Chapter 176: All 3 of You II

Priya closed her pad. Pettit put his pen in his anorak. The secretary went to the door and opened it, and the street came back in, a bus and a car alarm 2 streets over and the wind.

Pemberton hadn’t moved from the newel post.

"Mr Pemberton," Danny said. "Are you coming home? I’ll get you a cab to the door."

"No, Mr Flynn." The old man sat back down on the hall chair and picked his hat up off the tiles. "I have business of my own here this morning. Go on. Your young woman is on the corner. I saw her past you when the door opened, and she will be cold."

At 10:44 Danny came back down into the grey street with Priya on one side and Pettit on the other. Jodie was already crossing to meet them, with the page out of her coat and the biro in her other hand. She’d told Marie she’d be in at 12.

He wrote it against the railings. Out 10:44. Signed nothing. Took nothing but the 2 cards I brought. Priya and Pettit with me. Pemberton stayed inside. D. Flynn.

Jodie read it upside down as he wrote.

"He stayed in there? On his own?"

"He said he had business of his own."

Pettit picked his cold tea up off the railing and drank it anyway, and pulled a face.

"I’ll tell you what I’ve got," he said, to all 3 of them. "An employer with a number and no face. For attendance. And nobody needed to tell the house. I’ve never written a line like that in a file in my life and I’m not sure how I’m going to type it. And a man of near enough 90 sat in that hall like he’s sat in it 100 times, who asked a question and got told he was second in line."

He looked at Danny.

"You had a flat worth millions on the table in there, and all you had to do was pick the pen up. I’ve watched men sign for a lot less than that and lie to me about it after."

"What’ll your file say?"

"What I saw. Occupant attended with his solicitor, declined to sign, and gave notice to quit the flat. I’ll send Mrs Anand a note of what I saw, by post." He crumpled the cup and put it in his anorak pocket. "Friday."

He went off towards the grey Skoda without saying goodbye.

Jodie had turned round to Danny.

"Gave notice to quit," she said. "40?"

"On the Monday, 4 weeks from last Monday. I’m not signing their sheet to keep it."

"So you’ll be under your ceiling at Pembury."

"If Adaeze’s tenancy is right. Priya reads it tomorrow at 8."

Jodie looked at him for a moment in the cold, with her hair blowing across her face.

"Good," she said. "I’ll miss that bath. I’ll not miss the people who own it."

Priya was watching Pettit’s car go.

"That was the most useful man I have met this year," she said. "I will be at Lorraine’s branch again at 2 o’clock, with his 3 lines and mine, on paper. And tonight Mrs Nwosu brings me your tenancy. You will read it with me tomorrow at 8. Not 9. 8."

"I’ll be there."

"Mr Flynn." She stopped with her hand on the strap of her camera. "The host was asked for. You did not ask her by whom."

"No."

"Will you?"

He looked back at the black door. It was shut.

"I’ll ask my mum first," he said. "On Sunday."

Priya looked at him over her glasses. Then she wrote 4 words on her pad, closed it, and went to find her bus.

At 6 that evening Danny knocked on 17 on his way up. Nobody came. He knocked again and said his name through the door, and the corridor gave it back to him.

At 8, when the night desk came on, he went down and asked Osei to his face.

"Kieran’s book has him going out at half 8 this morning, sir. Coat and hat, out the front, into a black car. Nothing since." Osei turned the book round. "I’ll ring up the minute he comes in, whatever time."

The chair was still in the empty second bedroom at 40 that night, with the green cushion on it Jodie had sewn at lunch. Ray was coming for it at 8 in the morning with the van.

Danny sat down in it at 9 with a cup of tea. His legs had gone. The rush seat creaked under him. The varnish on the arms was worn pale and smooth under his hands.

Jodie stood in the doorway in one of his shirts, with her legs bare and her hair down, still damp from the bath that took 25 minutes to fill.

"That’s Pat’s chair," she said.

"I’m testing it for her."

"Are you." She came in slowly and took the tea out of his hand and put it on the windowsill. "Then test it properly. Pat’s 75 with a hip. You need to know it’ll take her weight."

She stood between my knees and undid the buttons of the shirt from the bottom up, watching my face. There was nothing on under it. When it fell open she took my hands and put them on her waist, and her skin was warm from the bath.

She got my jeans open and down my thighs, and took my cock in her hand and stroked it, her other hand cupping my balls, until I was hard and aching. Then she turned round.

She stood with her back to me between my knees, in the open shirt, and let it slide off her shoulders onto the floor. She looked at me over her shoulder, with her freckled back and her round arse right in front of me.

"Hold it steady," she said.

I held my cock steady for her. She reached back, took hold of the 2 pale wooden arms of the chair either side of me, and lowered herself onto it, slowly, an inch and a stop and another inch, till her arse was down on my thighs and her back was against my chest.

The rush seat creaked under the 2 of us.

"Oh, fuck," she said, out of breath. "It’ll take a weight."

She held the arms of Pat’s chair and lifted herself on them and came down again, slow at first, using the arms to push herself up and pull herself down. I reached round her and took her tits in my hands, and her nipples were hard, and she leaned her head back on my shoulder with her mouth open.

"Don’t you ever tell her," Jodie said. "Not ever. She’ll sit in this every Thursday."

"Not a word to Pat. Not to anybody."

She went faster. The chair rocked on its back legs and came down again with a knock on the floor. I slid one hand down her stomach to her clit and rubbed it while she rode me, and she swore at the ceiling and gripped the wood till I heard the joints creak.

Her pussy tightened on me and she worked herself on me harder, faster, with her hair in my face and her arse slapping down on my thighs, and the chair knocked and knocked on the boards.

She came with her hands locked on the chair arms and her back arched against my chest, crying out, her cunt squeezing my cock in hard waves. I held her by the hips and pulled her down onto me as far as she’d go and came, buried in her, with my face in her damp hair and the whole chair groaning under us.

She sat on me with her head back on my shoulder, getting her breath.

"It took a weight," she said, and started laughing, and couldn’t stop.

At 10 to 11 Osei still hadn’t rung. Danny went down to 17 in his jeans and jumper.

The door of 17 was on the latch.

It swung in an inch under his knuckle.

Osei never rang. So either he came in past the desk without Osei seeing him, or somebody else has been up here with a key.

The flat was dark except for the lamp by the chair, and cold. The gas fire was off. The bureau was shut and locked. The crossword wasn’t on the arm of the chair.

On the chair, square to its edge, lay a single sheet of Pemberton’s own blue notepaper, written in fountain pen, in the careful hand that had written Plasterer on an envelope.

Mr Flynn,

I asked them this morning to close my record. They tell me only the host can ask for that, and only after he has signed.

You will not sign. I knew it when I asked.

Do not sign for me.

P.