by Eva Dolan
Another five flats would empty out over the coming weeks, all owned by the same buy-to-let landlord who had been holding out for the very best price. While her tenants scrambled around for alternative accommodation, finding no help from the council and with the local housing charities all stretched beyond breaking.
At least one couple were going to end up on the street, Ella knew, unless something miraculous happened. Molly was calling shelters for them, churches and hostels, writing letters to their MP.
Back at the table, Sinclair had moved into her seat and was slipping his books into his messenger bag.
‘I had an interesting call about you,’ he said as she placed his beer in front of him. ‘Ta.’
Ella sat, took the last chip in the bowl. ‘I hate sentences that start like that.’
‘I was contacted by a guy in Wandsworth nick. He’s trying to sell a story about you. Wants to send me a visiting order, get an interview set up. Tell all, he’s saying. Career-ending.’
Quinn.
Ella tried to keep her face blank.
‘You know who it is?’ he asked.
‘I have an idea, yeah.’
‘Is it true what he’s claiming?’ Sinclair seemed to have sobered up instantly, no more matey chatter, back into investigative-reporter mode.
‘If it’s the same crap he was claiming when he was arrested, then no, it isn’t.’ Ella held his gaze, saw the faint trace of interest evaporate. ‘Ryan Quinn has had it in for me for a long time. He thinks I’m a fake, basically. In it for the glamour.’
Sinclair smiled. ‘I figured it was bollocks; you wouldn’t be stupid enough to get involved with anything like that.’
‘Quinn made an idiotic move and it achieved nothing but getting him locked up and making the rest of us – who protest peacefully – look like animals.’ Ella heard the anger in her voice and felt it in her chest, forced herself to speak calmly. ‘He’s doing the police’s job for them. The thing is, I don’t even think he realises that. He thinks he’s a hero. A martyr for the cause.’
‘He’s not the first bloke to do more damage than good like that,’ Sinclair said. He checked his watch and reached for his pint. ‘Drink up, we’d best be getting off.’
Outside, the theatre-goers had migrated to their plush seats, the young beggar moved on to fresh and busier patches. Sinclair was talking about the event, checking whether she was prepped, asking her how she wanted to structure it then telling her how he wanted to do it. Ella answered distractedly, kept walking when he stopped to light a cigarette, and only realised she’d lost him when she turned towards the empty pavement. He caught up with her, laughing about her inability to hold her beer and how you could apparently take the Durham out of the girl once you’d taken the girl out of Durham.
Ella laughed along, acting on autopilot. She followed him through the front door of Foyles, where his face was plastered large and lightly photoshopped in the windows and on boards near the staircase he ran up ahead of her.
Pull it together, she told herself. People are watching you.
By the time they reached the top floor, she found him already talking to the events manager, warmly shaking his hand. She played her part, trailed them into the green room, answering more questions and turning down a drink then requesting a jasmine tea if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, listening as Sinclair asked about the size of the audience and then rang his PR, who was stuck in an Uber with a driver whose satnav was broken.
‘That’s what you get for not supporting the cabbies, Imogen.’
He looked at Ella and she smiled like she meant it but even as they emerged on to the small stage, into the polite applause and the lights, she was thinking about Quinn and what would happen to her if the next journalist he tried actually bought his story.
It would be the end of this.
The end of everything.
Molly
Now – 11th March
I didn’t ask his name.
It only strikes me as I’m walking across Vauxhall Bridge, needing the breeze that blows up off the river to sweep the sickroom smell of Ella’s bedsit out of my head. Maybe it’s best I don’t know. It will make the inevitable lying that bit easier.
I look down into the water. There’s a grizzled, grey-haired man walking along the bank, eyes fixed on the mud, prodding at it occasionally with his toe. This isn’t the right place for mudlarking, the bank too narrow, the water too high, but what do I know, anyway?
On the bus home I kept thinking about the people at Ella’s party that night; witnesses, all of them, all carrying their surveillance devices. There will be photographs strewn across social media and blogs already and he’ll be in some of them, if only in the background, in profile. When he’s found and the police realise he’s too well-groomed to have been homeless they’ll start trawling the party footage.
They’ll realise too that he should have been carrying a wallet and phone, but Ella took those before we dumped him and I suppose she disposed of them wisely. I tried to take them, but she accused me of treating her like a child and time was passing so I let her have her way.
Maybe the police will buy it as a robbery gone wrong. No reason to look at either of us if that’s the story.
They have enough reports on file for undesirables at Castle Rise that another one slipping inside under cover of the party is credible. Ella’s friends looked like easy pickings, even to me.
This is what we needed to talk about this afternoon. We should have been working through narratives we could have nudged the police towards. Instead we bitched and sniped at each other. At least she’s getting her head together, though. I need her to be solid.
The old man on the muddy bank drops into a crouch, holding on to his stick with one hand as he digs into the ground with a small trowel. I want desperately to know what he’s found. It’s almost a physical longing in me as I watch him straighten up, wipe the thing clean and examine it, before tucking it away in his pocket.
The urge to go down there sweeps over me. I want to know this man’s life, what draws him to the river and forces his hands into the silt. I want to know what he finds there and where he spirits his treasures home to. An irrational part of me wants him to wipe me clean and tuck me safely away.
I step back into the foot flow and follow the southbound bodies across the bridge.
Ahead of me the grotesque ziggurats of St George Wharf fist the sky and I feel a little stab of nostalgia for Camden, with its rows of dignified townhouses and old corner boozers, an area that still looks like people actually live in it, eat and drink and buy ordinary, everyday things. This is real estate as unreal as plots of land on the moon, square footage most owners will never walk across.
It’s earlier than it feels, the end of lunch hour, but the bars and restaurants along the river path are busy, full of people who aren’t tied to their desks with a homemade salad. I don’t see a single suit among them and it makes me think how much easier it was to tell the ruling class from the rest of us when they all wore Savile Row. Now the entry-level nobody wears the suit and the billionaire dresses like a student and it’s impossible to stake your claim for individuality with anything as basic as your attire.
Everything is harder for this generation.
At the entrance to Castle Rise the very black tarmac is covered in clods of mud and smeared tracks from whatever heavy machinery has been in and out today. Two hefty men in full body suits, high-viz jackets, hard hats and safety glasses are shovelling the dirt into wheelbarrows. I wonder what they need so much protecting from, out there on the open road, before I catch myself. Better they’re safe, I think, remembering the man my dad worked with, who lost his hand because the piece of machinery he operated didn’t have a guard on it. One second’s inattention, that was all it took. No more evenings at the snooker hall or digging his allotment.
Something’s different on-site. There are workers swarming the place, more than usual it seems, and as I get further in, closer to the newest
block, I realise they’re tidying the place up, brushing down pathways, clearing away swathes of opaque plastic and lengths of rope, and all the rubbish the wind blows in.
They must be due a visit from the bosses tomorrow. That or someone they consider a very serious buyer, the kind who acquires property by the tower, rather than in mere blocks of two or three.
It would be a good time for us to mount an action.
A call to arms tonight might gather a few dozen supporters. Enough for coverage in the local press, and if we could provoke someone into a rash reaction – one of the executives or the drivers or site security – we might get useful video.
My heart isn’t in it, though.
And the last thing we should be doing right now is drawing attention to ourselves.
Callum is coming out of the main door as I approach, holding a clutch of plastic carrier bags, the cheap, thin kind you can see right through, and I know what’s in them by the greyish-brown bulk. More rats.
He holds them up. ‘Big as fucking cats. Four of them.’
I wrinkle my nose.
‘Do you want to see them?’ he asks.
‘You sick bastard.’
‘I thought you were an artist. Aren’t you creative types into death and decay and that sort of thing?’ He lifts the lid of one of the big bins and drops the dead animals inside, wipes his hands on the back of his jeans. ‘Must be the time of year, they’re coming in from the cold.’ He looks up at the empty sky, like he can read the air. ‘Do you want me to put some traps down in your place?’
‘Have you got enough?’
‘Four more than I had this morning, aye.’ He opens the door for me and we go into the lobby. ‘Or I’ve got poison. But you don’t want poison really, because they take themselves off to die and then you never know where they’re going to wind up. Might find one rotting round the back of your fridge or something. Reckon I’ve got one in my place. Reeks in there.’
My heartbeat stutters and skips at the thought of Ella’s nameless dead man rotting in the lift shaft. I slip my arm through Callum’s for support and resolutely avoid looking at the pair of lifts as we pass them. He’s in the one on the left and I’m sure I can smell him now too, even though I noticed nothing this morning when I went out. The power of suggestion is working on me and I hate it. This is what happens when you’re tired and scared. The fear takes a stronger hold on you.
Is he beginning to ooze? Are his fluids pooling under him, spreading out and spilling into the grooves of the lift’s ceiling, looking for places to settle, little cracks and holes to drip through?
How long before his death becomes something audible?
‘We need to find the nest,’ Callum says, taking the stairs slowly, at what he thinks is my pace.
Callum searching the building is the last thing I want.
‘You won’t stop them coming,’ I tell him, finding my voice again at last. ‘Rats are part of city living. Don’t waste your time. Let’s just try and keep them out of our flats, okay? They can have the rest of the building if they want it.’
On the half-landing he stops, his face showing concern. ‘You’re giving up.’
I grip the handrail. I don’t want to argue with him, don’t even want to talk to him right now, I just want to go into my flat and close the door and sit in silence for a while.
‘Cal, there are probably hundreds of rats in here. You could wipe them all out today and a bunch more would come in tomorrow. This isn’t worth you messing about with.’
‘You won’t say that when you wake up with one on your bed.’ He’s getting agitated, his left leg beginning to jiggle, and I’ve seen this before, know he’s on the cusp of going into one of his odd moods. I don’t have the energy to deal with this on top of everything else.
‘Okay, look, can you come up later on and put some traps down for me?’
‘You need to keep them out,’ he says, eyes bulging.
‘Will you bring the traps up?’ I ask, trying to get him to focus.
He nods. ‘Yeah, yeah, I better go and do the ones for Derek and Jenny first. He caught one yesterday, you know, found it in the bathroom when he got up for a slash. He goes four or five times a night, the poor old fucker, prostate, he keeps sayin’ I should get mine checked, but ahm no’ old enough far tha’.’
He’s slipping back into the accent he’s largely lost, his posture changing in front of my eyes, becoming slouched and sly, his head tilting at a new and wrong angle.
I can’t deal with him as well.
‘I’m going to have a kip,’ I say, pushing past him up the stairs. ‘Give me a couple of hours, yeah? I’m knackered.’
Gratefully I shut the door and lean back against it for a moment, close my eyes, wishing I was somewhere else, far from here. I don’t need a five-star hotel or a sandy beach, just a bolthole would do, any place beyond human contact, freed from worrying about other people, the living and the dead.
But that isn’t how it works.
I retrieve my laptop from its hiding place, switch it on and make a cup of strong coffee loaded with sugar. As tired as I feel, sleep won’t help.
I start with Twitter, find plenty of photographs from the party sent to Ella and a few to me as well, selfies I don’t remember agreeing to but I look drunk enough to have agreed to anything, beaming into high-held phones and mercifully filtered afterwards.
It’s the backgrounds and group shots I’m interested in, though. I blow up each photograph, work methodically, moving and zooming, looking for him among the crowd. I search for his profile, the knit of his hat, the shape of his beard, that army green flak jacket, which wasn’t heavy enough for the cold weather.
Picture after picture of laughter and smiles and frozen conversations, beer bottles poised an inch from parted lips and heads tipped back to empty plastic wine glasses, the odd blue dots of e-cigarettes floating.
There he is.
There they are.
Ella and her dead man standing close together.
She’s lied to me again.
Ella
Then – Christmas Eve
Ella’s mother was waiting for her at Durham station, overdressed as usual, in a camel coat and leather gloves, her ash-blonde hair whipped up into a chignon simultaneously too old and too young for her. She was tapping out a message on her phone, probably checking Ella’s father was up to speed with the list of last-minute Christmas prep she would inevitably have given him.
The Riordan household began bracing itself for festivities the day after Bonfire Night, when her parents presided over a party attended by half of the village, with a fire that took a week to build and a guy fashioned after whoever her father deemed most worthy of burning. It had been Jeremy Corbyn this year, her father had gleefully informed her, sending half a dozen photos of their badly formed proxy perishing in the flames while the fat Rotarians and members of the golf club toasted him with mulled wine.
Christmas would, hopefully, be less political. All the friends and professional acquaintances should have been and gone already and Ella only had to survive her family.
The other passengers off the 10.30 from King’s Cross progressed slowly through the ticket barriers, struggling with bags and looking for tickets which should have already been in their hands. Ella’s mother finally placed her phone back inside her handbag and waved in her reserved fashion as Ella made her way through the crowds.
Ella swung her holdall off her shoulder and hugged her, smelling hairspray and vanilla perfume, underneath it a slight trace of the cigarettes her mother occasionally smoked with less stealth than she realised.
‘You look tired, Ellie darling. Late night?’
‘Early start,’ she said, ignoring what might have been a barb. ‘It’s so good to be home.’
‘It’s so good to have you home.’ They linked arms and walked out towards the car park, carol singers collecting for charity on the pavement, filling the air with bells and song and the rattle of coins. ‘I was down your way l
ast week but I didn’t want to bother you. You’re always so busy.’
‘You should have told me you were coming,’ Ella said. ‘We could have gone for lunch.’
‘Oh, no, I didn’t want to put you out. It was all rather last minute. Christmas shopping.’ She thumbed her key fob and the lights flashed on a black Range Rover just ahead of them. ‘And I know you don’t enjoy shopping as much as I do.’
‘This is new,’ Ella said, as she placed her bag in the back.
‘Your father insisted.’ A little shrug of delighted resignation. ‘The other one was getting troublesome.’
On the drive home Ella let her mother do most of the talking and listened with half an ear to the updates on which neighbours were ill or downsizing or having affairs, which of her old school-friends had done very well since she was there last Christmas and who the less said about the better – a phrase that always heralded a far lengthier and more involved story than it suggested.
The countryside blurred by the window, her mother driving in the reckless way she always did on rural roads. There was something about being in a tank, Ella supposed: you didn’t have to respect any oncoming vehicle smaller than a combine harvester and those were long packed up in their sheds now. The familiar woods were greener than she thought they should have been at this time of year; she was sure she remembered them barren and skeletal in previous winters.
Now, as her mother slowed behind a man on a horse at the edge of the village, Ella noticed daffodils in bud around a blind-bend sign, could already see the tips turning yellow.
They passed the pub, thick with the lunchtime crowd, the car park crammed, smoke billowing out of the chimney. Nothing changed here. The same people would be inside, having the same conversations they’d been sharing for twenty years or more, and Ella found it didn’t oppress her like it once had. Now she didn’t have to be here she found it oddly comforting. In London you’d go down a street you hadn’t walked along for a couple of months and a building would be gone, razed to the ground and the site boarded ready for work to begin, and she would find she didn’t remember what had been there before. Here a front door being painted a new colour would be noticed by everyone, a side garden becoming a building plot could be blocked for years, fought to the highest level and then seethed about for evermore.
