Free The Fall by Claire McGowan

tightened.
    ‘Ow! In my jacket, OK?’
    He went and was back in seconds, emptying the purse over the table. The blonde girl’s Oyster card fell out, twenty pounds cash, video and gym cards. Coins bounced tinnily across the small kitchen; one hit the door of the microwave. Keisha felt weak. ‘See? Nothing there.’
    ‘Fuck.’ Suddenly his arm was on her throat and she was backed up against the fridge. It was such a fucking small kitchen, she always said that. ‘You take something out?’
    ‘No. For Christ’s – sake!’ She choked in air.
    ‘Nothing with her address?’
    ‘You’re hurting me!’
    ‘Fuck.’ He let her go.
    ‘She’s just a dumb white girl, she didn’t even see them coming. Why do you want her address? Why did you really go? I know you didn’t want to pay your respects, whatever shit you said to that Rachel.’
    ‘Shut up.’ He turned round in a circle, rubbing his chin.
    ‘You want to find out where she lives, is that it? But why? Why, Chris? It’s not ’cos you liked him, Anthony – you said he was a jumped-up tosser. He wouldn’t pay you, would he, was that it?’ The words were tumbling out of her like a train in that bit of a film where you can’t stop it and it goes falling over the cliff. ‘You went back to the club? Is that where you went? I know it wasn’t ketchup on your shoes, I’m not fucking stupid.’ She couldn’t stop talking.
    Chris was pacing in the small kitchen. One two three, one two three. ‘I said fucking shut it, Keisha. I’m warning you.’
    But she never could control her mouth. ‘Did you see him dead, is that it? You didn’t want the police to know you went back? But you wouldn’t get in trouble if you just tried to help—’ She felt an odd surge of something, like her stomach was doing somersaults. ‘Were you afraid? Fuck, Chris, fucking hell – is that why you went today? Why won’t you tell me? What did you do ?’
    There was a crash – Chris had snatched the bottle off the table and smashed it. The air smelled of beer and he turned, screaming. ‘I told you to shut it! You never learn!’
    ‘Stop fucking shouting at me, I’m trying to help! We could just tell someone—’
    And there was her, smart-arse Keisha Collins, who sneered at the poor white girl for not seeing her beating coming, who really should have known better. She was still surprised somehow when his hand came up and his ring connected with her cheekbone, and his foot with her knee.
    ‘You stupid cow,’ he swore, as his fist came down. ‘You’re going nowhere.’ The jagged edge of the table came up and flew at her face with shocking speed. ‘You’re talking to no one.’
    Really, you could never see it coming, however much you should know.
Charlotte
    By the time Charlotte had been taken away to have her face stitched up, a young reporter from the local paper, twenty-four years old and fresh from City Journalism School, had finished typing up his routine court reports and, with an eye out for a good story, the one that would lift his career out of the court circulars and car boot sales and into the big time, decided to place a call to the newsdesk of Metro . Doing a search for other bankers sent into meltdown by the recession – suicides, shoot-outs, murders – he started to draft a story on the Banker Butchers, playing with alliteration in the margins of his notebook.
    Calls were made, names Googled. While Charlotte was queuing to have her lip stitched, it was all over the news – London banker charged with murder . Soon Charlotte’s phone had started to ring, and ring, and ring. But it was still on silent in her bag, and she was sitting in the Royal Free waiting to have her face sewn back together.
    It was after eight when Charlotte finally left the hospital, having waited for hours with an ice pack held to her face that smelled strongly of dirty old freezers. A locum doctor from India jabbed her mouth with a local anaesthetic and then pulled the thread through her