Omega Place Page 10

  As Paul went past Uniformed Bill he could feel the man’s eyes following him, like walking past the bully-boys at school when you first went up and were new and the smallest. Waiting for the taunts and the punches had almost been worse than getting them. But nothing happened now, the man didn’t do anything, and the door swung shut behind him.

  Standing in the corridor, it took him a few moments to orient himself. Then, walking back the way he’d been brought in, Paul discovered the station staff were closing the place up and he had to be escorted out through the already locked gates. He was left standing on the pavement, wondering what the hell to do next. What he should do was phone Sky and find out what had happened, ask him why he hadn’t come back for him. Paul got out his phone and found it had been turned off. Why had they done that?

  Out on the deserted pavement, with only a few cars driving by on the streets, Paul felt angry and foolish at the same time. He’d been played for a total sucker. Those two, Keith and Bill, had been jerking him around the whole time, scaring the shit out of him and no doubt having a right laugh behind his back. Maybe they had thought he was up to no good when they first spotted him, after the guy shouted at him for barging past, but they’d got no evidence, nothing on him at all.

  Except the gloves.

  God, that’d been a bad moment, he really thought he’d had it then, but his nerve and luck had held. Lucky, too, that they’d not really looked at the what they’d thought were bits of paper. If he’d had the wit he should’ve told them he had rights, but cops were so bloody intimidating and he’d just sat there and let them keep him in that room until the last train had gone.

  Which was what it was all about, once they’d realised they had nothing on him. A stupid bloody game… can’t nick him, so we’ll dump on him from a great height, make him miss his train. That was why that Keith bloke had checked his watch, then let him go. He was waiting to get his last laugh. The punchline being that he now had to figure out how to get back to the house by night bus.

  Paul looked at his watch: twenty-five to one. He switched his phone back on and found he had three missed calls, all from Sky. He keyed the speed dial. As he waited for the call to be picked up he got his wallet out to check nothing had been taken, just for a laugh, and a paranoid thought crept out like a bad smell. Was it still safe to use the Oyster card? He knew it was stupid, the result of spending too much time around Orlando, but he was hungry, stressed and way too tired to fight it. He had no idea what could happen if he did use it, but, just in case, he took the card out and threw it in a waste bin.

  16

  Saturday 12th August, Kingsland Road

  The door opened while Paul was jiggling his key to make the lock work.

  ‘Look what the bleeding cat dragged home…’

  Izzy, head slightly down and sneering, did her thing of looking up at Paul through half-hooded eyes. Then she turned and walked away, leaving him standing in the doorway. He took a deep breath and walked in. It was just before four a.m. and it looked like everyone was still up. Waiting for him.

  Great.

  He’d hoped he’d be able to sneak back in and not have to deal with anything till much later, but, if it had to be now, he supposed it might be better to get it all over and done with. Quite why he felt like everything that had happened was his fault Paul didn’t know, but that was exactly how he did feel. And, as he traipsed towards the kitchen, dead on his feet, the look on Orlando’s face as he came into view did nothing to dispel the impression.

  Orlando – sphinx-like, dark shadows under his eyes – sat at the far end of the kitchen table, leaning back in his chair, arms crossed. There was one other chair, at the end nearest him. Guess who for? Paul thought, as he came into the room. The rest of the house was all there, kind of lining the room. Tommy, with a beer, Rob, Sky, Terri, rolling a smoke, and Izzy, still with a smirk pasted on her pale, sour face. Not quite the Spanish Inquisition, but no way a welcoming committee either.

  Orlando sat forward, elbows on the table. ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’ Paul pulled out the chair and sat down heavily, dropping his backpack on the floor.

  ‘Did you do everything Sky told you, Paul?’

  ‘Do we have to do this now? I’m knackered, man…’

  ‘Yes. We have to do this now. Did you do everything?’

  Paul nodded, glancing over at Sky and holding his eyes until the older man looked away. ‘I did.’ Paul looked back at Orlando, noticing the pattern of black stubble on his chin. ‘Came back just like you said, man. Took bloody ages.’

  ‘And…’

  ‘And nothing. Here I am.’

  ‘Anyone follow you?’

  Paul sighed and shrugged.

  ‘Well, did they?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. I was careful, man.’

  ‘Careful, really? So what happened, Paul… why’d they pick you up?’

  ‘They thought I was nicking. That’s what plod said, that he thought I was picking pockets or something.’

  ‘Why would he think that?’ Orlando cocked his head to one side and slightly raised one eyebrow.

  ‘I don’t know!’

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘It was crowded, I got separated from Sky and I was trying to push through people to find him. That was all, and then these two blokes, these couple of police grabbed me and the next thing I knew I was in this room being questioned.’

  ‘Didn’t you call out or anything, try and attract Sky’s attention? He can’t have been far in front.’

  ‘Yeah, I did…’ Paul stopped mid-sentence, not knowing quite what to say. Not wanting to dump Sky in it.

  Sky, clearing his throat, broke the awkward silence. ‘I was plugged in, Lando, thought I told you. My iPod…’

  Rob, who’d been looking like the man responsible for inventing boredom, perked up. ‘Was that the Cheap Trick at Budokan I ripped for you the other day?’

  Sky shook his head. ‘The Aerosmith, that album with “Love in an Elevator”?’

  ‘Pump.’

  ‘Right, man it’s…’ Sky noticed Orlando, forehead creased by a frown, rocking backwards and forwards slightly and drumming his fingers on the kitchen table, and the awkward silence returned.

  ‘So…’ Orlando’s eyebrow was still raised. ‘What did they ask you, these policemen?’

  ‘What I was doing and stuff.’

  ‘And you told them what?’

  ‘Nothing, man. Nothing to tell, I hadn’t done anything.’

  ‘Did they search you?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Paul was a crap liar and he knew it. He’d never been able to blag his way out of trouble, ever, and didn’t think this was going to be the time and place where his luck would change. He slumped forward, elbows on the table, chin resting on the palm of his right hand.

  Orlando leaned sideways and glanced down at Paul’s backpack, lying on the floor next to his chair.

  ‘And what did they find?’

  Paul blinked and rubbed his face, aware that Terri, standing behind Orlando, was rolling her eyes as she blew out smoke.

  ‘They found my gloves, and what the plain-clothes bloke thought was some bits of paper, so he mustn’t’ve read the Manifestos or anything. I just told him the backpack wasn’t mine, that I’d borrowed it off of a mate.’

  ‘He believed you?’

  Paul smiled and sat back in his chair. ‘No. Not a chance.’

  ‘But he let you go?’

  ‘They didn’t have nothing on me, man, and they knew it, too, but they were just messing with me, you know, because they could? I reckon they were keeping me in that room until the last train was gone. Right sods, the pair of them.’

  ‘And that was it, they didn’t ask for your name and address?’

  Eyes down, not having to pretend he was almost asleep, Paul yawned and shook his head. Orlando hadn’t asked about his wallet, so he didn’t have to say anything about the Oyster card.

  ‘I was clean.’

 
‘Not quite, Paul. Not quite.’

  ‘Why, man?’

  ‘You’ll be on camera.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So that’s not what I’d call clean.’ Orlando stood up. ‘Izzy?’

  Izzy smiled, as far as Paul could recall, for the first time since he’d met her; the expression looked kind of odd and unpractised on her face.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Give Paul a haircut tomorrow, a number one. And, Sky…’ Orlando motioned upwards with his thumb. ‘Just a quick word, the two of us?’

  Sky nodded. ‘OK, Lando.’

  * * *

  ‘What’s the betting we’re going to have to move, again, eh?’

  Paul turned round too fast in his sleeping bag and almost tipped the camp bed over. ‘Move?’

  Rob, sitting cross-legged on his bed in a very off-white Adidas T-shirt and tartan boxers, snorted at the sight of Paul’s near accident.

  ‘On my life, that’ll be what they’re talking about. Moving to a new squat. I’ll bet.’

  ‘I thought it would be about having a go at me… cos I, like, screwed up.’

  ‘Sky should’ve kept an eye out, man.’ Tommy reached down and switched off the desk lamp on the floor between his bed and Paul’s, the room’s only form of illumination, plunging it into an orange darkness as street light leaked through the threadbare curtains. ‘All your fault, really, Rob.’

  ‘Mine?’

  ‘Nicking that bloody iPod and giving it to Sky in the first place!’

  ‘I never told him to turn it up so loud he can’t hear nothing else, did I?’

  Paul lay staring at the ceiling, now wired and wide awake when all he wanted to do was go to sleep. The previous few hours were replaying in his head like a jump-cut video… the moment he was grabbed by the Keith-and-Bill double act; pissing himself in that room, wondering what was going to happen to him; the stupidly complicated route he’d had to take to get back to the house because he knew Orlando would freak that he might have been followed if he didn’t. God, what a bloody day. He sighed and turned over, carefully.

  ‘I do not want Izzy to give me a haircut, man.’

  ‘Why not? You’ll look a cool bastard like me!’ Tommy rubbed his own buzz-cut scalp.

  ‘I’ll not, she’ll find a way of making me look crap, I know she will. I could see it in the way she smiled.’

  ‘Orlando’s rules, Pauly… Pisses me off, sometimes, the way he acts like he’s some big wheel and can order us all around.’

  Paul looked over at Rob, still sitting on his bed in the dark. ‘Thought you said he was the boss and what he said went?’

  ‘Yeah, well…’

  ‘He is the boss…’ Tommy belched loudly. ‘Ahhh… better out than in… and nobody makes anybody stay here, do they, Rob?’

  ‘S’pose not…’

  Silence. Tick-tock. Breathing. The sound of a finished conversation.

  ‘… but he is paranoid, Tommy, right?’

  ‘Doesn’t want to get caught, does he, Robby-boy? It’s not like what we’re doing is, you know, legal. And it ain’t such a bad idea about the haircut.’ Tommy belched again. ‘All gas and no go, that lager.’

  Rob sniggered. ‘Going out and doing all that stuff wasn’t such a good idea, if he wants to us to be low-key. Stay off the radar.’

  ‘Does he have a boss?’ Paul yawned, tired, but with eyes that still refused to close. ‘You know, Orlando?’

  ‘A boss?’ Tommy shifted in his bed and the lamp turned on again, this time pointed straight at Paul. ‘Why’d you ask?’

  Paul squinted, shielding his eyes. ‘No reason… I just wondered if there was, y’know, someone behind Omega Place.’ He shrugged, surprised by Tommy’s reaction. ‘Like, are there other people out there doing this too, or is this it, the seven of us?’

  ‘No idea.’ Tommy switched the light off again.

  ‘Yeah, you do.’ Rob sounded like he was smiling. ‘You just don’t ask questions, just like the rest of us, cos Or-lan-do likes it that way. I reckon this isn’t all his idea, Omega Place. He’s got a real jones about the cameras, but there’s someone else, cos the money for the computers and printers and stuff had to come from somewhere, and he ain’t got it, for sure. Reckon so.’

  ‘The cameras are bad news, there’s too many of the bastards and who knows what they’re looking at and who’s doing the looking, right?’ Tommy sounded like he was repeating someone else’s words. ‘You can get spotted by three hundred cameras a day in this country – three hundred! And it’s not made a blind bit of difference to the crime rates neither. Not a bit.’

  ‘Stop trying to sound like you really give a damn, Tommy.’ Rob stood up, stretched. ‘Cos I don’t think so…’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah…’ Rob went over to the door.

  ‘Where you going?’

  ‘Bog.’

  The room was silent for a few seconds after Rob went out, Paul lying on his camp bed that was more like being in a shallow bath, thinking he should probably have kept his trap shut.

  Tommy shifted in his bed. ‘I do give a damn.’

  ‘Yeah…’

  ‘I do. Have you read what he says in them Manifestos?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Picked one up when I first saw Terri and Rob in Newcastle.’

  ‘Then you know. He makes sense, Orlando. Knows what he’s talking about.’ Tommy turned over and leaned on his elbow, looking at Paul. ‘You’ve seen enough since you’ve been with us… we are being watched all the bloody time and someone’s got to make a stand, right?’

  The door to the bedroom opened and Rob came back in.

  ‘You sound like some crap cowboy movie.’ Rob mimicked a really bad American accent as he crossed to his bed. ‘We gotta make a stand, guys, cuz the cavalry ain’t a-comin!’

  ‘Don’t you believe in anything?’ Tommy sat up. ‘This is all just about nicking stuff for you, isn’t it?’

  ‘I do my bit, Tommo… I’m out there.’ No smile in Rob’s voice now, Paul thought. ‘And you got no idea what I believe, sunshine. Not like you and your stupid cross, altar boy.’

  ‘You taking the piss?’

  ‘What if I am?’

  Tommy swung his legs out on to the floor and stood up, but he’d hardly got to his feet when Rob’s fist shot out and grabbed his T-shirt, pulling him forward almost into his face.

  ‘What if I sodding am, eh?’

  Paul slowly manoeuvred himself out of his sleeping bag.

  ‘Hold it… hold it.’

  Rob motioned with his free hand. ‘Keep out of this, Pauly. Nothing to do with you.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘I can look after myself.’ Tommy’s right hand blurred upwards and hit Rob’s arm, at the same time as he punched him away with his left.

  It all happened so fast in the filtered orange gloom that Paul couldn’t see exactly what happened. But he heard Rob’s winded grunt and he heard Tommy’s T-shirt rip. Before anything else could happen he bent down and turned on the light.

  ‘Cut it out, man… no point in this!’ Paul said, standing back up to see Rob hunched over, trying to catch his breath and Tommy staring down at his ripped T-shirt. ‘It’s late, we’re all knackered and –’

  ‘My cross… where… where the fuck is it?’

  Out of the corner of his eye Paul saw something glint on the scuzzy carpet. He knelt down and picked it up. ‘The chain must’ve broke, man.’ Paul glanced up at Tommy as he handed him the small heap of gold chain, and the cross that was still attached to it, and then looked over at Rob, waiting to see it would all kick off again. ‘It was an accident, right?’

  Rob took a deep breath. ‘Din’t mean to break nothing…’

  Tommy stood looking at the palm of his hand. ‘Me ma give me this.’

  ‘Right. Din’t mean nothing, man… I was just talking shit.’ Rob’s idea of an apology. Paul watched him literally back off, no bravado now, belatedly aware that he must’ve overstepped the mark in some way. ‘I’ll
buy you a new chain tomorrow, man.’

  ‘I don’t want nothing nicked.’

  ‘I’ll buy it, straight up.’

  ‘And don’t diss me like that again.’

  ‘Yeah, OK…’

  Paul watched Rob and Tommy, waiting to see if there was any fire left in their fight, whether it would burst into flames again, but it looked like nothing was going to happen. Rob had backed down and Tommy had accepted a stand-off. It was over, for now.

  He got back into his sleeping bag and lay down. No more questions from now on, although he had plenty of them. He turned on his side, trying to get comfortable, the memory of his own bed surfacing in his head, reminding him of what he’d left behind and the strange truth that he’d not really thought about home, or his mum, at all. And then he fell asleep like he’d been hit with a brick.

  17

  Sunday 13th August, Thames House

  The last place Jane Mercer wanted to be, before 9.00 a.m. on a Sunday morning, was the office, but after two interminably long weeks of the whole team banging their collective heads on various brick walls – and frankly getting nowhere – a breakthrough was more than worth coming in for. She opened the office door with her elbow, hands full of a Thermos of coffee and other stuff she’d brought from home, to find that Ray Salter had beaten her in.

  ‘Where were you when you got the call, Ray, round the corner?’

  ‘Was at a friend’s the other side of the river, boss.’

  ‘Heard from John and Tony at all?’

  ‘On their way, boss.’

  ‘Has all the footage arrived yet?’

  Salter nodded. ‘Oxford Street’s here.’

  ‘What about High Street Ken, is it on its way?’

  ‘High Street Ken? Don’t know anything about that…’

  ‘It may be the break we’ve been looking for.’ Mercer went over to her desk to unload what she’d brought in and saw the neat pile of bright green flyers which had been put there. ‘I see they’ve changed colour for Manifesto 4.’ She put her bag and the Thermos down. ‘Any change of content?’