2009 - Ordinary Thunderstorms (28 page)

He shut the front door behind him—thinking: maybe Hampstead Heath? Wide open spaces—and had just turned the key in the lock when a postman in shorts, heavy boots and a dusty blue turban stamped wearily up the stairs.

“Brilliant, got you. Mr Belem?”

Adam turned. “Mmm?” he said, in a neutral voice.

“Sign and print here, please.”

Adam signed and printed ‘P. Belem’ and was handed a registered envelope with the crest of Bethnal & Bow NHS Trust on one corner.

“Have a good one, Mr Belem,” the postman said and wandered off along the walkway.

Adam unlocked the door and went back into his flat.

I
T HAD TAKEN NEARLY a week to find Mohammed, much to Jonjo’s intense frustration. The guy seemed to be living at about five addresses and he had been obliged to pay serious money to Bozzy and his cohorts to track him down.

They caught up with him eventually in a terraced house in Bethnal Green, lodging with an uncle. Jonjo decided that this next encounter would run more smoothly without Bozzy being present so he drove alone to Bethnal Green and parked up some twenty yards or so from Mohammed’s temporary residence. Jonjo watched him come and go—with cousins and friends—before he finally left the house alone and headed for his Primera, presumably to start minicabbing and earn some money. Jonjo followed him for only a couple of minutes, Mohammed abruptly pulling up the Primera at the kerb—hazard lights flashing in the afternoon’s sunshine—and running into a twenty-four-hour supermarket to buy something. Jonjo double-parked his taxi so that it was impossible for Mohammed to drive away and settled down to wait.

There was a brisk rap on the window.

“‘Scuse me, mate. But you’ve parked—”

Flinging the door open abruptly, Jonjo knocked Mohammed to the ground. He helped him up, dusted off his denim jacket. Mohammed recognised him at once.

“Listen, man, no way you can—”

“Step into my office, Mo.”

They sat in the back of Jonjo’s taxi, Mohammed on the jump seat, Jonjo sprawled grandly at ease, opposite. The doors were locked.

“I got a big family,” Mohammed said. “Uncles, brothers, cousins—anything happen to me, they know Bozzy. He’s dead meat, yeah?”

“So do us all a big favour.” Jonjo leant forward and placed his hand on Mohammed’s knee to quell its spasmodic jumping. “I want to give you money, Mohammed—not hurt you.” He counted out
£200
and handed them over. “Take it.”

Mohammed did. “Why?”

“Because you’re going to tell me who else was in your car that night you took the mini to Chelsea. And then you’re going to show me where I can find that person who was with you. And then I’ll give you another £300.” Jonjo reached into his jacket and produced his big folded wad of notes.

“I was on me own, man.”

“No, you weren’t. You said the mim went into the patch of waste ground to get his raincoat—while you sat in the car.”

“Yeah, right—so what?”

“So why didn’t he do a runner if you were sitting in the car like a muppet?”

“Ah—‘cause I’d threatened him, like. Said I break his fucking leg if he don’t not pay me.”

“He must have been shit-scared.”

“He was. That why he do what I say him.”

“So you
trusted
him. You just sat in the car and waited, trusting him to bring you his raincoat.”

“Ah…Yeah.”

Jonjo wrested back the £200.

“Even the most fucking useless, thick-as-shit, minicab driver in the world wouldn’t do that. If you sat in the car who went with Kindred?” Jonjo waved the notes in front of Mohammed’s face. Mohammed looked at the money and licked his lips. His knee started jumping again.

“It was someone called Mhouse.”

“A man called ‘Mouse’?”

“Woman.”

Jonjo’s face registered no surprise at this information, even though he was very surprised. “Do you know where she lives?”

“Yeah.”

“Take me there and you get the rest of your money.”

Jonjo waited until it had grown dark before he went back to The Shaft. He climbed the stairs and walked quickly along the walkway to Flat L. In his pocket he had a small thick jemmy that he wedged in the door-frame above the lock and threw his full weight on it, levering at the same time, hearing the screws that held the lock ease and give under the pressure, the wood splintering. He slid the jemmy to the top and bottom of the door—no bolts. He paused, looked around to see that no one was looking, and with one powerful kick of his mason’s boots blasted the door open. He stepped in quickly, swinging the door shut behind him and stood still in the entryway. There was no noise—the flat was empty. There was a light burning in the kitchen and he walked quietly into the sitting room and saw a TV, cushions, two chairs. In the kitchen he noted the power cable and the rubber water pipe coming through the window and allowed himself a small righteous sneer of taxpayer’s disgust. These people will steal the bread from your mouth, he thought to himself. What kind of a world—

“Hello.”

Jonjo turned, very slowly, to see a small boy with curly hair, wearing a stained T–shirt that fell to his knees, standing in the doorway to a bedroom.

“Hello, little fella. Don’t worry, I’m a friend. Where’s your mum?”

“She working.”

“She asked me to get something for her.”

He moved past the boy into the bedroom—mattress on the floor, dirty sheets, wardrobe, a few cardboard boxes. He opened the wardrobe and rummaged through the clothes hanging inside, reaching into the back recesses to see what might have been stashed there. He pulled out shoes, a plastic bag full of sex toys, dildoes. The chemical smell of cheap perfume made his eyes smart. Then he pulled out a heavier box—no, a briefcase. He knew it well—solid locks, polished leather, brass trim at the corners. He clicked it open, empty. But this was Kindred’s—pieces were beginning to fit together and he felt his excitement rise. The little boy was looking at him sleepily but curiously, leaning against the door-frame, scratching his thigh.

“Whose is this?”

“My mum’s.”

Jonjo checked the other room—a bare mattress, bare floorboards, more boxes filled with crap. The state some people lived in—disgusting. He strode to the door, briefcase in his hand.

“Cheerio, mate.”

“You a friend of John?” the little boy said.

Jonjo stopped, turned. “Who’s John?”

“He live here but he gone now. You tell him to come back—say Ly-on want him to come back.”

“Does Mummy know John?”

“Yeah. She like John very too much. Green, green peas.”

“Whatever.” Jonjo patted him on the head, said good night and closed the door as best he could behind him.

Bozzy was waiting by the trashed playground. He pointed to the briefcase in Jonjo’s hand.

“Where you get that?”

“The Mouse-woman. Kindred’s been living there.”

“Fuck me. All this time?”

“Yeah. Where does she work?”

Bozzy grinned. “Work? She’s tugging sad bastards down Cherry Garden Pier.”

“She’s a gas-cooker?…” This confused Jonjo—what was Kindred doing living with a whore? “You sure?”

“Do dogs lick their bollocks? Twenty quid a go, mate. Thirty, no condom. Very high class, know what I mean?” He chuckled to himself.

“How do I get to Cherry Garden Pier?”

T
HE RIVER WAS BEAUTIFUL tonight, she thought, and very high, right up. It was the moving blackness, the beginning of the turn, the great mass of water beginning its journey back to the sea: the black river flowing strongly and the reflected lights on its moving surface staying still. Mhouse saw the power and the entrancement—not that she would have articulated it that way—but the river distracted her and she dwelt on it for a while before she remembered how fucking pissed off she was.

A quiet night—not half. She’d been trolling around Cherry Garden Pier for a couple of hours, up the side streets, down the lanes, looking for customers, for men. She’d met one girl who was thinking of heading up to King’s Cross, it was so dead down here in Rotherhithe. She even wandered back into Southwark Park but it was all gay boys there, although one bloke asked her to follow him to the lake, said he had some kind of shack they could use, but she told him where he could shove his lake and his shack, no way.

She lit and smoked a cigarette. She could see the big hospital, St Bot’s, downstream, every light shining. Some electricity bill that one. It was a shame John 1603 had left—it was like living with a money tap, you just turned it on when you needed a bit more. Short of a £100?—Spend a night with John. He was a nice enough geezer (she wasn’t that keen on men with beards, to be honest)—gentle, kindly, helped out—and he liked her. Well, he liked fucking her, anyway, she knew that, that was as obvious as the nose on his face. Ly-on liked him as well—and he seemed to like Ly-on. So, she let him fuck her from time to time, she got some ready money and he had a roof over his head with satellite TV, so why did he have to clear off like that all of a sudden? Now she owed Mr Quality and Margo and they were bugging her hard to repay. Lot of money. And you didn’t want to end up on the wrong side of Mr Q…

She wondered if she could track down John 1603, offer him his room back, maybe reduce the rates across the board. How you going to do that, silly bitch? I could try the church, she thought—he was always at the church, and they might know where he was. Maybe Scotland won’t work out for him. Maybe he’ll come back to The Shaft, to Mhouse and Ly-on—his little family. Maybe he really wanted to be—

“Evening, darling.”

She turned to see a man standing on the river pathway. Where had he come from? She moved towards him slowly, hitching up the top of her bustier so her cleavage was more defined. Cleavage always worked—funny, that.

“What you after, my lovely?” she asked.

“I got a car back here,” he said, gesturing with his thumb. “We could go for a nice drive.”

“I don’t go in cars, dear—sorry. You follow me—you’ll have the time of your life.”

She set off towards the King’s Stair Gardens and she could hear his footsteps behind her. There was a blocked-up doorway she used in a kind of water-pumping station, deeply recessed, very dark—people could walk right past and not see what you were up to.

She stepped into the doorway and sensed rather than saw his bulk fill the space. Big bloke. She reached for his fly—whip it out and get your hands on it, that was her routine. Don’t even let them have a second to think. All over before you knew it—before they had a chance to get specific.

She felt his strong hand on her wrist.

“Hold on, sweetness, not so fast. I got a few ideas myself…”

“It’s forty pound,” she said. “Fifty, no condom. If you want a room it’s a hundred—half an hour.”

She clicked on her cigarette lighter. It freaked them out if they knew you’d seen their face clear—stopped them getting any nasty little notions. The flame lit his big face and she saw the pale-lashed eyes, the weak chin with a big cleft down the middle, the dancing flame making the cleft look even deeper than it was. He seemed familiar to her, somehow.

“Don’t I know you?” she said. “Ain’t I done you before?”

“No. Not unless you work down Chelsea way.”

“I never been to Chelsea, darling.”

“Oh, yes you have.”

Then he grabbed her by the throat and lifted her almost off her feet, ramming her into the wall, driving the breath from her lungs.

“Where’s Adam Kindred,” he breathed into her face. “Tell me that and I won’t have to mark you.”

She couldn’t speak, so she made a choking, gagging noise. She had both hands on his wrist—it felt like the thick branch of a tree—and her toes were just touching the ground. He relaxed his grip slightly, let her down a few inches.

“I don’t know the name,” she said.

“How about ‘John’?”

And, now, for some reason, she remembered him. He was the guy she’d seen getting out of the taxi outside The Shaft, one night a few weeks ago. It was the taxi she’d noticed and then she’d walked right past this man—this big ugly bastard with the cleft chin who now had his hand round her throat. But what did he have to do with John 1603?

“John who?” she said. “There’s lots of Johns in this world.”

“How about the John who was staying in your flat? Let’s start with him.”

This chastened her—and she felt weak being caught out so quickly. How the fuck did he
know?
Who had told him? And she experienced a horrible premonition: she was suddenly aware that she was going to have to fight this big powerful man, fight him for her life—like that last time she’d got in the car with that evil bastard punter. You turned into an animal—you just knew.

“Tell me about John,” he said.

“Oh, that cunt,” she said, bitterly. “He fucked off to Scotland last week.”

“What? Scotland?”

She sensed his genuine surprise and his grip on her slackened again and she knew this was her moment. She drove her knee into his balls, full force, and heard his bellow of pain as she ducked beneath his arms and ran.

But he was after her in a second, it seemed, and she couldn’t run fast in those fucking high-heeled boots. He caught her just before she got to the river and its lighted walkways, grabbed her hands in some kind of a lock and frogmarched her back up into the darkness of King’s Stairs Gardens and there he did something strange to her neck—fingers digging deep in at the side, a thumb pressing hard behind one ear—and she felt one whole side of her body going limp, and pins and needles in her left hand.

She punched him in the face with her right hand, got her nails in his cheek and raked downwards, feeling his skin tear. She saw his whirling backhander too late and tried to duck but he hit her so hard that the last thing she remembered was the sensation of flying through the air—Mhouse was flying, off the ground, flying in the air like a little birdie.

And then—nothing.

G
ORAN, THE DUTY HEAD porter, came into the porters’ restroom, looked around at the half dozen porters sitting there—reading newspapers, texting, sleeping—and checked his clipboard.

“OK…Is Wellington and Primo, going for to ward 10—Mrs Manning for surgery.” He paused. “Hello, calling Primo, come in, Primo. Home base to Primo…”