The hippie toppled over onto the dirty floorboards, coughing foamy pink ichor down his chin, the handle of the box-cutter still sticking out of him, and the boy bent down next to him to watch - a satisfied little smile on his face that reminded Dolly of the joy she’d taken in the kill herself, her first few times. It was a bloody good strike, she’d give him that: a sucking chest wound like that, and the old man’d be drowning in his own blood, soon enough.
What then, though? Did the boy have sense enough to know how to take care of the rest?
She suspected he didn’t. But there was only one way to find out, wasn’t there?
He didn’t hear her come in through the door, though perhaps that wasn’t a surprise - she’d always been able to tread softly, when she’d needed to. He moved fast when he saw her, though: had the box cutter out from between the dying hippie’s ribs and back in his hand and pointed at her with the speed of a sniper.
A turn of speed like that would come in useful, she thought. Very useful.
She had her elbow at his throat, his shoulder in a joint lock and the box cutter in her own free hand before he knew what’d hit him.
“Am I gonna have to break your arm?” she asked him.
“You’re hurting me,” he winced, his breath coming hard - though he didn’t cry or beg, and she had to respect him for that.
“I know. So, am I gonna have to break it, or will you be able to control yourself if I let go of you?”
He ducked his head in what she took to be a nod, and she released her grip, the force of the action spinning his body away from hers and sending him sprawling, not a few inches from the bloody jumble of the hippie’s still-wheezing carcass.
“Are you a cop?” he asked, pushing himself onto all fours, then up and into a standing position that left them staring each other out across the room.
His voice hadn’t quite broken yet, she realised; was stuck in the discordant seesawing register that seemed to afflict so many adolescent boys.
Her eyes never leaving him, she tiptoed over to the hippie - side-stepping the sticky rivulets of blood seeping into the floorboards from both sides of his upper body - and, lowering herself into a squat position behind his head, ran the blade of the box cutter across his throat in a single, effortless motion.
“No,” she said, raising herself back up to her full height, wiping the box cutter clean with her handkerchief, sheathing it and sliding it into her handbag. “No, I ain’t a cop. But you’ll be seeing one before too long, if you don’t get this mess sorted.”
She gestured to the hippie, now - finally - dead.
“Got a plan, have you?” she continued. “For clearing it up, I mean? Getting rid of the body, so it don’t get found?”
He opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
“No. Didn’t think so. Lucky for you, I got a bit of experience in these sorts of matters. Question is: do you want my help?”
“You killed him,” he said, finding his words.
“No. You killed him - I just finished him off. And I expect you liked doing it, didn’t you? Liked the feeling it gave you, slicing him up?”
The boy fell silent again.
“You’re alright,” she told him. “I ain’t trying to trick you into nothing or back you into a corner. But let’s say, for argument’s sake, you did like doing it… I wouldn’t be wrong in thinking you wouldn’t mind doing it again, would I? Though perhaps with a bit more thought put into the planning, next time,” she added.
He dropped into a crouch, like a wounded animal, and she wondered if he might make a run at her, and how badly she’d have to hurt him if he tried.
“Who are you?” he said quietly. “If you’re not a cop, who are you?”
“Your fairy bloody godmother, that’s who,” she replied. “Now, I’m gonna ask you again, and if you don’t answer me properly then I’ll just take myself off and leave you to clean this up all on your tod. So listen careful. Do. You. Want. Help?”
The boy bit his lip. There was blood on it, she saw; just a smear, probably splash-back from going in too hard with the box cutter, but something he’d have to remedy before he went anywhere with overhead lighting.
“How?” he whispered.
“That a yes, is it?”
He nodded again, this time more decisively.
“Yes. Please.”
“Thought you might.”
She peered down at the body on the floor; cast an appraising glance around the room.
“It’ll take a while to get sorted, this lot. A bit of elbow-grease, too. But that ain’t the first order of business. ‘Fore we do anything, I’m gonna need you to nip back down the beach and grab the tent and any other bits and pieces this man here left behind when the two of you walked off together. Reckon you can do that?”
His jaw slackened.
“You were watching me?” he said, the possibility seeming to startle him.
“That’s right. And good thing I was too, eh? Or something tells me you’d racing ‘round like a headless chicken right about now.”
He considered this; looked as if he was mulling it over.
Doesn’t rush to judgement, then, she told herself. Can be thoughtful, when he has to be.
Another tick in the box.
“You want me to go get the guy’s stuff?” he said eventually.
Inside, she smiled.
“Yeah,” she told him. “And give your hands and face a wash in the water, while you’re there. Then I want you to come back here with what you got, quick as you can. Then I’m gonna need you to go out again, to that phone booth across the road - you know the one I mean? Next to the liquor store. Ring your mum and dad and tell ‘em you’ll be stopping at a friend’s tonight. ‘Cause you and me, even if we work fast… we’re gonna be here ’til morning.”
Chapter 11
Chelsea, London, April 1998
The house in Claringdon Mews had always been pink. The addition of the flamingo statue, however, had been Sita’s idea.
(“Just a little something to make it stand out, darling,” as she’d put it. “Pink paintwork isn’t terribly uncommon in Chelsea, but man-sized effigies of Rose Pompadour wading birds… they’re rather rarer”).
The house’s owner, thankfully, hadn’t objected to the temporary ornamentation; though El had wondered whether her neighbours might have had more to say about it, had their opinions been sought.
She was another of Sita’s old acquaintances: a romance novelist, well into her ninth decade but still sprightly, and - though herself a law-abiding citizen - sufficiently intrigued by Sita’s life of crime to have offered up her spare home in the city as a venue for the con.
(“On condition,” Sita had said, “that I tell her all about it, in the fullest detail, once the deed is done. So should some ill-disguised surrogate for one of us turn up in the pages of a bodice-ripper eighteen months from now... we’ll know why”).
El hadn’t been there when, immediately after their meeting at the basement bar in Chelsea, Patricia Swift had made a beeline for the house - closing the quarter-mile distance at a clumsy but energetic sprint, according to Karen, who’d been keeping tabs on the woman’s movements.
Nor had she been there when Ruby, her already-wrinkled features buried below the weight of half of Sita’s makeup case and her spine collapsing under the small false hump secured to the inner lining of her cardigan, had very slowly opened the front door to find Swift waiting just outside - looking particularly rapacious, even by Ruby’s own, not un-mercenary standards.
But the description Ruby had passed along to her later had been vivid enough to make up for it.
“Hello there,” Swift had said, as if addressing the sticky-fingered child of an old acquaintance or an unfamiliar dog in the park.
“Can I help you?” Ruby had answered cagily, her voice like sandpaper and tobacco.
“I do hope so. Allegra Moncrieff sent me - you know, the lady from the bottle shop on Clifford Street?”
R
uby had frowned - the puckered, latex-loaded face she and Sita had worked to create wrinkling so completely with the effort of remembering that she’d had trouble, she told El, actually seeing out of her left eye.
“She was here before, weren’t she?” she’d said eventually, still wary of the stranger on her doorstep. “Few months back. Girl had a fit down the cellar - just about ran away, she did. Ain’t seen her since.”
“Yes - yes, she said been… taken ill. And she sends her apologies, of course.”
“Why’s she not here now, then?”
“I’m afraid she’s still a little unwell. It’s an… ongoing condition. Which why I’m here. She asked if I might step in for her, just this once. To finish up the sale.”
“The sale? What you on about, sale?”
“Of the Glenallan. The whisky she came to value? You do remember?”
Ruby had let her expression go blank; had held the blankness long enough for Swift to start to sweat under her own - only marginally less severe - makeup.
“The whisky,” she’d said eventually. “Right, yeah. The whisky.”
Swift’s relief, she told El, had been palpable; had come off the woman’s body in waves.
“Now,” Swift had said, picking up where she’d left off as she rallied, “Allegra mentioned she’d suggested a price already? But I must say that, while I obviously trust her judgement, I’ll need to take a very quick peek at the bottle myself, just to be absolutely sure of everything before I write the cheque.”
“A hundred grand,” Ruby had replied, with a sudden sharpness that had taken Swift quite by surprise. “That’s what I said to her. A hundred grand, and not a penny less.”
Swift had balked.
“One hundred thousand?” she’d said. “Allegra told me she’d offered you ten. That ten was what you’d asked for.”
“Yeah, well. That was before, weren’t it? Before my boy went and did a bit more homework. Spoke to one of them auctioneers, he did. And a hundred grand, that was what they said to him.”
“That’s… an awful lot more,” Swift had spluttered - though, Ruby could tell, she was doing the sums in her head, working out the difference between a hundred thousand pounds and the million the bottle was worth and still, in spite of her shock, liking where the calculation took her.
Still only ten percent of the value, El could imagine her thinking. Maybe less…
“You’ve gone quiet,” Ruby had observed. “Can’t stretch to a hundred, is that it?”
It had been a well-calculated dig; designed, El knew, to poke at Swift’s ego.
“Don’t you worry,” she’d added, with just a hint of sympathy. “We’ll take it up the auction house instead. I should think they’ll know what to do with it.”
That would have been what did the trick, El thought; what pushed Swift from a maybe to a yes. The threat of not only losing the Glenallan, but of losing it to someone else. And of the world believing that she’d lost because she couldn’t afford to play the game.
“No,” Swift had said abruptly. “No. A hundred should be… more than manageable.”
Ruby had scratched at her chin; rubbed a fingertip over one of the little artificial hairs Sita had fixed there with cosmetic glue.
“You makin’ an offer, then?” she’d asked.
“Well… we’ll have to see about that, won’t we?” Swift had told her, shifting gears from alarm and back to confidence with the sort of smoothness that, Ruby said, must have made her bloody good at coaxing the bored rich into trading a piece of their savings for a diet plan and a set of numinous mantras. “I will have to come through and have a look at it, before we can talk numbers.”
Ruby had grumbled a bit, for the look of it - then relented, and let Swift inside.
(“Off like a bleedin’ rocket the minute I’d invited her in,” Ruby said. “Didn’t even need me telling her where the cellar was. I’ve known bloodhounds go slower”).
The sight of the ’37 Glenallan - a clouded vision of dark amber in the oldest, most authentic bottle Karen had been able to lay hands on, encircled by the finest age-stained label their exceptionally talented document man had been able to forge and stoppered by an original mid-thirties cap - had brought Swift very close to tears.
“A hundred grand,” Ruby had repeated.
Swift had picked up the bottle, so gently and so tenderly she might have been scooping up a bird with a broken wing.
“Okay,” she’d whispered - looking, Ruby said, as if she’d have agreed to just about anything, if it meant she’d get to walk out of the house with the whisky under her arm.
There’d followed a long and, for Ruby, slightly embarrassing silence.
“What’s the best way to do it, then?” she’d asked, when it became clear she’d have to be the one to break it.
“To do what?”
“The money. I’m thinking you ain’t got that amount of cash just stuffed into your knickers.”
At this, Swift had finally untethered her gaze from the counterfeit Glenallan.
“I’m sorry. Cash?”
“Yeah. That’s what that other girl said, and I ain’t arguing. I don’t do cheques, me.”
“You want me to give you a hundred thousand pounds in cash?”
“Ain’t no other way of doing it. I don’t believe in banks.”
Swift had had the cash - El knew it, and so did Ruby and the others. Had it salted away in forty- and fifty-thousand pound increments across three different accounts, but she’d had it, and more.
“I’m not giving you cash for it,” Swift had remonstrated. “That’s absurd.”
“Then I ain’t giving you that whisky.”
Ruby had reached out a knotted, arthritic hand and, with startling speed, snatched the Glenallan from between Swift’s fingers.
Swift had gasped at the loss - a sharp, rapid intake of breath that had put Ruby in mind of a new mother on a maternity ward, protesting an interfering midwife’s removal of the child from her breast.
“I’ll get you the money,” she’d said, affronted. “Just not in cash. I’m not some sort of… gangster, handing over a briefcase full of used twenties whenever she buys something. I pay tax, for God’s sake. A purchase like this will need declaring.”
“You can declare it how you like. But it’s cash or nothing.”
Ruby was good at the job; always had been. She hadn’t blinked; hadn’t given an inch of ground.
And finally, Swift had caved.
“Alright,” she’d conceded, after an eternity. “Alright, then. Cash.”
Ruby had grinned, black-flecked canines showing through her thin, cracked lips in the one-bulb light of the cellar.
“Good,” she’d said. “There’s a Lloyds, a NatWest and a TSB on the high street - you should be able to get there ‘fore they shut, if you head off now.” She’d placed the faux-Glenallan back into its wooden lockbox, with a little of the reverence Swift had bestowed on it. “And don’t you worry - I’ll have this ready for you, soon as you come back.”
Swift was gone for almost two hours: longer by far than Ruby had anticipated. And while Ruby hadn’t been nervous, exactly - because she was sure, absolutely sure that they’d got her on the hook - she did confess later to having been a touch less relaxed than she normally would have been, waiting around for a mark to deliver a payoff; a feeling she’d attributed, at the time, to the wider sense of unease she’d been living with since the month before.
To her surprise, whatever low-level disquiet she had felt hadn’t dissipated when Swift had finally reappeared at the house, a brand-new patent leather briefcase in her hand and the faintest trace of a smile on her face that had reminded Ruby, for reasons she couldn’t quite get at, of the glassy-eyed leer of a Punch and Judy puppet.
“You comin’ in, then?” Ruby had asked her.
“In a minute,” Swift had replied, her eyes flickering off to the right and lacquered fingers tightening around the handle of the briefcase. “I just want to make sur
e... Before I hand this over, this money, I want to make absolutely sure of what I’m getting. So, to be clear: I give it to you, and you’ll give me the Glenallan? The 1937 Glenallan you showed me down in your cellar?”
It was wrong, Ruby had understood then; all wrong. The strange specificity of Swift’s words, recited as if for the benefit of an audience; the way she was gripping the case, like a woman terrified to let go; the darting eyes Ruby should have recognised sooner for what they were.
A tell.
“I ain’t so sure now,” she’d said, hesitantly - simultaneously hypothesising what might have happened to Swift, what she might have done in the time she’d been away from the house, and sketching out the beginnings of a plan to extricate herself from the situation before it escalated and she ended up in the back of a police car, or worse. “Had a bit of a headache come on, might need to go and have a lie-down. Perhaps come back tomorrow instead?”
At this, Swift’s pupils had scanned not right but left - as if, Ruby had realised, she was looking at something, or someone, just out of Ruby’s line of sight. Searching out answers from a stage-prompt. Seeking reassurance.
There’d been a rustle of feet and movement, to the side of the open door.
“It’s alright, Patricia,” Ruby had heard. “There’s no need to keep pretending. I think she’s worked out she’s been rumbled, don’t you?”
And there, all of a sudden, pushing Swift aside and marching forward until she’d been face to face with Ruby in the doorway, was Hannah D’Amboise - a triumphant smirk spreading from her mouth to the flints of her eyes like runoff from an oil slick.
Chapter 12
The Remembrance Page 10