Chapter 166: Continued Service II

At 10:47 he came down the 5 steps into a grey Kensington morning and crossed the road. Jodie was off the railings before he’d reached the kerb.

"The page," he said. "Before anything else."

She gave it to him. He wrote under his own line against the railings, with her watching.

Out 10:47. Signed nothing. Took nothing. Copied the sheet into my pad by hand. D. Flynn.

He signed it and handed it back. She folded it into the inside pocket of her coat, against her chest, and then she put both arms round him in the street and held on.

"You’ve gone white," she said into his collar.

"You were 49 minutes. I counted the windows on that house 4 times. There’s 23 if you count the little one in the roof. A woman went past with a dachshund twice, the same dog, the same coat, and the second time she looked at me like I was casing the place, and I nearly said I’m waiting for my boyfriend, he’s in that house with some people who own his flat, and then I thought, Jodie, that sounds worse. So I drank the coffee. All of it. It was cold by quarter past and I drank it anyway."

She stopped and took a breath.

"And a man in a car across the road sat there the whole time with his engine off and didn’t get out. A grey car. I wrote the number on my hand." She held up her palm with the biro on it. "I’m talking too much. What’s in there?"

Danny looked at her hand. Then he looked up the road. There was no grey car.

"A woman in grey silk with no name, and a sheet that gives me 40 if I work for them forever and let them keep a list of you." He got his phone out. "Hold the pad open for me. I’m ringing Priya."

Priya picked up before the first ring had finished.

"10:48."

"I’m on the pavement. I signed nothing."

He read her the whole sheet off the pad, line by line, with Jodie holding it up in front of him, and then he told her about the secretary, the revert line, and the 28 days.

"And she said once I’ve signed, I can ask for Jodie’s record to be closed. Not before."

Jodie’s hands went still on the pad.

There was a silence on the line, and the dry cleaner’s machine thumping behind it.

"The host," Priya said. "The sheet says the host all the way through. Who calls you that, Mr Flynn?"

She’ll not stop till she has it.

"I can’t answer that," Danny said. "I’m sorry. Not today."

"Then I will write down that you could not answer it, and the time." The biro went. "Now listen to me. You think this mends your bank."

"It sorts Pettit’s file. And Naomi’s letter."

"At the bank it does the opposite. Lorraine will see a flat worth millions arrive in your name from 3 companies nobody can trace, in exchange for service to an employer you cannot name. That is Mr Pettit’s file with a deed stapled to it."

Her voice didn’t rise.

"And the revert line means it is not a gift at all. It is tied to the job. You will not sign it."

"If I don’t, I lose 40 in 28 days."

"Then you lose a flat, and you keep your mother and Miss Carter and the 2 people you mean to employ in March off a list kept in a house with no name on the door."

The biro tapped twice.

"Write on your copy the time you made it and where, in ink, today. I will come to you at 4 and photograph the pad myself."

"I’ve got Adaeze at 6. Her rent book’s due back."

"Then 4 o’clock it is."

She rang off.

Jodie closed the pad and gave it back to him.

"She put me in the price," she said. "Next to the pen."

"I watched her do it. She looked at the pen while she said your name."

"Then listen. Don’t sign that for me." Her mouth went tight. "If you sign that to close my record, I’ll never speak to you again. Write that down and all."

He wrote it in the pad, there on the pavement, with her watching. Jodie: if I sign it for her, she’ll never speak to me again. 10:52.

At quarter past 11 he rang his mum on her break.

"Same day," he said. "It’s 28 days. Then I’m out of the flat, unless I sign something that puts you and Jodie on a list."

"Have you signed it?"

"No. Priya says don’t. Jodie says she’ll never speak to me again if I do."

"Then you’ll find somewhere else to sleep," his mother said, with the hospital tannoy going behind her. "Hang on, that’s not me, that’s ward 6. Then you’ll find somewhere. You slept on a mattress on a floor at 17 and you were all right. I slept on Denise’s settee for 3 weeks in 2014 when the boiler went and I was all right, and Denise’s settee’s got a spring in it that goes in your kidney, I’ve told her 20 times and she’s still not had it seen to. You don’t need 40 floors. You need a door that locks and a kettle and somebody to tell where you are. Are you eating? Did she make you eat this morning?"

"Toast. She stood over me."

"Good. Keep her." The tannoy went again. "That’s me. Write it all down, every word that woman said, and the time. Come Sunday and read it me. I’m not having it down a phone."

Priya came up to 40 at 4 with a camera older than Danny and photographed every page of the copy, flat on the island, with the lamp pulled over. She made him write the house number and the street on a separate sheet and folded it into her bag.

"I will ask to read the original," she said. "In that hall, if that is the only place it lives."

"She’ll not let you take it."

"Then I will read it standing in that hall, with you beside me, and I will write down whether they let me." She looked once out of the glass at the river, and once at the green carrier bag on the island, and wrote something on her own pad. "Where will you live, Mr Flynn, if you do not sign?"

"I’ve not thought that far."

"Have an answer by Friday. I would rather you had a tenancy in your own name before anybody asks you to leave this one."

"And the shop?"

"The shop is yours. Your lease on Verney Road has your name on it and nobody else’s. I saw to that myself." She buttoned her coat at the door. "4 weeks today. I will have been to that house by then."

Adaeze opened her door at 6 with a wooden spoon in her hand and the kitchen smell coming out round her, pepper and onion and something frying hard. Her hair was wrapped in green, and she had a red jersey dress on that held every line of her and stopped at the knee.

"Monday night," she said. "As agreed."

Danny took the red rent book out of his bag and held it out. She flicked through it once, corner to corner, in the doorway.

"Not a mark on it," she said. "In. Both of you. You’re eating."

She put it back in the drawer by the cooker on top of the green napkin and bumped the drawer shut with her hip.

They ate fried plantain and stew standing up in her kitchen, out of bowls.

"I lay the table for guests," Adaeze said. "You’re not guests tonight. You’re a book coming back."

Danny told her about the bench at the pool, Deniz’s ceiling, and the house that morning, the sheet and the woman in grey and the pen with its cap off.