“Christ, woman - you’d think you’d never set foot on the Underground before, the way you go on.”
“Well, you’re here in one piece, anyway,” El said, more breathlessly than she’d have liked - rising from her seat and feeling her lungs re-inflate to their regular capacity.
“Barely,” Sita muttered.
Unlike Ruby, Sita had made no secret of her struggle to adapt to their currently reduced circumstances. Where Ruby had remained in West Hampstead with her sons, and El had trailed after Rose and Sophie to Harriet’s place on the Holloway Road, Sita had had no choice but to throw herself on the mercy of her own family. In practice, this had meant her son Rohan who, though based in Copenhagen, had been wise enough to channel a percentage of the profits from his civil engineering firm into the acquisition of an apartment on Ludgate Hill with space enough to accommodate periodically-rotating families of tourists - and, at present, a disgruntled sixty-something woman with a very extensive wardrobe who’d returned home to her flat in Kensington a fortnight earlier to find, dangling from the letterbox, an eviction notice from her landlord giving her, in a move she found particularly perfidious, only the barest minimum of notice.
She’d refused point-blank to sell or even pawn some of her more liquid assets: the jewellery, art and furniture collections she’d spent a lifetime assiduously assembling, and which, El was sure, would have raised her more than a few million, either at a reputable auction house or via one of the fences she and Ruby had worked with over the years.
(“I’d rather sell a kidney, darling,” she’d answered, when El had enquired).
And so, with the rest of her assets frozen and unable to stretch to the chauffeured Corniche in which she typically travelled - and with the fleet of classic vehicles Ruby kept at her lockup in Colindale impounded - she’d been forced to endure what she considered the ultimately indignity: traversing the city by bus, or on the Underground.
“Let’s have it, then,” Karen said, taking a final slurp of the hot chocolate and laying the mug on the floor beside Fergus. “What have you got?”
“Not a bleedin’ lot,” Ruby told her, with a shake of her head. “Either a lot of people have suddenly got very, very tight-lipped, or that Hannah’s better at keeping to the shadows than I’d have gave her credit for. ‘Cause we must’ve got a round in for half of North London this last week, and not one of ‘em there said a dicky-bird.”
While El had been in mourning for her cottage, and she and Rose and Sophie had been adjusting to life under Harriet’s roof - and while Karen, apparently, had been stocking up on precious metals in anticipation of societal breakdown - Ruby and Sita had been probing their network for intel: on the hacking and the arson, but also on Hannah herself.
The plan had been for the two of them to come to Kingston and share what they’d discovered, and for Karen to pick up the thread: to follow the clues they’d assembled down the inevitable electronic rabbit-hole and, eventually, back to whoever had done them over so comprehensively.
All of which was predicated on there being clues to follow; on the myriad thieves and grifters and kiters and cracksmen Ruby and Sita knew between Waterloo and High Barnet having something worth telling them in the first place.
“Fuck,” said Karen. “Nothing?”
“Not a peep,” said Sita. “And it didn’t seem to me that any of them were holding back some morsel of value. I’m afraid the whole undertaking may have been rather a waste of time.”
“Which means,” Ruby added, “we ain’t no closer than we were to getting back what got took.”
“What now, then?” El asked - an unappetising short-term future of spare mattresses and borrowed clothes and queuing for the bathroom flashing before her eyes.
“We keep going,” Ruby said. “Keep asking and keep looking ’til something turns up. Which it will, ‘cause it always does.”
I’ll do a job, El told herself. It can’t be a long con, because I’ve got nothing to offer upfront as a convincer and I haven’t had to find a mark in so long I might as well have forgotten how to do it. But I used to like the short con; used to be good at it.
I can get good at it again, if I have to.
Then, when I’ve got a bit more cash to play with…
“I can just about see you schemin’,” Ruby told her - her uncanny ability to read and interpret El’s thoughts never less than unnerving. “You’re thinking about doing a job, ain’t you? Something to bring a bit of money in?”
How does she know? El wondered. How does she know, every bloody time?
“Maybe,” she conceded.
“Stands to reason. It’s no fun, having your pockets emptied. ‘Specially when you’re used to working with a bit more capital than we got between us here and now. Lucky for you, I’ve been doin’ a bit of thinkin’ about that myself.”
“Thinking about what?” Karen asked.
“About a job, darling,” Sita said. “A little something to keep us afloat while we’re trying to restore ourselves to dignity.”
“You’ve found a mark?” said El, suspiciously.
Ruby looked to Sita, and Sita to Ruby - the same quick, furtive trade of symbolically loaded glances that had been driving El to distraction since she was a teenager.
“In a manner of speaking,” Ruby said. Then: “Though found ain’t exactly the word I’d use. It’s not a new mark we’re talking about. More like… one I’ve been savin’. For a rainy day."
“And I think we can all agree,” Sita added, “that since the clouds have rather drenched us these last few weeks… that day may be upon us.”
Chapter 6
Kensington, London, February 1941
They walked in lockstep, her smaller strides working to match his longer, quicker ones as they passed the Albert Hall and rounded the corner onto Kensington Gore.
They might have been father and daughter, Dolly thought: she in the nicest, cleanest party dress she had, the green one with the polka dots that went in at the waist; he in his dinner jacket and bow tie and a pipe like Clark Gable’s clenched between his teeth, and the both of them in long black coats and soft, warm leather gloves. Father and daughter or uncle and niece, strolling home together after a night at the theatre or a double-bill at the Majestic.
“This is madness,” he said quietly, taking the pipe from his mouth but still walking, not losing his pace. “You are aware of that, aren’t you? Sheer and utter madness.”
“You said you’d do it,” she replied, just as quietly, not letting her own step falter. “Said you’d show me how.”
“Because, for now, you have me over a barrel. But what sort of child are you, to want this? It’s monstrous.”
“You do it.”
“And I have no qualms about confessing to my own monstrosity. But it’s hardly something to aspire to, now is it? A girl your age ought to be stuck on… oh, I don’t know, dolls, or Hopscotch, or something. Climbing trees or playing marbles with your friends. Not this.”
“I don’t see why you think it’s so peculiar. Someone must’ve showed you how to do it.”
“Not as a child. Good God.”
“Well, I know my own mind, whatever you think I am. And you said you’d do it.”
It sounded petulant, even in her own head; made her sound, she thought, every inch the child he’d accused her of being.
But he had said; had promised to take her along with him, if only because she’d told him she’d get the law on him if he didn’t, and because he’d believed her when she’d told him there’d be consequences for him, if he did anything to shut her up.
“I want to know why you do it,” she’d told him, that first day in his house in Haverstock Hill - when she’d jumped through enough hoops to convince him that she wasn’t going away, no matter what he said, and that he couldn’t make her. “Why you kill them. And what it’s like.”
He’d given her the same uncertain stare he had on the doorstep, before he’d invited her in - like she was a tiger he’d pic
ked up by the tail, thinking she was a ginger tom.
“What it’s like?” he’d said, his mouth hanging open. “You want to know what it’s like to kill someone?”
“Yeah. When you, you know… wrap your hands ‘round their throats, or stick a knife in them, or however you do it. Wait, though - it the same every time? Or have you got a few different tricks you like to use, to keep you from getting bored?”
She’d been so excited, the words had just spilled out of her - a long, exhilarated cascade of them.
He’d looked back at her as if she’d slapped him in the face.
“What are you?” he’d said - caught, she’d thought, between revulsion and morbid curiosity.
“What am I? You’re the one who’s been going ‘round murdering people, not me. Anyway, you’ve not answered the first thing I asked you.”
“Which was? You seem to have come armed with rather a lot of questions.”
“Why. Why you’re doing it. Are you a Jerry, is that it? One of them secret assassins? Did Hitler send you over here?”
He seemed almost offended by the accusation.
“A Nazi? Certainly not. I’d swallow cyanide before I bowed to that madman.”
“What, then?”
He’d narrowed his eyes at her, behind the pop-bottle spectacles.
“You’re not going to go away, are you?” he’d asked her, with a sort of resignation.
She’d shook her head.
He’d regarded her a minute longer, as if he’d wanted to be absolutely sure of something, before he told her anything else. Then he’d taken off the spectacles, rubbed at the bridge of his nose - exactly like the librarian he wasn’t, but could have been mistaken for at a distance - and walked across the sitting room to the drinks cabinet, where he’d poured two fingers of what she’d come to recognise later as a very good Scotch into a brandy glass and downed it in one.
“Little girl,” he’d said, when the glass was empty, “do you happen to know of the phrase contract killer?”
He came to a stop in front of one of the fancy-looking blocks of flats that lined the road, so suddenly she almost ran into the back of him as she skidded to her own, jerking halt.
“Is this it?” she said, the thrill of it - of what they were about to do, the pair of them - rising up in her like champagne bubbles. “Are we here?”
He spun around and forward, until there was barely an inch of air between them, and pressed a hand to her mouth. Not gently, either.
“You do not speak,” he told her, practically whispering into her ear. “Your being here at all is an idiocy. A dangerous idiocy, and for both of us. But if you are to be here, then you do not speak, is that understood? Not a word, not a breath, not a sound.”
She nodded, entirely silently.
He released the hand that covered her mouth, grudgingly slowly, and reached with it into the inner lining of his dinner jacket.
When he withdrew it, there was a key tucked between the gloved knuckles of the fingers: small and silver and gleaming so bright it might’ve been cut only the day before.
Silent as a cat-burglar, he pressed it into the lock on the door leading into the building; twisted it right, with surgical precision.
The door sprung open, and he crept inside, leaving her just enough time to follow before he let it fall shut behind them.
There was a lift in the vestibule, a chunky-looking copper coffin inside a black steel cage, but he ignored it, leading them instead up three flights of stairs and along a narrow hallway with a moss-green carpet, thick and dark enough under her feet to make her feel like she was trekking through a forest.
The door he seemed to be searching for was at the very end of the corridor: a solid mahogany affair with the number 308 above the frame and a discreet bronze plaque identifying the occupant or occupants as Caster.
On reaching it, he stopped again, though this time she was ready for it and was able to still herself before she went flying forward. As before, he reached into the lining of his jacket - the left side, this time - and retrieved a key; slid it into the lock, opened the door and let the both of them in.
It was dark inside; not quite pitch black, the way it had been outside with the lampposts off, but dark just the same, and it took every bit of concentration she could muster to keep up with him as he moved, fox-like, down the hallway and towards a set of double-doors at the bottom.
They passed a desk along the way - a sort of writing bureau with the roller down that she nearly but not quite bumped into in the murk. Something big and heavy had been placed on top of it. A statue, she saw as her eyes adjusted: a great charcoal-coloured, foreign-looking thing with a long-nosed head and shoulders but no body, rough enough around the edges that she wouldn’t have been surprised to discover it had been carved out of a lump of mountain rock.
He picked it up in one fist; held it up in front of him like an oil lamp, and kept right on walking.
It was a bedroom, behind the double-doors - she could make that out even in the gloom. A bedroom with a man in it: a young man, good-looking and clean shaved. Almost a boy, really - curled up fast asleep in the four-poster bed in the middle of the room with the blankets pulled up to his neck and a plump pile of pillows supporting him from behind. He was snoring, gently; out for the count.
With great care, the thin-faced man set the statue he’d picked up down on the bedroom floor; unbuttoned his coat, took it off and passed it to Dolly. She took it wordlessly, slinging it over her forearm; he ducked his head at her, in acknowledgement if not thanks, and took hold of the statue again, his grip tightening around it.
He was across the room in a heartbeat, statue raised above his head. The man in the bed didn’t stir; didn’t so much as roll over in his sleep.
The statue didn’t crack, when the thin-faced man brought it down onto the skull of the sleeping man in the bed. But the man’s skull did - the breaking-eggshell sound of it cutting through the dark silence in the bedroom like the crack of a whip.
Something like an electric current raced through Dolly’s veins, under her skin. It was something else, the sight of it, even in the gloom. She’d never known anything like it; never felt anything near as alive as looking at the cracked skull made her feel.
She wanted more.
She inched closer to the bed; to the thin-faced man, the bloody statue in his hand.
The second blow brought gouts of dark red blood and something grey-green that she thought might have been liquifying bits of battered brain-matter spilling from the skull onto the pillows. For the third blow, the thin-faced man changed course - aiming the statue not at the skull but at the no-longer-snoring, very likely dead man’s face.
His nose and cheekbones shattered like glass; more blood and fragments of bone flew from him onto the pillows, the blankets, the thin-faced man’s dark shirt and dickie-bow.
That seemed to be enough.
The thin-faced man stepped away from the bed, opened his palm and let the statue roll out of his hand and onto the carpet.
“Now,” he said, taking a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiping the blood from his face with it, “you may speak, if you absolutely must.”
The excitement had left her flushed and breathless, sent her heart bouncing like a jackhammer in her chest; it took her a second or two to pull herself together enough that she could speak without tripping over her words.
“Who was he?” she asked.
She’d asked before; first, when the thin-faced man had told her where they were going, and then again on their walk from the Underground to the Albert Hall. Both times he’d ignored her.
This time, at least, he answered.
“Just a boy,” he told her. He finished with the handkerchief, replaced it in his pocket, snatched the coat from her hands and, slipping both arms inside, began to button it all the way to the throat. “A boy with an inheritance, who married unwisely. You might be surprised how often those two sets of circumstances converge.”
She considered what he’d said.
“His wife paid you to do it?” she said.
“With some minor monetary assistance from her lover, I believe. How else would I have got hold of the keys to the marital home? How else would I have known for sure our boy would be… let’s say… too tired to put up a fight?”
“She knocked him out? Slipped him chloral hydrate, or something?”
“A sleeping pill or two, that’s all. But it seemed to do the trick, didn’t it?”
He looked back across the room at the pummelled corpse with something like professional pride.
A job well done, she thought. Bloody well done.
“What now?” she asked him.
“That really depends,” he said. “Since you’ve insisted on inserting yourself into the proceedings - how useful do you think you might make yourself?”
It wasn’t quite so exciting as the bludgeoning had been - didn’t give her quite the thrill of seeing the brains of the young man in the bed tumble out of his head onto the mattress. But it was something. And after what she’d just seen the thin-faced man do, she’d take any crumb he’d throw her way.
“I can help,” she said, trying to come across more nonchalant than she felt.
He fixed her with yet another one of his stares. It was like being x-rayed, she thought; like having your mind dissected under a microscope.
“Yes,” he said, still looking at her through the darkness. “I think you probably can, at that. Pull out some of those drawers, then, will you? If this young man’s wife is going to be calling the police about a robbery when she eventually comes home, we’re going to need to leave her more of a mess than this.”
“Are you satisfied?” he asked, on their way back to the Underground. “Have you taken whatever it was you felt you needed from this experience?”
He was making fun of her, she knew. Sneering at her.
The Remembrance Page 6
