Early in the evening she danced with him but then Ruiz lost her in the crowd and spent four hours trying to find her. It was after midnight. People were starting to leave. Buses were waiting to ferry them back to London. Ruiz saw Laura standing near the entrance. She pointed to him and summoned him with her finger. Ruiz looked over his shoulder to make sure she wanted him.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Vincent.”
“I’m Laura. This is my phone number. If you don’t call me within two days, Vincent, you lose your chance. I’m a good girl. I don’t sleep with men on the first date or the second or the third. You have to woo me, but I’m worth the effort.”
Then she kissed him on the cheek and was gone. He called her within two hours. The rest is, as they say…
Picking up a notebook, Ruiz makes a list. First he contacts his bank and reports his cards stolen. The recorded messages give him six options and then another six. Eventually, a girl with an Indian accent takes the details. Checks his account. There was a cash withdrawal just before midnight and another one just after; a thousand pounds in total. There were two other online purchases. She won’t give him the details.
“Someone from our fraud department will call you, sir.”
Sunlight makes his head throb. He considers his options. How can he find the girl? The actress. The boyfriend either followed them home or Holly must have called him. Maybe both.
Ruiz picks up his phone and hits redial. The last number she dialed was a mobile-the boyfriend perhaps.
A man answers with a grunt.
“Listen, I don’t know who you are. I don’t care. But you took something of mine last night, something of great sentimental value. You can have the rest of my stuff. I don’t care about that. But I need the jewelry-the rings and the hair-comb-they belonged to my wife. Give them back to me and I won’t come looking for you. You have my word on that. If you don’t give them back, I will find you and I will punish you. You have my word on that too.”
He pauses. Listens to the breathing. The boyfriend clears his throat.
“Fuck off!”
Ruiz listens to the dead air.
“Who was that, babe?”
“Nobody.”
Holly Knight is awake now. She won’t go back to sleep.
“He sounded angry.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Zac rolls over and squashes a pillow beneath his head. Within half a minute he’s asleep again, his nostrils barely moving as he breathes.
Holly examines his sleeping face, the angular jaw line, darkened with growth, his heavy lids hiding blue-green eyes. There were no nightmares last night. No silent screams or sobs.
Running her fingers across his exposed back, the scars look like ripples on a dried-up lake bed, pink and grey and dead looking. When she touches them in the dark it feels as though his skin has been eaten away by acid or dissolved by some sort of flesh-eating bug.
Slipping out of bed, she goes to the bathroom and sits on the toilet, staring at the discolored tiles and the rust stains in the bath. Finishing, she pulls her jeans over her panties, buttoning them on the flatness of her stomach.
Looking in the mirror, she touches the bruise on her face. Zac hit her too hard last night. Sometimes he forgets his own strength. She will say something to him when he wakes and is in a good mood.
The flat has peeling walls, mismatched furniture and different floor coverings in every room. Poverty in progress. An old armchair sits in the middle of the kitchen floor, because Zac likes to watch Holly cooking and doesn’t like to be alone.
Smearing butter on the inside of a frying pan, she cracks two eggs. The smell of breakfast wakes Zac, who comes out of the bedroom in his boxers, scratching the line of dark hair below his navel.
Self-conscious about his scars, he pulls on a T-shirt, and brushes a finger across Holly’s cheek.
“You hit me too hard last night.”
“Didn’t mean to.”
“You might break me if you’re not careful.”
“I’m sorry, babe.”
Holly sets his plate on the table.
“Do we have any… any… you know?”
“We didn’t have any bacon.”
“No, do we have any, ah, any…?” He begins shaking his hand up and down. “Brown stuff.”
“Sauce?”
“Yeah.”
Holly finds the bottle in the fridge. Zac eats with his head low and one arm curled around his plate. Yesterday he forgot the word for petrol. He kept saying he needed to get “stuff” for the bike, “to make it go.” And before that he drove himself into a rage because he couldn’t remember who played left back for Spurs in the League Cup final in 2008. That’s one of the reasons he gets so angry-he can’t remember things.
According to the doctors there was no sign of brain damage, but something got rewired in Zac’s head when he was in Afghanistan. Now he forgets things. Not the big stuff, but small details-names and words.
There was a fire. Seven men were trapped inside a troop carrier, according to the commendation they gave Zac with his gallantry medal. He pulled three men from inside the carrier while it was under attack. That’s when he got burned. That’s when he started forgetting things.
Zac turns on the telly. A girl in a raincoat is giving the weather report, pointing to a map with cartoon clouds.
“How pointless is that,” says Zac. “Look out the window and you can see the sun is shining.”
Next comes a report on the stock market, the Dow Jones. Is that a person, wonders Holly; is there someone called Mr. Jones?
Zac picks up the near-empty bottle of Scotch.
“It’s too early,” she says.
“Hair of the dog.”
He pours two fingers into a glass.
Holly leaves him to get changed.
“I’ve got to go and see Bernie,” she yells from the bedroom.
“Why?”
“We owe the rent.”
“Again?”
“Comes round every month. We don’t have enough to pay Floyd.”
Floyd is their landlord on the estate and also a local crack dealer.
“I’m going to sell that stuff we got last night.”
“Don’t let Bernie rip you off.”
“I won’t.”
“And don’t let him touch you. He’s always trying to touch you.”
“Bernie is pretty harmless.”
“You want me to come?”
“No it’s OK. I want you to fill out the form from the DSS. You need to get your pension sorted.”
Holly has changed into her nicest clothes. She rinses Zac’s plate in the sink.
“I’m going to sell Bernie the laptop and other stuff. Then I thought I might take the jewelry to Hatton Garden.”
“Don’t let them rip you off.”
“I won’t. I have my audition today.”
“Can I come?”
“You know I get nervous when you’re there.”
He nods and goes back to watching an infomercial for a hair-straightening wand that features women with perfect teeth and lottery-winning smiles.
4
The queue outside the Ministry of Finance stretches more than a hundred yards, snaking between concrete blast walls that are decorated with political posters and daubed with anti-American graffiti.
Checkpoints are always dangerous. Anyone can approach-beggars, vendors, teenagers selling soft drinks or newspapers; fuel sellers carrying jerrycans and rubber hoses that are swung through the air making a whooshing sound. Any one of them could be carrying a grenade or wearing a suicide vest.
Luca produces his accreditation. The Iraqi soldier looks at both sides of the media pass, studying the English and Arabic versions. Then he consults a visitor’s book in the plasterboard kiosk.
“Your name is not on the list.”