What Came Before He Shot Her

fingerprints. For Joel’s prints were the only ones on that gun, and this had been the case from the moment that the Blade had wiped the pistol clean and handed it over, fresh as a baby newly born and newly bathed.

            The thought of babies newly born and newly bathed brought unbidden into Joel’s mind the thought of the lady’s baby. They hadn’t known, because if they’d known, they’d never have . . . They wouldn’t. All they’d done, he told himself, was just wait for someone to show up in that posh polished street of posh polished houses. That was it. And Joel had not intended her to die. He hadn’t intended her to be shot at all.

            This was the point. The shooting of that woman—wife of a Scotland Yard detective, pregnant, returning from a shopping excursion, in hospital now, on life support—was the fulcrum on which Joel’s life was balanced. He was in a precarious and dangerous position, ready to slide in either direction. For Cal Hancock and not Joel had done the shooting and all Joel really had to do was to say the name and not only that name but another name, and this was what he sat there considering in the interview room.

            He thought about what they did to twelve-year-old boys who found themselves in the wrong place, with the wrong companion, at the worst possible time. Surely, they didn’t put them in gaol. They sent them somewhere, to some detention centre for boys, where they were held for a while before they were released back into their communities. If their crimes were heinous enough, the authorities released them elsewhere, with new identities and the possibility of a future before them. This, then, was what Joel saw as an option he could choose if he wanted to do so. For he’d had no knowledge of what was going to happen that day in Belgravia, and he could tell them that as well. He could say that he was just hanging with one Cal Hancock on that afternoon, and they’d got on the tube and ridden around on the circle line and got off where it seemed that they could . . . what? he wondered. Mug someone was the obvious answer, and Joel knew he would have to offer that much in whatever statement he finally made.

            So he would tell them, he decided, that they’d intended to mug a rich white lady if they could find one, and things went bad in the midst of the mugging. Cal Hancock pulled out the gun to frighten her, and the gun went off. But none of it had been meant  to happen, none of it was planned, none of it had been thought out.

            Thus it seemed to Joel as he sat in the interview room, with the waiting and the silence growing heavier by the moment, that naming Cal Hancock would ensure his own release, sooner rather than later. Iwas wiv a blood called Cal Hancock. Eight words and that would be it: The true guilty party would be named, someone old enough to be thrown into prison for a life sentence that would rob him of at least twenty years. Eight words. Eight words only. That was all. But despite his thoughts, which were bouncing around in his skull like rubber balls, Joel knew that he could not grass. He also knew that everyone in the Harrow Road police station understood this as well, as did the Blade. There was simply no way. Grass and you were finished; grass and everyone whose life touched yours would suffer for your grassing as well.

            That meant Toby. For Ness—and this was something that Joel had been a long and terrible time understanding—had already been dealt with.

            Joel felt a hard bubble rising within him, one that grew as it climbed from his guts and worked its inevitable way to his throat. There, it wanted to burst from him in a sob, but he wouldn’t let it and he couldn’t let it and he had to avoid it no matter what. He put his arms on the table and his head in his arms.

            He said, “Where’s Toby?”

            “He’s safe,” the constable called Sherry told him.

            “Wha’s that mean?” Joel asked. “Where’s Aunt Ken?”

            There was no answer to this. The silence allowed Joel to work out the answers for himself, which he was quick to do: Toby had been hustled off to care—that nightmare place in which children entered the maw of a system that seemed fashioned to house them and then forget them—because with one Campbell locked up for a knife assault and another Campbell involved in a deadly shooting, the police, Social Services, and everyone else with a working brain had proof positive that the home of Kendra Osborne was no place for a juvenile to reside.

Joel wanted to demand to see Fabia Bender, in order to tell her that things weren’t like that. He wanted her to know that nothing  that happened was down to his aunt at all. He wanted to tell her it was down to someone and something else. But he couldn’t say.

            Everything within his mind then became a series of images. They played against his eyelids when he closed his eyes; they seemed present when he even held his eyes open. There was his father getting shot in the street one day. . . . There was his mother holding infant Toby out of the third-floor window. . . . There was Neal Wyatt coming after him in Meanwhile Gardens. . . . There was Glory flying off to Jamaica and the nighttime cold in Kensal Green Cemetery and Cal trying to tell him not to get involved with the Blade and George Gilbert and his mates doing Ness behind closed doors and Toby on the barge with the barge in flames . . .

            There was too much to think about and not enough words in the world to explain things in such a way that he would not end up grassing. Say nothing and you had a chance to live. Name a name and you died by degrees.

            So Joel told himself that the Blade would come for him. He’d done it before. He’d made that phone call when Joel had been brought in for attempting to mug the Asian woman in Portobello Road. It stood to reason that there was hope he would make a similar phone call now. But the thought of phone calls took Joel directly to the phone call that had brought the police directly to Meanwhile Gardens to pick him up. You scratch my back, I scratch yours.

            Joel squeezed his eyes shut so hard that he should have seen stars, but all he saw were more images. He swallowed hard, and the noise he made sounded to him like a sonic boom that sent shock waves through the room. The constable put her hand on his back. He tried to take meagre comfort from this.

            But she intended no comfort. She said his name. He realised he was meant to look up.

            He raised his head and he saw that while his thoughts had done cartwheels through his head, three more individuals had entered the interview room. Fabia Bender was one of them. The others were a tall black man in a business suit, a knife scar tracing a route down the side of his face, and a dumpy-looking woman in a donkey jacket that looked like something from the charity shop. These two stared at Joel. Their faces showed nothing. He took them to be plainclothes detectives, which indeed they were: Winston Nkata and Barbara Havers from New Scotland Yard.

Fabia Bender said, “Thank you, Sherry,” to the constable, and the woman left them. Fabia took her place next to Joel, while the tall black man and the dumpy woman sat at the other two places at the table. Sergeant Starr, Fabia Bender told Joel, was fetching him a sandwich. They knew he was hungry. They knew he was tired. Things could, if he wanted, be over soon.

            The black man spoke then, and while he did so, his companion kept her stony gaze fixed on Joel. He could feel the antipathy running off her. She frightened him, although she wasn’t very large.

The man had a voice that blended Africa, South London, and the Caribbean. He sounded firm. He sounded sure. He said, “Joel, you killed a cop’s wife. You know that? We found a gun nearby. Fingerprints on it that’ll turn out to be yours. Ballistics’ll show the gun did the killing. CCTV fi lm places you on the scene. You and ’nother bloke. What d’you got to say then, blood?”

            There seemed no answer he could give to this. He thought of the sandwich, of Seargeant Starr. He was hungrier than they even knew.

            “We want a name,” Winston Nkata said.

            “We know you weren’t alone,” Barbara Havers added.

Joel’s reply to this was a nod. A single nod only, and nothing else. He gave it not because he agreed with anything the two detectives were saying but because he knew that what would happen next had been long determined by the unchanging world through which he moved.

            Acknowledgments

            Enormous thanks go to my fellow writer Courttia Newland in London, whose introduction to Ladbroke Grove, West Kilburn, North Kensington and the housing estates therein proved invaluable to my work both on this novel and on its predecessor With No One as Witness. I thank Betty Armstrong-Rossner