“Shave him?” El said, as if the idea hadn’t previously occurred to her. “Yeah, alright. I suppose we could do that, if that’s what you’re after. What do you reckon, Lola?”
She turned to the red-haired girl sitting beside her on the sofa, shifting uncomfortably in her seat to accommodate the wheezing - and, it seemed to El, very elderly - Dachshund that had taken up residence between her knees.
“Don’t see why not,” the girl answered - her own approximation of a northern accent only half succeeding in masking her usual, cut-glass pronunciation.
She was younger than she looked, aged a handful of years older than the fourteen she actually was by strategically applied foundation, adjustments to her posture and a tailored white shirt that El herself had hand selected. Her name wasn’t Lola but Sophie, and she was, in a roundabout sort of way, something approaching El’s stepdaughter.
“Mind if we take a look at Horatio, while we’re here?” El asked, pivoting back to the Robinsons. “It’ll help us get a sense of how far we need to go, with Erasmus,” she added, pre-empting the inevitable what would you want to do that for? she knew was apt to follow. “How much fur we need to take off him.”
The Robinsons looked anxiously at one another, and then, apparently simpatico, shrugged in unison.
“If you must, I suppose,” Colin Robinson said, only slightly begrudgingly. “He’s downstairs, in his bedroom.”
Horatio’s bedroom, El had learned in her early reconnaissance, was the Robinsons’ basement, now converted into an air-conditioned sleep-and-play area that kept Horatio himself not only calm and entertained, but away from the other, more boisterous dogs that might startle him or nip at his perfectly maintained coat.
It was also, she happened to know, where they kept the painting.
They hadn’t bought it. Though partial to pastoral portraits of smiling Whippets and blue ceramic renderings of thoughtful-looking Westies, neither Robinson was much of an art aficionado. In fact, the painting, one of the very few oil-on-canvas pieces produced by the American comic-book artist Melinda Hogan, had belonged to Lauren’s Auntie Vanna, an unmarried radio producer and amateur fine art collector of whom both Robinsons had faintly disapproved, and whom Colin had long suspected of harbouring lesbian tendencies - but whose estate in its entirety, in the absence of a valid will, had fallen to her niece and only surviving relative at the time of her death.
The current location of the painting had come to El by way of Ruby Redfearn, her long-time friend, mentor, frequent collaborator and godmother in all but name. Ruby, herself an enthusiastic and knowledgeable connoisseur of anything with a sufficiently hefty price-tag, had known Vanna in life; she and Sita, El’s other almost-godmother, had been at one time frequent visitors to Vanna’s Paddington flat, and in Sita’s case (because Colin Robinson wasn’t entirely wrong about his wife’s aunt and the trajectory of her desires) to her bed. The Hogan canvas, a gothic reworking of Lichtenstein’s Crying Girl titled Weeping Skeleton, had captured Ruby’s attention from the moment she’d seen it resting, one evening in the late nineteen-eighties, against the crushed velvet walls of Vanna’s sitting room. So, when Vanna finally succumbed to the renal failure that had plagued her for going on a decade, and the Robinsons had helped themselves to her worldly goods, or at least those worldly goods they felt might prove valuable, Ruby felt, or so she claimed, almost obligated to retrieve it from them: to restore it to a place - specifically, the first floor of the West Hampstead duplex she shared with her twin sons - in which it might be better cared for and appreciated.
It was testament to the strength of the older woman’s affection for El that, when El mentioned that she might also have a suitable home for Weeping Skeleton in mind, Ruby didn’t just pull her hat out of the ring and step aside: she made an active contribution to the plan that would, all being well, help El to obtain the painting.
“It’s not for me,” El had told her, but Ruby had known already, or had at least suspected as much. Extensive though El’s working understanding of contemporary art was, after years of running cons on gallery owners and exhibitors and private collectors, she had no real passion for acquiring any of her own.
Rose, however, was a different story.
Rose - Lady Winchester to Tatler and the tabloids, Sophie’s mother and, as of the previous Autumn, El’s significant other - loved Pop Art: lived, breathed and purchased it so vigorously that she was known, among those with any interest in the subject, as one of the foremost collectors of Hockneys, Rothkos, Blakes and Warhols on either side of the Atlantic. Much of the substantial fortune she’d inherited from her late husband Sebastian - and augmented thereafter through myriad astute stock-trades - she’d invested in artwork, bidding thousands, hundreds of thousands and occasionally millions of pounds at a time on the pieces she coveted.
There were no Melinda Hogans in her collection, though. A situation that, with Rose’s 42nd birthday on the horizon, El - ably supported by Sophie, on her first live job - was on the road to rectifying.
El wasn’t, she knew, the most adept at romantic entanglement. Even plucking up the courage to ask Rose to dinner in the first instance had taken a year and a half of the two of them working very intensely together, one eventful trip to California, a pointed pep-talk from Ruby and no small amount of literal bloodshed. Now, six months later and on the verge of packing up her cottage in the Midlands and moving permanently to London to join Rose and Sophie in their Bayswater apartment, she was happy and something very close to secure in the relationship - and in the not-quite-parental rapport she’d established with Sophie. But she was also aware, sometimes subtly and sometimes more painfully, that both her happiness and her new-found security could evaporate in an instant, should she take her eye off the ball.
Long-term relationships, she knew - from observation, if not necessarily from practical experience - took effort to maintain; required hard work and sacrifice from their participants, if they were to go the distance. And since she wanted - really quite a lot, she was discovering - for her relationship with Rose to succeed, she was determined to put in the necessary effort. To try.
Hence, the painting, and the elaborate con she and Sophie - with Ruby’s input - had devised to extract it from the plywood crate that currently housed it, down in the Robinsons’ basement.
“He’ll be asleep,” Lauren Robinson warned them, gesturing to the hair-lined carpet and, presumably below it, Horatio in his bedroom. “He always has a nap after he has his lunch.”
El smiled, warm and trustworthy.
“Don’t worry,” she said, rising from her seat. “We won’t disturb him if he’s resting. A quick look, that’s all we’re after.”
She’d borrowed one of Ruby’s cars for the trip: an olive Land Rover Defender, tall as a Jeep, its tyres and bodywork artfully splattered with the mud and agricultural detritus she thought a couple like the Robinsons would expect of the cash-strapped farmer and show-dog-incapacitator-for-hire they imagined her to be. The afternoon traffic was light, and they made it out of the suburbs and onto the motorway quickly and painlessly, Sophie grinning and humming along to Celine Dion on the radio all the way.
“I can’t believe they fell for it!” she cackled, for the third time since they’d left the house, her voice beginning to settle back into an excitable Oxford English. “I can you believe you got them to fall for it!”
“It’s my job,” said El neutrally. “And can you turn that down a bit? Those high notes are a bit much, when you’re trying to concentrate.”
“It’s amazing, though! I mean, I know it’s what you do, you and Ruby and Sita - and Mum, even, sometimes - but seeing you do it, helping you do it… It’s just amazing, isn’t it? Just fucking amazing.”
“Don’t swear,” El chided her, glossing over the more problematic parts of the preceding statement. “Your mum doesn’t like it.”
It was a source of some anxiety for El, and not a little for Rose, that Sophie had become intent on learning the con
, since their busman’s holiday to San Francisco the previous year - and that both Ruby and Sita had been amenable to teaching her. They’d started small, introducing her to the pigeon drops and fiddle games that had so completely fascinated El at fourteen – but they had plans, Sophie had hinted, to bring her into some of the larger, higher-stakes jobs they had on the boil, once the kid had garnered a little more experience.
“It’s not ideal,” Rose had said, when El had asked her how she felt about this development. “But what can I do? As she’s pointed out so many times, both you and I were up to very similar things at her age. Worse, in fact. And she’s done nothing so far that could actually land her in any trouble, even if she were caught - or so Sita assures me, anyway.”
The first argument, at least, had been difficult to counter, since Sophie had been entirely right. Both El and Rose had been up to worse, in their teens: El pulling short cons and getting to grips with the long game under Ruby’s tutelage, and Rose helping her adoptive father steal paintings and jewellery and whatever other rare and expensive objects took his fancy from museums and climate-controlled cellars and private collections across the North West.
About the veracity of the second argument, however, El had her doubts, though she’d elected not to share them with Rose.
It had been Sita’s idea to take Sophie with her to the Robinsons as an assistant, ostensibly - although Sophie had been a more than willing accomplice.
“Don’t you see, darling?” Sita had told El, when she’d made the initial suggestion. “It makes such sense for her to tag along. She won’t rest until she’s able to get her feet wet, or at the very least dip a toe in the water. And how much better for her to do that with you, one of the very few people we can be sure will look after her and keep her safe, than for her to go running off on her own, trying her luck doing who knows what with a perfect stranger?”
It was a logical assertion - but also, like so many of Sita’s arguments, so blatantly Machiavellian that it had left El with the sensation of having been manipulated by unseen hands, even after she’d agreed to the idea.
Sophie, of course, had been overjoyed - albeit not quite so overjoyed as she was now, having seen the con in action.
“What’s next?” the kid asked, making no move to turn down the volume on the radio. “How are we going to get the painting? No, wait - don’t tell me, I bet I can guess. You got a replica made of Weeping Skeleton, didn’t you? A forgery. And when we go back there, one of us is going to swap it in for the original when those people turn their backs on us.”
“No,” said El, who’d yet to commission the forged painting but had planned to do more or less exactly what Sophie had outlined on her next visit to the Robinson house.
“What, then?”
“I’ll tell you once I’ve sorted it. And can you at least change stations? That song’s giving me a headache.”
Just outside of Luton, El pulled the Land Rover into a service area, parking close to the entrance of a fast-food restaurant that smelled, even with the windows rolled up, like cooking oil and mystery meat.
“Why are we stopping?” Sophie asked.
“You need to eat something. I told your mum we were going out for burgers, so I can’t very well take you back unfed, can I? She’ll get suspicious.”
“She’s already suspicious. You’re a terrible liar, she can read you like a book.”
“You just told me how convincing I was, back at the Robinsons’.”
“Sure, when you’re working. But when you’re just… you, you’re rubbish at it. So bad - like, it’s painful to watch.”
“I’ll bear that in mind, next time Ruby and Sita take you out for the day and you want me to tell your mum you’re going ice-skating with the girls from gymnastics.”
She climbed down from the driving seat, closed the door behind her and waited for Sophie to follow.
“I don’t even like burgers,” Sophie grumbled, when she eventually extricated herself from her seatbelt and joined El on the pavement.
“Then I’ll get you fish and chips. Doesn’t matter to me what you eat, as long as you’ve got the scent of something deep-fried clinging to you when you walk into that flat. But I need to get a tenner out of the cashpoint first so I can actually pay for it, if that’s alright with you?”
“You’re going to buy it?” Sophie said, disappointed. “With your own money?”
“What were you expecting? I don’t know what Ruby and Sita have been telling you, but you can’t con a cash machine. Karen could probably do something elaborate to it with a piece of cardboard and a screwdriver and trick it into coughing up someone’s life savings, but that’s not really my area.”
Karen Baxter - technically Karen Armstrong, El supposed, now she’d got married - was another frequent collaborator: a thief, sometime-grifter and perennial tech-head whose skill with a lock-pick, an algorithm and a motherboard - not to say a complex security network - never failed to make El’s head spin. If a system could be hacked, Karen could hack it - and if it couldn’t be, then the odds were good that she’d be willing to give it a go anyway.
“You can con a person, though,” Sophie insisted. “The counter assistants - you could persuade one of them to give us a free meal, if you wanted to.”
“And get their wages docked for giving away food, when I know I can afford five quid for a fizzy drink and a portion of fries and whatever you decide you want to eat?”
“I didn’t mean…”
“I know you didn’t. And I’m not trying to make you feel bad. But if you really are set on doing this, on picking up the con… don’t punch down, eh? There’s no joy in it.”
They walked to the ATM in silence, Sophie’s stare fixed to the floor and El’s stomach - the barometer by which she tended to judge any shift in her mood - tensing with guilt at having chastised her.
She’s a kid, she told herself. She doesn’t know any better. What were you thinking, shaming her like that?
And what would Rose have thought, if she’d heard you?
She pulled her wallet from her jeans, grabbed the first bank card she could reach - the most easily retrievable of a dozen or more cards she kept for everyday use, not one of them registered in the name El Gardener - and slid it into the machine; typed the corresponding pin into the keypad, and waited.
The machine beeped at her, ominously.
“Insufficient funds?” Sophie said, craning her neck to read the message that appeared in green neon text, immediately after the beep, on the machine’s dark screen.
El jabbed at another of the machine’s buttons, and it spat out the card. She plucked it from the slot, held it up to the light, and studied the account number embossed in the corner of the plastic.
“It’s a glitch,” she said, confident that it was. “There’s nearly…” She stopped herself, before she could let slip the intimate details of her personal finances. “There’s money in that account. The machine’s playing up, that’s all.”
She dug back into the wallet, snatched another card between forefinger and thumb - this one corresponding to an account that held, she was certain, somewhere in excess of £500,000 - and pushed that one into the ATM, punching in the pin with slightly more force than the action necessitated.
Again, the machine beeped.
“I don’t get it,” Sophie said, as a second message notified El that there were insufficient funds to proceed with the transaction.
“Neither do I,” El said.
She was reaching into the wallet for a third card when her mobile rang.
“Darling,” said Sita, the instant El flipped open the phone cover. She sounded breathless, El thought; breathless, and worried. “Have you spoken to your broker today?”
Another voice shouted something inaudible in the background; Ruby’s voice, by the sound of it.
“No,” El told her, the acid in her stomach beginning to rise and roil. “Why? Should I have done?”
Another muffled shout, a scuffle of foot
steps, and then it was Ruby on the line, not Sita.
“Ring ‘im,” she said, in the familiar, authoritative tone El knew would have no patience for counter-argument. “Ring him now. We need to know if it’s just us, or if it’s happened to you an’ all.”
“If what’s happened?”
More scuffling, another muffled exchange, and then the sound - what El thought was the sound - of the phone being passed around again.
“It’s not good news, I’m afraid, darling,” Sita said, clearing her throat. “I spoke to my financial advisor earlier, and Auntie Ruby to hers, and it seems as if…”
“As if..?” El asked, duodenum burning.
“As if we’ve been cleaned out,” Ruby answered, over Sita’s protests. “So I should check your money, if I were you. ‘Cause me and Sita here… we ain’t got none left. I don’t know how, but it’s gone. Every penny of it.”
Chapter 2
Mornington Crescent, London, February 1941
It was a stroke of luck, seeing him again.
She’d been back in Camden Town, waiting for a bus by the Black Cat Factory, her Dad’s old haversack on her back and loaded up with the few odds and ends she had left to transport. They were all but moved now from their house off Hampstead Road - what had been their house off Hampstead Road - to her Uncle Jim’s in Bethnal Green: the place it had been decided that she and her little sister would be living, with their parents gone, though neither one of them had been consulted about it, even after the decision had been made.
She’d half-wondered, before she’d found out what was what, whether they’d be evacuated: sent off to the seaside or the countryside to stay with some Lord of the Manor or an old maid with no family of her own. Had been in two minds about whether she might actually prefer a change of scenery to knocking around London, until Uncle Jim had come to see them with his news; whether the soft bellies and softer hearts of a load of country bumpkins might be made to work to the advantage of a city girl with a good head on her shoulders.
The Remembrance Page 2