Chapter 55: Threads
Two hundred yards up that same road, stopped in the outside lane at those same lights, Adaeze Nwosu sat in her car with the heater going and Radio 4 muttering to itself about the bond markets.
She was going nowhere important.
The wholesaler on the Old Kent Road, tiling for the bathroom in number 14, a job she could easily have sent someone else to do and had decided to do herself because the flat had been very quiet lately and she had noticed herself noticing that.
The lights went red. She looked out of the passenger window with no particular interest.
A green Vespa, two up. Man driving, woman on the back with her arms round him and her front pressed flat against his back, both of them helmeted, her cheek on his shoulder.
They were laughing about something; you could tell from the shoulders. Then the woman took one hand off and patted the man’s stomach twice, and Adaeze, watching that, felt something go through her that she was far too old to be surprised by and far too honest with herself to pretend she hadn’t felt.
A green Vespa.
Daniel has one of those now.
She’d seen it outside Pembury House twice, that ridiculous scooter he’d bought instead of a car with whatever mad money had landed on him, and she’d stood at her own window watching him swing his leg off it and thought, well. There’s a change in a man.
Friday. She had him for Friday.
She’d been thinking about Friday since she’d put the phone down on him, and thinking about it in a way that had made her change her mind twice about what she was cooking and once about what she’d wear, and she had caught herself on Saturday standing in front of the mirror in the black dress trying to work out whether it said dinner or whether it said something considerably less deniable, and had told herself out loud, Adaeze, you are a grown woman, put the dress on and stop performing for your own mirror.
She shifted in the driver’s seat.
Four seconds on a stairwell.
A young man shaking with the effort of holding perfectly still while pressed hard against her, every one of those seconds still available to her in high definition eleven days later, and available with a clarity that had begun to be a nuisance in queues and car parks and at half past two in the morning.
"Mm." Out loud, to nobody, in a Corsa on the Battersea Park Road.
The lights changed.
The Vespa pulled away and turned left toward the high street, and Adaeze indicated right and went to buy tiles, and never knew that she had spent a red light watching Danny Flynn take his girlfriend to work.
He dropped Jodie outside the shop at ten to nine. She got off, pulled the helmet off, handed it back with her hair completely ruined and no apparent interest in that fact.
"Right. That is officially the best commute I have ever had and now I have to go and count a till float."
"Same time tomorrow?"
She stopped. "You’d do that? Every day?"
"It’s four minutes, Jodie."
"It’s four minutes for you." Something complicated went across her face, and then she took hold of the front of his jacket and kissed him, in the street, outside her own shop, at ten to nine on a Monday where anyone from work could have seen her do it. "Go on then. Go and do your thing."
"I will."
"And Danny." Walking backwards toward the door, pointing at him. "If it comes off, whatever it is, I want telling."
"You’ll be the first."
That was almost true, and she went inside believing it completely.
The Vespa took him north over the bridge at half nine with the whole grey sprawl of it going past on both sides. South of the water he was a man with burnt toast and a toothbrush in a cup.
The second he crossed it he was the bloke in forty with a company behind him that led nowhere, and somewhere in the middle of that bridge the change happened every single morning, and he had stopped being able to say exactly where.
The Sterling took him back the way it took everyone back. Thomas at the door, the bronze, the lift that only went to one floor. Ninety minutes until Priya, a completion at eleven, a café by lunchtime. He didn’t look at the phone on the hall table, because in three weeks it had never once rung.
Four floors below him Mara Doyle was in the pool doing lengths she didn’t especially want to be doing. Empty, obviously.
Mr Pemberton ploughing along at the far end in his navy cap, the woman in the enormous sunglasses on her lounger ignoring the water, the towel attendant folding towels that were already folded.
No Danny-from-forty.
Twelve days. She’d started counting, which was humiliating, and then she’d started counting properly, in the notes app, under a heading that said THE FORTY PROBLEM, which was so far beyond humiliating that she had stopped examining it.
She flipped at the wall and pushed off hard, because every time she got into this water now she went straight back to the third floor. His hands flat on the small of her back.
His weight coming down through them. That first brush of his cock through his shorts against her arse and how completely still she’d gone underneath him, and then how very much she had not stayed still.
You ground back onto him. On a mat. In your own building. And he let you, and he didn’t take one single thing for himself, and you came like a train and then went upstairs and did it again twice.
Friday night as well. Saturday morning. She’d stopped keeping score on that.
She turned at the wall with her chest burning, and what was actually getting to her twelve days on had nothing to do with wanting him. She could manage wanting.
She’d been managing wanting since she was fifteen and it had never once been a problem she couldn’t solve inside a week. It was that a man had knelt behind her while she came apart under his hands and had then said nothing whatsoever about it.
No text. No look across a lobby. Not one syllable of acknowledgement that any of it had occurred. He hadn’t been embarrassed and he hadn’t been smug. He’d simply gone, and stayed gone, and the not-knowing was worse than any version of knowing would have been.
She hauled out at the shallow end with the water sheeting off her, stood dripping on the tile for a moment with her heart going, and then went up to thirty-nine still wet and still in the costume and rang her brother for the third time in four days before she’d even shut her own front door.
"Tom, it’s me. No. No, listen." The door went with her heel. "That name you gave me, the one that signed for forty. I’ve been through Companies House and it’s a shell. Three shells, in fact, and they go round in a circle and end up back at the first one, which is either extremely boring or extremely interesting and I genuinely can’t tell which."
She listened, walking wet footprints across somebody else’s expensive floor.
"No, I know that’s normal for that kind of money, you’ve said, twice. But here’s the bit." She stopped. "All three have the same correspondence address. Not a bank, not the agency. A solicitor’s office."
Longer listening this time.
"Clapham," Mara said. "It’s a one-woman practice above a dry cleaner’s on the Clapham Road."
Whatever her brother said made her laugh once with nothing in it.
"I know it’s mad, that’s why I’m ringing you. Eight million quid of riverside penthouse and the paperwork goes to a shopfront in Clapham." She looked out at the grey river. "Nobody does that by accident, Tom. Somebody does that on purpose, and I want to know why."
She hung up, stood dripping in the middle of her own hallway, and addressed the empty flat.
"Right, Danny-from-forty. Let’s have a look at you."
Forty floors above her, the phone in the hall rang.
Danny had been back in the flat forty minutes and had genuinely forgotten the thing existed: a cream handset on a small table by the door, the sort he’d only ever seen in hotels, silent for three solid weeks. It rang like something out of another decade, two short trills, a pause, two short trills.
He stood and looked at it a moment before he picked it up.
"Hello?"
"Mr Flynn." Warm, composed, entirely unhurried.
"Naomi Adeyemi. I do apologise for the internal line, it’s terribly old-fashioned, but you haven’t answered my messages and I thought a telephone might work where a text hadn’t."
Something cold went through his stomach.
"Naomi."
"You’ve been busy."
"I have."
"Yes." A small pause, and behind her he could hear the lobby, the bronze, the whole marble quiet of the place. "I won’t keep you long, and I’d rather not do this at the desk if it’s all the same to you. There are always people at the desk."
"Do what at the desk?"
"Speak to you properly." Another pause. "Would it be terribly inconvenient if I came up?"
He looked at the door, at his coat on the hook, at the phone in his hand.
"Up here?"
"To forty. Yes." And then, still perfectly pleasant, still entirely warm: "I think it would be better for both of us if this conversation happened somewhere nobody can hear it. Shall we say twenty minutes?"