The Debt

by Natalie Edwards

  Under the rapidly-accreting layers of tiredness, confusion and blind panic, something in the conscious part of El’s mind clicked into place.

  Holt - the same place, Karen said, that Marchant sent Leon Baxter on the smash and grab that turned out to be his last.

  You heard of it? she’d asked El. It’s on the Welsh border, up by Cheshire. Might even be in Wales.

  But Kat would have been a kid then, wouldn’t she? 11 or 12 at the oldest.

  Unless…

  “Her parents,” El said slowly, still only half-sure of the question she was asking. “What happened to them?”

  ———

  There had been blood on Hannah’s clothes. On her face - dried around her mouth, smudged across her cheeks, rising up under the skin from the broken vessels under her eyes - and in her hairline, too, gluing the no-longer-immaculate strands of her bob to her scalp in stiffened clumps. But it was the blood on her clothes that El was drawn to: the streaks on her jacket, the splashes on the clouded leather of her shoes, the white piping turned pink on the collar of her blouse.

  She was barely standing: slumped against a pillar in the front porchway, knees bent and bowed at the waist.

  Ruby got to her first - ducking outside, down and around until Hannah’s arm was draped around her shoulder and hauled her bodily upright.

  “Someone get her other arm,” she shouted to the others.

  Karen and Sita sprung forward - though Rose, El noticed, hung back, apparently frozen to the spot.

  “The car,” Hannah said as Karen lifted her, air whistling through her teeth as she spoke. “She’s in the car.”

  She jerked her neck to one side, towards the pavement behind her, where the BMW they’d taken to Berkhamsted jutted out at an angle from the kerb, its windows smashed and bodywork dented.

  El got to it first, sprinting down the path with an urgency that had little to do with rational thought. Ruby and Karen followed, pulling Hannah with them.

  “Cover your hand, girl,” said Ruby, before El’s fingers could reach the door handle. “We don’t want to leave no more prints than we have already, if the Old Bill come knocking.”

  El nodded in acknowledgement; wrapped the sleeve of her sweater around her left fist until it covered all her fingers and tugged at the handle, opening the passenger door.

  “Fucking hell,” said Karen under her breath.

  Where Hannah’s clothes and face were smeared with blood, Kat’s were saturated with it. The beginnings of bruises were forming at her temples; her lips were parted, exposing broken teeth. Even in the dark of the street, El could see the dent in the back of her skull, gore pooling in the unnatural concave left at the crown.

  “They drove us off the road,” said Hannah, still struggling for breath, the effort leaving potholes in her words as she tried to explain what had happened, what it was they were seeing. “At Berkhamsted. Near the house. Marchant’s house.”

  “Who, darlin’?” said Ruby gently. “Who drove you off the road?”

  “Couldn’t see,” said Hannah. “Country roads. No streetlights. Two of them, maybe. Men. Pointed a gun at the windscreen when we’d stopped. Told us to open the doors.”

  She paused for breath, then carried on, gathering steam as she spoke.

  “They didn’t want me,” she said. “It was Kat - they wanted Kat. One of them hit me with the gun, and I must have blacked out, but before… They were beating her with something, both of them. Sticks or batons, I’m not sure. Kept going until they thought she was dead.”

  “What happened then?” Ruby asked.

  “They hit me again. I couldn’t stay awake, and then… I don’t know. I woke up, and they’d gone, but it was so dark and there was nobody for miles, and all I could think of was getting away. I don’t know how I got from there to here. I must have driven. And then we were here, and I could hear her next to me, trying to breathe, and… oh, God. Oh, God.”

  She stopped speaking as suddenly as she’d started, face immobilised by the memory.

  Ruby stared at the scene inside the car - at Kat, at the blood, at the fragments of glass sparking like gemstones across the fabric of the seats.

  She’s thinking, El thought. Working it out. She’s not flying into a tailspin like the rest of us - she’s planning.

  “Take her inside,” Ruby told Sita, indicating Hannah. “She’ll need looking at.”

  Sita nodded; gave Karen a moment to disentangle herself, then slipped Hannah’s arm around her own neck and led her, slowly, back up the path and into the house.

  “You still got that van of yours?” Ruby asked Karen.

  “Yeah,” said Karen. “Parked it round the corner.”

  “Then run and get it. I need you to get this one to a hospital, now.”

  She pointed down at Kat. Karen nodded assent, complying with the order as readily as Sita had, and sped off up the road.

  Which left only El.

  “Tell me,” said Ruby softly, “you bring any of them bags of tricks with you down here? Wigs and makeup and that?”

  “In the house,” El replied.

  “Good. Go inside and get yourself dressed - and take Rose with you. I want you both unrecognisable, understand? Because in about two minutes, Karen’s going to be putting one of them epileptic bracelets round this one’s wrist,” she looked down again at Kat, “and your number’s gonna be on it for the doctors to find when she drops her off at A&E. Alright?”

  ———

  The nurses were changing shift. El could hear them lingering outside the Death Room, talking and laughing; hear their shoes clattering, step on step, as they traversed the corridor.

  Rose still hadn’t answered her question.

  “What happened to Kat’s parents?” she asked again. She was pacing now, not quite able to sit still despite the fatigue.

  Finally, Rose replied.

  “You’ve been talking to Karen,” she said. “About Leon Baxter.”

  There was no point in denying it, El thought. Not at this stage of the game.

  “Yeah,” she said. “She told me Marchant sent Leon up north the day he disappeared, to a place on the Welsh border. A place called Holt. Bit of a coincidence, isn’t it? Two girls drafted into the same job, wanting to take down the same man - and the father of one of them vanishes on his way back from the same small town in the middle of nowhere that the other one came from.”

  She waited; let the statement and its implications hang in the air.

  “It’s not up to me to share the details of other people’s personal lives,” Rose said. “If Kat had wanted you to know about her family or her motivations for working with us, she’d have told you herself, as Karen did. I’d prefer not to be accused of spreading gossip.”

  “That’s a very noble sentiment, coming from a woman whose plan sent her to intensive care with a brain injury.”

  It was a low blow, a cheap shot, and El knew it. Rose winced, recoiling from the words as if El had thrown a punch at her - as if she were preparing to land a second.

  “I’m sorry,” El said, ashamed of herself. “That was a shit thing to say. I shouldn’t have said it.”

  Rose looked up, directly at her; she was crying.

  “If it’s what you think,” she said, “then you should certainly have said it. I can hardly deny it, can I? She is in here, and it is because of me.”

  “It’s not… I don’t think that. She made her own choices, we all did. I’m just… it’s been a very long day, you know? I’m running on empty. And this job… sometimes it feels like I only know half the information I’m supposed to know, that I need to know to do it properly, and you and Sita and Ruby are leaving me just enough of a trail of breadcrumbs to keep me on the hook without ever actually sharing anything useful. I mean, I’m not a bloody detective. I’d rather people just told me things than insist I waste my energy trying to work out the clues for myself.”

  She tailed off, realising how much she’d said, how much she’d shared - then, em
barrassed, sat down quietly on the sofa opposite Rose.

  “What is it you think you don’t know?” Rose asked after a while.

  El almost laughed at the absurdity of the question.

  “Are you serious?” she said. “I know almost nothing. Beyond the video of Lomax and the bits I’ve picked up from Karen and Hannah, I’m pretty much completely in the dark about why any of you are doing this. I know why I want Marchant gone, but the rest of you? No idea. I know you have some kind of history with Ruby and Sita that neither of them will talk about, but I couldn’t even take a guess what that might be. And you or your husband obviously have a connection to Marchant, something big enough to make you hate him as much as you do and plough the money you have into planning this job and bringing the rest of us in on it. But what that is? Again, I have no idea. Like I said, I know almost nothing. And that’s not something I’m used to.”

  Another silence.

  “I’m sorry,” Rose said. “I thought… Or rather, I assumed it wouldn’t matter to you or to the others what my motivations were. Not when you all have so many reasons of your own for wanting him stopped.”

  “Of course it matters. It’s another data point, another thing to understand about who he is and what makes him tick. The less I know, the less able I am to do what you need me to do. And the more information you have but hold back,” she added, voicing the concern she’d been suppressing since the day before, the week before, the second she’d heard Lomax tell the camera how light her mother’s body had felt as he’d bundled it into his suitcase, “the more danger you put me in. Put all of us in.”

  She’d expected Rose to argue; to fight her corner. But she didn’t.

  Instead, she got up from her sofa and walked the few steps there were across the room to sit down beside El.

  “You’re right,” she said. “It isn’t fair. You’re taking an enormous risk at my behest, and I haven’t been willing to share even the things that are mine to share.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said El awkwardly, looking anywhere but at Rose.

  There was a rustle of fabric. El looked to her right, and saw that Rose had rolled up one of the sleeves of her shirt, exposing the arm to the elbow. Up close, the scarring was worse than it had seemed the few other times El had caught a glimpse of it: angry red lines crosshatched with faded silver, the epidermis scaled, drawn too tight over the muscle and bone.

  “He did this,” she told El, holding the arm up and close enough that El could see the few faint hairs that remained on its skin. “Marchant. When I was a child.”

  El was shaken. Not by the scar itself, or the revelation that Marchant was responsible for it, but by the child part of the sentence - the suggestion that Rose had known him for the length of time it implied, that her animus might go back not years but decades.

  “You knew him then?” she asked. “When you were a kid?”

  Rose traced a thumb over her forearm, back and forth across the scar tissue.

  “I’ve known him all my life,” she said. “He’s my father.”

  Chapter 20

  Clapham

  1966

  She wasn’t Rose, back then; she was Olivia. Not Olivia Marchant, like her father, but Olivia Green, like her mother.

  The day of the night he tried to kill her had been, as she remembered it later, a fun one; an adventure. He’d taken them out, her and her little sister Pamela; for ice cream floats at the Italian cafe up the road, then on to the Regal in Streatham to watch Thunderball. They’d been the only ones in the cinema, which she’d found thrilling - the thrill compounded by the presence of her father in the afternoon, and on a school day, when usually she saw him only once or twice a month, and always in the evenings.

  That evening had been less fun. He’d gone back with them to the house; not just dropped them off but stayed for dinner, the three of them and her mother huddled up in the dining room with the pie and mash the cleaning lady had heated up for them before she left. It must have been the cleaning lady, Olivia had reasoned: her mother didn’t cook, if she could possibly help it - she’d choose a glass of Hock over a meal every time - and she’d never seen her father so much as pick up a cheese-grater.

  Her mother was already drunk when they arrived home, and became progressively more so as they ate, working steadily through the uncorked bottle on the tablecloth as she picked with no obvious enthusiasm at the food on her plate. Drunk, and combative.

  “Are you staying tonight?” she asked Olivia’s father, a bellicose edge to the words.

  “Not tonight, no,” replied her father mildly.

  “Because you’re going back to her?” said her mother.

  Her father laid down his knife and fork.

  “Girls,” he said, addressing Olivia and Pamela, “would you go upstairs and play in your room, please?”

  “But I want pudding!” said Pamela, who was six, four years Olivia’s junior, and given to whining at the slightest provocation.

  Olivia, who knew better than to antagonise their father, grabbed her by the hand and dragged her, complaining, out of her chair and into the hallway.

  She also knew, though she wished she didn’t, which her her mother had been talking about - that the days and nights he spent away from them, neither at the dining table nor in their mother’s bedroom, he spent instead with his other family, his real family.

  Who they were, these phantom almost-relatives - where they lived, how they talked, what they ate - these were things she didn’t know. Things she’d rather not know.

  She moved towards the stairs, then hesitated - torn between wanting to ignore the argument that she knew would be going on in the dining room, to emphatically not hear any of the words exchanged, and the necessity of keeping an eye on her mother, in case there came a time later that night that she needed to help her up to bed, or put a cushion under her head where she’d passed out, or roll her over onto her side on the settee to stop her choking.

  “Daddy said to go and play,” Pamela chided her. “You’re not supposed to be spying.”

  “Go up, then,” said Olivia. “Nobody’s stopping you, are they?”

  Pamela harrumphed and stamped her feet - then, failing to get a rise out of Olivia, stomped away upstairs.

  Left alone, Olivia pressed an ear to the door and listened.

  They were arguing - her mother’s voice loud and angry, her father’s cooler and more measured.

  “I refuse to keep having this conversation,” he was saying. “Especially with a woman so full of cheap wine she can barely string a sentence together.”

  “Why do you think I drink?” said her mother, half-shouting. “I’m on my own with your kids every hour God sends while you’re off with her doing I don’t know what.”

  “And I’ll continue to,” he said evenly. “You know I have no intention of leaving her, and you know why. Who do you think pays for this house you’re living in? For the woman who mops your floors, that very expensive school you were so eager for the girls to attend? It’s Liz’s money, all of it. Without her, there ceases to be any money. She and Saul would take every penny if they ever caught wind that I were anything but a model husband. And what kind of life would either of us have then?”

  “Has it never occurred to you that there might be more important things than money? That I might prefer having you around to just having you foot the bill?”

  “This is the arrangement we made. And for as long as Liz trusts that I’ll come home to her each night, and as long Saul persists in remaining healthy as a damn carthorse, it’s the arrangement we will keep.”

  There was a lull; the sound of liquid sloshing in a glass.

  “And what if,” said her mother slyly, “someone were to tell old Liz that her boy was playing away? What would you think about that?”

  Olivia heard footsteps, heavy shoes echoing on tiles.

  “I would think,” said her father, “that whoever it was would know better than to toss around idle threats.”

>   “Who says they’re idle?”

  A sound like a thick whip cracking, sharp but organic, somehow fleshy - an open hand striking a face, an arm.

  Olivia bolted up the stairs and into the bathroom. Sat on the edge of the bath with the door locked, waiting for the arguing to stop.

  ———

  “I can’t sleep with the light off,” Pamela called up to her from the bottom bunk as she climbed up the ladder to her own. “Turn it back on, Livvy. Please. It’s scary with the light off.”

  Olivia pulled the sheets up over her chest - annoyed and disgusted by her sister’s fear, in a way she didn’t fully understand. How, she thought, could something like the dark be scary, when there were real problems, grown up problems out there worse than anything your imagination could conjure up in the darkness?

  “It’s staying off,” she said. “Go and get in Mum’s bed if you don’t like it.”

  Afterwards, when she dreamed of her sister, it was that line she’d hear, that moment she’d replay.

  ———

  She was already awake when the smell of the smoke hit her, jerked from what must have been deep sleep by a pair of leather-gloved hands on her shoulders - shaking her, dragging her down from her bunk through the gap in the railings.

  “Come on, girl!” said a muffled voice - the voice that belonged to the hands that were pulling at her. A woman’s voice, one she thought she recognised. “You need to move it, now!”

  Olivia rubbed at her eyes, and before the heat from the smoke-clouds crowding the room burned into them and took her sight, she saw her: a lady about her Mum’s age but much shorter, not very much taller than Olivia; brown hair cropped like Twiggy’s, her own bright blue eyes widened in alarm and a silk scarf wrapped around her face, covering her nose and mouth. The cleaning lady - the one she knew then as Martha, but wouldn’t always.

  “What are you doing here?” Olivia asked her, coughing and retching as the smoke poured into her open mouth, then her chest. The room was hot, hotter than an oven, scalding her skin from all sides, and under the heat was noise, a low rumbling like a train passing through a station.