In the Dark (22 page)

Helen said that she knew what he meant, that this was exactly how she had been feeling, but that there hadn't been much in the way of elation. Certainly not over the previous few days.

She had managed to control herself during the confrontation with Paul's mother, telling herself that this woman, with whom she'd never really seen eye to eye, was every bit as destroyed as she was. Helen still did not know if Paul's mother knew about the affair, and she wasn't likely to ask. The row with her father had been no different to a hundred they'd had over the years. The old man did not like being told what to do. He'd passed that on to both of his daughters.

But it had got seriously nasty round at Jenny's.

Sitting through a pleasant Saturday afternoon lunch; Tim with one eye on the football and the kids playing nicely. If anything, they were a little
too
well behaved, and Helen guessed that they'd been briefed not to say or do anything that might upset Auntie Helen. There was certainly no mention of Uncle Paul.

In the kitchen later, Jenny had said that she'd spoken to Tim and that he already had too many clothes as it was; that their own trip to the charity shop was long overdue. Helen had flown off the handle and Jenny had walked calmly back into the living room and told the children to go and play upstairs. It hadn't ended well, and Helen had not spoken to her sister since.

Now she sighed, but she could still remember the urge to throw something at Jenny, to scatter some of that nice, expensive crockery across the granite worktop. ‘I'm buggered if I'm going to be the one to try and smooth things over.'

‘That's what I mean,' Deering said. ‘Everything's . . . heightened.'

‘I'm angry with Paul more than anyone.'

‘I know.'

‘
Really
furious.'

‘Your emotions are all over the place.'

Helen nodded, thought, Still no tears, though, then said it.

‘That's normal, too. By which I mean there's no such thing as behaving “normally” at a time like this. There's no . . . template for grief, you know?' He twisted the button again. ‘I went pretty mad myself.'

‘Oh. Who?'

‘My wife.' Deering smiled. ‘A brain tumour, eighteen months ago.'

Helen studied him. Suddenly the man's attention to her, his solicitude, seemed to make perfect sense. She opened her mouth, struggling for the right words, but Deering saved her the trouble.

‘She always had a lot of headaches, was pole-axed by the bloody things two or three times a week.' He placed a hand flat against his head, just above the right ear. ‘We just called them migraines, and Sally wasn't one of those people who'd rush round to the doctor's at the drop of a hat. By the time I'd talked her into it, she only had a few months.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘I should have been a bit more pushy.'

‘Don't be silly.' She watched him shrug, and lean forward, and move the empty cups away from the centre of the table. Watched him drop a dirty spoon into each one and line them up, so that the handles were perfectly parallel. ‘So, how were you? Afterwards.'

He blew air from between pursed lips, like he didn't know where to begin. ‘I just needed to talk to people who knew her.
Anyone
who knew her. I wanted to hear things I didn't know. Stories, things people remembered. I think I wanted to stock up on all that stuff. Memories, even if they weren't my own, that . . . wouldn't run out.' He smiled. ‘Stupid, I know. Like they'd ever run out.'

Helen told him that she'd been doing much the same thing. He waited, but she didn't elaborate.

‘It's always nice to know you're not the only weirdo,' he said.

She didn't tell him that she'd been looking for something, getting to know the man she thought she knew well enough already and finding out far more than she'd bargained for. She didn't tell him
who
she'd been talking to, of course; about the conversations with Frank Linnell and Kevin Shepherd. And she didn't tell him who she was planning to talk to later that day. She thought he might think it was twisted, somehow.

It probably was.

When Helen started taking more than casual glances at her watch, Deering announced that he needed to be going as well. He told her that he'd pretty much finished his report, but that there were a couple of minor things he needed to iron out with the collision investigator.

‘What things?'

‘It's nothing. Just some procedural stuff.'

‘Never my strong point,' Helen said.

‘You know you can call me,' Deering said. ‘If there's ever anything you want to talk about. I do understand. Well, now you
know
I do.'

‘Thanks.'

‘Even if you just need someone to shout at.'

‘You'll be sorry,' Helen said.

Outside, on the street, she watched people walking past, drinking in the good weather on their way to join friends at barbecue parties and pubs. She watched them chat and laugh, and hated each and every one of them.

Like Deering had said. Heightened.

She imagined it as something rushing through her body and wondered if any of this unnatural chemistry would be passed into the child she was carrying. Fed through the cord like a drug, until he kicked his way out, red-faced and screaming his little head off.

 
Javine had taken Benjamin round to a friend's for the day, so Theo had the place to himself. It suited him. He didn't know if his mum and Angela were at home two flights down, but the way things were, he preferred his own company.

It was a hot day and he walked around the flat in shorts and a vest, working his way through the last of his skunk and most of the cold beer in the fridge.

He'd put on some music, had tried to sit and listen, flicked through a paper and an old magazine, but couldn't sit still for more than a few minutes. He turned up the volume so that he could hear it loud and clear as he moved from room to room.

 
Theo didn't know if Dennis Brown was alive or dead, but he loved his voice, the way it made him feel.

Once the ancient music system they'd had at home had given up the ghost, he'd replaced some of his father's old reggae albums with CDs. Handed them over to his dad at Christmas or on various birthdays, then inherited them all later on. He listened to one or another every now and then: Burning Spear, Toots and the Maytals, the
Rock Steady
and
Tighten Up
compilations; Marley, obviously.

It wasn't any big retro thing. There were plenty of grime DJs and rap outfits laying down the illest beats and he liked to get out of it, same as anyone else, and lose himself. But he found something in these old albums that he couldn't get from the imitation-American stuff so many of his mates were listening to. How big their guns were, how many bitches they'd smacked, all that rubbish.

It went
seriously
well with a spliff too. His dad had been right about that much.

He lay down on the bed, closed his eyes and thought about how stupid everything had got since Mikey had been killed.

There had been more police around than ever. The High Street was still thick with the vans and conspicuously armed foot patrols. There were staring contests on every street corner and, for a while, Theo had felt relieved that at least they weren't out there looking for him.

Not all of them, anyway.

He'd even spoken to a couple. Not that he'd had any choice about it - they were talking to everyone. He hadn't said much, just given a name and address and told them that he didn't know anything. Got that look back like they'd heard the same thing a hundred times already that day.

One of them, a woman, said, ‘Don't you lot
want
this shit sorted out?'

Theo knew
enough
, course he did. Suspected, at any rate . . .

There were always gangs who went up against others for business reasons, who targeted crews like theirs because of the drugs, because there was money knocking around to be taken. More often than not, though, it was all about territory. About ends, and the borders between them.

Easy had been overstepping those boundaries, and Theo knew it because he'd been fool enough to tag along. Breaking into houses and robbing from whores. They'd been slipping, no question, going into other areas, and it wasn't like Easy hadn't known what he was doing. Most of the time the lines were clearly marked - a particular tag sprayed on a wall; a pair of old trainers strung across a telephone line - but even where there wasn't a sign, people knew. Which pubs to avoid, the streets you did not
want
to wander onto.

Easy thought he could go where he liked, though, stupid fucker. Thought he had some kind of special visa or whatever, and now he had started something serious.

Now it was coming back to bite them all, wicked and hard.

Theo hadn't seen too much of him over the last couple of days, but he could see his friend was rattled. He didn't know if the rest of the crew could tell, but he saw it. Wave had been keeping his head down as well. Probably getting major grief from those in the triangle above him, worried that people would start buying their rocks from a crew that wasn't being shot up.

‘
Wolves and leopards are trying to kill the sheep and the shepherds
. . .'

He got up and went back into the kitchen, threw away his empty beer-can and stared into the fridge, thinking about lunch.

Javine wouldn't be back for a while. She was happy to stay out and Theo was happy to let her. Things had been tricky the last couple of days, since Mikey. It was always the same when somebody died.

It wasn't like she said too much. She just looked at him. Held on to the baby and looked, like ‘
Now
will you think about it? Think about getting us out of this shit-hole?'

Theo closed the fridge.

How was he supposed to do that? It wasn't like he was exactly minted as it was, plus there was his mum and Angela to think about. There'd never been any sort of promise made about looking after them, no quiet moment with his dad towards the end, but there hadn't needed to be. It was just assumed.

The track faded out and was replaced by another: drum and bass intro, with the soft horns coming in underneath. He remembered his father singing along with these songs, his voice high and hoarse; the old man still convinced he could sell it like a lover-man, swaying on the spot.

Growing up, Theo had felt like a freak having his dad around, but now he was the same as the rest of them. Most of the boys in the crew, at any rate. Absent fathers. That's what the papers were always banging on about, and the white people in colleges who did reports and all that nonsense. That's what they reckoned caused the trouble. Why the likes of Easy and Mikey, and Theo himself, went off the rails. They'd been robbed of guidance, that was the jist of it; by men who'd walked away or been taken. By cancer or a bullet.

Walking into the living room, Theo found himself thinking about the dead copper's kid, the one who hadn't even been born yet. He wondered how he would handle things. The kid Theo had robbed.

He turned the music up louder and stood by the open window. It wasn't like he could see it happening any time soon, but if there was
ever
to be a chance, for Javine to get what she wanted for the three of them, he needed money. Plenty of it.

He needed to get out of the flat. To go down and walk right past those blue uniforms and through the lines of vans with bars on the front and blacked-out windows. To go to work.

 
Frank picked up his mobile to check he still had a signal. He didn't want to miss Clive's call. The replacement driver, one of Clive's boys, came into the beer garden, or what would be a beer garden when all the work was finished, and reached for his sunglasses.

‘Do you need a drink or anything, Frank?'

‘I'm fine.'

‘Sure?'

Frank held his hand up against the glare. Said, ‘A lemonade or something.'

The driver went back inside the pub and Frank went back to the Sunday papers, the gentle but welcome breeze nagging at their pages.

The rear of the pub was something of a sun-trap, and there'd be no umbrellas until someone bought the place, but he had eventually found some shade tight against the fence at one side. There was still some decking to be laid and some potted plants to come, but it was already a pleasant enough place to spend a Sunday morning, and Frank felt it was important to be there. To make sure the work on the pub was progressing as it should, while Clive was busy with more important business elsewhere.

There was still plenty of stuff in the papers about the gang problems, but it was more general now. Paul wasn't front-page news any longer. There was a cursory mention in a leader or two, but only in so far as his death was symptomatic of a wider problem; one that had been highlighted by the latest gang shooting, that of Michael Williamson, aged sixteen, in Lewisham two days before.

It was the conclusion Clive had said they'd come to. Made sense. Made their lives nice and easy.

He was turning to the sports pages of the
Mail
when the driver returned with his drink: a tall one, with ice and lemon. ‘No lemon next time,' Frank said. He felt sorry for the bloke, sweating like a pig in a dark suit and tie, but appearances were important. No such thing in his line of work as a casual day. That didn't apply to Frank himself, of course, who was happily wearing swimming shorts, sandals and a shirt he'd been saving up for the hot weather. Hawaiian, he called it, but Laura had said it looked like someone had been sick on it. ‘Do people throw up a lot in Hawaii?' she'd asked.