Chapter 199: Fridays II

She hauled me up by the shoulders till my face was level with hers, me still kneeling 2 steps down, my hips right at the edge of the step she sat on.

"Here," she said, breathless. "On the stairs, now."

I got my jeans open and my cock out. She wrapped her legs round my hips and pulled me in, and I pushed into her where she sat on the edge of the top step, with one hand flat on the landing behind her and the other arm round her back to keep her from sliding. She was hot and slippery and still twitching from coming, and she gasped fuck against my ear and held on round my neck.

I fucked her on the stairs of Pembury House, slow and hard, with the cold of the concrete under my knees and the heat of her round my cock. She pulled the jumper up herself to her collarbones and pressed her bare tits against my chest, her nipples hard, and kissed me with her mouth open.

"I love you," she said, with her lips still on mine. "You stayed with him. I love you."

I couldn’t hold it. I came inside her as deep as I could get, with my mouth in the side of her neck and my balls pulled up hard against her, holding her on the edge of that step with my arm, and she held on through every pulse of it with her legs locked round me.

The timer light came on. Somebody downstairs had pressed it.

We heard feet on the first-floor landing, and then a door. Jodie laughed into my shoulder, shaking, and pulled the jumper back down over herself.

"Inside," she said. "Before Adaeze gets a letter about us."

Priya Anand had said she’d give him an hour on Saturday at 10, and only an hour, and the kettle was on when he came up the stairs to her office in Clapham with Jodie behind him. Priya was in a cardigan instead of a jacket. Danny had not seen that before. She had the drawer open already and the 2 envelopes on her blotter, square to the edge.

"Sit," she said. "Both of you. Miss Carter, you are welcome. Mr Flynn told me on the telephone last night that you would be coming."

He’d told her all of it on the telephone at 11 o’clock last night. She had a page of notes in her neat hand on the pad beside the envelopes.

"These are the 2 that were sealed when you gave them to me." She touched them. "One with a December postmark from the same week as the card you opened. One 3 years later, thinner. I have not opened them. I am going to open them now with my paperknife, in front of you, and read them aloud. I do not think you will read them to yourself to the end."

"Read them both out, Priya."

She slit the December one first. A single sheet of lined paper, folded in 3. She read it in her flat clear voice, exactly as it was written.

"SON. IF A MAN CALLED VIC COMES ROUND HE IS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU. DON’T PAY HIM. DON’T LET YOUR MOTHER PAY HIM. DAD."

The kettle clicked off in the corner.

"Postmarked 10 December," Priya said. "About 2 months after a man called Vic split your lip in the street outside your mother’s flats. Your father knew Vic had been, or knew he would come. He sent this, and a card with a 20 in it, the same week."

He knew. He wrote me 3 lines telling me not to pay, and they sat in a green bag in her wardrobe for nearly 11 years.

"My mum kept it from me with the other ones," Danny said. "She thought she was keeping Dad off me."

"Your mother was not to know what was inside it." Priya put the sheet down. "I am going to open the other one now."

The 2018 envelope held one sheet, written on both sides, the capitals smaller and more cramped than on the card, as if the hand had got older.

Priya read it without stopping.

"SON. A MATE IN THE FLEECE IN CLAPHAM TELLS ME VIC HARRIGAN STILL HAS YOU PAYING. 3 YEARS. I NEVER MEANT THAT. I WROTE THAT ON HIS CARD DRUNK, I NEVER THOUGHT HE’D HOLD ME TO IT, NOT WITH A KID. I’VE GOT NOTHING TO SEND YOU. THE BOAT’S GONE. SHARON’S BROTHER HAD IT OFF US FOR WHAT WE OWED HIM.

"BUT LISTEN TO ME. IF YOU STOP PAYING HIM HE CAN’T DO NOTHING. IT’S NOT YOURS, YOU WAS A KID. STOP PAYING HIM. I’M SORRY. YOUR MOTHER WAS RIGHT ABOUT ME. DAD."

She laid the sheet on top of the other one and put her hand flat over both of them.

Jodie had hold of Danny’s hand under the desk, hard enough that her nails were in his palm.

"The boat’s gone," Danny said. "I said it’d say that. I said I’d pay it."

"You paid Vic Harrigan for 8 more years after this letter came through your mother’s door." Priya’s voice didn’t change. "If it had been opened in 2018, you could have stopped. Your father told you to stop. He told you it was not yours, and in law he was right about that."

She picked up her biro.

"Now I am going to tell you what I think, and you are going to listen. You were 17 and you signed nothing. Your father’s note on the back of a card binds nobody but your father. You paid a man cash every week for 11 years because he came to your mother’s door, and then in the street told you he knew her name and her bus.

"That is payment under duress. And a man who lends cash in a pub and collects it at the bottom of a stairwell with threats was not licensed to lend anybody anything."

"You know he’s dead, Priya. Who would anybody even go after?"

"His estate." She wrote it down. "A man who took cash every week for 11 years from you, and I doubt you were the only one, may have left savings or a car. Somebody will be dealing with what he left. I will find out who on Monday, by letter, and write to them on your behalf.

"I will tell you now that some of it may be out of time. The law gives you 6 years, as a rule, and duress does not stretch that. The last 6 years are still within time. That is something over 30,000 pounds."

"I don’t want his money."

"Then you may give it to whoever you like when it comes. But it does not stay with whoever inherits from the man who split your lip." She looked up. "For that I need evidence. Did you keep anything? A receipt, a withdrawal slip?"

"Cash. Always cash. He’d never have given me a receipt."

"Then all I have is your word for it, and his executor will have a solicitor who says so."

Danny sat back in the chair. Jodie’s nails were still in his palm.

I kept something. Every Friday. I did it so I’d know how many. So I’d know it was getting nearer the end.

"I did keep one," he said. "On the back of my door at Pembury. Every Friday night after I’d paid him, I went up and drew a line on the back of the flat door in pencil. 4 lines and one across. Every Friday from when I was 17 till I moved out in October, top to bottom."

Jodie turned in her chair.

"Danny," she said. "Adaeze had the flat painted after the nurse went. The door’s magnolia now. I’ve looked at it every morning since we moved in."

"I saw it the day we viewed. I knew what was under it and I didn’t say."

Priya’s biro had stopped.

"A line a week proves how many Fridays," she said. "With your account of the amounts, and your mother’s account of the Monday, it is real evidence. I need it photographed properly, without the paint."

Deniz came at 2 with his heat gun in a carrier bag and a scraper in his top pocket, still in his work trousers with plaster on the knees, and he talked from the bottom of the stairs to the top.

"Pencil under emulsion, I’ve done it a hundred times. You get it in these old blocks, kids’ heights on the kitchen door, and the landlord’s painted over the lot and the mum’s in tears wanting it back. Graphite outlasts paint every time. You go slow and you don’t cook it, and you lift the emulsion off like skin off custard.

"My wife got our Selin’s heights back off a door in Edmonton when we moved. 9 years of birthdays, every one of them still there under 2 coats of white. She cried the whole afternoon, happy. Jodie gave me Adaeze’s number this morning, so I rang her, and she knows I’m here. She said take the door off its hinges if I have to. She said, and I’m quoting her, tell him I’m sorry I painted it, I didn’t know."

He looked at the door, standing open on the landing, magnolia and blank.

"How many years?"

"11. Every Friday I paid him."

Deniz did the sum on his fingers and stopped, and looked at Danny.

"That’s 500 and odd lines, son. That’ll be the whole door, edge to edge."

He laid a dust sheet down on the landing and took the door off its hinges with a screwdriver, and laid it face down on the sheet so the back was facing up. Then he knelt beside it and plugged in the heat gun on a long lead from the kitchen.

He worked from the top corner down, a square foot at a time, with the gun on low and the scraper flat. The magnolia softened and came up in long pale curls, and he caught each curl on the blade and laid it on the sheet. Jodie knelt on the other side and held a torch flat to the surface so the light came across it sideways. Danny stood on the landing and didn’t speak.

The first lines came up after 4 minutes. Short upright marks in grey pencil, 4 and a slash across.

Deniz grunted and kept going.

It took him 2 hours. A woman came up the stairs from the floor below with her shopping and stopped on the half-landing to look, and Jodie told her what it was, and the woman put her bags down and stayed. Adaeze came at half 3 in her camel coat and stood behind Danny with her hand over her mouth and said nothing at all.

At 10 past 4 Deniz switched off the heat gun and sat back on his heels.

The door lay on the dust sheet under the landing light, back side up, stripped down to the old paint underneath, and from the top corner to the bottom corner, edge to edge, in rows Danny had kept straight with a pencil and a ruler from 17 to 28, it was covered in grey pencil lines in fives.