A Darker Shade of Blue (10 page)

‘What do you want me to do?' Kiley said.

‘Go see her. Talk to her. Here.' He pushed a slip of paper towards Kiley's hand. ‘Tell her it's not fuckin' on.'

‘Wouldn't it be better if you did that yourself?'

Marshall laughed, a grating sound that finished low in his throat.

Kiley glanced at the poster again. ‘Is it true?'

‘What?'

‘What it says.'

‘What do you think?'

‘Did you leave her?'

‘Course I left her. There weren't no livin' with her.'

‘And child support? Maintenance?'

‘Let whichever bloke she's screwing pay fuckin' maintenance.' Marshall laughed again, harsh and short. ‘And she's got the mouth to accuse me of goin' with whores. Ask her what she was doing when I met her, ask her that. She's the biggest whore of the fuckin' lot.'

‘I still think if you could go and talk to her …'

Marshall leaned sharply forward, slopping his beer. ‘She's trying to make me look a cunt. And she's got to be stopped.'

‘I'm sorry,' Kiley said, a slow shake of the head. ‘I don't think I want to get involved.'

‘Right.' Marshall's chair cannoned backwards as he got to his feet. The poster he screwed up and tossed to the floor. ‘You ain't got the stomach for it, believe me, there's plenty who have.'

Kiley watched him go, barging people aside on his way to the door. The piece of paper Marshall had given him was lined, the writing small and surprisingly neat. Jennie Calder, an address in N8. He refolded it and tucked it out of sight.

*

He had met Kate at a film festival, the premiere of a new Iranian movie, the organisers anticipating demonstrations and worse. The security firm for whom Kiley had then been working were hired to forestall trouble at the screening and the reception afterwards. Late that night, demonstrations over, only a handful of people lingering in the bar, Kiley had wandered past the few discarded placards and leaned on the Embankment railing, staring out across the Thames. Leaving Charing Cross station, a train clattered across Hungerford Bridge; shrouded in tarpaulin, a barge ghosted bulkily past, heading downriver towards the estuary. In their wake, it was quiet enough to hear the water, lapping against stone. When he turned, there was Kate, her face illuminated as she paused to light a cigarette. Dark hair, medium height, he had noticed her at the reception, asking questions, making notes. At one point she had been sitting with the young Iranian director, a woman, Kate's small tape recorder on the table between them.

‘What did you think of the film?' Kiley asked, wanting to say something.

‘Very Iranian,' Kate said and laughed.

‘I doubt if it'll come to the Holloway Odeon, then.'

‘Probably not.'

She came and stood alongside him at the Embankment edge.

‘I should get fed up with it,' Kate said after some moments. ‘This view – God knows I've seen it enough -but I don't.' She was wearing a loose-fitting suit, the jacket long, a leather bag slung from one shoulder. When she pitched her cigarette, half-smoked, towards the water, it sparkled through the near dark.

‘There's another showing,' she said, looking at Kiley full on. ‘The film, tomorrow afternoon. If you're interested, that is.'

‘You're going again?'

‘I shouldn't think so.' She was smiling with her eyes, the merest widening of the mouth.

The opening images aside, a cluster of would-be teachers, blackboards strapped awkwardly to their backs as they struggle along a mountain road in a vain search for pupils, it turned out to be the longest eighty-five minutes Kiley could recall. Kate's piece in the
Independent on Sunday,
complete with photographs of Samira Makhmalbaf and suitable stills, he thought far more interesting than the film itself.

Plucking up a certain amount of courage, he phoned to tell her so.

Well, it had been a beginning.

*

‘I'm still not clear,' Kate said, ‘why you turned it down.'

They were sitting in Kate's high bed, a bottle of red wine, three-parts empty, resting on the floor. Through the partly opened blinds, there was a view out across Highbury Fields. It was coming up to a quarter past ten and Kiley didn't yet know if he'd be invited to stay the night. He'd tried leaving his toothbrush once and she'd called down the stairs after him, ‘I think you've forgotten something.'

‘I didn't fancy it,' Kiley said.

‘You didn't fancy the job or you didn't like the look of him?'

‘Both.'

‘Because if you're only going to take jobs from decent, upstanding citizens with good credit references and all their vowels in the right place …'

‘It's not that.'

‘What then?'

‘It's what he wanted me to do.'

‘Go round and talk to her, persuade her to ease off, reach some kind of accommodation.'

‘That wasn't what he wanted. He wanted me to warn her, frighten her.'

‘And now you're not going to do it?'

Kiley looked at her. Pins out of her hair, it fell across her shoulders, down almost to the middle of her back. ‘What d'you mean?'

‘Now you've turned him down, what will happen?'

‘He'll get somebody else.'

‘With fewer scruples.'

Kiley shrugged.

‘Maybe it would've been better for her,' Kate said, ‘if you'd said yes.' The way she was looking at him suggested that pretty soon he'd be climbing back into his clothes and setting out on the long walk home.

*

Some housing department official lacking a sense of irony had named the roads after areas of New Orleans. Anything further from the Crescent City would have been hard to find. Kiley walked past a triangle of flattened mud masquerading as a lawn and headed for the first of several concrete walkways. ‘
Do Not Let Your Dogs Foul the Estate
', read one sign. ‘
No Ball Games
', read another. A group of teenagers lounged around the first stairwell, listening to hard-core hip-hop at deafening volume and occasionally spitting at the ground. They gave no sign of moving aside to let Kiley pass, but then, at the last moment, they did. Laughter trailed him up towards the fifth floor.

Two of the glass panels in the front door had been broken and replaced by hardboard. Kiley rang the bell and waited.

‘Who is it?'

He could see a shape, outlined through the remaining glass.

‘Jennie Calder?'

‘Who's this?' The voice was muffled yet audible.

‘Kiley. Jack Kiley.'

‘Who?'

He took a card from his wallet and pushed it through the letter-box. The shape came closer.

‘Who sent you? Did he send you?'

‘You mean Marshall?'

‘Who else?'

‘Not exactly.'

She unbolted the door but kept it on the chain. Through a four-inch gap Kiley could see reddish hair, unfashionably curly, grey-green eyes, a full mouth. She tapped Kiley's card with the tip of a fingernail.

‘Private investigator? What is this, some kind of joke?'

Kiley grinned. ‘I'm beginning to wonder.'

Out of sight, a child started crying.

‘You here to do his dirty work for him?'

‘No.'

As the crying grew in intensity, the woman looked hard at Kiley, making up her mind. Then, abruptly, she pushed the door to, unfastened the chain and opened it wide enough for him to step inside.

‘Wait there,' she said, leaving him in a square hallway the size of a telephone booth. When she reappeared, it was with a tow-haired child astride her hip. Eighteen months? Two years? Kiley wasn't sure.

‘This is Alice.'

‘Hello, Alice.'

Alice hid her face against her mother's arm.

‘Why don't we go through,' Jennie said, ‘and sit down?'

There were pieces of Lego and wooden bricks here and there across the floor, a small menagerie of lions and bears; on one of the chairs, a doll, fully dressed, sat staring blankly out. Toys apart, the room was neat, tidy: three-piece suite, TV, stereo, dining table pushed into a corner near the window.

Without putting her daughter down, Jennie made tea and brought it through, with biscuits and sugar, on a tray.

Only when she sat opposite him, Alice clambering from one side of her chair to the other, did Kiley see the tiredness in her face, the strain behind her eyes. Jennie wearing blue jeans and a soft blue top, no-name trainers without socks; late twenties, Kiley thought, though she could have passed for older.

‘So?' she said.

Kiley held his mug of tea in both hands. ‘These posters …'

‘Got to him, have they?' A smile now.

‘You could say.'

‘And you were meant to warn me off?'

‘Something like that. Only I'm not.'

‘You said.'

The tea was strong. Kiley spooned in sugar and stirred it round.

‘Biscuit,' Alice said, the word just this side of recognition. Jennie reached down and broke a digestive in half. ‘So what are you doing here?' she asked.

‘If it's not me it'll likely be somebody else. I thought you should know.'

‘I didn't think he was going to be leading the applause.'

‘Isn't there somewhere you could go?' Kiley asked. ‘Until it blows over.'

‘No.'

‘Friends, a relative?'

‘No.' The child's piece of biscuit broke and pieces crumbled across her mother's top. Automatically, Jennie brushed them away and reached for the other half. ‘Besides, who says it's going to blow over? The day he puts his hand in his pocket, faces up to his responsibilities, that's when it'll blow over. Not before.'

*

For the time being, Kiley was working out of his flat: he had a fax, an answerphone, directories, numbers on a Rolodex. What he didn't have, the faithful secretary secretly lusting for him in the outer office, the bottle of Scotch in the desk drawer alongside the .38. When he'd jacked in his job with the security firm – no hard feelings, Jack, keep in touch – he'd contacted those officers he still knew inside the Met and let them know what he was doing. Adrian Costain, a sports agent he knew, had thrown a couple of things his way, but since then nothing. A local firm of solicitors likewise.

Recently, he'd spent a lot of time watching movies in the afternoons, starting paperbacks he never finished, staring at the same four walls. He would have sat diligently doing his accounts if there were any accounts to do. Instead he took out ads in the local press and waited for the phone to ring.

When he got back from Jennie Calder's flat, two red zeros stared back at him from the answerphone. The people in the flat upstairs were playing ‘Green Green Grass of Home' again. He had a bacon sandwich at the nearest greasy spoon and skimmed the paper twice. Each time he reached the sports page, Charlton Athletic had lost away.

Still it kept nagging at him. A brisk walk through the back doubles and he was back at the estate, keeping watch on Jennie Calder's place from below.

He didn't have too long to wait. There were two of them, approaching from the opposite direction and moving fast. The one at the front, bulkily built, shoulders hunched, wool hat tight on his head; the other, younger, taller, tagging along behind.

By the time Kiley arrived, the front door was half off its hinges, furniture overturned, the front of the television kicked in. Alice was clinging tight to her mother and screaming, Jennie shouting over the noise and close to tears.

‘Company,' the youth said.

On his way over, Kiley had picked up a piece of two-by-four from a building site, solid wood.

‘What the fuck do you want?' the big man said.

Just time for Kiley to think he recognised him before swinging the length of wood hard against the side of his head. Twice, and the man was down on his knees.

The lanky kid standing there, not knowing what to do.

‘Get him out of here,' Kiley said. ‘And don't come back.'

Blood ran between the man's fingers; one eye was swelling fast and all but closed. The pair of them stumbled to the door, mouthing threats, Kiley watching them go.

Alice was whimpering now, tears wet against her mother's neck.

‘Thanks,' Jennie said. She was shaking.

Bending forward, Kiley righted one of the chairs.

‘You think they'll be back?'

‘Not yet.'

Kiley went into the kitchen and filled the kettle, set it on the gas, made tea; he tracked down an emergency locksmith and told him to fit extra bolts top and bottom, metal reinforcements behind both hinges and locks.

‘Who's going to pay for all that?' Jennie asked.

‘I will,' Kiley said.

Jennie started to say something else but thought better of it. She put Alice down in her cot and almost immediately the child was asleep. When she came back into the room, Kiley was clearing the last of the debris from the floor.

‘Why?' Jennie asked, arms folded across her chest. ‘Why're you doing all this?'

‘Job satisfaction?'

‘Nobody hired you.'

‘Ah.' He set one of his cards down on a corner of the settee. ‘Here. In case you lost the first one. Ring me if there's a need.' Leaving, he leaned the splintered piece of two-by-four against the wall by the front door. ‘Just in case. And don't let anybody in unless you're certain who they are, okay? Not anybody.'

He found Dave Marshall later that evening, at a table in the Royal Arms. Two others with him. The big man was still wearing his wool hat, only now there was a good inch of bandage visible beneath it, plaster sticking to his cheek. One eye was bruised and two-thirds closed. Their companion – loose suit, dark shirt, blue patterned tie – Kiley didn't recognise.

He crossed the floor towards them.