* * *
Scotland, he’d said, and that was where Vic pictured him when he returned in the late evening to stow a waterproof backpack with Ellen’s fifteen thousand pounds, along with the outer garments he’d promised. The clothes were oversized, which would help mask the fugitive’s identity if anyone decided to check CCTV footage from the local streets and train stations.
If he did as Vic prayed. If he took the money and ran.
Vic didn’t know for sure until, forty-eight hours later, he judged it safe to return. He felt woozy with relief to find the bag gone. In its place, under the tarpaulin, lay a sheet of paper with the scrawled message:
I WILL PAY YOU BACK
‘Don’t,’ he said under his breath. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
He stood in the clearing for ten minutes or so, breathing the air, exorcizing himself of Kieran Watts. He honestly never expected to see him again.
And, if the rest of his own life was to proceed along an even vaguely peaceful course, Ellen absolutely, categorically, must not be allowed to either.
Vic
Now
Ellen is aghast. Though her fingers have stopped playing with the bag chain, her feet fidget and the umbrella gets kicked over, lying sopping and ignored on the lobby floor. In the street outside, headlights streak by.
‘You mean you left a bag with all that cash in a public place? What if an engineer came and found it?’
‘It was completely hidden. And, anyway, the station looked abandoned.’ Vic’s tone is defensive. Even in his hour of discovery, he feels a certain pride in the technicalities of his plan. He’d spent most of his waking – and working – hours combing it for loose strands. He’d even transported the bag meant for Kieran inside a second identical one, so that – in case of a camera he’d failed to note – he could walk out of that park looking exactly as he did when he walked in.
‘You were lucky the police didn’t decide to launch a manhunt and search the park,’ Ellen says. ‘They might have found his note before you did.’
‘It was a risk. It paid off,’ Vic says.
‘It did not pay off!’ Her voice rises, shrill enough to make him wince. ‘How can you say that? I wanted him dead and I thought you did as well!’
The lobby is empty, but Vic can’t help glancing around. Anyone could have come out of the lift or in through the main doors and heard what she just said. ‘Let’s keep our voices down.’ He’s had enough of this, he really has. He visualizes his pregnant girlfriend upstairs – she’ll be awake from her nap and wondering where he is – but try as he might, he can’t invest enough power in the image to conquer the one in front of him.
‘Sorry.’ Ellen seems to notice for the first time where she is. ‘Does India know any of this?’
‘No, she wasn’t on the scene then.’
‘What about other girlfriends?’
Vic scoffs. ‘Funnily enough, it’s not something you tend to introduce into the conversation. “Me and my ex had this revenge fantasy – wanna hear how crazy it got?” ’
‘Revenge fantasy.’ She repeats the words with distaste. ‘So everything I thought, everything that made it possible to carry on, it wasn’t actually true. You’ve made me keep a secret that didn’t actually exist. You’ve wrecked my life.’
Vic looks narrowly at her. ‘No, Ellen, I’ve saved your life – and I’ve saved his, as well.’ He draws air deep into his lungs, like a man about to tombstone from a sea cliff. ‘You know what? Maybe Kieran deserves a bit of consideration here. A tiny shred of sympathy. Maybe it’s time for us to accept that he couldn’t do anything to help that night.’
‘What?’
He feels the electrification of her shock. She hasn’t expected them to rove into this territory, and he didn’t either when he came down to meet her. But, if he’s formed any conclusion these last few years, it is that she needs to hear this from someone – from him – just once. ‘Think how his mind might’ve worked down there. It’s pitch black, icy cold, he’s thrown forward, not sure which way is up, and he’s badly injured and in pain. He’s a teenage deadbeat, not a trained SAS operative, there would have been a survival instinct, literally nothing more. Get out of the car, get out of the water, get onto dry land. It was a miracle he got himself to safety. Easily the most likely outcome was that they were both going to die down there.’
‘Don’t.’ Ellen puts her hands to her ears, palms flat. ‘Change your mind about everything else, but not about that night. I can’t bear it.’ She drops her hands and gives her head a little shake, as if ridding it of the words he’s forced her to consume. ‘If he could get himself out of the car, he could have got Lucas out with him. He chose not to, Vic. He chose not to.’
Vic does not argue. She may be right, she may be wrong, but either way he is done. ‘Just so you know, I’ll pay you back the money. I always intended to, the moment you found out.’
‘For God’s sake, this isn’t about the money, it’s about justice, justice for Lucas.’ She makes a desperate gesture to the doors, the world beyond, as if their son is out there somewhere, judging their efforts. ‘I can never forgive you for this, Vic. Never.’
She’s on her feet, gathering her bag and brolly, buttoning her coat. Looking down at him with a blend of martyrdom and fury. ‘And don’t get me wrong, I do want my money back. I want it as soon as possible. In cash.’
* * *
The lift delivers him to the fifteenth floor with mute efficiency. The thought of screwing together the last piece of furniture – a chest of drawers, he’s left the hardest till last – makes him want to pluck his own eyes out.
In the flat, some crap meditative music is playing, all harp strings and – what is it called? – glockenspiel. He craves something with screaming metal guitars, music to throw TVs through the windows to. The immersion heater is whining, which means India is in the shower. He pours himself a Coke, though he’d prefer a beer. But since launching Common or Gordon, he has a strict rule for himself: no stock at home. He can’t risk plunging back into the near-alcoholism of the years directly after Lucas’s death.
Taking his glass with him, he slides open the balcony door. The downpour has ceased, but the air is still greasy with drizzle. He steps out and pulls the door shut behind him. They are mean with space, these developers, and you couldn’t swing a cat out here. He hasn’t put on a coat and his skin begins to stiffen with cold. The Coke is flat but he gulps it anyway. He imagines throwing his glass – it could kill someone from this height. What if Ellen’s still down there and it hit her?
He resents her for putting him in this mood and yet, come on, did he really think he was going to get away with it? For ever? She has every right to despise him for his deception, and nothing in the way she’s behaved in the past suggested she would pass up that right.
Presently, the door grinds open behind him. India, dressed in a pink towelling robe, her hair damp and tangled. ‘What are you doing out here? It’s freezing?’
‘I needed some air,’ Vic mutters.
‘Why? What did she say?’
‘Nothing. Go back in.’
She frowns. ‘You’re scaring me, Vic.’
He loses his cool. ‘I said, go back in. It’s nothing to do with you, for fuck’s sake!’
He doesn’t wait to see the hurt in her face, but pivots back to face the night. The brisk crack of the door closing says it all. Some women would lock it for good measure, leave him out here to teach him a lesson, but he knows the thought wouldn’t occur to India.
He’s unaware of how long he stands out there, but when he finally goes back in, she is cooking dinner. The music is off, TV on, and the room smells of garlic and tomato and basil.
‘Sorry,’ he says.
She doesn’t turn, but continues to prod a pan of boiling vegetables with a utensil too short for the job. ‘I don’t appreciate being barked at like that,’ she says.
‘I know. Mind you don’t scald yourself there.’
She puts t
he utensil aside. ‘What’s going on, Vic? You’ve been weird ever since I told you about the baby.’
Ah, of course. Thanks to the dreadful coincidence of Ellen’s news arriving at the same time as hers, she’s naturally made the connection to her own.
‘I’ve always been weird,’ he says, mustering a laugh. ‘You just didn’t notice before.’ There is a thawing sensation in his muscles and he feels his mood warm along with it. ‘Chances are the baby will be too. Sorry about that.’
She smiles. She doesn’t hold grudges, India (not like you know who). In her worldview an apology is a gift to be accepted, not a springboard for further recrimination. She adjusts the heat under her pans and goes over to check he’s locked the balcony doors.
‘Should we move?’ she says.
‘What? Why?’
‘Because we’re having a baby and I don’t want it to fall from a fifteenth-floor balcony.’
There is a nightmarish moment when it could be Ellen speaking to him. Not that swing, Vic Watch him on the steps, Vic Careful, Vic!
He gropes his way back to reality. ‘Plenty of kids live in high-rise flats,’ he says. ‘We’ve talked about this: we’ll child-proof the doors and windows to within an inch of their lives. She’ll love bringing her friends up in the lift.’ By unspoken consent, they always refer to the baby as female. ‘When I was a boy I lived in a bungalow, so going in a lift was like Thunder Mountain to me.’
India giggles. ‘I suppose she might like the views. She could stick stars on her bedroom window.’
‘She won’t need to. She’ll have the sky.’
‘Aw,’ India says, moving towards him. Her breath is soft. Her mind is reasonable. He is forgiven.
Which means he can stop worrying about her and go back to worrying about Ellen and the money. Where the hell is he going to find fifteen grand? He has no property to mortgage. Every penny of investment funding has been committed to the business – not that he’d ever consider siphoning any off for personal expenses. You don’t try for decades to get something off the ground only to sabotage it when you finally succeed.
More troubling still is what Ellen plans to do with the cash if and when he returns it to her. The same thing she tried to do the first time, it would seem.
If so, and if that money were traced back to him, it means he’ll remain embroiled in this nightmare whether he likes it or not.
Fuck.
Killing Time (cont)
I suspect that many readers of Saint or Sinner may ask themselves the same question I asked Felix Penney when I’d read the finished manuscript: doesn’t some of the content – notably Ellen’s attempt to arrange the killing of Kieran Watts in the summer of 2017 – expose her to the risk of prosecution for conspiracy to murder?
‘There was never a conspiracy to murder,’ Penney responds. ‘It was only ever a fantasy.’
A criminal barrister I consult confirms the extreme unlikelihood of any charges being brought at this stage. ‘The Crown doesn’t have unlimited funds,’ she points out. ‘The police may even choose to interpret Mr Gordon’s feigned co-operation as a form of crime prevention.’
Whichever way you look at it, Vic Gordon does appear to be the only one to emerge from this mindboggling plot twist with his honour intact.
Sunday Times magazine,
December 2021
Vic
Now
‘Vic Gordon?’ repeats the receptionist, with several degrees’ less warmth than she’s just extended to the fashionably muscled and bearded young man ahead of him. How blissfully untroubled the guy appears as he waits for the lift, whereas Vic, with his knotted shoulders and repeated glances to the street, must look as skittish, as hunted, as he feels.
Before he can state his business, the receptionist’s screen has identified him. ‘You must be here to see Cam? I haven’t got your name down, but let me give him a buzz and see how his schedule’s looking.’
‘Actually, it’s James I’m hoping to see,’ Vic says. ‘James Ratcliffe.’
Her fingers pause on the keyboard. The big boss. ‘Do you have an appointment?’
‘Not exactly, but would you mind trying?’
‘Of course,’ she says, with the kind of proper politeness that telegraphs her full confidence of failure.
So urgent are the circumstances that Vic hasn’t given much thought to what he will do if Ratcliffe declines to see him. Slink away and pick up his thinking cap from the dusty South London streets where he’d left it, he supposes. He can feel spasms above his left eyebrow and hopes they are not visible.
After a brief phone exchange, the receptionist turns back to him with new respect. ‘James will be down in a few minutes. Take a seat, Vic.’
The seating in the offices of Green Shoots is spongey-looking and pouf-style, too low to get back up from easily, Vic judges (God, he’s old), and so he remains standing. The offices upstairs are, he knows, just like those start-ups you see photographed in the Standard – an old rickshaw repurposed as a coffee stand; a tubular slide linking the floors (again, hard to get up from); a bank of retro arcade games – nicely ironic given all the tech services and products the firm invests in. The address is a ten-minute walk from Shad Thames, and though he didn’t say it to Ellen when they stood on St Saviour’s footbridge craning for a glimpse of The Heights, Vic knew exactly how Kieran Watts had come to land in this part of town: James Ratcliffe.
Of course, Ellen had already discovered the great man for herself by then and would meet him face to face soon after. Vic is not proud that he swore at her when she tried to tell him about the encounter (For fuck’s sake, Ellen, I don’t want to hear it!). As for the one element she has managed to share – Ratcliffe telling her about the tip-off to Kieran, now revealed to have been made by her own co-conspirator – well, that’s only the start of the deductions she might make. The intelligence she might put to use.
They can’t go on like this.
He is watching the lift doors when the man himself approaches in his peripheral vision, having taken the stairs. Dressed in black jeans and a daffodil-yellow button-down shirt, he is lithe, with scarcely a spare ounce at the waistline, despite being over a decade older than Vic.
‘Vic!’ Ratcliffe offers his hand. Loose on his wrist is some vintage watch Vic couldn’t begin to identify but which no doubt cost more than his own van. ‘Good of you to come in.’ He is absurdly at ease. Really, it’s as if he’s arranged this meeting, not been surprised by it, which is helpful because Vic already knows he is not going to be able to do what he’s come here to do. Which is to ask for the money. No, what presented itself as an ingenious solution during last night’s attack of insomnia now strikes him as embarrassingly naïve. How could Ratcliffe not link such a request to the renewed hostilities between Ellen and Kieran? And yet… he is making time to see Vic. Perhaps he’s come up with a fix of his own to their Ellen problem.
Oh, God. Vic feels a deep and grinding shame as he remembers their last parting. I can never forgive you for this. Never.
‘Thanks for sparing the time,’ he says, summoning a smile.
‘Not at all. I had a feeling you might be in touch,’ Ratcliffe says. ‘Let’s walk up to the river, shall we? Get some air.’
The short walk takes them past Tanner Street Park and under the railway bridge up Tower Bridge Road, and they talk only of what passes before their eyes: the traffic, the road works, the pubs and the many products they serve that aren’t but absolutely should be brewed by Common or Gordon. Cutting down Queen Elizabeth Street, they pause at a beautifully maintained historic building where Ratcliffe says he lives in the penthouse apartment. An interesting intimacy, Vic thinks – or just a crass display of wealth? For a moment, he thinks he is going to be invited in, but, no, Ratcliffe begins moving again and presently they are turning up Shad Thames and past the entrance to Jacob’s Wharf, where Ellen’s client lives, and from whose window she first saw Kieran on his roof terrace.
He can only hope Ellen is not pro
wling the neighbourhood this morning, tracking Kieran, plotting logistics. If she really does still want him dead and can’t get someone else to do it, will she… will she try to do it herself?
They reach the river. The tide is high, the currents making harlequin patterns of silver and gold, and the beauty of it fills Vic with sudden optimism. The Thames, the City with its commanding new towers, the thousands of people bustling back and forth, up and down, the billions of pounds they earn and spend: the scale of it all makes his own troubles less significant, less disastrous.
‘Where shall we start?’ Ratcliffe says, affably. ‘With Ellen, I’m guessing?’
‘Yes, I gather you’ve met her,’ Vic says. ‘What did she say to you?’
Ratcliffe eyes him with mild surprise. That’s why you’re here? ‘She didn’t tell you herself?’
No point pretending, Vic thinks. ‘We’re not exactly bosom buddies right now. Nothing major.’ (Well, maybe he’ll pretend a bit.)
‘Ah.’ There’s a flicker of sympathy behind those costly-looking frames. ‘She’s found out you have a separate connection to me?’
‘No, not that.’ Nor would she consider it separate, Vic thinks. Just as he did not. There were no coincidences in this sordid little circle of theirs. ‘I just meant we don’t see eye to eye on a lot these days.’
‘That’s a shame,’ Ratcliffe says, with a tolerance honed, no doubt, over decades of difficult conversations. ‘I’ll level with you, Vic. I’m concerned about her. When we talked, she didn’t strike me as someone who will listen to reason, even after all this time.’
‘It’s not that long,’ Vic says. ‘Not to her.’ It feels like a betrayal, that ‘her’. He should have said ‘us’ – It’s not that long to us. Because it is not. Five years ago, Lucas was still alive. He steadies himself, tries to focus. ‘I wondered, maybe, could Kieran be persuaded to move on?’
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