Until Death (7 page)

K
elly woke with a start, heart pounding from a bad dream. In the half-light her youngest daughter Amber was climbing on to the foot of the bed in her Winnie the Pooh pyjamas. Amber turned and sat cross-legged and smiled at Kelly, her dimples huge in her little face. Kelly’s heart soared and she blinked. The end of the bed was empty. Her daughter wasn’t there. She wasn’t in Southampton, the man next to her wasn’t Michael. She could feel Christos’s leg with its scratchy hair, lying heavy on her thigh. She forced herself not to whimper. Christos didn’t like it when she cried for her lost family. She was now the wife of a man she feared, in a flat with no air in a city she didn’t like. She felt she was lying not in a bed but a box, with a heavy black lid that was sliding slowly over her.

She wriggled out from under Christos’s leg and got out of bed, the tears slipping silently down her cheeks. She walked through into the bathroom but didn’t turn on the light, she didn’t want Christos to wake. She began ticking off hiding places for the passports. She knew Medea searched the house under the guise of cleaning it and cameras covered the areas that Medea didn’t. At the moment the passports were still in the back pocket of her jeans, tossed casually on the chair in the bedroom, but if they were found she could be in very great danger. She was under no illusions as to the violence her husband was capable of.

She opened the bathroom cabinet. The panty pads were still in their opened box. Her eyes rested on the third in on the left. Wrapped inside the mint-green cover was the one cashpoint card she had managed to apply for and hide a few months after Christos had started to question every bit of spending she’d incurred on their joint account. She walked soundlessly out of the bedroom and across the corridor to the children’s bedroom, sandwiched between the lift and the stairs. The green light on the bottom of the hall camera pierced the darkness.

There were ample bedrooms in the flat, but the children preferred to share. She took pleasure in how close they were, half-brother and sister. She had never had siblings, it had been just her and Mum. Yannis had thrown off his covers and lay sprawled the wrong way round on the bed. His checked pyjama top had ridden up, exposing his stomach. She watched the line of sweat on his hairline as he snuffled and snorted in his sleep, his mouth working through his dreams. She sat down on a small armchair and pulled up the blind that covered the window. The view this side of the flat was north, over the wide stretch of train tracks from St Pancras right below her, the tracks of King’s Cross Station to her right, snaking and curving away through north and east London. At this hour, just a touch before dawn, the railway was still moving, lights coming and going. The inky black crescent that was the Grand Union Canal, which ran to Birmingham and the heart of England, bisected the railways, and she spotted the faintest winking red light of a cyclist heading north past the side of the British Library. She didn’t know all the destinations served by those trains, all of the north of England and Scotland, Paris and Brussels and places further afield. They were a tantalising glimpse of all the places Christos wouldn’t let her go. Those trains could take her back home to her mother, to her old life, if only she could go there.

Sometimes Christos changed the code on the lift so she couldn’t get out. He would take the children to school and leave her there, shut up like a princess in a twisted story, invisible in her tower. The first time he had done that she had ranted and railed, the second time less so. Now she endured. On those days she would sit here in the children’s bedroom, her head resting on the double glazing, and she would stare for hours at the lives of others beneath her, feeling invisible to the entire world bar her children.

She missed the beach. She used to race Michael on beaches near their home, her husband just beyond her fingertips, his shouts loud and free, his long legs thumping across the sand and his heels leaving deep holes when he suddenly changed direction. But now those memories felt so distant they were less substantial than a dream. She had met Christos when the foundations of who she was had been hollowed out. Kelly knew that her identity was buttressed by her children, family and friends, but these had been stripped away, leaving behind a teetering façade overlain with grief.

Christos had picked apart what was left. Now he was smothering her to death, slowly erasing the other facets of her life that didn’t revolve around him or the children. The fact that Yannis and Florence needed her was what stopped her disappearing altogether.

She stared out, trying to summon the belief that she could live through Yannis and Florence – that it was enough. She still clung to her job. Christos let her work doing what she loved and before she had met him that hadn’t been possible, she had had to spend long hours as a waitress to pay the bills. Yannis twisted in his sleep and threw out an arm. A mother’s love is boundless. A mother would die for her children. She endured the life she did for them and she prayed that they would never know the dark side of that life.

She shifted in her chair and put her hand on her stomach, feeling the undulations of the scar tissue through her T-shirt. A shaft of anger pierced her; the old defiance was still burning there, the old Kelly was buried under the layers of grief and shame. She knew what was right and wrong. She watched a train snake away from King’s Cross, wobbling as it picked up speed. The passports were a piece of good fortune that she had a duty to use. Since Christos would never give her or the children up voluntarily, she had to run, and run far. She thought about Lindsey, her friend from when she worked as a waitress. Lindsey had gone back to the country a long time ago, but Kelly had her email address.

She heard a faint shuffling out in the corridor. It sounded like someone walking around. Maybe Christos was up. She stood uncertainly and came out of the bedroom into the dark corridor. She stared for a long moment into the deep shadows, the flat silent, the faintest hum of night-time traffic outside. Christos had never hurt the children. Yet this didn’t give her comfort, it was the thing that terrified her most: that put her and her children in the greatest danger. She turned with a heavy heart back to her bedroom. She had read about mothers attaining superhuman strength to save their children – women able to lift cars off bodies, break down doors with their bare hands. Because the day he laid a finger on one of them would be the day she was taken away from them, because it would be the day she murdered him.

G
eorgie watched Mo log on to Google Maps to find the address on the paperwork that was attached to the container of rosewood. She was surprised to see it was almost within walking distance. Mo used the zoom feature to expand a square on a map of east London. The river’s irregular, pale blue expanse was flat and calming, so unlike the real thing. Mo played around making the map smaller and larger.

‘I’ve always thought zooming in makes it look like a slow-motion bomb drop,’ Georgie said.

Mo swivelled round with mock seriousness. ‘Careful – I don’t want you to report that.’

‘You’re safe, there’s no one to hear you today.’ Georgie gestured round the half empty office. It was Saturday morning, and a skeleton shift were at work. ‘Come on, West End boy.’

Mo reached to the back of his chair for his coat. ‘You’re on, East End girl.’

Differences attract, Georgie felt. Working with Mo was one of the highlights of the job. He had been in the service a year longer and was three years older than her but he didn’t mind being paired with her in the least. The third son of Afghan immigrant parents, he had an ability to let insults and setbacks bounce off him without a care. He was never without his iPod buds shoved in his ears and as they got in the car – he let her drive – he belted out their favourite song of the week: ‘East End Boys, West End Girls’.
United over the Pet Shop Boys was a good way to start the day.

Even though the address was in walking distance along the dock, they needed to negotiate a warren of streets that were dead-ends or blocked off or one-way to get to their destination. Eventually they found Casson Street, a faded Victorian terrace and a set of low-rise fifties council blocks, some in the process of being dismantled, that ended in a dead-end by the river. The new shopping complex loomed over the housing. The end of the street also housed a children’s indoor play area that, Georgie assumed, you could walk to from the newly built shopping centre, enjoying the fine view of next to nothing bar the grain silos on the opposite bank of the river as you did so. In ten years she knew her commute to work would be longer as the docks were pushed further east, the pressure on property prices driving trade further downriver. They’d be laying cobbles over the expanses of tarmac and installing fancy floor-level lighting here in a few years. She parked and they got out. A St George’s flag hung from a council balcony; a minaret of the local mosque poked over the terrace.

‘We’re looking for number four.’ They walked along to the play area and a grinning clown’s head stared back at them.

‘That’s number three, I think,’ Mo said. They both turned round and looked across the road. ‘And that’s number four.’

‘Or that’s where number four should be.’ They crossed the road and walked on to a gravel space between a three-storey estate and another building. Weeds broke through the rough ground, puddles reflected the sky. Whatever had stood here years before had probably been destroyed or damaged in the Blitz, and nobody had got round to rebuilding. Part of an ancient chain-link fence still clung to the edges of the space, but the pretence of keeping anyone out had long since been abandoned.

‘How disappointing,’ Mo said flatly.

Georgie walked into the middle and looked down at the large truck tyre marks in the mud. ‘What do you think the chances are that anyone in these flats here has seen anything?’ she asked Mo.

He paused for a moment. ‘Oh, nil to zero.’

Georgie looked around for CCTV cameras. You could always hope. The shopping centre would have them, but out here was unlikely.

‘I don’t get it,’ Georgie said. ‘Why does anyone need a whole shipping container worth of wood? For a floor, you’d use Indonesian plantation wood, you wouldn’t run the risk with this stuff, would you?’

‘And guitar makers don’t need this quantity.’ Mo stood quite still, thinking it over. ‘It must be a cover for something else. The question is, what?’

Georgie thought for a moment. ‘You’re looking at this the wrong way round. The question isn’t what is he really shipping into London? The question is how is he hiding whatever it is, so we can’t find it?’

A
cross town in the solid comfort of Marylebone, Kelly sat on a chair outside the headmaster’s office and watched the morning sun slide across the parquet. It was so quiet here, so different from her own memories of school. The headmaster’s door opened and he came out. ‘Mrs Malamatos? Please come in.’ The headmaster was in his late fifties and wore thick glasses and, even on Saturday, an academic gown. She stood and he ushered her into his office. ‘This is Mrs Weaver, who deals with pastoral care of our children. She really understands the pressures on parents these days.’

A large, big-breasted woman with short blonde hair leaned across to shake Kelly’s hand. ‘I’ve got three of my own,’ she puffed and raised her eyebrows to the ceiling, inviting Kelly to agree. Kelly said nothing.

Yannis sat on a chair next to the headmaster’s desk, his legs too short to reach the floor. ‘Please, take a seat.’

The room smelled of damp; a large clock that looked like it dated from 1940 loomed over them. ‘We need to have a talk about Yannis, Mrs Malamatos,’ the headmaster said. ‘And the next steps.’

‘Please, call me Kelly.’ He smiled at her vaguely, as if she were shifting in and out of focus. ‘What do you mean, next steps?’

‘I’m afraid your son’s behaviour has fallen below the high standards we expect of pupils here.’

‘And it’s not the first time, is it, Yannis?’ added Mrs Weaver.

Kelly looked at her son. He sat on his hands and looked at the floor. Christos had been to this school. She knew early on that Yannis would be sent here too. The prospectus had shown a series of solid Victorian buildings and narrow courtyards on its heavy paper and there were long paragraphs about discipline and boundaries and the highest academic standards. She had seen pictures of serious-looking boys wearing protective goggles doing science experiments. She looked at Yannis, the weight of being in the headmaster’s office on a non school day hanging heavy on him.

Kelly had tried to explain to Christos that she thought their son needed a different kind of school. A nurturing, protective place, where the boys and girls would grow sunflower seeds on the windowsills and there were lots of drama productions. Christos had said no. He demanded competition, rigour and results. She had wanted only love for Yannis, space for him to dream, and as the years had gone on she had had a dream of her own, that maybe his school could be a relaxed place where she could chat to other mothers as they clustered in the playground at home time. Somewhere she could dare to make a friend. But here the school, with its high fees and cramped urban site, was full of au pairs or nannies speaking languages she didn’t understand, and the mothers who might have been her friends jumped from their four-by-fours and harried their offspring, car keys waving in their palms, worried that today they wouldn’t avoid the traffic wardens who hovered over the easy pickings on the double yellows outside the gate. Her relationships were of the most superficial kind. She felt invisible here, too.

‘I have to be honest with you, Mrs Malamatos, if this school didn’t have such a long-standing relationship with the Malamatos family, we would have to think quite carefully about whether we could still have Yannis attend,’ continued the headmaster.

‘What did he do this time?’ asked Kelly.

‘He punched Mrs Inskip,’ said the headmaster.