‘So what are we doing?’ she asks. ‘Bribing the guards?’
Tia turns to another page in her school exercise book. There is a list of numbers.
‘What am I looking at?’ Connie asks.
‘This is what everyone at the complex gets paid,’ says Tia. ‘I’ve got all of them. The managing director – she gets the most, fair enough; the guards inside the vault – they’re on nice money; the driver gets nothing; the guards at the gate are on minimum wage.’
‘Got to pay guards well,’ says Connie. ‘Otherwise –’
‘Then, right down the bottom of the list, there’s the fork-lift driver, and the cleaners who look after the car park and the service corridor. Not even minimum wage once the agencies have taken their cut. Works out at eight fifty an hour.’
‘How did you get these salaries?’
‘The big ones you get from LinkedIn,’ says Tia.
A lot of cocaine dealers are now using LinkedIn, Connie has noticed; she keeps getting requests. ‘And the fork-lift driver and the cleaner?’
‘Well, I got them because I’m now one of the cleaners, and my mate Hassan is one of the fork-lift drivers.’ Tia takes an envelope from her bag and slides it across to Connie. ‘My pay-slip.’
‘This is very good, Tia, very good. You started working there yesterday?’ Connie asks.
‘Yep,’ says Tia. ‘I’m already one of the longest-serving cleaners.’
‘Do they search you on your way in?’
‘They did,’ says Tia. ‘But I hid a bit of coke in my pocket, for them to find. So now they just want to buy coke off me and no one’s going to worry too much about searching me.’
‘Where did you get the coke from?’ asks Connie. She always takes a professional interest.
‘Some guy from the 24-hour garage with one arm,’ says Tia.
‘Ah, Dan Hatfield,’ says Connie. She remembers when Dan Hatfield had two arms. The money he’d wasted on tattoos on that other arm.
‘So you’ve been scoping it out?’
‘Yep,’ says Tia. ‘I’m quite enjoying it. I’m going to miss it. There’s a shipment due on Tuesday, probably two hundred grand or so, if you can handle it?’
‘I can handle it,’ says Connie. You have to smile with the youngsters sometimes. Connie remembers when she thought two hundred grand was a lot of money. Gentler days in some ways.
‘Great,’ says Tia. ‘I’m going to smuggle in two guns and hide the –’
‘Good day, Connie,’ says Ibrahim. Tia closes the exercise book. ‘Please excuse my lateness.’
‘Ibrahim Arif, this is Tia,’ says Connie.
‘Ah, you are being mentored,’ says Ibrahim. ‘How are you finding it?’
‘Rewarding,’ says Tia.
‘She’s already doing a job,’ says Connie.
‘Oh, congratulations,’ says Ibrahim. ‘I knew Connie would be a good influence.’
‘Tia, I’ll leave you to it,’ says Connie, standing. ‘Why don’t I meet you at my lock-up next Tuesday if you can get out of work quickly enough?’
‘Will do,’ says Tia. ‘Very nice to meet you, Mr Arif.’
‘And you, Tia,’ says Ibrahim. ‘And very best of luck with the job.’
Connie takes Ibrahim’s elbow and starts to lead him out of the café. She stops at the next booth, where the young man is now watching an anime cartoon of two eggs screaming at each other. Connie motions for Ibrahim to go on without her for a second. She sits down in the booth, takes out a gun from her handbag and points it at the man’s groin under the table. He looks up, slack-jawed.
‘I swear to God I will shoot you if you don’t switch your phone off. And when I’m in court I’ll tell them why I did it, and the judge and all twelve members of the jury will cheer and carry me out of the courtroom on their shoulders.’
With some panic the man switches off his video. Connie digs the gun into his groin.
‘I know it’s your lunch,’ says Connie. ‘But I need you to know that you are the worst man in the world, and I just wonder if, in future, you could wear headphones when an old woman tells you to?’
The young man nods, mutely. Connie notices a dark patch seep across his suit trousers.
‘Good lad,’ says Connie, and slips the gun back into her bag and rejoins Ibrahim, who is looking at meringues.
Connie takes his arm again.
‘What would you like to talk about this week, do you think?’ Ibrahim asks. ‘Have I missed anything interesting?’
‘You never miss anything,’ says Connie.
‘That’s very true,’ says Ibrahim. ‘I’m a hawk. Honestly, the size of these meringues.’
12
Donna De Freitas is not happy. She should be enjoying a day off with Bogdan. They’d been at a wedding reception last night: Joyce’s daughter was marrying a man who seemed very nice, but who had a very interesting family when you looked him up on the police computer, which Donna had, of course, done. Donna looks everyone up. Paul Brett is the name.
She should still be in bed with Bogdan, watching Homes Under the Hammer, listening to him shout, ‘There is asbestos in that bathroom ceiling, you idiot,’ to a first-time property developer from Swansea. Occasionally, very occasionally, Bogdan will nod his head slowly and say, ‘That is good plastering.’ It is usually when the house buyer is Polish, plastering being a skill that, in Bogdan’s estimation, takes a wild dip about thirty miles west of Gdańsk.
Chris is not at the station this week. He’s still on his firearms training, and Donna is being destroyed by jealousy. If there’s one place she’d rather be than watching Homes Under the Hammer in bed with Bogdan, it’s doing firearms training. He wouldn’t stop talking about it at the wedding. They let him have a sub-machine gun the other day. A sub-machine gun? Chris! Sometimes life isn’t fair.
To make it worse, instead of being given an easy ride as she waits for his return, Donna has been called in for ‘extra duties’. She has been sent out onto the streets of Fairhaven on ‘security patrol’. There is a royal visit next week, and every available body has been drafted into sweeping and scouring Fairhaven looking for security threats. Someone acting out of the ordinary, a car parked where it shouldn’t be. Half the station is pounding the beat with resentful looks on their faces. No one is revealing which royal is visiting Fairhaven, but after ruining Donna’s day off it had better be a good one, like the King, and not just Prince Edward or something.
Very little was coming through the radio as Donna walked down the high street, peering into rubbish bins. There was brief excitement earlier when a man in Mad about the Soy said he’d had a gun pointed at him. But by the time an officer had attended the call, the man had decided he’d been mistaken and apologized for wasting everyone’s time.
She feels her phone buzz in her pocket and takes it out. Elizabeth.
Elizabeth had been at the wedding. She’d been quiet, but it was nice to see her out and about. Three or four times a week Bogdan pops in to see her, and once in a while Donna is summoned too. She’ll tell Elizabeth about some new murder or other, and Elizabeth will let her know where she’s going wrong. But she’s not the Elizabeth of old. She’s more polite now, on the defensive. Her pain is keeping her quiet. Donna longs to be patronized and dismissed by Elizabeth once more. Bogdan misses Stephen, but he won’t talk about it. Boys. Donna answers.
‘Hello, Elizabeth.’ Nice and gentle.
‘Are you roaming the town for this royal visit?’
Well, that was short and to the point. Encouraging.
‘How do you know about the royal visit?’ Donna asks. ‘It’s confidential.’
‘I’m grieving,’ says Elizabeth. ‘I’m not dead.’
Donna chances her arm. ‘I don’t suppose you know who it’s going to be?’