Keith Ridgway - Hawthorn & Child

*

He had never seen anyone die. He’d never seen a body.

Sometimes when it was just Price and some of the others they would get back in the car and laugh and shout and punch the back of his seat.

— Did you see his fucking face?

— Thought you were going to have his fucking arm off!

— I swear I’ve broken a fucking finger!

He thought that this was probably for his benefit. That they’d done nothing other than have a chat or maybe shout at someone a bit.

He drove Mishazzo to a meeting in a suburb where he had never been before, to an industrial estate that seemed abandoned, but only temporarily, as if it was the weekend, even though it was a Tuesday. He sat in the car waiting. He read a newspaper. Then there was a shot — a sound like a shot — and he looked around but he couldn’t see anybody, and he wasn’t sure if it had been a shot at all. What does a shot sound like? He saw Mishazzo in the rear-view mirror and he started the engine, and he saw Mishazzo hurry, and he frowned at the frown on Mishazzo’s face, and as he drove off he waited for something to be said, but nothing was said. It was only when they were some distance away that Mishazzo spoke.

— Slow down.

Hours, sometimes. He sat in the car outside somewhere or other. Warehouses, electrical shops, pubs now and then. A lot of the time he had to wait around the corner, on a side street, his eyes peeled for wardens. Sometimes he just had to drive around in a circle, waiting for Mishazzo to emerge. Furniture shops, little lawyers’ offices, cafés, a house in East Ham. A minicab place in Walthamstow. He would smoke with the windows open. He’d get out and lean against the door. He wasn’t allowed to go anywhere. He sent texts. He started keeping an empty plastic bottle under the driver’s seat. He thought of things to write in the book, and he would try to remember them until he got home. It was like trying to hold water in his hands, and sometimes he made it back and sometimes he didn’t. He decided that whenever he forgot something it wasn’t a loss but a correction.

He went dipping less and drove more. The money was better. Price generally told him a couple of days in advance when he’d be needed. He could calculate. He liked to have Saturdays so that he could do the matches and the tube crowds, and that was OK because Mishazzo took weekends off most of the time. The money was good. He bought her stupid little presents until she told him to stop, Jesus.

When he was naked she would look at all of him, and move him around to see what would happen, and she would keep him still and tether him. She got some straps from somewhere. Then he bought ropes, and collars. They sometimes had to stop, a little spooked, sweating and laughing suddenly, something breaking the spell. She was better at ropes. She said it was because she wasn’t as self-conscious about the whole thing, that he had a sort of leftover embarrassment. And because he was used to trying to touch people so that they didn’t notice. He had to practise, she said, and he’d get better.

Mishazzo asked him questions.

— Do you gossip?

— No sir. I don’t gossip.

— Why not?

— I don’t know.

— You don’t know why you don’t gossip?

— Not really.

— Are you not interested in people?

— Not really.

— What are you interested in?

— Myself, he said.

He could see Mishazzo nodding in the rear-view mirror and that was the end of the conversation.

He thought about how myself really meant him and her together. He could say myself , and mean another person as well. It didn’t feel like he was leaving anything out.

They kept the book in a drawer in the kitchen. They never looked at it together. It came out of the drawer only when one of them was alone in the flat. He was afraid someone would find it. Once he moved it when her mother was coming over.

— Where the fuck is it?

— What?

— You know.

— What?

She looked at him like he was the stupidest fucking idiot she had ever seen.

— It’s not in the drawer, she said.

Slow, sharp, so that he’d understand.

He smiled at her.

— It’s not fucking funny. Where is it?

— It’s on top of the kitchen cupboard.

She couldn’t reach. She was clambering up on top of a chair when he went to get it down for her.

— Don’t do that again.

— OK.

It was fucking hot.

He was mingling with a match crowd — burly men with burly wallets, hip pockets, drink taken, everyone happy and hugging. Replica shirts, T-shirts, no shirts. Home wins were the best. If they lost they were surly — mean-eyed and watchful. He picked out a pot-bellied man who was keeping a close eye on his two boys, guiding them, pointing things out, steering them away from the drunks and the shirtless thickets. One of the boys kept clutching his father’s belt for a tow. He manoeuvred to the boy’s side, coming towards them out of a raucous knot of beery singing, and bumped against him gently, laughing, getting the timing just about right, and veered behind his mark, whose attention was down at the bumped boy reaching for the reassuring belt. It was all good.

He stuck the wallet down his jeans and moved towards the path.

They took him from both sides, quietly, two great grips on his arms, whispering his name and that they wanted a word, no trouble now or it’d be the van. Don’t let’s make a scene, son. Or it’d be Sunday night in a cell, and the magistrate first thing Monday morning. How did they know his name? He sucked in his stomach hoping the wallet would fall into his crotch where they might not search him, or if he was lucky all the way down his leg and out on to the ground. But it stuck on his bollocks, and as they opened the car door one of them held his hand out for it. They weren’t uniforms.

— What?

— The wallet.

— The what?

— Don’t be a stupid fucking cunt.

They were the worst kind of police. Suits. Relaxed. Blank-faced, youngish, stone-eared. They looked like estate agents. He fished the wallet out of his jeans. They pushed him on to the back seat. One sat beside him, the other sat in the front and turned around.

It was Mishazzo they wanted. He felt stupid for not even suspecting it until they said it. He felt stupid but he kept his face still. They wanted a relationship. A friendly chat every now and again.

— I know what you’re thinking. For dipping a wallet? Well, there’s the hotels. There’s the routine you have down in Angel, and the one you have in that boutique place in Shoreditch. We have you on camera for both of those, some nice DNA in the last room you did, with the dead-drunk guy sleeping through the whole thing.

The policeman laughed like he’d seen it.

— We have you as far back as April in Shoreditch. Nice targets. Clever stuff. I like it. Dodgy types, but wobbly. Little out of their depth. They get a couple of girls in, they snort some coke, they’re not quite sure if they’ve been robbed sometimes. And they never want to report it even if they are. But we still have you on at least three in Angel and five in Shoreditch.

The one in the front seat was doing all the talking. His glasses reflected bits of the car. Every now and then he pushed them back up his nose. The other one sat next to him saying nothing, looking at him, at the side of his face.

— I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking you’ll go and see nice Mr Mishazzo and tell him all about it. I can tell you what he’ll say. He’ll tell you to take your chance in court with whatever we have and he’ll see to it that you don’t get too badly fucked up inside, and when you get out you go and see him and he’ll find something for you to do. And that’s you married to Mishazzo for the rest of your life. And you proposed.