This Is How It Ends Read online

  ‘You got any papers?’ he asked.

  Carol dug into her pocket and handed him a pack. He started to roll a skinny cigarette, looking Ella over while he did it.

  ‘You kids met before?’ Carol asked.

  ‘I know who she is,’ the man said.

  ‘This is Quinn,’ Carol told her, leaning in to whisper his name, like it was something dangerous or sacred. ‘You’ve got a lot in common. You should get together after this.’

  Subtlety was never her strong suit, Ella thought. Quinn seemed dismissive of the idea. But Ella had heard of him, that he’d come out of the anti-capitalist movement and had started getting involved with anti-gentrification protests, targeting the offices of architects working on major regeneration projects, the contractors who made them physical realities and even members of the local councils suspected of corrupting the planning processes.

  Nothing concrete. No evidence that anything claimed about him had actually happened. But companies like that rarely reported break-ins or criminal damage. It tarnished their reputations, created a stink around them, which didn’t sit well alongside their glossy brochures and aspirational branding strategies.

  If he was serious, rather than just another loudmouth looking to play the big man, then maybe he was someone she should get to know. She knew she couldn’t keep her hands clean for ever. Not if she really wanted to make a difference.

  But finding people who were prepared to back up their boasts was proving more challenging than she’d expected.

  Quinn unwound the scarf covering his mouth so he could smoke, but kept his back to the police, shifting slightly so the crowd would block him from their view. The plainclothes officer with the camera had spotted him, though, and was moving around to try and capture his face.

  The fact that they wanted it piqued her interest even more. That and watching how he tracked the cameraman’s movements reflected in the window, waiting until he was seconds away from a clear shot to hide himself again.

  ‘Let me give you my number,’ Ella said.

  His eyes crinkled and she could hear the sneer in his voice. ‘I can find you whenever I want to. Not like you’re shunning the spotlight, is it?’

  He ground the cigarette butt out against the window and tucked it into his pocket as he returned to the front of the crowd. Another good sign, she thought. Never leave anything behind that could be used to retrieve DNA or fingerprints. His caution suggested he didn’t have a criminal record yet and was trying to stay out of the system. Which meant he was the kind of smart she was interested in.

  Carol was talking about the officer with the camera, commenting on how his own face was covered up, but Ella was only half listening. She was still thinking about Quinn, watching him carefully now, seeing how he whipped the others up around him, but always held slightly back. If you were looking for it, you’d see his orchestration, but to a casual observer the mood was turning spontaneously.

  He changed the chant and the rest of the crowd took it up immediately.

  ‘Woolwich for workers!’

  The words were calmer but the tone was darker and harder, the drumbeats thumping, whistles sounding in ear-splitting bursts. Shoppers were no longer slowing to watch and take photos; now they were crossing the road rather than stopping to ask questions and take fliers, hurrying along their curious children.

  ‘Woolwich for workers!’

  Ella looked at the faces of the people inside Brighams, saw the men had been infected by the rising rage outside. Conferring in a huddle, they stood hands on hips, stabbing fingers at the window. The woman had left at some point. Ella wondered if she’d chosen to or was sent home. They looked like the type to try and protect the little lady, even though she’d displayed more spine than any of them when she arrived.

  Maybe that was why they were puffing themselves up finally.

  Three hours was a long time to hang around powerlessly in your office while protestors halted the flow of money.

  ‘Woolwich for workers!’

  A masked woman with pastel-pink hair stepped up to the police cordon, raised both arms in a V, fists clenched. She kept chanting, strutting back and forth, until she stopped in front of the biggest guy there. He’d been flexing his fingers inside his gloves for the last half hour and Ella wondered if the woman had spotted that. If she wanted trouble.

  He put his hand out. ‘Step back, miss.’

  She didn’t move.

  ‘Someone pull her back in,’ Carol said.

  Nobody did.

  The drums slowed to an ominous tempo. One coordinated strike every five seconds. The woman was inches from the PC’s face, skinny arms still raised. She barked:

  ‘Burn, Brighams, burn.

  ‘Burn, Brighams, burn.

  ‘Burn, Brighams, burn.’

  The drums kept striking. The silence in between punctured with the woman’s voice and then others joining her, peeling away from the body of the protest, crossing the clear channel of pavement that had separated them from the police all morning.

  That cordon represented peaceful protest. Now it was breached, anything might happen.

  Ella felt a nervous excitement stirring in her stomach, bounced up on her toes to check where Quinn was. Saw no sign of him.

  When she looked back she saw the pink-haired woman had an air horn in her hand. She raised it into the face of the nearest PC and let it off. They were on her immediately, a flurry of bodies, and within seconds she lay unmasked on the ground, still shouting as she was cuffed. Two other officers pushed back a man who was trying to get to her. He yelled that he loved her as she was led away. The rest of the group was still chanting, but they’d moved back again now their temporary leader was gone.

  ‘Always one.’ Carol shook her head.

  ‘We need more than one, don’t we?’ Ella said.

  ‘We need more than this.’ Carol turned towards the estate agent’s window. ‘Look at them in there. Fucking raging but they don’t have the arsehole to come out here. What do you think they’d like to do to us?’

  The men were jeering at them. One had his wallet open now, waving a black credit card in their direction.

  Carol laughed scornfully. ‘Back in the day that would have been a wad of cash. Now the stupid bastard’s proud to be flaunting his debt.’

  She reached into her coat pocket and brought out a paint can, shook it up vigorously.

  ‘They’re probably worse off than some of the people out here.’ She started to spray a metre-wide red circle on the plate glass. ‘One overblown mortgage payment from the streets.’

  On the other side of the window the men were shouting. They looked like caged animals, Ella thought, silverbacks preparing to assert their dominance. She wondered if Carol realised how much anger she was provoking and if it made her feel as uneasy as Ella did. She’d finished the large circle and was spraying a second one inside that, forming a bullseye that framed the biggest man’s head.

  He barked at them, his words dulled by the thickness of the glass, but Ella could lip-read his insults well enough as he slammed his palm against the window. The sheer intensity and immediacy of his anger forced her to take a step back.

  ‘See that,’ Carol said, putting the final dot at the centre of the target, blocking out the man’s face. ‘His sense of ownership’s getting pricked. Some disposable suit on fifteen grand a year basic, plus commission and a shite car. But he’s losing it because I’ve painted on his bosses’ window.’ She dropped the can into her pocket, nodded towards the door. ‘Here it comes.’

  The door flew open and the man barrelled through the crowd towards her, fifteen stone of incoherent rage bearing down on her, and Ella saw his hand curl into a fist as Carol threw her chin up at him, ready to have her say. She didn’t even get a word out.

  His fist crashed into her nose, so hard it snapped her head back with an audible crack, and Ella lunged to catch her under the arms. Carol yelped, blood running out of her nose, down her face and on to her T-shirt.r />
  ‘The fuck d’you think you are?’ the man shouted, looming over her, fist still clenched.

  Carol climbed to her feet, but the police were coming, shoving people aside.

  ‘We’re going to have you,’ Carol told him, in a low voice clogged with the blood running down the back of her throat. ‘See how long that black card lasts when you’re jobless.’

  Ella didn’t see the second shot coming. He caught Carol as she was stepping back, clipped the side of her head with enough force to send her into the window. This time she didn’t pick Carol up. Instead she grabbed a sign that had been lying against the shopfront and stamped on it to free the wooden handle. She felt adrenaline and fury tightening her muscles, didn’t think, didn’t hesitate, the noise of the crowd falling away, only her own heartbeat clear and fast and strong in her ears as she moved.

  The man was elbowing his way towards the police now.

  ‘Why aren’t you arresting these people?’ he demanded.

  Ella slowly followed him, holding the wood low by her side, focused on the path clearing ahead of him and the space he left behind. No matter what else had happened here today she would make sure this man understood that they weren’t people he could push around without consequences.

  She was four metres away from him and his mates were already with the police, gesturing and shouting. He would be there within seconds. It was now or never.

  As he was stopped by another protestor just as big as himself she swung the piece of wood – straight into Quinn’s outstretched hand. He’d stepped into her path from nowhere.

  ‘Not this,’ he said, gripping her makeshift weapon. ‘Not now. Get Carol to a walk-in or something and have her nose fixed up. She’ll say she’s fine, but she needs looking after. Okay? Can you do that for me?’

  She nodded.

  A smile lifted his eyes, the only part of his face visible, as he twisted the wood out of her hand and threw it to the ground.

  ‘I’ll be in touch, Ella.’

  Molly

  Now – 16th March

  We’ve lost another one.

  Stacey Frears and her daughter are leaving. Young Beth, I like her. Smart girl, smarter than her mother by such an outstanding degree that I’ve always wondered where that brain could have come from. Not her father, apparently, who they’ve not seen since the night that Stacey brought baby Beth home from the hospital; he went out to buy nappies and Dairy Milk and never came back. A man so stupid even Stacey says he’s as likely to have got lost than done a runner on them.

  ‘What about your degree?’ I ask Beth, who sits on the cream leather sofa toying with her phone. She’s probably passing on the bad news to her mates and telling her boyfriend this doesn’t have to be an end to their relationship.

  ‘She can take the points from her first year and transfer them to another college,’ Stacey says, with the confidence of someone who doesn’t realise the huge gulf between the educational standands of a Russell Group university and whatever her new city has to offer. ‘Clever’s the same, no matter where you get your degree from.’

  Beth’s brow creases and she curls up tighter, lifting her phone closer to her face. She makes no comment and I’ve never seen her silent before. It’s like the decision has rendered her mute, and I wonder how far she was consulted, if she even considered the option of staying here and making her own future.

  I was younger than her when I left home and more than ready for it.

  Beth’s position is so much tougher, though, forced to choose between family and education, and she has the added complication of actually being close to her mother. For me the emotional bonds were already severed and the hard realities were so much softer. My generation ‘stood on our own two feet’ thanks to generous grants and affordable rents and no security tags hidden in the back of expensive textbooks, jobs you could pick up and leave on a whim, knowing the place across the road would be hiring. It’s easy to forget how wide and well sprung our safety nets were.

  Beth doesn’t have the luxury of independence. Not yet. Maybe not for a very long time. She’s a child of London who might never be able to find her way back here.

  ‘What have they upped the offer to?’ I ask Stacey. ‘You were at one-eighty with them, weren’t you?’

  The same as I’ve been offered.

  ‘They’ve not upped it,’ she tells me, staring into her tea. ‘They’re never going to.’

  ‘Not if you don’t dig in, no.’

  ‘Molly,’ she virtually sighs my name. ‘They’ve got us by the balls and they know it.’

  The last two years have aged her. Living in this crumbling building, the uncertainty about her future and the constant low-level fear of break-ins and vandalism. She’s stopped dyeing her hair and now wears it short and grey, a few strands of the black it used to be threaded through at the crown, the same colour as the eyebrows she paints in defiantly every morning. You can always afford eyebrows.

  I understand her resignation, but I don’t like it.

  Maybe if I had a child to consider I would have made a different decision. Maybe I’d have caved at the first round of offers rather than being one of the last to leave. It’s a test I’ll never be put to, so it’s easy to convince myself I’m better than that.

  There’s a knock at the door and Stacey tells Beth to get it.

  It’s Ella.

  She looks flustered, pink-cheeked from the cold and like she hasn’t had enough sleep. I wonder if the police pulled her in yesterday after they left me. She never called me to report back on what they’d asked her. Has she only just got out of custody? Is that why she’s been silent?

  I’ve been worried – just one more layer of worry painted over all the others – and I wish we weren’t here in Stacey’s flat, with the rest of this conversation to be had. The fight for Castle Rise is over, we all know that, and the pantomime of trying to discourage Stacey from the course of action she’s already committed to is wearing on me. I’m sure Ella has no heart for it either.

  ‘You’re leaving then?’ she asks, not even bothering to remove her coat or sit down.

  There’s a trace of exasperation in her voice, but you might take it for anger if you didn’t know her and what she’s going through.

  ‘We’ve got to,’ Stacey says, meeting Ella’s gaze with admirable defiance. ‘There was a murder here, for God’s sake! How can I keep going out to work nights, leaving Beth here on her own, when whoever did it might come back?’

  Ella’s cheeks flush.

  My mouth goes dry.

  We don’t look at each other.

  ‘The last time was bad enough,’ Stacey says. ‘I wanted to pack up and leave then, but you two talked me out of it.’

  ‘And they’d only offered you one-eighty at that point,’ Ella snaps.

  ‘It’s not about the money,’ I tell her softly. ‘Stacey’s right. She needs to think about what’s best for her and Beth now. Maybe none of us are safe here any more.’

  Ella drops on to the arm of the sofa, shoulders sagging.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘Stacey, Beth, you two have been so tough. I’ve got so much respect for you, staying on here when everyone else bolted. Honestly.’ She finds an unconvincing smile from somewhere. ‘I hope they’ve done right by you with the money.’

  Stacey doesn’t tell her the figure and I decide I won’t either.

  ‘What did the police say?’ Ella asks. ‘Did they tell you it was a murder? I thought it was an accident.’

  ‘“Not ruling anything out,” they said.’ Stacey shrugs. ‘They wouldn’t tell me anything else. They acted like I was being ghoulish even wanting to know what happened. I live here but I’m not supposed to be curious. I’m not allowed to be worried.’

  ‘It was probably an accident,’ Ella says reassuringly.

  ‘Probably,’ Stacey agrees. ‘But we don’t feel safe here any more. I’m sorry. I feel really bad about letting the rest of you down.’

  ‘You’ve got nothing to
feel bad about,’ I tell her, getting to my feet. ‘Just let us know if you need any help before you go, though, okay? Paperwork, legal advice, anything like that. And don’t sign the contract without having someone read it through. You know they’ll stiff you at the last minute if they can.’

  Stacey nods and assures us she still doesn’t trust them, she knows what they are.

  Ella and me leave the flat together and say nothing until we reach the stairwell door. She automatically starts up towards my floor but I stop her.

  ‘Let’s go down to the Embankment. I need some fresh air.’

  We walk to the river in silence and the longer it goes on the thicker the space between us becomes, filled with traffic noise and sirens and the ever-present sound of heavy plant at work; the gap feels freighted, occupied by some invisible third party.

  This distance didn’t exist the night it happened or in the days afterwards. Not when she cried in my arms in her bedsit like a child or when she cried again down the phone. This is new.

  And it frightens me.

  Last night I did some reading up on Ella’s father, Assistant Chief Constable Alec Riordan, and I didn’t like what I found. He’s too clean. For his generation – the one caught up in the miners’ strike and the Birmingham Six, Hillsborough and all those child-abuse scandals quietly covered up or discredited – clean is more suspicious than dirty. It makes me think he was just smarter than the others. He must have dirt on people. The kind that would keep Ella out of prison.

  If I was naïve, I’d feel relieved at that, because if she stays out then shouldn’t I stay out too? But sacrificial lambs are always handy to have around and I’m eminently expendable.

  As we reach Riverside Walk, my eye is drawn to the bulk of Dolphin Square rising behind a line of bare-limbed trees on the north bank.

  ‘Do you want a coffee?’ Ella asks.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘I’m getting one for myself.’

  I can’t wait any longer.

  ‘Ella, what did the police ask you?’

  She holds her hand up as she walks away from me. ‘There’s nothing to worry about, Mol. Just let me get a drink, okay?’