“You have spare room, here,” Mr Quality said, opening a door into the second bedroom. There was a mattress on the floor and a few cardboard boxes with clothes and old toys in them. “I can get you lodger—£20 a week. No worry, clean nice person. Asylum, no speak English.”
“No, I’m fine at the moment. Keeping busy, business is good,” she said, trying to appear casual. “Things are OK, going fine. Yeah, fine.”
“You go let me know.”
“Yeah, sure. Thanks, Mr Q.”
After Mr Quality had gone she gave Ly-on his supper — mashed banana and condensed milk with a slug of rum. She crushed a Somnola into the mix and mashed it further with a fork.
“Mummy’s got to go out to work tonight,” she said as she handed him the bowl.
“Mummy working too hard,” he said, spooning the banana pabulum into his mouth.
“You go to toilet if you need pee-pee,” she said. “Don’t do it in you pants.”
“Mum — don’t saying that.” His eyes were on the screen.
She kissed his forehead and went to change into her working clothes. No point in waiting, she thought, might as well get the cash as soon as possible. She put on a cap-sleeved T — shirt with a red heart across her chest, wriggled into her short skirt, pulled on her zip-up white boots, picked up the umbrella, checked her bag for condoms and fastened the keys on the long chain to her belt. She locked the door on a sleeping Ly-on — she’d be back in a couple of hours or so, she reckoned, no need to alert Mrs Darling, and headed along the walkway to the stairs.
As she was leaving The Shaft, heading out to the Rotherhithe shore and her usual beat, she saw a black taxi-cab pull up, its light off. No one got out while it sat for a minute or two at the kerb. Who’s ordering a black cab at The Shaft? she wondered as she made towards it. Brave fool.
The driver stepped out as she walked past — big bloke, ugly face with a weak, cleft chin. She glanced back to see where he was going and saw him lock his cab and wander into the estate.
15
THE VET HAD BEEN — what was the word? — contemptuous, yes, almost contemptuous when Jonjo had told him what The Dog’s routine diet was. He was a young fellow with a square of beard under his bottom lip and a single dangling earring — something Jonjo didn’t expect to see in a Newhani veterinary surgeon.
“He eats pretty much what I eat,” Jonjo had said, reasonably. “I tend to cook for two — scrambled eggs and bacon, curries, sausage rolls, pork pies — he really likes pork pies — biscuits, crisps, the odd bar of chocolate.”
“This is a pedigree bassett hound,” the vet said. “Anyone would think you were trying to kill him.”
Jonjo sat quietly as the vet berated him for his neglect, then told him the sort of food The Dog should and must eat and wrote a list down on a piece of paper and handed it to him. Smug bastard, Jonjo thought.
He touched his breast pocket and felt the crinkle of the vet’s folded list. The back of his cab was full of tins of special dog food and paper sacks of dog biscuit and fibrous additives; there were pills and suppositories and other types of medication should symptoms appear and complications occur. Bloody expensive too. He’d hand it all over to Candy in the morning. He wondered whether he should give The Dog back to his sister…
He stepped out of the cab and locked it, contemplating the tall blocks of the Shaftesbury Estate. He ran through his checks: the small Beretta Tomcat between his shoulder blades, snug in a rig he had designed himself; the larger 1911.45 ACP holstered in the small of his back, one round in the pipe, cocked and locked; knife strapped just above the left ankle. He was wearing an extra roomy leather blouson jacket that perfectly concealed the small prints of his weapons. He had loose, pale blue, stone-washed jeans and yellow builder’s boots with steel toecaps. He eased his shoulders and rotated his head, remembering the last time he’d experienced this adrenalin buzz — when he had knocked on Dr Philip Wang’s door in Anne Boleyn House.
He walked into The Shaft completely unafraid, calm, ready for anything.
Jonjo could hear Sergeant Snell’s voice in his ear. “The Three O’s, youse cunts!” Over-arm. Over-react. Over-kill. Number one: you can never have too many weapons. Number two: somebody calls you a name — you knock him down and kick him senseless. Number three — you don’t just wound, you permanently disable. Somebody tries to hit you — you kill him. Somebody tries to kill you — you destroy his family, his house, his village. Snell always made sure you got the picture. True, these instructions were tailored for violent combat zones but Jonjo had always regarded them as pretty sound counsel for life in general and, by and large, adhering to the Three O’s had served him well, only a few of his overreactions landing him in trouble with the police — but they tended to understand once they learned of his background.
Jonjo wandered across the cracked dry mud of a grassless central courtyard, looking around him. He was in a wide, two-acre quadrangle, surrounded by four of The Shaft’s apartment blocks. He saw snapped-off saplings, a washing machine with its guts ripped out and its porthole window open, graffiti-ed walls and doors. A few people looked down at him from the upper walkways, elbows resting on the concrete balustrades, smoking.
These places should be razed to the ground, Jonjo thought, and houses built for decent people. Take all the scum who live here, put them down with humane killers, like cattle, incinerate their bodies and throw their ashes in landfill sites. Crime in the area would fall by 99 per cent, families — would relax, kiddies would play hopscotch in the street, flowers would bloom again in front gardens.
Three little girls were sitting on a bench, sharing a cigarette. As he approached, Jonjo saw that they weren’t so much little — just small. He looked at them: eleven? Or eighteen?
“Hello, ladies,” he said, smiling. “Wonder if you can help me.”
“Fuck off, peedlefile.”
“What’s the name of the main crew, round here? Who runs the area, you know? Number one gangsters. I’ll give you a fiver if you tell me.”
One of the girls, with bad acne, said, “Give me ten and I’ll flog you off.”
Another, a fat one, said, “Give me ten and it’s the best blow-job of your life.”
They all laughed at this — giggling, silly, pushing at each other. Jonjo remained impassive.
“Who’s the big guy in The Shaft, eh? I got a job for him. He’ll be well angry you didn’t tell me.”
The girls whispered to each other, then Acne said, “We don’t know.”
Jonjo took a twenty-pound note out of his pocket and dropped it on the ground. He turned away from them and put his heel on it.
“Let’s do it this way,” he said. “I didn’t give you this, you found it. I just need a name and a place, then I walk away and I won’t know who told me. No one will know. Just tell me — and don’t play silly buggers, right? Because I’ll come back and find you.”
He crossed his arms and waited. After about twenty seconds one of the girls said, “Bozzy, Flat B1, Unit 17.”
Jonjo walked away, not looking round.
Jonjo followed the signs to Unit 17 and found Flat B1—it was derelict, on the ground floor, the windows boarded up. For a second or two he wondered if those little bitches had conned him but then he saw that there was no padlock on the door and, peering through a slit at the edge of one of the boarded-up windows, he realised there were lights on inside.
He slid his 1911 out of its holster in the small of his back and held it loosely in his hand, butt first. Then he knocked on the door.
“Bozzy?” he said, in an anxious voice. “I need to see Bozzy. I got money for him.” He knocked again. “I got money for Bozzy.”