Chapter 168: Continued Service III

Adaeze listened with the spoon going round the pot and her back to them. When he’d finished she turned round.

"Ken told me one more thing on the phone. I didn’t think it mattered then. Ken talks, you see. You ring Ken about one sale and you get his whole 40 years. He told me about his wife’s knee, and a bungalow in Broadstairs he nearly sold to a man who turned out to be 2 brothers sharing a passport, and the lunch at Rules in 1998 when a duke paid with a cheque that bounced. I let him go. You let Ken go, he gets there."

She pointed the spoon at the ceiling, remembering.

"So after the duke, he said, the funny thing about your Holborn one, Adaeze, was the pen. The old man at Holborn wouldn’t touch the solicitor’s pen. He took a bottle of ink out of his coat and filled his own at the table, and made the whole room wait while he did it."

Jodie put her bowl down.

"Pemberton writes everything in fountain pen," she said. "Plasterer on an envelope. The crossword. On Friday night he opened the door with one in his hand."

"Then it was him at Holborn, and his own ink," Adaeze said. "And this woman in grey has a fountain pen out on her table, waiting for you."

"With the cap off," Danny said.

Adaeze put the spoon down on the side and looked at him in her steamed-up kitchen.

"When you go back to that house, you take your own biro in your pocket," she said.

"I had one in my top pocket this morning. Next to Priya’s card."

"And Jodie, you make sure he does." She filled his bowl again without asking. "Where will you go, if they take the flat?"

"Priya asked me that an hour ago."

"Then I’ll tell you a thing she doesn’t know." Adaeze looked at him over the pot. "Your old flat. Top floor, end of the landing. It’s been empty since you left in October. I’ve had 2 people round it and neither of them signed."

Jodie looked at Danny.

"Under that ceiling," she said.

He went home with Jodie at 8, up 40 floors in the private lift, and she held his hand the whole way.

In the flat she walked straight through to the glass and stood looking south over the river, with Battersea somewhere in the dark under the lights.

"28 days," she said. "Then we use this place. Every room of it." She turned round. "Starting with the terrace. Fetch the duvet."

He fetched the duvet off the bed. When he came back she’d taken his navy suit jacket off the back of the chair where he’d hung it.

She’d taken everything else off.

She stood barefoot on the stone by the terrace door in his jacket and nothing under it. It came to the tops of her thighs.

She’d done up 1 button, at the middle, and her tits pushed at the lapels, and the cold off the glass had made her nipples stand out hard under the navy.

"You’ll catch your death out there in that," Danny said.

"Then warm me up. You’ve 28 days to do it in." She opened the terrace door. "Out. Before I freeze."

He followed her out with the duvet. The wind came round the corner of the building off the river, wet and cold, and the whole of London was lit up 40 floors below.

He folded the duvet double against the glass balustrade, half to sit on and half to pull round, and sat with his back to the panel. She stood over him in the jacket with her hair whipping across her face and the city behind her.

"Clothes," she said.

He got his shirt off and kicked his trousers away across the stone. He was already hard in the cold, and she looked down at him and smiled with her lips pressed together.

"Hands," she said. "Give me them."

I held them up. She took them and put them inside the jacket, flat on her bare waist, ice cold, and she gasped and arched into them and pressed them there with her own.

"Leave them there," she said. "I want to feel them get warm on me."

She came down onto my lap facing me, her knees either side of my hips and her shins tucked into the fold of the duvet behind me. She pulled the other half up round both our backs.

"You’re shaking," she said.

"It’s 4 degrees."

"It’s not the cold you’re shaking from." She reached between us and took hold of my dick, and cupped my balls in her other hand, and squeezed gently till I swore.

Then she let go of my balls, held my cock upright, and lowered herself onto me, and kept going till she was sat right down in my lap with all of me inside her.

"Fuck," she said into my mouth. "Fuck, that’s deep."

We were chest to chest inside the jacket and the duvet with the wind on our faces. My hands were on her arse now, and warm.

"Better?" I said.

"Much. Keep them there." She put her arms round my neck and moved, a slow grind forwards and back in my lap, never lifting, my cock buried in her the whole time and her clit pressed against me at the end of every grind.

"Like that," she said against my lips. "Exactly like that. Don’t speed me up."

A loose bit of something banged on the roof above the terrace. A siren went along the embankment, tiny, far below. I kissed her, deep, and she kissed back with her hands in my hair.

She undid the 1 button herself and the jacket fell open on both sides, and I put my mouth on her nipple with the cold air on it, and she pulled my head in harder and moaned.

Then she took the lapels of my jacket in both fists and pulled them round my face, so I was inside it with her, in the warm and the smell of her, and she ground down on me hard.

"Stay in there," she said. "Breathe me."

I breathed her in, the warm of her skin and the wool of my own jacket.

"I can feel your cunt getting tighter," I said into her breastbone. "Every time you go down."

"Then stop talking and hold me down."

Her pussy was squeezing me now on every grind. She went faster, short and hard and grinding, with her nails in the back of my neck, and I held her arse and pulled her down onto me and kept her there.

She came sitting in my lap with my face shut inside my own jacket against her skin, her thighs clamped on my hips and her whole body shaking, crying out into the wind. The wind took it off the edge of the building.

I felt it all round my cock in long hard waves, and when she was still shaking I pushed up into her as far as I could go and came, with my mouth on her breastbone and her fists still in the lapels.

We stayed sat up and joined, with the duvet round us and the river going past 40 floors down.

Her teeth started to chatter. She pulled the jacket shut over both of us with one hand.

"That’s the terrace," she said. "27 rooms to go, or however many it is."

"There’s 9," I said. "Counting the bathrooms."

"Then we’ll do the bathrooms twice."

Just after 10 that night the phone went on the kitchen island. Osei on the night desk.

"Sorry, sir. There’s a gentleman in the lobby called Deniz. He’s got a shoe box. He says you’ll want to see it tonight, not tomorrow."

Danny went down in jeans and a jumper. Jodie came in his hoodie and her jeans with her coat over the top.

Deniz was sat on the lobby bench by the lifts in his work boots, with plaster on his knees and a shoe box on his lap with a year written on the end in felt pen.

"Streatham ran over," he said. "A woman with a Victorian cornice she wants matching, and the cornice is 140 years old and half of it’s horsehair, and she stood under me the whole day saying it’s not quite the same, Deniz, it’s not quite the same. It’s never the same. It’s plaster. So I’m late, and my wife’s been up the loft since 4 on the stepladder with the torch in her teeth. I’d rung her at lunch and said find me that year, and she found it, and she rang me back and read me the date down the phone, and I said read it me again. And she did. And I said, I’m going to Danny’s."

"You’ve come from Streatham with plaster on you to show me a receipt?"

"I’ve come because it’s the wrong date, Danny. You said on Friday the date was all you wanted off it."

He took the lid off. 6 carbon books, the old blue kind, held together with an elastic band. He took out the 3rd and opened it at a page he’d marked with a bus ticket.

2 sheets, carbon copies in his own capitals, one under the other.

The top one was a job sheet. MR PEMBERTON. PEMBURY HSE, TOP FLAT, END. CEILING DOWN. STRIP, BOARD, SKIM. MUST BE DONE BEFORE SAT. CASH. +50. And the date it was written.

The one under it was the receipt, dated the Friday. RECEIVED WITH THANKS. FOR THE LAD MOVING IN SAT.

"I write the job sheet the same day a man first rings me," Deniz said. "He rang me off my card. I’ve not wrote a job sheet a day late in 30 years, Danny."

Danny got his phone out and found the photographs he’d taken in the lift on Friday night, both sides of his tenancy. He made the front one bigger with 2 fingers.

Signed at Mare Street. The date. A Wednesday.

He held the phone next to the carbon book on Deniz’s knee, under the lobby lights.

Jodie read them over his shoulder and her hand closed on his arm.

"On the bench he told you Robin rang him the Wednesday night," she said, very quietly. "After you’d been into Mare Street."

"And that he met Deniz on the Thursday."

Deniz put his thick finger on the date at the top of the job sheet.

"He rang me on the Monday," he said.

Danny looked from the carbon to the phone and back, at the 2 dates under the lights.

"Then he booked my ceiling 2 days before I ever walked into Mare Street," he said.