The Remembrance

by Natalie Edwards

  Swift’s own eyes widened, cartoonishly, in their sockets.

  “The ’37 Glenallan?” she whispered. “Of course I know it. Everyone knows it.”

  “Then you’ll be familiar with the price tag.”

  “Yes. I mean… yes, obviously. Didn’t it go for just under a million at Christie’s last year?”

  “Just over, I believe. But that bottle wasn’t the one she showed me. There were two of them produced - a pair. The one that sold was the first. The one in the photograph, by all accounts, was the second.”

  Allegra hadn’t known that at the time, of course; hadn’t known, until she’d been able to do more research, which of the ’37 Glenallans she was looking at.

  “Is this… yours?” she’d asked the antediluvian creature before her, scarcely believing such a thing could be the case.

  “Damn right it is,” the old woman had creaked, the scrape and grind of her vocal cords descending on Allegra’s ears like fingernails down a blackboard. “Now, can you tell me what it’s worth, or am I going to have to take myself off to one of them other fancy bottle shops ‘round ‘ere? ‘Cause you’re not the only one in the phone book, you know.”

  “Well, I mean… yes, of course I can,” Allegra had managed, struggling to overcome speechlessness.

  “Good. And don’t think you can stitch me on the money, neither, ‘cause I know how old it is, and I know it’s worth a few bob. My son’s had a look at it, and he says it’d go for at least ten grand. At least.”

  Allegra had executed a brief but thoroughly breath-taking round of mental arithmetic: subtracting ten thousand pounds (fifteen, let’s call it fifteen, just to be safe) from the hundreds of thousands the Glenallan would fetch, should she take it to an auction house or - better yet - directly to one of her clients, and had alighted on a total that had snatched the remaining air from her lungs.

  “Ten… thousand?” she’d asked, her own voice almost as hoarse and scratched as the old woman’s.

  “Yeah. And I’ll not take a penny less, before you go telling me lies about how it’s not what I think it is, or what have you. Not a penny.”

  She’d glared at Allegra through rheumy, pink-rimmed eyes, and snatched the polaroid back from the countertop, letting it drop into the basket of the wicker trolley she’d wheeled in behind her.

  “Do you… have the bottle with you?” Allegra had said.

  “Ha!” the old fossil had replied, her laughter something closer to a coughing fit than a show of mirth. “Think I’m barmy, do you? Think I’d take a ten-grand bottle of Scotch out for a walk ‘round the block, just like that?”

  “But… I’ll need to see it,” Allegra had countered, beginning to gather her senses. “I can’t give a valuation without examining it first. I need to see the label, the level, the packaging…”

  The woman had scratched her nose and plucked at one of the wiry grey hairs scattered across the leathery folds of her chin, deep in thought.

  “See it?” she said.

  “Yes. Up close. It’s the only way I can confirm that it is what it appears to be - and if it is, that it’s sufficiently intact. I don’t buy anything sight unseen, I’m afraid.”

  There had followed a long, deep silence.

  “I ain’t bringing it out the house,” the old woman had said eventually. “Not for all the tea in China. What if I should break it? What if you should break it, when you pick it up?”

  “I understand. Perhaps I could come to you, then? I’m not entirely averse to making house-calls. Do you live nearby?”

  She couldn’t be from Chelsea, Allegra had thought. Not looking like that; not sounding like that.

  “I do, as it happens,” the woman had replied. “You heard of Drayton Gardens? Not far from there, I am.”

  The salubriousness of the postcode had surprised Allegra almost as much as the Glenallan itself. Several of her wealthier clients, in fact, kept homes on some of the surrounding streets.

  “Have I heard of it?” she’d said. “Yes. Yes, absolutely.”

  “Alright, then. Should save us a bit of time. Got a pen and paper, have you, so’s I can write down the address?”

  Swift’s jaw was now almost on the floor.

  “And did you go to the house?” she asked El. “Did you get the Glenallan?”

  El sighed.

  “I went,” she said ruefully. “The very next day I went - all on my own, just as I’d promised the old bat I would be. Couldn’t believe where she was living, when I got there. Absolutely phenomenal place in Clarington Mews, you couldn’t miss it. Bright pink, the colour of candy floss, and the most enormous statue of a flamingo by the doorstep. It was like something you’d find in Las Vegas.”

  “And the bottle was there?”

  “Oh, yes. The place was an utter pigsty, but she’d stored it in the cellar, thank God. And it was the real thing - I knew it the moment she brought it out from the cheap old lockbox she’d been keeping it in. You can’t imagine how wonderful it felt, to look at it. To hold it.”

  El allowed a shadow to fall over Allegra Moncrieff’s face at the memory; a strange, bitter sadness quite at odds with the jubilation she’d experienced in the old woman’s cellar.

  “And that was where the problem began, you see,” she continued, more quietly. “I was standing there, the most magnificent specimen I’d ever encountered quite literally in the palm of my hands… and suddenly all I could hear was this tiny voice in my head demanding to know what in God’s name I thought I was doing, trying to swindle a little old lady. Asking what sort of person I’d become, that I was prepared to do such a thing.”

  “And then… well, I’m rather embarrassed to say I had something of a panic attack: right there in the cellar, in front of her. It was as if I couldn’t breathe; couldn’t stand to be in my own skin. All I could do was put down the bottle, make my apologies and dash out of there. I’ve never moved so fast as I did, running back to the shop that day.”

  “You just left it?” It was Swift’s turn, now, to look aghast. “A ‘37 Glenallan, and you left it there?”

  El bowed her head.

  “I did. The whole thing rather brought home something I hadn’t wanted to confront head-on before then - something I’d been shying away from for quite some time. The fact is, Patricia: I didn’t like myself very much. Didn’t like how I behaved, or who I’d become. You’ve heard that many times before, I expect?”

  “Hmm,” Swift agreed, though with less enthusiasm than before.

  “I knew, after that, that I couldn’t carry on as I had been - that something would have to give. Which is why I… well, I suppose you’d say retired. Sold on the business. I hardly needed to keep going with it, anyway - I’ve been rather comfortable on the financial front ever since my father passed on, and the shop was always more about the joy of it than the profit margins. Even getting the Glenallan… it wouldn’t really have been about the money, so much as about the getting it, you know? The thrill of the chase and the satisfaction of the win.”

  “Hmm,” Swift repeated.

  “The challenge, of course, is knowing what I ought to do now. As I say: I’ve been somewhat adrift since I gave it up. And with Archie gone… I feel so terribly untethered. So purposeless.”

  Swift’s eyes had begun to glaze over, as Allegra Moncrieff concluded her tale of woe. She was no longer really listening, El thought; had lost her appetite for the pursuit of this particular prey.

  “Is that the sort of thing you normally help with?” El asked.

  “What?” Swift replied - then, seeming to remember why she’d requested the meeting, added: “Oh. Yes. Absolutely.”

  But her mind, El thought, was elsewhere - in a cheap plywood lockbox in the basement of a bright pink, flamingo-festooned house in Clarington Mews. A house so bright and so peculiarly decorated, it would be absolutely impossible to miss.

  Chapter 10

  Santa Monica, February 1972

  She realised, around about the time Charlie Manson
and his girls went to trial, that the business was getting too big for her to handle on her own. That if she wanted to carry on at it, she was going to need an extra set of trigger fingers. A hired hand; an apprentice, even.

  It would be a risk, taking someone on; a big one, if she didn’t tread carefully, didn’t start growing eyes in the back of her head. There was nothing like a neophyte for thinking he could get away with playing dead man’s boots - hadn’t Dolly done it herself with the man who taught her, back when the war was still fresh in people’s minds and she still called herself by the name she’d been given?

  Paris, it had been. She’d been a teenager, still, though old enough that no-one had batted an eyelid at him and her shacking up together in an apartment on the Avenue Montaigne. It had been building in her for a while - the wanting to leave, to strike out for herself without the dead weight of what had seemed to her at the time like an old man holding her back. And he’d been getting handsy, too, especially after he’d had a drink – that hadn’t helped his cause. Getting to think that, because she was sharing his flat, she ought to be sharing his bed at nights, too.

  He hadn’t seen it coming, when she’d come at him; hadn’t expected the needle in his neck that turned his legs to spaghetti, or the paring knife across his throat that sent the blood rushing out of his body and his buck teeth gnashing at the air in agony.

  She was smarter than he’d been, though. Much smarter. And she knew better than to turn her back on anyone - and especially on a lieutenant who might stand to gain a thing or two from having her six feet under.

  It was months before she happened on someone she thought might be a likely candidate.

  He was young, though not as young as she’d been when she started. She’d guessed fourteen or fifteen, from his height and build and the dusting of fuzz on his upper lip, though God knows it was difficult to tell, when none of the kids wore uniforms to school. Physically, he was unremarkable, unmemorable: white but suntanned to a light, all-over brown; straight, white teeth and an aquiline nose; hair down to his collar and curling slightly at the ends, the same as every other boy his age in California. He was neither particularly attractive nor notably ugly; even a sharp-eyed observer could pass him in the street or serve him dinner in a restaurant without his face leaving a lasting impression.

  And that was good, she’d thought. If he really was cut out for the sort of business she was in, then it would do him well to look ordinary; to fade into the background. To be the sort of person who could be anyone and no-one.

  She’d seen him first hanging about by the beach - a can of pop in one hand and a comic book in the other, medium-brown eyes fixed on the blue of the ocean. Except, and she couldn’t have said exactly how she knew, they weren’t; instead, she was sure, he was only pretending to stare at the water. Was using it as a pretext, a cover for looking at something else altogether. Something he shouldn’t have been looking at.

  She’d watched him, covertly enough that he wouldn’t have known she was watching him, until she got a bead on what he was really looking at; what was actually in his line of sight.

  Who.

  He was an oldish man: grey-haired and long bearded and unkempt, a string of love beads around his neck and a dirty rainbow poncho that she’d known would stink of armpit sweat and marijuana if she ever got close enough to catch a whiff. One of the ageing hippies who lived around the pier, she’d reckoned; destitute, but by design, preferring to pitch a tent on the sand than submit to the constraints of a nine to five. He was crouched on the ground, rubbing a pair of sticks together for a fire; something to cook his dinner on, perhaps, or keep his bones warm when the sun went down.

  Another woman might have asked herself, then, what the boy was doing, staring at the old bloke like that. But not her. The more she’d watched the boy, watched the vacant expression he wore crystallise into something like hunger, the more certain she’d been about what he wanted, what he was after. She’d known that expression; had likely worn it herself, back when she was his age.

  Curiosity: that was what it was. The sort of dark curiosity that could lead a boy to cut a man’s throat or stick a knife in his guts to see the look on his face as the life drained out of him, to feel the ebb and flow of the blood as his pulse ran down like a dying battery.

  She’d wondered if he was going to act on it there and then: invent some ruse to lure the old hippie away from the beach and towards a more secluded place where he could do the deed. But he’d been more patient than that - and that was a good thing too, she’d thought. A boy who was willing to wait for the kill, to keep a lid on his impulses until he could be a little bit strategic about satisfying them... that was a boy who could learn. A boy she could teach.

  She’d followed him home, the way she’d followed the thin-faced man back to his house in Haverstock Hill, all those years ago - back to a plush-looking apartment block on 2nd Street, where the epauletted doorman had let him in through the lobby with a deferential tip of the hat.

  A rich boy, then, she’d thought. A rich boy who’d have more to lose than a poor one, if what he was - the abomination he was - was ever made public.

  She could work with that.

  She’d been following him a week when he made his move; long enough to have worked out his pattern. He’d catch a bus to school in the early morning, Monday to Friday, and stay at school for the remainder of the day, like his classmates. But rather than returning to the apartment once his classes were out, he’d make his way back to that same stretch of beach - where, always with a tin of Coke and a comic book by his side, he’d look out at the surf. At the old hippie in the poncho hunkered down on the sand.

  The pretext he ultimately settled on to snare the hippie was unoriginal, unimpressive, and she felt a touch of disappointment at his lack of imagination, though she chided herself for the reaction - reminding herself of his age, his inexperience, the likely lack of a guiding hand to steady him on his journey towards self-discovery.

  He’d brought an extra Coke with him that day, along with a square package of something greasy - a sandwich, she’d guessed - leaking oil and butter into its brown paper wrapping. This time, instead of standing and looking out to sea, he walked down further onto the beach, across the sand - leaving a trail of footprints behind him, she noted - and squatted down next to the hippie. They talked for a moment, though about what she couldn’t hear from the shelter of her hiding place. And then the boy was pressing the brown food package into hippie’s open, outstretched palms; placing the can of Coke onto the sand beside the man like an offering to a minor water deity.

  The hippie opened the package greedily, a grin blossoming across his weather-beaten face as he took in the contents: a Reuben, she thought, or something like it. He ate quickly, shovelling the bread and meat into his mouth as if he was worried it might be snatched away at any second, and washed down the unexpected meal with the Coke before crushing the can in his fist and belching, loud enough that she caught the echo of it even from fifty feet away.

  When he’d finished, the boy squatted down next to him on the beach; leaned in close, almost whispering in the old man’s ear, then - when he looked to have said his piece - stood up again. The hippie cocked his head quizzically, then nodded, and scrambled to his feet.

  The boy began to walk away, back in the direction of the city proper: the long, straight, intersecting lengths of road and rows of shops and houses and fancy hotels fading to clusters of yellow light as dusk closed in on the Pacific. And the hippie took off after him, leaving his patchwork tent and dirty sleeping bag behind him on the sand.

  There’d have been promises made, she thought, to draw the old geezer away from his home like that. Promises of booze to share, or something harder; of sex, even, though she wasn’t inclined to dwell on that possibly, given the boy’s age.

  Stupid.

  It was dark out, but it wasn’t dark enough, not yet. And the beach might have looked empty to the boy, except for the hippie - and except for her
, though he couldn’t have known that - but nowhere was ever completely deserted; she’d learned that much. There was always someone about: a businessman taking a shortcut home after an afternoon quickie with his mistress; a jogger midway through an evening workout by the ocean; a tourist who’d wandered off the beaten track and stopped to take a photo of the sunset.

  People who’d take note of a clean-cut teenager out for a stroll with a shabby-looking derelict three times his age or more; people who’d remember seeing them together, if they were ever prompted.

  So bloody stupid.

  He didn’t go into the city, she saw, or stray far from the shore - another bit of idiocy she’d have to chalk up to his inexperience, she told herself. Instead, he led the old hippie down the bit of pavement running parallel to the beach, towards a small, shack-like house along the beach-front, its light blue wooden frontage overrun with moss and mould and beginning to surrender to rot. The house was abandoned, no question: there were boards across the broken windows, rubbish bags and scraps of broken furniture stacked up on the strip of dead grass that passed for a yard. No lights on anywhere inside.

  The old hippie looked puzzled, at first, as they walked the path to the peeling front door. But the boy leaned close to him again, whispering what she reckoned were likely more inducements - and whatever he said must have been convincing enough, because the hippie smiled, showing teeth that were nothing but orange stumps even in the darkness, and followed the boy into the house.

  If the boy was clever about it, she thought - cleverer than he’d been about everything else she’d seen him do so far - then he’d do the job with a knife: something sharp and efficient, even if it was something he’d had to swipe from his dad’s toolbox or one of the drawers in his mum’s kitchen.

  And fortunately, she saw as she peered in through the gap in the mildew-reeking boards across the window-panels, he had been clever - about that, at least. The hippie had barely set foot in the empty front room when the boy struck: took his weapon out of his schoolbag - a box-cutter, not a knife, though the blade of it was keen enough for the difference to be negligible in practice - and shoved it, with a thrust that would’ve done an Olympic fencer proud, into the old man’s chest, just about where his lungs ought to have been.