The Remembrance

by Natalie Edwards

  Perhaps he thought she’d seen enough to frighten her away - to scare the curiosity out of her, enough that she’d not see fit to darken his door again.

  If he did, though, he was wrong; dead wrong.

  Because how was she supposed to go back to normal, knowing what she knew now? After feeling what she’d felt in the blackness of that bedroom, with that symphony of hot blood and mashed-up bone echoing through her body like a high note through a tuning fork?

  Whatever it was she’d been keeping locked up inside her, whatever darkness of her own she’d known she had in her but had never thought to lay claim to… it was out of her now. She’d seen it, and it hadn’t frightened her; hadn’t scared her away.

  It was as she’d suspected. Now she’d done what she’d done in that bedroom - or, at least, what she’d been party to, which was almost the same thing… she didn’t want to stop.

  Except she didn’t want to watch, next time. She wanted to be the one to hold the statue in her hand; the one to bring it down on the skull.

  And she didn’t want to wait to do it, either.

  Chapter 7

  King’s Cross, London, April 1998

  In the soft, low light of the wine library, Kat Morgan looked healthier - if not happier - than she had even three months earlier: her face fuller and less consumptive, her smile wider, her blue eyes clearer and less bloodshot.

  “I thought it was just me, when it first started happening,” she said, tapping a long red nail irritably against her thigh. “That I’d typed in the wrong pin, or something. I still get a bit of, you know… brain fog. Trouble remembering the odd word. The odd number. It’s not as bad as it was, nowhere near, but it happens, still. From time to time.”

  “Sorry,” El said, grimacing. Mild though they were, the cognitive impairments - like the weakness in her legs and the intermittent balance problems that demanded she still, periodically, needed a walking stick to get about - were among the more enduring reminders of Kat’s run-in with Hannah D’Amboise two years before.

  “Not your fault, is it? Wasn’t you that did me in the head with that bastard wheel lock. Anyway. Like I said: I thought it was just me, having one of my moments. Then when I tried the other cards, and none of them got the job done either…”

  “You knew something was up?”

  “I had an inkling, yeah. And then those two old baggages rang me out of the blue and told me what’d happened to all you lot, and I thought to myself: well… probably not a coincidence, is it?”

  The way El had heard it, Kat had lost millions, like the rest of them - but had managed, through the now apparently quite extensive property portfolio she’d been developing, to retain several of her more valuable assets, albeit in less liquid form than she might have liked.

  She’d agreed immediately to the job, when Ruby had suggested it - not so much, El suspected, because she needed the money, but because helping the rest of them stay afloat while Karen used every backdoor trick in the technical manual to ferret out Hannah would give Kat her best shot yet at getting even with the woman who’d maimed her.

  That she wanted to get even was a given, as far as El was concerned. She liked Kat, and she respected her - respected her skills on the job, especially. But she was a tough woman, hard-edged and unforgiving, and El couldn’t conceive of a situation in which, after the attack she’d suffered and the damage she’d been left with, she’d pass up the opportunity to nail Hannah to the wall.

  “But you’re coping?” Rose asked, sipping delicately at one of the complementary glasses they’d been given - a gritty Cabernet that tasted, to El, like it had been stored under a heat lamp.

  “Keeping it together,” Kat said. “Just about. And you two doing alright, are you?”

  “Not so bad,” El answered, flashing Rose a quick smile and pressing all recent memories of Harriet Marchant’s sagging spare mattress and decidedly cat-stained guest duvet to the very back of her mind.

  The glass door connecting the wine library to the wider drinking club beyond slid open, and the bearded sommelier who’d seated them stepped discreetly through, immediately ahead of a very tall, very angular middle-aged white woman, her thick platinum hair piled up on the crown of her head like a braided loaf and an ivory fur coat slung, Cruella De Vil-style, across her thin shoulders.

  The two walked towards their table, and El took her cue.

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now,” she wailed, in a voice an octave and at least two social classes higher than her usual register - one she’d modelled, in fact, on Rose’s, though she’d die before she’d let that slip. “He just left! Took the bloody Jag, and everything. Thank God he didn’t take Valeria, is all I can say. I don’t know how I’d have coped without her to come home to. Animals are such a comfort, aren’t they? Such a comfort.”

  She downed the remainder of the stewed Cabernet with a melodramatic flourish reminiscent of one of Sita’s, and placed her forearm over her eyes, as if to cover the tears that threatened to well there.

  “You mustn’t worry,” Rose drawled, loud enough to be overheard by anyone with an interest. “It’s your money, isn’t it? Every penny. Not his. He’s got no claim to it. And you’ve still got that pre-nup in place, so even with Anthony Julius on his side he’d fall flat on his face. Let him try, I say. Let him try!”

  “But what’s the use of money when you have no-one?” El replied mournfully. “I don’t even have a job to throw myself into anymore. There’s nothing to do all day but lie around the house feeling sorry for myself.”

  “You need a purpose, darling,” Kat chipped in, her Welsh lilt lost to an artificial upper RP. “Something to get you up in the morning.”

  Through the obstructive canopy of her own arm, El saw the angular woman’s head tilt towards them - as if, somewhere on the wind, she’d caught the scent of a fox she hadn’t expected to be hunting.

  “Her real name’s Patricia Swift,” Ruby had told them, when she’d first mooted the job back at Karen’s place. “But she goes by Doctor Upgrade. Ain’t a real doctor, mind - she’s one of them, what do you call ‘em? Life coaches. Pay ‘em a couple of grand a week and they’ll tell you whether to have pork or salmon for your dinner, sort of thing.”

  “She’s at the higher end of the affordability scale,” Sita had said. “Terribly expensive, for what she offers. And, if I may say, a rather nasty piece of work.”

  “Specialises in the sort of rich, posh bird you get out west.” This had been from Ruby again. “Bored, neurotic types with no self-confidence and enough time on their hands to want to dick about finding themselves and what have you.”

  Sita had wrinkled her nose in disapproval - of Swift, of her clients, or of both, El hadn’t known for sure.

  “It’s really rather sad, the way they flock to her. Brainless lambs to the slaughter, every one.”

  “And Christ knows, she fleeces ‘em,” Ruby had agreed. “We’re talking fifty, sixty grand a pop, just to make ‘em a to-do list reminding ‘em to drink enough water and get an early night and have a clear-out of the attic. Talk about money for old rope.”

  “And you like her for a mark?” El had asked.

  The two old women had nodded in unison.

  “Very much,” Sita had replied. “She’s quite appalling.”

  “Greedy, an’ all. Prides herself on gettin’ what she wants, and not lettin’ nothin’ stand between her and whatever that might be.” Ruby had grinned, the action splitting the lower half of her face into a thousand small crevasses. “Just our type, in other words.”

  Did they have an in? El had wanted to know. And Sita had affirmed, with some pleasure, that they did - if, that was, El would be willing to working the inside.

  “Wine,” she’d said. “Our Doctor Upgrade is quite the oenophile. Especially now she’s accumulated sufficient funds to indulge her more costly enthusiasms.”

  “Bloody loves the stuff,” Ruby had concurred. “Gets her arse to Rioja and Barbaresco for the weeken
d once a fortnight. Owns a stake in at least one vineyard in Stellenbosch too, that we know of. Ain’t afraid to pay top dollar for the right bottle, neither - she splashed out ten thousand on a crate of Montrachet, and that was just last month.”

  A bottle scam, El had thought. It’d have to be. A bent bottle, or a falsified label. Both, if they could find a way to spring for them.

  “Seems like the more straightforward way of getting her on the hook, don’t it?” Ruby had confirmed, when El had pressed her on it. “Not too original, I’ll grant you, but ain’t the old ones meant to be the best?”

  “And we were wondering,” Sita had added slyly, as if the idea was such an afterthought that she’d considered it barely worth mentioning, except in passing, “whether you might ask Rose to put in a membership enquiry to one of the wine clubs Auntie Ruby happened to stumble upon, in her research? There’s a little place just off the Pentonville Road of which Ms. Swift is particularly fond, and I daresay they’d kill to have a Lady on the books…”

  “I must go,” El said, smoothing down her poker-straightened hair and slipping the Thierry Mugler sunglasses Ruby had lent her for the occasion from her forehead until they shielded her eyes. “Valeria will need her supper.”

  She climbed down from the high metal stool on which she’d been perched, came to rest on the four and a half inch heels of the shoes she’d borrowed from Rose - and the toes of which she’d liberally stuffed with tissue paper, to compensate for the difference in their foot sizes - and draped the Louis Vuitton handbag Sita had donated to the makeshift wardrobe department of the con over the padded shoulder of her blazer.

  “Call me, won’t you?” she asked the other women at the table, dropping air kisses on first Rose’s cheeks, then Kat’s.

  And, throwing a nervous smile at Patricia Swift and the sommelier as she brushed past them, she left the building.

  “It went exactly as smoothly as we’d hoped,” Rose told her later, as they lay together on the dropping cushions of Harriet’s tartan sofa while Sophie and Harriet cooked pasta and chopped fresh basil in the kitchen; Harriet’s cat, an obese tortoiseshell improbably named RD Laing, resting across El’s calves.

  “Yeah?” El asked, trying to dislodge RD Laing from her legs, and succeeding only in pushing him onto her ankles.

  “Oh, yes. She was very interested.”

  Swift had sidled over to their table almost as soon as El - and soon after, the sommelier - had exited the wine library, claiming the stool El had vacated without so much as asking if Kat and Rose would mind if she joined them.

  “I couldn’t help but notice,” she’d begun, so warm and personable the three of them might have been old friends settling in for a night of drink and gossip, “that your friend seemed a little… upset?”

  Kat had jumped in and taken charge of the conversation before Rose could even open her mouth.

  “Oh, she’s just a little down,” she’d said, her delivery treading a fine line between legitimate sympathy and catty schadenfreude. “Husband left her, you know. Gather it came as a bit of a shock.”

  Rose had scowled at Kat, as they’d planned; castigating her for spilling the intimate details of their friend’s misfortunes to the intruder at their table, whomever she might turn out to be.

  “Ah,” Swift had said, helping herself to one of the tasting glasses and wincing as the sour Cabernet hit her palate. “One of those.”

  “I said to her,” Kat had continued, with a slight slurring of her speech designed to signal moderate drunkenness, “what is it you’re so upset about, exactly? She must have seen it coming, all those hours he told her he was working - all those Saturdays he was spending at the office. Honestly. I’ve known Archie Moncrieff since we were children, and that man has never spent a minute extra at his desk past five thirty.”

  “Jessica!” Rose had whispered, feigning outrage at the looseness of Kat’s lips. “For heaven’s sake!”

  “Oh, please,” Kat had said, shushing her friend into silence. “We both know I’m right. And as for all that business about needing a purpose and trying to find herself… well, really. She’s still young enough to find a replacement for old Archie if she desperately wants one, she’s thinner than she’s ever been since she stopped eating, and she’s positively swimming in money. Really, what else is there?”

  Swift’s eyes had widened, for a split-second - just long enough to show them the avarice there, to let them see that the rope had worked, and they had her on the hook. And then, lowering her gaze, she’d turned her attention back to the commandeered wine.

  “Find herself?” she’d asked, casually.

  “She gave us her card,” Rose told El, grasping RD Laing by his love handles and lowering him to the floor. “Kat said we’d pass it along. She’s expecting your call.”

  “She thinks she can help me find myself?” El replied, with a grin.

  “She guarantees it, if you believe half of what she told us at the club. So really, I think the bigger question is: are you ready to be Upgraded?”

  Chapter 8

  Los Angeles, May 1957

  “A lady driver?” the man mumbled from the back of the limousine. “Jesus. Now I’ve seen everything.”

  He was beautiful, when he was still; as beautiful as he’d seemed, the handful of times she’d seen him on screen, all rosebud lips and tousled brown hair and twinkling green eyes under thick, dark eyebrows. When he spoke, though, he was ugly: his perpetual sneer reconfiguring the perfect symmetry of his face into something wicked, malign.

  The drink probably wasn’t helping his cause, Dolly thought, as she watched him swig again from the leather-bound hip flask he’d been clinging to like a baby’s bottle since he’d stumbled into the car. Some men, she’d seen - some women, too - got calmer, the more they put away; closed their eyes and drifted off, dead to the world. Others, it was like they were possessed: shouting and swearing and hurling punches at anyone who got in their way, or - worse still, to her mind - stabbing jibes and insults with scalpel precision into the soft bellies of whoever they’d decided most deserved it, in the moment.

  Castle, she reckoned - even after only half an hour in his company - sat squarely in that last group. She didn’t know how much he drank, or how often; he was too young and too pretty for it to have shown up on his face yet, to have ruined his looks. But it was obvious to her, at least, that he was an absolute bastard, with a drop of liquor inside him. A bastard, and a liability. The sort of loose cannon that’d run his mouth off, before he started in with his fists.

  “A job’s a job, Mr Castle,” she told him, in the Mid-Atlantic Katherine Hepburn voice she’d adopted since coming to America. It didn’t quite cover the residual sediment of the accent she’d been born to, the one she was still working on shedding, but it was good enough to convince most Americans that she was an American, too - albeit one with ideas above her station.

  Besides, this was Hollywood: nobody was from here. Everyone around her was a shapeshifter, a rootless chameleon trying to be someone other than the person they’d been, sloughing off names and errant vowels and religious identities like so much dead skin.

  They just had… different ambitions than hers, that was all.

  And it might be, she thought, that she’d benefit herself from a bit more of a change. The name she’d been given by her long-dead parents wasn’t the name she’d been using, and it certainly wasn’t the one she’d been giving to her clients, when they’d asked, although many of them didn’t - preferring to know as little as possible about the hand behind the trigger they were paying her to pull, and who could blame them? But it was the name that remained on what official documents she had, and perhaps it was time to do something about that, too.

  “How does a woman get to be a limo driver, anyway?” Castle said, whatever was in the hip flask beginning to macerate his words, to take the edge off their cruelty. “Your fella up and leave you or something? Or are you one of those girls who thinks she can be just like a man, if s
he puts a pair of pants on when she gets out of bed in the morning?”

  “It’s just a job, sir,” she said again, flatly.

  She turned left, following the road as it curved around another of the mountainous hills that ringed the city, the high beams of the limo’s headlights cutting through the darkness up ahead as it climbed. From the top of this hill, she’d discovered in the long hours she’d spent poring over maps of the city, the drop from the edge of the road to the ground below was near-on two hundred feet; almost certainly not survivable. Definitely not survivable, if you factored in the sharp, eroded spikes of sand-coloured rock that poked up out of the earth floor like stalagmites at the bottom.

  “You gotta make it look like an accident,” Rudolph had insisted, the single solitary time they’d met face-to-face after he’d blackmailed Rube Orloff, another producer at the studio, into giving up her name and number. Rudolph had chosen a roadside diner, of all places, for the meeting; one that had looked to her more like an oversized caravan than a bricks-and-mortar restaurant, hidden away at the end of a dusty stretch of track somewhere just north of the San Fernando Valley.

  He was a large man, tall and stout and with an appetite so big he’d polished off a plate of bacon, scrambled eggs and waffles before she’d finished her coffee. Large and mean, if his reputation and the snippets of studio tittle-tattle she’d been privy to meant anything - and she could well believe, having met him, that they did. He hadn’t told her why he wanted the job done, or what Castle had done to earn his ire, but Dolly wasn’t stupid, and Castle had quite a reputation himself.

  He swung both ways, or so the grips and runners she’d talked to had implied: some with a derogatory grin and a hand gesture, others with an aggressive revulsion evidently intended to let her know, in no uncertain terms, that they, themselves, were not like Castle, were not that way. Unlike Castle, Rudolph was married, had kids and grandkids - but his own predilection for the better-looking boys that his casting directors brought onto the lot for auditions hadn’t gone unnoticed, either. And it didn’t take a genius, Dolly thought, to work out how things might have unfolded between the two of them: Rudolph the producer, with a weakness for beautiful young men, and Castle the careerist, prepared to do more or less anything to make it in front of the camera and, once there, all the way up to top billing.