Authors: Helen Black
‘Here we are,’ said Lilly, as they approached the office.
Anna nodded and smoothed her jacket. She had dressed as smartly as her few belongings would allow.
It was too cold to be without a coat and Lilly had tried to lend one to Anna, but the hugeness of it buried her and made her seem somehow even more pathetic.
‘I think it would be best if you let me explain the situation,’ said Lilly.
Anna laughed. ‘I prefer I don’t speak at all.’
Lilly took a deep breath and opened the door.
‘Look what the cat dragged in,’ said Sheila.
Lilly ignored the remark. ‘Rupes in?’
‘Yes indeed.’ Sheila leaned back in her chair, hands behind her head, determined to enjoy herself. ‘And she wants to know what the hell is going on.’
‘Then I’ll go and tell her,’ said Lilly.
Sheila jumped to her feet and followed Lilly and Anna to Rupinder’s office. ‘This I gotta see.’
‘Rupes,’ said Lilly, and grinned so widely her cheeks hurt.
Rupinder placed her Dictaphone down at an exact right angle to her keyboard.
‘Lilly,’ she said.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Lilly.
‘I think that unlikely,’ said Rupes.
‘Well, I can guess you’re annoyed.’
Sheila snorted. ‘That’s an understatement.’
‘Which is understandable,’ said Lilly, ‘but you have to see it from my point of view.’
‘Do I?’
Lilly nodded. ‘It all makes sense when you get where I’m coming from.’
‘Lilly Valentine, I gave up trying to get where you’re coming from years ago,’ said Rupes. ‘Your mind is an unfathomable place to me. A place of madness and chaos.’
Lilly hung her head. ‘Is it really that bad?’
‘Yes, it is.’ Rupinder raised her voice, something she never usually did. ‘You have taken on this case despite everyone telling you not to, and then you have agreed to have the client under your supervision.’
‘It’s worked out fine so far.’ Lilly turned to Anna. ‘Hasn’t it?’
Anna nodded vociferously.
‘In that crazy house you call a home that may be the case.’ Rupinder was on her feet. ‘But what about here? In the place we laughingly call your office? What on earth will you do with your client here?’
‘She can help me,’ said Lilly.
‘With what?’ asked Sheila; Lilly had forgotten she was behind her. ‘We don’t have much call for armed assassins.’
‘Actually,’ said Lilly, ‘I was thinking she could make the tea.’
‘Not bleeding likely,’ said Sheila. ‘She’ll probably poison the lot of us.’
It was all too much for Rupinder, who roared like a panther: ‘Get out of my room.’
Lilly pushed Anna outside and closed the door behind her.
‘That went better than expected.’
Luke thumps the pinball machine. He knows they might kick him out but he doesn’t care. It has rained on and off all day and some miserable bitch working in Topshop kicked him out of the doorway. He headed down to Chinatown, to the Golden Gate arcade, but got caught in a downpour. He spent the next hour wet and miserable, watching some rent boys play Motocross 3.
He pulls the neck of his hoodie over his mouth. It’s dry now but it smells stale.
He remembers all the stuff he left at home, clean and hanging in his wardrobe. Jeans, trackies, a jacket from Quiksilver he’d nagged for and his mum said looked like an overpriced cagoule.
His mind is a tangle of thoughts, spinning round and round like clothes in a tumble dryer. Not looking where he’s going, he bumps into a girl with dreads hanging past her waist.
‘What’s your problem?’
Luke is instantly ready for aggro, but it’s someone he knows. Long Tall Sally, named not after her height but her tendency to stand at the top of bridges and multi-storeys to abuse the pedestrians below and spit on their heads. Despite this filthy habit she’s always all right with Luke. Caz says she fancies him.
She smiles at him and reveals black teeth. ‘What’s up, mate?’
Luke shrugs. ‘Pissed off, that’s all.’
‘Why’s that?’
Why indeed? He could blame his mood on the shitty weather or the fact that he stinks, but he is used to both by now.
The real reason is Caz, of course. She’s gone AWOL again. At about midday she’d gone off to score. Her usual dealer, Sonic Dave, was on the missing list. Some said he’d gone away for a six stretch, others that he’d been sectioned for climbing up the new statue of Nelson Mandela wearing only a loincloth and a pair of goggles. Either way, Caz said she would make her way over to some bloke she knew in Waterloo. She could have gone to any of the Turks who hung about on Oxford Street but she doesn’t trust them.
‘They cut the gear with vim and all sorts of shit,’ she had said.
But she’s been gone four hours now, and it doesn’t take that long to go a couple of stops on the tube and back.
He doesn’t feel frightened when she goes off any more, not like in the beginning when everyone and everything around him seemed overwhelming and dangerous. But he still hates it when she isn’t around.
Maybe she has overdosed.
A couple of nights ago, Teardrop Tony had collapsed and no amount of slapping him and pouring water over his head could wake him up. Eventually someone phoned for an ambulance and they injected him with something that got him breathing again. Caz said it was adrenalin.
‘Don’t you lot think we’ve better things to do than keeping bloody junkies alive?’ the paramedic had said.
Luke had tried to slink away but Caz had stood her ground, hands on her hips.
‘Are you saying we should have just left him to die?’
The paramedic had strapped Tony onto a stretcher. ‘Some might say you’d have been doing us all a favour.’
If Caz has overdosed today would there be anyone there to dial 999?
‘You can’t OD when you’re tooting, only with needles,’ she’d told him. But was that right?
‘A gang of us are off to a squat party in Camberwell, why don’t you come with us?’ says Long Tall Sally. ‘It’ll cheer you up to get off your head.’
‘Thanks, but I’m heading up to Waterloo to meet Caz,’ says Luke.
Sally cocks her head to one side, her dreads shivering like snakes. ‘I’m not sure she wants to see you right now.’
Luke frowns. ‘Why would that be?’
‘I’m saying nothing, mate, but we all have things we like to keep to ourselves.’
Luke watches her leave with a group of boys who already look halfway to being drunk. If he thinks about it, Long Tall Sally is right. Caz is obviously keeping something from him. The way she disappears with no explanation before or after. At first it made him sad, but now it makes him angry. They’re friends, so why can’t she trust him?
He’s still racking his brain when he jumps the barrier at Leicester Square station.
‘Oy,’ roars the guard, and chases him down the steps.
Luke jumps them two at a time and races down the platform. A train is just about to leave. ‘Please mind the gap,’ warns the mechanical voice. Luke leaps into a carriage as the doors close and the guard is left slapping the glass with the palm of his hand.
People stare, so Luke pulls his hoodie back over his head and looks at the floor as the train pulls away.
Lilly poured herself a glass of Chablis. She was keen to draw a line under what had been a taxing day.
She had known Rupes would react badly to the current bail arrangements, but hadn’t expected her to lock herself in her room. Lilly had felt the resentment seeping from under her door every time she crept past. Another round of bellowing would have been preferable.
Anna, on the other hand, had been a revelation, tidying Lilly’s workspace and filing the snowstorm of loose papers. Sheila had tossed her tight perm and sniffed in disgust, but Lilly could tell even she was impressed.
It might have all ended relatively peacefully if the package from the CPS hadn’t arrived. Lilly would have gladly slid the manila envelope into her bag and dealt with it at home but not today. No doubt it was to outshine their newest member of staff but Sheila insisted on following office policy. She opened the package with her knife and slid the photographs onto her desk to be date-stamped on the back.
As soon as Lilly saw what they were, she flung herself on top of them—but not before Anna had seen the corpse of Charlie Stanton.
‘Autopsy,’ said Lilly ‘Standard stuff.’
Anna nodded, her face as pale as the body in the photo. Then she vomited across the desk.
After that, Sam’s tantrum about extra time on his Nintendo seemed almost to be expected.
‘You never think about what I want,’ he raged, and they both knew he wasn’t referring to Super Mario.
Now, with Sam and Anna both in bed, Lilly would have a quick drink and get an early night herself.
Ring, ring.
The doorbell.
‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’
Lilly yanked open the door and found Milo standing in the rain. He held up a pink plastic rucksack. ‘I found this in Anna’s room.’
‘And that?’ asked Lilly, pointing to a box in his other hand.
‘I shave your front entrance,’ he said.
Lilly choked so hard that Milo dropped both items and clapped her on the back.
Lilly gasped for air, tears coursing down her cheeks. ‘What did you say?’
‘It’s a lathe.’ Milo knocked the warped door frame with his knuckle. ‘I shave this so it opens more easily.’
Still coughing, Lilly ushered him inside and poured him a drink.
‘I have spoken wrongly?’ he asked.
Lilly wiped her face with the back of her hand. ‘No, no. I just swallowed something too quickly.’
He smiled up at her, obviously relieved. His hair was damp and the curls on his forehead were more pronounced.
‘That happens to me,’ said Lilly. ‘When mine gets wet.’
He touched his finger to his black coil. ‘Kissing curls.’
He looked directly into her eyes, the green as startling as ever.
Lilly took a gulp of wine.
‘Things are okay?’ he asked. ‘With Anna?’
Glad to be on safer ground, Lilly see-sawed her hand. ‘I’ve got to get to grips with the evidence. Work out what our case is.’
Milo shrugged. ‘She didn’t do it.’
‘I wish it were that easy.’
‘It is simple. She didn’t kill that boy’
‘Technically that’s true,’ agreed Lilly. ‘But why was she there? Why did she have a gun? She can’t give me any explanation for that.’
Milo put down his glass, his face thoughtful. ‘Sometimes you just do what you’re told to do.’
‘What? Someone says here’s a gun, now come with me, and you don’t ask what’s going on?’
Milo rubbed the stem of his glass. ‘When I left Bosnia I spent eleven days in the container of a lorry. It was pitch black. I did nothing at all but sit there. I had put my life in the hands of the driver. I ate when the driver told me to eat, drank when he told me to drink. I even make toilet when he tells me.’
‘Would you have taken a gun if he’d asked you?’
‘My life was his to save or not.’ Milo wiped his hands across his face as if washing something away. ‘I would have done whatever he asked of me.’
Without a second thought, Lilly leaned towards Milo and embraced him, one hand around his shoulder, the other around his head. She breathed him in as if she could inhale his pain. As she moved her hands through his hair she felt the distinct jolt of attraction and knew that if she did not move away she would kiss him.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and moved to the sink.
Milo laughed. ‘Always you apologise. Do you think I mind when a beautiful woman tries to kiss me?’
‘I didn’t try to kiss you.’ Lilly rinsed her glass. ‘I was sorry for what had happened to you.’
‘Not a kiss then,’ he laughed. ‘What you English call a mercy fuck.’
Lilly put her hands on her hips. ‘First, what just happened then was not a…I mean, not even close to…not even in the same hemisphere as a…’
‘Milo got up to leave and smiled. And second?’
‘Second, I would never, ever sleep with someone out of pity, and if you think that then you are a very poor judge of women.’
He paused at the door, amusement still playing around his mouth. ‘So what would be a good reason?’
‘For what?’
‘To sleep with a man.’
Lilly’s mouth opened and closed like a trout. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Come on, Lilly, you have an answer to everything.’
‘Okay, he’d need to be sexy and clever,’ said Lilly. ‘And funny.’
He went outside into the night and the rain. ‘A tall order.’
‘I’m choosy,’ she said, and closed the door, thinking of all the men in her life who hadn’t come even close to what she’d just described.
An hour later she was still shaken. She told herself that nothing had happened with Milo. He’d got the wrong end of the stick, nothing more. So why did it feel so deliciously dangerous? Please God, let David be wrong about her deliberately jeopardising her relationship with Jack.
She poured another glass of wine and forced herself to turn her mind to the case. What Milo had said about following orders rang true. When Lilly had last spoken to Artan he’d certainly been menacing. Perhaps Anna was afraid of him? But was she fearful enough to do whatever he asked?
Lilly needed to know what had been in Anna’s mind. She ripped open a packet of peanuts with her teeth and emailed an old friend.
When Luke arrives at Waterloo it’s dark and raining again. He swears to himself and sets off to The Black Cat, a café that lets the homeless hang out as long as they buy the crappy food and keep their fights outside.
There’s quite a crowd, what with the crap weather, and the air hangs thick with condensation and grease.
‘Either come in and shut the door or fuck off,’ shouts the man behind the counter.
‘Just looking for someone,’ says Luke.
‘Well, now you’ve looked, so make up your mind.’
Luke gives him the finger and leaves.
He heads over to the NCP. Most of the cars are gone by nine when the crack-heads and homeless take over the lower levels. Caz mostly steers clear at night.
‘Can’t bleedin’ sleep with all that wailing and grunting,’ she said.