by Maeve Binchy
'Fantastic. They're very talented, those kids, it's running like clockwork.'
'I'm so pleased for you, Freddie, truly I am.'
He hung up. A stolen moment away from his guests, his wife. It had always been like this, and this is what it was always going to be like from now on. So why was she complaining? Geraldine had known the score when she signed up.
Wearing black cotton gloves, Walter let himself in and used the code to disarm the alarm. Where were all these treasures the kids had talked about? He must be quick; he needed to get the stuff hidden in his garden shed, the key back into the van and the truck back to the friend who would be starting his evening at around ten p.m. It looked like it had always looked, a big ugly catering kitchen, a lot of stainless steel, coloured tea towels drying on the backs of chairs, shelves of inexpensive china, drawers of worthless cutlery. He pulled out possible items like a toaster, an electric grill, a microwave oven. But these things were peanuts. They wouldn't bring him a fraction of the money he needed. The money he had lost with that fool friend of his father's, old Barty, who knew a great game and had brought Walter along. On the table in the front room, he saw the big silver punchbowl the children had spoken of. It wasn't solid silver at all, and he pushed it aside in disgust. There were boxes of supplies, unopened steamers and saucepans in the storeroom; they might make something if he could just unload them on the right person. And he needed something, even if he got a couple of hundred quid it would be a start. He began to drag the items towards the front of the premises, and knocked over a tray of glasses as he did so. The splinters of broken glass were everywhere. They wouldn't like that when they got back. Something welled up in him, and he swooped an entire shelf of plates onto the floor as well. It was somehow satisfying. He would do more later.
He worked for forty minutes, unscrewing and transporting what might possibly change hands in an iffy market he knew about. Then, with his elbow, he raised the end of one of the china shelves so that all its contenIs went in a great crashing slide to the floor. He pulled out the plug of the freezer and tossed items out of it at random. He noticed with annoyance that they had a very poor stock of alcohol, and remembered that they usually arranged for a wine merchant to deliver straight to the venue. Still, there was a bottle of brandy and some other off-looking liqueurs; it would keep the guy who owned the car cheerful. He remembered one day how they had been going on and on for ever about what message to leave on the answering machine, so he wrenched it from the wall and stood on it. He hit the light bulbs with a stick and leaped aside as the shattered glass came tumbling down. He packed the car, taking the punchbowl at the last moment. He might get £20 for it anyway, and these days that couldn't be laughed off. What fools to tell the children that these things were treasure! They were so bloody smug, those two. This would show them.
Chapter Seven
JULY
Even if they hadn't had to tell the story two dozen times, they would never forget the return to the premises that night. They were high with the success of the party at the Flynns'.
'We've got so much better,' Tom said as he reached for the keys.
'I hope so. Sometimes I think we've just got more confident, you know, papering over the cracks,' Cathy said.
'No, we are better,' said June.'I met the Riordans there, remember, the people who had the christening… They said our food was in a different category altogether.'
Tom and Cathy loved the way June considered herself part of it all; even young Con was beginning to feel the same way. Then they opened the door. They had often heard that people who were robbed felt this strange sense of being violated. This was what it was like. When they walked into the front room, Cathy saw the clock Joe had given them lying on the floor inside the door, broken beyond repair. Tom saw the huge vase that Marcella had chosen with such care in three pieces beside the overturned table. And all their plates knocked from the shelves. June saw the drawers opened and their contenIs spilled and the telephone and answering machine dragged from the wall. Cathy saw that her punchbowl, the only prize she had ever won in her life, was gone from the table. They couldn't take it all in. Tom was the first to speak.
'Bastards,' he said. 'Total bastards. There's nothing to steal, and so they've destroyed everything we have…' There was a catch in his voice which released the tears. He clung to Cathy and June.
The guards were mystified. No sign of a break-in, no forced entry, nobody else had access to keys. They had no idea of anyone who harboured malicious feeling towards them. Had they? They couldn't think of anyone at all. Rivals over work, possibly? No, they weren't in the business in a big enough way, they explained. One of the young guards who had already asked twice about insurance mentioned it yet once more to Tom.
'Yes, I told you,' Tom said a trifle impatiently. 'Our accountant insisted we pay what we think is a huge premium, but that's not the point… That's not going to sort this out.'
'I know, sir. They can take it up with you themselves,' he said.
'Who can?' he asked.
'The insurance company, sir,' he said
Neil was asleep when Cathy rang. 'Yes, Neil Mitchell,' he said sleepily.
'Neil, we've had a break-in.'
'Cathy?' He was mystified. He had thought she was beside him in their bed.
'Oh, Neil, burglars… the whole place is destroyed.' There was a catch in her voice.
'Anybody hurt?'
'No, but it's terrible,' she knew her voice was quivering.
She could see him swinging his legs out of bed as he had so often when phoned at night about a case.
'You'd like me to come in?' he said. His voice sounded resigned.
'The guards are here, it's very frightening, Neil.'
'I'll be there.'
'Do you mind?'
'Of course not.'
'Neil coming in then?' Tom said.
'Yes. Do you want to ring Marcella?'
'No, let her have her sleep, she'll know soon enough.'
Why had Cathy not done the same thing?
Neil arrived wearing a sweater and a pair of faded cotton trousers, but as full of authority as if he were wearing his full formal barrister's outfit and carrying a briefcase. The questions were endless and the leads seemed to be non-existent. The guards hadn't known of any gangs working in the neighbourhood, not anyone specialising in this kind of crime. Back and back they went to the keys and the access.
Finally the guard said, 'So all I can say is for you to take things up as best you can.'
'What do you mean, exactly?' Tom was barely paying attention. 'We are taking things up as best we can, aren't we?'
'With the insurance company,' the guard said.
'But what has this got to do with finding whoever did all this?' Tom waved his hand around despairingly.
Neil spoke suddenly in his crisp, barrister's voice. 'The garda is pointing out, Tom, that because there were no signs of a break-in or forced entry, the insurance company is going to have to look into the possibility of it being an inside job.'
There was silence in the room. Nobody thought that things could get any worse than they were, but they had now.
It seemed that all night they were cooking Tom's bread for Haywards partly in the small oven in Stoneyfield while Marcella helped and timed things and lifted out batches, and partly with the better facilities in Waterview with Neil and June helping.
'What will your Jimmy think about your being out so late?' Tom asked.
'He's had time to get used to it in the past; he'll think it's just another party,' June said succinctly.
The night ended, the bread was delivered and they were back at the premises.
Gradually and slowly they picked through the rubble, pausing to sigh or even cry over a broken treasure. Tom insisted that Cathy put on those big thick mittens they used to take things out of freezers.
'I can't feel anything with them on,' she complained.
'You'll cut your hands otherwise.'
'I wo
n't.'
'Listen, Cathy, all we have left are your own good hands if we're ever going to get out of this mess,' he said.
The reality of it hit her. They might not get out of this mess. Whoever had done this to them had ruined their life's work, their dream, their one chance of running a business. She picked up a large, triangular piece of glass and took it to the heap outside. It had once been part of a corner cupboard in the front room. All the big coloured plates it had once held were broken, just as the ones from their old dresser had been flung to the ground.
She felt a great wave of sadness.
Good hands or no good hands they might never build this business up again; nothing would ever be the same. She wanted very badly to sit down and cry like a child.
They had fixed the telephone and it rang cheerfully from time to time, calls from people who had no idea into what devastation their call was being received. Molly Hayes wanted a supper for twelve. It was Shay's birthday.
'Can we come back to you on that one, Mrs Hayes, before the end of the day?' June asked in a bright, businesslike voice.
'Very busy, are you?' Molly asked.
'You wouldn't believe, it Mrs Hayes,' said June.
Cathy looked at June with pride. In six short months she had learned confidence and style as well as a lot of other little interests that her silent plumber husband would not have approved of. But she was no longer apologetic and afraid to tell the customers which was filo pastry and which was choux. June could discuss quail's eggs and langoustines with any of them now. And Cathy gulped thinking that June's career and future lay in ruins on the floor as well as their own. She watched Neil as he worked with them, helping with the clearing away: his face was grim at the outrage, his energy unflagging, even though he would have to be in court that morning. This was the man whom she had hoped to tell about the pregnancy, but that would have to wait. She paused and looked at him as he squatted in front of the cooker with Tom. They were trying to see how much of the actual fixtures and fittings had been destroyed. She couldn't hear what they were saying, but she saw him pointing and Tom pointing and the concentrated effort Neil was making to understand something unfamiliar to him.
Some of the frozen food still seemed very hard, but they couldn't take the risk of refreezing it. No one could know when the vandals had come in. It could have been any time after six p.m., and they hadn't discovered it for nine hours. By now the food might be twelve hours out of the freezer compartments. Impossible to know what to do.
When the rest of Dublin was beginning to wake up and go to work, they sent June home in a taxi, Marcella showered, changed and went to Haywards, put on her cool white coat and dealt with the nails of those with the money and time to pay for it. Despite the shocking events of the night, her heart was much lighter than usual. She wasn't going to be painting and shaping nails always. By the end of this month she was going to have had her first professional modelling work and an introduction to a model's agent. She could afford to smile and be charming to the customers. This life would not last for ever. Neil showered, changed, put on his lawyer's gear and went down to the Four Courts to represent two men in a wrongful dismissal case. Everyone said that he hadn't a chance, the two were troublemakers from way back, their case was full of holes. But Neil knew that the company who fired them was on very thin ice; it had an unhealthy history of being anti-trade union. He was going to win and confound them. Nothing to make legal history, and indeed his clients could well be described as highly unreliable, but it was the principle of the thing that mattered.
Back at the premises, Tom and Cathy looked at each other, red-eyed.
'They surely can't think it was an inside job?' she asked.
They had been asking each other this all the time.
'Apparently they could think we did it to get the compensation.'
'People would think we did this to ourselves?' She spread her hands out at the rooms.
'It's been done before, when companies were going down the tubes.'
'But we're not going down the tubes… James could tell them that for one thing,' Cathy said.
James! They had forgotten about him. Was it too early to ring him? They risked that he would be up on a summer morning just before eight o'clock.
'James Byrne.' He was crisp and matter-of-fact when he heard the news. He asked questions, one after the other. The safe? Opened and papers scattered around. Yes. Yes. The guards? Any likely leads? No, no. The plant, cookers and freezers, would Scarlet Feather be able to continue trading? Hard to say. Quite, quite. The insurance? Yes, he assured them, it was all in order and would well cover losses. Then they told him that there had been no break-in, no forced entry.
'I see,' said James Byrne.
'But you know that it wasn't an inside job, James,' Tom cried.
'Yes, I know. Of course I know,' was the answer.
'But you mean they mightn't?' Tom was hardly able to say the words.
'Let's say it may just take longer for them to pay up,' said James
Byrne. He was thoughtful and quiet. Last night by chance he had had a dinner with Martin Maguire, who had said that he wished those youngsters success in their premises, truly he did, but he felt that there was some kind of curse on the building. Something they would never be able to conquer and survive. James didn't feel it necessary to report this conversation. Those two had enough to put up with already.
Shona Burke got them permission to use Haywards' kitchens from now on to do the breads; in fact it worked so well they said it could be permanent. Tom worked until the store opened, and assured the management that he would not use their ovens for his own work.
'Getting back to normal there?' the management at Haywards asked him sometimes.
'Absolutely,' lied Tom.
Nobody could be told of the shambles that was the kitchens of Scarlet Feather.
Cathy did the entire birthday party, including a chocolate birthday cake for Shay and Molly Hayes in her own house, and no one was any the wiser. No one but Neil, who was more or less dispossessed and had to step over crates and boxes everywhere if he moved, so much so that he set up a table and chair in the bedroom to do his own work.
'I thought a town house was small, but it seems to have become a bedsitter,' he grumbled. He was out almost every evening, so they could work on without fear of annoying him further.
They had forgotten how impossible it was to prepare food in such a small space. There was simply nowhere to leave anything down. Every single chair, stool and even suitcase had been pressed into service and used as a surface to store the plates that had been done, but they were always knocking them over. There wasn't nearly enough room in the freezer or the fridge; ice melted, cutlery fell on to the floor. Each day was more like a nightmare than the one that went before.
June and Cathy worked on and on as they had never worked before. They did a picnic for Freddie and Pauline Flynn; they did two First Communion buffet-lunch parties on the same day, shuttling from one to the other with Con. They left Tom to deal with the business of putting the pieces back together. And this, they all knew, was something that was sheer hell. Men from JT Feather's builder's yard came in to clear the premises, but only after James Byrne had insisted on photographs being taken and a representative of the insurance company coming to view the waste and destruction. It was going to cost over two thousand pounds to get the cooking under way again, and this was before they bought a single replacement item for the hundreds of pieces of china and glassware that would need to be replaced. The frozen food had been given away that morning or destroyed; long weeks of work thrown out at just a stroke.
Among the very first people that they should have told were Geraldine and Joe, their backers, the guarantors who had invested in their company. But neither Tom nor Cathy wanted to tell them until it was under control. Not until they knew they were going to come out of this horrible thing. They had the sickening feeling that they were going to go under. It was not a feeling that could yet be sha
red. Cathy didn't want to tell Geraldine. To ask her aunt to dig deep again into those pockeIs lined by wealthy men of whom Cathy had disapproved, and said so. She didn't want Geraldine to hand over more money. Cathy's pride had always meant that it was a debt of honour to repay Geraldine's investment with interest. The aunt who had given her so much, wanting nothing in return except the satisfaction of seeing her do well. The aunt whom she had insulted and criticised about her lifestyle. That was one aspect of it. Another aspect was that she feared Geraldine might say they should pack it all in now, since Cathy was pregnant; that the timing might have been in an odd way appropriate. There was a minefield that she didn't want to walk into yet.
'Do you mind if we don't say anything to Geraldine for a bit?' she asked Tom.
'That's funny, I was just going to say the same about Joe,' he said.
He didn't explain because they didn't have to tell each other everything. Joe was the last person he wanted to talk to just now. Joe who had given Marcella this chance to strut nearly naked across a stage in front of half of Dublin. Joe who had filled Marcella's head up with the chance of meeting some model's agent who could put her on his books and get her jobs 'across the water', as he called it. Tom hated the phrase—if he meant London or Manchester why couldn't he just say so? He couldn't bear to hear his lovely Marcella parroting it all and talking about the opportunity of modelling across the water. Joe who had been so good and generous with his funding; Joe who had obediently become a regular visitor to their parents at Fatima, thus halving Tom's own need to be present; Joe who somehow felt guilty about this fashion show, would dive into his resources and find funds for Torn as a way of buying himself out of any unpleasantness. Tom didn't want Joe to know how very near the ropes they were.
So if they didn't want Geraldine and Joe to know, that meant they couldn't tell a lot of other people either. Shona was sworn to secrecy, and June was asked to keep quiet as well—there was no problem there. They couldn't tell Muttie and Lizzie Scarlet, nor JT and Maura Feather. Cathy longed to tell her mother, to go to that familiar kitchen and cry while her mother stroked her hair. But if you told one you had to tell all. There were no accounts of it at all in the evening newspaper, nor did they go on the television programme which tried to get the public to solve a crime. James Byrne had urged caution as he always did, and Neil Mitchell had said the big multinational insurance companies would not be allowed to shelter behind a lot of pious phrases. It was an issue he felt very strongly about. He would fight for them against nameless bureaucrats who always kept the little people waiting for their money. He was already looking up precedents about it, and he wouldn't let them get away with it. He was being supportive, but Cathy wished more than anything that he had been a different kind of help. That he would take her head on his shoulder and stroke her hair. Tell her that he loved her and that they would get through this. And then she could tell him about the baby.
