The Manor

by Keane Jessie

  Milly surged to her feet and was gone, out into the hall, shoving past the mourners, running off up the stairs.

  ‘She OK?’ asked Nipper, coming over to Belle.

  Belle stared at him with dislike. Harlan’s toy poodle. ‘No. Not at all.’

  He sat down on the couch. Oh fuck off, thought Belle. But he didn’t.

  ‘How do you think it happened? The accident?’ she asked Nipper.

  He shrugged. ‘Helicopters are dangerous things,’ he said. ‘The servicing has to be top-notch. You hear of accidents. All the time.’

  ‘Harlan told me it takes months for the Air Accident people to sift through it all. To find out what really happened.’

  ‘Yeah. He’s right. The AAIB are bloody thorough. But dead’s dead, ain’t that so? It won’t bring either one of them back, no matter what they find.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget that day,’ said Belle.

  It was so vivid in her mind, even now, over a month after the event. The panic, the shouting, the wail of the fire engines and the police cars, the ambulances to take the bodies away to the morgue – and then in the days after that, the Air Accident crew came in with heavy lifting gear, disassembling the wreckage that remained and taking it off to their headquarters in Farnborough.

  Belle stared at Nipper, sitting there. He was watching Harlan, just like she was. ‘You really think this was an accident?’ she said.

  Nipper’s eyes swivelled to her face. ‘What are you saying?’

  Harlan’s attitude was so relaxed, so in charge. He looked her way and half-smiled, and she felt a shiver go right through her.

  ‘It suits him,’ she said. ‘Them being gone. Out of the way.’

  ‘Don’t let him hear you say that,’ Nipper said, giving her a steely-eyed look.

  ‘I’m not scared of him,’ said Belle. She nodded toward Ludo, who was lounging against the wall beside the door. ‘Or any of you pet apes he likes to hang around with.’

  Then she thought of Harlan chasing her down the road in his Porsche, and his parting words to her, and suddenly she wasn’t so sure.

  ‘Well,’ said Nipper, standing up, ‘you fucking well ought to be.’

  95

  Milly sat on the bed up in her room, listening to the roar of conversation from the guests downstairs and glad to be up here, away from it. Away from the necessity to be polite, to play hostess. Because she guessed she was the hostess now.

  Now that Mum was gone.

  Milly gulped and blinked back tears. She felt scoured out, empty, finished. She sat there, slumped, and looked at the black bin bags stacked up high against the far wall of her bedroom.

  Nula’s things.

  Her designer dresses. Her furs. Her jewellery. Her make-up. Harlan had sent that dead-eyed creep Ludo upstairs yesterday and the bastard had bagged all her mother’s gear up and stuffed it in here.

  ‘You’ll want to go through all this, won’t you,’ Harlan had said to Milly. ‘See if there’s anything you want to keep? I might hold on to some of Dad’s pieces, there’s a few designer bits I like, but most of the stuff’s too loud for my taste,’ he said. ‘I’m taking over the master suite, anyway. The boys’ll move my stuff in there.’

  Rotten bastard, she thought, but didn’t dare say it.

  Now she wearily got to her feet and went over to the pile of bags. Her mother’s stuff. Crying, she opened the first. Such beautiful gowns. Sequinned and hand-stitched and worth a small fortune. And – oh God – here was the pastel blue shift Nula had been wearing the day before she’d left for the Med with Dad for their pre-anniversary cruise. The last time Milly had seen her alive.

  Milly clutched at the silky fabric, brought it to her nose, inhaled Je Reviens, Nula’s signature scent. Sobbing, she dropped it back into the bag. Oh Christ. Oh Mum.

  With shaking hands she moved on to the next bag, tearing it open. These were more personal, intimate things. Nula’s Chinese tortoiseshell jewellery case. Her tablets. Dad had called them ‘Nula’s crazy pills’. That had been unkind. But she supposed the stress of living with someone as flaky as Mum must have told on him. Must have frustrated him, she guessed, because Charlie wasn’t the kind that would ever succumb to a mental illness, and he had never understood Nula’s pain.

  Milly delved deeper. There was a big Louis Vuitton holdall in here, with notebooks inside. Nula had never been a reader. You either were or you weren’t, and she knew that Nula had never picked up a book in her life.

  ‘I’ll read when I’m ninety,’ she had always said.

  But Nula hadn’t lived that long. And these weren’t books to read. Milly thumbed through a few pages and saw Nula’s scrawled, shambolic handwriting. Ah! Nula’s journals. These were the notebooks the psychiatrists and psychotherapists had encouraged Nula to write in when she was receiving treatment and in her day-to-day life; they had wanted her to pour out her troubles onto the page, to find some release maybe. Milly reached into the bag again. There was a whole stack of them, testament to Nula’s long struggle with her mental health. There were more of them in the pouffe in the sitting room, the ones she’d shown Belle when she’d been asking questions about the business; she’d get those later, keep them all together in this bag. She couldn’t just bin them. And she didn’t want anybody else pawing through them. Maybe later, she would be able to look at them in more detail. Right now, she couldn’t. It was too raw, all of it.

  She thought of what Belle had told her about the Clacton place, the one they’d found reference to.

  A crack factory, running alongside a legitimate furnishings business? Her father, a drugs baron? Her mother, going along with that? Belle’s parents, in the know?

  No. It couldn’t be true. Could it? She wished she smoked or drank or something, because she was in a bad, bad place right now and she felt that it could only get worse.

  96

  The nightmare went on and on for Milly. She collected the two urns containing her parents’ ashes from the undertakers, wondering – not wanting to, but unable to stop herself – how much of the dust inside the bronze-coloured urns was flesh, blood and bone, and how much was just scorched fragments of metal from the Jet Ranger.

  Got to stop thinking about that, she thought.

  And now came the reading of the will. In his office, Mr Gatiss the family solicitor read it out to Harlan and Milly. Milly was so dazed that for a long while none of the dry legal words he was spouting even registered. Then she saw Harlan sitting there with a big shit-eating grin on his face and said: ‘What?’

  Patiently, Mr Gatiss pushed his half-moon specs up his nose and read the will again.

  This time, Milly paid closer attention. The gist of it was, Harlan got everything. Everything. Milly got an allowance, thirty grand a year, that was all. The rest went straight to Harlan. Charlie and Nula’s entire fortune. The houses. The cash. The business. The nightclubs. The boats, the cars. The whole damned lot.

  She sat there and thought of course.

  She’d never been rated. She was just a girl. Harlan was the boy, the favoured one, heir to Charlie Stone’s empire. She thought of coming downstairs to proudly display her first teenage party dress and Charlie saying, crushing her in an instant: ‘Well no one’s ever going to call her Twiggy, are they?’

  Subtlety had never been Charlie’s strong suit. Mum had thumped his arm, shushing him, but Milly had got the message, loud and clear. She looked a mess. She was a mess. Fat and ugly. But Harlan? For Charlie, everything perfectly dressed and handsome Harlan did was OK. Nothing had ever changed that for Charlie, not even when Nula had started to hate Harlan and fear him.

  For Charlie, Harlan could do no wrong. And here was proof of it.

  Milly drove into town that night and went to one of the nightclubs Dad had owned. Now it was Harlan’s. She ordered a Bloody Mary at the bar and then stood there, wondering what the fuck she was doing here amid the deafening noise of Diana Ross belting ‘Chain Reaction’ out of the sound system. Sh
e downed the drink and ordered another. Then she felt a bit sick. She wasn’t much of a drinker. But she drank the alcohol because it numbed the pain.

  Feeling hazy, she stumbled off toward the ladies and stood and stared at her face in the mirror, noting that her potato-shaped nose – thanks, Mum! – was shiny with grease, her lipstick gone. She dabbed powder on and added a slick of lipstick. Better. Well, a bit. Other girls were pushing in alongside her in the cramped loos, and a black-haired beauty with hard, knowing eyes came up beside her and met Milly’s gaze in the mirror. She was exactly the sort of girl who’d always frightened Milly, reminding her of the snobby tomboy girls at school and at the stables, the ones who’d bullied her.

  ‘Need a livener then?’ the girl asked with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. She had a tiny square of cellophane in her hand, a couple of pills inside. ‘Tenner?’

  You never touched drugs. Not even cannabis, which everyone said was harmless. That had been rammed into her brain, nailed into it, from an early age. Playing with drugs was Russian roulette. You could be fine on it – maybe – or it could induce psychosis. You could wind up a paranoid schizophrenic. Pull the trigger, her dad had always said, and see whether the bullet took your brain right out. Your choice!

  Which was fucking ironic, given the fortune that Charlie Stone had apparently – according to Belle – made from selling the damned things. But looking at this girl, looking at the stuff in her hand, made Milly wonder.

  Everything hurt. Life hurt, right now. Her parents were gone. She missed Mum already, much to her surprise, and she had once adored her dad, even if he did have faults, even if he was the world’s worst crook, a fucking drugs baron, even if he’d never rated her at all. Now she was afraid of the future, under Harlan’s thumb. He would be in charge, and she would be nothing. As per usual. She stared at the pills in the girl’s hand. It made you feel better, they all said. Milly felt she would give anything, to feel better.

  ‘You in or not?’ said the girl, getting impatient.

  Milly pulled a tenner out of her bag and handed it over. Then she tossed the pills onto her tongue, bent her head to sluice in water straight out of the tap.

  For the first time ever, she let the good times roll.

  97

  Terry could feel a cold wind coming. Charlie had always laughed at Terry’s sensitivity to atmosphere – because Charlie had been dead from the neck up, as far as any finer feelings were concerned. Terry was the one who sometimes sensed danger before it hit, and Charlie had been glad to have him around.

  Now, with Charlie gone, it was like a part of Terry himself was missing. Guilt chewed at his guts day and night. He should have been with Charlie that day. What Harlan had said when that Jet Ranger crashed was absolutely right. It was his job in life to look after Charlie, to be his right hand, and he had failed. Feeling sick at heart, still he did the rounds as usual, checked out the dealers, visited the crack production lines and so far – so far – Harlan had left him alone to get on with it all, while making it perfectly clear that Terry answered to him now.

  For the first time since he’d been a small boy forced to go to Sunday school by his mum, he went to the church on the manor, the one where he’d married Jill and where Charlie had married Nula, back in their old glory days. Somehow he needed to do this. He walked up the aisle, absorbing the peace of the vast place, his eyes fixed on the suffering Christ in the stained-glass windows behind the altar. Wondering why the hell he did it, he crossed himself and then slid into a pew and sat there, head bowed.

  He thought of Charlie, dead, burned to ashes. His old friend. His mad, impulsive friend who’d been such a great laugh, such a ruddy fool, such a mate. As he remembered the helicopter crashing, his face screwed up in anguish. He should have stopped that happening somehow. Somehow. He’d lost his best friend in the whole world, but before that there had been other losses; too many. Little Col in that botched burglary. And Beezer, funny stupid Beezer in his poncy designer gear, who’d always made them laugh down the pub. Terry closed his eyes and tried to pray, but no words would come into his mind, nothing would come except his firm belief that this was an evil trade they were all involved in, and they were all damned to hell. God had punished Charlie and Nula for it and eventually God would punish him and his family for it, too.

  God no. Please spare them. Spare Belle. Spare my wife. Take me. I know I’ve been bad. Just take me and be done with it.

  ‘My son?’

  He looked up. A priest he didn’t know was standing there in a white dog collar and black cassock. Back in the day, the preacher here had been all hellfire and brimstone, but this one was new. Bulky and bald and with myopic blue eyes, there was a smile on his thin lips.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked the priest.

  ‘I’m fine. Thank you, Father.’

  ‘If you need to talk . . .’ he started.

  Terry started to shake his head. Then he said: ‘Would you hear my confession, Father?’

  ‘Of course,’ said the priest.

  Then Terry thought of what he could say, what he dared say to this God-fearing man. ‘No. Maybe I won’t,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  The priest stood there looking down at Terry with gentle eyes. ‘It’s never too late to find God,’ he said.

  Terry felt a tightness in his throat and for a moment he was afraid that he might actually start to cry.

  ‘Maybe He wouldn’t want to find me,’ he managed to say.

  The priest smiled. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. God’s love is for everyone,’ he said, and walked on, up the aisle to the altar.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Jill over the phone later that same day.

  She was at the gatehouse, and Terry was still up in town meeting a few of the lads, just checking things were running smooth. They weren’t, of course. The trusted old guard were complaining about Harlan’s up-and-coming young bucks, kids with bum fluff on their faces and big attitudes, trying to tell them how to behave. Terry smoothed things over as best he could, but truthfully he felt the same as any of them. Dispossessed. Shoved aside. He didn’t tell Jill about his visit to the church. He couldn’t.

  ‘Where’s Belle?’ asked Terry.

  ‘She’s right here. Up at the big house in the outside pool, swimming. You OK?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ It was a lie, but still. He couldn’t let Jill know that he felt shaky all of a sudden, unsure of the ground beneath his feet, fearful for the future. He was always the strong one, the one who looked after everyone else. He couldn’t be seen to be weak, not ever.

  ‘I’ll call back later today. And tonight I’ll be home, right?’ he said.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I love you.’

  There was a surprised silence. He never said that. Never. It was understood between them; never spoken out loud. ‘I love you too,’ she said softly, but he didn’t hear it.

  He’d already hung up.

  98

  Terry had to meet up with Harlan at the apartment near Tower Bridge. He didn’t like going there. Memories of poor bloody Beezer going over that balcony. Shit, if the poor old cunt felt so bad about his life, why hadn’t he spoken to him or to Charlie? They were his mates. Close as ticks on a cat. If he’d confided in either one of them, they would have taken care of him.

  If it really was suicide. But was it?

  Terry remembered Charlie at Beezer Crowley’s funeral, crying his fucking eyes out, the soft sentimental sod. But he’d been choked up too. Mates like Beezer passed through but once in anyone’s life, and he was going to miss Beezer’s stupid smutty jokes and his endless good cheer, which as it turned out had maybe been fake anyway, but what the hell. He would miss Beezer every day for the rest of his life. And now, Charlie too.

  Christ, we’re all going, one by one.

  Maybe it was time to get out now. Just grab Jill, grab Belle, cut and run.

  Shaking off his gloom, he went up in the lift and tapped on the door. Ludo opened it and Terry st
epped into the grandly appointed apartment. It was flashy in the extreme, he’d always thought – typical Charlie and Nula. Huge Osborne & Little cream damask drapes at the floor-to-ceiling windows, massive white couches, vast tan-and-white cow skins on the floor, enormous cream and chocolate brown lamps all over the place. It shouted wealth and that was them, all right. Their money was always highly visible, like it comforted them after their poor childhoods to see it all out on display. Now, what had that all amounted to? Harlan would soon redecorate in the spare, minimalist style he favoured, which struck Terry as cold, just like him. Cold as ice.

  The only person in the big open-plan room was Ludo, one of Harlan’s chief boys, a blank-eyed dandy always togged up in designer suits, his dark skin gleaming, flashy gold chains draped around his neck. Ludo invariably smelled as perfumed as a tart’s boudoir and he was neat as a new pin.

  ‘Harlan here?’ Terry asked. Maybe he was in one of the four bedrooms. Harlan liked to make people wait. Put in a late, grand appearance.

  ‘On his way right now,’ said Ludo.

  ‘So what’s the meet for?’ asked Terry.

  ‘You’ll see. When Harlan gets here.’

  There was something in Ludo’s eyes. Something bad.

  Terry felt his heartbeat pick up, felt light sweat break out on his brow.

  ‘I need to make a call,’ he said, finding that he needed to swallow hard to get his voice working.

  ‘Sure,’ said Ludo, indicating the phone by the couch.

  ‘It’s private.’

  Ludo shrugged and displayed a rack of gleaming white teeth. ‘We got no secrets from each other, bro. Anything you say, these ears can hear.’

  Terry went and picked up the phone. Dialled the number. Waited. It was a damned long time, but finally, she picked up.

  ‘Hi babe,’ he said, keeping his voice even. There was a lot he wanted to say right now.