The Debt

by Natalie Edwards

  The next time she saw him, she made her move.

  He was sitting alone, as he’d been the first time - sipping at a tumbler of whisky in a wingback chair, his nose buried in the Wall Street Journal. She retired to the toilets before he could notice her; smudged her makeup in the mirror and spritzed her dress with a small perfume bottle of vodka from her handbag, sprayed a little into her mouth, then staggered back into the bar, letting herself weave left and then right. She walked straight to the bar, ordered a double Absolut and soda, loudly, and - suppressing her gag reflex - downed it in one.

  She ordered another and nursed it, leaning against the bar on her elbows. And waited. Fifteen minutes later, Marchant appeared at bar beside her and beckoned the waiter over with a crooked finger.

  Kat turned her head to look at him, deliberately slowly, as he ordered another whisky. Flashed another, sloppy smile his way.

  He saw but ignored it, as before.

  Undeterred, she sidled closer to him along the bar.

  “What are you drinking?” she asked him, in what she promised El was a pitch-perfect if inebriated Home Counties drawl.

  Again, he ignored her.

  “What’s he drinking?” she bellowed at the waiter.

  “Umm... Dalwhinnie?” said the young waiter behind the bar, nervously.

  Marchant glared at him, obviously irritated.

  “It’s on me,” said Kat, and passed a banknote across to the waiter, who took it but avoided looking both her and Marchant in the eyes.

  The waiter poured the whisky and slid it across to Marchant, who tipped the glass towards Kat and graced her, finally, with a tight-lipped smile of his own.

  “Much obliged,” he said, and took a sip.

  “Now that we’ve met,” she said, dropping her voice to a breathy Marilyn Monroe whisper, “I don’t suppose you’d like to come and keep me company?”

  “We haven’t met,” said Marchant.

  “Then let’s do something about that,” she said, sidling even closer towards him, close enough that the tops of their legs were touching under the bar. “Jasmine Philips.”

  “A pleasure,” said Marchant curtly, and, still holding the whisky, stepped away from the bar and back to his seat.

  She followed him, plonking herself down into the chair opposite his with the confident gracelessness of the lunchtime drunk.

  “I’m afraid I’m rather busy,” said Marchant before she could speak.

  “I’ll be direct, in that case,” she said, slurring her words a little. “I have a room upstairs. Would you like to join me there?”

  Marchant looked her over appraisingly.

  “Much as I appreciate the offer,” he said, “I believe I’ll have to decline.”

  He picked up the Journal, opened it at the page he’d left open on the table and began, pointedly, to read.

  “Well that’s just perfect, isn’t it?” she muttered as the rejection sank in. “A stellar end to the morning, just stellar. Can’t run my story, can’t go home because my boyfriend’s bitch of an ex-wife is there, and now I can’t even give it away to a stranger. Wonderful. Thank you, universe. And thank you, Seymour bloody Henderson. Thank you.”

  She swore to El that she could see Marchant’s ears prick up at the name, at the word “story.”

  “Seymour Henderson?” he said. “The MP? That Seymour Henderson?”

  “What?” said Kat, as if realising belatedly what she’d let slip. “No. No. Different one. Totally different.”

  She stood up on legs she allowed just the smallest tremor of unsteadiness - but he’d reached out already to grab her arm, stopping her.

  “Sit down,” he said. “Join me. Please.”

  “I thought you weren’t interested?” she said suspiciously.

  “It’s not that I’m not interested,” he said, suddenly apologetic, attentive. “I mean, look at you - what man wouldn’t be interested? But, you see...”

  He held up his left hand, and pointed to his wedding band.

  “Unfortunately,” he added, “I’m one of that rare breed that still cares about trifling things like lifelong vows and promises before God.”

  Rose had snorted humourlessly at this when Kat recounted it, not bothering to hide her contempt. El had found herself again swallowing down bile.

  “Married long?” said Kat, sitting back down.

  “Longer than you’ve been alive,” Marchant laughed.

  “Nice for some,” said Kat bitterly.

  Marchant signalled to the nervous young waiter, who sped over to their table, and without asking her what she might fancy, ordered them another round of drinks. Less than a minute later the waiter returned with two whiskys, both neat.

  “Let’s see if we can’t improve your day,” he said, urging her to drink.

  “Thanks,” said Kat, still wary.

  “Now,” he said, “why don’t you tell me what happened? It sounds like you’ve had quite a morning.”

  “Don’t even ask,” she said, sipping at the whisky.

  “You said something about a story being pulled. Should I assume from that that you’re a reporter?”

  “You can assume whatever you want.”

  “Come on. A stranger at a bar just asked you about your troubles. You’re supposed to bare your soul, are you not? There’s a tradition to uphold here.”

  He was a bastard, Kat said. No doubt about that. But a charismatic bastard, once he’d switched it on - leaning in and smiling, all warmth and attention. You could see why he’d done as well as he had.

  “You really want to know?” she said.

  “I really want to know.”

  So she told him.

  She was a journalist, she admitted - but freelance, not affiliated to any one paper. She had - she said, with a blush of embarrassment - a little money of her own, inheritance money, and it meant that she could be a bit more choosy than your everyday writer about the stories she pursued and the jobs she took on.

  “And why not, if you can afford to be?” said Marchant. “Better that than having to forever dance to some editor in chief’s tune.”

  True, she agreed. And she’d always enjoyed her autonomy.

  “But wait,” she said, as if remembering something even through the haze of alcohol. “You’re not in the industry, are you?”

  “Couldn’t be further from it,” he replied, smiling. “I’m in shipping. A total civilian.”

  She’d smiled back, relieved, and visibly relaxed.

  So, a few weeks ago, she told him, she’d caught wind of a story. A big one. She couldn’t tell him where she’d heard it, but the source was reliable - one she trusted.

  “Something about Seymour Henderson?” he asked, innocently.

  “You promise this is just between us?” she said.

  “Cross my heart.”

  “Yes, then. About Seymour Henderson.”

  “And what about him?”

  “About the kind of stuff he’s into. Sexual stuff.”

  “Sexual stuff?”

  “You know... call girls, and bondage, and dominatrixes. Dominatrices? And more. Worse.”

  She’d managed, she told him, to track down a couple of the girls she’d heard that Henderson had hired: one a full-time domme with a private dungeon in Surbiton, the other a student who went moonlighting as an escort when she struggled to buy textbooks or to pay the rent. Both eventually acquiesced to her requests for an interview, on the record, albeit for a price; both reported first-hand experience of his taste for coke, domination and rough, degrading sex.

  Both, moreover, knew exactly who he was - the domme in fact had once lived in his constituency, and made a point of catching him on Question Time whenever he appeared. Though a Lib Dem voter herself, she had nothing but praise for the diligence and genuine concern for local issues he’d demonstrated as an MP.

  “Not bad at all, for a Tory,” the domme had said. “Though I do wish he’d lay off all that family values crap.”

  The story h
ad written itself: sitting MP, illicit sex and illegal drugs, prostitutes and emasculation and hypocrisy. Another bit of Cabinet sleaze guaranteed, Jasmine had thought, to make the front page of at least one of the red-tops.

  Except that nobody would run it.

  “It made no sense,” she said, shaking her head, “no sense at all.”

  Until a guy she knew from one of the Sundays, a friend from university, had agreed to meet her for a coffee that morning, and had told her in no uncertain terms that neither his paper, nor in all probability any of its rivals, would ever run the story, and that she should do herself a favour and let it go.

  “But why?” said Marchant, feigning shock.

  “It’s this bloody fixer Henderson’s got working for him,” she spat. “Alison Miller. One of those spin doctors, you know?”

  “Never heard of her,” said Marchant.

  “You wouldn’t have. She’s super low-profile, or so my friend says. Not some Alastair Campbell type out doing press conferences - she likes to stay hidden. But she’s got some serious clout. Enough to put the thumbscrews on half of Fleet Street.”

  “She sounds... effective,” said Marchant.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Kat, bitterly. “Very fucking effective. I’m sitting on a story that’d get anyone else recalled, or at the very least humiliated into a resignation... and no commissioning editor will touch it, because Henderson’s got his own personal Machiavelli on the case. Bloody politics, eh?”

  She downed the rest of her whisky and placed the empty tumbler onto its cocktail napkin with a trembling hand.

  “Interesting,” said Marchant thoughtfully. “Very interesting. Another drink?”

  ———

  “Sounds like he really took the bait,” El had said, when Kat finished relaying the encounter in the kitchen of the Ledbury Road house that evening.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Kat. “Took my number, too. Never called it, mind.”

  “He didn’t need to,” Karen had said, rifling through the biscuit tin on the other side of the kitchen. “As soon as he left you at the Chestnut, he went straight back to his office and started calling up every newspaper contact in his little black book, asking if anyone had heard of an Alison Miller. They all told him no, never heard of her. And that really pissed him off, I can tell you. He thought they were straight-up lying to him - that she was this great big boogeyman who had ‘em so scared they wouldn’t even admit to knowing who she was.”

  Karen’s skillset, El had discovered, extended not only to lockpicking and larceny, but to the manipulation of technology. Within a day of starting her contract with the catering team at the Marchant Holdings HQ, she’d squirrelled away listening devices in any office Marchant himself was likely to occupy, acquired a wallet full of duplicate keycards giving her access to every locked door in the building and done something complicated to the phone lines in Marchant’s office that meant she could redirect his calls to the number of her choice at the push of a button - and listen in on every call he made and took using an earbud that nested in her left ear and connected via a thin black wire to a Walkman-like device fastened to her left biceps by a Velcro strap.

  “I’d tell you how it works,” she’d said, when El had asked, “but you wouldn’t understand, so why waste both our time?”

  The number of her choice had turned out to be for Sita’s mobile. Or, as Marchant understood it, the direct line of Harry Fox, editor of the London Herald - a paper Marchant Holdings had tried but failed to purchase from its parent company three years earlier.

  Fox was the ideal candidate for the redirect, Karen and Rose had explained, in that Marchant knew of him but didn’t know him personally. They moved, Rose said, in very different circles - and so were unlikely to bump into each other at the club, or over dinner. Most importantly, Fox knew Rose (and had once known her husband) socially - well enough, apparently, for her to be certain that he’d be out of the country for at least the next month.

  So when Marchant’s PA called Fox’s direct line, she got Sita instead, or rather another of Sita’s alter egos: Sheila McAdams, a formidable Scottish woman tasked, she’d told the PA and then Marchant himself, with standing in for Fox during his leave of absence.

  Her response to Marchant’s questioning had been less than friendly.

  “What do you want to know that for?” she’d demanded, when he asked her if she knew of a PR consultant named Alison Miller - and if so, if she’d mind handing over her contact details.

  “I’d like to get in touch with her,” he replied smoothly. “There was something I was hoping she’d be able to help me with. Do you happen to have a phone number for her?”

  “If Alison wanted you to have her number,” said McAdams, “she’d have given it to you herself, wouldn’t she? If you knew anything about her, you’d know that much. So, sorry - can’t help you.”

  And she’d hung up on him.

  But Marchant was nothing if not persistent. Everyone else he’d spoken to, Karen reported, had denied ever having met or even heard of Alison Miller - whereas McAdams at least indicated that there was an Alison Miller, and that the two of them were on first name terms.

  He rang her back immediately, this time bypassing the PA.

  “What do you want now?” growled McAdams, after he’d identified himself.

  He’d led in with an enticement - a carrot, not a stick. If she could see her way to helping him, he said, he’d be happy to help her in turn - to give her a leg-up, perhaps even see about getting her an interview for a senior post at one of his own publications. Did she know who he was?

  Yes, she’d said - she knew exactly who he was. And the answer was still no.

  At which point, he’d fallen back on his more usual approach: outright threat. If she knew who he was, he’d said, then she knew that he could bring her down just as easily as he could help her up. He was very good friends with the brothers who owned her paper - did she know that? And with the family who owned all three of its immediate competitors. So how keen was she, exactly, to go back to reporting on school fetes and traffic offences in the Highlands?

  And at that, McAdams’ bluster had faded, and she’d caved; had handed over Alison Miller’s number, followed by a plea that Marchant not mention her name to Miller, if he could help it.

  He’d said he couldn’t promise anything, and hung up on her with what El imagined was a victorious smirk.

  That had been yesterday. Today the five of them - El, Kat, Karen, Rose and Sita - were back in Rose’s kitchen, huddled around the dining table, sipping coffee and watching the brand-new mobile El had bought on Alison Miller’s credit card with the intensity of focus of a bomb-disposal unit scrutinising an unexploded IED.

  “Shouldn’t he have called by now?” asked Kat.

  “Patience, darling,” said Sita, the most sanguine of the quintet. “He’ll have other things to do, no matter how keen he is to track down our Alison here. But he’ll call, I promise you that. You’ve seen for yourself how much he wants what we’re offering.”

  “She’s right,” said Karen. “You should’ve heard him on the phone with all the people he was ringing. He was properly desperate to get hold of her.”

  “And what if he doesn’t?” said Kat. “What are we supposed to do then, just walk away and leave him to it?”

  She’s a short-game artist, El reminded herself. The results she gets are instant - she’s not used to having to wait.

  “We’re not walking away,” said Rose, firmly. “He’s going to call.”

  Kat rolled her eyes.

  “I’m going out for a fag,” she said. “I can’t be doing with all this anticipation.”

  She pushed her chair back from the table - but before she could stand, Karen raised a finger, silently instructing her to wait. She pressed another finger to the earbud, pushing it further into her ear, and tilted her head in concentration - apparently listening intently to whatever was being said in Marchant’s office.

  “He’s gonna call,
” she said quietly. “Right now.”

  A second later the mobile rang, the ringtone shrill and echoing in the tiled silence of the room.

  El let it ring - once, twice, three times - before answering.

  “Yes?” she said, falling back with surprising ease into Alison Miller’s stern schoolmistress tone.

  “Am I speaking with Alison Miller?” asked Marchant from the other end of the line.

  She nodded at the other women around the table by way of affirmation; made a thumbs-up gesture with the hand not holding tight to the mobile. Yes, it was him; yes, he wanted to talk to her.

  “You are,” she said into the handset. “How can I help you?”

  Chapter 13

  Tufnell Park

  1996

  They met, at her insistence, at an anonymous chain pub on Fortess Road.

  He’d queried the choice of venue at first, no doubt irked by the thought of abandoning the city proper for the quasi-suburban hinterlands of Zone 2.

  Why not meet at his office? he’d asked. But she’d pushed back, citing privacy concerns.

  “I’d rather not be seen going into your building,” she said bluntly - and had made it very clear that if he wanted to meet with her, he’d be doing so on her terms. He’d conceded with surprising alacrity.

  She landed at the pub half an hour early and settled herself into a booth with a glass of lemonade. Her heart was racing; sweat prickled on the back of her neck and under her arms, stinging the skin and threatening the set of Alison Miller’s thickly-applied face and body makeup. She’d run through the scenario a hundred times since arranging the meeting, pre-empting and unpicking - or so she thought - all the ways she might possibly react on coming face to face with Marchant: panic, fury, grief, even fear.

  But where ordinarily preparation allayed her concerns, helped her centre herself and focus on getting the job done, here it seemed only to have heightened her anxiety. And the more she thought about Marchant - about who he was, what he’d done, how she’d feel when she looked at him over the table - the more nervous she became.