(“I keep asking him to tell me what he’s fucking playing at, getting them put in,” Karen had said, in response to El’s apparently obvious surprise at seeing the horns when Fergus had greeted her at the door. “The lenses I get - they’re meant to block out UV light, so they stop him getting headaches when he’s sat in front of a screen all day. But those nubs in his head … what do they even do, except make him look like he’s auditioning for the role of back-up faun in The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe?”
“I like them,” Fergus had replied, running a protective hand over his left-side horn.
“You can like them all you want,” she’d told him, showing El inside, “just as long as you put a hat on when we’re out together. Last thing I want is some smart-arse coming up to me in Tesco to ask me if I’m Mrs Tumnus”).
“It looks great,” El said, making a show of scanning the room: the exposed brick of the walls and industrial-chic pipework of the ceiling and, she noticed now, the double futon and tatami mat folded out in a far corner by the plank bookshelves. “Sort of… spartan. But in a good way.”
“Severe, you mean?” Karen laughed. “Yeah - can’t argue with that. Good news is, we’ve kept downstairs more or less the way it was. Only thing that’s changed is how we get to it.”
She gestured to a thin but incongruously wide grey and ochre rug covering a portion of the floor to her right.
El stared at the rug - then, mentally restoring the bungalow to its previous configuration, understood its significance.
“There’s a door underneath?” she asked.
Karen smiled.
“Leads down to the basement. It’s still got the fingerprint lock on it,” she added, as if to pre-empt any security concerns El might have. “So nobody’s getting in or out of it but me and Hellboy here.” She reached down and ran a hand, affectionately, over one of Fergus’ horns. “But we thought, you know… if we’re gonna have an underground lair, we might as well have a trapdoor as well. Go, you know… full-on supervillain.”
Lair, it occurred to El, wasn’t an entirely off-base description of the couple’s joint office-cum-workshop. It was a huge, cavernous space, one that housed not only their computers and the various pieces of electrical equipment that Karen, at least, seemed to need to work whatever tech-magic it was she worked on the job, but a mind-boggling array of files, lockpicks, blades and pliers - all of which she’d assured El that she used, and on a semi-regular basis.
Whether it also served as a vault and safe-haven for even a portion of Karen’s (she assumed pretty significant) fortune, El didn’t know - though it struck her that, given the circumstances, she might very soon find out.
“Should have got one of those done myself, shouldn’t I?” she said, ruefully. “Might’ve helped.”
Karen looked down at her feet.
“Sita told me what happened to your place,” she said, with unusual awkwardness. “I’m sorry. It’s just shit, innit?”
El considered her own feet; the trainers she’d borrowed from Sophie - who was, against all odds, her size - in the absence of clothes of her own. And the absence, moreover, of any available money with which to buy new ones.
“Yeah,” she said. “Shit about covers it.”
She’d had more to say, at the time; a lot more, much of it in anger. In the two hours it had taken her, in the panicked wake of Gerry Adler’s off-the-record call to Sita two weeks before, to drive herself and Rose from the flat in West Hampstead to her cottage in Leicestershire in Ruby’s mud-splattered Land Rover, with Sophie sitting in awkward silence in the back seat, she’d cycled through four of the five stages of grief: from denial of the veracity of Adler’s claim, all the way to depression at the thought of her worldly goods, or the vast majority thereof, disappearing in what had to be a cloud of arson-smoke.
Acceptance, she suspected, would be a long time coming.
The cottage, when they’d finally got there, had been every bit as damaged as Gerry Adler had said: a black, roofless exoskeleton of smoke-ravaged timber and melted appliances; nothing left of its organs but hot, choking piles of ash and soot. She’d been so shell-shocked she’d barely made it out of the car, and the fire crew still there would doubtless have made it their business to keep her away from the scene if she’d tried to get close, but even from a distance she could tell that almost everything she’d had in there was gone: every book, every album, every bra and toothbrush. Every scarf and wig and makeup kit and stack of research notes she’d ever used to transform herself from usefully nondescript El Gardener to geologist Tara Ashworth, or sushi restauranteur Dipti Agrawal, or crime boss Angela Di Salvo.
All of it, gone, in no more time than it had taken for whichever bastard did it to light the fuse and leave it to burn.
With no access to Rose’s money and no money at all in El’s account, they’d considered driving back to London and coming back to Leicester to assess the damage up close the following day - but had been spared that, at least, by the intervention of June Martin next door.
An elderly widow and owner of a hideously ugly hairless cat named Jenkins, whom El had occasionally had cause to feed and water, Mrs Martin been watching the blaze and the ministrations of the firefighters from her front window for quite some time before El and Rose and Sophie had arrived. She’d taken pity on them; had ambled out from her own cottage in her nightgown and curlers, Jenkins at her heels, and urged El to spend the night on the fold-out bed in their front room, if she needed to.
“And your friends, too, duck, if they like,” she’d added. “Does you good to have people stopping with you, times like this.”
So dazed she might as well have forgotten how to speak, El had nodded her agreement - and, with Rose’s arm around her doing much of the work of keeping her vertical, had followed the old lady and her pink, wrinkled familiar where they’d led.
She’d woken early the following morning, unfolding herself one stiffening limb at a time from the makeshift sleeping space she’d constructed for herself out of cushions and a blanket on the floor - the popping of her joints waking Rose and Sophie, who’d come around almost immediately thereafter, the ancient springs of the camp-bed she’d insisted they sleep on creaking under the weight of them with every shift and stir of their bodies. All of them had snuck out before either Mrs Martin or Jenkins could intercept them in the hallway - though El had left an effusive thank-you note on the kitchen table, and resolved to send the old lady a very large bouquet and a bottle of something expensive, once the current storm had passed.
The cottage had looked, if anything, even worse in daylight than it had the night before. El had imagined, lying there on June Martin’s threadbare carpet with her hips aching and her shoulders seizing, that she’d want to pore over the remains of it: to pick through the charred lumps of microwave and mattress and refrigerator to see if there was anything - anything at all - for her to salvage. But standing on the edges of it, the barbecued-plastic stench of cooling white goods flooding her sinuses, she’d wanted nothing but to get away: to jump back behind the steering wheel of the Land Rover, press a foot to the accelerator and not stop until she and Rose and Sophie were back at the apartment in Bayswater, and she could lick her wounds and mourn her losses somewhere she wouldn’t be confronted quite so viscerally by the still-smouldering evidence of them.
There was no question of the fire having started accidentally. The police and the fire brigade had said as much, when she’d eventually spoken to them, although neither service had any leads they’d felt able to share with her, nor any sense of why her cottage had been targeted - and the several hours of discussion she’d had with the overzealous young officers in charge of the investigation had veered, at times, towards full-on interrogation of her life and history.
No, she’d told them when they asked - she didn’t know of anyone who might want to harm her.
No, she didn’t have any enemies, that she knew of - personal or professional. She was a self-employed management consultant,
as her tax records would demonstrate if they’d care to look; she worked mainly away from home, in London and elsewhere, and almost always alone. She had no colleagues to speak of; certainly no-one they’d find it worth their while to talk to.
Yes, she lived alone: no partner, no children.
Yes, the cottage was her only asset. They were welcome to check for themselves, if they’d like.
No, she hadn’t been at home when the fire had been started. And thank God for that.
“But did she know you wouldn’t be there?” Rose had asked her in bed that night, after El had relayed the highlights of her conversation with the police.
The she, of course, had been Hannah. Rose had long been paranoid about the threat her sister might pose - to all three of them, but especially to Sophie. The fear of Hannah’s return had been the driving force behind her decision to move them from the house she’d loved in Notting Hill to the rented apartment overlooking Hyde Park: a block of flats so heavily guarded and comprehensively alarmed that it was effectively a fortress.
“She must have known the odds were good I wouldn’t be,” El had answered, counting the small indentations in the ceiling above them and avoiding Rose’s eyes. “I mean, when am I ever there? Even before I was here every night, I was usually in town somewhere if I was on the job.”
“I can’t say I’m convinced.”
El had torn her gaze from the ceiling and rolled onto her side, pulling Rose closer.
“I’m know what you’re thinking,” she’d said. “And you don’t have to convince me she’s a fucking lunatic. I was there in the hospital that night, just like you were - I remember what she did to Kat. But you’re safe here. Sophie’s safe here. You’d have more luck trying to break into Buckingham Palace than you would this building.”
Rose hadn’t been convinced, however - and a week later, grey in the face and biting anxiously at her bottom lip, she’d taken El aside and told her, in no uncertain terms, that she wanted them to move again.
“Not forever. Just for a few months, until we’ve worked out what Hannah’s up to and what we can do about it.”
“Where?” El had asked - knowing Rose well enough to be fairly sure that there was nothing to be gained in trying to dissuade her, if she’d already made up her mind.
“To Harriet’s. Hannah… she wouldn’t think we’d go there, would she? I doubt she even knows that Harriet and I have a relationship. And Harriet loves Sophie. She’d do anything for her. Protect her with her life, if it came to it.”
El couldn’t fault her logic. Harriet Marchant, another recently discovered half-sister with whom Rose shared a biological father, had proven herself to be - in the year or so that Rose had known her - an especially attentive aunt, as well as a reliable friend and confidante to Rose.
On El herself, Harriet had seemed less keen; had seemed suspicious, even. But if Rose was happy, then El could learn to live with the odd arched eyebrow or harshly worded comment over soup and sandwiches.
“Sure,” El had replied, suppressing her disappointment. “Go for it, if you think it’ll stop you worrying. I doubt Ruby’ll mind having me stay with her and the boys for a bit.”
At that solution, though, it was Rose who’d seemed dismayed.
“I mean, of course,” she’d said, her face flushing in a way El knew it tended to, when she’d been thrown a curveball and was trying to keep her surprise from showing. “Absolutely, if you want to. Though I was rather hoping you might want to come with us. You know… to Harriet’s.”
And what else could El have done but acquiesce?
Karen swirled an index finger in her hot chocolate and licked at it, thoughtfully.
“You want to know why she’s not come at me, don’t you?” she said. “Why I’ve not lost anything, the way you lot have.”
It seemed a waste of energy to deny it. It wasn’t why El had come all the way out to Kingston to see her; wasn’t the main reason, anyway. But she’d been dying to know - ever since Ruby had told her that Karen had so far dodged the bullet that had torn through the rest of them. That Karen’s house and money and everything else she owned were, or seemed to be, entirely intact.
“I’m curious, yeah,” she admitted. “Do you know?”
Karen dipped the finger back into the hot chocolate; stirred it around the gloopy not-quite-liquid like a teaspoon.
“The trouble with money,” she said - unnecessarily elliptically, El thought, “is, it’s not real. It’s symbolic, know what I mean? A medium of exchange. It’s only useful ‘cause everyone’s willing to believe it’s useful, that it’s worth something. If everyone stopped believing in it, it’d be nothing but tin and paper. Even more, when the money’s electronic - all the ones and zeros on your monthly statement, all the lines of digits that come up on the screen when you go to make a transfer. People stop believing in that, and you’d be just as well off trying to buy a new pair of Levi’s or whatever with a load of hieroglyphs scribbled on papyrus as you would with a roll of banknotes, for all the good they'll do you.”
“You can’t wear money,” Fergus murmured from his cross-legged position on the floor. “Can’t eat it, either.”
“Exactly,” Karen said, rewarding him for his agreement with a pat on the horns.
“So, what?” El asked. “You don’t believe in currency?”
“Didn’t say that, did I? ‘Course I believe in it. I mean, it exists, yeah? Objectively exists. Or everyone thinks it does, which is basically the same thing. But let’s just say I’m not one hundred percent convinced we’re all gonna keep thinking it does, the way we do now. So when, from time to time, I come into a bit of money… I like to make sure it’s not gonna stay as money very long, if you get what I’m saying. I like to turn it into something else, so it’s not just sat there in a bank vault or getting pegged to more imaginary money on the global stock exchange.”
El considered what she knew about Karen: about her likes and dislikes, the Byzantine workings of her complicated brain.
“Gold?” she said, taking her best guess. “You buy gold?”
Karen, to her surprise, seemed to find the suggestion hysterical. Even Fergus cracked a smile.
“Gold?” she laughed. “What am I gonna do with gold? Civilisation collapses and I end up bartering with some shopkeeper for a couple of chickens and a bag of flour, you think he’s gonna want a bit of metal that’ll do nothing for him but make him a medallion he can show off ‘round his neck? Fuck that. You buy gold, you might just as well be keeping a pirate treasure-chest under your floorboards.”
“What, then?”
Karen leaned in towards her.
“I’m only telling you this ‘cause you’re a mate, you get me? ‘Cause we’ve been through the wringer together, and I trust you.”
“I’m glad. So tell me.”
She hesitated, then leaned in a little further.
“Silver,” she told El, so quietly it was nearly a whisper. “Silver bullion.”
El frowned.
“Silver?” she said. “The metal? I don’t… Isn’t that like gold, but cheaper?”
Now Fergus laughed too, the both of them chuckling heartily together at her expense.
“Sorry,” Karen eventually answered, dabbing at her eyes. “Sorry. Think it just… took us by surprise, that’s all. You not knowing. But to answer your question: no, silver’s not like gold. It’s fucking nothing like gold, actually. Gold’s got no intrinsic value, you know what I mean? It doesn’t do anything, just sits there and looks pretty. But silver… silver’s in everything.”
“Everything,” Fergus added, sagely.
“Everything,” Karen repeated. “Heavy industry, tech and electricals, photography… it gets fucking everywhere. It’s the best electrical conductor out there, silver. Plus it’s got medicinal value. Turn it into silver sulfadiazine, and you’ve got yourself a proper old-school antibiotic. So, yeah - it might not cost as much as gold, right now… but you better believe it’s what people are gonna be
scrambling ‘round for, come the apocalypse.”
El was genuinely speechless, albeit only temporarily.
“Where do you keep it?” she asked, when she could move her lips again. “These bullions bars - where have you got them stashed?”
“Not here, I’ll tell you that,” Karen said, more cagily. “And not somewhere that psycho bitch Hannah’d ever know to look. Take my word for it, I got ‘em locked up tight. Don’t I, goat-boy?”
“She does,” Fergus nodded. “Safe and sound.”
There was a knock at the door: a quick, impatient rapping, the progenitor of which El would have recognised even if she hadn’t been expecting her.
“Will you bleedin’ shut up about it?” was the first thing she heard, once Fergus had got up to let Ruby inside, and Sita with her, and the two old women had insinuated themselves into the bungalow. “It was one bloody train ride. One. And you didn’t even have no-one sat next to you for most of it.”
“Has our stint in that godforsaken Tube carriage slipped your mind?” Sita said tetchily. “That man in the windbreaker was practically on top of me. And did you see him eating? There’d be a place in the stocks for people like that, if there were any justice. Fish and chips! With vinegar! Vinegar!”
“You wouldn’t be saying that if he’d offered you any. I saw you eyeing up them chips.”
“Glowering at them, not eyeing them up! This cardigan is vicuña. And now it smells like a haddock.”
“Turns out, she ain’t so good on public transport,” Ruby explained to the rest of them, elbowing El in the ribs to make room for herself on the tubular steel construction Karen and Fergus had fashioned into a sofa. “Spent so long getting her arse warmed on hand-stitched leather in the back of a Rolls, she’s forgotten how the other half travels.”
“Uncomfortably, on recent evidence,” Sita groused, lowering her own body - tarnished knitwear and all - down at the opposite end of the sofa and compressing the oxygen from the other half of El’s ribcage.
The Remembrance Page 5