by Zoe Sharp
Or maybe Angelo was right. I just didn't have the killer instinct.
“Are you OK?”
I hadn't heard Marc come up behind me. Without looking round I said tiredly, “Yeah, just wonderful, thanks.”
He came and sat beside me, linking his well-manicured hands together on the table top. He was wearing another devastating suit over a collarless white shirt with no buttons visible except the pearl stud at the neck. I wondered how long it took him to choose his wardrobe in the mornings.
With a supreme effort, I managed to take a sip of coffee without slopping most of it down the sides of the cup. When I looked up at Marc it was with steady eyes.
He was watching me with a half-smile quirking his mouth. “Once again it seems I have to say you've handled yourself pretty well,” he remarked.
“Once again without any back-up from your own security people,” I put in bitterly.
“So it might seem.”
It was the slight emphasis that tipped me off. My head came up and I stared at him. “You told them,” I said, my voice a whisper as the realisation hit. “You told them to leave me to it, didn't you?”
“I wanted to make certain you could cope on your own, take care of yourself,” he admitted without any visible signs of remorse, “so, yes, I told them to let you handle the first incident that came up solo.” He allowed himself a rueful smile. “I didn't realise it would be one quite so . . . serious.”
I felt a cold sweat break out between my shoulder-blades, prickling my skin. Would I have willingly gone into it knowing I had nobody behind me? I replayed the scene in my mind. Saw again the broken bottle, and the blood. I knew I couldn't have walked away and let those two slug it out until only one was left standing. “And if I hadn't been able to cope?”
He left the question hanging for a few moments. “I didn't doubt for a moment that you could,” he said calmly. His eyes shifted to focus behind me. “Ah, Len, is everything sorted down there?”
“Yes sir.” Len took a chair alongside me, leaning back and scowling. “Bad one. We had to get a meat wagon for the pair of them.” He glanced at me and said grudgingly, “You did OK, but you should have gone in sooner. We're not the police. We don't have to give them a chance to surrender. You go in hard and fast so they don't know what's hit them.”
He demonstrated his point by smacking a fist against his palm. “As soon as trouble starts, you stamp on it. Trying to talk them out of it is just a waste of time and it'll get you hurt.”
“Being reasonable is never a waste of time,” I said, trying not to grind my teeth. “Most people will respond to reason, given the opportunity. Most people will respect reasonable force as well. Unlike back there at the door when Angelo kicked that guy when he was already down and out of the play. That's not being reasonable. That's just vindictive. That bloke'll remember that, and I wouldn't be surprised if he's back with a few more of his mates later. That is what will get you hurt!”
I watched with mild interest as the blue touch paper of Len's temper ignited. Marc's presence was probably the only thing that was keeping his hands clenched on the table top instead of round my windpipe. “You don't know the first thing about this game, so keep your half-baked opinions to yourself,” he growled. “We've seen it all. Done it all. And we know how to handle it!”
Irritated, he lifted himself back to his feet and stumped away.
I swivelled round in my chair and waited until he'd made two strides. “If you're so all-seeing and all-knowing, perhaps you can tell me what the boy was on?”
Len stopped, revealing quite a bit by the way his head ducked at the question. He turned back slowly, eyes flicking nervously to his employer as he did so.
“On?” It was Marc who made the demand, his voice sharp.
“Yeah, Len here was only too keen to let me know earlier that nothing went on in this club that he didn't know about, so he should be able to tell me – what was he on?”
“What are you talking about?” Len asked. He didn't make it sound convincing.
“The kid with the bottle,” I said patiently. “I hit him hard enough to put him down, but he stayed on his feet, and he kept coming. I don't know what shit he had in his system, but I'd lay money that you can't buy it over the counter at Boots.”
Marc sighed, as if talking to a child. “Charlie, we don't ask people for a blood sample on the door before we let them in. If he had taken something, he probably did it before he came into the club.” He pinned me with those pale eyes. “I can tell you now that nobody with any sense tries to bring anything in to my place. Not if they know what's good for them.”
Len vigorously voiced his agreement. Marc glared at him. He made a swift exit.
Marc stood, smoothing out his jacket, his face tightly controlled. Abruptly he leant forwards, resting his hands on the back of my chair and the table top. He spoke in a voice quiet with fury. “I will not have anyone spreading rumours that the New Adelphi is open house for aspiring chemists. Is that understood?”
I had to force myself to hold his gaze, not to back away from him. Pure pig-headedness made me pause for a few moments, defying him, before I nodded.
Satisfied, he straightened up. “Now,” he continued, his voice icy, “if you’re sure you’re all right, I have a club to run.”
***
I fully expected that to be the last I saw of Marc all evening, but to my surprise he reappeared just as we were packing up, around two.
Most of the security lads had already said their goodnights, climbed into their cars and departed into the night.
It had started to drizzle around midnight, a fine spray which sat on people's clothing like dust when they came into the club. Now the rain had started in earnest. I wasn't looking forward to the ride home. What a night to forget my waterproofs.
I'd already pulled on my leather jacket and scarf when Marc caught up with me. “Have you got a moment, Charlie?”
I paused, running quickly through a mental checklist to see what else I'd done to deserve another talking to. I couldn't think that the way I'd handled the brawl on the dance floor could have been dealt with any better. Angelo, of course, would have just kicked both their heads in. And probably the girl's as well.
Now, I just nodded and followed Marc upstairs. We went right the way up to the small dining area on the top floor. I was surprised to find one of the chefs waiting for us, still in his whites.
Marc turned. “I was going to have a bite of supper. Will you join me?”
It was phrased as a polite request, but I wasn't sure of the reaction I'd get if I said I'd rather be on my way home to bed. I hesitated. Although I'd had a break at ten, I'd been too unsettled to do more than drink coffee. It had been good strong stuff and now it was doing its best to burn a way out through the front of my chest. Eating something might dampen it down a bit.
I smiled. “Yes, please, that would be great.”
We made our way over to a centre table and two place settings were whisked in front of us. Marc ordered wine. Mindful of having my wits about me for the ride home, I stuck with water.
“You should smile more,” Marc said as he lifted his glass. “It suits you.” His voice was strangely neutral. I looked hard for mockery, but couldn't find it in his impassive features.
I took a swig from my glass and avoided his eyes. When I next looked up it was to find him amused.
“What's so funny?”
“I was just thinking what a contradiction you are, Charlie,” he said. “You field a right hook more easily than you take a compliment.”
“Maybe I'm just used to men seeing me more as a potential sparring partner,” I hedged. Or as a target.
The chef reappeared at that moment with two succulent Spanish omelettes that melted on your tongue. We both dived in like we were starving. There was a long pause before Marc took up the thread of the conversation again.
“I think it's only fair to tell you that a sparring partner is not how I think of you at all,” he
murmured. His voice was rich with hidden meanings, most of which I didn't want to think about right now.
“Yeah, right,” I said, trying not to squirm.
“So cynical for one so young.”
I regarded him straight-faced. “I'm forty-five really, but I've got this painting in the attic,” I said.
To my surprise, he frowned, shaking his head. “I don't get you.”
“Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray,” I explained and dredged the abridged story line from a long-forgotten pigeonhole in my memory. “He was an exceptionally beautiful young man who lived a life of total depravity, but he had a portrait of himself which he kept hidden away, and while he utterly escaped the ravages of time and the effects of his own immorality, his likeness in the picture grew more hideous and more ugly.” I shrugged diffidently. “We studied him at school.”
Marc raised an eyebrow, and took another sip of his wine. “They didn't go a bundle on Oscar Wilde where I went to school,” he said wryly. “Didn't go much on education either, for that matter.”
“It doesn't seem to have done you much harm,” I commented.
He inclined his head slightly with a modest smile. I must remember that method of accepting praise. It was gracious without being smug.
“Ambition can overcome plenty of obstacles if you're determined enough,” he said quietly. He pulled out a packet of cigars and lit one, dunking the end directly into the flame until it caught. “I grew up with plenty of ambition and not much else.”
He pushed his empty plate to one side and twirled the stem of his glass between his forefinger and thumb. He watched the pale golden liquid shimmer in the bowl for a few moments, lost in his thoughts. That single diamond on his little finger dazzled as it caught the light.
Finally he looked up, and met my eyes levelly. “I was born in one of the grimmest tower blocks in the roughest areas of Manchester,” he said. “My mother overdosed when I was seven.”
The bald statement hung in the air between us like it had suddenly grown a body. Stricken, I searched for the right thing to say, but had to admit defeat. There wasn't any right thing.
Marc suddenly seemed to realise what he'd said. He waved an elegant hand mockingly towards his expensive attire, as if only too aware of the contrast with his present-day situation. “If you saw anybody round my old haunts wearing a suit it was usually because some time that day a judge was going to be referring to them as ‘the accused’.”
I felt my shoulders relax a fraction. “Sounds like one of those places where the ambulance crews have to go in wearing flak jackets.”
Marc half-smiled, little more than a derisive twist of his lips. “Oh no,” he said, “they never bothered sending ambulances.”
***
When I finally left the New Adelphi Club it was almost three-thirty. There are not normally two three o'clocks in my day and I was shattered. My eyes felt as though someone had emptied the contents of a seaside sandal into them. My hair and even my fingernails stank of cigarettes.
There was almost no traffic on the ride home, and I was able to give part of my brain over to thinking about the snippets of his past that Marc had handed to me during supper.
The contrast with my own upbringing was stark. While he'd been avoiding rats in pissy stairwells, and dodging the drunken fists of yet another temporary uncle, I'd been taking ballet classes and going to the Pony Club. There'd been a lot of distance travelled between then and now. For both of us.
The rain hadn't eased off on the way back to Lancaster, so I wasn't surprised when I hit the light switch at the bottom of the main staircase in the hallway below my flat and nothing happened.
I think the wiring in the whole of the building was rejected by Noah for the ark because it was past its best even then. Every time there's heavy rain with the wind in the north-east the water seeps in somewhere like a thief and the circuit breakers in the basement click out.
It took me ten minutes or so, swearing, to stumble down there with a torch and flip them back in line. I tripped over a pile of junk on the way and I just knew I was going to have a bruise on my shin the size of a beer mat.
Great! Still, the way things had gone at the club, it was probably the perfect end to a pretty shitty sort of a day.
I fell into bed and into sleep almost simultaneously, but it wasn't untroubled slumber. I woke abruptly in the early hours, before it was light, from a jumbled dream where my father was trying to inject my mother with rat poison through a huge syringe.
She kept screaming and struggling and my father was ordering me to hold her down. I tried to do as I was told, crying because I knew it was wrong. When I looked up at him and he'd changed into a giant rat with yellow eyes.
I looked back down at my mother, but she'd changed, too. It was Susie Hollins I was holding now, on the dance floor at the New Adelphi, while a shadowy madman with a razor-sharp knife reared over us both. He laughed as the blade came slashing down to cut her throat.
Ten
After the rain, Sunday morning showed up dry, lit by pale watery sunshine. The sort of crisp weather, close to warmth, that fools spring plants into making an early break for the surface, only to be decapitated by the next frost.
Not that I saw much of the morning. By the time I'd dragged myself out of bed it was past ten o'clock. I worked out to try and lift my energy reserves up from semi-dormant, but I'm not sure I managed to hoist them much over hibernating tortoise level.
I showered straight after, glad to finally wash the last of the smoky smell out of my hair. I dumped all the clothes I'd been wearing into the washing basket, wrinkling my nose.
I had grapefruit juice for breakfast, drinking a glassful with the shutters open, looking out across the Lune. The water level was high that morning. Sometimes the river seems no more than a stream, sandwiched between two rock-strewn, greyish mud banks. But during high springs, with an onshore wind giving it a step up, it can completely flood the stone quay.
At times like those the residents try, Canute-like to fend the water away from their front doors and cellar windows with sandbags. The unlucky ones discover just how good the anti-corrosion warranty is on their cars, parked outside.
I took the precaution of buying a set of tide tables just after I moved in. If the weather looks bad I shift the bike up the ramp they used to use for loading trucks at the back of the building. It leads to a solid brick platform, about four feet above pavement level, just outside the old boarded-up rear doorway. Then I watch the mopping up exercise from the safety of my first floor balcony.
OK, so maybe balcony makes it sound grander than it really is. In reality all I have is an old iron railing about three feet off the floor, embedded in the sandstone and misshapen with rust. I usually treat its protective qualities with caution. I've no desire to find out the hard way that the railing is only held in by the skin of its teeth and a bit of flaky mortar. There's a good twenty-foot drop to the flagged pavement below.
Now I stood leaning on the stonework enjoying the view. I checked my watch, looking forward to nothing more strenuous than a ride out to Jacob and Clare's for lunch.
Afterwards, I looked on the half an hour or so I spent then as a little oasis of calm before I was hit by a full-blown hurricane. Complete with monstrous winds and tidal waves.
Traffic on the other side of the river heading into Morecambe was reasonably light. There was just the soothing rumble of a train crossing the Carlisle Bridge to the west of me. The odd car moving past on the quay below.
Then the phone started ringing.
Reluctant to spoil the mood, I turned away from the window and went to answer it. I had no premonitions as to who was calling me, just a mild curiosity. My pupils tended to respect my weekends, and I'd never built up the kind of friendships with people who loved to chat from a distance.
“Hello?”
“Hello Charlotte.” A man's voice, authoritative, but quiet and self-contained. The sort of voice you could imagine imparting the new
s of terminal cancer with cool detachment. He had probably done so on more than one occasion.
My father.
I was momentarily stunned. In all the time since the rift between my family and I had first opened up, through all the attempts by my mother to heal the breach, he had never contacted me. Not once.
The last time I'd seen him was just before the court martial. He hadn't bothered to embroil himself in the civil action I'd then impulsively brought against my exonerated attackers. Not after I'd turned down the exclusive legal services of one of his golf club cronies. The guy was a full-blown silk and I couldn't afford those sort of rates. Not when, if I'm honest, the realistic chances of winning looked so slim.
