She’d been nine, Vincent twelve.
It had taken her five long years to accept that her father was gone for good.
Their feckless mother had done her poor best, but as she slid down a spiral of substance abuse and bad partner choice, she had little time or will to give her children the attention they needed. Vince readily came to accept that it was his young sister he had to look to for the basics of hot food and clean clothing. And once he got launched on what to a neutral observer looked like a dedicated effort to become the most inefficient criminal of the age, it was Fleur, masquerading as his elder sister, who visited him inside and was waiting for him outside the many prisons he spent a large proportion of his young manhood in.
At sixteen Fleur left school. She could have stayed on. She was a bright girl with a real talent for mathematics, but she’d had enough of classrooms.
Her mother’s current boyfriend, a small-time pimp, offered to find her a job. He and the girl got on quite well, so instead of telling him to take a hike, she thanked him politely and explained she would prefer to earn her money on her bum rather than on her back. He became quite indignant and assured her that he wasn’t inviting her to join his team; her brain was too sharp and her body too shapeless for that. Instead he recommended her for a clerking job in the office of a local finance company.
That sounded almost as dull as school. But she knew the company he referred to and she knew it was run by The Man.
On the appointed day she went along to the company offices, located in what had once been a pet shop in a dingy street north of East India Dock Road. Determined to make a good impression she got there nice and early. The shop space still smelled of animal piss, but there was no sign of human presence. Then she thought she heard voices beyond a door at the back.
As she pushed it open, the voices died or rather disappeared beneath a loud crash and a louder scream.
She was looking into a small office occupied by three men, two black, one white. Or rather, grey.
The grey-faced man was sitting on a chair before a desk. The reason for the greyness and for the scream was that the older of the two black men, standing beside him, was holding his hand flat on the desktop, while the other black man, seated behind the desk, had just smashed the knuckle of his right forefinger with a claw hammer.
She knew who the black men were. The older one was Milton Slingsby, known as Sling, a small-time pro boxer who’d found more profitable employment for his skills as the chief lieutenant of the younger black man who was of course Goldie Gidman, The Man.
Gidman regarded her expressionlessly then made a gesture with the hammer.
Slingsby pulled the grey man upright and dragged him towards the door. As he passed Fleur, he turned his gaze upon her, his eyes wide in pleading or maybe just in pain. She realized she knew him too, at least by sight. His name was Janowski and he ran a small tailoring business just a couple of streets away. Then Slingsby thrust him through the door and heeled it shut behind them.
‘Why’d you not run, girl?’ asked The Man.
He was probably in his thirties but looked younger till you saw his eyes. Good looking, slim, medium build, he wore a pristine white shirt that accentuated the deep black of his skin against which glowed a heavy golden necklet, gold rings on his fingers and a gold bracelet on either wrist.
‘I’m Fleur Delay,’ she said. ‘I’ve come for the interview.’
The hammer made another gesture, and she subsided on to the grey man’s seat. Her eyes took in the desk’s nearer edge. A series of small craters suggested that grey man was not the first to have sat here. She didn’t feel safe, but she felt safer than she would have done running.
The craters vanished beneath a sheet of paper bearing a column of about twenty sums of money ranging from the teens to the thousands.
‘Add it up,’ said The Man. The hammer, she was glad to observe, had vanished.
She took her time. Something told her that accuracy was more important than speed.
‘Nineteen thousand five hundred and sixty-two pounds fourteen pence,’ she said.
‘So you can add up,’ said The Man, pulling the sheet out of her fingers. ‘But can you shut up? The guy who was sitting there when you came in–’
‘What guy?’ she interrupted.
He stared at her with a blankness that could have concealed anything.
‘You know who I am?’ he asked after a while.
‘Never seen you before in my life, Mr Gidman,’ she said.
Slowly the blankness dissolved into a grin, then The Man laughed out loud.
‘Tomorrow, eight thirty, sharp,’ he said.
She stood up and as she reached the door found the courage to say, ‘What about wages?’
‘Let’s wait and see what you’re worth, why don’t we?’ he replied.
At the end of a week what she got wasn’t much more than she could have earned stacking shelves in a supermarket, but she didn’t complain.
A few days later a policeman who didn’t look much older than herself came to her home. Mr Janowski was laying a charge of assault against The Man. He claimed she had been a witness to the assault. He was mistaken, she assured the cop. She knew vaguely who Mr Janowski was, wasn’t sure she’d recognize him if she met him in the street, and certainly had never seen Mr Gidman assault him.
‘That’s OK then,’ said the constable, who had a local accent and a cheeky grin.
‘So I won’t have to go to court?’ she said.
‘Shouldn’t think so, darling. Though maybe Sergeant Mathias will want to talk to you himself. Just tell him what you told me, you’ll be all right.’
Mathias turned up later the same day.
Unlike the constable, the sergeant had a funny accent, like somebody taking the piss out of a Pakki. ‘So what you’re saying is you wouldn’t recognize Mr Janowski if you met him on the street, right? In that case, miss, how can you be sure you never saw Mr Gidman assault him?’
‘Because,’ she retorted, ‘I’ve never seen Mr Gidman assault anyone, that’s how.’
The sergeant looked as if he’d have liked to give her a good shaking, but she saw the young constable hide a grin behind his hand, and as he left he gave her a big wink.
She said nothing of this to Gidman but presumably someone did, for next pay-day her wage packet tripled and stayed tripled.
One night not long after, a fire broke out in Mr Janowski’s workshop, quickly spreading to the flat above where the tailor lived with his wife and infant daughter. The firemen fought their way through the blaze to the smoke-filled bathroom where they found the Janowskis crouched over the bath. The mother was already dead through smoke inhalation. Janowski, who had third-degree burns, died four days later. But under a dampened blanket stretched across the bathtub, they found the child unburnt and still breathing.
At least, thought Fleur, she wouldn’t have to face the pains and problems parents could inflict on their growing daughters.
Whether she would be spared the pains and problems life itself inflicted on most women was another matter.
She was feeling much better now. The past dwindled into its proper space, the cathedral descended from the sky and took its rightful place at ground level, still huge but now firmly anchored to the earth.
God’s house they