Before Carlyle could respond, the phone started vibrating in his hand. It was a text message from Alice: At home. All ok. x
A mixture of relief and frustration washed over him. He looked up, but the teacher had already walked off. For a few seconds, Carlyle stood there, feeling like a spare part. Then he called his wife and left the Square, heading west.
The bell rang, shortly followed by a low rumble of excited chatter. Michael Hagger leaned against a pillar outside the entrance to Coram’s Fields Nursery. Trying to look like the kind of bloke who would regularly pick his kid up from playschool, he watched the children start to stream out, still happily playing, stuffing their faces with snacks, or chatting about the day. Mostly it was women — mothers or childminders — doing the collecting, but there was the odd father here and there making the effort to be part of the post-school run.
Once he was sure that home-time was in full swing, Hagger slipped past a woman struggling with a buggy and went inside the building. Smiling at the girls in reception, he casually walked down the corridor towards Jake’s classroom.
Wearing jeans, trainers and a Thomas the Tank Engine T-shirt, the boy sat at a desk, drawing on a piece of paper with a green crayon. He was concentrating hard, with his tongue poking out of one corner of his mouth. For the first time, it struck Hagger that he was a good-looking lad. Must get it from me, he thought. A teaching assistant stood at a sink in the far corner of the room, tidying away a selection of paints and brushes. She had her back to them and didn’t turn round when he entered the room.
Jake saw him and made a face. ‘What are you doing here?’
Hagger forced a small smile. ‘I’ve come to pick you up.’
Jake looked confused. ‘You never pick me up.’
‘Well, I am today,’ Hagger replied through gritted teeth.
‘Where’s Mum?’
Hagger reached over and patted him on the head.
‘I’m picking you up today,’ he repeated. ‘I thought it would be nice.’
The teaching assistant was still busy putting caps back on tubes of paint.
‘Mum always picks me up,’ the boy said stubbornly. ‘Or Amelia.’
A right pair of useless, lazy bitches, Hagger decided. ‘They said I could come and get you today.’
‘Mum says you’re a complete bastard,’ Jake said casually, lowering his gaze and pressing the crayon harder into the paper. ‘And a total cunt,’ he added, swapping his green crayon for a red one.
‘Does she now?’ Hagger bristled.
‘What is a cunt, anyway?’
‘Nothing.’
The boy looked up. ‘It’s a bad word, isn’t it?’
‘She’s only joking.’ Hagger grinned nervously. He glanced towards the back of the room but the teaching assistant clearly hadn’t heard. She had the taps running now, washing out some pots.’
‘Amelia too.’
‘They love me really. Just like you, eh?’
Jake still didn’t look up. ‘I want to wait for Mum.’
Hagger had expected this reaction from the boy. He knew that he had to be quick. He couldn’t afford a scene. Dropping a small bag of jelly babies on the desk, he whispered, ‘I thought we could go and get an ice cream.’
The boy grabbed the sweets and stood up. ‘Okay,’ he said, tearing open the packet. He looked up at his father. ‘Then can I go and see Mum?’
‘Of course.’
Happy to be on his own for once, Dominic Silver relaxed on a couch in his house on Meard Street in Soho. Gideon Spanner, his eyes and ears on the street, was out on his rounds and so Silver had the place to himself. The room was silent apart from the hum of traffic outside, interrupted by the occasional burst of a police siren. He had muted the television, on which was playing a rerun of Evander Holyfield’s 1989 fight with Michael Dokes, to focus on a report in the Evening Standard. It was the unremarkable story of two drug dealers who were due to be sent down for up to twenty-seven years after police found two holdalls containing 50 kilograms of heroin in the boot of their car. The report claimed that the ‘haul’ was worth almost?5 million ‘on the street’. I’m not sure what street you’re thinking about, mate, Dom sniffed. Off the top of his head, he estimated that anyone would do well to generate three and a half million from such a load in these straitened times. Still a tidy sum, but well below peak prices. The deepening recession was savaging all types of discretionary spending; even the drugs business, which had held up better than most for longer than most, was now seriously feeling the pinch. Austerity was the name of the game now, even when it came to getting wasted.
He turned back to the newspaper story. The dealers claimed to have been picking up leaflets that they had ordered from a printing business. According to this version of events, the leaflets were not ready for collection at the appointed hour. Meantime, the men were asked to deliver the holdalls instead in return for?250. The jury had taken less than fifteen minutes to find the cretins guilty. It was a surprise that its deliberations had taken that long. The police must have been pissing themselves.
‘Idiots!’ Silver studied the mugshots of the duo that accompanied the story and shook his head. He had mixed feelings about the police’s success in this case. The drugs had belonged to a rival dealer and someone else’s product being taken off the market was always good news. Without feeling too smug, Dominic felt that natural selection would always work to his advantage. At the same time, however, it showed that you could only push your luck so far. Disappointed customers would still want servicing and any gap in the market invited a free-for-all. There were plenty of people who would happily spill blood for the sake of market share. That was the capitalist way.
Dominic closed the paper and tossed it on the floor, thinking that it was getting ever closer to the time when he really should be calling it a day. He shut his eyes and tried to clear his mind of all its various distractions.
This, he knew, was a big test.
Could he live up to one of life’s basic rules?
Could he quit while he was ahead?
TEN
A shower and a fried-egg sandwich went a little way to easing the frustrations of the day. Alice had retired to her bedroom to do her homework, and seemed completely unfazed by recent events. Picking up the evening paper, Carlyle flopped on to the sofa beside his wife. ‘What a day!’
Helen finished sending a text message and dropped her phone on the coffee-table. ‘Well, at least there was no bomb. Apparently a couple of the older girls called it in.’
Carlyle gave her one of his many bemused looks. ‘Huh?’
‘They were due to have a test. They didn’t want to do the test, so
…’
‘So they said that there was a bomb in the bloody school?’ he spluttered.
‘Yes.’ Helen grinned.
He half-laughed. ‘Well, I suppose that’s using your initiative, kind of.’
‘But sadly for them,’ Helen continued, ‘one of the girls used her mobile to call it in. They are soooo busted.’
‘Jesus. How do you know all this so quickly?’
Helen tapped her nose with a finger. ‘The mothers’ network is always first with the news.’
‘Very impressive.’
‘There’s more.’
‘There is?’
‘Yes.’ Helen’s face darkened. ‘The sniffer dogs didn’t find any bombs, but they did come up with eight bags containing drugs.’
‘What kind of drugs?’ Carlyle asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Dope, presumably.’
‘What about that skunk stuff?’ Helen asked. ‘Isn’t that the new super-threat to the nation’s teens?’
‘Only if you’re a neurotic middle-class parent,’ Carlyle yawned, ‘happy to throw a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc down your throat every night while lecturing your kids about how they shouldn’t even look at a spliff.’