Chapter 165: Uncapped II

He brought her tea. She drank it sitting up with the duvet round her and listened to Priya’s rules with her eyes narrowed.

"Fine," she said. "I’ll be on the pavement across the road from quarter to 10. I’ll swap with Nadia for Monday, she owes me 2 Saturdays."

"The card’s got me down as on my own."

"It says you come alone. It doesn’t say anything about who drinks a coffee on the pavement in Kensington." She put the mug down. "I’ll be by the railings opposite. You’ll see me when you come out."

Sunday morning Jodie woke at 7 in her own bed in Battersea and lay on her back looking at the ceiling.

"I’ve met your mum once," she said. "Outside the Co-op in 2019. You said this is Jodie from work, and she said hello, love, and that was it."

"She’s not met you properly yet."

"No. Today she meets the girl who knew about 2 million quid before she did." Jodie pulled the duvet up to her chin. "I’ve been awake since 5 working out what she’s going to say."

"She’ll feed you till you can’t stand up, and then she’ll ask you something you can’t get out of."

"Danny. Take my mind off it. Properly. But Sarah’s in, and Sarah’s on lates, so she’s still asleep through that wall."

"Then I’ll put my hand over your mouth."

"No," Jodie said. "I’ll keep my own mouth shut. You’ll be slow. If you make me make a noise, I stop."

I rolled onto my side behind her and fitted myself along the back of her, knees into the backs of her knees, my chest against her shoulder blades and my face in her hair. She was warm all down the front of me and smelled of sleep and the lavender stuff she sprayed on her pillow.

She pushed back against me, once, with her arse.

"That’s a start," she breathed.

I put my hand flat on her stomach under the T-shirt and moved it up slowly till I had her tit in my palm, soft and heavy and warm from the bed. I rolled her nipple between my finger and thumb until it went tight, and she breathed out through her nose and didn’t make a sound.

"Slower," she whispered. "We’ve got till 12."

I kissed the back of her neck under her hair, where she was ticklish, and felt her bite down on it. She squirmed back against my cock through my boxers.

"Off," she mouthed over her shoulder. "Both."

I got her knickers down her legs under the duvet and she pushed them off the end of the bed with her foot. I got rid of my boxers. Then she took my wrist and moved my hand herself, down over her hip and between her thighs from behind, and lifted her top knee to let me in.

She was wet already, soft and open.

She kept her hand on mine. She showed me how she wanted it, 2 fingers, slow circles round her clit and never straight on it, and her breath went ragged and silent against the pillow.

Then she reached back between her own legs and found my balls and cupped them, gently, and squeezed, and I had to put my mouth against her shoulder to keep quiet.

"Shh," she whispered. "You’ll lose."

She let go of me and guided my cock to her herself, and pushed back onto it, slow, an inch at a time, until I was all the way inside her lying on our sides with her arse pressed into my stomach.

Neither of us moved. Through the wall Sarah’s alarm went, and somebody’s hand slapped it off.

Jodie shook with silent laughing round my cock.

Then I started to move, slow and deep, rocking into her, my fingers still on her clit the way she’d shown me, and she rocked back to meet every stroke without a sound. The headboard wanted to knock. I held her hip to stop it and kept the rhythm long and even.

I slid my other arm under her and got hold of her tits, one in each hand, and her cunt started to tighten round me. She pulled the pillow round and bit into it.

"Fuck," she mouthed into it, without a sound.

She got my hand back down between her legs with her own.

"Thumb," she whispered into the cotton. "There. Don’t move it."

I didn’t move it. I kept my cock deep and slow and my thumb exactly there, and she came biting the pillow, her whole body going rigid against me, her pussy closing on me tight and letting go, tight and letting go, while not one sound came out of her.

I went over 3 strokes later with my teeth in her shoulder and my hand clamped on her hip, emptying into her in silence with my eyes shut.

We lay there locked together, breathing through our noses, while Sarah’s kettle started up on the other side of the wall.

At 5 to 1 they were on the walkway in Battersea with a bag from the bakery and Jodie’s sewing tin in her coat pocket. His mother had the door open before they reached it. She had her good blouse on, the blue one, with an apron over it, and her hair was down.

She looked at Jodie, all of her, from her boots to her face, and Jodie stood there and let her.

"Hello again, love," his mother said. "Outside the Co-op."

"2019," Jodie said. "You had a trolley with a wonky wheel and you made it go straight by kicking it."

"I’ve still got that trolley." She stood back. "Come in. Keep your shoes on, I’ve not had the hoover out."

The flat smelled of roast chicken and gravy granules and the gas turned up too high. The Formica was laid for 3 with the good plates, and the chair with the wobble had a beer mat folded under its short leg.

Jodie was looking at the grey fleece on the hook by the door.

"Is that the one with the page in it? Same day?"

His mother’s hand went to the hook. "Who told you that?"

"Danny. He said you push a trolley up and down all day with that pocket open." Jodie took the sewing tin out of her coat. "If you’ll let me have it while the chicken rests, I’ll put a flap on it with a button. 10 minutes. Then it can’t fall out."

His mother looked at her and then at the tin. Then she took the fleece off the hook and handed it over.

Jodie sat at the end of the Formica with it across her knee. She cut a square off the inside of the hem where nobody would see, folded the edges under with her thumbnail, and sewed it on over the pocket in small grey stitches, fast, without looking up.

His mother stood at the oven with the glove on and didn’t open the oven once. She watched Jodie’s hands.

Jodie bit the thread and found a button in the tin that nearly matched.

"There. Button it and it’ll go through the wash."

His mother undid the new button and looked inside. The folded page was still in there. She did the button up again and ran her thumb along the stitching.

"That’s proper sewing."

"It’s what I do."

"I know it is. He tells me." She hung the fleece back on its hook, and then she turned round with her arms folded. "Right. Did you know before me? About the money."

"Yes," Jodie said. "The Saturday afternoon. 2 days before you."

"Did you tell him to tell me?"

"No." Jodie kept her eyes on her. "I didn’t think about you once that weekend, and I should have. When he told me on the Monday night you’d found out last, I felt sick for you. So I made him shake on same day, for both of us."

His mother looked at Danny over Jodie’s shoulder.

"Is that right?"

"She made me shake on it in bed before 11," Danny said. "And I still broke it with you on Thursday. She’s not let me forget that either."

"Good." His mother turned to the oven. "Sit down, the pair of you. It’s chicken."

They ate chicken and roast potatoes gone hard at the edges the way she always did them, with carrots and peas and too much gravy. Jodie had seconds of the potatoes without being asked. Halfway through, the pipe in the wall went knock, and his mother said "Denise’s got her bath on," and nobody explained it to Jodie.

"Tomorrow," his mother said, with the gravy jug in her hand. "This house. You’re going in on your own?"

"The card says alone, Mum. Priya says go. The old man on 17 says go."

"And you’re stood outside?" She looked at Jodie.

"Across the road from quarter to 10," Jodie said. "He rings Priya the minute he’s out. If he’s not rung by half past 11, she rings the police."

His mother put the jug down.

"Then you do this as well. Before you go in, you write on a page the time, and the address, and who you’re going to see as far as you know it. You tear it off and you give it to her." She nodded at Jodie. "And when you come out, the first thing you do, before you ring anybody, is write the time you come out on that same page, in front of her, and sign it."

"Why have I got to sign it?" Danny said.

"Because if anybody ever says you weren’t there, or you were there longer, or you signed something in that house, she’s got your handwriting off the pavement with both times on it."

She picked her fork up. "Nobody stood outside for me, in 2014. I’d have liked that."

Jodie had stopped eating.

"I’ll keep it," she said. "With his pad. And yours, if you ever want one kept."

His mother looked at her for a second longer than she’d looked at anything else all afternoon.

"There’s rice pudding," she said. "Out of a tin."

At 2 minutes to 10 on Monday, Danny stood on the corner of a street of white stucco houses in Kensington in the navy suit, with Priya’s card in his top pocket, Adaeze’s rent book in his bag for tonight, and a slice of toast in him because Jodie had stood over him while he ate it.

He tore a page out of the pad and wrote on it against his knee.

Mon. 09:58. The house in Kensington, as per card. Going in alone. Who: "the company". D. Flynn.

He gave it to Jodie. She folded it once and put it inside her coat, and stood with her back to the railings opposite, with a coffee she wasn’t drinking.

"Half 11," she said.

"I’ll be out long before. Drink that, it cost you 4 quid."

He crossed the road. 5 steps up to a black door with a brass knocker. He’d been up these steps once, in October, into a house that didn’t want him in it, and it had paid him for every minute.

The door was on the latch. It swung inwards 2 inches at his touch on the brass.

He pushed it the rest of the way.

The hall was black and white tile and smelled of beeswax and cold stone. There was nobody in it. A clock ticked somewhere up the stairs.

On a narrow table against the wall, squared to its edge, lay a single sheet of the same cream paper, typed close all the way down, with a fountain pen laid across it.

The cap was off.