The Push (El Gardener Book 2)

by Natalie Edwards

  It wasn’t a lie; not completely. She had been working with the probation service that year - albeit on another project, in an entirely different area. And it was entirely possible that the service did do spot checks on its clients - especially ones, like Soames, who’d served life sentences.

  If Lois Soames knew better, of course, then things were apt to become very difficult, very quickly.

  “Oh!” the woman said, holding a palm to her emaciated chest. “Oh! You scared me then!”

  The panic cleared. She eyed Harriet up and down, with the sort of wary scrutiny Harriet imagined she reserved for public sector employees taking an interest in her husband.

  “He doesn’t live with us,” she said, leaning against the door with both hands - desperate, Harriet thought, to push it closed and scurry back inside, but aware that wasn’t an option. “He needs a lot of care, and space for his oxygen and his other things, so it isn’t big enough for him here, and even if it was, I wouldn’t be any good at looking after all the equipment and keeping it clean enough…”

  She gestured inside, to the hallway and living room of a perfectly normal-sized council house that was, it seemed to Harriet, more than adequate to accommodate a man with Soames’ disabilities.

  “He’s got a place in Kent,” she finished. “Out by the sea. It’s good for him, the air there. Clean. Better than all the smog you get here.”

  “And are you there often?” Harriet asked.

  “He doesn’t like us seeing him, the way he is now,” she replied – a touch defensively, Harriet thought.

  “Well, it’s really you I was hoping to speak to anyway,” Harriet said, veering away from what was evidently a sore point. “You and your son.”

  “He’s not here. He’s gone out.”

  “Is there a better time for me to call in? Perhaps later this afternoon, when he’s back?”

  “He’s out all day. You won’t catch him.”

  She was creeping back, now - retreating behind the door, pushing it towards Harriet’s body. Harriet fought an urge to shove her foot against the frame; to step inside uninvited, impose herself by force on the starving church mouse of a woman, and her objections be damned.

  Not that she’d voice them, anyway, she heard her father say. A doormat like that would let you get away with anything. I doubt she’s ever said no to anyone in her life.

  “Where is he, can I ask?” she said - still measured, still sing-song gentle. Still intent on proving to herself, whatever the voice might tell her, that someone else’s weakness wasn’t an invitation to use and exploit.

  “He’s at college,” Lois Soames answered - anxious again now, her utter desperation to get away from Harriet, to bolt the door and lock herself in with the curtains drawn so obvious Harriet was almost certain she was screaming inside. “He’s got lectures in the day, and he goes out with his mates after. I don’t know where. What did you want to ask him that you can’t ask me?”

  “If that screw’s right, and Soames has got a son,” Ruby Redfearn had told her after her meeting with Briscoe, in an unlit corner of the dingy, smoke-clogged Greek restaurant in Golders Green where she’d insisted they meet in place of Rose’s apartment, “then that boy’d be twenty-odd now. More than old enough to set to stabbin’ someone if his old man said the word.”

  “Are you quite sure about that?” Harriet had asked. “Charles Soames would have spent most of his son’s life in Hendon. And stabbing someone, a perfect stranger no less… that’s no small request, even from your own father. It’s rather hard to imagine they’d have a relationship strong enough to elicit that level of blind filial obedience.”

  “You don’t know Charlie Soames,” Redfearn had replied ominously. “He’s like one of them psychopaths you study. He knows how to pull your levers; how to get under your skin and make you do what he wants. And if his boy’s been raised by the same girl my Winston seen to when she come ‘round our flat all them years ago, then he’d have grown up not knowing no different than doing what his Dad told him. That Lois… she was his, you know what I mean? Soames’. Might as well have had his name stamped on her arm with a cattle iron.”

  “Is that even possible?” the woman Redfearn had brought with her had asked – El, the maybe-Spanish, maybe-Indian girl with the big dark eyes and the haunted face who’d inadvertently brought Harriet into their strange orbit the previous year, and who’d been throwing lovelorn glances at Rose across the table whenever she had an idea the others weren’t looking.

  If these are the best liars and dissemblers London has to offer, Harriet had thought, then the fat cats of the City can rest easy.

  “Is what possible?” Redfearn had said.

  “Keeping that much of a hold on someone for that long, when you’re inside. I mean, I believe you when you say he had her under his spell - and we’ve seen what Soames is like, so no argument there. But could you really control someone - a partner - when you’re not with them? Not physically with them?”

  Redfearn had shrugged.

  “I’m gonna pass that one over to the doc here,” she’d said, gesturing to Harriet. “What do you reckon, Dr Marchant? Think it’s possible?”

  “Theoretically?” Harriet had answered. “Maybe. If the initial hold he had over her was entrenched enough before he was convicted. I couldn’t say with any more certainty without having met them. But it’s not impossible.”

  “The difficulty, of course, would be maintaining that level of psychological dominance over her without being able to guarantee that she’d stay socially isolated - that she wouldn’t engage for any length of time with the sort of people who might weaken his hold on her.”

  “The kind of coercive control that you’re suggesting… it would rely to some extent on his keeping her apart from friends, family… really from anyone who might encourage her to think more critically about his behaviour or the power dynamics underpinning their relationship. If absolute authority over her was what he wanted, he’d need to be sure that she wouldn’t come into contact with anyone in her everyday life who’d ask uncomfortable questions - or worse still, try to intervene in some way. Try to rescue her, even - or deprogramme her, if you’d prefer. The cult analogy certainly isn’t so wide of the mark, since we’re effectively talking about brainwashing.”

  “What I suppose I’m saying,” she’d concluded, “is that for him to know, to be absolutely certain that he could trust her to stay under his thumb, under his control, even while he was serving a life sentence in a closed prison… he’d have to have had his hooks embedded in her very deeply indeed.”

  “Stockholm syndrome?” Rose had asked. “Is that what you mean?”

  El had nodded vigorous agreement at this. Rose, in turn, had smiled shyly back at her, apparently pleased to have won her approval.

  Perhaps it isn’t just some unrequited crush after all, Harriet had thought - and then wondered, distantly, whether she and Rose were sufficiently close yet that she could ask her about it and find out for sure.

  “I wouldn’t use that term,” she’d answered. “It’s not a very helpful descriptor. Stockholm syndrome is really more of a media phenomenon than a clinical diagnosis - it’s not in the DSM, for one thing. But I suppose there are some similarities with what we’re describing: a woman so completely in thrall to her captor that she’d stay loyal to him through years, even decades of being physically separated from him. And then do everything she could to inculcate that same loyalty in their child.”

  “Raising him to be Daddy’s Little Soldier,” Redfearn had said.

  “I suppose so, yes. His soldier, and his slave.”

  “There’s nothing I need to ask him specifically,” Harriet said. “But it would save me having to come back another time, if I could speak to the two of you together.”

  Lois Soames slunk further still behind the door, leaving only her head and wasted neck visible from the outside.

  “You won’t be able to catch him,” she repeated.

  “Perhaps I cou
ld come in anyway?” Harriet asked. Ruby Redfearn wouldn’t like it, she knew - the woman had near-on insisted that Harriet meet the Soameses together, that she assess them as a unit. But if this little doorstep interaction had confirmed anything, it was that Lois Soames was, if not her son’s keeper, then his gatekeeper - and that she’d stand between him and anyone she deemed a possible threat to his safety and security. Except, perhaps, her husband.

  Getting to the son, as Harriet saw it, meant getting past the mother first.

  Lois Soames hesitated; caught, Harriet surmised, between the compliance she knew she ought to be showing and the urge to protect her husband and her son, to shield them from the scrutiny of the justice system and the further batch of trouble that scrutiny might bring.

  Eventually, deference won out, and she tugged the door fully open.

  “Come in,” she sighed, sounding utterly defeated. “I don’t have hot drinks or biscuits,” she added, apologetically. “We don’t keep them in the house.”

  “Water’s fine,” Harriet told her.

  It was apparent, almost from the moment she crossed the threshold, why there were neither hot drinks nor biscuits on offer. Inside, the house was the closest she’d seen in the flesh to a clean room: every surface polished, every millimetre of floor spotless. The cutlery and crockery stacked in neat symmetrical piles on the gleaming stainless steel sink were, she saw as they passed the kitchen, not only made of disposable plastic but wrapped in plastic, too - despite the apparent absence elsewhere in the room of any food or drink that might be consumed on, or with, or in them.

  (Which could, she reasoned, explain Lois Soames’ emaciated appearance - at least, if what she’d read initially as anorexia was actually obsessive-compulsive mysophobia, a germ-aversion so acute that it prevented her from eating or drinking anything she might perceive as contaminated).

  What little furniture there was in the plain, beige-hued lounge was similarly wrapped - most notably the sofa that served as the room’s centrepiece, a brown velour model enveloped in broad strips of transparent cellophane that crinkled as, following her host’s lead, she lowered herself onto it. There was no table, nowhere to put a hot drink or a biscuit, had Harriet had one; just a small walnut writing bureau pushed against the wall, not swaddled but laid open to reveal box upon box of latex gloves, surgical masks and plastic aprons.

  “I like to keep clean,” Lois Soames said, seeing Harriet struggle to adopt a comfortable position on the slippery, squeaking cushions.

  “Absolutely,” Harriet replied in the most empathetic tone she could muster - hoping to communicate that, yes, cleanliness was important, and there was nothing unusual or dysfunctional at all in striving to maintain a living environment as aseptic as an operating theatre.

  “Charlie always liked things kept clean. Clean and neat. Have you got a list?” she added, apropos of nothing, as far as Harriet could tell.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Of questions. About us and Charlie. There’s normally a list, when you people come ‘round.”

  Harriet kicked herself for not bringing a bag, or a notebook, or anything at all that might speak to an official, legally sanctioned reason for her presence in the Soames house.

  “I’m a bit more informal than some of my colleagues,” she said, freewheeling madly, and was this how Redfearn and the others played it all the time? If it was, she could see herself developing a new admiration for their dexterity, their stamina. Five minutes into the lie, and she was already exhausted.

  “What sort of thing is it you want to know? You’re really best off speaking to Charlie direct, if it’s to do with him.”

  Ask about the son, Redfearn had said. Go around the houses a bit so she doesn’t twig it’s him you’re after. But we need to find out. ‘Specially if he’s still running ‘round the place with his dad’s grudge and a knife in his pocket.

  “How long have you and Charlie been married?” she asked, glossing over the last entreaty.

  “Don’t you know all that already?”

  “I do. But I’d like to hear it in your words. To get a fuller picture.”

  Lois Soames’s mouth twitched - not in irritation or impatience, as Harriet would have expected of another woman asked to answer the same question she’d doubtless been confronted with a hundred times before, but in fear. Fear of saying the wrong thing; of incriminating her husband - and possibly her son, too - through some unplanned, inadvertent admission.

  “Twenty two years,” she said. “We done it while he was inside. After we’d had Jay.”

  She never had him registered, the son, Redfearn had told her. There’s no birth certificate for him, no child benefit claims, no vaccination records, no national insurance number. My Dexter’s checked everywhere, but there weren’t nothing to find. Not so much as a passport photo. I doubt she even sent him school, so Christ knows how she managed to get a visiting order for him to go and see his old man inside. Only good news is that anything you dig up, anything at all, is gonna give us more than we’ve got on him already. As things stand, we don’t know nothing. Not what he’s called. Not even what he looks like.

  There were no pictures in the lounge, that Harriet could see - no graduation shots or baby photos, no carefully posed portraits of Lois Soames and her son. Just blank, sponged-down walls.

  “And does Jay see his father often?” she asked - making a note of the name and storing it away for further use.

  “When he can,” Lois Soames answered, more elliptically than Harriet would have liked. “He loves his dad.”

  Something caught Harriet’s attention, a flash of light on metal in the corner of her eye: a silver picture frame, balanced on the window ledge to her left.

  She squinted; focused, until the picture inside came into view.

  It was an old photo - late ‘60s or early ‘70s, she guessed, from the fading and desaturated colour as much as from the clothes and hairstyles of its subjects. There were two of them in shot, their faces turned to the camera like the dour farmers of Grant Wood’s American Gothic: a man in his twenties or thereabouts, one she recognised from the clippings Redfearn had shown her as Charles Soames, his suit ironed and immaculate and a bow-tie fixed below his collar. And beside him, pressed into his side, a girl, blonde and sallow and no older, it seemed to Harriet, than eleven or twelve years old.

  It was difficult to know for sure, even from a distance of only a few feet - the picture frame was small, and her eyesight was less than 20/20 even when she remembered to wear her glasses, which she hadn’t today.

  But she thought the girl was Lois Soames.

  Part IV

  September/October

  Chapter 24

  Flight EXK 255 (SFO to LHR)

  September 1997

  “You’re a fool to yourself, you are.”

  El debated the merits of responding. She wasn’t asleep - had woken up somewhere over Saskatchewan - but had planned to feign unconsciousness at least until they hit the Atlantic.

  Ruby, evidently, had other ideas.

  “I’m sleeping,” El said, her eyes still closed.

  “No, you ain’t. You don’t snore so bad as Karen, but I can always tell when you’re having a kip - your breath goes in and out like one of them iron lungs. You can hear it from all the way back there.”

  She opened one eyelid, tentatively, and saw Ruby gesturing behind her to her own, now unoccupied seat three rows along the cabin.

  “Go on, then,” she said wearily, still reclining against her headrest. “You might as well get it off your chest. Why am I a fool?”

  “You know why. All that business with Rose. I don’t know what you think you’re playing at, but if you don’t start pulling that head of yours out of your arse, you’re gonna miss the boat altogether. She’s a nice girl, a patient one an’ all, but she won’t keep waiting ‘round for you to work out if you want her or not. And when she does lose interest, there won’t be nothing me or Sita can do to sort it out for you.”

&
nbsp; She bolted upright at this; scanned the mostly empty cabin, panicked at the prospect of Karen or Sophie - or worse yet, Rose herself - hearing anything that Ruby had to say about her love life.

  The others, thank God, were asleep, or otherwise occupied: Karen, her legs propped up on her footrest, stretched out under a blanket and, yes, snoring; Sita, sipping champagne and resplendent in the jewelled vermillion sari she reserved for airline travel (“it’s pure Bollywood, darling - guarantees celebrity treatment”), making animated conversation with a high-cheekboned, impeccably-suited businesswoman across the aisle; Sophie, separated from the world by the enormous black headphones covering her ears, and Rose, resting lightly against her daughter’s shoulder, her face shielded against the overhead cabin lights by an emerald sleep mask.

  “You know your trouble?” Ruby said - then, not waiting for El to reply, continued: “You think too much. Tie yourself in so many knots trying to work out what you should do or you shouldn’t do, you never get round to actually doing what you thought you might want to do in the first place. Me and her over there,” she gestured this time to Sita, now laughing heartily - and, in El’s estimation, not un-flirtatiously - at something the businesswoman had said, “you think we got where we are by worrying if we were doing it right?”

  “Doing what right?” El asked.

  “Anything. Everything. I like to plan, don’t get me wrong - more than she does, that’s for bleedin’ sure. I need to have my ducks in a row when I’m on the con. But it ain’t cerebral, grifting, or it shouldn’t be, not when you get right down to it. It’s instinct. And you… you’re good at it, at trusting your instinct on the job. Always have been, ever since you were a kid. So why you don’t do the same and just trust yourself when you’re off the clock, I’ll never know.”