He had heard, 'If you think you've "done my bit", go and look at her. I'm telling you very frankly, because I nearly trust you, we push paper round desks but we alter nothing. Enough, that's us, to get little newspaper headlines and "God, aren't we great?" stories on local TV, but we're not affecting the trade – it's the trade that put Millie where she is. You know what happened up north a few months ago? I'll tell you. A big city, with police costing millions a year, had to admit it was so swamped with class A that it had "lost control of crime" in its area. That's direct, what they said. "Lost control". Not Bogota, not Palermo, not bloody Kiev or Chicago, but a city you can take a train to. Barely surfaced in our papers and TV, because it was a bad-news story. Who wants bad news? But it's where we are. You live in this sink -
Christ, I couldn't – and you see what's not on TV and in the papers.'
The sun had brought the baby-mothers out. No thin gold finger-rings, just prams to push and toddlers to traipse towards the play places, or the swings and slides that weren't broken. Twice since he had lived on the Amersham, Malachy had seen children who could barely run, not understand, happily carry syringes picked up from the gutter back to the baby-mothers.
Once he had seen a little boy, done up in his best party clothes, kneel in the mud with a syringe and fly it over his head like it was a rocket.
'Up north, that time, they got round to admitting what we all know. We're losing. Not that you ever will, but if you came into my place – where I push my poxy bits of paper around – you'd see that only the arseholes and the career wonks find anything to cheer about. When we do get ourselves wound up, and head off to do the good things, we're tripping over the European Court of Human bleeding Rights and we're flat on our bloody faces. I'm telling you this because I reckon you understand, Malachy Kitchen, about losing. You're a loser big-time – but you came running when you were called.'
He came out past the last of the big blocks and walked a street towards the corner shop that Ivanhoe Manners had pointed out to him. There had been – he knew it because Millie Johnson had told him over tea – two more armed robberies since the twelve the social worker had spoken of. And the Southwark News had quoted the Asian shopkeeper as calling himself 'a sitting duck', with no insurance company prepared to quote for him. He couldn't quit because there was no buyer idiot enough to take it on. Guns under his chin, clubs in front of his face, CCTV and the panic button useless.
'My estimate of you is that you're sick, spewing it up, with losing… so I've got plans for you. You did well – three kids out of the picture. You did what we cannot. Over the line, of course, sufficient to get you banged up and a charge sheet as long as half your arm. You should look at me as a visiting angel, who pitched up to help you get your life back, and if you make it I'll be on the sidelines cheering you. You got a long, long road. You won't be coming to me with "I've done my bit", will you? You won't disappoint me, will you? That would really upset me, because – whichever way you look at it – I'm helping you.'
Malachy cut through the Green Street market, sidled past the stalls heavy with fruit and vegetables, thin clothing and tacky-bright toys; another plastic pistol was in the place where his had come from, good enough for a ten-year-old in daylight and good enough to scare the shit out of three gang youths at night. He glanced at his watch and quickened his stride. He saw ahead of him the traffic on Walworth Road, and the bus stop.
'Think of it as a pyramid – that's what all the clever buggers at the Home Office do. Right down at the bottom are the vagrants, the addicts, who have to buy and have to thieve and have to ambush Millie Johnson. They're dross, not worth the sweat. Next up from them are the pushers, the High Fly Boys, and you wrecked them, which was well done and got you on the ladder. Keep climbing. Read this name, memorize this address. The dealer feeds the pushers.
He is at the next level of the pyramid. If I wanted to crank it up I could say that he has Millie Johnson's blood under his dirty little fingernails. Got it in your memory? Good. I'll have the paper back. Look after yourself, Malachy, because no one else will, and a dealer fights dirtier than kids do.'
He crossed then and looked up Walworth Road.
Three buses came, in crocodile formation, towards him. They stopped, disgorged passengers and pulled away. He would wait till she came. More minutes and more buses. He idled. He knew what time she left work, and what time she would get the ride from Whitehall. She came off the bus.
Dawn, the cleaning lady who was his neighbour and who was the friend of Millie Johnson, walked right past him. She saw him, recognized him and anger twitched at her mouth. She ignored him. He had a cavalcade of excuses to offer her – gone to sleep, dozed off – and a litany of apologies to make for leaving her last night to come into the estate alone, but the excuses and apologies went unsaid. As she crossed the road he watched the pride in her walk – she was not dependent on a man whose promise did not count. He followed her, but did not run to catch her; he hung back when she stopped in the market and bought fruit, which he knew she would later take to the hospital.
He had a good life, well organized. Jason Penney, a month past his twenty-eighth birthday, lived in a ground-floor flat. The one-bedroom unit had been allocated by Housing to a pensioner and was suitable for a disabled person. Legally, Penney was disabled, and to prove it he had a doctor's certificate, stating his severe knee-ligament injuries, which had cost him ?250 in cash from a Ghanaian medic and entitled him to benefit. But the disability money was chicken-feed to his other earnings. Illegally, he had inserted himself, his partner, his baby and his dog into the pensioner's home. As a base of operations it was ideal.
He sold class-A narcotics on the Amersham. What the customer wanted, the customer had – but only class A: he shunned cannabis and the derivatives as too bulky to handle and with insufficient profit margins. He dealt in heroin, cocaine powder, crack cocaine. Whatever the market demanded, he could get: MDMA tablets, made from a base of amphetamine, ketamine, 2C-B, and ephedrine or methylamphetamine. Where the market took him, he followed. A bad week gave him, clear, a thousand pounds; a good week, two thousand, but in a worst week, if he was arrested and nailed down with evidence, he faced seven years in prison. The money he made, and the risk of going to gaol, led Penney towards a life of exceptional caution.
The caution dictated where he lived.
His live-in partner, Aggie, had had his baby. Aggie had located the pensioner, and later, together and over three weeks, they had watched the block and the pensioner's door for suitability. That was eight months back. She had befriended the old man, a half-reformed alcoholic in his early seventies: meeting him, getting him into conversation at first, later, dropping off six-packs – 'You're my friend, aren't you? No problem'; later, getting inside, close to him on the sofa, cuddling him, touching him up – infatuating him; later, shopping for him – 'Don't thank me, it's for nothing, anything I can do to help'; later, moving in with the baby – 'Just while I sort myself out, and I'm ever so grateful'; later, Jason Penney's at the door, with his dog and his bag – 'He's ever so nice, you won't know he's here, and the dog's lovely. We'll all be company for you.'
In a month, Aggie had given Penney what he most wanted. He had safe premises among the pensioners' units that were about at the bottom of police priority taskings for surveillance. Penney, his partner and the baby had taken the pensioner's bedroom, the dog had the hall, the old man spent his days in the kitchen and slept on the front-room sofa with receding memories of the cuddles and the affection. And how was the old beggar going to get rid of them? No way. Changes were made to the flat, discreetly, and unnoticeable from the outside. Steel sheeting covered the inside of the front and back doors. New locks, bolts and chains were fitted. A trellis of bars reinforced the windows.