by Tom Bale
The line was dead. Pure bad luck, or something more sinister?
She was pushing her luck to stay in here any longer. And she could hardly go crawling under the bed to check the socket. Returning Evie to her favoured position high on her shoulder, Alice tiptoed downstairs, with an excuse prepared that she always took the stairs slowly when carrying her daughter.
She reached the hall and saw the door to the lounge was ajar. There was music playing quietly – something blandly classical – along with the murmur of conversation. Even before she could make out the words, Alice knew from the tone that this wasn’t just idle chatter.
She stopped a few feet from the door and went into a rocking motion, as if pausing to get Evie to sleep. She caught Nerys saying: ‘… could offer to return the money, and see if they’ll—?’
‘No. I am owed this. Anyhow, it is also our history. What I know of their business.’
‘Well, I knew all about it, and they let me retire, didn’t they?’
Renshaw grunted. The silence that followed was sheer agony for Alice: the tiniest squeak from Evie and they would know she was eavesdropping.
Then Nerys said: ‘Or do you know something I don’t?’
In a dismissive tone, Renshaw sidestepped the question. ‘Men such as Laird, one does not reason with them. I take it you do not broadcast your whereabouts?’
‘I don’t, but not because they threatened me. Just plain common sense, that’s all. You never know when one of them might …’
She tailed off, presumably because Renshaw had got the message. Evie wriggled and arched her back, and Alice took a step towards the door, and then Nerys said: ‘Getting yourself saddled with passengers, Edward. What in God’s name are you intending to do with them?’
Alice flinched. Her heart was beating so loudly it was a struggle to hear the conversation.
‘Put them on a train tomorrow.’
‘Oh, and that’s the end of it, eh? All nice and simple.’ The Welsh accent lent a whimsical note to her scorn. The response from Renshaw was far more subdued.
‘There is the possibility of reprisals, when she returns to Brighton. Alas, this is not my concern.’
‘Maybe not. But if it was me in this sort of mess, I’d be considering all my options …’
She must have lowered her voice, or moved across the room, because Alice couldn’t make out what she said next. But she heard Renshaw’s flustered response: ‘I didn’t—’ before Nerys broke in with something else, and then Renshaw, more decisively, said, ‘No. No. It is too complicated.’
Complicated, Alice thought. Was that all he could say about the chaos he’d brought down upon them all? Not illegal, or morally wrong. Complicated.
Her indignation nearly gave her away. Shifting her weight from one foot to the other, she almost bumped against the door. There was an immediate rustling sound from within the lounge.
Nerys, her voice much closer, as if she was walking out of the room, said, ‘I thought by now she’d have—’ just as Alice pushed the door open, trying frantically to make it appear that she’d crossed the hall in a single fluid movement.
Thirty-Six
Nerys had indeed been approaching the door. At the sight of Alice she shrugged on a friendly manner like a well-worn coat, beaming as she held out her hands towards Evie.
‘Oh, isn’t she a darling? Do you mind if Auntie Nerys has a cuddle?’
You’re not her auntie, Alice wanted to say. But she managed a sickly grin and handed the baby over.
‘And she’s been fed, has she? Anything else she needs, my love?’
‘No.’ Alice secretly hoped the baby would take against Nerys and start to wail, as she had a habit of doing with some of Harry and Alice’s older relatives, but to her dismay, Evie seemed delighted to be cooed over by this smiling stranger.
Renshaw had taken the interruption as an opportunity to reload his plate. The coffee table in front of him was set out with a pot of tea, two different types of cake, a plate of homemade biscuits and bowls of nuts and crisps.
Nerys saw her looking and said, ‘Please, help yourself. If you’d like a sandwich or something, just say …’
‘No, we ate at the services, thank you.’
‘Edward told me. Hasn’t stopped him making short work of my carrot cake.’
‘It’s my weakness,’ he admitted, cutting himself another slice.
Nerys wanted to know if she was all right with tea or preferred something stronger. Alice noticed a glass of dark liquid next to Renshaw’s cup.
‘Tea’s fine.’
The situation reminded her a little of the first time she’d met Harry’s family. Everyone on their best behaviour, the conversation polite but brittle in its formality. As on that occasion, Alice found it was actually a relief to eat: if nothing else, it spared her from speaking.
Nerys had good news: her son, Michael, was able to lend Alice some baby clothes.
‘He’s popping round later. If there’s anything else you need, let me know and I’ll text him.’
So mobiles do work here, Alice thought. But what about the landline?
‘That’s very kind,’ she said, ‘but there’s no need. We’ll be going home tomorrow.’
‘Oh, but you know how the little ones can mess up an outfit, whether it’s burping up milk or a leaky nappy. And Michael’s happy to help.’
Alice could only shrug and smile. She didn’t want an argument about it. As she summoned up the nerve to ask another favour, Renshaw had a question of his own for Nerys.
‘Your son lives nearby?’
‘In Cheltenham. For the schools and shops, really.’ She chuckled. ‘Robyn, his wife, would never agree to live out here in the sticks.’
Nodding inanely, Alice gestured to get Renshaw’s attention. ‘Could I check to see if Harry’s replied to my text?’
‘He has not.’ Renshaw tried to stare her down, but Alice held his gaze.
‘Could I take a look? Please?’
Under sufferance, Renshaw handed her the Nokia and watched as she confirmed it for herself. Even though it was a crushing disappointment, Alice fought to appear untroubled. It felt important somehow not to show any weakness in front of them.
‘May I try him again?’
Renshaw exchanged a glance with Nerys, who said, ‘Good idea. Best if he knows you’re safe.’
Renshaw held up a chubby index finger. ‘But do not reveal our location.’
‘I won’t,’ she snapped, and then forced a conciliatory smile. ‘Thank you.’
It was mortifying to make the call in front of them, but Alice wasn’t about to leave the room while Nerys had Evie. Not when that strange comment she’d overheard was still reverberating in her mind: If it was me in this sort of mess, I’d be considering all my options.
What could Nerys have suggested that Renshaw felt was ‘too complicated’?
Alice listened to the connection go straight to voicemail. Nerys saw the reaction in her face.
‘Never mind, dear. You texted him earlier and said you were all right, didn’t you?’
Alice nodded. Renshaw already had his hand out. ‘If he replies, I will be sure to tell you.’
Alice had no choice but to return the Nokia and trust that Renshaw would keep to his word. It occurred to her that he still had her phone, so she asked for it back.
‘But the battery is dead.’
‘I know that.’ She asked Nerys: ‘Do you have a charger for an iPhone, by any chance?’
Nerys squinted in the manner of someone addressed in a foreign language. ‘Um, no. I’ve got a Samsung, I think it is, if that’s any good to you?’
Alice shook her head, then held out her hand to Renshaw. ‘I’d still like to have it, though.’
‘Very well.’ He passed the phone to her, a peevish smirk on his face, as though her behaviour was completely irrational.
Then again, she thought, perhaps it was. It seemed like she couldn’t be sure of anything at the moment, including her o
wn judgement.
She drank a cup of tea, ate a biscuit and tried not to resent Nerys’s natural rapport with Evie. They talked about the trials of childbirth, the stresses of motherhood. Renshaw contributed little. A couple of times Alice saw him glance at Nerys and then look away.
When his glass was empty, he refilled it himself from a bottle of rum that had been sitting on the floor beside the sofa. Nerys pressed Alice to have a proper drink, but she resisted.
‘Sure?’ Nerys said. ‘I’ve got some wonderful pear cider.’
Thankfully, Evie chose this moment to emit a whine of displeasure. Alice pretended to groan, but she was thinking: thank God thank God thank God!
‘Uh oh, someone’s tired. Time for bed, I think.’
‘Come back down once you get her off,’ Nerys said as she handed her back. ‘Have a proper drink with the grown-ups.’
‘Thanks, but I’m pretty shattered myself.’
Nerys tutted in sympathy, but didn’t press Alice to change her mind. Probably keen to discuss those ‘options’ that Nerys wanted Renshaw to consider.
Poor woman can’t win, Alice thought as she fled the room. She’s either too hospitable, or not hospitable enough.
Back in the sanctuary of the vast bedroom, she tried to analyse what she’d overheard. Renshaw and Nerys had been in the same line of work, which presumably meant providing medical support to a criminal gang. Nerys had been allowed to retire, but Renshaw hadn’t. Did that mean Nerys was less intimately connected to the illegal side of the business? Or was she simply more trusted than Renshaw?
And what about her sarcastic reaction when Renshaw said he’d put Alice and Evie on a train tomorrow: All nice and simple. Well, why wouldn’t it be? Did Nerys think it was unlikely to happen?
Alice puzzled over it for a while, and concluded that it was probably only her current insecurity that had cast the comments in such a sinister light – and that, after all, was quite understandable in the circumstances.
Sleep on it, she told herself. Go through it again in the morning.
After using the bathroom, where she took a dab of Nerys’s toothpaste and brushed her teeth with her finger, she undressed and got comfortable in the big double bed. Evie grizzled and wouldn’t settle, so Alice fed her to sleep. Another contravention of the Ideal Mother’s Handbook, but she was past caring about that.
She wasn’t sure what happened next. A noise seemed to startle her awake, and yet she could have sworn that she hadn’t dozed off. It was pitch dark in the room, even though she’d left the curtains partly open. She had to move in close to Evie to see that she was fast asleep.
The noise, Alice thought, might have been the crunch of tyres on gravel. She had no idea how much time had passed. It could have been minutes since they’d gone to bed; it could have been hours. Normally her first instinct would be to check her phone, but right now that was only a sleek but useless rectangle of plastic.
Listening hard, she made out the distant thud of a door closing. And voices, maybe?
This must be the son. Nerys had said he would drop by, so there was no need to worry. And yet it was unsettling, the thought of another stranger in the house. It prompted her to consider the possibility she’d been trying so hard to dismiss as absurd: that she was here not as a guest, but as a prisoner.
A few minutes passed in silence, then came the creak of floorboards. A tap on the door.
‘Alice?’ Nerys said in a loud whisper. ‘Alice, are you awake?’
Feeling about eight years old, Alice clamped her lips together and said nothing. Nerys called once more, waited, then walked away.
Slowly, Alice let out her breath. She couldn’t have said why she hadn’t answered, and now wasn’t the time for yet more self-interrogation. She wanted only to sleep, so she pulled up the duvet and buried herself beneath it: like her eight-year-old self, scared of the dark and hiding from the monster in the closet.
Thirty-Seven
Well, who’d have thought it? His dull Friday evening had been transformed into a whirlwind of excitement and intrigue – and by his mother, of all people.
He’d taken the call in the kitchen. It was almost seven o’clock and the kids were bleating and squawking around him, the normal bedtime rules abandoned on Friday. Robyn was bottle-feeding baby Mikey, helping five-year-old Betty with a puzzle and discussing best friend traumas with seven-year-old Chloe: all this while also making pasta and meatballs, as well as a vegetarian stir fry for Betty. The eldest – thirteen-year-old Ronald, who since his grandfather’s death had insisted on calling himself ‘Jay’ – was locked in his bedroom as usual.
After mouthing, ‘Only Mum,’ and receiving the customary half-serious grimace, Michael had slipped away to his study. That was the beauty of honesty, he thought later. Robyn didn’t expect her mother-in-law to have anything interesting to say, so she wouldn’t want much in the way of a report on the conversation.
Domestic duties kept her confined to the kitchen while Michael hurried upstairs and helped himself to a selection of little Mikey’s clothes. He sneaked the bag into his car, then went back inside and concocted a story about an enquiry from Revenue & Customs.
‘It’s to do with a partner on one of Dad’s dodgy sidelines, from the 1980s. Something the chap’s done now might be explained by his – and Dad’s – activities back then.’
‘What’s that got to do with your mother?’
‘Apparently Dad had her down as a director. It was during one of their truces. Anyway, she’s in a right tizz about it, so I said I’d pop over.’
‘Now?’ Robyn gestured at the meatballs, which did, he had to admit, smell delicious.
‘No. It’ll wait till after dinner.’
‘Why doesn’t she ask her accountant for advice? She can easily afford the fees.’
Robyn said it in a mild enough tone – and it was undeniably true – but still there was a moment where Michael longed to punch her in the face.
Instead he shrugged, and in an equally reasonable voice said, ‘Better if I can save her a few quid.’ And he winked. ‘Remember: we’ll get it back eventually.’
Michael Baxter was a man of habitual secrecy, a trait he’d inherited from his late father, whose fortune was undoubtedly boosted by his inclination to tell the tax authorities only what he thought they needed to know; as such, the tale Michael had spun to his wife was all too plausible.
Now, however, it was becoming apparent that his mother was no slouch in the secrets department, either. She hadn’t explained much on the phone – just that an old colleague from her nursing days needed a room for the night. Oh, and he had a young woman and a baby with him. Nerys claimed she didn’t know the full story, not right then, but she’d get it.
‘And I might need your help. The situation with my pal Renshaw is a bit … volatile.’
Hmm. Arriving at the house at a little after nine, having been delayed by a succession of slow drivers and the aftermath of a three-car shunt on the Cirencester Road, he quickly formed the view that ‘volatile’ was something of a euphemism.
This man Renshaw had a hunted air about him. He radiated tension as Nerys made the introductions, and there was a wariness, a feral look in his eyes that only started to dim once they’d sat down. Michael had been served a mug of hot chocolate, made just the way he liked it. Renshaw, for his part, was self-medicating with a bottle of dark rum, which Michael decided was not a bad thing. Good tongue-loosening properties.
‘Nerys tells me you have four children.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And you are close, you and your mother.’ Renshaw was nodding, as if it was a statement rather than a question. He frowned at Nerys. ‘And yet, I seem to recall you said it was difficult, the relationship …’
‘It was. With my first husband – Michael’s father – we went through a very bitter divorce. At first I was going to have custody, until Ronald decreed that his son would have the best education money could buy.’
‘Trouble w
as,’ Michael chipped in, ‘he’d only fund it on the condition that I pledged loyalty to him.’
‘A pledge?’ Renshaw echoed.
‘That’s what it was, effectively,’ Nerys said. ‘He had to disown me, his own mother.’
Michael said, ‘But we talked it through and decided it was the best thing for us both, in the long run.’
Renshaw looked amazed. ‘And you were, how old?’
‘Eight.’
‘Always had a wise head, this one,’ Nerys said approvingly.
‘I used to sneak away to visit Mum in the holidays. Told my dad I was staying with friends. He thought I hardly had any contact, but in fact we were talking most weeks.’
‘I was usually rushed off my feet, anyway. So it worked out perfectly.’
‘Of course, Dad was already quite ill.’
‘Diabetes,’ Nerys explained. ‘Ronald and I actually met in a hospital canteen, did I never mention that? So we knew that, for all his money, his long-term prognosis wasn’t very good.’
‘Just a matter of time,’ Michael said, ‘though he actually lasted years longer than anyone expected. We even had to pretend the grandchildren never saw Nanny Nerys, didn’t we?’
‘Ronald was a vindictive bugger. He’d always sworn I’d never get a penny, you see? He died thinking Michael had been brainwashed into agreement.’
‘I was the sole heir.’ Michael illustrated his freedom with an expansive wave of his hand. ‘I could do whatever I liked with the money.’
‘It’s Michael I have to thank for all this.’ Nerys made exactly the same motion to indicate the house, only hers was slightly less co-ordinated. Clearly she’d been imbibing along with her new house guest.
Renshaw made a poor job of concealing his envy, ‘An impressive home, indeed. A pity you have not met someone else …’
‘Oh, I did. Not long after I retired.’
