It would have been an ugly death, killed by a piece of falling plaster in a house he was supposed to be renovating; his body wouldn’t have been found for days, rats would have eaten him, it would have been a horrible end, and then they would have found the £500,000 in cash, and God knows what they would have thought … When the adrenaline of the near miss wore off, and the thought of how long it would have taken to find his body took hold of him, Zbigniew began to feel ill. Who, in truth, would have found him? He worked alone. He stayed in the house alone. He had no girlfriend. Mrs Leatherby lived in Essex
and came down to London only at monthly intervals. Zbigniew called her once a week to keep her informed of progress – part of his do-what-British-builders-don’t-do strategy – and she would probably notice the absence of that call, but it would take at least a week for her to become concerned. Piotr would have called his mobile and got no answer, then he would have left it another day or so, then he would have tried again, then he would have started to get worried, and then, finally, perhaps he would have gone to the house, a little reluctantly and prepared to be angry at Zbigniew for forgetting to charge his mobile, and then he would have peered through the letter box, and then, only then, perhaps, he might have thought, I wonder what’s that smell …?
The thought was slow to get into Zbigniew’s head, but once it did it made him feel shaky. He took a break and went downstairs, stopping at the turn of the landing to look back at the place from where the chunk of plaster had fallen. Motes of dust were still drifting down. It had been a close one. He had the feeling he sometimes had, of envying people who smoked, because they had something to do at moments such as this. Instead Zbigniew simply sat at the bottom of the stairs for ten minutes before trudging back up them and returning to work, ready to leap backwards the moment he sensed anything untoward.
That same day, he went over to number 51 and told Mrs Yount he would do the decorating work for her. He had always half-wanted to do it, not for the money but for the chance to see that sexy, distant Hungarian girl again. It was the revelation of his cut-offness, his isolation in his London life, which made him act. Poland was real in a way that Britain was not, but he had to live here for now, so while he was living here, he might as well try to have a life. That was the idea.
‘Bogdan, I’m thrilled to bits,’ said Mrs Yount. He told her he would start work the following week – it was, he estimated, about a four-day job. It would be a break from his work at number 42, but he would stop in there at the start and finish of each day, just to keep an eye on things, and also to keep his conscience clear. So he would have four days to make an impact on the Hungarian. After that he could leave a couple of tools and brushes there and he would have other opportunities to make contact – but his best chance would be in those four full days.
Day one was a disaster. Zbigniew had not allowed for the fact that because it was summer, Matya and the children spent most of their time outside. Add to that the fact that his painting job was at the top of the house – the third time he had painted these particular walls – and it was a perfect recipe for spending an entire day failing to speak to her. He could hear movement in and out of the front door downstairs, and there was one time when Matya and the children seemed to have come back from their lunch date. Aha! thought Zbigniew. This is my chance! I’ll go down to the kitchen for a glass of water! But by the time he had checked himself in the bathroom mirror and wiped some paint off his face and straightened his hair, and started downstairs, he heard the front door close again. It was unfair. Weren’t these children allowed any rest?
Some builders and painters he knew would have got depressed at going over work they had already done, effectively undoing their own labour, but Zbigniew didn’t allow himself those sorts of feelings. If he wasn’t doing this work, someone else would be; if someone was going to be paid for it, it might as well be him. So he got on with the job and waited for his opportunity. Matya got back at five and Zbigniew recklessly went downstairs to try and start a conversation – only to find that the boys had friends over, and she was cooking tea. She was making what seemed to be an entire restaurant service’s worth of meals: a baked potato with beans (one of the Yount children had baked beans at least once a day), another baked potato with cheese, a carton of chicken and sweetcorn soup to be divided between the visiting children, a portion of spaghetti and pesto which she had planned to share with the other nanny until it emerged that she couldn’t eat anything containing flour, so Matya was eating the pasta herself and had made an omelette for her guest. At the same time, two of the boys were making mess with finger-paints. Matya, doing ten or eleven things at the same time, had the look of a woman who did not want to be courted; who would regard any flirting as somewhere between an irritation and an outright provocation. He got a good view of her bum as she bent over the table to mop up some spilled food, J-cloth in right hand, mobile phone in left. The effect on him was such that Zbigniew forgot to get the glass
of water he had come downstairs pretending to want. At six, she left. He heard the door close. At five past six, he left too.
Day two was very similar. Matya and the boys were out, briefly in, then out again. Zbigniew felt he had to be careful – if he did the same accidentally-popping-downstairs manoeuvre, she might see through him and he might begin to seem desperate. The outcome of this sensible strategy was that he didn’t see or speak to her all day. He spent it painting and – since he’d brought his laptop, which still had the Younts’ wireless password on it – intermittently checking on his stocks. He stopped at five thirty, wrote an email to his brother back in Warsaw, and went back to the house.
Day three began promisingly. Zbigniew arrived at eight, while the children and their nanny and their mother were all still at breakfast, so he went straight upstairs and got on with the work. He was ahead of schedule and if this had been a different kind of job might have contemplated a flat-out fourteen-hour day to get it all finished – but that would disrupt his nanny plan, so instead Zbigniew was budgeting for two days of steady progress. He had worked here before and knew the sounds of the house, so he could interpret the noises when Arabella called out her farewells, then went upstairs to shower and get dressed, then went out with more farewells, then came back in again a minute later to collect her car keys, then went out again. It was about nine o’clock. Zbigniew could hear the crashing, scuttling, and laughing noises which meant that Matya and the children were downstairs. There was no evidence that they were about to head out – that took a good twenty minutes, so there would be warning. Excellent. Finally. Today was the day. He would give her a few minutes, then go down and initiate … whatever there was to be initiated. He would make no special preparations for what he should say – something natural, spontaneous, perhaps something based on whatever it was the children were doing. Yes – the children. Ah! Such energy! Something like that. One day, I hope to have children of my own, and hope that they have a nanny just as beautiful, who would bend over the kitchen table and – no, that probably wasn’t the way to go. Small talk about the children, a joke, a drink after work. Yes. And then just as Zbigniew was about
to act on his audaciously brilliant plan, disaster. There was a car horn from outside, the doorbell rang, the door was opened, two women’s voices were speaking a loud foreign language at each other – from its unrecognisability, Zbigniew recognised it as Hungarian – there was the noise of a loud car engine, probably an SUV, there were rapid orders, a rapid gathering of coats and toys, and in an unprecedentedly brief time, less than two minutes at most, Matya and the children had been swept out. As for where, Zbigniew didn’t know and didn’t care. It had been a stupid idea taking on this job. Mrs Yount would change her mind about the colour again in a matter of weeks. Matya was out all day every day, she obviously couldn’t stand to be in the house. By the time he left she still hadn’t come back.
By day four, Zbigniew had more or less given up. It had been a moronic idea and he didn’t fancy her that much anyway. The real reason he had taken on the work was that he felt he owed it to Mrs Yount. He felt responsible because it was his paint job that he was redoing. No other reason. Matya, who he didn’t want to speak to anyway, was out all day, just for a change. He heard her and the children leave the house at about nine o’clock, the usual drama with clothes and shoes and last-minute trips to the toilet, and then they were gone. He made steady progress with his painting, finished the dado rails by late morning, then went on to the final details and was done by five o’clock. The Hungarian nanny, who he hadn’t liked much anyway, and her charges still weren’t back. Zbigniew cleared up the paper and cloths he had used to protect surfaces, and wrote a note for Mrs Yount saying that he was done, that he would be round in a day or two to see if everything was all right (and to collect his cheque, though he didn’t say that). He took his brushes and paints downstairs, then went back up to get the note and the coffee mug, and as he did so heard the door open and a stampede of children and nannies come into the house, the nannies issuing orders, the children voicing protests. Zbigniew came down into the mayhem with his note for Mrs Yount and his dirty mug.
‘Aha!’ said the second nanny, another Hungarian from her accent, shorter than Matya, with short hair cut to curve under her chin and bright flirting happy eyes. ‘A man! Perhaps he will eat pizza!’
‘Pizza is horrible!’ said the younger of the two Yount boys, who, like the other three children, was hiding under the dining-room table.
‘They said they wanted pizza. Now they say they don’t want it,’ said Matya, addressing herself to Zbigniew, the first time she had spoken to him. Zbigniew put his set of house keys and the note for Mrs Yount on the table by the telephone, where messages and letters were left, and saw, sitting next to the lamp, a set of car keys and Matya’s phone, a Nokia N60. He had the same model phone. They were meant for each other. Zbigniew had an idea.
‘We want baked beans,’ said a voice from under the table.
‘Perhaps you can help us eat all this pizza?’ said Matya’s friend.
He made gestures to indicate polite refusal and then, since both the girls were eating, said, ‘Just a slice.’ Then he introduced himself.
‘I thought your name was Bogdan,’ said Matya.
‘Bogdan the Builder. A little joke of Mrs Yount’s.’ He saw this register with her.
‘My name is Matya,’ she said, ‘but the children called me Matty.’ She had a nice undertone to her words and eyes – lively and a little sad at the same time. That body too. Zbigniew was convinced. He made some chat with the girls, helped joke the boys out from under the table, and left with his brushes and paints and, in his jacket pocket, Matya’s mobile phone.
T
here was no clock in Shahid’s cell, and no natural light, and he wasn’t wearing a watch when he was taken to jail, so his sense of passing time was limited to the point when his lights were turned out and then turned on a stretch of time later – which, he assumed, meant that a day had passed. That had happened five times now, which meant that five days and nights had gone by. Shahid had not spoken to anybody apart from – he presumed this is what they were even though the thought of what it meant was difficult to process – his interrogators.
Not that they called themselves that. They did not call themselves anything. They were all men and there were four of them, two significantly older than Shahid – in their fifties or so – and two about the same age. One of the thirtysomething men was Asian, a police inspector, and he was the only one of them who wore a uniform. The others all wore suits. They all of them kept asking the same set of questions, over and over again, mainly about Iqbal, but also about his own past, about Chechnya and people he’d known there. Sometimes they showed him photographs, and asked him if he could recognise any of the people in them. When he truthfully said that he couldn’t, they looked as if they didn’t believe him.
Iqbal, however, was the main subject, and the question they asked most often was ‘Where is he?’ Today, the sixth morning after he had been arrested and therefore his seventh day in prison, was no different.
It began with the lights being turned on and with breakfast being pushed through a hole in the door: a single poached egg, cold burnt toast, and the most over-sugared tea he had ever tasted. He had a shit, which was the most humiliating thing about the whole experience since it was degrading and defiled to have the open toilet so close to the bed. There was an inspection hole in the window, so anybody could look at him on the bog, which was bad enough. The smell was worse. It wasn’t a chemical toilet, but it had a persistent chemical smell, and the metal washbasin also gave off a faint scent of industrial perfume. He had had an upset stomach, surely caused by stress, and his bowels were loose. The frequent semi-liquid shitting and the toilet and the sink combined together to make a humiliating cocktail of odours, which hit him hard when he returned from interrogations.
Shahid washed his hands, brushed his teeth, and waited. About fifteen minutes later, a police officer came in and took the tray, and then another two policemen came in, put handcuffs on him, and led him along the corridor and round two corners to the interrogation room where the Asian policeman and one of his colleagues were waiting. The white policeman was a man who gave an impression of heaviness. It wasn’t that he was fat, but he sagged as if with a moral or psychic burden; his shoulders sagged, his eyes sagged, his suit sagged and he sat sagged in his chair, as if his disappointments with the world were bearing down on him. He made it clear that Shahid was one of these disappointments.
‘Well rested?’ asked the Asian officer. Shahid, who had not lied about a single thing as yet, saw no reason to answer with anything other than a shrug. The interrogators had a varying set of props and tools; sometimes they read files that came in plain brown folders, over the top of which Shahid couldn’t quite see. They might be looking at their horoscopes – you couldn’t tell. Sometimes they had turned on the tape recorder, sometimes they took notes. Sometimes they had cups of coffee, bottles of water (always Volvic; there must be a dispenser somewhere). Once one of the older officers came in drinking a Diet Coke. But the times Shahid found most disconcerting were the occasions, like today, when his interrogators were entirely empty-handed:
no folders, no drinks, nothing. They just sat there with their hands in their laps and asked questions. The fact that they made no attempt to record his answers made it seem as if they weren’t listening to him. His answers were being discounted. So he was being grilled and ignored at the same time; Shahid found that hard to take.