The Plan

He didn’t go downstairs. Not yet.

Dev’s voice had been coming up through the floor half the night — the whole block, thirty years, my dad — and there was a letter on the desk that wanted answering, and the old Luther would already have been down there with a cup of tea and a sympathetic face and nothing else. But the old Luther had spent four years listening to people ring a complaints line in a rage, and he’d learned exactly what a rage got you. Nothing. The ones who got what they wanted were the ones who’d sat down first and worked out what they had.

So he made tea, with sugar, and opened the notebook, and had a proper look at what he had.

“Right,” he said to the screen. “Tell me what you can actually do.”

It waited.

“Can you do anything to the world? Move something. Make somebody do something. Change a record.”

NO. I DO NOT TOUCH THE WORLD. I TOUCH YOU.

He wrote that down. A part of him — the part raised on films — had been hoping it could just fix things. It couldn’t. Whatever got done, he’d have to do it, with his own hands and his own mouth. The screen was a set of tools and a scoreboard. Nothing else.

“Can you see the future?”

NO.

“Read minds?”

NO. I GUESS. I GUESS WELL.

“How do I get points?”

QUESTS. CONTROL — OF PEOPLE, THINGS, PLACES. CONTROL IS SCORED BY KIND: FEAR — PAYS LEAST. FADES. DEBT — PAYS MORE. LASTS. LOYALTY — PAYS FAR MORE. GROWS. DEPENDENCE — PAYS MOST.

He read it three times, and somewhere in the third reading something in him went very quiet.

He’d thought, his whole life, that power was the lads who’d walked four abreast. Shoulders and volume. The top line. And the top line, according to this, was the cheap one — the one that faded. The people who actually owned things had never once raised their voices at him. His mother didn’t shout; she compared. Halcyon didn’t threaten; it scheduled. The man in Purley with the solicitor didn’t send anyone round first — he sent a letter and let you frighten yourself. They’d all been working the bottom two lines, quietly, forever, and calling it just how things are, and Luther had been on the receiving end of it since he could read.

Fine. He could read this too.

“What does STREET need?”

THE BLOCK STANDS. THE STREET KNOWS YOUR NAME. 400 DP

He looked out of the window. Sixty-odd flats, a chicken shop, a launderette, a barber’s. One landlord who’d sent everyone the same letter on the same day, on the assumption — never wrong yet — that a street like this doesn’t answer back.

The old Luther would have read that quest as save the street. He could feel that reading sitting there, warm and obvious, wanting to be picked up.

He didn’t pick it up.

Because the street wasn’t the point. The street was the first rung. Sixty households that were frightened and unowned, which meant sixty households nobody else was buying — the cheapest stock he’d ever see. And above them, a landlord with a portfolio, who’d just put his own name on sixty pieces of paper that weren’t legal. That wasn’t a threat. That was an opening.

He turned to a fresh page and wrote his own ladder next to the System’s.

1. The people. Cheap. Nobody else is buying. Get them. 2. The landlord. Every crime he’s already committed is a lever. Don’t stop him — squeeze him. 3. The buildings. He’ll sell or he’ll lose them. Either way they’re mine. 4. Rent. A base. Money that comes in while I’m doing something else.

He stopped, pen over the page, and let the next one come, because it had been sitting at the back of his head since the hospital.

5. Halcyon.

Four years on the phones. A company that was quietly dying — everyone on the floor knew it; the dialler was down more than it was up and the good accounts kept going to Leeds — and it was sitting on the one thing he now knew how to use. Sixty thousand angry customers a month, every one of them ringing in to say exactly what they needed and what they were afraid of. Halcyon had been paying him eleven pounds an hour to listen to the most valuable thing in South London and then apologise for it. One day he’d own that building. It had issued him a visitor’s badge, and he’d keep it.

6. Croydon.

He looked at the six lines. They looked insane. They also looked, in the flat grey morning light, entirely doable, one at a time, if you didn’t blink.

Under the ladder he wrote his rules. Not the screen’s. His.

Fear is cheap. Use it where it’s cheapest. Never where it’s the only thing. Loyalty costs. It’s also mine forever. Buy it. Never pay for what you can be owed. No kids. Everything else is arithmetic.

He read the last line twice. Then he went to the Shop and bought Iron Will, because he was about to start a fight with a man who sent people round, and the first thing to fix in a fight like that wasn’t his arm. It was the flinch.

SKILL ACQUIRED: IRON WILL — Lv. 1 ALL SALES FINAL. DOMINATION POINTS: 70

It didn’t feel like anything. He’d braced for something, and got quiet instead — like a noise he’d lived beside so long he’d stopped hearing it had been switched off at the wall. He tested it. He thought about the lorry, the horn arriving late, the sky. His hands stayed on the desk, being hands.

“Right,” he said. “Now Dev.”

---

Dev Mistry was forty-four and had aged since Thursday. He was behind the counter reading the letter again, lips moving, and he looked up at Luther like a man who’d forgotten anyone lived upstairs.

“Morning. Can I see your lease?”

It was in a biscuit tin in the back under a photo of a man with a moustache and a pair of ribbon-cutting scissors. 1995. Luther read it at the counter while the fryers warmed up.

The little card sat by Dev’s shoulder, where only Luther could see it. Sick with it. Wants: to not be the one who lost it.

He read the lease twice. Then he put it down and gave Dev the news in plain words: the letter wasn’t a notice, it didn’t cite anything, it was designed to make people leave on their own. The lease had the protection of the ’54 Act because Dev’s father had never signed that away. Aldous couldn’t just end it — he’d need a proper notice and a real reason, and he’d have to prove the reason, and there was no planning application on the council’s site. Nothing. The man had sixty letters out and nothing behind any of them.

Dev put both hands flat on the counter.

“He sent that to my dad’s shop. Knowing that.”

“He sent it to everyone. It’s cheaper than lawyers and it’s always worked.” Luther let that land. “Don’t ring them. Don’t reply. If they call, say in writing and hang up. I’ll draft you one letter, and it’ll be short.”

“How much?”

Here it was. The old reflex reached for don’t be daft. And underneath the reflex, new, was the quiet floor the skill had made, and on the floor stood a man who had a ladder in a notebook upstairs.

“I don’t want a fee,” Luther said.

Dev frowned.

“I want an arrangement. Anyone on this parade gets a letter, a knock, a problem with that man — it comes to me. You introduce me. The launderette, the barber, the couple at sixteen, all of them. And when this is done, and I mean done — not when he’s stopped, when he’s gone — you’ll remember you were first.” He held Dev’s eye, and the eye contact, he noticed, wasn’t costing him anything. “I’m going to own this building, Dev. Not today. But you’ll want to have been on my side early.”

Dev looked at him for a long moment, and Luther watched him do the maths a man does when the bloke from the flat upstairs, who’s said perhaps two hundred words to him in three years, has just said I’m going to own this building and, for some reason, doesn’t sound mad.

Then Dev went out the back and came back with two hundred pounds from a different tin and put it on the counter anyway.

“Retainer,” Dev said. “My dad always said, pay the man, then he’s yours.”

“Your dad,” said Luther, taking it, “had it the wrong way round.”

CONTROL ESTABLISHED — MISTRY, DEV DEBT → LOYALTY — 40% +90 DP

---

Wes came at two and found the notebook open on the desk, and read the six lines before Luther could turn the page, because Wes read everything you put in front of him with total seriousness.

He read them twice. Then he sat down on the bed.

“So we’re stopping the eviction.”

“No,” Luther said. “We’re taking the block.”

Wes didn’t say anything for a bit. He looked at the six lines, and then at Luther, and then at the crutch leaning against the desk, and Luther watched him arrive at the same place Dev had: that the man saying this ought to sound mad, and didn’t.

“How?”

“Everybody on this street is frightened and nobody’s on their side, which makes them the cheapest thing in Croydon. I’m going to be on their side. Loudly. Every problem, every letter, every boiler. Six weeks from now there won’t be a door on this road that doesn’t know my name.” He tapped the second line. “And every problem I fix is a crime he’s already committed. Fake notices. Fees that don’t exist. I collect them. Then I don’t go to the council with them. I go to him.”

“To do what?”

“To offer him a way out.” Luther heard his own voice and it was level and it was cold and — this was the part he’d remember — it was enjoying itself. “He’s got a portfolio. He’ll have debts against it. Everyone like him does. When he’s got sixty tenants who won’t leave and a file that ends with a headline, he’ll want rid of this block. And he’ll want rid of it cheaply, to someone who’ll make the file go away.”

Wes worked it through. “That’s you.”

“That’s me.”

“You’ve got two hundred and sixty quid.”

“Today.”

Wes rubbed the back of his neck. He was, Luther could see, alarmed — properly, the way an honest man gets when the friend he’s sworn himself to turns out to have a page like that in a notebook. And he was also, visibly, not going anywhere.

“I know the barber,” Wes said, eventually. “If you want the street, you start with Sal. He’s got every door in his head.”

---

They went to Sal’s, and Luther sat in the chair and let a man who’d cut hair on this street for forty years take off what the hospital had left, and asked one question at a time, and listened. Who’d been here longest. Who’d had a knock. Who was behind. By the time the cape came off, the question marks in the notebook had turned into names, and Sal had agreed — without quite being asked — to tell everyone who came through his door that the lad above Dev’s read leases.

On the way back, Wes stopped on the pavement.

“Don’t look.”

Across the road a man in a black puffer jacket was walking slowly along the block with his phone held up, photographing the doors. The shop. The flats. The bins. He looked across at the two of them, one beat longer than a stranger would, and moved on.

“That’s Kenny,” Wes said. “The one who does the knocking. Sal reckons he’s on licence.”

Luther watched him go, and felt the thing in his chest that used to be fear turn over, look at the man, and settle.

He didn’t feel angry. What he felt, watching Kenny Doyle photograph the bins, was closer to what a mechanic feels looking at a car with the bonnet up. Bit of a thug. Paid by the day. On licence, so frightened of going back. Loyal to nobody — Aldous pays him, that’s all. A tool. Just working for the wrong man.

“We’ll want him,” Luther said.

Wes looked at him. “Want him?”

“He knocks on every door on this street. He knows who’s scared and who isn’t. He knows what Aldous is paying and what he’s planning.” Luther started walking again, crutch and all. “Nobody’s ever offered Kenny a better deal in his life. Somebody should.”

Wes said nothing for most of the walk back, which for Wes was a speech.

At the door, Luther looked at the screen, at the quest sitting there — THE STREET, 400 DP — and, above it, the rung with the padlock on.

“And DISTRICT?”

LOCKED.

“Not for long,” he said, and went up the stairs one at a time.

DOMINATION POINTS: 160 THE STREET KNOWS YOUR NAME: 2 / 60