Chapter 174: Paper Only II

The old man stood looking at the card in the open book. Then he went to the bureau, unlocked it with a small key from his cardigan pocket, and opened the second drawer down. He took out a long envelope, yellowed along the fold, and out of it a card the same size as the one on the table, cream gone the colour of weak tea at the edges.

He laid it on the open book next to the new one.

A boy will come into the Mare Street office this week to take a flat. Take him. See that the roof does not fall on him.

The same typing. The same space between the lines. The e’s leaning the same way.

"11 years," Pemberton said. "I have never shown it to anybody. Robin never saw it. Take it with you tomorrow. Your solicitor will want to see that the same machine typed both."

"It’s yours."

"It was about you," Pemberton said. "Take it."

Danny looked at the 2 cards side by side. His hands were cold again.

"Will you be there tomorrow?"

"Mm."

"You said Mm to me on Friday night and all, about how you ask them."

"I did." He unfolded the paper under his arm and looked at it without reading it. "Be on that pavement at 10, Mr Flynn, and let your solicitor talk first."

Jodie was at 40 when he got back, sat cross-legged on the floor of the empty second bedroom in her coat, with a wooden chair in front of her that she’d brought over the bridge in a black cab with it wedged across the back seat. It had arms. It had a rush seat with one corner frayed, and dark varnish worn pale on the arms where somebody’s hands had rested for 40 years.

"12 pound," she said. "The charity shop on Northcote Road. I saw it in the window on my lunch and ran down at half 5 before they shut. The woman said it came out of a house in Balham where an old lady sat by the window in it every day. I said good, it’s going to a window."

"Pat’ll love it."

"Pat’ll say the seat’s too low and then sit in it every Thursday for 10 years." She got up off the floor. "I’ll do a cushion for it out of the last of the green roll, and Ray says he’ll run it down to Verney Road in the van Friday, so it’s there for her next Thursday."

She was still in her coat. She stood in front of him with her hands in the pockets.

"You’ve been to 17."

"He gave me the card. The old one. 11 years in his bureau." He put the book down on the windowsill. "And he wouldn’t say if he’s coming tomorrow."

"Then he’s coming." Jodie took her hands out of her pockets and undid the top button of her coat. "And you’ve been carrying that look all the way up from 17. Come here. I’ve made something. I cut it out on Monday night and finished it on my lunch today, with the chair waiting in the shop window across the road."

She undid the rest of the buttons slowly, and let the coat open.

Under it she had on a black suspender belt, narrow, with 4 straps down the front of her thighs, and black stockings clipped to them, and a pair of black knickers that tied at the hips with ribbon. Nothing on top. Her tits were bare in the cold of the empty room and her nipples went tight while he looked at her.

"I sewed the last of it on the back stairs at Marie’s," she said. "Out of the lining of a coat nobody bought. The clips are off an old one of my mum’s. Do they work?"

I put my hands on her waist, on the black band of it, and ran them down over the straps to the tops of the stockings, where the clips held, and the skin above them was warm and bare.

"They’d hold up a bridge," I said.

She let the coat drop off her shoulders onto the floor. Then she walked backwards out of the empty room and down the hall to the bedroom, with her hand in mine, in her stockings, and sat down on the edge of the bed with her knees together and looked up at me.

"Kneel down," she said.

I knelt on the floor in front of her. She opened her knees. I pulled the ribbon at one hip and it came undone, and the other, and the knickers came away in my hand and I dropped them.

She leaned back on her hands on the bed, her tits lifting, the suspender straps tight down her thighs, and looked down at me between her stockinged legs.

"Your clothes," she said. "Off. I’m not undoing these clips for anybody."

I got my clothes off kneeling there and threw them behind me. My cock was hard and she watched it, and spread her knees wider, and I could see how wet she was, her pussy open and pink between the black straps.

I put my hands under her arse, on the warm skin below the straps, and pulled her to the very edge of the bed, and pushed into her kneeling on the floor, slow, all the way.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, that’s... stay at that height. Exactly that."

I fucked her like that, on my knees on the floor with her on the edge of the bed, my hands on her stockinged thighs, holding them open. She leaned back on her arms and watched me go into her, and every time I pushed in deep the suspender clips rattled against my hips.

"Look at you," she said. "On your knees on the carpet, for me."

"I’d kneel on gravel for those clips."

"Then kneel on gravel next time." She lay back on the bed and put her heels on my shoulders, the black nylon cool against my neck. "Harder. I want to hear those clips."

I gave it her harder, till the clips rattled and the bed creaked and my balls slapped against her. I held her ankles against my shoulders and drove into her, and her cunt gripped me on every stroke, and her tits shook with it, and she put her own hand down between her legs and rubbed her clit while I fucked her.

"Danny. Fuck. Don’t stop. I’m right there, I’m..."

She came with her back arched off the bed and her heels pressing into my shoulders and her fingers still on her clit, crying out at the ceiling. I felt her squeeze me hard and let go and squeeze again, and I held her open by her stockinged thighs and pushed as deep as I could and came inside her, on my knees, gasping.

She lay with her heels still on my shoulders, breathing.

"I’ll do you a pair of braces next," she said, when she could talk. "So it’s even."

At 2 minutes to 10 on Thursday morning Priya Anand stood on the pavement opposite the black door in Kensington in her navy coat, with her pad in one hand and her ancient camera on a strap round her neck, and talked.

"I have brought 3 biros, Mr Flynn. A biro can run dry in the middle of a sentence, and I am not having my note of this morning end where a pen decided to stop.

"I have a copy of your copy of the sheet. I have photographed this street from the corner so that there is a record of which house it is. I have a letter on headed paper addressed to The Secretary of the Company asking to inspect the original document. I shall hand it to whoever opens that door and ask them to sign for it. They will not sign for it. I shall write down that they would not."

Pettit stood on her other side in his navy anorak with his clipboard and a takeaway tea, and he talked as well.

"I’ve done 22 years of this, Mrs Anand. I’ve knocked on doors in Walsall where the dog came out before the man did. I’ve stood in a kitchen in Stourbridge while a woman told me her husband had never owned a lorry and the lorry was in the drive. I’ve never once stood on a pavement with the other side’s solicitor and agreed in advance who speaks first." He blew on his tea. "You speak first, then me, and him last."

"That is the correct order," Priya said.

Danny stood between them in the navy suit with the library book under his arm. Inside it, flat, were 2 cream cards 11 years apart.

Jodie was 20 yards back at the corner, by the railings, with the page from his pad folded inside her coat. He’d written it at 8 at the kitchen island with her watching. Thu. 10:00. The house in Kensington. With Priya Anand and G. Pettit. Going in. D. Flynn.

10 o’clock.

None of them had crossed the road yet when the black door across it opened on its own.

The secretary stood on the top step in a dark green silk blouse and her narrow black skirt, with her hands folded in front of her and every light in the hall on behind her. She looked across the road at the 3 of them, at Priya’s camera, at Pettit’s clipboard, at Danny.

"Mr Flynn," she called, clear across the road. "You have brought company."

"My solicitor. And Mr Pettit from the insurer."

"We know who they are. Come in, all 3 of you." She stepped aside.

Behind her, on a hall chair at the foot of the stairs, in the full light, an old man sat upright in a good coat with a grey hat on his knee and a fountain pen in his hand.

Pettit lowered his tea.

"Who’s that, then?" he said.

Danny was already halfway across the road.

"That’s Mr Pemberton," he said, without turning round. "From the 17th floor of my building. And that’s the fountain pen he signed for Pembury with."