The Push (El Gardener Book 2)

by Natalie Edwards

  When they were all home, of course – him, and them – there’d be more to deal with. Once they’d cleaned the old walrus out of whatever they could get, they’d need to be dealt with. He doubted he’d get a say in how, but if he did, he’d do them all in one go, take them out in one clean sweep: a fire, maybe, or a traffic accident, if he could make it so all five of them – and her sons too, the mixed-race lad in the smart suit and the other one, the one he’d slashed – were in the same place at the same time.

  He had no taste for pain or violence, he’d realised since this business had started. He knew why it was needed here, and he understood why he – out of everyone – was the best placed to mete it out. But stabbing the son on his mother’s doorstep, feeling the knife go in and hearing the skin pop as it broke the surface… it made him queasy. He’d been sick straight after, pulling his van into a side-street near the Brent Cross roundabout and vomiting into the gutter until the nausea passed – a detail he’d omitted, when he’d recounted later how his mission had gone.

  And as for the old girl…

  Bad enough, he’d thought, that he had to slash her – even if it was just a warning shot, not the whole shebang. Maybe she was a con – but she was an OAP, too, old enough to be his nan, and tricking her outside then going at her in the dark with a blade … it had felt wrong. Shameful. And that was before he’d let her take the knife off him; before she’d given him a kicking and sent him racing off through Kensington with his tail between his legs.

  It was no fun, hurting people. No fun at all.

  But sometimes it had to be done, didn’t it? Sometimes the world didn’t leave you much choice.

  Part III

  July/August

  Chapter 20

  Matlock, Derbyshire

  July 1997

  There were storm clouds over the Peak District when Kat Morgan left Bakewell for Matlock Bath: dark, pillowy malignancies hanging claustrophobically low in the sky, threatening thunder and lightning as well as rain. It had stormed, on and off, since she’d started the trip, an impromptu tour of the northern counties that had taken in what felt like every market town and mining community between Chesterfield and Cleveland; the Mini, which had been sparkling when she’d left London, was now, not even a week later, streaked and smeared, splattered with mud and whatever unholy stew of gravel and dirt and dead animals she’d been driving through.

  This village, she’d heard, was a tourist trap, the bustling hub at the centre of a network of theme parks, museums and aquariums penned in by a crop of vertiginous moors and valleys so steep they might as well have been mountains - but she saw no evidence of this today. What she took to be the main shopping drag, a curving stretch of sweet shops and souvenir stands, was all but deserted, the road beside it clear of traffic. Probably the weather, she thought. Clouds like that’d be enough to put anyone off their toffee apples.

  The house she was looking for turned out to be not a house at all, but a bed and breakfast - a converted cottage with space, she guessed, for no more than four visitors at a time. It was neat, well-kept and unfussily pretty, the kind that would photograph well for a holiday brochure; a welcome change, at least, from the terraces and bungalows and council flats she’d been shown into, sometimes warmly and at other times grudgingly, since she’d begun her odyssey.

  She parked the Mini as near as she could manage to the B&B without ramming the front gate, reached for her sticks and began the process of untangling herself from the driving seat. It took so long now, this untangling; so fucking long. A minor inconvenience by the standards of everything else that had come her way since the year before, since the bitch she’d considered an ally, if not exactly a friend, had taken her head apart with a twelve-inch metal bar and nearly killed her in the process: the pounding migraines, the constant ache in her hips, the legs that wouldn’t do what she fucking told them no matter how much she tried to will them into submission. But an inconvenience just the same, and one that reminded her, every time, of all the other things that were more difficult now than they used to be - and of the other other things, though there were fewer of them, that were probably impossible.

  Gritting her teeth, she pressed down on the sticks and levered herself to a standing position on the pavement. The ground was flat, and the walk to the doorbell short; all being well, she could make it without losing her balance or falling flat on her arse.

  The woman who answered the door when she rang it seemed friendly, though Kat supposed friendliness was a hygiene factor if you wanted to sell yourself as a landlady - and the sticks themselves had a tendency to elicit an initial burst of sympathy in an audience. The wheelchair - which she’d brought with her but which had stayed thus far, fingers crossed, in the boot - even more so.

  She was younger than Kat had been expecting - not even sixty, ash-blonde and as modestly immaculate as the guest house she kept.

  “Can I help you, duck?” she asked.

  “I hope so,” Kat answered, falling back into the light-touch Scouse accent and hesitant disposition she’d adopted for the week. “I’m Faye Tuttle, Mrs Otley - with the Wirral Advocate. I was hoping I might be able to talk to you about Ingrid Wainwright.”

  “I ain’t just asking this for me,” Ruby had said, when she’d first called Kat to recruit her for the job. “It’s me Soames is after, but what he’s got - it’s on all of us. You included.”

  Kat hadn’t bitten. Not then.

  “In case you hadn’t noticed,” she’d replied, angry as hell at the old battle-axe for reasons that even she didn’t really understand, “I’m not really up to working just at the moment, what with the crippling headaches and it taking me half an hour to get my knickers on in the morning. Perhaps come back to me when I’m not having to use a Stannah lift to make it up the stairs.”

  “He’ll have us,” Ruby had said, not rising to the bait. “I know him. He’ll have us, and he’ll keep having us - he’s that sort. Doing one job for him once, it won’t be enough. He’ll want us on the hook for the long haul, dancing to his tune. Unless we do something about it.”

  “Are you not hearing what I’m saying to you? I can’t.”

  “You can’t do the job - that’s what you’ve been saying. Which I’m not so sure is true, but that’s neither here nor there. What I’m asking you to do ain’t work - not the way you mean it. It’s more like… research.”

  “Research? What does that mean?”

  “It means you don’t need to be conning nobody. Just pokin’ around a few places and askin’ a few questions.”

  “And how’s that supposed to help us dig our way out of this pile of shit you’ve landed us in, if I may ask?”

  “I ain’t exactly sure yet. But I’ll tell you one thing: I might not’ve been there with Rose and young El when they went down to see the bastard, but you don’t get to my age without a decent nose on you, and this whole thing… it smells wrong. There’s more to it somehow - more going on behind the scenes than what he’s told ‘em. And if we’re wading feet-first into the game he’s got set up for us, then I don’t know about you, but I want to know what that something is.”

  “Ingrid Wainwright?” said Mrs Otley, neither budging from the doorstep nor making any move to let Kat inside. She was suspicious now, bordering on frosty - but at least a little bit curious too, if Kat was reading her right.

  “That’s right,” Kat said. “You might have known her as Little Ingrid? It was a long time ago now, but I understand you were doing some work at the Wainwright house when she was kidnapped? With the horses?”

  “Who told you that?” Mrs Otley asked sharply.

  You know what? Kat replied to herself, in her own voice. I don’t even remember. I’ve spent the whole fucking week running up and down motorways chasing interchangeable old biddies who might have been in Harrogate forty years ago and might have known these Wainwrights, whoever they were, and you expect me to remember which one it was?

  If that’s what coppers do 24/7, I’m bloody g
lad I’m on the other side of the fence.

  “I’d rather not say, if you don’t mind, Mrs Otley,” she replied out loud. “She asked me to keep the conversations we had private. But she said she was sure she remembered seeing you there, around that time.”

  You want to talk to the stable girl, love, that particular biddy had told her - one of the really old ones she’d talked to in Knaresborough, or so she thought, though her memory was like a block of bloody Emmental these days, and she doubted there was a physiotherapist alive who could help her out with that, no matter how much money she threw at them.

  Ada Lee, her name was then. ‘Course, that was before she married that Otley boy from Ripon and they moved down south. John? Jack? It’ll come to me. Any road, have a word with her and see what shakes out. I weren’t up at that house much, just two mornings a week to see to the carpets and give it a once-over with the duster, but I always used to catch sight of her hanging about the place, watching and listening. We all used to think she had a bit of a thing for Ted - Mr Wainwright, I should say. Though if she did, she’d have been flat out of luck. He’d never have strayed, that one. Only ever had eyes for his wife.

  “Whatever you’re sniffing ‘round for, I can’t help you,” Mrs Otley said. “I’ve nothing to say to you that I’ve not already said to the police back when it happened.”

  You’re not closing the door, though, are you? Kat thought. At least some of you wants to talk to me. It’s a bit of excitement, isn’t it? Probably the biggest thrill you’ll get between changing the bedsheets and doling out the scrambled eggs at breakfast.

  “It’s nothing salacious, I promise, Mrs Otley,” she said. “We’re running a series on unsolved crimes, and the Little Ingrid case came up as one worth looking into. I’m just after some background - you know, on the house, the family, that sort of thing. Something a bit more human than what we’ve got already in the archives. I’d keep your name out of it,” she added.

  And that, she judged - that’d be the clincher. I’d keep your name out of it. You can have your moment in the spotlight - a willing audience, sat there on tenterhooks listening to everything you say. And the neighbours’ll never know you told.

  “Alright,” said Mrs Otley, opening the door a crack and taking two steps back into the hallway. “Five minutes. That’s all I can spare.”

  “Brilliant,” Kat replied, crossing the threshold. “Should be all I need.”

  Five minutes turned into twenty, then forty five. When the storm clouds finally cleared and the rain began to dry up outside the window of the little front parlour that served as her private living room, Mrs Otley had been speaking, virtually uninterrupted, for almost two hours.

  Getting them to open up - that had always been Kat’s gift.

  She’d known, from her first year at drama school, that she’d never be an actress, not a proper one. There was too much competition: too many genuinely talented - far more talented - Lears and Blanche DuBoises and Desdemonas on her course alone, never mind in the years above or already out there with an Equity card. The same way she’d known, since she’d woken up in hospital after that bitch Hannah had come at her with the wheel lock, that the cons she used to run out of the casinos around Mayfair and Park Lane and Piccadilly were off the menu - the ones that relied on her showing off her legs in a little black dress and being quick enough to make a sharp exit once her marks were passed out cold on their beds and she’d had a rifle through their wallets. Now, and forever, most likely.

  But knowing how to get people to talk to her, to say the things they didn’t know they wanted to say - that had stayed with her.

  “She killed herself, you know,” Mrs Otley told her - speaking, Kat noticed, directly into the recording device set up on the coffee table between them. “Mrs Wainwright - the wife. A year or two after the little girl was took. Drowned herself in the river like that writer, that Virginia Woolf.”

  “Did she?” said Kat, who’d heard some variation on the same story at least four times that week.

  “Oh, yes. But I mean, you can see why she would, can’t you? Losing her little one like that. Especially when…”

  She stopped abruptly, mid-revelation.

  “Especially when…?” Kat prompted.

  “Oh, I shouldn’t say. It was nothing, really. Just gossip.”

  “Gossip?”

  “Folk whispering. You know the sort of thing. Saying this and that.”

  “About?”

  Mrs Otley paused again; looked from the recorder to Kat, and back again.

  “And this is definitely off the record, is it?” she asked. “You won’t be quoting me, or owt like that?”

  “Not unless you want me to.”

  “Alright. Thing is, see, it’s not something I told the police, back then, when they came ‘round asking questions. I didn’t lie, as such. I just… didn’t mention it, and they had so many people they were talking to I were sure someone else would’ve brought it up.”

  “Brought what up, Mrs Otley?”

  “The gardener, duck. Bob Kingsley. That was the gossip - about what was meant to have been going on with him and Mrs Wainwright, ‘round about the time the kiddie went missing.”

  Ada Lee, as she was then, had started with the Wainwrights only a few months after Little Ingrid was born.

  She stuck to the stables, mainly - mucking out the horses, grooming and feeding them, taking them out across the fields that bordered the Wainwrights’ big country house. But Mr Wainwright was so handsome, and always so nice to her when he saddled up to go riding, that she’d developed a bit of a crush on him - and so, whenever the opportunity arose to go into the house to request more feed or get herself a drink of water from the kitchen tap, she took it, hoping she might catch a glimpse of him.

  It was in the kitchen that she first heard the rumours about Bob and Mrs Wainwright.

  “Shocking, that’s what I call it,” the cook was saying to the housekeeper. Ada stilled by the sink, glass in hand, pretending not to listen.

  “Shocking’s right,” said the housekeeper. “The pair of them swanning about ‘round the garden together, thinking nobody’ll have a mind to put two and two together. And her still with a babe in arms, too!”

  “If I were young Mr Wainwright,” said the cook authoritatively, “I’d be going back over my diary to about the time she first announced she were expecting. Checking a few dates, if you know what I mean.”

  “No!” said the housekeeper, scandalised. “You don’t think…?”

  “Doesn’t matter what I think, does it? It’s what he thinks that’s important. And she’s got him convinced the sun shines out of her proverbial. But if you’re telling me it’s a new development, this thing with our friend Bob and that little madam…”

  Both cook and housekeeper seemed to notice, all at once, that Ada was still in the kitchen.

  “What you doing skulking ‘round in here, cloth ears?” the housekeeper said, shooing her outside as if she were a stray cat in the larder. “Get back to them horses, ‘fore I clout you one!”

  “The baby wasn’t Wainwright’s?” Kat asked, taken aback by this twist in the tale despite herself.

  “Those were the rumours,” Mrs Otley shrugged. “Bob Kingsley handed in his notice a month or so before young Ingrid were snatched - got a better job at some stately home in London, or so he said. There’s no sense rehashing it all now, so long after the fact, but if she was his… well, it wouldn’t surprise me if it were the guilt over that on top of what happened to the little one that drove Mrs Wainwright into that river. And poor Ted. You just have to hope he never found out, don’t you? I know he married again, after - but can you imagine going through all that, losing your only daughter and waiting ‘round to pay a ransom that never comes, and then finding out she was another’s man’s child all along?”

  Chapter 21

  Caledonian Road, London

  July 1997

  Briscoe was late. Harriet, who was never late - who left the f
lat for seminars and lectures and appointments thirty minutes earlier than she needed to, every time, to make absolutely certain of it - was thrown; irritated by his carelessness, but anxious too that his absence from the table would call attention to her presence, would announce to the handful of other daytime drinkers at the bar that she was both there, and there alone. That she’d been stood up, or dumped - or worse, that she was on the lookout, casting her net into the sparsely-populated waters of The Golden Lion at four o’clock on a Tuesday in hope of luring in a balding City trader or an alcoholic solicitor with a redundancy cheque burning a hole in his pocket. What else, as her father would doubtless have told her, would a woman your age be doing on her own in a place like that?

  At ten past the hour, when she was on the verge of gathering her things to leave, Briscoe arrived, smelling of cigarette smoke and murmuring half-hearted apologies, his bomber jacket zipped up to the neck – she assumed to hide the uniform underneath.

  “My shift ran over,” he said, pulling up a stool so unnecessarily close to hers that she was forced to physically veer away, inclining her upper body in the opposite direction at an uncomfortable forty five-degree angle. “Couldn’t get away.”

  “No problem,” she said, though it was.

  She didn’t offer to buy him a drink, and he made no move to order one, which she took as a sign of his desire to get the initial, transactional part of their meeting out of the way before he settled himself in for the long haul. She’d been ready for this; under the table, the envelope was already in her hand, so full she’d had to seal it with sticky tape to keep it closed.

  “Here,” she told him, pushing it towards him - not to where he was, where the bulk of him was encroaching onto her, but where he ought to be, across from her and at least a foot away.