Money Never Sleeps

by Whitelaw, Stella

  ‘Did your chief reporter cover the story? Think back. Think carefully.’

  ‘I have no idea. It’s a million years ago. I can’t remember that long ago. Why are we talking about this now?’

  ‘Because you are connected in some way. And whoever has it in for you knew you were coming to the conference, knew they could target you here. There would be more opportunities. You would be vulnerable, away from your normal routine, an easy target.’

  ‘An easy target,’ Fancy agreed. She thought of all the things that had happened since she arrived. Not a pleasant memory, yet the bad had been tempered with good. Kind people, sympathy, Jed’s protection. And now a wonderful kiss. It was a long time since a man had kissed her with such feeling.

  ‘Is it about money?’

  ‘It’s always about money. Money never sleeps.’

  ‘Last drinks before lunch, folks,’ Jessie called out from the bar. There was a general movement without looking as if anyone was rushing. Jessie poured out the last of the special wine into their glasses.

  ‘I didn’t know you two knew each other,’ she said.

  ‘Passing acquaintances,’ said Fancy.

  ‘Jed can pass my acquaintance anytime,’ said Jessie.

  ‘But you’re married, aren’t you?’

  Jessie looked surprised, then quickly regained her composure.

  ‘I know. But my husband wouldn’t understand. We had a big row last week, about money of all things. It’s water under the bridge.’

  ‘Have you sorted it out?’

  ‘In a way, but don’t hold your breath.’

  Fancy understood. Even happily married couples could be on their own sometimes. Couples drifted along their own paths, taking different routes through the woods. It didn’t mean that they had stopped loving one another. It meant that they had individual lives, not joined at the hip, not always breathing the same parcel of air.

  Jed steered her over the lawn towards the dining room, then let her go. ‘You had better go and fraternize with the top table, while I get my nosh with the plebs.’

  ‘Don’t leave me,’ said Fancy, panicking.

  ‘I can’t hold your hand all the time,’ he said, inferring that he wouldn’t be able to eat if his good hand was otherwise occupied. ‘I have to eat.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘What’s happening this afternoon?’

  ‘I’m doing an extra workshop. Some of the white-badgers got together and asked if I would do something really basic. You know, double spacing, page numbering, markets, agents.’

  ‘You never stop,’ said Jed over his shoulder as he walked away to the far end of the dining room, looking for a spare seat. ‘I knew they would devour you.’

  Fancy couldn’t remember what she ate. It was something cold. Different kinds of salad, sliced cold meats, quiche, cheese – again. The last hour had been a roller coaster and her stomach was in no fit state to accept food. She wondered if she could make a sandwich and slip it upstairs. Room 425 still felt the safest place despite the fire and the flowers.

  Perhaps if she was alone, the mist would clear and she might remember some stray bit of information that could be the reason for all these unpleasant happenings. She thought of Melody, floating in the old lake like Ophelia, her face down in the cold water. The police presence was still evident, combing the grounds, but the detective had not spoken to her again.

  Except Jed and he was police, wasn’t he? He said he was semi-retired. Supposing he wasn’t? Supposing he had only said that to reassure her. He certainly asked a lot of questions. Questions that she couldn’t answer.

  ‘Stop it,’ she said loudly to herself.

  ‘Comment?’ said Jessie, fork in mid-air.

  ‘Sorry, talking to myself as usual. Bad habit.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I do it all the time. Reminding myself of what I’ve got to do.’

  ‘And I’ve got to prepare my extra workshop for this afternoon,’ said Fancy, rising. ‘So if you don’t mind, I’ll leave you to all this delicious food and grab an apple on my way out.’

  Fancy hurried out of the dining room with a chunk of cheese surreptitiously wrapped in a paper napkin, an ice-cold apple and a frozen banana. It might have defrosted by tomorrow. She obviously wasn’t going home. She need not pack and warm up the car. No excuses to make. She just hoped she wouldn’t find a bomb outside her bedroom door.

  She paused at the lift. Would the lift man still be saying Doors opening and Doors closing? Or had he been programmed to imprison her in the lift till she ran out of oxygen?

  ELEVEN

  Wednesday Afternoon

  The police were still searching the garden and the lake, an inch at a time, everything bagged and labelled. The crime scene had been sealed off and freeze-frozen. Now and again there was a glimpse of white overalls. They were looking for strands of hair, flakes of skin, fibres. The lake had even been dredged. It gave up a quantity of empty bottles, plastic bags and rotting debris, even a dead bird. It also gave up Melody’s handbag. The sodden contents were being examined by forensic.

  Fancy nodded to the white spacemen at they combed the gardens. She didn’t ask them if they had found anything. They would think she was going to put them in a book. People were always suspicious of writers, their eyes narrowing. They inevitably asked: ‘Are you going to put me in a book?’

  No, thank you, she wasn’t. She had an unruly crowd of characters romping about in her head, waiting to be given life, stampeding for attention every time she started on a new book. ‘Me next!’ they shouted, pushing each other out of the way.

  She let herself into her room, checking for intruders and anything weird. The flowers had gone. She examined the coffee sachets and milk cartons for pin-pricked holes and decided that the Nescafé was uncontaminated. She refused to make a nest of her own fears. Both fruits got a hot water wash before she ate them. She munched the chunk of cheese with relish.

  As she sat at the desk, eating and drinking, she drew a sheet of A4 paper forward and started to write down all the possible connections with the Marchant twins. As she worked out the dates, she realized that it was almost impossible to find a connection. It happened before she was even born. The trial, the disappearance, the subsequent investigations. The case had rarely been written about in the last twenty years. Only her magazine had dredged up the mystery.

  She opened the lid of her laptop and went onto Google. The Missing Cover Girl case was on Wikipedia and had several other empty sites. One site covered the trial of Rupert Harlow. She made a note of all the names mentioned in court, the judge, the barristers. The dry mechanical details. None of them rang a bell, not even the merest tinkle.

  Then something caught her eye. The Marchant money was mentioned. ‘Money never sleeps,’ Jed had said. Wasn’t there a film, with that title? She hadn’t been to see it. Wall Street was of no interest to her. She clicked on the link.

  The twins’ father, Eddie Marchant, had owned a family brewery in the Midlands, which he sold to a big northern conglomerate for a tidy fortune. The money was left equally to both girls in Eddie’s will, on condition that when one daughter died, her share of the brewery money should go, without question or qualification, even if she had married, to the remaining daughter.

  This clause caused a great deal of trouble. Thelma could not be declared dead for seven years because her body was never found. Grace, therefore, had to wait for Thelma’s share of the inheritance. Lawyers made a lot of money out of the proceedings. But again, there was no link to Fancy.

  She put the banana skin and apple core in the bin. Now she had a basics workshop to do, showing budding writers how to take the bread out of her mouth. She would be surviving on the Public Lending Rights in her sixties. No mileage left in you, her publisher would tell her, by email, his eye on her diminishing royalty returns.

  This thought of the future shocked her. She did not want to grow old, wrinkled and die, even if it was some way off. She did not want Jed to reach seventy, his hai
r turning white, crippled with arthritis. He might die before her. That would be devastating. The taste of grief enveloped her, even though she might never know what happened to him. They might not be together. She might read his obit in the Police Review. That seemed even worse.

  Her only link with the Marchant twins was that it was a cold case and her Macabre Mysteries magazine had featured it some months earlier. Perhaps someone thought she was getting warm. She had a quick wash and changed into a plain white T-shirt to show that this workshop was in casual mode.

  On her way to the Orchard Room, she passed Jed walking the other way. He was talking earnestly to an elderly, white-haired gentleman with a stick. Her heart lurched at the sight of him. This was getting ridiculous.

  ‘Is it the Marchant money?’ she asked as they passed.

  ‘I think you’re getting warm,’ he nodded.

  She focused on climbing the steep path to the Orchard Room. ‘You knew all the time,’ she threw back over her shoulder.

  ‘I’m a detective, remember?’ he reminded her with a wink.

  Fancy wondered if Jed was really retired. They could still employ a one-armed detective, couldn’t they? It made no difference to his ability to detect, only for the required two-hand hold on a gun.

  ‘You are not really retired, are you?’ she continued, catching her breath.

  ‘Whoever said I was?’

  ‘You did.’

  By now he had moved on, still talking to the elderly gentleman. She’d heard that the old gent was famous, had written a war-time thriller, which had been made into a film called 633 Squadron. It was still re-shown every Christmas on television with big stars, David Niven or Dirk Bogarde. She wasn’t sure which actors.

  ‘She sounds nice,’ she heard the old man saying. ‘Can’t see too good these days. Eyes going. Go by the voice. She’s always pleasant.’

  ‘She is nice,’ said Jed.

  Fancy bounced into the Orchard Room. It was full. They were all waiting; big white A4 ruled notebooks from pound shops at the ready. Eager to fill them with her words of wisdom. They were determined to be on the next best-sellers list. They saw themselves mounting the steps to collect the Booker Prize.

  ‘Settle down now, chairs in a semi-circle, please. This is not a lecture. Shoot questions at me, not all at once, and I’ll answer them. Only don’t ask me how much I get paid. Never enough for the amount of time and midnight candles burned.’

  They laughed. Chairs scraped on the floor. It was a non-stop hour of giving information, words flying through the air. They asked questions they’d been too embarrassed to ask earlier with everyone listening. A lot of them were wearing white badges. They were also using her pink pens. Fancy wondered if she would get them back.

  Fancy covered a dozen issues: presentation, titles, character names, covering letter, synopsis, agents, PLR, conferences, postal courses. She was truthful and concise. No point in making it sound easy. Should it be 1.5 spacing now, in order to save trees?

  ‘But what does double double-spacing mean?’ she asked the delegates.

  ‘A passage of time,’ they chanted back.

  ‘So many beginners make that mistake. Putting an entire line of extra space between paragraphs. This shrieks that the writer is an amateur. Not necessary unless it’s a passage of time.’

  Fancy looked at her watch. ‘I can hear the rattle of the tea trolleys. Buns and cake time. I hope this has been useful.’

  ‘Wonderful. Thank you.’

  ‘Great. I can’t wait to get home and get started.’

  ‘Just what I wanted to know.’ The words flew, fragmented through the air.

  They followed her out onto the lawn, still finding more questions to ask. Some of them didn’t listen. She moved with people, hustling towards the forming queue. She was dry-mouthed, dehydrated, longing for a cuppa.

  ‘You know you said you’d look at my manuscript when you got home, Fancy? Well, you didn’t give me an address.’ It was the woman whose manuscript had been burnt in a bucket. Today her tow-coloured hair was in plaits and she had entwined flowers in the braiding. She wore big sunglasses with pink rims and a yellow flowered caftan.

  ‘Ah, flower power,’ said Fancy, digging in her bag for a card. ‘Glastonbury. All that mud. Singing and dancing.’

  ‘Before my time,’ the woman said, cutting short the pleasantries.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Fancy. ‘I’ve forgotten your name. Is it Maggie or Meggie?’ The woman had been to all her lectures, sitting at the back, taking notes earnestly, not saying much. Her name on the white badge was too small and cramped to read.

  The woman shook her head. She was annoyed. ‘Peggy. Peggy Carter.’

  ‘Nearly got it right. I’ve met so many people, you’ll understand.’

  Peggy Carter took the card and shrugged. Fancy sighed. No top marks on the feedback form from this delegate. Fancy had met over a hundred people in the last few days. It was a wonder she could remember her own name.

  Only one more full day to go and then she really could go home. If her car was still in one piece and not vandalized. She had an awful premonition of another night fire lighting the sky. There were two more nights to get through, though, as everyone left on the Friday morning. The domestic staff had a quick turnover day: sheets out in the corridor promptly, please. Seeing the coach off to Derby station after breakfast on Friday was apparently a tradition, noisy and tearful. Jessie had told her that she should be there, to show an element of bonding.

  But she could sneak off home on Thursday evening, after supper, join the M1 when the southbound traffic was minimal. Nothing in her contract said she had to stay for the last night’s entertainment, whatever it was that they had been planning. There had been mad and secret rehearsals going on behind closed doors most days. Doors of the hall vibrating with laughter.

  She could plead a deadline. The committee would understand that. Work came first.

  Peggy Carter was at her side again, holding out a cup of tea. She looked contrite. ‘Sorry, I was a bit sharp earlier. Stress, you know. Rushing everywhere. It’s starting to get to me. Northcote fatigue, they call it. Here’s a cup of tea for you. I didn’t know if you took sugar.’

  Fancy took the cup. ‘How very kind of you, Peggy. It’s been a hard week for all of us. People don’t realize the stress. Everyone writing up notes, having to concentrate and still do their own writing in any spare time. Not much sleep.’

  ‘If you can find any time to sleep.’

  ‘Exactly. Thank you for the tea.’

  Fancy wandered onto the lawn, holding the tea, looking for a seat. They were all occupied. She sat on a bank of grass, hoping it was dry. If it wasn’t, she decided, she would just have a damp bottom.

  Jed sprawled out beside her, not looking at her, gazing across to the croquet lawn where a game was going on. Not strictly according to the rules, by the sound of laughter.

  ‘Still mad at me?’

  ‘No,’ said Fancy. ‘Life is far too short to take offence.’

  ‘Did you recognize who I was talking to?’

  ‘Not his name, but I know him by reputation. He wrote the Squadron book that was made into a film, didn’t he? He’s famous, then?’

  ‘That’s right. And he was around at the time of Thelma’s disappearance and Rupert’s trial. I wondered what he could remember.’

  Fancy heard the tantalizing promise. ‘And could he remember anything?’

  ‘His memory is as sharp as a pin. And he was working for a newspaper in south London at the time, a reporter, writing features in his spare time, as well as his novels.’

  ‘Like most of us, he still needed a day job.’

  ‘But you don’t have a day job. So you make enough to live on from your books?’ Jed looked at her as if for pound signs on her forehead.

  ‘That may change, any day soon,’ said Fancy. She wanted to steer the conversation away from her perilous finances. ‘So what did he tell you about the Marchant twins?’

&n
bsp; ‘Lots of interesting stuff. It was not all sweetness and light between the twins. There were stories of quarrels and fights, of the girls being thrown out of nightclubs, parties. They made headlines in all the tabloids. Once, Rupert Harlow was taken to hospital with a broken nose after a fight. He didn’t know which twin hit him so didn’t press charges. They both looked so alike.’

  ‘So I wonder which was the twin with the aggressive temper? The glamorous Thelma or the clever Grace? Perhaps Rupert was innocent after all and one twin turned on the other twin.’

  ‘It was Thelma who disappeared,’ Jed reminded her.

  ‘She could have been murdered by Grace and the body disposed of by Rupert. Don’t ask me how. Then Grace and Rupert married, eventually, when the law allowed. To keep each other quiet, sharing the proceeds. All that Marchant money.’

  ‘A bit far-fetched. There must be a simpler explanation. The trouble is that there is no one to talk to, no one to question.’ Jed was sipping tea, thoughtfully.

  ‘What about Melody’s husband, the farmer from Cornwall? Surely he must know something about his wife’s past? Especially if she is related to the Marchant twins. She must be, with the same surname.’

  ‘I can’t seem to find him. I want to speak to him.’

  ‘Has he got a name?’ Fancy asked. ‘Marchant was Melody’s writing name.’

  ‘I’ll find out.’

  ‘Thelma disappeared sometime around 1975. That’s more than thirty years ago. Who told you that Melody’s husband had arrived from Cornwall?’

  ‘Someone on the committee, I think. I’ll check my notes.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense. So who was Melody? Is she related to the twins? We know so little about her. This gets more and more complicated. It’s a cold case that can stay frozen, for all I care. Except that someone thinks I am implicated. Shall I make a placard saying I am Not Involved and parade about the grounds?’