“Information?”
“Yes. About that businessman who vanished last year, James Marchant. It’s possible I may know what happened to him.”
Gerry’s brows furrowed.
“Marchant?” he asked, surprised. And legitimately so, El thought - Sita, as far as she knew, hadn’t let him in on that aspect of their problem, despite their many clandestine calls and meetings in the Bay Area, nor on the way that Ruby had planned to deal with it.
“Yes. I’m sorry to say…these ladies, they had something to do with his disappearance. Indeed, I believe they may have been responsible for his death. His murder.”
The bemusement on Gerry’s face intensified.
“I think you may be mistaken, sir,” he said.
“I’m certain that I’m not. In fact, if you’d like to take a seat, I can share with you exactly what I know, and exactly how it was I believe they came to murder the man.”
Gerry looked from Sita to El to Rose, as if trying to reconcile what he was hearing with what he knew of them.
“No,” he told Soames. “No, I don’t think so.”
“If you imagine they’re not capable of such an action,” Soames began, “then I can assure you…”
“No, sir,” Gerry said, stopping him mid-sentence. “It’s not that. It’s just… well, perhaps I shouldn’t be sharing this, but it’ll be common knowledge soon enough once the press get hold of it. James Marchant – he isn’t dead. He’s very much alive.”
“Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?” Rose had asked Harriet the day before.
Rose’s worries, El had thought at the time, weren’t entirely misplaced. Harriet hadn’t looked sure; had looked, in El’s opinion, somewhat nauseated at the prospect of doing what she’d committed to do.
“Will it help you?” Harriet had replied. “You and Sophie?”
“More than you know.”
“Then I’m sure. Absolutely sure.”
“Right, then,” Ruby had said. “Now we’ve got that out the way, here’s what’s gonna happen…”
The call, when it came, would be placed not by Karen, as Ruby had originally suggested, but by Sita’s good friend Alanza, based currently in the Leblon neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro. It would last roughly five minutes: long enough, Karen had assured them, to be certain that anyone attempting to trace the call after the fact could identify Brazil - and, if they were competent, Rio specifically - as its point of origin.
“Alanza’s a very nice girl,” Sita had added. “The perfect combination of loquacious and discreet. Which is exactly what we’re in need of here, I’d say.”
“When she’s finished gabbing away and you’ve hung up,” Ruby said, “don’t pick up the phone again straight off. Go and make yourself a cup of coffee; watch a bit of telly. Leave it an hour - more, if you can manage it. You want to make it look like you weren’t sure what you ought to do about it, when the call came in. Like you were sat there biting your nails trying to work it out.”
“That… makes sense, I suppose,” Harriet said.
“And then,” Sita said, “when you’re confident enough time has elapsed…”
“I dial 999,” Harriet finished. “Ask for the police, and tell them that I need to speak to the person in charge of the investigation into my father. That he’s been in touch.”
“No!” Soames said. “No! Marchant’s dead. These women here murdered him. Stabbed him to death with a kitchen knife.”
“I can assure you, sir,” Gerry told him, eyeing Soames now with a faintly uneasy look that suggested to El that he was harbouring concerns his suspect might be laying the groundwork for an insanity defence later down the line, “he’s alive. We received information yesterday that confirmed as much. Some of my colleagues are liaising with Interpol as we speak to work out how we can expedite the extradition process, just as soon as they track down where he’s hiding.”
Soames stared at him; at all of them.
“That’s impossible,” he said. “Impossible.”
Gerry stared back at him.
“I don’t know where you’re getting your information,” he replied eventually, with a finality that told El, if not Soames himself, that this particular portion of the conversation had gone far enough already, and would go no further, “but whoever you’ve been talking to… I’d say they’ve been winding you up. I just hope for your sake that you haven’t been using what you thought you knew to make life uncomfortable for these women, or anyone else for that matter. Because I wouldn’t take kindly to that, sir. Not kindly at all.”
Chapter 32
Lancaster Gate, London
November 1997
It was Sophie, not Rose, who answered the intercom; Sophie who opened the door to the apartment when El knocked. But still, she seemed taken aback to find El standing in front of her.
“You want Mum?” she asked, in lieu of a greeting.
She’d dyed her hair since California, El noticed - the canary-yellow-streaked red now a mousey, characterless brown that struck her as a peculiar choice for a teenager. Her clothes too were oddly characterless: a plain white t-shirt, blue jeans and unbranded black trainers that said nothing, made no statement at all.
“If she’s in?” El said.
Sophie gave what could have been a nod, or just a twitch of her head, and melted away into the vastness of the apartment, leaving El to make her own way inside.
It was nothing at all like the cluttered, eclectically organised Notting Hill house that she’d come the previous year to associate with Rose - to see as a reflection of her tastes and interests, the rhythms of her life. It was barren, impersonal; so under-decorated that it seemed barely lived in at all. Not one of Rose’s prints or paintings hung on the tastefully off-white walls; none of Sophie’s books or magazines or computer games littered the pale-wood floor the way her toys and clothes and school-work had at Ledbury Road.
They’re not staying here long, she thought. This isn’t a home - it’s a way station. A safe house.
Rose found her nosing around what was probably intended to be the study, a pleasantly beige non-room with an electric faux-Victorian fireplace as its centrepiece.
“This is unexpected,” she said, coming up behind El as she took in the view of the park from the window. She was smiling, El saw as she spun around; her eyes wrinkling in a way that suggested the surprise visit wasn’t entirely unwelcome.
“I was in the area,” El replied. It was at best a half-truth: she’d driven in that morning to have lunch with Ruby and Sita in Highgate, forty minutes and a dozen sets of traffic-clogging roadworks away. But seeing Rose while she was down in London had seemed important; not something she ought to put off for much longer.
You’re a fool to yourself, you are, Ruby had told her. And perhaps, El considered, she hadn’t been entirely wrong in that assessment.
“Sophie looks different,” she added.
“You can blame Ruby for that,” Rose said, still smiling. “I’m afraid my daughter has decided - against my deeply-held and explicitly communicated wishes to the contrary, I might add - that she wants to be a grifter when she grows up.”
El, too, had to smile at this. It occurred to her that, really, it was a development both of them should have seen coming. Sophie was a bright kid, pain in the arse though she could be, and it had been a while since Ruby had taken a protégé under her wing. The two of them together were a perfect match.
“Hence the clothes?” she asked.
“Hence the clothes. Apparently camouflage is key, in your line of work? She’s learning how to blend into the background. And if the pound coins that keep disappearing from my wallet are any indication, how to pocket-dip, too.”
Surely it’s our line of work by now? El thought. Then realised, having thought it, the implication of the thought. That whatever new life she’d imagined for herself in the wake of the Marchant job, whatever fantasies she’d harboured about retiring from the con and retreating to her cottage to grow herb
s or keep bees or write a screenplay, they were just that: fantasies. Grifting wasn’t just what she did; it was who she was. And perhaps that wasn’t so terrible, after all.
You know your trouble? she heard Ruby tell her again. 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.
She hadn’t been entirely wrong about that, either.
“It’s a worry,” Ruby had said, tucking into her Lobster Thermidor with eye-watering gusto.
“What is?” El had asked, poking at her linguine with considerably more restraint.
“Soames. Not knowing how he heard about us, how he got his information.”
It was a worry; El had no argument there.
Though currently out on bail on medical grounds, Soames no longer - or so Ruby and Sita believed - represented much of a threat, to them or to anyone. His family were gone, his hold over his son broken, and - in light of James Marchant’s recent contact with his daughter - his means of blackmailing them into submission had effectively dematerialised. He was powerless, now; just a weak, sick old man waiting to stand trial for crimes of which, Gerry Adler had assured them, he would almost certainly be found guilty. Eyewitness testimony was unreliable, especially so many years after the fact. But the DNA evidence provided by Lois Soames and her father - not Bob Kingsley, as she’d always thought, but Ted Wainwright, the father from whom she’d been stolen - should, Gerry had said, be enough to guarantee a conviction.
The question of who had given Soames the details of the Marchant murder and their involvement in it, however, remained entirely unanswered. And Soames himself, El suspected, would take whatever secrets he knew back to prison with him - and, in the fullness of time, to the grave.
“It was her, though, wasn’t it?” El had said. “It was Hannah. It had to be.”
Ruby had shrugged.
“We’re making enquiries,” Sita had said, downing two Jersey oysters in quick succession.
“Good at that, she is,” Ruby had added sourly. “Sneaking around, interrogating people down dark alleys.”
“Must this forever be a bone of contention?” Sita had sighed.
“It ain’t right, that’s all I’m saying - going behind people’s backs like that. Ain’t right at all.”
El hadn’t been sure how much of Ruby’s irritation at Sita conspiring with Gerry Adler in San Francisco - the excuses, the late-night phone calls, the fabricated Taj Mahal story - was real, and how much was feigned. Probably, she thought, the deception had stung, at least a little. But that it had proven so pivotal, so necessary to neutralising the danger Soames had posed … that, she suspected, had cut deeper.
Sita had sighed again - a loud, grande dame suspiration that was more performance than catharsis.
“To move away from this, if we may,” she’d said, when her breath was spent. “El, darling - how are you? Have you been seeing very much of Rose?”
“I thought I’d stop by,” El said, galled by her own nervousness, the roiling churn of her stomach. “See how you are.”
“We’re fine,” Rose said lightly. “Settling back into the swing of things. Though I will say that I’m in no rush to return to California any time soon, after this year’s adventure.”
“Not even to see Kate?” she asked before she could stop herself - clamp a muffling hand, perhaps, over the jaw that seemed, suddenly, not entirely under her control.
Rose moved back a step, and fixed her with the same appraising stare that Sita had used on her earlier in the day.
“No,” she said, sounding both puzzled and faintly amused. “Not even to see Kate.”
“And how’s Harriet?” El continued, feeling a pressing need to manoeuvre things in an alternative direction, to reverse them out of the humiliating conversational cul-de-sac into which she’d steered them.
“She’s well. Taking everything that’s happened in her stride, I’m happy to say.”
This tallied with what El had heard already over lunch. Harriet Marchant, Ruby had told her, had seemed surprisingly unfazed both by her involvement in the Soames affair and by the lies she’d recounted subsequently for the police - and presumably for Interpol - around where exactly in the world her father might be found.
(“She’s a cold fish, that Harriet,” Ruby had said, “but she’s got a good head on her shoulders. Can’t fault it”).
“Is she still in touch with Lois Soames?” El asked.
In part because of her job, and in part - or so El thought - because of the sense of responsibility she felt towards both Lois and Jay after having sprung Ted Wainwright on them, Harriet had offered herself to all three of them as an informal counsellor and confidante - until, as she took pains to emphasise, an appropriately-qualified (and wholly impartial) therapist could be located to work through their respective issues, one-on-one and, where relevant, together.
Lois, to everyone’s astonishment - including, Harriet said, her own - had dealt the best of the three of them with the revelations that had confronted her the month before: the combined impact of Wainwright’s arrival on her doorstep and the realisation of what her husband had done, what he was still doing to her and her son apparently enough to pull the scales forcibly from her eyes. She’d be testifying at Soames’ trial, she’d told Harriet; was prepared, now she recognised it for the abuse it was, to tell anyone who’d listen what she’d suffered over the decades at his hands.
“She’s resilient,” Harriet had said. “I don’t think she sees it that way, but she is. He had her for nearly thirty years, and she survived. If I were to guess, I’d say she’ll survive the rest, too.”
Jay Soames’s recovery, she’d said, would likely be a longer and more challenging journey - his desire to protect and avenge his mother still warring with the lifetime of conditioning he’d received from his father.
“He knows what the right thing to do is, and what he ought to think,” Harriet had added - the small catch in her throat as she spoke suggesting to El that it might not just be Jay she was talking about. “But there’s still a voice in his head telling him a different story, a more toxic story altogether. A sort of… demon on his shoulder. He’ll learn to stop listening, I’ve no doubt of that. But that voice… I’m not sure it’ll ever quite leave him.”
Wainwright, she thought, was still shell-shocked - his newly discovered daughter and grandson still seeming to him not quite solid, not quite real.
Nevertheless, Harriet said, he had no plans to return to the Bay Area for the foreseeable future, and would be staying instead in England - not in London but in Yorkshire, far enough from Lois and Jay that his presence wouldn’t be felt as oppressive, but close enough that he could be on hand as and when they needed him, as they began the slow, painstaking process of getting to know each other.
Just as importantly, as Harriet had observed: his substantial personal fortunes meant that paying for the treatment all three of them so desperately needed would present no problem at all.
“She’s found her a therapist,” Rose replied. “A good one, I think - a friend of hers from university, one who specialises in domestic abuse. And another for Jay. She wouldn’t tell me much more that, for obvious reasons, but Harriet knows what she’s doing - she’d never recommend someone who wasn’t every bit as capable as she is.”
She’s proud of her, El realised - proud of her accomplishments, her competence.
The idea pleased her. If, she thought, Rose and Harriet could be close enough, after not even a year of knowing each other, for Rose to take a sisterly pride in what Harriet did and was, then perhaps there was hope, after all, for Lois and Jay and Ted Wainwright.
“Did you hear about Karen?” Rose asked, when no further reply from El was forthcoming.
“Got the invitation yesterday,” El said.
She hadn’t quite believed what she was seeing, when she’d opened the envelope - a thick, gold-t
rimmed slab of ivory that had weighed more than her last utility bill.
Mrs Eleanor Baxter, the ornate and disorientingly formal script on the folded note inside had read, requests the pleasure of your company at the marriage of her daughter Karen to Mr Fergus Ian Armstrong, hosted at Allemore Castle, Loch Lomond on Saturday 10th January at 2pm.
Karen’s getting married? she’d thought, so shocked she’d nearly said the words aloud. Karen’s getting married in a castle in the Highlands?
“Apparently Fergus missed her while she was away,” Rose said, the smile creeping back to her eyes and mouth.
“Isn’t she a bit young for it, though?”
“She’s older than I was, when Seb and I got married. And she and Fergus are actually in love, at least as far as I’ve been able to tell. Besides - you could hardly accuse her of not knowing her own mind, could you? I’m sure they’ll be absolutely fine.”
The reference to Rose’s husband - the best friend with whom she’d shared a life and a daughter, if not a bed, before his premature death - seemed to nudge some part of El’s brain into action; to remind her of why she was there, in the apartment. Of what she’d come to ask.
If you don’t start pulling that head of yours out of your arse, Ruby had said, you’re gonna miss the boat altogether.
She won’t keep waiting ‘round for you to work out if you want her or not.
“I actually…, ” El began - and stopped abruptly. Coughed, ran a hand through her no-longer-neon-pink hair and started again.
“I was wondering,” she said, “if you might want to go for dinner sometime this week? Just me and you?”
Rose’s smile spread, pulling the skin of her forehead tight and deepening the crow’s feet in the corner of her eyes.
The Push (El Gardener Book 2) Page 26
