The Manor

by Keane Jessie

  Charlie’s shouts of rage could be heard all over the house.

  ‘What the hell . . . ?’ Milly crossed the hall with Belle at her side. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked her mother, hearing the yells coming from behind the closed study door.

  ‘Just your dad, kicking off as usual,’ said Nula, who was used to hearing Charlie bawling the place down.

  Now she’d had another long spell away, had time to think, she realized that her mind had been playing tricks on her, that the psychiatrists were right; it had been her imagination, and really she had been cruel to Harlan, unintentionally cruel, and he must have seen her wariness around him as a rejection.

  She made up her mind that in future she would make an effort to be nicer to Harlan. Now she was better, things would be easier. She had a clear mind. That horrible black dog of depression had let her go. She was still on the meds, of course – just to keep her steady. And still keeping her journal, writing everything up, tucking photos inside the pages, explaining her life. But that was all right.

  Charlie emerged from the study, red-faced with rage.

  ‘That little bastard wants to watch his fucking step,’ he told Nula, and filled her in about the Langham business. ‘I’m off down to see to the animals,’ he said.

  A visit to his ‘menagerie’ always seemed to soothe Charlie. He said he’d set it up for the kids – but Nula reckoned he’d done it for himself. There were no fluffy bunnies down there, no cute pygmy goats or Shetland ponies. Spiders and reptiles were Charlie’s thing. Coincidentally they were Harlan’s too. But they were not Milly’s, or hers. ‘Got some new baby caimans. You want to see them, babes. They’re cute.’

  Nula didn’t think baby caimans were cute. They were creepy, emitting those weird cries and watching you with blank staring eyes that said: When I’m older, I will eat you.

  Charlie went out. Then Milly came and stood in the doorway, trailing Belle behind her.

  One of the new younger guys on the staff called Sammy was sitting beside the front door, reading the newspaper. The headlines shouted about Dickie Attenborough and Ben Kingsley winning Oscars for Gandhi. He looked up when the two young women crossed the hall and nodded at Milly. ‘All right?’ he said.

  Milly didn’t answer but Belle was suppressing a grin.

  ‘He likes you,’ she whispered to Milly. ‘Say the word, he’d be yours.’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Milly, but she did like Sammy. He was OK. She’d chatted to him once or twice. He worked for Dad, here at the house or on the cars or on the doors at Dad’s clubs or snooker halls, or at the furnishing factories. He’d told her about his own dad, who’d been an army man, ballistics or bomb disposal or something like that, and how Sammy had been a disappointment to him when he didn’t join the army too, preferring PPO work like this.

  ‘Mum? Can we have a word?’ she asked, opening the door to Nula’s sitting room.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ asked Nula.

  ‘I’m not sure about this,’ said Milly to Belle.

  ‘About what?’ asked Nula. ‘Come on in, don’t stand in the doorway.’

  The two of them stepped inside. Belle glanced back into the hall, and carefully closed the door. Then she followed Milly over and sat down beside her.

  ‘Well?’ said Nula, not liking the troubled expression on her daughter’s face.

  ‘We don’t want to upset you,’ said Milly.

  Nula smiled. ‘Come on. Spit it out.’

  Milly glanced at Belle again, then took a deep breath and told her mother about what she’d found back in the summer, in Harlan’s room.

  73

  ‘What you got to understand is, you work for us, not some pissing pitiful lowlife, all right?’ said Beezer.

  They were in a flat in Shoreditch. Two of Charlie Stone’s soldiers had a kid who didn’t look any older than eighteen pressed down on a piss-stinking mattress in the bedroom. There had been a girlfriend in the flat when they arrived, but Beezer had quickly ushered her out the front door and told her to fuck off and not to even think about telling anyone about this or next time he wouldn’t be so gentlemanly, did she understand what he meant?

  She understood. She went. And that left just her boyfriend, a spotty little oik with spiky blond hair, dressed up in a hat and eyeliner, like Boy George. Ten minutes into the visit, Charlie’s boys had his fancy pants off him and were holding him down on the bed while applying his girlfriend’s steam iron to his ball sack. His screams were echoing around the room, nearly deafening the lot of them.

  ‘I said, do you understand?’ asked Beezer.

  ‘Don’t think he did,’ said Harlan, grabbing the iron off one of Beezer’s cohorts and sending a long jet of steam billowing over the boy’s private parts. The screams were dying away to little more than tired choking barks. Tears of anguish were running down the boy’s thin cheeks, ruining his prettied-up hairstyle and smearing his make-up.

  ‘He’s had enough,’ said one of the men.

  Beezer nodded. The boy had got the message. He’d be careful about staying true to the cause, the Charlie Stone cause, in future. He wouldn’t want to risk this happening again.

  ‘Nah, he hasn’t,’ said Harlan, and again the steam billowed out with a loud, hungry hiss.

  The boy’s eyes rolled in his head. He was passing out with the pain.

  ‘Want some more, pretty boy?’ said Harlan, leaning over him, grinning.

  ‘I said that’s enough,’ said Beezer, and snatched the iron away. He moved over to the socket and yanked the plug out and stood the thing on the dressing table among the pots of rouge, an inch of dust and half-opened packets of coke. ‘We don’t want him out of work too long.’

  Harlan drew back, scowling. For a minute, Beezer thought that he was going to get a right-hander off his boss’s son. He’s enjoying this. Really getting off on it, thought Beezer with a cold shudder.

  All right, sometimes you had things to do. Unpleasant things. You didn’t have to bloody well enjoy it though. You didn’t have to be a fucking monster.

  Then Harlan composed himself.

  ‘OK,’ he said with a shrug, and went and lounged in the doorway, hands in pockets.

  Beezer went to the bathroom, dipped a towel in cold water and took it back out and dropped it onto the boy’s shrivelled, scarlet manhood. The boy’s eyes flickered open and he groaned.

  Beezer pointed a finger at him. ‘You remember this, all right? You work for Ch—’

  ‘Harlan Stone,’ said Harlan from the doorway.

  All the men standing around the bed froze.

  ‘Dad said I was in charge up here and I am, right?’ Harlan said, looking first at Beezer and then at the two others. ‘If any of you disagree with that, there’s still plenty of water left in that steam iron,’ he added with a smile that chilled them all.

  Beezer didn’t think he’d ever once heard Charlie say that Harlan should be in charge. Personally, he wouldn’t leave Harlan in charge of a dog, much less an outfit of the size and scale of Charlie’s. But what could you do? Cross Harlan and you were crossing Charlie too, and if Charlie got upset, blood was spilled. Nobody would be dishing out medals if anyone opened their stupid gobs and spoke out.

  ‘Fine by me,’ said Beezer.

  ‘That’s good,’ said Harlan, and they left the building.

  Later, Harlan and Beezer were in Charlie’s luxe apartment with a Tower Bridge view. Harlan had ditched the Langham because he was sick of hearing Charlie carping on about the expense of it, but he wasn’t going to rough it just to please that tight old cunt. This place would do him nicely, for now. As they sat there, Beezer said he was going to tell Harlan the facts of life.

  ‘You what?’ Harlan almost laughed. He knew all that shit. He’d had his first girl, a nobody, in the art cupboard at school, dreaming of Belle whilst he was doing it. And he would have Belle too, one day. Properly. He knew it. Her fucking father could say and do what he liked. Who did Terry Barton think he was, laying down the law to him,
to Harlan Stone?

  Terry Barton could go fuck himself.

  ‘Not those facts,’ said Beezer. ‘I mean the real ones. The ones that apply to the trade.’

  ‘OK. Go on then.’

  Beezer told him.

  ‘There’s basuco, they get that as a by-product in the jungle labs of South America. Looks and tastes like shit. Nobody’ll touch that except the street kids in Colombia. Turns ’em into zombies. The Medellin cartel were looking for something as strong as basuco but nicer for smell and taste, you see? Then a chemist who worked for the Cali cartel got it. Dissolved cocaine powder in ammonia, added water and bicarbonate of soda, heated it until the liquid boiled off. And there it was. Crack cocaine.’

  ‘OK. Go on,’ said Harlan.

  ‘Crack is quick. You’re on the ceiling, like, instantly,’ Beezer enthused. ‘And the best thing? It lasts forty, maybe fifty seconds. That’s all. Heroin will give you three or four hours’ worth of high. Straight cocaine will give you half an hour. Crack takes you higher, faster. It’s a high like no other and you come down from it always wanting more. You can get cocaine users hooked – maybe ten per cent of them – within two years. With crack? Eighty per cent of them are hooked within a fortnight. A fortnight! Can you believe that, boy?’

  Harlan believed it. He could see the years stretching ahead of him, all the money those poor stupid bastards out there on the streets or at their fancy dining tables would fetch him, because he was the sole heir to Charlie Stone’s manor.

  He was going to rule the whole fucking world.

  74

  Nula always avoided Charlie’s so-called ‘petting’ zoo. Lizards, geckos, tarantulas, snakes, caimans – they were like aliens, she often said. Not like a cat or a dog, something you could stroke and relate to. So Charlie was amazed to see her coming in there.

  He was feeding the caimans, tossing chicken carcasses into the water, when the door opened into the superheated interior jungle with its endless running waterfalls, wet moss-greened walls and tropical greenery. Seeing Nula there, he paused, chicken in hand. One of the caimans, the biggest one, George, eased closer, waiting.

  ‘What you doing down here, babe?’ he asked, distracted. There was only one buggy and he’d driven it down here. Nula must have walked, all this way. And she wasn’t much of a walker.

  Nula was out of breath. She hadn’t walked. She’d run all the way down here, through the grounds and then through the orchard. She had to talk to Charlie. She had to tell him what Milly and Belle had just told her. And that would prove it, once and for all. That she wasn’t mad. That she hadn’t been imagining things. Then she looked at what was moving near Charlie, hauling itself out of the black brackish water and up onto the stones . . .

  ‘Charlie!’ she shouted.

  The caiman he’d been tossing chicken to had lumbered further out, over the stones and on to the big ornamental rocks. Distracted by her arrival, Charlie had missed it. He looked down and the thing was there, right there. His heart was suddenly in his mouth. He stumbled back as his ‘pet’ approached, quicker than he would ever have expected. It was near his leg. Near enough to bite. Christ, the things could move. Thirty miles an hour, all the manuals said. He could be dragged in and drowned in an instant.

  Panicking, he tossed the chicken into the water, and the caiman instantly turned, plunging back in, its jaws gaping and then snapping shut on the thing, ripping it in half. Pieces of pallid flesh floated and then the caiman turned again, gulping down what was left. Charlie’s heart was thundering like a drum. His face was slick with sweat.

  Christ! It nearly had him.

  Charlie stepped back, out of the caiman enclosure, pushing Nula ahead of him. He shut the big thick plastic door, then rounded on his wife.

  ‘You fucking idiot! You don’t come in here when I’m feeding the caimans. You damned near got my leg chewed off, you daft mare.’

  Nula had been so shaken by what she’d been told that she hadn’t given it a second thought. She’d just blundered in.

  ‘Sorry, sorry, but I had to talk to you, it’s important, it’s . . .’ She ran out of breath and leaned a hand against his chest. ‘Oh God. I feel like I’m going to faint.’

  Charlie took her arm. ‘It’s the heat in here. Come on, let’s get outside.’

  Out in the fresh air, Nula began to feel better. There was a bench set out near to where the buggy was parked. She went to that and sat quickly down, breathing deeply, steadying herself. Charlie sat too, feeling weak with the aftermath of fear, and began rubbing her back.

  ‘You OK now?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah.’ Nula turned her head and stared at him. ‘I’ve just heard something, that’s all.’

  Charlie was frowning. ‘What have you heard?’

  ‘Milly found something in Harlan’s room in the summer.’

  ‘Dirty mags, was it? Come on. We’ve all done that at one time or another.’

  Nula gave him a look of pure disgust. Yeah, you dirty bastard – I bet you have.

  ‘It wasn’t anything like that. It was a tape recorder. She played the tape on it. And . . . he’d recorded Jake crying. He had it right there, recorded. And I think he was playing it sometimes when I was alone in the house, to frighten me. To make me think I was crazy.’

  ‘Babe . . .’ Charlie was shaking his head. He looked sad. Like he was going to say any minute now, Oh babe, I thought we’d covered all this . . .

  ‘Charlie, listen to me! Beezer saw Harlan going into Jake’s room after the christening, on the morning he died. I think . . . Charlie, this is awful but I think it’s the truth and I can’t get it out of my mind. I think Harlan killed Jake. That he was jealous of him. That he wanted to be number one son. He couldn’t stand the thought that Jake was always going to be your favourite.’

  Charlie stopped rubbing her back. He stood up sharply, walked away from the bench.

  Then he turned back and pointed a trembling finger at her.

  ‘You know what?’ he said.

  Nula dumbly shook her head.

  ‘You are fucking crazy,’ said Charlie, and he got in the buggy and drove away, back up to the house, leaving her sitting there, aghast.

  75

  The parents weren’t talking. Milly had sweated over whether to tell Mum about what she’d discovered, and now she wished she hadn’t. But it had tormented her for so long. It had to be said. And now Dad and Mum were ice-cool with each other, barely polite.

  The best thing to do was keep out of their way. She did a few laps of the indoor pool, happy that Harlan wasn’t here. She didn’t know what he got up to in the city, and she didn’t want to know, either. Dull business stuff, she guessed. Learning all about brocades and sofa stuffing. Really riveting. After she got bored with the pool, she decided to go down to the gatehouse and find Belle, have a chat.

  She dried off, combed out her hair, dressed and set off down the drive. Maybe she’d stay for lunch, escape the parents and the frosty atmosphere; Jill always made her welcome. Felt sorry for her, she supposed, with Nula half off her head most of the time, Charlie always raging.

  When she got close to the gatehouse, she let herself in the little gate in the picket fence and was approaching the front door up the path when she heard voices coming from the back garden. She could hear Belle’s voice, and Nipper’s. Something Nipper was saying brought her up short against the house wall.

  ‘. . . why would you get your knickers in a twist about that? It’s just sex. Just fun. That’s all. I told you.’

  ‘Yeah, well. I’m not sure that’s all it is for Milly.’

  ‘Christ, I hope it is.’ Nipper gave a harsh laugh, and it was an ugly sound, gloating, unkind. ‘Grow up, for Christ’s sake. Look, Milly’s glad someone’s shagging her, and I’m getting some relief whenever I’m stuck down here – which, thank Christ, isn’t too often any more – without any complications.’

  Milly listened and felt like she was going to throw up. His voice was horrible. Cold. Dismissive. Th
ey’d been going out for quite a while now and this was what he truly thought about her. They’d last slept together only days ago. She felt tears of humiliation start in her eyes and run down her cheeks.

  ‘Milly?’

  It was Jill, coming up the path toward her.

  Milly started guiltily, shoved herself away from the wall, swiped wetness from her eyes. She didn’t answer. Then Belle appeared from the back garden; she’d been riding this morning and she was wearing jodhpurs. Nipper appeared too.

  Oh Christ!

  Milly shoved her way past Jill and lumbered off down the path, flinging open the gate. Behind her she could hear them all talking, Jill’s voice mingling with Belle’s and Nipper’s. She had to get away, back to the main house, she couldn’t face any of them right now, she couldn’t bear them to know she’d heard that.

  ‘Milly!’

  Someone was tugging at her arm, halting her. It was Belle, her face a picture of concern.

  ‘Milly, stop! We . . . what are you—’

  Milly felt swamped with rage then. Perfect, pretty Belle. No one would ever shag her as an act of charity, would they?

  ‘You knew,’ she gasped out.

  ‘What—’ Belle looked pale all of a sudden.

  ‘You knew he was making use of me. I heard you, the pair of you, having a laugh at my expense. You knew what he was doing, and you let it carry on, you didn’t tell me, Christ I hate you.’ Milly wrenched her arm from Belle’s grasp and ran on, up the drive. A long black car swept past, going up to the house, but she barely even noticed.

  ‘Milly, I didn’t . . .’ Belle was saying, but Milly didn’t stop.

  Nipper would have to look elsewhere for his charity shags in future, because she didn’t want to know. Not any more. Anyway, didn’t she have other avenues open to her? That new guy of her dad’s, Sammy, liked her. And creepy old Javier Matias had been sending her flowers, asking her to dine alone with him.