A flight attendant, her trolley loaded with wine and spirits, wheeled her way towards them.
“A drink for you, Lady Westholme?” she asked Ruby, with the confidence of a woman who’d memorised the First Class passenger manifest and wasn’t about to be thrown by something as minor as a change in the seating plan. “And you, Ms. Di Salvo?”
El shook her head. Ruby, though, was more ebullient.
“Do you know, my dear,” she trilled, in the plummy if slightly inebriated tones of the elderly society widow whose name she’d been travelling under since they began their American adventure, “I believe I will. A little of the Bordeaux, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“What I’m trying to tell you,” she said, when the attendant had moved on, “is that you ain’t got time to sit around wringing your hands and umming and ahing. If you’re interested, then you best tell her so, and pronto. Besides which: it were bloody agony last night, watching you mope around the house like a kicked puppy, and I ain’t keen on seeing that again for a good long while if I can possibly help it.”
El saw her point.
The previous day, their last in the city before flying back to London, had begun well enough - all six of them convening for an outdoor lunch on the long bench under the eucalyptus trees in the backyard, a lunch only slightly marred by the low thrum of tension that had kept all of them faintly jittery since their final meeting with Wainwright.
Sita had left first, wrapping a shawl around her tunic and disappearing into the back of a yellow cab bound for parts unknown, or at least unknown to El.
“She’s gone to sell the Taj Mahal,” Ruby had said, when Karen asked. “Met some oilman from Alaska coming out of Trader Joe’s the other day, and now she’s got him on the hook she reckons she can seal the deal before he sods off back to Anchorage. You know what she’s like, always trying her luck. Don’t tell me none of you have noticed all the sneaking about she’s been doing?”
El had noticed - but, knowing Sita’s propensity for cultivating her own side projects even in the middle of a job, had considered it barely worthy of attention.
“Tell you what, though,” Ruby had added, “she’ll be a bleedin’ nightmare if it works. Be the second time she’s managed to offload that charnel house - we’ll have her crowing about it for years.”
The first sale, to El’s recollection, had been to a Russian oligarch named Yahontov, a rapacious and unscrupulous man with a taste for plundering Islamic antiquities. First Sita, presenting herself as the undersecretary to the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, had invited him - after much groundwork had been laid - to proffer a bid for the mausoleum when it came to auction, as it soon would. The auction, she’d explained, would be kept secret, the Minister having no desire to incur the wrath of UNESCO or the newspapers or the Wakf Council or the nationalists; all bids would be sealed, and all participants required to sign a non-disclosure agreement so complex and so binding it would reduce even the most affluent of them to ruin were they to violate its terms.
Later, and so tacitly Yahontov was unsure at first of what she was actually suggesting, she’d made a second offer: in exchange for a small percentage of the bid - something as negligible as, say, £500,000, sterling - she could ensure that his bid not only made it to the top of the pile, but was higher (if only by an equally small percentage) than its nearest rival, thus securing for him ownership of the jewel of India.
He’d leapt at the former offer readily; then - after scarcely a day’s deliberation - accepted the latter one, too.
Sita hadn’t elaborated further on how things had unfolded thereafter. But El had been left with the distinct impression that Yahontov still considered himself, despite all evidence to the contrary, the rightful landlord of the Crown of Palaces.
“Who is she for this one?” El had asked Ruby, reaching for the last of the bread.
“Some UN delegate, she said,” Ruby had replied. “Wish I could tell you what sort, but I don’t know no more than that myself. She’s been cagey about this one - properly cagey. Christ knows why - it ain’t as if I’m looking to get in on the action, is it? I got my own fish to fry.”
Karen had gone next, excusing herself to go and call Fergus (“before he falls asleep playing Transport Tycoon again”); then Sophie, who had her Game Gear out of her pocket and her thumbs on the controls before she’d even left the table. And finally, Ruby.
“I’ll just take this lot inside, then, shall I?” she’d said, picking up a salad bowl in the crook of one arm and a bottle of olive oil in the other and levering herself up from the bench. “Leave you two to it.”
She hadn’t tipped them a wink as she left, not quite, but El found herself embarrassed anyway; looking anywhere but at Rose, her eyes fixed on the red and white cotton of the tablecloth and her hands wrapped tightly around the neck of her beer bottle.
“How are you feeling?” Rose had asked.
“What?” El had replied, startled - terrified that Rose had not only picked up on her embarrassment but elected to tackle it head-on.
“About the job,” Rose had clarified. “Soames and Wainwright.”
“Oh, right. That. Okay, I think. For now. It’s the next bit I’m worried about.”
“You’re not alone. I feel as if I’ve spent the last fortnight doing nothing but bite my fingernails.”
“And bidding on yachts at fundraisers. And opening up your closet to the San Francisco art community.”
“I daresay I had the readers of the Oakland Girlfriend clutching their pearls at that one.”
“Still, though. Big step.”
“Hardly. I can’t say I care who knows, now that Sophie and I have talked it through. The secrecy, before - it was never about my private life. It was about him. Keeping him in the dark and away from us.”
Him, El had known, meant Marchant: the father Rose had hidden from for almost all her adult life.
“Any plans tonight?” El had asked, more to change the subject than because she thought Rose might have made any. They were all exhausted, close to spent; there was nothing left to do before they flew out but rest and recharge, and get themselves as ready as they could for the next stage of the game.
“Actually… yes,” Rose had answered - awkwardly, fingers tracing the scar along her wrist and forearm the way El had noticed they tended to when she was nervous, or anxious, or upset. “I’m having dinner with Kate. There’s a Cindy Sherman exhibition that I mentioned wanting to see before we left,” she’d added, what might have been apologetically, “and she called last night to say she’d got us tickets, so I thought…”
Something like a boulder had fallen, hot and heavy, in El’s stomach.
“Sounds great,” she’d said, and finished the beer.
It was morning again when they touched down at Heathrow, as light as it had been when they’d left California.
She stood; stretched; pulled her backpack from the overhead locker and made for the aisle.
She found herself waiting, in the elongated stretch of time between the extinguishing of the seatbelt sign and the suction-thwock of the airlock releasing, directly behind Sita and the businesswoman in the suit - an American, she learned from the conversation she couldn’t help but overhear, and a lawyer, one of the senior partners at a West Coast firm with an international client base.
“I’m staying at the Kendal, over on Great Portland Street,” she was telling Sita, her voice Mid-Atlantic-clipped and cigarette-husky. “We should get dinner, while I’m here.”
“I’d love to, darling,” Sita said. “I’m afraid I’m promised elsewhere this week, but how’s Saturday? There’s a little place in Soho that does the most remarkable butternut terrine, if you’re game.”
The lawyer took a pen and a soft, suede business card from her purse, scribbled something on the back and passed it across the aisle to Sita.
“Here’s my cell,” she said, with a wide, even-toothed smile. “My personal cell. Call me when you’re free.”
“I
certainly shall,” Sita replied, taking the card and returning the smile.
How does she do it? El wondered, marvelling at Sita’s charisma, the ease with which she seemed to navigate the world even when she wasn’t in character. How the hell does she do it?
When the cabin door finally opened, she surged to the exit, through the bridge, up the escalator and along the walkway to Passport Control, breaking free of the others and putting as much distance as possible between her and them - between her and Rose, if she was honest with herself - before the limo Ruby had arranged to drive them home threw all of them back together again in yet another confined space.
She was the first from their flight in the queue, catching the tail-end of a glut of passengers disgorged from what she took to be - from the accents she could hear, the Lakers jerseys and Dodgers jackets she could see, the smattering of Bear Flags decorating sundry pieces of luggage - another West Coast flight.
Tiredness, incipient jet-lag and a gnawing discomfort that she refused to recognise as jealousy meant she didn’t register him as familiar, even when she saw him ahead of her in line: a white man, of entirely average height and build, dressed in jeans and an unmemorable t-shirt, his unremarkable features mostly hidden by the Giants cap pulled low over his face.
Then the queue moved forward, catapulting him into the waiting arms of a bored-looking customs officer - and before she could blink, he was gone.
Chapter 25
Herne Bay, Kent
October 1997
Satis House hadn’t improved in the time they’d been away. If anything, El thought, it had deteriorated: the weeds and rushes grown higher and denser, the windows more thoroughly caked with grease and dust.
“Good God,” Sita muttered, as they made their way up the path to the main entrance. “It’s the Castle of Otranto.”
“Yet somehow exactly right for a man like Soames,” Rose replied, taking Sita’s arm and helping her across a particularly unyielding patch of nettles. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find some young girl locked up in a dungeon inside.”
Jared the home-help answered the door when they knocked, his eyes widening when he recognised them - then widening further as he took in Sita behind them, dark-suited and radiating authority.
“You’re back?” he said - less friendly and more hostile this time around, a sentry rather than an usher. “What’s happened now?”
“We need to talk to Soames,” El told him, all business herself.
“Do you know what a state he was in after you left before? He could hardly catch his breath. He doesn’t need you lot upsetting him again.”
“Open the door, please,” Sita said, her delivery suggesting the please was no more than a nicety, and one that might easily fall away, should Jared fail to comply. “He’s aware that we’re coming.”
Jared gawped at them, aghast at their rudeness - then, apparently realising the futility of remonstrating any further, turned around and stalked away, leaving the front door open.
“He’s in the conservatory,” he shouted down to them, his back turned as he stomped away up the stairs. “You know where it is.”
Soames was waiting for them - still hunched and vulturine, his chair now turned towards the conservatory doorway as if in anticipation of their arrival.
“Mrs Acharya!” he rasped as they approached him, pulling the oxygen mask from his mouth. “Such a lovely surprise. I’d expected it to be just me and the younger ones for this part of the proceedings.”
Sita didn’t answer him, but seemed instead to see through him - her gaze fixed on a single point a metre or so above his head.
He disgusts her, thought El, who’d rarely seen Sita broadcast such outright revulsion, even in the face of marks so objectionable they’d left her own stomach sickened. She can’t bring herself to look at him.
“No Mrs Redfearn today, though, I see,” he added.
“She’s ill,” El said. “Has the flu.”
“That’ll be the flight home taking its toll,” he said. “She must have picked something up on the aeroplane. It’s rather a hazard of air travel, as one ages. Wouldn’t you agree, Mrs Acharya?”
Sita continued to stare through him, her face so impassive it might have been cast in marble.
A hundred miles away, in her duplex flat in West Hampstead, inside the spare bedroom that her sons had carefully remodelled into a temporary sick bay, Ruby slept - covers pulled up to her chin and a box of paracetamol on the nightstand beside her.
From his hiding place behind the wardrobe, Jay watched her toss and turn in her sleep; heard the small, soft noises she made as she - he supposed - dreamed.
The butcher’s knife in his hand felt heavy as lead; so heavy he wondered if he’d even be able to lift his wrist, when it came to it.
He’d never had a grandmother, on either side of his family. But if he had had one, he could see her looking a bit like she did, now: tired and wrinkled, bags on top of bags under her eyes; hair like greased-up candy floss, sticking out in all directions on her pillow; lips dry and cracked, parched tongue darting out to try to lick them moist.
Old, and weak, and vulnerable.
Even she-devils got old, of course. He knew that; he wasn’t stupid. And that was what she was, no question - no-one but a she-devil could have done what she did to his Dad. Twenty three years inside, nearly as long as Jay had been alive now, and for what? To make extra sure that Jay’s old man would keep his gob shut about the cons she was running, the mob medicine her husband was administering from his kitchen table?
It beggared belief: the lengths she’d gone to, just to shut the old man up. The depths of her cruelty.
She stirred again; called out for someone. A man: someone named Winston. Her dead husband, most likely.
He was grateful, today, that the husband was dead. It was an unkind thought, and not one his Mum would approve of, because it wasn’t this Winston’s fault, what his wife had done, and from the way Jay’s Dad told it, he - Winston - was all but under her thumb anyway. But being dead meant he wasn’t here, now, in this bedroom; meant he wouldn’t interfere, wouldn’t get in the way of what Jay knew he was there to do. Wouldn’t, thank God, need Jay to take care of him as well as her.
The sons were gone, both of them: to work, or so Jay had gathered from the snippets of their conversation he’d overhead while he’d been crouching, armpits sweating and knees buckling, in his last but one hiding place, a linen cupboard under the stairs that housed the boiler as well as the towels. They’d be out all day; would be back - or so the nerdier, more serious one had told the other - in time to cook a rosemary chicken for their sick Mum’s dinner.
Jay would be gone by then; long gone. At home, in his own bedroom, with a beat ‘em up game on the PlayStation - clean and showered, his clothes in the wash on the hottest, longest cycle he could find on the machine. Or better yet, down in Kent with the old man - the two of them talking and sharing a celebratory bottle of single malt in front of the telly, once the home-help had knocked off for the day and Jay could stop pretending he was there to clean the house, or weed the garden, or whatever lie the old man had told about what Jay did around the place so the little queer wouldn’t go sticking his nose into their business.
And - touch wood, fingers crossed - his Dad could rest a little bit easier knowing some sort of justice had been done. Even if it was twenty years too late.
“We’ve got your money,” El said, her voice as expressionless as Sita’s face.
“How did you find Wainwright?” Soames asked, smiling. “Easy to get along with? I suppose he must have been, or how would you have taken his cheque? And he sounded very excited about meeting you, Lady Winchester, when I last gave the old chap a call. I assume the family reunion went well?”
“Karen’s transferring it now,” El told him, ignoring his questions. “It should be in your account in the next few minutes.”
“I’ll get Jared to check on it then, in that case. Not that I don’t trust you
.”
The pager in El’s back pocket beeped: once, twice, three times.
She held it up to the light; read the message picked out in capitals on the little green screen.
“That’s her,” she said - to Rose and Sita, as much as to Soames. “It’s done.”
Jay wrapped his other hand around the knife handle and raised it to his ear - like nunchaku, or a Samurai sword.
He was ready, he told himself. He could do this.
With his shoulder, he nudged the wardrobe door open a crack; not much, but just enough for him to slide out and into the room if he sucked in his stomach and flattened his back.
He’d left his trainers in the linen cupboard, before he crossed the landing. That would help him now; would keep his feet from making a sound as he crept across the carpet. She’d be half deaf, if she was anything like the other old people he’d met, but he didn’t want to risk taking chances. Not now; not when he was so close to finishing it.
He snaked one sock-clad, shoeless foot through the crack and let one, tentative toe sink into the carpet.
She stirred again. Only not in her sleep, not this time. Now she was awake - wide awake and sitting up, getting ready to get up and out of bed, her arms rising up above her head in a long, yawning stretch that made her bones crack and her jaw click.
He panicked; yanked his foot back into the darkness of the wardrobe and held his breath, praying she wouldn’t sense his presence in the room with her as she untangled herself from the covers and slid her own feet into a pair of slippers, her arms into a blue flannel dressing gown.
She stood; shuffled to the door and out into the hallway - over the landing and down the stairs.
He let himself breathe. Listened; waited until her could sense her moving around in the kitchen, could hear the opening of drawers and the clanging of spoons on cups. Then he leaned forward; let the wardrobe swing open and stepped out of the darkness to follow her.
The Push (El Gardener Book 2) Page 21
