Until it's Over Read online

  I hardly ever went into the office. It was really nothing more than a cubby-hole where Campbell and his assistant, Becks, took orders and phoned the riders, but it was amazingly squalid, all cardboard boxes, unwashed coffee cups and unfiled files.

  ‘Lovers’ tiff?’ said Campbell, as I walked into the office.

  ‘Car door,’ I said.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

  I was less all right when I saw the bike he was lending me. Campbell saw my dubious expression. ‘It’s served me well, that bike,’ he said.

  ‘At least it’s not going to get stolen,’ I muttered. ‘So, what’s up first?’

  He looked at his clipboard. ‘ Fancy Wardour Street to Camden Town?’

  ‘All I fancy is you, Campbell,’ I said, taking the piece of paper he was holding out. ‘Now that I’ve seen the state of the office, I must remember to come in less often. See you at the pub later, maybe.’

  It was a lovely day, the sort that made up for January, when you got wet and numb and it was dark at four o’clock, and August, when you seemed to breathe nothing but heat and car fumes. It was sunny but with a chill, and there wasn’t too much traffic and I felt happy, even if I didn’t know why. I darted across the map of London in straight lines. After Camden Town I went from Charlotte Street to Maida Vale, then from Soho to London Bridge. On the way back I spent too much money on an exotic sandwich at Borough Market. Then it was over the river to Old Street and thence in a long straight line to Notting Hill Gate. Cycling back into town, I stopped in St James’s Park, ate my sandwich and drank a bottle of water. And so back to criss-crossing London, in and out of the photographic labs, advertising companies, editing suites, solicitors’, and offices I had been in and out of for months without knowing, or needing to know, exactly what they did.

  Some days it felt like I was dragging heavy weights behind the bike, but not today. The accident had clearly done me no lasting damage. My aching limbs gradually loosened up and by the evening I’d done sixty or seventy miles and I didn’t even feel tired, just a pleasant ache in my calves and thighs. On the way home I stopped off at the Horse and Jockey. The pub was strictly for the cycle messengers. The motorbike messengers were large, bearded and male: they dressed in black leather and met up at the Crown just south of Oxford Street. They congregated on the pavement and whistled at women walking past and talked about cam shafts, or whatever it was that motorcycles were made of.

  We cycle messengers saw each other as a more sensitive breed. We were certainly a bloody sight healthier, those of us who survived. When I cycled up, there was a small cheer from the people who were already there, clutching their bottles of beer. They gathered round to inspect my bruises and grazes and to comment that they were really nothing special. Then we got down to the more serious business. We talked about employment prospects, we gossiped and, above all, we slagged off the clients. We depended on them but that didn’t mean we had to respect them. Most of the job was company work, taking envelopes from office to office, but several families had accounts with us and some of them were so rich, or at least so much richer than we were, that they thought nothing of picking up the phone to summon one of us. There was an unofficial competition about the most ludicrous request. I’d once gone on successive days to deliver a forgotten packed lunch from Primrose Hill to a girls’ prep school in the West End. One messenger claimed he’d cycled to Notting Hill Gate in the rain to collect an umbrella and deliver it to a woman standing outside Fortnum & Mason. The job also gave us a chance to gawp inside some of these houses. One of the messengers said he was going to start a game: you’d get five points for a private cinema, ten for a fountain, fifty for an indoor swimming-pool.

  Just as a messenger called Danny was telling me, quite falsely, about a client who fancied him, I was saved by my phone ringing. It was Davy.

  ‘I’m at the Jockey,’ I said. ‘Want to meet up?’

  The pub was a handy place to rendezvous in the middle of town and Pippa or Davy or Owen would occasionally join me there and attempt to blend in with the lithe, suntanned, lightly clad, generally god-like bodies of us messengers.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m at home. Maybe you should come back.’

  ‘Is anything wrong?’

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Not really. Nothing to do with us. But dramatic.’

  I cycled home slowly, enjoying the amber light and the cooling air against my glowing skin. As I steered into Maitland Road, I was thinking that the one thing I mustn’t do was have another stupid accident in my own road when I almost ran into a police car at the same spot where I had hit the car on the previous day. An area of pavement a few houses down from ours was taped off. Several policemen and -women were bustling around busily. One was standing by the car looking bored.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

  ‘Move on, please, love,’ he said.

  ‘It’s just that I live in the street.’

  ‘It’s all over.’

  ‘What’s all -?’

  ‘Just move on.’

  I felt reluctant. Something had happened almost exactly where I lived and I wanted to know about it, but the officer stared at me and I couldn’t think of an excuse so I just pushed my bike along the pavement to our house.

  Dario was up a ladder in the hallway painting the rose round the light. I leaned Campbell ’s bike against the wall. ‘Someone’s going to fall over that,’ he said.

  ‘It’s just for today,’ I said. ‘What’s going on outside?’

  ‘There were more police a couple of hours ago,’ he said. ‘There were cars and an ambulance.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t really know,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been out. I heard that someone had been robbed.’

  ‘Murdered,’ said a voice behind me.

  I turned round. It was Mick. ‘Murdered?’ I said. ‘No! What happened?’

  ‘Someone was being robbed in the street and they got killed. They must have tried to resist. Fucking idiot.’

  Dario grinned down at me. ‘Yesterday Astrid crashes into a car, today someone gets murdered. This area’s getting dangerous.’

  ‘Lucky we’re getting evicted then, isn’t it?’ I said, and then I looked up at Dario suspiciously. ‘How long have you been doing the house up?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘Were you in on Miles’s plan?’

  ‘Me?’ he said. ‘What would I have to gain from that?’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to think how your twisted mind works,’ I said.

  Chapter Four

  I had a cool, very quick shower and pulled on loose-fitting clothes over my bruises and grazes, wincing. A light skirt, because outside the May evening was balmy and soft; a shirt that would cover my arms; sandals. I had a date with three old friends in Clerkenwell, and I wasn’t going to get on my bike again but travel on the top of the seventy-three bus. Dario came with me, because he, too, was going out. The police were still there. There seemed to be even more of them than before, and now there was also a yellow metal sign on the pavement, just a few metres from the taped-off area, asking anyone who had witnessed anything unusual on the evening of Thursday, 10 May, to contact the police.

  ‘Do you really think someone’s been murdered?’ I asked Dario.

  ‘Definitely,’ he said, with enthusiasm.

  ‘It just says “serious incident”. That could mean all sorts of things. Maybe a car crash. Or a mugging.’

  ‘There’s an awful lot of police for that,’ said Dario.

  We were quite used to muggings in Maitland Road, and to yellow signs asking the public for help, which rarely came. Maitland Road backed on to a rough estate. Gangs of youths roamed the street and hung out in the park, bored and belligerent, trousers dropping off their arses and cigarettes dribbling from their lower lips. They broke windows, threw bins across the road, did their drug deals in the bus shelter where we were standing now, had scuffles that could turn nasty. Where we lived was one of
the roads that formed a kind of border between the well-off and the desperately poor.

  When Miles, Pippa and I first moved in, many of the houses were crumbling and boarded-up. Gardens were rank with weeds, the only shops were twenty-four-hour news-agents and strange outposts of a previous civilization that sold Crimplene slacks and long johns. The sandpit in the park was full of needles and litter. It was an area that felt abandoned and unloved. Now it was being gentrified. There were still run-down terraced houses and dilapidated squats, but others had been renovated and decorated, inappropriately smart now between their dowdy neighbours. There were Volvos and BMWs as well as beaten-up old Rovers and Fords. Estate-agents’ signs peppered the front gardens, builders’ vans and skips squatted outside gutted houses. The brutal grey and pink blocks, with names like Morris and Ruskin House, were now grim, stubborn, neglected islands.

  The bus came and I climbed up to the top deck to stare out as Hackney ended and I was into more genteel Stoke Newington, then more-genteel-still Islington, where lights glittered in terraced houses and all the expensive restaurants were full. I didn’t think about the Maitland Road incident for the rest of the evening. I met my friends and we had a drink, standing outside the pub in the ebbing warmth, then going on for a cheap meal, and back to Saul’s house for coffee. Everyone was tired, but because it was Friday night we lolled about, chatting idly, not willing to leave.

  It was late by the time I took the night bus home. The air was cool on my skin now. I thought about sleeping late the following morning, then maybe going with Pippa to the flower market and out for lunch. And I thought, too, about the need to find a new place to live. Three months wasn’t long, just until the end of the summer.

  Two police cars remained in Maitland Road. Several teenage boys were standing around the first; as I passed, one kicked the front kerbside tyre, trying to be cool. When I grinned at him, he blushed, suddenly appearing much younger than he wanted to.

  ‘Hi,’ I shouted, as I pushed open the front door.

  Everyone except Dario and Owen was downstairs, sitting round the kitchen table with a couple of empty wine bottles between them. Miles’s girlfriend, Leah, was there as well: the cause of our eviction from the house. I would have expected there to be a certain chilliness in the air, but instead I sensed excitement

  ‘You missed all the drama,’ said Miles.

  ‘What drama?’

  ‘The police were round here, asking us whether we’d heard anything unusual last night.’

  ‘Really? Did they say what had happened?’

  ‘Mick was right,’ said Miles. ‘Someone was murdered.’

  ‘In Maitland Road,’ added Davy, as if that was good news.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘God, how awful. Who was it? We don’t know them, do we?’

  ‘No,’ said Pippa. She sounded almost disappointed.

  ‘Someone called Margaret Farrell, apparently,’ said Davy. ‘We don’t know a Margaret Farrell, do we?’

  ‘I don’t, anyway,’ I said. ‘Did she live near here?’

  ‘That’s the thing,’ said Pippa. ‘She lived just a few houses up. Number fifty-four. She was a neighbour, kind of.’

  ‘Number fifty-four?’ I said. I tried to remember which house that was and who lived there.

  ‘The house with the dark green door and the tidy front garden,’ said Miles.

  ‘We went out to have a look at it,’ added Davy.

  ‘What time was it?’ I asked. I couldn’t get my head round the fact that while we had been safe and warm inside someone was being killed just a few feet from our front door.

  ‘The police weren’t sure about that. They just wanted to ask us if we’d heard anything unusual during the night.’

  ‘Only the usual unusual,’ I said. ‘Shouts, people running, things being thrown.’

  ‘That’s what we said.’ Davy tipped the last of the wine into his glass and held it up to the light. ‘And we gave everyone’s names in the house.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Routine,’ said Miles, vaguely. ‘I said we were all here last night. They just said we should get in touch if we remembered anything that might be helpful.’

  ‘Margaret Farrell,’ I pondered. ‘Do they know why? Was she robbed – or what happened? Was it in her house?’

  ‘No,’ Davy explained. ‘Apparently someone found her body where the bins go, outside the basement front. They said the binmen found her.’

  ‘No! Just dumped with all the rubbish? That’s horrible.’

  ‘That’s what I heard. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I think she was mugged and they killed her by mistake,’ said Miles.

  ‘They?’

  ‘It’s probably the husband,’ said Pippa. ‘It always is, you know.’

  ‘Do you even know she has a husband?’ I asked.

  ‘We don’t really know anything,’ said Miles. ‘People keep passing on rumours and suspicions and by now they’re flying round the street, getting more and more bizarre. Everyone’s talking to each other at last. Ironic, isn’t it?’

  ‘Very ironic,’ agreed Leah. I started. I’d almost forgotten she was sitting there, composed and elegant, her hands lying placidly on the table.

  ‘Scary,’ I said, with a little shiver. ‘Right on our doorstep.’

  But then the conversation drifted on to other things. Davy was doing his Portuguese homework, I picked up a magazine and started browsing through it. Miles used the remote control to turn on the TV. We watched a programme in which two experts redecorated somebody’s flat and made it look much worse than before. Then we watched a cookery programme, which featured ingredients I had never even heard of. We were just starting to watch a film, the sequel to something none of us had seen, when there was a clatter on the stairs. Dario burst into the room. ‘Turn the TV on!’ he shouted.

  Miles looked round. ‘It is on,’ he said.

  ‘Change channel. I was watching upstairs. No, give me the fucking control.’

  He changed the channel. A photograph of a woman appeared on the screen, then the picture cut to a local newsreader. I had only seen the face for a second but it was enough. ‘It was -’ I began.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Dario, turning up the volume so that the speaker in the television rattled with the sound.

  ‘… the body of fifty-seven-year-old Margaret Farrell was found yesterday evening,’ said the suddenly booming voice. ‘Police have begun a murder inquiry…’

  I heard something about appealing for witnesses and house-to-house inquiries, but we were too excited to stay quiet.

  ‘Margaret Farrell – She’s Peggy!’

  ‘Peggy!’

  ‘We saw her last night,’ said Davy, in a voice of awe. ‘Me and Dario and Astrid. We saw her.’

  ‘What? When?’

  ‘Peggy! But it was Peggy who knocked me off my bike.’

  And so it was that the following morning, instead of having a lie-in, a hot bath, an hour in the garden tending my vegetables and a stroll down to the flower market, Dario, Davy and I found ourselves sitting in the local police station, waiting to be seen by PC Jim Prebble. The horrified euphoria of last night had died away. We were tired, the reception area was drab and depressing; outside it was drizzling. Davy had a stye under his left eye and seemed to be coming down with a cold. But Dario was in the worst state: he had had only a couple of hours’ sleep and we had dragged him out this morning without even a cup of coffee. What’s more, he had a paranoid dread of the police. They made him feel guilty even when he was abiding by every letter of every law. So he sat there, looking like the accused, pasty-faced and fidgeting with anxiety, his eyes glancing rapidly round him.

  And when at last we were called in to see PC Prebble, in a small, square room with chairs for only two of us, and the shutters closed, it was an anticlimax. Prebble was a small, stocky man with a bumpy face, like a potato, and a bristle of grey hair. He too
k our names and address, and heard our account of seeing – and, in my case, being hit by – Margaret Farrell, known to us as Peggy.

  ‘What time was this?’ he asked, picking up a pencil.

  ‘About half past seven,’ said Davy. He was standing behind Dario and me.

  ‘Around seven o’clock,’ said Dario, at the same time.

  ‘No, it was nearer eight,’ I said. ‘Five to, something like that. I remember because I thought I’d be late for our house meeting, which was supposed to start at eight, so I was very conscious of the time and in a rush. Which was why I hit the car door so hard.’

  ‘So. At just before eight you saw Mrs Farrell?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you speak to her?’

  ‘Yes, well, not really. I think I swore a bit.’

  ‘You did,’ said Davy, behind me. Dario sniggered.

  ‘And what did she say?’

  ‘I don’t really remember. Sorry. She kept saying sorry.’

  ‘She wanted to call an ambulance,’ said Davy.

  ‘And she offered to pay for the bike,’ added Dario. ‘She won’t do that now. You can ask her husband instead.’

  ‘Dario!’ I hissed, but Prebble didn’t appear to notice.

  ‘And that was all?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Sorry.’

  ‘You didn’t see her after that?’

  We shook our heads.

  ‘You didn’t notice what direction she went in?’

  ‘It’s a bit of a blur,’ I said. ‘I only remember her shoes clearly.’

  ‘Her shoes?’

  ‘I remember lying on the ground and seeing them coming towards me. Sensible brown lace-ups. I think I might have been a bit concussed. I remember I had this vague impression there was someone else nearby, beside Dario and Davy.’

  ‘Nope. It was just us,’ said Dario, firmly.

  ‘So it was only the two of you?’ asked PC Prebble. ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dario.

  ‘Yes,’ echoed Davy.

  ‘Right. You two, then, did you see where she went after the accident?’

  ‘We were helping Astrid into the house,’ said Davy. ‘I didn’t really pay any attention. We wanted to get her inside so she could lie down. She was quite cut up.’