When he rang the buzzer for the flat, Lark’s voice replied. He identified himself and there was a pause. Then the silence that bore no hollow sound within it, telling him she’d broken their connection. He rang again. She answered with, “Do I need to ring your dad or what?”
Which was exactly what he needed to know. Lark was alone, as he’d suspected she would be. Or her children were with her. But in either case, Abeo wasn’t there.
He used the old trick, then. He pressed the buzzer for every flat but Lark’s. Someone in one of them released the lock without question. People, he thought, never learned.
Lark opened the door when he knocked. She seemed resigned to his presence. She stepped back and let him enter.
She looked hugely pregnant, and he wondered at this. She hadn’t seemed so pregnant when last they’d met. So Abeo’s newest offspring was soon to make an appearance. He wondered what the kid’s life would be like.
She said, “I’ve rung your father. You’ll want to be gone when he gets here.”
“What I’ll want,” he said, “is the passports. Hand them over and I’m out of here.”
“What passports? Whose passports?” Lark pressed her fingers into the small of her back and grunted. She looked hot, tired, and dispirited.
“Mine, Simisola’s and Mum’s passports,” Tani said. “They weren’t at home and you and me know there’s only one other place they’d be.”
“Is that the case? Then the location should spring into my brain. But it hasn’t and it’s not going to.” She walked into the kitchen where she opened the fridge’s freezer, saying, “This bloody heat.” She stared inside before she shifted things round, and in a moment she took out an icepack of the sort used by athletes after a workout or a sporting match of some kind. She put this on the back of her neck and walked to the dining table, where she sat. The table held crayons and a colouring book, opened to images from a Disney cartoon in which every hero was white and every heroine needed rescue. What shit, he thought.
He waited. He wasn’t lit up by the idea of tossing Lark’s flat to find the passports. He’d do it if he had to, but he took her at her word when it came to ringing his dad. And Abeo wasn’t about to come on foot from Ridley Road Market, not with his plans hanging in the balance. He’d be here within minutes, and Tani wanted to be gone before then.
Lark moved the icepack from the back of her neck to her chest. She gave Tani a glance. She looked surly. She moved the icepack to the back of her neck again. As she did this, she directed her gaze to a thirsty-looking potted plant beneath the lounge window, and she held it there. Then it was the sofa that interested her, and she held her gaze there.
Tani knew she was trying to misdirect him. She was trying to buy time as well. The question was, Where did she not want him to look? The answer was in that moment of hesitation she’d displayed, the one in which she realised she’d unwittingly made the wrong decision and quickly had to cover it.
Tani went to the fridge. Lark’s chair scraped the floor as she pushed back from the table. He thrust his arm into the freezer and began sweeping everything in it onto the lino. And there it was.
Along with frozen chips, three plastic trays of ice, two bags of veg, premade dinners, a package of crumpets, and two boxes of fish fingers, a small freezer bag of the sort used for sandwiches lay at his feet. Inside were the passports, their dark covers a contrast to the frost that had built up on the bag. They had probably been here for months, Tani thought. Perhaps for years.
He picked up the bag. Lark, on her feet now, said, “Leave them.” And when his reply consisted of opening the bag and drawing from it all of the passports, she said, “I told you to leave them. Leave them.”
He ignored her. He opened each to make sure whose they were. He tossed the plastic bag onto the floor into the freezer’s detritus. She took a step towards him and then another, one hand raised.
He shoved the passports into the back pocket of his jeans. He said, “I don’t fancy hitting you, but I will. You got that?”
“I don’t care. Do it.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“Do it! He says that’s what you’re like. He’s told me. You’d do anything to get what you want.”
“That i’n’t the case,” Tani told her. “But you be wise and listen cos I will do this. You’re not likely to win against me if you wan’ to go at it. He’s prob’ly told you I fight dirty ’s well.”