The Debt

by Natalie Edwards

  I guess there’s only so much crying you can do before you start to bore yourself, she thought. Disgust yourself, even.

  “You must regret asking now,” said Hannah, sipping again at the drink.

  “Not at all,” El said. “I like knowing who I’m working with.”

  And this extra bit of information, she thought, made sense of another part of the puzzle: why a woman like that, a respectable woman, would walk away from a respectable life and a respectable career to throw in with a group as disreputable as theirs.

  “When Rose made her offer,” Hannah said, “it felt like a gift. Or perhaps not a gift, exactly, given the circumstances… A reprieve? A break, finally. I’ve spent the last year digging and digging, trying to find something on Marchant I can make stick… and I’ve got absolutely nowhere. Then one day there she is, on my doorstep, with a team and a fleshed-out plan and a means of actually implementing it…”

  And it falls like manna from heaven, El finished silently. So of course you take it; it’s exactly what you want, at exactly the moment you want it.

  It’s the way you want your mark to feel, right before you take them.

  “Did you know Rose well?” she asked. “Before?”

  “I wouldn’t say well,” said Hannah. “We’d see each other from time to time socially, but I don’t remember the two of us ever being alone together. It was Justin who knew her, really - or knew Seb, anyway.”

  “Her husband?”

  “Yes. They were at college together, back in the day. Justin was a couple of years ahead, but their paths crossed, or so I gather, at societies and things. I don’t know that they were close… but he liked Seb, I know that. And he must have known him reasonably well, because he’d always say when we saw the two of them out and about how surprised he was that he’d taken up with Rose. He said he’d always assumed that Seb…”

  Laughter broke through the ceiling from one of the rooms upstairs - a cackle, undeniably Ruby’s, and a softer chuckle that might have been Kat’s.

  Hannah jumped at the sound, a full-body shudder that caused the tumbler in her hand to twitch and the liquid inside to spill over the rim and onto the table.

  El waited, holding back her questions while Hannah soaked up the Scotch with a napkin, then asked:

  “What did he assume, about Seb?”

  “What?” said Hannah, rubbing at the wood in tight concentric circles, apparently lost in thought. “Oh. Nothing, really. Just that he hadn’t expected him to get together with someone like Rose.”

  “Someone like Rose?”

  The kitchen door opened, and Rose herself stepped through.

  “What about me?” she asked, smiling widely at El.

  “I was asking how you two knew each other,” El said, cutting Hannah off before she could reply.

  “That?” said Rose. She pulled a chair out from the table, the one closest to El, and sat down next to her. “Not a very interesting story, I’m afraid. Our husbands were friends at Oxford.”

  “You were there too, weren’t you?” said El.

  Rose pushed her chair backwards an inch; angled it slightly towards El so they were facing each other.

  “I was,” she said, still smiling. “But Justin and I ran in different crowds. And he was older than me, obviously - finishing up his masters while I was in my first year, I believe. So our worlds didn’t really overlap.”

  Hannah drained what remained of her whiskey and got to her feet, still shaking very slightly with what El thought might be the aftershocks of the previous fright.

  “I should be going,” she said.

  “Already?” said Rose. “It’s barely 6.”

  “I need to walk the dog,” she said, adjusting her scarf around her neck and pulling her handbag over one shoulder. “Before it gets too dark. I’ll be back in the morning.”

  She scurried away from them and out of the kitchen, the spiked points of her stilettos hitting the tiles trailing sound waves after her.

  “Something I said?” Rose asked.

  “She’s just nervous,” El said. “I mean, this isn’t exactly her regular scene, is it?”

  With Hannah gone, the proximity of Rose’s body to hers felt more intrusive than it had. She pushed her own chair away from the table, picked up the empty tumblers and walked them, very deliberately, across to the dishwasher.

  “She’s tougher than you think. She’s had to be.”

  “I’m sure she is. But it’s still a lot, isn’t it? We’re a lot.”

  She reached a questing hand into the pocket of her jeans; flipped open the lid of the cardboard box she found there with her thumb and closed two fingers around the comforting smoothness of a cigarette filter.

  “Where are you on Marchant’s contract?” Rose asked, suddenly businesslike.

  “I’m calling him tonight to confirm,” she said, equally curt.

  “Why not do it now?” said Rose. “Before you go outside to smoke that cigarette?”

  And this is why I don’t do other people’s dirty work, El thought. You’re forever on their clock, dancing to their tune.

  “Why the urgency?” she said.

  “I want to keep up the momentum. Keep moving forward.”

  “And I don’t want to push him. We need to let him come to us.”

  “Leave him too long and he’s apt to get cold feet.”

  El took a deep, performative breath - as much as an expression of her impatience as to keep her annoyance at bay.

  “I know what I’m doing,” she said. “This is my area. You have to let me work. Let me do it my way.”

  “And I don’t know what I’m doing?” said Rose, her jaw visibly clenched with the effort of keeping her own anger in check.

  “I’m not trying to offend you. All I’m saying is, this is my job, and I know how to do it. It’s why you brought me in.”

  “I brought you in…” Rose began, the thread of Rotherham back in her voice as her temper rose, but El stopped her - pointing a finger to her lips, and then to the mobile phone she’d left, face-down and unattended, on the table. It was ringing.

  “It’s him,” she said, without looking at the display.

  She picked up the phone; pressed the Answer button.

  “Yes?” she said impatiently, slipping back into Alison Miller’s skin, her unshakeable confidence. It got easier, she knew; easier every time.

  “Alison?” said Marchant.

  “Who am I speaking to?”

  “James Marchant. We chatted earlier this week - I imagine you remember.”

  He sounded, to her disappointment, relaxed; louche, even a little amused with himself. She’d hoped to find him more needy, more anxious.

  “And how can I help you, Mr Marchant?” she replied, upping the hauteur of Alison Miller’s delivery in response.

  “I was hoping you might have an answer for me. Given our deadline.”

  There wasn’t a trace of uncertainty there; no concern that she might say no, might put the phone down on him and walk away from the offer. Just reproach, and the mild irritation of a man unaccustomed to waiting.

  She glanced away from the phone and up at Rose, who was watching her so intensely that it might, in other circumstances, have frightened her. But Alison Miller didn’t do frightened.

  She tilted her head; raised an eyebrow. Now?

  Rose nodded.

  Now.

  “I want 50% of the fee upfront,” she said. “And a written agreement specifying services.”

  “I’ll have my solicitor draft it this evening,” said Marchant.

  “Please don’t take what I’m about to say personally, Mr Marchant,” she said, “but I’d rather my solicitor took care of the contract in this instance.”

  “Don’t you trust me, Ms. Miller?”

  “Why should I need to trust you? I’m putting you in office, not accepting your hand in marriage.”

  He chuckled down the line, a good-humoured baritone she was sure other people would find disarming.<
br />
  “Your solicitor, then,” he said. “Bring him in tomorrow, and we can get started straight away.”

  “He’ll need a few hours in the morning to sort out the paperwork. We can be with you for 2 o’clock.”

  “Shouldn’t you check in with the man first?”

  “If I needed to check in with him before I made commitments,” she said, the vulgar Americanism leaving a bad taste in Alison Miller’s mouth, “then he wouldn’t be my solicitor.”

  Marchant chuckled again.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, and ended the call.

  She switched off the phone and slid it into her back pocket.

  Rose was staring at her from the table - no longer, as far as El could tell, looking for a fight.

  “What?” El asked, sloughing off Alison Miller and stepping back into herself.

  “You’re a very good liar,” Rose said. “And I intend that as a compliment, not a criticism.”

  “It’s my job,” El repeated, shrugging. She slid the cigarette out of its packet and placed it, unlit, in her mouth. “I’m just going to…” she started, gesturing at the door.

  “Wait,” said Rose, standing.

  El paused; removed the cigarette.

  “I’m sorry for snapping at you, just now,” Rose said. “I think I just wanted to… push someone to get a reaction.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” El said.

  “It’s been… well, truthfully, it’s not been a good day.”

  “No?”

  “No. I’ve had to send Sophie away.”

  El was taken aback. They’d seemed very close, in the bit of time she’d spent with them - their easy, knockabout intimacy a kind she’d seen more than once in the dynamic between single parents and their kids. A kind she’d had herself, with her own mother.

  Sophie, she’d thought, was Rose’s world. The idea of Rose sending her away… it didn’t compute.

  “Not far,” Rose added. “She’s with Seb’s sister, down in Sussex. But, you know… any distance is too far, when it’s your own child you’ve sent packing.”

  “Why?” El asked, realising immediately afterwards how judgemental she might have seemed, how close the question might have sounded to what kind of mother are you, anyway?

  But if Rose was insulted, she didn’t let it show. There was no anger there now, that El could see. She just looked tired; tired and sad.

  “To keep her safe,” she said quietly.

  Safe from who? El wondered. From them - the bunch of cons she’d invited into the family home? From her, and Ruby, and Sita, and Karen with her muscles and her beltful of lockpicks?

  No. There was no logic in that; no sense. However it had happened, whatever the backstory, Rose had known Ruby and Sita for years - for decades, by the sound of it. And Karen had been there, embedded in the Highgate house, before El had ever heard of Rose Winchester and her art collection.

  Not them, then. They weren’t the threat.

  Which meant that the threat had to be Marchant.

  “You’re that frightened of him?” she asked. “Of what he might do?”

  Rose dropped her gaze to her own lap; ran a fingernail, El thought probably unconsciously, along the tendrils of scar tissue snaking upwards from her wrist into her shirt-sleeves.

  “After everything he’s done,” she answered, “I’m not sure that I’m frightened enough.”

  Chapter 15

  Vauxhall

  1996

  Nothing reminded El of Dexter more than the smell of burnt fish.

  Ruby’s flat had reeked of it, the day she’d met him. Ruby hadn’t explained why at the time, though El had gathered afterwards that it connected in some way with a long con she and Sita were running in the kitchen of a West End seafood restaurant.

  The boys had seemed immune to it - the two of them stretched out lengthways on the living room carpet, heads buried in biology textbooks, still wearing the maroon blazers and striped ties that identified them to El immediately as students of the rich-boy school in Hampstead, the one with the belfry and the gates so high and spiked you’d likely do yourself an injury trying to sneak in or out.

  Ruby had talked about them, long before she’d ever invited El over for tea, so much and in such detail that El felt like she knew them already: knew that, although they were physically identical, they had very different temperaments. That Dexter was the funny one, the joker, and that Michael was more serious, more polite and circumspect.

  They were taller than most of the men she’d known; even then, at 17. They were neat, well-kept and cared-for: their shirts clean and ironed, their trousers pressed, their hair combed and sculpted into short, tidy Afros. And they were good-looking, soft-eyed and long eyelashed in a way she knew a lot of girls her age would find appealing - even if, as she was beginning to suspect, she was unlike a lot of girls her age in at least a couple of quite critical ways.

  “This is El,” Ruby had said, before she bustled out of the room to put the kettle on. “She’s not lived round here long, so you two - get your backsides up off that floor and make her feel at home.”

  Both boys had obeyed, but one, seeing Ruby disappear through the doorway, had sat immediately back down again, flashing El a crooked smile that she read as half-cheeky and half-apologetic as he returned to his book.

  That’ll be Dexter, then, she thought.

  The other boy stayed standing.

  “Very nice to meet you,” he said awkwardly, sounding three decades older than he looked; a stiff headmaster, welcoming parents at an open day.

  “And you,” she answered, unconsciously matching his crisp, clipped delivery with vowels so excessively over-pronounced that she sounded, she thought, like an East End barrow girl auditioning for a Jane Austen adaptation.

  “Have you known Mum long?”

  “Just a few weeks.”

  “And she’s showing you the ropes?”

  El was shocked into speechlessness. Did they know what their mother was, what she did?

  “At the laundrette,” he clarified. “I take it you’re one of the new people?”

  Ah, she thought. So that was Ruby’s cover story.

  “Yes,” she said. “I do weekends,” she added. “You know... folding. Unloading.”

  “How are you finding it so far? It must be very tiring. Quite demanding, physically.”

  “Very,” she said, thinking fast. “I’m on my feet all day. And the machines are very... heavy. To open.”

  “I’m sure they are. With all those clothes in there, especially. Brassieres and underpants and so on.”

  The boy on the floor sighed and looked up from his book.

  “Must you do this with all of them?” he said, addressing his brother. “Ignore him,” he said, turning his attention to El. “He plays this game every time Mum brings home someone she works with. He knows she’s not a laundress, any more than Auntie Sita is the Empress of Rajasthan, or whatever she’s pretending to be this week. He just likes to watch you squirm.”

  The standing boy grinned, showing perfectly white teeth - the teeth of a high-school athlete or a Hollywood actor.

  “Sorry,” he said to El, his register less formal, less stilted than it had been the moment before. “He’s right, I’m just messing with you.”

  He stuck his arm out towards her, inviting a handshake.

  “Dexter Redfearn,” he said. “That one down there with a stick up his arse is Michael. And you must be the girl Mum’s been talking about lately. The mouthy one with the hammer.”

  ———

  The accent was more refined these days, Ruby’s rasp and Winston’s lilt flattened into a generic South East by mock trials and Law Society dinners, so that he sounded more and more like the chinless Bullingdon Club types he used to parody, even in everyday speech. But the same playfulness was in him now, almost 20 years on - the same sense of delighted amusement in the world as he found it.

  “It’s not bad,” he said, passing the stapled pages
of the contract to El over the tablecloth and helping himself to a parcel of her ravioli with his fingers. “Near on watertight, if I say so myself. If this Alison Miller existed, and any of her services were actually on offer, she’d have herself a very sweet deal.”

  And that was the other thing about Dexter: he wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty or bend the law to breaking point if Ruby - or El, or Sita - asked him to.

  Michael was as straight as a die, so squeaky-clean he left the room when his Mum and her friends talked shop, lest he hear something incriminating. He was in the City now, specialising in corporate litigation, the first Black man to be offered a partnership at Fine & Porter, and had plans to set up his own firm within the decade. He was, by any estimation, an upstanding citizen - more his father’s son than his mother’s, although there was something of Ruby’s laser focus, her methodical ferocity, in the way that he attacked a brief.

  Dexter, conversely, was a chancer, a wheeler-dealer. Though as materially successful as Michael - his bank balance evident in his suits, his Porsche, his Battersea penthouse - he preferred to operate under the radar. His own two-man firm - ably supported by the redoubtable Mrs Day - was unheard-of by all but a very select client-base; his business came exclusively via word of mouth. Like Michael’s, his record was clean, his right to practice absolute; unlike Michael’s, his reputation - where it was known at all - was decidedly murky. He was good, every client he’d ever had in his office agreed; there was no one better to solve a complicated problem or resolve a complicated dispute that couldn’t be addressed by more conventional means. But, those same clients would add quietly: you wouldn’t always want to know how he did it, would you?

  “Cheers,” said El. She scanned it, briefly, and passed it back to him. “I owe you.”

  “How would you like me today?” he asked, washing down the ravioli with a swig of mineral water. He wasn’t much of a drinker; neither twin was. Despite their differences, they both saw value in keeping a clear head. “Lapdog, pitbull? Tenacious legal terrier?”

  She considered the question.

  “Let’s play it by ear,” she answered. “Just… follow my lead, alright? No improvising. I know what you’re like.”