Read Online What Came Before He Shot Her by Elizabeth George - Free Book Online Page B

the owners of each of these establishments. These same owners frequently threatened the girls with the truant officer, a form of attempted intimidation that none of them took seriously.
    When Kilburn Lane wasn’t their destination of choice, it was Queensway in Bayswater, a bus ride from the Mozart Estate, where attractions aplenty abounded in the form of Internet cafes, the shopping arcade in Whiteley’s, the ice rink, a few boutiques, and—pollen for the bee flight of their utmost desire—a mobile phone shop. For mobile phones comprised the single object without which an adolescent in London could not feel complete. So when the girls made the pilgrimage to Queensway, they always made the mobile phone shop the ultimate shrine they intended to visit.
    There, they were regularly asked to leave. But that only whetted their appetite for possession. The price of a mobile was beyond their means—especially since they had no means—but that didn’t put mobiles beyond their scheming.
    “We c’d text each other,” Six pointed out. “You c’d be one place and I c’d be ’nother, and all’s we need is dat moby, Tash.”
    “Yeah,” Natasha sighed. “We c’d text each other.”
    “Plan where to meet.”
    “Try to get shit when we need it from one ’f the boys.”
    “Dat as well. We
got
to get a moby. Your aunt got one, Ness?”
    “Yeah, she got one.”
    “Why’n’t you pinch it for us?”
    “Cos I do dat, she take notice of me. An’ I like how it is wivout her notice.”
    There was no lie in this. By having the sense and the discipline to restrict her nights out to the weekends, by being home in her school uniform when her aunt returned from the charity shop or a massage class, by pretending to do a modicum of schoolwork at the kitchen table while Joel did the real thing, Ness had successfully kept Kendra in the dark about her life. She took extraordinary care with all of this, and on the occasions when she drank too much and could not risk being seen at home, she religiously phoned her aunt and told her she’d be sleeping at her mate Six’s flat.
    “What kind of name is that?” Kendra wanted to know. “Six? She’s called Six?”
    Her real name was Chinara Kahina, Ness told her. But her family and her friends always called her Six, after her birth order, second to the youngest child in the family.
    The word
family
gave a legitimacy to Six that lulled Kendra into a false sense of both security and propriety. Had she seen what went for
family
in Six’s home, had she seen the home itself, and had she seen what went on there, Kendra would not have been so quick to embrace gratitude at Ness’s having found a friend in the neighbourhood. As it was, and with Ness giving her no cause for suspicion, Kendra allowed herself to believe all was well. This in turn gave her a chance to get back to her career plans in massage and to reestablish her friendship with Cordie Durelle.
    This friendship had suffered in the weeks since the Campbell children had descended upon Kendra. Their girls’ nights out had been postponed as regularly as they’d once been experienced, and the long phone chats that had been one of the hallmarks of their relationship had been cut shorter, until they’d ultimately metamorphosed into promises to “phone back soon, luv,” except soon never came. Once life in Edenham Way developed what seemed to Kendra to be a pattern, however, she was able to inch carefully towards making her days and nights like what they’d been before the Campbells.
    She began with work: No longer needing that wages-reducing one hour per day of free time that she’d been given at the charity shop to see to the needs of her niece and nephews, she returned to full-time employment. She reengaged with a class at Kensington and Chelsea College as well as with demonstration massages down at the sports centre in Portobello Green Arcade. She felt confident enough of how the Campbells were doing to extend her demonstration