“She’s been bloody lucky,” Barbara told Ruby - the stiff Ulster vowels and vestigial lilt of an accent, softened only a little by forty years in London, clearly underlining her disapproval. “Very bloody lucky. Her and your wee boy both.”
She dropped the needle into the disposable sharps box she’d brought with her; pulled first her left hand, then her right free of their blue nitrile sheaths.
“I won’t be asking what it is youse all have got yourselves mixed up in,” she added. “But I hope you’ve got yourselves an exit strategy, is what I will say. I might not be around to sew youse up, the next time.”
“That ain’t all of it, is it?” said Ruby, when Barbara Potter had gone and Sita had related to her and Dexter an abridged version of the story she’d told El and Rose and Karen. “There’s more to it.”
She looked long and hard at Sita, now reclining like Ariadne on a Rococo chaise lounge - her eyes closed and the back of one hand resting on her forehead.
“Not now,” she replied. “Later. We’ll talk later.”
When they’re gone, you mean, El thought, with the irritation that prickled her whenever she became aware of the two old women conspiring to withhold information - some clue or piece of a puzzle they’d decided it wasn’t necessary for El, for example, to know.
But Ruby - the firmest advocate El had ever known for keeping things from others for what she decreed to be their own good - seemed to El’s surprise to have no patience for it either, here and now.
“I ain’t interested in secrets,” she said softly. “Not from this lot - not no more. If there’s something to say, you ought to say it to the rest of them an’ all.”
El flashed back, involuntarily, to a scene in the kitchen of Rose’s Notting Hill house the previous year - to another knife, thickened with blood and tissue, its grip clenched tight in Ruby’s hand and its blade buried deep in the neck of the man who’d probably have killed them all, given the chance. To the others who’d watched it happen: Karen, her ribs smashed and jaw broken; Rose, paralysed with shock and fear; Sita, the only one of them with a clear enough head to decide what needed to come next, what would have to be done.
To Dexter and Michael - honest, law-abiding Michael - carrying the body out of the house in a Matryoshka nest of cling film, duct tape, rubber sheets and carpet, because their Mum and Auntie Sita had asked them to.
Maybe, she thought, there weren’t many secrets worth keeping, after that.
“You know, don’t you?” said Karen. “The pair of you know it weren’t Hartwood that did Michael.”
Ruby seemed genuinely stunned.
“It weren’t Hartwood?” she said. “How’d you know?”
Karen sized her up, sceptically - then, apparently convinced that her shock was real and not feigned, answered:
“He ain’t got it in him. He was shitting it when El started throwing her weight around. And he pissed himself when I had that water pistol of yours pressed to his head - literally pissed himself. Like he’d never seen a gun before, let alone had one pointed right at him. Bloke like that… he wouldn’t have the stomach for real violence. And I can’t see him having the sort of connections that’d do it for him if he bunged some cash their way. A proper criminal would’ve laughed in his face if he tried.”
“I have to say, I agree,” Rose added. “I can well imagine him making threats from a distance, over the phone where there was no possibility of an immediate retaliation. But in person? No.”
“Bleedin’ hell,” said Ruby, half to herself. “And you’re sure about this, are you?”
“Never been surer,” said Karen. “Man who leaves a puddle on the bedroom floor when you put a scare on him ain’t a man who’d put himself on the hook for murder. Just wouldn’t happen.”
El turned to Sita - Sita, who’d stayed conspicuously silent through this last exchange.
“You knew, though,” she said. “You knew it wasn’t Hartwood.”
Sita opened her eyes; removed her hand from her forehead and sat upright on the sofa, her expression grim.
“Not before,” she replied gravely - all trace of irony and melodrama gone from her voice. “You must believe me, darling - I’d never have sent you off to chase your tails in the provinces if I’d so much as suspected that someone else was responsible for what was done to Michael. That boy is as good as my own child - I’ve wanted nothing more than to see the creature who hurt him brought low.”
“Before when?” asked Ruby - more mildly than El might have expected.
“Before tonight. Before… this.”
She gestured to her own, wounded arm.
“You think the person who attacked you was the same person that attacked Michael?” said Rose.
It was a logical conclusion to draw, El thought. But it was baffling, just the same - the idea that the same assailant would go after both a man as straight as Michael and a woman as inherently crooked as Sita. For all their closeness, the two of them ran - at least by day - in very different circles, the Venn diagram of their professional lives overlapping only on those few occasions when Sita happened to be running a job on a banker or a broker in the City.
Unless it wasn’t the job that had marked them as targets, but a more personal grievance altogether.
Sita didn’t reply.
Instead, she got up from the chaise lounge and walked slowly, tentatively, across the dining room to a black lacquered chest of drawers El recognised as one of several pieces the old women had liberated from a stately home in Surrey three summers earlier.
She opened the topmost drawer and, turning her back on them, retrieved something from inside.
When she turned around again, there was a knife in her hand: a pocket Toothpick that, with its unexpectedly curved blade extended, reminded El of nothing so much as a scimitar in miniature. It was whetstone-sharp and cruelly thin; flakes of drying, glue-like blood lingered on the metal. The handle was plain woodgrain, but decorated – inscribed with logograms, Japanese or Chinese, above a carving of what looked to El like an animal’s head. A dragon, or an Oriental lion.
“Mother of God,” whispered Ruby.
“This,” said Sita, her eyes on the knife, “was the weapon used to stab me. I thought it prudent to retrieve it, afterwards - better that than leave it on the pavement and there be questions later. It wasn’t until I brought it upstairs and really looked at it that I realised what it was. Whose it was.”
“Soames,” said Ruby distantly.
“Soames,” Sita confirmed. “I may be wrong - I very much hope that I’m wrong. But given the events of this evening, and the misfortune that befell Michael last month… I’m afraid he may be back.”
Chapter 9
Edgware, London
April 1972
Before there was Barbara Potter, there was Judit Neumann – a Hungarian-born midwife whose respect for the rule of law had eroded considerably when her son was given five years in Pentonville for resisting the enforcement efforts of the local National Front with a snooker cue. And before there was Judit Neumann, there was Winston.
Unlike the women who succeeded him, Winston Redfearn had received no formal clinical training beyond the combat medicine he’d picked up as a much younger man in the latter days of World War II, and informally practiced in fits and starts across the battle zones of the Italian peninsula. He was a typesetter by trade and a gardener by inclination, but the knack for healing in a pinch had never left him - a knack that Ruby Wood, the blue-eyed girl with the quick fingers who would eventually become his wife, had spotted the night they’d met in a run-down pub on the Kingsland Road in the spring of 1949.
She’d been seventeen, working the factory floor of a place that made ball-bearings and dreaming of better things. But still smart enough to put three tables between herself and the Twelvetrees brothers, Mark and Harold, when the heated words they’d been trading about their mother’s ashes had become an exchange of fists and flying pint glasses - and practical enough to be impressed wh
en the tall black man she’d been admiring earlier at the bar had stepped in to wrap up Harry Twelvetrees’ lacerated arm with a strip of cotton torn from his own shirt sleeve.
Because she’d never had a problem getting what she wanted, and because he’d been noticing her just as she’d been noticing him, they began courting that very week - an arrangement that progressed to their mutual satisfaction until they married, with Sita and Winston’s friend Hadley as their witnesses, in a Westminster registry office in the summer of 1955, the day troubled by the presence of neither Ruby’s surviving relatives nor the extended family Winston had left behind in Trinidad before the war.
She and Sita were a double act by then, running pigeon drops and pigs-in-a-poke in the fiscally salubrious districts of Chelsea and West Brompton and making friends across the full spectrum of the London demimonde - and it wasn’t so many years after, when word had spread of her new husband’s facility with a needle and thread and a bottle of antiseptic, not to say his iron-clad discretion, that the first of Winston’s patients turned up in the courtyard of their brand new flat in Barnet, stinking of faulty explosives and missing both a trouser leg and a chunk of the calf muscle it had previously concealed.
The patient, Keith Monroe, had been a particularly loquacious man, and had chattered non-stop as Winston, more taciturn by far, had washed, dressed, stitched and bandaged his wounds - primarily about the bungled robbery that had taken a bite out of his leg, singed off his eyebrows and led him, finally, to Winston’s doorstep.
Winston had let him talk, tuning out the man’s chittering until it was so much white noise - interrupting him at the last only to let him know when the reconstructive work was done, and to advise on the aftercare that might, with luck, prevent infection from taking root in the mangled limb.
“Appreciate it, doc,” Monroe had told him - shaking Winston’s hand, and tucking five warm pound notes into his saviour’s top pocket on his way out.
Winston had been speechless.
“Where’s the harm in it?” Ruby had said, when he’d related the incident to her later that night. “I know you, Winston Redfearn, and you’d have done it for nothing without a word of complaint. So if the man wants to pay you for your trouble, bleedin’ well let ‘im. Besides which - now might not be a bad moment to start thinking about putting the odd bit of money to one side for a rainy day. I didn’t want to mention it before, ‘cause I weren’t sure myself, but I nipped in to see the nurse this morning, and it looks like we might be having a little visitor come May…”
And so had begun Winston’s second career as an unofficial field medic, tending this time to the injuries suffered by the London criminal community across their myriad urban battlegrounds. He was quick, and efficient, and every bit as circumspect as they said, and as his reputation grew, so too did his case load - with two, sometimes three patients a month appearing at the flat with a fistful of cash and a burning desire to be healed of their cuts and bruises, burn marks and bullet holes. They were, for the most part, good patients: friendly, polite and grateful for the attention they received from him. Just as importantly, for the salving of Winston’s ethical code and conscience, the crimes that sent them his way were almost always non-violent - typically involving larceny of one kind or another, or so his wife had assured him. On this, as on everything, he trusted her word: it had been a central tenet of their marriage from the beginning that, whatever the jobs she worked or the cons she pulled on other people, they would never lie to one another, by design or by omission.
Until Charlie Soames came knocking.
He wasn’t the affable sort. But if Charlie Soames had had friends, and those friends had been asked to describe him, they might have used words like meticulous. Single-minded. Obsessive, even.
He was a neat, clean little man in his middle thirties, always well-scrubbed and smooth-shaven. His style of dress tended towards the idiosyncratic: the dandyish flourishes of his polished spats, frock coat and pinstripe trousers suggesting a minor character from a PG Wodehouse novel. His voice was soft, the trace of a lisp discernible in his sibilants - entirely at odds with the rudeness of his manner.
Like Ruby and Sita, he was a grifter, his preferred marks wealthy widows twenty or thirty years his senior - ones lonely or vulnerable enough to be impressed by a dapper, solicitous young suitor who said all the right things, up until the day he disappeared into the ether with a solitaire ring, or a treasured coin collection, or a set of Russian Imperial dinner plates, leaving the women too flustered or too ashamed to report the matter to the appropriate authorities.
Ruby despised him.
“Bleedin’ parasite,” she’d mutter with a shake of her head when his name was uttered in her presence. “Not right, is it, what he does? Not right at all.”
Winston had been shocked to see Soames, when he’d appeared at 9 o’clock one weekday morning outside the front door of the flat - not only because his wife’s contempt for the man was public knowledge, but also because the kind of con he was made him an unlikely candidate for physical peril. In spite of the ostentatious pocket knife he carried with him everywhere, playing it back and forth between his fingers like a pair of Chinese worry-balls (more for the look of it than anything else, in Ruby’s opinion), Soames’ primary weapon wasn’t a crowbar or an old service pistol but his instinct - his unerring predator’s sense of which dowager would be receptive to his advances, and which would invite him to take his flowers and his flattery elsewhere. The firing line, for him, was a purely metaphorical proposition.
He’d been more shocked by the skinny, frightened-looking white girl half-hidden behind Soames’ body – a girl so thin she seemed to him nearly transparent, her peroxide hair scattered around her pinched face like day-old candy floss and the troubled, otherworldly look in her puffy, bloodshot eyes much older than the sixteen or seventeen he thought she probably was.
“Can I help you?” Winston had asked Soames warily, half-wondering if he was at the wrong address, had pressed the wrong doorbell.
“I’m certain you can,” Soames had replied, the c of certain reaching Winston as an aspirated th.
Winston had shown them inside; invited them - still puzzled, but as polite as always - to take a seat at the kitchen table. Asked what he could do for them.
Soames had shot a look to the girl, who - head bowed, eyes fixed on the table - had slid her emaciated arms out of her brown polo-neck and pulled it over her head, exposing her braless chest, her ribs, her concave stomach and the three bloodstained cloth bandages taped inexpertly to her hip, her navel and her right breast.
“Go on,” Soames told her. “Show the man why we’re here.”
She reached for the tape, wincing as its grip on her skin loosened and came free, and pulled down the bandage across her breast, exposing the wound underneath.
It was a bite mark: raw and deep and bloody, a torn red crescent going all the way down to the muscle. A bite mark, the size and shape of an adult human mouth.
“Lois, her name was,” Ruby said. “I never found out much about her, even when I went digging, but Win weren’t wrong about her being young. Way I heard it, she’d been shacking up with Soames a while already by then, poor kid. Couldn’t have had no family to speak of - no-one to nip in and see she was alright, no-one to ask questions. And I know I ain’t telling none of you what you don’t know already, but a girl like that - the wrong kind of bloke can get away with doing just about anything he wants with her.”
Winston stared at the bite; couldn’t look away.
The teeth that had made it, as far as he could tell, were straight and evenly-spaced - an entirely unremarkable set of canines and incisors, molars and bicuspids. Only one of the gouges they’d made in the girl’s flesh was unusual - a clotting groove in the upper left corner of the bite, sharply tapered at one edge in such a way as to suggest that the eye tooth that had left it was cracked, or otherwise damaged.
Seeing it, he turned, automatically, from the wound to Charlie Soames�
�� mouth, its parted lips allowing him a flash of Soames’ fang-like incisors.
The left one was chipped - the jagged edge a perfect match for the bite taken out of the girl’s mauled breast.
“There were two more bites just like it under the bandages, Win said,” Ruby continued. “And that weren’t the half of it, neither. It weren’t obvious, if you weren’t looking. But when she’d took her kit off, and he could see her, really see her… well, it were there. Right in front of him.”
The ribs had been fractured. Probably not recently, or there’d have been more swelling, more bruising, but fractured all the same, and healed wrong - at least two of them slipped out of place, not where they ought to be below the intercostals. She must have known, he told himself; must have felt the misalignment, the stabbing pain in her chest when she coughed or sneezed.
Her fingers had been broken - he noticed that, too. Broken, but not set, the middle and index digits of both hands more knotted than the others, more crooked. He thought, though he couldn’t say exactly why, that they’d been bent rather than crushed, deliberately peeled up and back until they snapped. With no effort at all he could imagine it: the crunch of the bones as they gave way under the weight of Soames’ clenched fist; the pleasure, the malicious satisfaction on his face as she begged him to stop.
And those bites… Puppa Jesus, those bites…
“He were a sensitive soul, your dad,” Ruby told Dexter, squeezing his hand. “A thinker, like your brother. A peacemaker, an’ all. But that don’t mean he was soft. He’d stand up for anyone that needed it. Anyone he saw couldn’t stand up for themselves.”
Winston rose to his feet; took three steps across the kitchen towards Soames until he was looming over him, close enough to see the fine white hairs of his earlobes, to smell his lemongrass cologne.
The Push (El Gardener Book 2) Page 8
