The Remembrance

by Natalie Edwards

  It was another stroke of luck that the man - as thin-faced as he’d seemed to her that day at the bomb site but more spiffily dressed, a toff now rather than a workman, with his brogues and bow tie and silver-tipped cane - had stopped to admire the big cat statues by the factory entrance; that he hadn’t walked straight past her as she'd stood at the bus stop.

  He hadn’t spotted her - or if he had, had paid her no heed. And why should he have? She’d noticed him, sifting through the rubble with a dead body in a sack over his shoulder, but he hadn’t noticed her.

  She’d never forget that face, though. It was burned into her, the impression of him; the lines and ridges of him seared onto the film at the back of her eyes as deeply and as permanently as a cattle-brand. Something had changed in her, when she’d seen him - had changed irrevocably. She imagined it as a sound, the change: a soft whirr and a clank, the hiss and click of a combination lock sliding into place the second before the door released and the safe popped open and the diamonds inside spilled out into your hands.

  What he’d done… concealing the old man’s body, most likely doing away with him before that: she wanted to do it, too. And not just do it - do it well. Do it as cleverly as he had; as flawlessly.

  Do it, and get away with it, so she could do it again.

  When he’d had his fill of the cat statues, he took off on his heels, heading north towards Camden Market. She’d followed him - followed him all the way to Haverstock Hill, where he’d let himself into a grand old terrace next to a boarded-up cafe and failed to come out again. She’d hung around outside, watching; waiting for him so long that the balls of her feet had grown sore.

  She’d gone back to the terrace, though: gone back the next day, and the day after that, lurking in the shade of walls and trees and parked-up motor cars in the hope that he’d show himself. Show her more of himself.

  After nearly a week of watching and waiting, her good luck struck a third time.

  It was the middle of the afternoon, and she was beginning to get hungry: wishing she’d had the foresight to slip one of the oranges Uncle Jim never seemed short of into her coat before she’d left the house, or even a bit of bread and jam. She was debating whether to nip across to the market and help herself to something from a greengrocer’s stall when he limbered out of the front door - as lithe and sure-footed as he’d been the night she’d seen him trip-trapping through the wreckage of the pub.

  He looked different than he had both of the other times she’d seen him, though that didn’t catch her off-guard; she’d been expecting as much, after his last transformation. This time he had on a peaked cap, button-down shirt and striped apron that made him look exactly like a butcher’s shop assistant. The impression was only reinforced when, after disappearing for a minute or so down the side-alley of the terrace, he reappeared by the front gate, wheeling a bicycle and delivery cart behind him; the cart - a wooden box far bigger than she was - advertising Arden’s Meats: Fine Cuts Straight To Your Door.

  He opened the gate, mounted the bike and began to pedal, slowly, along the pavement, cart trundling heavily along behind him - weaving in and out of the passers-by that met him at the speed of a snail. And a good thing he did, she thought: there’d have been no chance of her keeping up with him, if he’d been taking the road at any sort of lick.

  Still, she was out of breath when, finally, he put the brakes on: drawing the bike to a halt by the front of an even grander, white-painted mansion in a little street off Belsize Gardens, its entrance separated from the road by a waist-high brick wall and a hedge of rhododendrons so high she could barely see over them, but which, she had to admit, did a bloody good job of keeping her out of sight.

  She’d expected him to take the cart around to the back of the house, to what were probably the servants’ quarters - any man who owned a place like that, she reckoned, must have servants, the full complement of cooks and maids and butlers whose job it was to take in food deliveries and deal with any tradesmen who came knocking, so the gentleman of the house wouldn’t have to.

  But he didn’t. Instead, he hauled both the bike and the cart a foot off the ground - his thin face seeming to strain under the weight of it, cheeks puffing out like a circus strongman’s - and pulled both, with no small amount of effort, up the steps to the front door.

  He knocked, and before she could count to ten, the door opened, revealing a middle-aged man - not much older than her Dad had been, before the ceiling beams flattened him. The man had a pencil moustache, a boxer’s build and a crop of curly black hair slicked down with coconut oil; his thick body was wrapped tightly in a pair of Oriental silk pyjamas. He looked around, furtively; opened the door as wide as it would go to let the thin-faced man inside, cart and all, and then, casting a final - and, she thought, slightly nervous - glance around the empty street, slammed it shut again.

  She considered having a nose around outside, to see if she could find a pane of glass to peer through or an open window to listen at. But it was clear even from a distance that it would be pointless, trying to snoop. The house was a fortress: blackout curtains already drawn shut and every point of ingress and egress sealed off from the world outside, probably by design. All she could do was stay where she was, in the shelter of the bushes, until the thin-faced man came out again; wait, and keep waiting, for as long as it took.

  It was nearly dark when he finally emerged from the house - gone five o’clock. She was ravenous; the stomach that had been growling when she’d started following him now roaring like a wounded animal, screaming to be fed. Seeing him totter down the steps, though, sucked the appetite from her. Her mouth dried to sandpaper, and the light-headedness that had been leaving her dizzy turned, in a heartbeat, to the electrified pounding of her own pulse in her ears, a fibrillated fluttering she’d associate, much later - when she’d learned about these things, and what they meant - with the spike of adrenaline that was nothing more or less than her own body telling her to sit up and pay attention.

  The cart was even weightier coming out than it had been going in - that much she could tell, even in what little remained of the early evening light. If getting it up the steps had been a struggle, then getting it down was a feat so Herculean that he groaned aloud as he lugged it and the bike towards the more even ground of the pavement. There was something in there that hadn’t been before; something heavy.

  There was blood on his apron: red-black streaks of it, and the smudged remains of what might have been a bloody handprint.

  Nothing out of the ordinary, for the uniform of a butcher’s boy whose job called for him to handle slabs of dripping meat day in, day out.

  But it hadn’t been there before, had it? When he’d gone into the house, the apron had been clean.

  Once he’d wrestled the bike and cart upright and perched himself on the saddle, his movements were more fluid, his handling of the contraption more controlled. He was still slow, thankfully, wobbling his way along the darkening stretches of road from Belsize Park back to Haverstock Hill, and she just about managed to match his pace - losing herself in the shadows so she’d be hidden from him, should he have cause to throw a look backwards over his shoulder.

  He didn’t stop at Haverstock Hill, though.

  Instead, he pushed on - past the Underground and around the corner towards Euston Station. Just before he reached the turning onto the Euston Road itself, he dropped what little speed he’d picked up - veering the bike into a tiny slice of passageway between a tobacconist and a sandstone Methodist chapel that had just about room, it seemed to her, for twenty parishioners and a priest, if they squeezed in tight.

  She edged as close to the mouth of the passage as she could without giving herself away, banking on the darkness covering her, and peered around the wall.

  There was a cigarette lighter in his hand. Yet more good luck, because the way he was holding it - close to his face, the palm of one hand cupped around the flame - meant she had a decent view of him, as he leaned the bike to rest again
st the wall. A decent view, that was, of what he was doing, as he tugged the crate from its moorings and prised the lid of it open with his fingertips.

  They were bloody too, she saw; red raw.

  She couldn’t have said she was surprised, when the flame flickered across the open crate and she saw, just before the light passed over it, the bare white foot of a dead man - of someone she thought was a dead man - protruding out from the rim. Truth be told, she’d been expecting to see something like it.

  What did surprise her was the other thing he’d been wheeling around in the crate.

  The official name for it, though she didn’t know it then, was a bundle charge: a cluster of hand grenades with the handles and fuses removed, strapped to a larger, more fully assembled grenade by a length of wire and capable of discharging the explosive power of all seven of its component pieces, when properly deployed.

  He pulled it from the crate and held it upright, close to the flame; dangerously close to the flame, if you’d asked for her opinion on the subject. Though she knew it was an explosive - the look of the casings on the defused grenade parts told her so, even in the dark - there was something faintly comical about its appearance; a strange circularity. In another time and place - not in the thin-faced man’s hands, and not six inches from another dead body he’d very likely made dead with those hands - she might have thought she was looking at a toilet plunger, or a funny-shaped rolling pin swiped from someone’s kitchen.

  With the same turn of speed she’d seen him call on in the pub that night, he replaced the lid on the crate, spun around and, leaving the crate and the bike and the unfortunate cargo in the passageway, strode towards her, the bundle of explosives in his fist.

  No, she corrected herself; not towards her. He wouldn’t have been able to see her; not when it was as damn-near pitch-black as it was becoming.

  He was heading past her, for the street.

  She side-stepped, quietly as she could manage, into the doorway of the tobacconist, hoping its canopied arch would be deep enough to protect her, to give her the camouflage she needed.

  But, as it had been before, his attention was fixed on another point entirely - in this case, on the chapel.

  He made quick work of the lock on the door to the church; had it unfastened, and had slipped himself and his improvised bomb inside almost before she could blink.

  Then, before she’d had time to steady her breath, he was out again - away from the church and back down the passageway, a torn-off piece of what looked to her like cotton wool shoved in each of his ears.

  And she knew, in a flash, what it was that he’d done the last time; what he’d done, and why he’d done it.

  Knew what was coming - and had sense enough to understand what to do with the knowing.

  Sense enough to run, as quick as her legs would carry her, towards the Euston Road and away from the chapel, before the grenades went off and the roof caved in.

  Chapter 3

  West Hampstead, London, March 1998

  “We’re skint,” Ruby told her, draining her coffee and sinking back into her overstuffed recliner with the weary resignation of a Romanov empress recounting the news of a peasants’ revolt. “Brassic. Not got tuppence to rub together, neither one of us.”

  She seemed, El thought, less alarmed by this development now than she had on the phone earlier that day: philosophical, stoic even, rather than panicked.

  “You don’t sound too upset, for someone who’s had God knows how many million quid vanish into thin air,” El replied, trying to keep her own panic out of her voice.

  Ruby shrugged.

  “I’ve had nothing before,” she said. “And I daresay I’ll have nothing again someday, once we’ve get all this lot back. Wouldn’t be much cop at this game if I didn’t know how to make something out of nothing, would I? You keep hold of your wits and you’ll do alright, no matter how much you got left in the bank. Ain’t that right, Sita?”

  Sita, who as far as El was aware was more than five decades removed from anything like poverty, nodded grudgingly - but looked, to El, decidedly little green about the gills.

  They’d assembled at Ruby’s for an emergency summit meeting: El, Sophie, Sita and Rose, with Ruby presiding over them from her armchair. Neither Dexter nor Michael, Ruby’s twin sons - and current cohabitants - had yet made an appearance, but it seemed likely to El that they’d be arriving home at any moment. For both of them, their mother’s distress was a kind of Bat-Signal: calling out to them, wherever they happened to be, and summoning them back to the familial roost.

  “Do we have any sense at all of when it happened?” Rose asked - sounding surprisingly untroubled herself, for a woman whose entire fortune, like Ruby’s, had dematerialised from the vault like so much leprechaun gold in more or less the blink of an eye.

  She’d been the first person El had called, after her initial conversation with Ruby and Sita and the shock of her experience at the cashpoint. Before her accountants, before her Filofax of bank managers, before the ethically dubious but refreshingly competent broker who oversaw the ebb and flow of her income and savings from his one-man office in the Caymans - and who, unlike the others, knew her by her real name, and not a pseudonym.

  El had expected to do most of the talking; to be speaking rather than listening when Rose finally picked up her mobile, after it had rung unanswered for so long that El had begun to believe that she’d gone out and left it plugged into its charger in the kitchen.

  Instead, she’d found her heartbeat accelerating and the acid cauldron of her stomach dropping as Rose had told her, with far less composure than she was now exhibiting, that there was something wrong with her accounts, too. That her business manager and her financial advisor, both in some distress, had been in touch to break the news; to tell her, the financial advisor very nearly on the verge of tears as he choked out the words, that her assets - personal as well as professional - had been inexplicably frozen; rendered inaccessible, and thus effectively useless.

  “I’ve spoken to the police,” Rose had said - a phrase that had caused El, for whom the police generally represented a bump in the road around which to swerve and not a go-to solution for pecuniary difficulties, to jump that bit further out of her skin. “They’re on their way over now. The boy I spoke to said it sounded like… what did he call it? A cyberattack. You know - hackers.”

  “The police are coming to the flat?” El had answered, as perturbed at the prospect of the police paying a visit to her home - to the place that was about to become her home - as by the both of them apparently having been made suddenly and inexplicably penniless.

  “God, no! Do you think I’m insane? They’re going to Highgate - I said I’d meet them there."

  Highgate, El had known, meant the gated four storey house in the north London suburbs in which Rose kept the most expensive of her collections: one of a handful of properties she owned in London and Paris. It had served as the venue for their first, strange meeting two years earlier - and still served, to the best of El’s knowledge, as a stand-in for Rose and Sophie’s real home whenever they were in need of a little anonymity.

  “Do you want us to head out that way, too?” El had asked.

  “Not unless you really want to. There is one favour you could do for me, though. Would you mind calling Karen? I feel like she might be better placed than either of us to find out what the hell is going on.”

  It was a sensible next step; El had planned to give Karen a bell herself about Ruby and Sita’s pecuniary conundrum, and her own, just as soon as she’d talked to Rose and the finance guys. If anyone could follow the digital breadcrumbs left by a small nation’s worth of evaporated money, it was Karen.

  “Wait, though,” she’d said, before Rose could hang up. “There’s something I need to tell you. The reason I rang.”

  “Is it Sophie? Did something happen?”

  “No. No. She’s fine.”

  “And you’re alright? You’re safe?”

  �
�Yes. Sort of. More or less.”

  “Then… can it wait, whatever it is? I really need to get to Highgate.”

  El had taken a deep breath; placed a splayed, self-soothing palm across her churning belly.

  “No,” she’d said, “I don’t think it can.”

  They were connected - the thefts, and the freezing of the assets. Ruby and Sita were sure of it, as both had made abundantly clear when El and Sophie, and then Rose, had eventually landed in West Hampstead. Rose had been quick to agree.

  “But what I don’t understand,” Rose had said, after she’d despatched Sophie to the kitchen to put the kettle on, “is why whoever did this didn’t take my money, too. Why they’d leave it just… sitting there like that.”

  “Could be they couldn’t take it,” Ruby had suggested. “A lot of your cash is tied up with your business, ain’t it? So maybe it’s locked up too tight for whoever doing this to do much more than just stop you getting to it. Maybe the security on the accounts is that bit too hard for them to hack. Especially if there’s, I don’t know… firewalls and that set up to stop any thievin’ bastards getting their mucky hands on what’s inside.”

  “Could be,” El had murmured - wondering, absently, where Ruby had picked up enough IT lingo to drop references to hacks and firewalls into the mix.

  “When it happened?” Ruby said, parroting Rose’s question back at her. “Sometime today, I should think. Everything were fine at my end when I spoke to Bernie yesterday.”

  Bernie was Ruby’s money man: a crooked, decidedly old-school IFA who’d handled her finances since at least the seventies, and whom - despite all evidence suggesting she should do nothing of the sort - she trusted implicitly not to cheat her.

  (“He’s bent,” as she’d told El more than once, when the subject was raised. “But he knows he’s bent, you know what I mean? He ain’t trying to pretend he’s anything else. You know where you are, with a bloke like that”).