The Remembrance

by Natalie Edwards

  “And at mine,” Sita added morosely. She reached for the flat gold case and box of matches laid out on the coffee table in front of her, unlatched the case, took a slim white cigarette from inside and lit it, inhaling so deeply that her exhalation, when it came, wreathed her head and shoulders in a fog of near-Dickensian density.

  “Do you have to do that in here?” Ruby coughed, batting the smoke from her bright blue, now slightly watering eyes. “If the boys ain’t allowed to stay indoors when they smoke them little cigarillo things they like when they’ve had a drink, then I don’t see why you should be able to light up left, right and centre.”

  “I think you’ll find these are somewhat exceptional circumstances,” Sita replied, taking a second, equally long pull on the cigarette and tapping the ash into her teacup. “A small suspension of your usual rules is hardly a gargantuan ask.”

  El found herself, instinctively, reaching for her own pocket, her own cigarette packet, and came up empty. Annie Cutler the dog-shearing farmer, she remembered, didn’t smoke, for reasons she could no longer recall but which had felt compelling when she’d started to build out the persona; neither therefore, for the duration of the con, did El.

  She stared at Sita’s cigarette, fixing the burning tip with a look of what must have seemed, to Sita, great yearning. The older woman took pity on her: opened the case and thrust its contents El-ward.

  “No, you don’t,” Ruby snapped at Sita, before El so much as extended an arm. “Bad enough I’ve got you puffing away and stinking up the place - I ain’t having you corrupt her an’ all.”

  “The girl smokes twenty a day,” Sita said, gesturing languidly at El. “I’m hardly the serpent in the Garden, leading her into temptation with my nicotine apples.”

  “Not in here she don’t. And you want to be thankful I ain’t making you go and stand out on the balcony.”

  “So you believe it happened today, whatever it was?” Rose said - trying, El could tell, to draw Ruby and Sita away from their habitual bickering and back to the problem at hand.

  Ruby glowered at Sita and allowed herself to sink down further into the cushions of her chair.

  “I do,” she said. “But if you ask me, the question we’d all do better to ask ourselves is: who done it? Who is it that’s been at my money, and yours, and Sita’s, and young El here’s? Or perhaps I should say: who do we know who hates us, hates all four of us so much that they’d be wanting to hit us in the wallet where it hurts?”

  “You think it was her?” Rose asked her, when at least a minute of silence had elapsed.

  “You’re damn right I do,” she answered. “You mean to say you don’t?”

  Hannah, El thought. Hannah fucking D’Amboise. The one that got away, but refused to stay away.

  Hannah D’Amboise was, at least genetically, Rose’s half-sister, and every bit as sociopathic in disposition and in practice as their late biological father - something Rose and El and Ruby and Karen and Sita had discovered that bit too late for the information to be useful, sometime after Hannah had nearly killed their then-colleague Kat Morgan with a blow to the head that took out half her skull.

  She’d also, they suspected but couldn’t prove, been behind a blackmail attempt on them the year before - orchestrated via another sociopath with a grudge, the now-imprisoned Charlie Soames - that had almost ended with Ruby stabbed to death on her own kitchen floor.

  It was fair to say, therefore, that Hannah had it in for them, individually and as a group. And Ruby, though it pained El to admit it, was probably on to something with her supposition: if someone was targeting them through their bank balances, targeting all of them at once - and not just Ruby or Sita, who’d amassed more than a few enemies in their fifty-plus years on the job - then Hannah was a very likely candidate.

  “I suppose it’s a reasonable conclusion,” Rose agreed, looking so forlorn as she spoke that El thought she might cry.

  “She’s upped her game, that Hannah - I’ll say that for her,” Ruby said. “I’d never have thought she’d have it in her to do that much damage, just with a computer.”

  “I think we can safely assume she isn’t working alone,” Sita observed, stubbing out the remainder of her cigarette in the small puddle of liquid left in the bottom of her teacup, where it hissed and then, with a final wisp of smoke, expired.

  “No?” said Ruby.

  “With that amount of money to move, and all at once?”

  From somewhere close to Sita, a phone rang. She shifted position in her seat, drew a very small mobile from her purse - gold, to match the cigarette case - and, with only the most cursory glance at the screen, brought it delicately to her ear.

  “Yes, darling?” she demanded of the caller. El heard a pause; the faint, distorted sound of someone speaking, very quickly.

  Sita’s perfectly cultivated brow creased in response.

  “Now isn’t the best time you could have chosen,” she told whomever the caller was. “My hands are rather full, at present.”

  More talking: as tinny as before but the delivery rapid, urgent.

  Sita’s eyes widened.

  “Good lord,” she said. “Are you certain?”

  “Who is it?” Ruby hissed at her, in her variation on a sotto voce.

  “Gerry Adler,” Sita whispered back, momentarily covering the receiver on the handset.

  “Adler?” said Ruby, more loudly. “What does he want, when he’s at home? Has something happened?”

  Gerry Adler, El had learned during their run-in with Charlie Soames, was an old friend and on-off lover of Sita’s: a senior officer with the Met, now close to retirement, who’d taken it upon himself since the events of the previous year to watch over Sita - and by extension Ruby, and the rest of them - from a discreet distance, and to alert them to any difficulties that might be coming their way in the not-too-distant future.

  “Gerald,” Sita said, dropping her own voice lower, “I really must go and deal with this. Yes, now. I shall call you back just as soon as I’m able. Yes, darling - today. You have my word on it.”

  She closed the phone, ending the call, and slid the handset back into her purse, her mouth tightening and face paling to wheat. She turned ninety degrees in her seat, until she and El were face to face.

  “El, darling,” she began, with unexpected gentleness, “It appears I have some rather bad news. Gerry tells me… well, he tells me your house is on fire.”

  Ruby snorted.

  “I’d bloody say so,” she said. “Hers and all the rest of ours, an’ all. Some bleedin’ use he is. He couldn’t’ve told us that before that harpy sucked my pension dry?”

  “I’m not speaking figuratively,” Sita snapped, eyes swivelling back to Ruby’s. “The girl’s house is quite literally on fire. The police are there now, with the Fire and Rescue Service. And I’m sorry to say, darling,” she added to El, more sympathetically, “that there may not be very much of it left standing.”

  Chapter 4

  Haverstock Hill, London, February 1941

  Dolly was worried, walking up to his doorstep, that her nerves would get the better of her: that the thin-faced man would look right through her and tell her to bugger off, or that her tongue would freeze up altogether and she’d end up able to do not much more than stand there staring at him, mouth flapping open like a goldfish’s.

  Or worse.

  There was no sense in entertaining the worry, though - not if she wanted to get from him what she’d come to get. And he didn’t strike her as someone who’d have much time for timidity.

  It was early in the day, just gone ten o’clock; a normal bloke, she thought, would be out at work. But he wasn’t normal, was he? And everything she’d seen of him so far had led her to believe that he was the kind of man who did his best work at night, with the darkness of the blackout wrapped around him like a pair of dragon wings.

  Besides: not everyone kept to a regular calendar. Her Uncle Jim didn’t, for starters. He was up and about at every hou
r of the day and night, letting himself out through the kitchen after supper and sneaking back in before the break of dawn - though she couldn’t truthfully say, even after going on a month under his roof, what it was he actually did for a living.

  She’d tried asking her sister what she thought, in bed one night with her mind galloping a mile a minute with the puzzle of it. But the kid had been practically mute since their Mum and Dad had passed; getting her to answer even the most straightforward question was like shouting at a brick wall, and eventually Dolly had grown tired of trying, turned herself around and gone to sleep.

  Ah, well. She’d find out for herself, eventually. He wasn’t stupid, Uncle Jim - but he wasn’t as clever as he must have thought he was, either. And if it came right down to it, Dolly had an idea she might be cleverer still.

  There was no answer, at her first knock; no noise at all behind the door. But she wasn’t willing to give up. Not yet.

  She tried again. This time there were noises, drifting out through the sealed wood from the hallway inside: footsteps on tile, light but audible.

  The door opened. And, instead of freezing up or choking on her words or any of the other dozen scenarios she’d managed to persuade herself might play out, as she’d made her way across to Camden from the East End, she smiled; had to bite down hard on her bottom lip to stop herself from laughing.

  He was dressed for bed - how was that for a turn-up? White Long Johns on his legs and a light blue nightshirt down to his knees; a pair of little round spectacles balanced on his nose and soft grey slippers on his feet. Even a nightcap on his head, like Wee Willie Winkie. The very ordinariness of him seemed, to her, ridiculous - even if (or perhaps, she thought later, because) she knew what he was capable of. That he’d have no qualms at all about killing her stone dead where she stood.

  “May I help you?” he asked, peering down at her and rubbing at his tired-looking eyes behind the lenses of his specs. He sounded posh, she thought; plummy and well-educated, not at all the sort of gent who’d need to go around doing people in and setting off bombs in churches to cover his tracks.

  She cleared her throat. She’d rehearsed this; she knew what she wanted to say, what she needed to say.

  “Can I come in?” she said, the words flowing out of her as smoothly as if she were reciting the lines of a poem from a page or a Bible verse at Sunday school.

  He took two steps backwards, the soles of his slipper-shod feet delivering a silky, whistling shuffle as they pulled him along the floor, and rubbed again at his eyes - blinking back at her in surprise. The gesture lent a bird-like cast to his features; gave him the look of a professor or a librarian, not a habitual killer.

  “What do you want?” he answered, warily. “I’m rather tired, and I haven’t been up for long, so I’d prefer not to stand around here chatting, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “Bit of a night-owl, are you? I thought you might be.”

  “Are you selling something? Because the sign says very clearly that I’m not interested in that sort of thing.”

  He pointed to a square bit of ivory card someone had stuck above the doorbell, a bit of card on which that same someone - perhaps the thin-faced man himself - had stencilled, in bold letters: NO PEDDLERS, HAWKERS OR SOLICITORS.

  “I want to know why you do it,” she said, still unexpectedly calm.

  “Why I do what, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Kill them. I want to know why you kill them.”

  Something shifted, very subtly, in his bearing. The dazed bookworm veneer was still there, still in place behind the spectacles and the night shirt, but there was something else there now, too: a hard, appraising quality to his eyes, a sharpness to the lines of his jaw as he sucked in a lungful of freezing smog through his oversized teeth. The strange contrast between the two expressions - the flash of wolf showing just beneath the sheep - reminded her of a fish she’d once heard about on the wireless, a deep-sea fish that disguised itself as another sort of fish altogether to lure in its prey. Or the Devil, in the skin of a man.

  “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about,” he said, curling his lips in a smile that was more than half a grimace, “and I’m sure you find it terribly amusing to make these … accusations, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave, if you don’t mind.”

  I could go, she told herself. Leg it now, back home, and hope he doesn’t come after me or find a way to hunt me down.

  Or I could stand my ground and see how all this unfolds.

  The decision came so easily, it hardly felt as if she’d made a choice at all.

  “I’ll just be off, then, shall I?” she said lightly. “Nip off down the police station and tell ‘em what I saw you do the other day to that big bloke over in Belsize Gardens?”

  It was a gamble, baiting him that way. Technically, she hadn’t seen him do anything to the big man in the silk pyjamas; couldn’t have done, with the curtains drawn and that bloody rhododendron bush in the way.

  But he didn’t know that, did he? He couldn’t be sure she hadn’t seen him.

  He didn’t answer - just kept staring at her with those hard eyes like she was a funny-looking spider he’d trapped under a glass. One he wasn’t sure wanted to bite him or scuttle away through a crack in the wall.

  She stared right back at him. Then, when it had been so long since either of them had said anything that she was starting to question whether she’d got it all wrong, whether maybe she’d dreamt the whole thing up and he really was just some posh bloke trying to sleep off a hangover, he sighed through his teeth - a sound like air being let out of an inner tube - and took a handful of steps towards her, edging her backwards.

  “If I really had done what you say I have,” he said, so casually he could have been asking her for the time, but with an edge of something else to the utterance that might have scared another person, someone softer than Dolly, “which of course I haven’t, because even the allegation is absurd… then wouldn’t it be somewhat incautious of you to challenge me on it - and on my own turf, so to speak? Rather like diving into a mangrove swamp to pull at the tail of a crocodile.”

  He’s trying to scare you, she told herself. Trying to scare you, so he can get the measure of you.

  Don’t let him.

  “Only if I’d been too stupid to cover my arse,” she replied, pulling her spine straight and her shoulders back and making a point of looking him in those granite eyes of his, even with him towering over her.

  “What can you mean by that, I wonder?”

  “I mean, I ain’t daft enough to try to go after someone I know is a murderer without making damn sure I’ve got at least one person who’d know where to come looking, if I should happen to, let’s say, turn up dead. Or, I don’t know… disappear in mysterious circumstances. I mean I’ve got enough brains in my head to have wrote down what I saw you doing the other week, put it in an envelope and left it for someone to open and read, if I ever need ‘em to.”

  His eyebrows rose in what might have been consternation - as if what he’d thought was a garden spider had turned out, after all, to be a tarantula with a mouthful of venom. Still littler than him, and still confined to a glass, but capable of doing him some damage, if he didn’t handle it just right.

  “How old are you?” he asked - looking her up and down and sideways, taking her in. “No more than thirteen or fourteen, surely?”

  “Twelve,” she told him. “Thirteen in September.”

  “And do you have a name?”

  She hadn’t expected him to be asking her questions. But the fact he was asking didn’t throw her, either - though she reminded herself that she needed to be cautious, to tread carefully, just in case. He might’ve thought she had a bit of poison to her, but she couldn’t let herself forget what he was, either.

  “Dolly,” she said. “And that’s all the detail you’re getting, so don’t think you can go asking me no more. Like I said: I ain’t daft.”

  This response seemed to amus
e him. Then his smile faded, and he sighed.

  “Alright, Dolly-with-no-last-name,” he said, opening the door wide and stepping back again to let her inside. “In you come. Perhaps we do have things to talk about, after all.”

  Chapter 5

  Kingston, London, April 1998

  From the outside, Karen’s bungalow looked much the same as it had, the first time El had laid eyes on it. Dark beige, net curtained and gardened to within an inch of its life, it seemed every inch the residence of a house-proud pensioner: one with a penchant for outdoor ornaments of the bearded gnome and ceramic hedgehog variety.

  Inside, however, it was radically different than El remembered: the kitchen, living room, bedrooms and store cupboard (which, El knew from experience, had held its own peculiar secrets), and the flock wallpaper and antiquated fittings that had littered them now replaced by a black and white, entirely open-plan arrangement so starkly minimalist it could have been designed by Walter Gropius. There was no bathroom in sight, a feat of architectural courage El admired but elected not to enquire about.

  “We’ve been renovating,” Karen explained, entirely unnecessarily - plonking herself down on a Wassily chair opposite El in a section of the now-enormous room that had previously been the hallway. “Fergus kept telling me how sick he was of living like a little old lady. Didn’t you, babe?”

  Fergus - the tall, redheaded boy who was now Karen’s husband - placed a cup of hot chocolate in her hand, passed another to El and sat down, crossed-legged, on the flagstone floor beside his wife.

  “Just fancied a bit of a change,” he said, his soft Highlands accent a marked contrast to Karen’s London vowels.

  Like the house, Fergus himself was somewhat different than he’d been - even two months earlier, at their wedding. Though still thin as a rake and pale as the undead, he now sported yellow-tinted contact lenses that gave his eyes an unsettlingly panther-like appearance - and, more disconcertingly still, a pair of stubby, stainless-steel horns jutting out from the stretched white skin of his forehead.