Chapter 159: In Your Hand II

At half 2 she turned the trolley in the doorway and went off towards the bus.

Ray was in the bay door of Southwark Tyres with his fleece zipped to the chin and a mug, and he’d watched her go.

"Pat first," he said. "Then me. So?"

"She’s in my will. If my mum and me both go, the shop’s hers."

Ray put the mug down on the tyre stack.

"Does she know you’ve got money?"

"She knows I’ve got a shop and a machine and a ceiling."

"Her John died in that flat in 2009." Ray looked up the road where the trolley had gone. "Nobody’s left her anything since but a dog that bit her. She’ll tell her sister’s lad on the bus and he’ll tell the bookies, and by Saturday every man on Verney Road knows."

"Is that bad?"

"No." Ray picked up the mug. "Get her a chair with arms on it before she asks. She’ll not ask."

Jodie opened her door at 6 in the dark blue wool dress, with her hair down and lipstick on and no shoes, and her own copy of the log in her hand.

"Pad," she said.

They sat on the settee with both pads open, his and her copy, and she went down his pages with her finger.

"Robin Hollis," she said. "He signed your tenancy at 17 and you lied and said 18, and he let you."

"He said I counted it twice."

"And the nurse wrote you down at 11:12. Good. And Pettit put clothing supplied by employer he cannot name." She looked up. "That’s the line that’ll get read."

"I know. I’d rather that than a lie on it."

"So would I." She turned the page. "White house in Kensington. That’s where he learned to ask? For somebody to come?"

"A long time before I was born, he said. Then he wrote in his crossword and wouldn’t say any more."

"And you’ve been in that house."

"In October. It paid me for walking in."

Jodie wrote a question mark next to it in her own copy and turned the page.

"Pemberton. Envelope. Plasterer."

He took the long brown envelope out of his coat and put it on her knee. She didn’t open it. She read the single word on the front in the old man’s hand.

"He knew about Deniz," Danny said. "The key, the 3,200, the bank. Nobody in that building knows any of that. I asked him who told him and he said nobody in this building."

Jodie turned the envelope over and back.

"Then it’s somebody outside it," she said. "Ray. Wasim. Deniz himself. Or the thing on your phone tells him things the way it tells you things."

"He said he asks, and somebody comes."

"Then that’s who." She weighed it on her palm. "Priya said not 50 quid."

"I know."

"Why did you take it?"

"Because he said if I didn’t, he’d take it to Deniz himself this afternoon. I’d rather it went through my hand where I could see it."

Jodie thought about that.

"That’s a reason," she said. "It’s still his money, Danny, whoever’s hand it goes through. And you still don’t know what he wants for it. Decide at 9, in front of Deniz, and write down what you decided." She put the envelope on the arm of the settee. "Now the other thing."

"I love you," Danny said. "I loved you on the 38 in 2019 when I sang that. I loved you through your chain on Sunday. I couldn’t say it this morning with my other hand in a dead man’s, so I’m saying it here."

Jodie put her hand over her mouth, and took it away again.

"Again."

"I love you."

She stood up and took my hand and walked me backwards down her hall into the bedroom, to the long mirror on the wardrobe door, and turned so her back was against me and we were both in the glass.

"Undo me."

I took the zip down her back slowly, past the bra strap, down to the curve of her arse, and the dark blue wool came open and slid off her hips onto the carpet.

She stood in the mirror in black knickers and the black bra with the hook mended in white cotton, and watched me look at her.

"Look at us," she said. "Both of us."

I put my hands on her waist. Her freckled shoulders were in the glass, and her dark blonde hair over my wrist. She unhooked the bra herself and let it drop, and I cupped her tits in my hands in the mirror and she watched me with her lips apart.

"Say it in the mirror."

"I love you."

She leaned her head back on my shoulder. I slid one hand down over her stomach and inside the front of her knickers, and she was wet through, and I found her clit and circled it, and she watched my hand move under the black cotton.

"I can see everything," she said.

She pushed the knickers down and stepped out of them. Then she took the tape measure off the handle of the wardrobe, where she’d hung it after work, and held it up.

"Shirt off," she said. "On the bed, on your back. Hands up."

I lay on her bed with my hands above my head against the rails of the headboard. She knelt over me and wound the tape measure round both my wrists and through the rail, twice, not tight, and tucked the end in.

"You can get out of that any time," she said. "You won’t."

She got my jeans open and down and took my dick in her hand, slowly, with her eyes on my face.

"You don’t touch me," she said. "You say it."

She straddled me and sank down onto my cock, all the way, with her hands flat on my chest and her face over mine.

"Say it."

"I love you."

She rode me once, slow and deep, and her pussy gripped me.

"Again."

"I mean it."

"That’s not what I asked for."

"I love you."

Every time I said it she rode me once more, slower, deeper, and every time it got harder to get the words out. Her tits swung over my face and her nipples brushed my mouth, and I pulled against the tape measure and it held.

"I love you," I said, without being asked.

She reached up and tugged the end of the tape measure loose, and my hands were free.

I took her by the hips and she rode me properly then, fast and grinding, and I pushed up into her and held her down on me. She leaned back with her hands on my thighs and her head thrown back, and I put my thumb to her clit and she shook.

"I love you," Jodie said. "I love you, Danny, I love you..."

She came saying it, her cunt gripping my cock in long pulls, and I came up into her with my hands on her hips, saying it back to her.

She fell forward onto my chest with the tape measure still trailing off the headboard.

"First time I’ve said it out loud," she said into my neck.

"Say it again, then."

At 10 to 9 Danny stood inside the shop on Verney Road with the shutter half up and the lights on.

Deniz was washing his tools in a bucket by the door. The ceiling over him was flat and white, with the 6 drops hanging from it on their wires.

"Third coat’s on. Dry by Monday." Deniz dried his hands on a rag. "Now."

He held out his empty hand, palm up.

Give it him, and you’ve broken Priya’s rule with your eyes open and it goes in the pad tonight and you tell her tomorrow before she writes.

Don’t, and the key stays in his pocket. No Errol on Tuesday. No hood, no kitchen, no 28 days. Keisha’s 1st of March gets further off every day that shutter’s down.

And Keisha and Tobi are the reason any of this is a shop.

Danny took the long brown envelope out of his coat and put it in Deniz’s hand.

"3,200, in twenties," he said. "It’s not out of my bank. It’s off a 90-year-old man in my building who gave it me this morning, after I sat with his brother while he died. He says it’s not a loan and he doesn’t want it back. I’m telling you where it came from so you’re not taking it blind."

Deniz didn’t open it. He turned it over in his big hand and looked at the single word on the front in fountain pen.

His thumb went over the ink twice.

"Pemberton," Deniz said.

Danny went cold from the back of his neck down.

"How do you know that name?"

"Because the last envelope I had with Plasterer on the front in that hand was 11 years ago." Deniz looked up at him. "One flat, in a block in Hackney called Pembury House. Old gentleman met me on the stairs with it, in a good coat. Mr Pemberton, he said, and spelled it for me so I’d put it on the receipt right."

He held the envelope up between them.

"He said it was for a lad of 17 moving in on the Saturday, and to do the ceiling properly, because the lad would be lying under it a long time."