Jack Carter's Law (15 page)

“Hello?” he says. “Mum?”

There is a silence at the other end.

“Hello?” he says again. “It’s Charlie.”

“Yes, I know it’s Charlie,” says Mrs. Abbott.

“I thought you couldn’t hear me.”

“I can hear you. What you want?”

“How are you? Keeping your pecker up?”

“I said what you want?”

“Well, I was wondering if you’d seen Jean lately. Wondered if she’d been in touch.”

“Why?”

“I been trying to get hold of her all week only when I phoned I never seem to be able to catch her in, so I thought maybe she and Jimmy had some kind of Domestic or something and she was staying round yours.”

“No, she isn’t staying round mine.”

“Oh.”

“What you want her for?”

“I got something for her. Something she wanted me to get for her.”

“What?”

“One of those cassettes. Asked me to look out for one about a tenner but this geezer let me have it at a fiver.”

Mrs. Abbott doesn’t answer.

“So that’s why I want to get in touch,” Charlie says. “So could you put me on to her?”

“You’ll just have to keep ringing her,” she says. “I haven’t seen her in weeks. Never brings the kids round these days, she don’t.”

“Well, can you tell her to get in touch if you see her first?”

“If I do. But I doubt it.”

“Well, thanks anyway. Tell you what, why don’t I pop round Sunday? Have a bit of Sunday dinner with me old mum?”

“Suit yourself. I’m always here.”

“Great. I’ll see you Sunday, then. Goodbye, Mum.”

Charlie puts his receiver down and I put my receiver down. Charlie stands there looking at me. I walk through into the main room.

“Was it all right?” Charlie says.

I don’t answer him.

“What happened?” Con says.

“Charlie,” I say, “would you say that your mother was the same as she always is just then?”

“Mum? Yeah, she was all right.”

I have a sip of my tea. “Because I got the feeling that she knows that your Jean and her Jimmy’s gone away.”

“No she don’t,” says Charlie. “Hell, if Mum knew that she’d tell me, wouldn’t she?”

“Yes, that’s right, Charlie.”

I stand up and put my coat on.

“So what happens now?” Charlie asks.

“We’re going down to see your old mother, Charlie,” I tell him. “I reckon she’ll be able to put us right.”

“Here, listen,” Charlie says. “That ain’t right. You said all I had to do was to phone her. You said all—”

“Oh, fuck off, Charlie. We know you’re stupid but not that fucking stupid. You think we’re going to let you walk away until we’ve found your brother-in-law? You think we’re going to say, ‘Now look, Charlie, you can clear off but don’t you breathe a word of this to anybody’? ”

“But I wouldn’t, Jack. Honest, I wouldn’t.”

Con laughs and picks up his coat off the divan.

“Come on, Charlie. Let’s go and see Mum.”

Outside, when we get to the Scimitar, Con gets in the driving seat and I pull the passenger seat forward to allow Charlie to get in the back.

When I’ve closed the door I say to Charlie, “Right, my old son. Where to?”

“Fourness Road. Just off the North Circular. But Jack—”

“Fourness Road,” I say to Con. “Just off the North Circular.”

Con pulls away and makes for Oxford Street. The shops are bright with Christmas lights and as I look at the gawpers staring in the windows I wonder where they all come from at this time in the morning, why they’re not all at work or looking after the kids.

“What you getting me for Christmas, Jack?” Con says.

“Jimmy Swann’s bollocks.”

“That’s nice. I’ll have them made up into cuff links.”

“Here, Jack,” says Charlie. “Leave it out, will you?”

“Would you rather I gave him yours?”

Charlie doesn’t say anything.

“Well, then.”

Con goes round Marble Arch and up the Edgware Road. The gray sky seems to get grayer the closer we get to
Kilburn. Then eventually we reach the North Circular and drive past the unlovely changing face of London until we get to Charlie’s mother’s district. It’s all petrol stations and light-engineering and cut-price furniture shops and mean tarted-up boozers. The daylight seems to be the same colour as the surface of the road. A Wimpy sign or a Tesco’s occasionally stabs out into the different shades of dirty gray but their colours only emphasise the flatness of the depressing streets.

“You want to turn left into Fourness Road,” Charlie tells Con. “It’s past the Blue Star, just before the fly-over.”

Con goes past the garage and turns in to the road that Charlie’s pointed out. One side of the road is a row of small bay-windowed Edwardian houses, the other side is a flat waste ground of grass supposed to be some kind of leisure area that stretches away to the fly-over and the factories beyond. Directly opposite the houses there are some swings and roundabouts, right on the edge of the wasteland, but there are no kids playing on them.

“She lives at the end house,” Charlie says. “Next to the stocking factory.”

“Stop a few houses away,” I tell Con.

Con does as he’s told. We all sit there in silence for a minute or two staring through the windscreen at the house where Charlie’s mother lives.

“I’m going to talk to Charlie’s mother now,” I say to Con. “When I get out drive down to the corner and get Charlie to show you the way round the block and then drive past here every five minutes. All right?”

Con nods.

Charlie says, “Jack, my old lady . . . ”

“Don’t worry, Charlie. I’ve got a mother myself, you know.”

Con grins and I get out of the car and the car slides away.

I walk down to the corner house. It has a narrow front garden bounded by a low brick wall and a gate with peeling green paint and only half the house number on it. There is a small recessed porch and in the porch there is a dustbin so full that the lid is at forty-five degrees to the bin. At the side of the house there is a high trelliswork gate.

I stand in the porch and peer through the coloured diamonds of glass in the front door but there are no signs of life. I push open the front gate and go to the trelliswork and lift the latch and walk round to the back of the house. The garden is completely flag-stoned over and is covered with old cardboard boxes full of rubbish and there are a couple of rotting carry-cots and a rusty bicycle frame just to set everything off. At the end of all this garbage there is a six-foot-high slatted fence and beyond the fence an extension of the stocking factory cuts out any light that might illuminate the beauty of the back yard.

I take hold of the back-door handle and turn it very slowly. I push inwards and I find that the door opens into a small kitchen. The kitchen is empty so I slip inside and close the door as quietly as I opened it.

The kitchen sink is full of last week’s teacups. There is an alloy kitchen cabinet with the cupboard doors wide open revealing shelves that are empty except for half of a sliced loaf. The kitchen table is about three foot square and littered with crumbs. I squeeze between the table and the sink. The door that leads out of the kitchen is slightly ajar and I push it gently and find I am looking into the hall, and in the hall, bathed in the dusty light that is falling from the frosted panel in the front door, there are a couple of suitcases, all packed and ready to go.

To the left of the hall there is another open door and from behind this door are coming the faint sounds of Radio 1. I cross the hall and stand outside the door and listen but I can still only hear the sounds of Radio 1. So very slowly and very carefully I maneuver myself into a position where I can look into the room. The angle of my view takes in a pale green fireplace with a mirror above it and standing in front of the fireplace, putting on her make-up, is who I take to be Mrs. Abbott. With one hand she is wielding her lipstick, with the other she is holding a cigarette. She has bright red hair and her lips are redder and brighter and she is wearing a chiffon polka-dot head scarf over her rollers and the head scarf doesn’t exactly go with her leopard-skin patterned coat. Altogether quite a bright little ensemble for someone in her early sixties. I can see from the reflection in the mirror that there is no one else in the room so I give the door a gentle shove and make my entrance.

Mrs. Abbott drops her lipstick and shrieks and whirls round and begins to back away from me but there is only so far she can go and when she reaches the sofa that is pushed up against the wall beneath the window the seat causes her legs to buckle and she sits down with a thump that makes the dust fly up into the gray light that is filtering through the window.

In a cage in the corner a myna bird says, “Suit your bleeding self, then.”

“Morning, Mrs. Abbott,” I say.

Mrs. Abbott sits there with her mouth open. She’s still holding her cigarette and a piece of ash falls to the carpet.

“I was wondering if you could help me?” I say to her, but she still doesn’t move and she still doesn’t say anything, so I walk over to the settee. She has a mild convulsion and this time she drops the whole of her cigarette. I bend down and pick it up and sit down beside her on the settee and stick the cigarette back between her fingers. She keeps her eyes on my face all the time.

“I noticed your suitcases as I came in,” I tell her. “Off on your holidays are you?”

She still doesn’t answer.

“Look, you know why I’m here,” I say. “What I want to tell you is this. If you let me know where you were about to go with those suitcases then I promise you, I promise, understand, that nothing’ll happen to you or to Jean or the kids or even to Charlie. I can guarantee that because it makes no odds to us what happens to the rest of the family because there’d be nothing in it for you to talk to the law in Jimmy’s place. Your family’d know better than to do that twice, wouldn’t they?”

She nods.

“So,” I say. “What about it? What about telling me where Jimmy is?”

She just keeps on staring at me. The cigarette is about to burn her fingers so I take it out of her hand and stand up and throw the filter tip into the fireplace, then I turn to face her again. The radio on the mantelpiece is beginning to get to my nerves so I reach out and switch it off. The room buzzes with silence and gradually the sound of a jet passing overhead burbles its way into the room.

“Now look, Mrs. Abbott,” I say, about to tell her that I’ve got Charlie outside, but a voice behind me stops me
doing that.

The voice behind me says, “No, you look, you mug.”

I close my eyes. I don’t have to look. I know by the tone that the voice is carrying the kind of reason I’m not prepared to argue with.

Mrs. Abbott is still frozen to the settee.

Another voice says, “Get down on your knees, mug.”

As I’m in the process of getting down to my knees the irrelevant thought enters my mind that both voices have Geordie accents. Then there are a couple of soft footsteps and I feel the icy touch of double barrels at the base of my skull and my mind no longer has any room for irrelevant thoughts.

There is a low laugh and the second voice says, “Jack Carter. Fucking great. Just fucking great.”

“Bleedin’ marvelous,” says the myna bird.

For the first time Mrs. Abbott speaks and at first it’s hard to tell the difference between her and the fucking bird.

“What are you going to do?” she says.

There is still no answer from behind me.

“You can’t do it here,” says Mrs. Abbott. “Not in my house.”

“Don’t worry, Ma,” says the second voice. “Keep your bloomers on.”

Whatever they’re going to do they’re taking their sodding time because there are a couple more minutes of silence before Number Two speaks again.

“Ma,” he says, “lean forward and feel in his pockets and take out what he’s carrying.”

Mrs. Abbott leans forward and dives her hand into my inside pocket and I can smell her dry smoky breath mixed in with her face powder. Her fingers close round the shooter and she yanks it out and throws it to the
far
end of the settee. Then she spits in my face.

“Filth,” she says. “Shit. Bleeding shit.”

There is more low laughter from behind me. I shake my head but it doesn’t speed up the passage of the spit as it slides down my face. And I know better than to feel for my handkerchief.

Whoever isn’t holding the shotgun steps past me and picks up my shooter and holds it in his hands and looks at it.

“Jack Carter’s shooter,” he says. “Beautiful. Something to tell the kids about. That is, if I ever have any.”

“You won’t,” I tell him.

He sits down on the edge of the settee, next to Mrs. Abbott, and for the first time I got a proper look at him.

He has a blond crew cut and the skin around his mouth is covered in eczema. He is wearing a white Shetland polo-neck sweater and a pale gray gabardine suit that is as out of fashion as his haircut. He smiles at me and the colour of his teeth does nothing to brighten up the dimness of the room. Then he balances my shooter in the palm of his hand and with it he smacks me on the side of my face so that I have to roll with the blow and to steady myself I find I have put my hand among the cigarette ends that are littering the grate. I straighten up again and dust my hand on the lapel of my coat and then the shotgun is digging into the skin of my neck again.