A Stars and Stripes flag leaned out of the rubble at a drunken angle, as if someone had just conquered this place.
It was total and utter chaos. And seemingly uncoordinated.
It was perfect, Ronnie thought.
He glanced over his shoulder. The long ant-line stretched, never-ending, behind him. He stepped aside, letting it continue past him, and moved further away. Then, surreptitiously, and with some small regret, he dropped his mobile phone on to the rubble and trod it in. He stamped on it and took a few steps forward. Next, he pulled his wallet out of his jacket and checked through it, removing the dollar bills and jamming them in the rear pocket of his jeans.
He left his five credit cards, his RAC membership card, his Brighton and Hove Motor Club membership card and, after some moments of thought, his driving licence as well.
Unsure whether he could smoke here or not, he discreetly put a cigarette in his mouth, pulled out his lighter and cupped his hands over the flame. But instead of lighting his cigarette, he began singeing the edges of his wallet. Then he dropped that into the rubble also and stamped it in, hard.
Then he lit his cigarette and smoked it gratefully. When he had finished, he ducked down and retrieved his wallet. Then he retraced his steps and picked up his mobile phone. He carried them across to one of the makeshift repositories for recovered items.
‘I found these,’ he said.
‘Just drop them in the bag. All gonna be gone through,’ an NYPD woman officer told him.
‘They might help identify someone,’ he said, just to be certain they took notice.
‘That’s what we’re here for,’ she assured him. ‘We gotta lotta people missing from Tuesday. Lotta people.’
Ronnie nodded. ‘Yep.’ Then, to further double-check, hepointed at the bag. ‘Someone’s logging everything?’
‘You bet. All gonna be logged, honey. Every damned item. Every shoe, every belt buckle. Anything you can find out there, you just hand it.’
‘All of us got family in there – somewhere,’ the officer replied, waving her hand expansively at the devastation in front of them. ‘Every damn person in this city got a loved one in there.’
Ronnie nodded and moved away. It had been much easier than he had thought.
72
‘Here,’ Abby said. ‘Just past the lamppost on the left.’ She glanced again over her shoulder out of the rear window. No sign of Ricky’s car or him. But it was possible he could have come a quicker route, she thought. ‘Could you drive past, turn left and go around the block, please.’
The taxi driver obliged. It was a quiet, residential area, close to Eastbourne College. Abby scanned the streets and parked cars carefully. To her relief, she could see no sign of Ricky’s rental car or him.
The driver brought her back into the wide street of semidetached red-brick houses, at the end of which, totally out of character with the area, was the 1960s low-rise block of flats where her mother lived. It had been built cheaply at the time and four decades of battering from the salty Channel winds had turned it into an eyesore.
The driver double-parked alongside an old Volvo estate. The meter was reading thirty-four pounds. She handed the driver two twenty-pound notes.
‘I need your help,’ she said. ‘I’m giving you this now just so you know I’m not doing a runner on you. Don’t give me any change, I want you to keep the meter running.’
He nodded, giving her a worried look. She shot another glance over her shoulder, but still she wasn’t sure.
‘I’m going inside the building. If I don’t come back out in five minutes, OK, exactly five minutes, I want you to dial 999 and get the police here. Tell them I’m being attacked in there.’
‘Want me to come in with you?’
‘No, I’m OK, thanks.’
‘You got boyfriend troubles? Husband?’
‘Yes.’ She opened the door and climbed out, looking back down the street. ‘I’m going to give you my mobile number. If you see a grey Ford Focus – a four-door, clean-looking, with a bloke in it wearing a baseball cap, call me as quickly as you can.’
It took him several agonizing moments to find his pen, then, with the slowest handwriting she had ever seen, he began jotting the numbers.
Once he’d finished, she hurried to the entrance door of the building, unlocked it and went into the dingy communal hallway. It felt strange being back here again – nothing seemed to have changed. The linoleum on the floor, which looked as if it had been there since the building was put up, was immaculately clean, as ever, and the same metal pigeonholes were there for mail, with what could even have been the same pizza, Chinese, Thai and Indian takeaway advertising leaflets poking out of several of them. There was a strong reek of polish and of boiled vegetables.
She looked at her mother’s mail box, to see if it had been emptied, and to her dismay saw several envelopes wedged into it, as if there was no further room inside. One of them, almost hanging out, was a Television Licence Renewal reminder.
The post was one of the highlights of her mother’s day. She was a competition fanatic, subscribing to a number of magazines that included them, and she had always been good at them. Several of Abby’s childhood treats and even holidays had been from competitions her mother had won and half the things her mother now owned were prizes.
So why had she not yet collected her post?
With her heart in her mouth, Abby hurried along the hallway to the door of her mother’s flat at the rear of the building. She could hear the sound of a television on in another flat somewhere above her. She knocked on the door, then opened it with her key without waiting for a reply.
‘Hi, Mum!’
She heard the sound of voices. A weather report.
She raised her voice. ‘Mum!’
God, it felt strange. Over two years since she had been here. She was well aware of the shock her mother was going to get, but she couldn’t worry about that now.
‘Abby?’ Her mother’s voice sounded utterly astonished.
She hurried in, through the tiny hallway and into the sitting room, barely noticing the smell of damp and body odour. Her mother was on the couch, thin as a rake, her hair lank and greyer than she remembered, wearing a floral dressing gown and pompom slippers. She had a rose-patterned tray, which Abby remembered from her childhood, balanced on her knees. An open tin of rice pudding sat on it.
Torn-out newspaper and magazine competitions were spread all over the carpeted floor, and the lunchtime weather forecast was on the Sony wide-screen television, which Abby recalled her winning, perched clumsily on a metal drinks trolley, which was another prize.
The tray crashed to the floor. Her mother looked as if she had seen a ghost.
Abby ran across the room and threw her arms around her mother.
‘I love you, Mum,’ she said. ‘I love you so much.’
Mary Dawson had always been a small woman, but now she seemed even smaller than Abby remembered, as if she had shrunk during these past two years. Though she still had a pretty face, with beautiful pale blue eyes, she was much more wrinkled than last time Abby had seen her. She hugged her tightly, tears streaming down her face, wetting her mother’s hair that smelled unwashed, but smelled of her mother.
After her father had died, horribly but mercifully quickly from prostate cancer ten years ago, Abby had hoped for a while that her mother might find someone else. But when the disease was diagnosed, that hope went.
‘What’s going on, Abby?’ her mother quizzed, then added, with a sudden twinkle, ‘Are we going to be on This Is Your Life? Is that why you’re here?’