tried to think of something pleasant, of anything but where he was and what was likely to happen next. But he couldn’t manage it. So he dwelt instead on questions and answers.

What did they have on him? he asked himself. A video image and nothing else. An e-fit that didn’t fit at all.

            And what did a video image and an e-fit mean? That someone looking vaguely like Joel Campbell had been walking down a street not far from the spot in Belgravia where a white lady had been shot. That was it. The long and the short of it. The alpha and the omega. The black and the white.

            But at heart Joel knew that there was more. There was the au pair who’d come face-to-face with him inside the house in Cadogan Lane. There was the old woman who’d been walking her corgi around the corner from where the countess had been shot. There was his knitted cap, left behind in one of the gardens through which they had escaped. There was the gun, lost in one of the gardens. Once the police had the gun in their possession—which really was only a matter of time, if they didn’t have it already—there would also be the small problem of