The Debt

by Natalie Edwards

  “No, Dave,” Debra said, the words carrying up the stairs and into the hallway, where El was crouched behind the bannister, listening. “You can do what you like, but I’m stopping here until her Mam gets back. I’ll ring for a taxi if I need one.”

  It was already midnight, a half-hour later than Debra usually stayed, and El’s Mum still wasn’t back from work.

  “I don’t know where she’s got to, do I?” said Debra self-righteously. “I rang that pub she’s supposed to work at and they said they hadn’t seen her for a month, so Christ if I can tell you where she’s been going.”

  This was new information to El. Her Mum, as far as she knew, had been working as a barmaid at the Cow & Calf in town since just after Christmas. It was the reason she’d got Debra in in the first place, to keep an eye on El until she could get away after last orders.

  If she wasn’t there, El didn’t know where she might have gone. She hadn’t had a boyfriend, that El knew of, for over a year, not since she chucked Steve The Mechanic (who might just as easily have been Steve The Train Driver or Steve The Chicken Farmer, but who always seemed to be covered in motor oil) for slapping El’s face when she talked back to him. And she didn’t have any friends, not really - never had, unless you counted Mrs Biggs in the maisonette above, who’d lost her hearing in the war when the Germans dropped a bomb on the munitions factory she worked in. And El’s Mum didn’t know any sign language, so it wasn’t as if the two of them could talk to each other anyway, not properly.

  “I’m going now,” Debra said, cutting Dave off in the middle of whatever he’d been saying. “I’ll speak to you tomorrow.”

  She slammed down the phone with more force than El thought was probably necessary. El stayed where she was, hoping her breathing wasn’t loud enough that Debra would know she wasn’t in bed.

  “You alright up there?” Debra shouted up the stairs.

  El slid on her stomach across the carpet to her bedroom.

  “Fine!” she called back from the doorway. “Reading.”

  “You want to go bed soon,” said Debra. “You got school tomorrow.”

  “Just finishing this chapter,” El promised.

  “Make sure you turn that light off when you’re done,” Debra said, and - from the sound of her platforms hitting the floorboards - trudged off into the living room, El assumed to watch late-night telly or flick through a magazine.

  El crept into bed, mindful of her own feet on the ceiling, and returned to the Shirley Jackson collection she’d stolen the week before from the book shop up near the university. It was good, and definitely as creepy as the cover promised, but she couldn’t settle, couldn’t concentrate, not after what she’d just heard.

  Why, she wondered, would her Mum say she’d been working at the pub if she hadn’t been? What had she been doing instead? It made no sense.

  She turned the problem over in her brain, chewing on it, breaking it down into chunks that might prove more digestible.

  Could she have got another job - a job she didn’t want anyone to know about? Or a new boyfriend she wanted to keep secret?

  The second seemed unlikely. She’d told El very firmly, after the business with Steve The Mechanic, that she was finished with men - that it would be just the two of them from then on, her and El, and no belligerent Neanderthals getting in their way.

  (El had looked up “belligerent” and “Neanderthal” in the dictionary that night, and had to agree that both described The Mechanic to a T).

  As she thought, she listened out for signs of movement downstairs, for the sound of a key in the lock or the phone ringing or a damp coat being shaken out and hung up by the door. But there was nothing.

  By 1.30, she’d fallen asleep.

  Sometime around dawn, weak sunlight streaming in through the gap in the curtains, Debra shook her awake. She looked rumpled, El thought, eye-makeup running and lipstick smudged, as if she’d only just woken up herself.

  “Your Mam isn’t back,” she said, flustered, unsure. “Is there someone I can ring?”

  “Like who?” El said, still semi-dazed.

  “I dunno. An Auntie, an Uncle? Has your Mam got any brothers or sisters?”

  “She’s got a sister,” El said. “My Auntie Annie. She’s in London, though.”

  “There’s not anybody closer? What about your Granny, your Granddad?”

  “They died,” said El. “When I was little.”

  Debra bit her lip; seemed to weigh up her options.

  “What’s your Auntie’s number?” she said eventually.

  “It’s in the address book,” El said. “By the phone. She’ll be under A for Anne. Or F for Frederick, that’s her surname.”

  “Alright,” said Debra, nodding. “Alright. You wait here. I’ll be back up in a minute.”

  She was more than half an hour. When she finally came back into El’s room, her face was softer, kinder. She smelled like toothpaste, and El’s Mum’s perfume.

  “I’ve rang your Auntie Annie,” she said gently. “She’s coming up now. Should be here before lunch.”

  “Was she alright about it?” said El.

  Auntie Annie was El’s Mum’s sister - four years older and miles richer, her husband Alan an accountant for a soap and shampoo-maker with a headquarters, El’s Mum had told her, somewhere near St. Paul’s Cathedral. She had no children, dressed like a Sunday school teacher and talked like a Radio 4 newsreader, though El knew she’d grown up on the same council estate in Leicester that her Mum had. El saw her twice a year - at Christmas, when she and Uncle Alan came to drop off presents on the way to his parents’s house in Derbyshire, and at Easter, when she and El’s Mum went together to Gilroes Cemetery, to put flowers on El’s Grandma’s grave.

  “She was fine,” Debra said, and though she couldn’t say why, El knew she was lying. “Are you alright to get yourself up and ready for school?”

  El said she was, and Debra left her to get dressed, looking relieved.

  They left the maisonette together, El locking up after them with her key, but parted ways at the bus stop by the post office. Deliberately blocking out any thought, any sensation but the sound of the traffic and the rhythm of her own footsteps on the pavement, El carried on along the main road and into town, not to school but to the central library on Belvoir Street. She’d been there more often than she’d been in lessons lately - losing herself in novels and story collections and reference books for hours at a time, no-one bothering or demanding anything of her in the cool, partitioned quiet of the carrels.

  It was early enough when she arrived for there to be only a handful of other people around, all elderly - the regulars, the ones who came in to read the paper in the morning for want of something better to do. She made a beeline for the ground-floor stacks, and the copy of Logan’s Run she’d been steadily working through - which, she saw, was exactly where she’d left it on the shelf two days before.

  Book in hand, she settled into a desk, far away from the old men and their newspapers, and allowed herself, finally, to think.

  There were two things she thought she knew:

  1: Her Mum wasn’t given to disappearing overnight without a word. She had what Auntie Annie would probably have called A Reputation - the kids at school had hammered that home to El, even before she’d worked out for herself what it meant to have an Unmarried Mother dropping her off at the gates - but she wasn’t flighty, wasn’t irresponsible. Whenever she was out late, or got held up at one of the jobs she was working that month, she found a way to let El know, always - to make sure she wasn’t worried, and wasn’t, more importantly, ever on her own in the maisonette after dark. She didn’t just vanish.

  2: She didn’t lie to El. She made a point of it - of telling El the truth about things, even when it was awkward or made both of them feel uncomfortable. Like when Uncle Alan had given them some pâté in a hamper, and El had taken a bit and then, curious, had asked what it was, and her Mum had told her, with Uncle Alan and Auntie Annie right the
re at the table, that it was made out of smashed-up liver, from ducks that had been force-fed corn until they’d nearly burst. Or when Peter Menzies had made fun of her for not having a Dad, and she’d gone and asked her Mum about him, and her Mum had sat her down on the settee and given her a hug and said that, honestly, she didn’t know much, but what she did know - that he was very tall, and very gentle, and had a head of thick black hair and a moustache like Omar Sharif, and before he went back home to Ahmedabad he’d brought El’s Gran a lovely set of curtains for her front room… well, El was welcome to know it, too. So if she was lying now, about where she was or where she going when she was meant to be working at the Cow & Calf, then there had to be a reason for it - a really good reason.

  Neither fact did anything to make her feel better.

  She read until lunchtime, emerging into the midday sunshine just after 12.30 and winding her way back across town and through the stubby tower blocks and flat-roofed four-storeys of the estate. She let herself into the maisonette and, anticipating nothing but silence inside, was surprised to find Auntie Annie standing in the hallway, waiting.

  She looked annoyed, El thought - eyes narrowed and lips pursed like she was sucking a lemon, though her white-blonde helmet of hair was as perfect as ever, sprayed and teased into an immovable Dusty Springfield beehive.

  “You’re here,” she said, seeming surprised herself to see El there.

  “Mum lets me come home for lunch,” El said.

  Truthfully, her Mum was rarely awake early enough to notice El sneaking in to make herself a sandwich and a glass of milk in between library stints - or, less frequently, between lessons. But it didn’t seem the time to split hairs.

  “You’d better come in, then,” said Auntie Annie irritably.

  She led El inside and into the kitchen - where, to El’s further surprise, she took a tub of margarine from the fridge and two slices of Mother’s Pride from the half-loaf in the bread-bin, and began to butter them, furiously, on the chopping board.

  “What do you want on them?” she asked El as she buttered.

  “Cheese,” said El dumbly. “There’s a block of Cheddar in the egg tray.”

  Auntie Annie opened the fridge again and took out the cheese; unwrapped it, sliced two thin squares from the thickest edge with the knife and sandwiched it between the buttered bread. She took a plate from the cupboard over the sink, placed the bread onto it and cut it into 4 triangles, then placed the finished sandwich on the table in front of where El was sitting.

  “Thanks,” said El.

  Auntie Annie pulled out a chair of her own, which separated from the table with a drawn-out squeak, and sat down opposite her.

  “Your Mum didn’t come home last night,” she said, with no preamble.

  “I know,” El said.

  She picked up one of the sandwich triangles and bit into it, leaving impressions in the bread with her teeth.

  “Has she done this sort of thing before?” Auntie Annie asked. “Stopped out all night without telling you?”

  El could hear the Midlands creeping back into Auntie Annie’s voice; wondered if it was worry that was doing it, or just the act of coming back to Leicester unexpectedly.

  “No,” she said emphatically. “Never.”

  “Right, then,” said Auntie Annie.

  She stood up from the table suddenly, and walked over to the kitchen door, her back rigid.

  “Where are you going?” said El, startled.

  “To fetch the police,” said Auntie Annie.

  Chapter 9

  Highgate

  1996

  El stayed very still.

  “Whatever information you think you’re giving me, it’s wrong,” she said eventually, struggling to keep her voice even, to stay unreadable. “It’s bad intel. I know who killed my mother, and it wasn’t James Marchant.”

  “You believe it was George Young,” said Rose, levelly.

  She’s done her homework, El thought. I’ll give her that.

  “I know it was,” she said. “And if you’ve been reading about my mother, then you know it too. They found his fingerprints all over her body.”

  “Because he touched her,” said Rose. “Afterwards, in the graveyard. Not because he killed her.”

  El flinched before she could stop herself; swallowed down the sudden pain in her gut, the ghost of bile in the back of her throat.

  “I don’t appreciate being manipulated,” she said slowly, letting a note of toughness into her voice, an edge of threat. “So whatever you’re trying to do, you want to stop it, now. Before you really piss me off.”

  “I’m not trying to manipulate you,” said Rose, still calm. “What I’m telling you is the truth.”

  “Says the woman trying to rope me into her con.”

  “Says a video confession from the man who disposed of her body. Would you like to see it?”

  She gestured to the projector screen.

  El wanted to shout; to rage at Rose for the stunt, for the set-up, for all of it. To storm out of the room, out of the house, past the artwork and the marble fittings and the picture-perfect family portraits. To ring Ruby from the back of the nearest taxi and demand to know what the fuck she thought she was doing, hooking her up with a woman who’d use George Young - who’d use El’s mother - to get what she wanted.

  But she didn’t. Instead, she let herself acquiesce - collapsing back onto the sofa her without so much as a word of protest.

  Because it was her mother - and how was she supposed to say no to that? Rose was playing things just right. It was exactly the carrot to dangle.

  Rose picked up a large remote control from the arm of her own sofa. She pressed a button, and the lights above them dimmed.

  A paused image filled the screen: a bald white man lying in a hospital-style bed with side rails, a transparent tube running from a cannula on his hand to a saline drip to his left. It was clear even with a sheet covering him from feet to chest that he was absolutely enormous, a barrel-chested giant with the thick neck, gnarled hands and fabric-ripping musculature of a bare-knuckle boxer. His skin was yellow, his eyes bloodshot, and there were deep lines etched into his forehead. He looked very, very ill.

  “This is Ricky Lomax,” said Rose. “Until last year, he was Marchant’s head of security. His chief fixer.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” El asked.

  “Lung cancer,” said Rose, with no trace of compassion. “Stage 4, metastasised to his bones. He died a week or so after this video was shot.”

  “He looks terrible.”

  “Yes, I imagine he was in a great deal of pain. Not enough, but a lot.”

  She pressed another button on the remote control. The video played, and Lomax started to speak.

  “It was a weeknight, summertime,” he said, in a low-pitched growl that was faintly intimidating, even given how incapacitated he seemed. “1976. He’d gone up to do an overnight for a meeting he couldn’t get out of. Some town past Kettering, Market something. He didn’t want me or any of the lads to go with him, which meant he had plans for the evening, you know what I mean? So we’d arranged to pick him up the next morning from his hotel. But then it gets to 11.30, 12 o’clock at night, and I’m in with the missus when the phone goes...”

  Lomax paused as a coughing fit took hold of him, turning his mouth into the crease of his elbow while his vast body shook.

  “He rang you?” said a voice off-screen that sounded to El like Rose.

  “Yeah,” croaked Lomax, his vocal chords straining. “Tells me to get out of bed and get my arse up the motorway, pronto. Says we’ve got a situation.”

  ———

  Marchant was staying, Lomax said, in a hotel in the centre of Leicester, a neo-classical place near the station stuffed with cornices and Greco-Roman statues, red velvet drapes and doormen in full top hats and tails. As per Marchant’s instructions, Lomax had brought luggage - an empty Dominion suitcase, brown and well-polished, measuring 30 inches long and 12 inch
es deep.

  He’d parked around the back of the hotel, studying the building for a few minutes from his car before slipping in, unseen, through a fire escape. Marchant was on the fifth floor, he remembered; room 507. He’d knocked on the door twice before Marchant answered, smoking a cigarette and wrapped in a silk Noel Coward dressing gown, cool as a cucumber.

  “She’s through here,” he’d told Lomax as he let him inside.

  “She” was a woman; a Tom, he’d found out later, naked and battered and sprawled out on top of the bedsheets, the bruises already starting to rise to the surface of her milky skin. She was Marchant’s type, Lomax had thought: blonde and skinny, clean-looking, though a few years older than he normally went for. It was obvious, from her contorted arms and legs as much as from her injuries, that she was dead.

  “Can you take care of it?” Marchant had asked him, and Lomax had sprung into action - rinsing the body with a washcloth to get rid of any obvious physical evidence, drying and re-dressing her in the short skirt and heels he presumed she’d arrived in. She was even lighter than she looked, and short; he’d got her into the suitcase easily, closing the lid with no effort at all.

  Then, while the boss took a bath, he’d stuck on his driving gloves and taken the suitcase down into the lobby.

  (“You didn’t ask what had happened?” said the off-screen voice, incredulous. “You weren’t even a little curious about how she’d died? Or who she was?”

  Lomax coughed again, this time bent double in his bed with the effort of it. When he raised his head, there were flecks of blood on his lips.

  “She was a Tom, and she was in his room,” he said indifferently. “What else was there to know?”

  El curled her fingers into fists as she listened; dug her nails into the palms of her hands. Hoped he’d suffered as he died).

  He’d carried the suitcase to the car with the same ease with which he’d loaded the body inside; had locked it away in the boot and, after downing a lukewarm cup of tea from the flask he’d brought for the journey up the M1, had settled down in the driving seat with a map of the city.