Plastic (30 page)

This time the bullet ricocheted off the polished marble kitchen counter and went straight through the cupboard door under the sink, ploughing into ranked cans of highly pressurised cleaning sprays and flammable fluids. The resulting explosion sent a ball of flame across the room that felt as though it would melt our faces.

The tallest Fosh was standing nearest. The shoulders of his suit appeared to be on fire. The Fosh next to him had a fork stuck in his ear. Rennie had been knocked off his feet, and had fallen back against the far wall. There was a cake-slice sticking out of the sofa. I was still standing, but could barely hear my own voice above the singing in my ears. There was a very strange smell in the air. ‘Nobody move!’ I bellowed, shocked at my own power.

Flames crackled, popped and spat, spreading through the cupboards and blowing out partitions as further cans exploded.

‘You don’t have to shout,’ Rennie pointed out. ‘What do you want? Come on, you’re the one with the gun, think of something you want fast, just keep your fingers away from the trigger while you’re thinking.’

‘I can’t hear you.’ I wiggled the gun between them, causing each to duck in turn.

‘What – Do – You – Want?’

‘I want to go home.’

I remembered my husband-less smashed-up house, my friendless, hateful street and my embittered neighbours.

‘No I don’t,’ I carefully corrected myself. ‘I want to go shopping.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Shopping At Gunpoint

A
S WE LEFT,
I looked across the car park to the river side of the Ziggurat. In the building’s shallow front garden, Stefan was sprawled across a plastic lawn chair and appeared to be sunbathing. A livid bruise had spread from his left ear to his shoulder.

Mr. Rennie drove me in silence to the Westfield mall at Shepherd’s Bush. From behind, I and my companion could have been any couple heading for the shops, except that we were periodically hitting fifty miles an hour on backstreets, speed-bumps included.

I knew I wasn’t thinking straight. Right now, I couldn’t tell if I was hosting a backfired kidnap or behaving like a Stockholm Syndrome sufferer on a shopping trip. Whenever we pulled up at the lights, I wondered if anyone could see the dark gleam of the gun barrel in my right hand, but I knew no-one would do anything, not with the dangers of road rage these days.

By now the Foshes would have taken Petra’s book from Stefan in order to turn it back into its component chemicals. Despite the fact that Rennie’s drones were clearly longing to hurt me, I found them almost endearingly silly, like Munchkins or body builders. Firing the gun had made them look a bit soft. I had shown them how to use Malcolm’s fire extinguisher, and left them happily putting out the blaze in the kitchen. None of them seemed very bright, but they obviously made stacks of money, because they were all wearing designer suits under their smouldering overcoats. Call me old-fashioned, but it seems odd to spend over a thousand pounds on a suit and have your hair cut like a Turkish convict. I blame footballers for getting in touch with their feminine sides.

The Westfield car park was less than half full, so we didn’t have to wait at the entrance. Rennie made no attempt to take the gun from my hand. The heavy automatic was now welded to me, its stainless steel casing matched to my body temperature. Actually, it was starting to feel rather sexy, if a little obvious in the ‘I Haven’t Got Much Of A Penis’ way.

‘Park in the Blue section of Level 3,’ I told him, ‘between numbers 245 to 253. That way we’ll be nearest the entrance door to Zara.’

‘Jesus, you could get a job as a buyer here.’

‘That’s right, and you’re on my territory now,’ I warned him. ‘The amount of money I’ve put back into this country’s retail outlets, they should give me an OBE.’

I loved the new store policy; open early, close late. My kind of place. I suppose at this point I had gone slightly mad. I just wanted the freedom to do it one last time, before my life came to an end – as I was sure by now it would.

Department stores have countless ways of easing the plastic from your pocket, but I knew all their tricks. They use the old casino ruse of hiding their clocks to make you lose track of time. They arrange their high-profit lines so that they’re perfectly reflected in your fitting mirror. They dot their spaces with leather armchairs and copies of
GQ
because they know that men will rather sit than shop, not that I ever went shopping with Gordon. Shopping is self-pleasure. There’s no point in going with a husband who races for the counter with the first pair of trousers he sees in his approximate size. Gordon regarded shopping as an SAS manoeuvre – get in, do the job, get out fast. It betrayed a carefully plotted commercial ethic. Retailers went to the trouble of constructing their food courts at the tops of buildings to keep the smell of fried meat from permeating their womenswear collections. They marked their UP escalators but hid their DOWN ones. They built their cosmetics bars with plenty of angles because research showed that women preferred to sit at counters with lots of corners. To them I was someone important, someone sexy and rich enough to be worth pursuing, and Gordon merely ignored all their hard work. I thought that was plain bad manners.

We walked into Zara half an hour before the mall was due to close. There was hardly anyone in the store. I kept my eyes on Rennie, who seemed vaguely amused rather than bothered by my behaviour.

‘I just want some underwear here,’ I explained. ‘They do nice tops, but when someone else is paying you want something a bit pricier.’

He looked at me as if he’d been handcuffed to an escaped lunatic. In Dolce & Gabbana I gathered together a whole new wardrobe in black, jumpers and shirts, jackets, belts and pairs of jeans from the racks, and whenever Rennie turned around to complain or ask where we should go next, I allowed the gleaming barrel of the gun to become visible behind my bag, like a flasher exposing himself to a child.

There’s always a prickle of electricity over my skin when I buy something expensive, a race of blood cells as I press my card into the reader and watch the assistant delicately folding tissue as if packing a rare dead insect for a long voyage by steamer trunk, running her scissors over the back of a piece of ribbon to make it curl.

I found a Mango outlet that unfortunately didn’t have my size, so I picked up a trouser-suit and a pair of rhinestone evening pumps from Prada. I didn’t care whether the CCTV could see us. On the one hand, if they did they might come and save me. On the other, it would put an end to my spending pleasure.

Rennie sulked like a fractious husband, thrusting his hands into his pockets. He was quite attractive in a degenerate way, but I couldn’t see him as husband material; too arrogant, too restless. He seemed less concerned about being shot than being embarrassed.

‘If I don’t find the shoes that go with this dress, I’m going to kill you.’ I was only half joking. I piled him with bags and headed for Marks & Spencer. I didn’t care where I shopped. The mere act of exercising purchasing power was enough to restore me. It would be an ignominious end to a career as a crimelord, arrested at the M&S bra and knicker counter.

‘What do you think, the grey or the blue?’ I asked, holding different brassieres against my breasts.

‘I don’t know, I really don’t care,’ my hostage replied sulkily.

I let him see the muzzle of the gun again. ‘Make a decision.’

‘The blue. This is like being married.’ Rennie shoved his hands into his pockets. ‘Do you want me to sit down over there and leaf through magazines while you rob the till?’

I changed my clothes in the cubicle with Rennie standing on the other side and the gun trained through the door. Balancing on one leg like an armed flamingo was not an easy thing to do. Shopping had been my drug of choice, and I had gone for one final overdose, hoping it would now be out of my system.

I applied some lipstick while targeting Rennie in the makeup-mirror, Annie Oakley attempting a trick shot. As I did so, I caught sight of a cashier peering around a rack of remaindered skirts at us, but when I looked back the girl had vanished.

‘Just stay close enough for me to shoot you if I have to.’ I piled my hostage high and aimed him at the checkout. I was nudging him with the gun-barrel just as his mobile rang.

‘Answer it,’ I commanded.

He flipped open the phone. ‘Hi... yes, we’ve sorted it out. No, I’m still with her.’ He listened for a moment, then covered the phone. ‘It’s my director. He wants to know where we are. Where are we?’ He took a look around. ‘Marks & Spencer. We’re in ladies’ separates, but I think we’re heading for tops and tights. No, why would I be joking?’

I was surprised to hear he had a boss. How high did these things go?

The counter girl was pretty, but heavily made up. She didn’t seem to notice that I looked – quite accurately, as it happened – as if I’d fallen into an incinerator and been tied to a chair. She didn’t see anything beyond the eyeline of her route between counter and screen. She could have been on the fourth quarter of her shift in a factory, filling bullet cases with powder.

We waited awkwardly as she detagged the items and folded them into carrier bags. I felt the burning panic that had been roaring about inside me receding as each purchase received its tissue-paper prepuce. Rennie withdrew a platinum Amex card and handed it to the cashier. I almost fell in love with him.

‘What do you want to do now?’ he asked as we moved toward the exit. Overhead, a soothing voice told us the mall was closing. I was disappointed because there was a perfume concession somewhere above us selling virgin rose-oil at £600 an ounce. Rennie had got off lightly.

‘Give me a minute,’ I told him. ‘I’ll think of something.’

‘Dinner? Arson? Blackmail? When you abduct someone it’s a good idea to have a plan.’

I had no answer for him. Now that I had shopped, the familiar thrill was fading to post-coital guilt. We reached the car with a trolley full of purchases and he began loading them onto the rear seat.

‘You don’t know, do you?’ he pushed. ‘Look in the back of the car, all the clothes you don’t want. Are you planning a killing spree, or shall we just go and get your legs waxed? You can’t go home, you can’t stay here. You’re stuck between two lives. There’s no quick fix; shopping will never work again after this. I’ll tell you, some of the people who work for me get into drugs. They’re fine for a while, but after that they get so restless they don’t know what to do with themselves, and that’s when it gets dangerous, for me and for them. You’re in the same state, I can see it in your eyes. You have to figure it out, June. What the hell is it you want? Until you figure that out, you’ll never cure your addiction.’

‘I’m not listening to you, Mr. Rennie, you kill people.’

‘Give me a break, it’s been an unusual week. I explained to you that the girl had to be punished. She was jacked-up all the time and useless at her job. She went missing for days. She’d have died young if she’d stayed in her own country.’

‘Instead she ended up in an incinerator.’

‘Don’t preach to me. The guy you knifed in Lower Marsh market is still breathing, no thanks to you. He has to have a zipper in his stomach.’

‘I thought I’d killed him.’

‘Yes, you’ve blazed quite a trail, haven’t you? Interfering here and there, stabbing one of my best men, forcing us to get rid of the doctor and generally screwing everything up wherever you go. Why don’t you let me call your husband and have him take you home? Go and do some damage in the suburbs where it won’t be noticed.’

‘He’s divorcing me. And he’s sold the home. I’ve got nothing to go back for.’

‘There are plenty more –’

‘Don’t say it. I’m nearly thirty. All the women’s magazines agree that the odds of getting into a permanent relationship after the age of thirty are the same as being in a fatal boating accident.’

‘Listen, thirty is no age at all. I have sixty-year-olds working for me who look fantastic.’

‘I don’t want to bleach my hair and be filmed giving blowjobs on the internet, thank you. Every woman looks good when you only see the back of her head.’

‘Ah.’ Rennie thought for a minute. ‘I don’t suppose you’d consider employment in a more legitimate capacity?’

I suddenly felt so very tired. I sniffed and wiped my eyes, swinging the gun into my right hand and causing Rennie to duck back. ‘Doing what?’ I asked, trying not to let my voice quaver. ‘What can I do? I’m still a housewife, for God’s sake, it’s in my genes. I can’t stop reading the backs of cleaning product packages because it’s too ingrained in me. You’re not even supposed to say “housewife” anymore, you’re an “unwaged homemaker”. But I was rubbish at homemaking, even at school. I dropped out right after we did meringues.’

‘Nobody cares whether or not you finished school. You’ve got one major asset you’ve overlooked. You’re respectable. Take a look at yourself. Anyone would trust you. Do you know how rare that is in our line of work?’

‘Really?’

‘Really. It could be a big help. Tell you something, June. I’ll admit I was going to have this little business sorted out in the traditional manner, but that was before I got to know you. I wouldn’t hurt you now. I think you could be an asset to us, I really do.’ He looked over at me and his smile lit up the interior of the Mercedes. ‘Put the gun down, for God’s sake. Let’s go back to the Ziggurat.’

We drove in silence for a while. I wasn’t about to suddenly drop my guard just because he was being charming. But I lowered the gun onto the seat, and looked sadly back at all the ridiculous carrier bags.

‘I don’t want you to hurt Stefan.’

‘He used to work for me. I don’t hurt my own people unless I have to. It’s up to him now.’

‘Thank you for the clothes. I can’t help myself.’

‘We all have our obsessions, it’s nothing to be embarrassed about.’ He pulled up in front of the darkened building. The other car was still there, but there was no sign of any Fosh activity. ‘They’re up in the penthouse.’

‘I don’t think I should come up,’ I told him. I was counting on the police not giving up on me, but couldn’t see them anywhere. If I knew they had the place under surveillance there was a still a chance that I could get out, but the odds had fallen to around zero. ‘You could lend me a few pounds, I could check myself into a hotel and think things through for a few days. Maybe come to some kind of decision about my future.’