The Debt

by Natalie Edwards

  “I’ll float it with them,” Marchant said noncommittally. “See what they think of the idea. But I can tell you now that it’ll be a no from Harriet.”

  “A no?” said El.

  Though she knew it was impossible, she was sure she could hear the camera recording - the hiss and whirr of it burrowing into her skin, vibrating through her bones.

  ———

  “You need to keep your head straight,” Karen had told her, “and keep your eyes forward, so they’re right on him. No point bothering with any of this if all you end up with is three hours of footage of a blank wall.”

  She’d pushed the glasses up onto El’s nose and hooked the black plastic arms around her ears, fiddling with the hinges until the fit was snug.

  El had stayed perfectly still, not daring to move for fear of dislodging some vital component of the device.

  “Heard any more about Kat?” Karen asked, as casually as if she’d been enquiring what El had made herself for lunch. El was fairly sure it was a front; that Karen was as worried as the rest of them.

  “Not since Ruby’s mate called yesterday,” she answered, wishing she had something more to share.

  Since they’d learned - first through Ruby’s old friend Arlena, a staff nurse at St Luke’s, then through TV news bulletins and headlines in the Standard - that the police investigation into the assault on Kat was very much ongoing, they’d avoided visiting the hospital or ringing to check on her condition. There was, moreover, no longer any way for the hospital to contact them: the phone number Ruby had offered up to the ICU via Kat’s supposed epilepsy bracelet had belonged to a burner handset, cheap and untraceable, that El had no hesitation in abandoning to the river. She’d bought another immediately afterwards - issuing the new number to the handful of people she felt would need it and enjoying, despite the circumstances, a brief sensation of pleasure at the knowledge that Bernard Croft would have no means of hounding her about his son’s exam results thereafter.

  She’d tried, despite the permacloud of anxiety and uncertainty that had hung over the Ledbury Road house since the attack, not to think too much about the night that she and Rose had spent in A&E after Kat had been admitted; about ambitious young constables in back offices, hopped up on black coffee, poring zealously over enlarged CCTV stills of the two of them in the waiting area and competing with one another to match blurred images to known names and faces, to identify the mystery women who’d claimed to be Kat’s sisters but - as surely everyone knew by now - weren’t. Her one consolation was that there hadn’t been, at least as far as she remembered, any cameras in the Death Room - and no way, therefore, for those constables to have heard Rose’s story, and to have joined the dots from there.

  Arlena’s latest update had been, in effect, that there was no update. Kat remained stable but unresponsive: still unconscious, still in ICU. Her comatose state meant that no reliable assessment could be made of the damage to her brain and body, nor of how successful the craniectomy had been in mitigating that damage. She was a black box, all but the most basic of her vital signs unknowable. And the longer she stayed a black box, the lower the odds of her coming out whole and unscathed on the other side.

  “I’ll ring tonight,” Karen said.

  “You can’t,” El said. “They’ll trace the call.”

  “Believe me, they won’t.”

  You’re kidding yourself if you think they’ll tell you anything, El had thought. Even if – and it’s a big if - there’s something for them to tell.

  “How did you learn to do it?” she asked, casting around for a change of subject.

  “Do what?”

  El pointed a finger upward to the glasses.

  “All this,” she said. “The gadgets and the cameras. I thought you were meant to be a thief?”

  Unexpectedly, Karen had laughed.

  “I’ve got to be one thing or the other, is that it?” she said. Then, without waiting for El to answer, she added: “I am a thief, as it happens. A good one and all - maybe not quite up there with my old man, but pretty fucking close, especially if we’re talking security networks. I’ve also got a BSc in mechanical engineering, a masters in electronics and once we’ve put this job to bed, I have every intention of getting back to that MPhil in applied cryptography I keep meaning to write. And if you think these things are mutually exclusive, then I’d politely suggest that you might want to find yourself a different vocation than weighing people up for a living.”

  She flashed a grin at El, one that suggested that this wasn’t the first time she’d been underestimated and that she found it, for the time being, more entertaining than insulting. El took her in again - the tightly-packed muscle, the South London accent, the security guard stance - and kicked herself for her misconceptions. Her embarrassment was only amplified later, when Ruby let her in on the fuller story.

  Karen, it turned out, wasn’t just a wallet dip, a short-con artist or a safecracker, although she was all of these things. She was, or had been, a child prodigy with a particular aptitude for numbers and machines: admitted to Imperial at 15, UMIST at 18 and the Engineering Council at 20. She held patents for 3 different machine vision innovations - one of which, a gait analysis system widely considered in the industry to be at least a decade ahead of its time, generated enough annual licensing revenue to ensure that neither Karen nor any children she might have would ever want for anything material.

  (“She don’t need to work any more than you do,” Ruby had told El, sucking on another of her disintegrating custard creams. “But she likes a challenge, same as you. And neither one of you are doing this one for the money, are you?”).

  “So,” said El, returning Karen’s grin with an apologetic smile of her own, “I should trust you when you tell me this thing will work?”

  She touched the bridge of her nose, in roughly the place she thought the camera might be.

  This time Karen’s laughter was a roar - amused and forgiving.

  “It’ll work,” she said. “It’s not mechanical failure I’m worried about with this one. It’s human error.”

  ———

  “Harriet doesn’t approve of me,” said Marchant. “She finds my work… you might say distasteful. Between us, I suspect she finds the whole idea of commerce distasteful. She’d never deign to sully her hands with it. And as for my politics… Suffice to say, my daughter and I are very different people. We have very few things in common beyond the basic biological connection, and our respective political beliefs are not among them. In other circumstances, I’d be exactly the sort of candidate she’d picket. As it is, we restrict our conversation to safe subjects - her mother and brothers and so on.”

  El privately saluted both Harriet’s politics and her sound judgement of character.

  “Should we consider her a liability?” she asked.

  “Good God, no. Whatever ill she might wish me, she’d never actively work against me. Doing that would only hurt Elizabeth, and Harriet knows it.”

  She imagined for a moment what life might have been like for the legitimate Marchant children, what flashes of their father’s cruelty they might have glimpsed, growing up in his house - especially once Saul Bellman was gone, and with him any reason Marchant might have had to keep himself and his temper in check at home.

  A shadow fell across the table. Marchant reached for the menu, readying himself to bark instructions at whichever waiter or sommelier had been assigned to them.

  El kept him in her line of sight, the camera capturing every change in his expression as it happened: surprise, at looking up to see not a waiter or a sommelier but an angular woman in Chanel, a blue cardboard folder clasped in her hands where a notepad should have been; annoyance, at being disturbed during dinner by a stranger; recognition, then horror, upon realising that the stranger wasn’t really a stranger at all.

  Hannah hovered over them - an avenging angel, brandishing her folder like a burning sword.

  “You again?” said Marchant, clicking
his fingers to attract the attention of the waiting staff. “What do you want?”

  Hannah opened her folder and pulled from it a stiff A4 rectangle. She let it drop to the table in front of Marchant, face-up. It was a photograph - a posed black and white studio shot of a young woman, dark-haired and pretty, holding a toddler of indeterminate gender in her arms. Both the woman and the child were smiling.

  Marchant pointedly avoided looking at it.

  “Heidi Simpson,” Hannah said. “And her daughter, Jade.”

  “That supposed to mean something to me, is it?” said Marchant.

  A waiter rushed towards them from the bar, red-faced, still holding the cutlery he’d been polishing a moment before.

  “I would hope so,” Hannah replied, speaking softly, “since you murdered them.”

  Marchant froze in place, his face unreadable, then held up a hand to shoo the waiter from the table. The waiter, puzzled but obedient, turned on his heels and sped away, back to his place at the bar.

  “I’m not going to ask who you are,” Marchant told her, his voice equally quiet, “because I don’t care. But if you know who I am, and I assume you do, then you’ll also know that I have some very, very expensive lawyers on retainer, and that they earn the bulk of their really quite substantial invoices by defending me and my organisation against defamatory claims. They’re clever and they’re tenacious, and they couldn’t care less if I’m being slandered by a bin man or the editor of the Telegraph - they’ll go after them just the same. So my advice to you, whoever you are, is to pack away your pictures and your accusations and take yourself somewhere that isn’t here. Because the best outcome for you currently, and the only one that doesn’t see you bankrupt and begging for scraps in a gutter, is that I never have cause to think of you again.”

  Hannah ignored him; pressed her thumb down onto the corner of the photograph.

  “They died in a house fire 3 years ago,” she continued. “Deliberately set. Before that, they lived in a rental property in Greenwich - a mews house, the kind you’d think would be a little out of the price range of a single mother on benefits. It was leased to Heidi through a shell company, Hallett Lettings - one of yours. I’m not sure why the detective investigating the fire didn’t find that out - it took me all of 5 minutes at Companies House - but there we are. I’m sure she had her own reasons for looking the other way.”

  “Do you have any idea how many properties I own?” he said, unfazed. “If this is what you’ve seized on as evidence of my involvement in this woman’s death…”

  “Jade was your daughter,” said Hannah. “I assume that’s why you killed her and her mother? To keep your wife from finding out about her? You’re not listed on her birth certificate, of course, and her body was too badly burned for there to be any reliable physical evidence. But you can never completely cover up something like that, can you? Take the kindergarten she went to, for example - again, a very good kindergarten for the daughter of an unemployed hairdresser. Perhaps not quite as expensive as your legal bills, but certainly not cheap. I had a quick chat with the owner not so long ago - a very nice woman, quite loquacious - and she was as surprised as I was that Heidi had been able to afford the fees. She seemed to think that there was a man in the picture, supporting her - paying her bills. She’d never met him, but she remembered seeing him once, waiting in the car outside when Heidi came to collect Jade. An older man, she said - quite a bit older than Heidi. Driving a little red sports car - something vintage, she thought. A Lotus or an MG.”

  “Tell me, James - what is it that you drive?”

  The bare bones of the story were true, El knew - one of Rose’s investigator’s had spoken to the kindergarten manager, and she had mentioned spotting an older man in an MG in the car park one afternoon. But the information hadn’t been given quite so freely as Hannah had suggested: money had changed hands, and the woman was nothing like as certain about what she had or hadn’t seen. As evidence went, it was even flimsier than it sounded.

  “Have you quite finished?” asked Marchant.

  “Almost,” Hannah replied. “Now, I know what you must be thinking - that this is all circumstantial, it doesn’t prove anything. Doesn’t really prove that you knew them, let alone that you had anything to do with their deaths. But bear with me. I have just a little more to tell you, and I think you’ll want to hear it.”

  El leaned in across the table towards Marchant, the glasses still trained on his face. He looked calm, she thought; untroubled.

  “Someone saw you set the fire,” said Hannah, in a whisper so low that El was afraid the camera wouldn’t catch it.

  Now his expression changed - his eyes widening a fraction, the skin around his mouth tightening as he sucked in his cheeks. He was afraid, she thought. Hiding it well, but afraid all the same.

  “This is absurd,” he said. “Utterly absurd.”

  “Absurd, but true,” said Hannah. “This person - he saw you go into the house that night with a can of petrol. And he saw you drive off afterwards, once you’d used it - albeit in something a bit less distinctive than the MG. He doesn’t follow the news, and he’s certainly not an FT reader, so he hadn’t heard of Marchant Holdings - he had no idea who you were. But he’s got a fantastic memory for faces, really very impressive. And he knew exactly where he’d seen you before, once I showed him your photo.”

  There was no man, El knew; no convenient bystander who’d borne witness to Marchant’s crime. But Hannah sold the lie so beautifully, so convincingly, she could almost believe it.

  “The question I’d be asking myself if I were you, Jim,” Hannah said - and she was wrapping up now, El could feel it, “is this: if he’s already talked to me, how long will it be before he talks to someone else?”

  Marchant was pale, his jaw clenched, as if he couldn’t bring himself to open his mouth.

  “What do you want?” he said eventually, each word a bullet spat from between his teeth.

  Hannah slid the photograph off the tablecloth and back into her folder.

  “Nothing you can give me,” she said. “You’ve taken everything already. But ruining you, the way you’ve ruined me… if that’s my consolation prize, then I suppose I’ll have to take it.”

  ———

  She left the restaurant without fanfare; he didn’t try to stop her, although El hadn’t thought that he would.

  For a long time, there was nothing but silence between them.

  This is it, El thought. Showtime.

  “Her name is Hannah D’Amboise,” she told him. “She’s a political correspondent, ex-BBC. Don’t insult either one of us by telling me you didn’t recognise her. Though I imagine you’re more familiar with her husband Justin - Justin D’Amboise, your CFO. Your late CFO. The one she seems convinced you did away with.”

  His mouth opened, but she raised a hand, pre-empting his question.

  “I do my homework,” she said. “And after that incident at your club, I thought it in both our interests to find out who might be invested in causing you harm. As it transpires, there’s rather a long list of candidates.”

  She smiled ruefully; sipped at her sparkling water. It was warm; flat.

  “I told you, didn’t I, that I dislike surprises? That surprises can derail campaigns, ruin candidacies?”

  He nodded, apparently dumbfounded.

  “Under ordinary circumstances, this would be exactly the kind of surprise that would see me walk away from a campaign. If a client isn’t honest with me about the challenges we’re likely to face together, it becomes very difficult for me to represent them successfully. It prevents me, Mr Marchant, from doing my job - which has its own implications for my reputation. And I care very deeply for my reputation.”

  “Alison...”

  “There are, however,” she said, not allowing him to speak, to control the course of the conversation, “three factors working in your favour in this particular instance. The first is the effort I’ve already expended in planning your campa
ign - which, sunk cost fallacy or not, has been significant. The second is you yourself. Were you able to resolve the particular challenge that now confronts us before it becomes public knowledge, then you stand, I believe, a very, very good chance of taking the vacated seat in Silvertown. And the third... well, the third is more personal. I will not be held hostage - not by anyone, for any reason. If and when I leave a client or abandon a campaign, it’s because I’ve chosen to. Not because my hand has been forced.”

  “It didn’t happen,” said Marchant flatly. “What she said - there’s no truth to it.”

  “Whether there is or there isn’t is immaterial to me. I’m not your confessor - what you may or may not have done in the past matters to me only inasmuch as it’s likely to affect your profile. I won’t be pressed into a corner, but nor am I keen to back a losing horse, much less one that may be facing a murder charge in the not too distant future. So answer me this, Mr Marchant: is this a problem that you’re able to deal with?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked - sounding surly, petulant.

  “I mean: can Ms D’Amboise and her vendetta - and any witnesses she claims to have to the crime she says took place - be made to go away?”

  He stared at her; seemed to take stock of her. She wondered if she’d shocked him; if he was asking himself whether he’d underestimated her - and if he had, by just how much. The idea pleased her. There was something reassuring, she thought, about the possibility that even monsters could be horrified.

  “Yes,” he said eventually. “I believe she can.”

  “You have the resources?”

  He swept another gaze around the restaurant, which was now entirely empty but for their table.