The Debt
Page 11
“You did a bang-up job, from what I heard,” said Ruby.
“And all it took was three solid weeks of unpaid prep work,” said El, rolling her eyes.
“As if you need the money,” said Ruby, ignoring the eye-roll. “What do you reckon, then? Are you in?”
I’ve been in since the moment I saw that video, El thought. Since the second I heard Lomax reminisce about loading my mother’s body into the boot of his car like a roll of old carpet.
“Provisionally? Yes,” she said.
“How absolutely wonderful,” said Sita ebulliently - then, more sombrely, added, “I can’t think of a woman better qualified to drag that monster into the light of day.”
Ruby flashed Sita another look - this time one that El interpreted as a warning, as meaning something along the lines of “shut it, now.” Sita saw the look, and pressed one hand to her mouth in response, a gesture of embarrassed penitence that El wasn’t sure Sita even knew she was making.
They know him, she thought. They know Marchant. And well enough to know what kind of monster he is, even if they don’t know what he did to my mother.
“Monster?” she said.
“He’s… not a nice bloke, that one,” said Ruby guardedly.
“So I’ve heard,” said El, equally careful not to show her hand. “You’ve met him, then?”
“Once or twice,” said Ruby. “Years ago.”
And that was a lie, El thought.
“You find you’ve come to meet an awful lot of people, when you get to our advanced age,” said Sita.
“All sorts,” Ruby agreed. “Even the high and mighty,” she added, wrinkling her nose.
Try as Ruby might to keep her reaction under wraps, she couldn’t hide the contempt. And something else too, something El had rarely heard from her: hatred. Ruby, generally speaking, didn’t hate marks, not even the really despicable ones - the Gordon Gekkos and the Peter Rachmans, the ones who probably deserved it. Hers was much more of a live by the sword, die by the sword philosophy: if, she’d told El once, you were going to go around behaving like a grade-A bastard, kicking families out of their houses or snatching pension books out of little old ladies’s handbags, figuratively speaking, then you shouldn’t be surprised when a bit of payback comes round to bite you on the arse. It was the game you played.
The Marchant job, though - it wasn’t about playing, not for Ruby, and apparently not for Sita either. Whatever he’d done to them, whatever they’d seen him do to someone else, it was enough to burrow under their skins and set up home there, over however many years it had been. And for them as for Rose - as for her, if only they’d known it - it was personal.
“What do I need to know about him?” El asked - conscious of all three of them skating over paper-thin conversational ice, and as keen as either of them to avoid sticking a foot through into the dark water underneath.
“Ah,” said Ruby, smiling for the first time. “Thought you’d never ask.”
She reached under the cushion behind her and withdrew a pink plastic ring-binder. One of Ruby’s pre-reads - the background dossiers she liked to pull together on suspected marks ahead of any serious job beginning.
She dropped it to the floor and kicked it across the carpet towards El.
“Have a read of this,” she said.
Here, El thought, they were on safer ground. As long as they could all at least pretend that Marchant was a mark like any other they’d dealt with - and not, in fact, a monster - then they could pretend, too, that this wasn’t personal, that it wasn’t retribution or a settling of scores. It was business - just another job.
She picked up the folder, opened it and began to leaf through the photos, print-outs, handwritten notes and press cuttings inside.
“Can you run me through it?” she asked.
“My pleasure,” said Ruby. “First few pages are historical - date of birth, education, all the usual. Main things you need to know there are: he’s an old bastard, nearly as old as me and your Auntie Sita, but he’s got no plans to retire. Born in Bristol in ’32, son of a moderately-successful shipbuilder and a mother who died in childbirth. No brothers or sisters. Left school at 14 with no qualifications to set up a business selling second-hand kettles to housewives, though that one lasted all of five minutes, then tried his hand at nylons, penny sweets, transistor radios and chess sets, all with about the same degree of success.”
“It’s as if he had no business acumen at all,” said Sita drily.
El looked down at the first photograph, obviously clipped from an old newspaper: a black and white head-and-shoulders shot of a good-looking teenage boy with a prominent nose and piercing Gary Cooper eyes, his hair slicked down and parted to the side and a cigarette dangling, Bogart-like, from his full lips.
“His luck changed in 1950,” Ruby continued, “when he met a girl named Elizabeth Bellman - now better known as Mrs James Marchant. She was 17, he was 18, and they got married within a month of him sweeping her off her feet down the local dance hall. Young love, eh? All very romantic. Course, it couldn’t have hurt when he found out who her dad was.”
“Who was he?” asked El, glancing down at a second photo, another black and white clipping, showing the same boy standing outside a church in a dark wool suit and tie, a flower in his lapel, next to a plainer, slightly chubby girl in a floor-length wedding dress.
“Saul Bellman,” said Ruby. “Bloke who founded Handsworth’s.”
“The department store chain?” said El, thinking of the green-liveried, faded-looking shop fronts she’d passed without a second glance on Edgware Road, High Holborn, the High Street in Leicester town centre.
“One and the same,” said Ruby. “Worth a few quid, as you can imagine.”
“A terribly nice man,” said Sita, distantly. “If a little too fond of the horses for his own good.”
“And absolutely devoted to his daughter,” said Ruby. “Would’ve done just about anything to make her happy, the way I heard it. Which could explain the fifteen grand he bunged Marchant’s way to help him buy his first block of flats the following year, over in Slough. That’s about a quarter of a mil in today’s money, in case you were curious.”
“They’re still married?” El asked - wondering what kind of woman would tether herself to a man like Marchant. Whether the former Elizabeth Bellman knew - whether she even suspected - what her husband did on his nights away.
“45 years last October,” said Ruby. “Three kids: Oscar, Harriet and James Junior. There are pictures of them at the back, if you want to have a look.”
El flicked to the last page in the file, and a recent colour photograph of what had to be the full Marchant clan: the older Marchant, thicker in the waist but with the same nose and piercing eyes and a head of silver hair, still parted to the side; Elizabeth, thinner and more carefully-groomed than she had been in the 50s, her hair now expensively highlighted and her makeup skilfully contoured to accentuate her cheekbones; two smiling, blandly-attractive men in their late 30s or early 40s, both in dark roll-neck sweaters and tailored blazers, whom El assumed to be Oscar and James Junior; and a younger woman, no older than 30, in jeans and a faded Sisters Of Mercy t-shirt, seeming awkward and out of place in the company of her immediate family.
“I expect you know the rest already,” said Ruby. “One tower block turns into two, then five, then a big hotel and load of office space over in South Kensington. By the early ‘60s he’s Marchant Holdings, not just Marchant Properties, and he’s started branching out into broadcasting and publishing, buying up dying magazines and a couple of radio stations on their last legs and bringing them miraculously back to life. Fast forward to the ‘70s, and he’s got a hand in shipping and logistics too – cargo boats, freight transport, that kind of thing. As of last year, he’s worth about 2 billion quid - or Marchant Holdings is, I should say.”
“Not bad going for a guy who couldn’t flog a kettle,” said El.
“Quite,” said Sita. “Though back then, of cour
se, he didn’t have the benefit of Mrs Marchant as a helpmeet.”
“She’s involved in the business?” El asked.
“Not officially,” said Ruby. “She owns 17% of the company in shares, which is more than he does, but that’s more of a formality - a hangover from when her old man first got him set up. He loved his daughter, enough to put up with Marchant as a son-in-law, but he was no fool, that one. We think he must have made the shares a condition of the initial loan. Not that that matters - she’s never actually cast a vote that counted. No, it’s more that she’s…”
“The brains of the outfit,” finished Sita. “Very gently, and very surreptitiously - more of an advisor than the power behind the throne. But if I were to hazard a guess as to which of them were responsible for some of the more successful deals Marchant Holdings has negotiated these last few decades….”
“It wouldn’t be him,” said Ruby. “He’s a cunning bastard, don’t get me wrong. But he’s not a strategic thinker, you know what I mean? Not a long-term planner. He doesn’t have the impulse-control.”
He doesn’t need it, El thought. Not when there’s someone else around to clean up his messes.
“But he’s into politics?” she asked.
On that, Rose had been clear. Marchant, despite his corporate successes, had one, deep-seated ambition that remained thus far unfulfilled: he wanted to get into office. Not buy his way to a peerage or sit on the non-exec board of a policy institute, but actually get elected - to have people want to vote for him.
It wasn’t even really about power, Rose had said - he had more than enough of that already. It was about ego. He had a narcissist’s appetite for veneration - and the kind of sociopathic self-belief that had him convinced the public would adore him, if only they knew enough about him. The relatively nominal power of the MP post he coveted was really just a bonus, a sweetener.
“What he’s into is adoration,” said Sita, who knew more than a little about that herself.
“Which is where you come in, eh?” said Ruby.
“Give a man a taste of what he thinks he wants,” said Sita, as if quoting Shakespeare, “and he’ll follow you into the very bowels of hell. I don’t care who he is.”
The political ambitions were the leverage, Rose said - the crowbar, prying open Marchant’s inner world enough for El to slip inside and put Rose’s idea into action. To ruin him; to bring him down.
“I think you’ll like the crew,” said Ruby, changing tack. “They’re all women, the ones Rose has got lined up. Just your cup of tea.”
“You know them?” El asked.
“Couple of ‘em, yeah,” said Ruby. “Little Karen Baxter - I’ve known her since she was in Pampers. Think you’ve met her already?”
El considered the sardonic, imposingly-muscled girl who’d first greeted her on the doorstep of Rose’s Highgate house - and then, briefly, what she might possibly have been like as a toddler.
“And the rest?” El said.
“Couldn’t say,” said Ruby. “But if Rose trusts them enough to bring ‘em in, then they must be halfway decent. One of them’s straight, if you can believe it.”
“A journalist,” said Sita, evidently amused.
“Former,” said Rose quickly. “She’s not doing a story on us for The Times, before you ask.”
“How straight can she be, if she’s caught in all this?” said El, holding the open folder up for emphasis.
And how much of a liability is she going to be, if she’s green? she thought, less convinced of Rose’s impeccable judgement than Ruby and Sita seemed to be.
“Couldn’t say,” said Ruby again.
There was a muffled thud from the direction of the front door, followed immediately by the soft rattle of a key turning in a lock. El slammed the folder shut. And then, before she’d even had time to conceal it in the folds of the beanbag, Dexter was standing in the middle of the room, a burgundy briefcase in his hand.
“Don’t stop what you’re doing on my account,” he said, grinning at her through straight-capped teeth, his eyes on the folder.
“Didn’t your mother ever teach you to knock?” she asked.
“If she’d wanted to know I was coming,” he said, bending down to kiss Ruby on the cheek, “she wouldn’t have given me a key, would she?”
He covered the room in three strides, kissing Sita on one already-outstretched hand before bounding over to El and wrapping her up in a hug. He smelled, as always, like expensive aftershave - sandalwood and pepper and vanilla.
“You look good,” she said, making a show of scanning him up and down - taking in the Savile Row suit and pocket-square, the discreetly-patterned socks just visible above the handmade shoes, the tight black curls cropped down to a respectable number 2. All overlaid onto the tall, long-limbed frame she’d once forced into a jujitsu hold on an earlier incarnation of the same living room carpet when, one dull-skied afternoon in the late ‘70s, Ruby had decided that a little self-defence practice would be a useful addition to the teenage El’s developing skillset.
Physically, Dexter was a perfect amalgam of his parents - lighter than Winston but darker than Ruby, with Winston’s broad shoulders and Ruby’s bright-eyed look of perennial amusement. But where Michael had inherited Winston’s earnestness and keenly-felt sense of responsibility, Dexter’s personality was nearly all Ruby’s: her easygoing humour, her softheartedness, her flexibility around any moral, legal and societal rules she perceived as unhelpful.
“Don’t I always?” he said, feigning hurt.
“Shouldn’t you be at work?” said Ruby. “I thought you weren’t coming round ‘til later.”
‘Work,’ for Dexter, was a tiny two-room office off the Strand - a legal practice just large enough to accommodate him, as the most senior and only partner; a junior solicitor named Sandra whose sole purpose, as far as El could ascertain, was to field the dull, mainstream cases that Dexter couldn’t be bothered to engage with; and finally Mrs Day, a ferociously competent middle-aged secretary so circumspect that El had never discovered her first name.
“I’ve got a meeting in Elstree,” he said, undoing the heavy brass buckle of his briefcase. “Thought I’d drop your stuff off on the way.”
He delved into the briefcase and extracted a folder of his own - a Manila file, unlabelled.
“Best give that straight to this one,” said Ruby, pointing to El. “She’s the one who’ll be needing it.”
Dexter pivoted away from his mother and back to El.
“I didn’t give you this, obviously,” he said, handing her the file with a wink.
“It’d be a lot less incriminating if you didn’t wink whenever you said that,” said El, taking the file.
There were two pieces of paper and three smaller, rectangular pieces of laminated plastic inside: a birth certificate, a credit card and a National Insurance card, a utility bill and a driving licence, all in the name of Alison Miller. A paler, more imperious variant on El’s face stared back at her from the driving licence.
“Alison Miller?” she said.
“That was the one you were using for that posh twat on the Southbank, weren’t it?” said Ruby. “It’s what he kept calling you.”
“While I was on another job,” said El emphatically.
“You’d hardly started,” said Ruby, waving away the objection. “And the way you were playing it with him, it’s perfect for Marchant. Just the right amount of haughty.”
“I don’t recycle,” El said.
“Oh, please, darling,” said Sita. “Do you know how many times I’ve been a Priya Patel or an Asha Kaur? There’s no benefit to reinventing the wheel.”
El studied the documents in the folder. They were good, very good: whoever Dex was using these days, they were a perfectionist.
“Has Rose signed off on this?” she asked.
“Signed off on it?” said Ruby. “She’s the one who paid for it.”
Chapter 11
Notting Hill
1996
From the outside, at least, it was unremarkable by the standards of its more ostentatious neighbours, with their ivy-rich trellises and underground car ports - or as unremarkable, El thought, as a Notting Hill house worth upwards of 2 million quid could feasibly be considered. It was plain and whitewashed, with none of the security fences or CCTV cameras that increasingly characterised the terraces in the area. The ornate metal curlicues around the windows were beginning to rust; the mint green paintwork on the front door was beginning, in places, to peel. If she’d ever been asked to identify the primary residence of a globally-renowned art connoisseur and dealer, she probably wouldn’t have picked it out of a line-up.
Inside was another story. Where the Highgate house was, for the most part, a triumph of cold monochrome and minimalist sterility, this one exploded with colour and character, from the Boyzone annual on the stairs (which El assumed belonged to the daughter) to the polka dot wallpaper and the Ed Ruscha screenprint over the telephone stand that, she thought, was probably an original.
“Sorry about the mess,” said Rose, as El stepped around a Game Boy left to die on the stripped pine floorboards of the hallway. “I haven’t had much time for cleaning lately.”
“Totally fine,” said El. There were other hazards up ahead: a grey school backpack, unzipped, the exercise books and pens inside spilling out onto the floor; a red-framed bike, propped up against the wall; a Buzz Lightyear toy that El thought the daughter had probably outgrown. She navigated them with caution, following Rose’s lead into an open-plan kitchen-diner-lounge with the kind of wipe-clean tiled floors and oatmeal sofas that could only appeal to a parent.