Soho, London, 1977
“I don’t care who you are,” Dolly said, letting the Cockney creep back into her voice, sharpening the edges of the accent that three decades of California sunshine had sanded away, “I ain’t agreeing to nothing ’til your boss decides to ask me to my face. It’s the organ grinder I deal with, not the bleedin’ monkey.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the boy - Lucian, he was calling himself now, though he’d been plain old Luke, once upon a time - draw himself closer to her on the cushioned bench; getting ready to spring up at the bloke like a jack-in-the-box, if it came to it.
“I told you,” the bloke in front of them said, his own voice like two boulders descending from the upper slopes of a mountain, “I’m the one you got. The boss don’t do face to face meetings, not for this sort of caper. That’s what I’m here for. So it’s me you go through - take it or leave it.”
He was a giant of a man, too big by far for the tight suede sports coat and drainpipe trousers that currently constrained him. He belonged bare-chested in the ring, or out on the cobbles in a pair of hand bandages, or stood on guard by the velvet rope of a West End nightclub. Not squeezed into a corner booth at a Chinese restaurant on Greek Street, playing middleman for a guv’nor too scared or too concerned about what the rest of the world thought of him to get his own hands dirty.
His name was Lomax; first name Rocky or Ricky, something like that. But who he was didn’t matter, he’d told them early on in the meeting. What mattered - what it’d do them well to pay attention to - was who he worked for. Who the boss was, that’d send his minion out to commission a hit like this on his behalf.
Marchant. James Marchant.
Lomax had said it like they’d know immediately who he was; like the sound of the two words together would send shockwaves through them. In truth, neither Dolly nor Lucian - or so she’d judged, from the look on the boy’s face at hearing the name - had any idea. Though if this Marchant, whoever he turned out to be, could afford to keep a block of granite like Lomax on the payroll, and had pockets deep enough to accommodate the considerable fees Dolly and Lucian charged for the performance of their duties, then he was probably a man worth knowing. Knowing about, at any rate.
“Think we’ll have to leave it, then,” Dolly said, sliding herself across the cushion and out of the bench and freeing Lucian up to do the same.
It wasn’t a bluff. They’d had a good year, made some solid investments, and they could walk away from Lomax and his guv’nor, she knew, without it making even a dent in their nest-egg. But Lomax reacted like it was; like she’d been wrestling with him, sparring, and had got him in a choke-hold so tight it left him no choice but to tap out on the mat.
“Hold up,” he said, not standing but extending his arm towards them and flattening his palm outwards, like he was stopping traffic. He sounded hot and bothered, too - worried that they’d leave, and he’d never see them again. “Hold up. I’ll ring him, alright? Wait here, and I’ll go and ring him. Tell him what you said and see if I can get him to come out.”
Interesting, she thought, as Lomax wrenched himself loose from the booth and strode - she could see through the glass of the restaurant window - across to the red phone box on the stretch of pavement where Greek Street met Old Compton Street. This Marchant… he must really want us for the job.
She made a note to herself to press Lomax on why, when he came back. She - and now Lucian too - had a reputation, back in Los Angeles, and she didn’t think she’d be flattering herself too excessively if she said that she, especially, was the first in her particular field that certain influential people would reach out to, whenever they needed her type of work doing, and doing well.
But she hadn’t realised this reputation had stretched any further East than Nevada. She’d stayed away from London for a long time before the promise of this job and its very hefty payday - not to mention the first-class flights and five-star accommodations Lomax had arranged for them - had brought her back home. Stayed away by design. She might’ve still had family there, if you could still call them that when you’d hadn’t said a word to them for thirty years or more; and alright, yes, she’d made a point of keeping a very distant eye on her sister, seeing how things worked out for her. But she had no ties to the place anymore; no clutching roots.
Whoever had told this Marchant about her, about her and Lucian and what they had to offer… they’d heard it from someone in California. Must have done.
And if he’d been looking that far afield for talent and avoiding the plethora of domestic boys and girls peddling their wares on his doorstep… then he had to be more paranoid than most about word getting out that he was hiring.
Which meant that the job, whatever it was, was very big, very risky, or very, very sensitive.
Whatever Lomax said to his boss, it did the trick: Marchant agreed to meet them.
“Not here, though,” Lomax had said, when he’d huffed and puffed his way back to the booth in the restaurant, smelling as if he’d chain-smoked the best part of a pack of fags while he’d been in the phone box. “Too public.”
They’d driven out of Soho onto Oxford Street, the three of them packed uncomfortably into Lomax’s little yellow Porsche - passing the Beaux-Arts columns of Selfridges and the dirty white carvings on the Marble Arch and a dozen other landmarks she hadn’t seen since she was a kid as they moved out West towards Ealing, to the empty house in Acton where Marchant had insisted they meet.
“It’s one of his rentals,” Lomax told them, somewhat elliptically, as they passed the Westway over Paddington - then had lit yet another fag, blown a stream of smoke through the crack in his window and kept his mouth shut for the rest of the journey.
The house was a shabby thirties semi not far from the Hanger Lane roundabout, free of furniture and fittings and looking to Dolly as if it hadn’t seen a tenant for months, possibly years. There was nowhere to sit, so they stood while they waited for the man himself to make an appearance, every bulging muscle in Lucian’s body tense as piano wire and her own jaw starting to clench with impatience.
There were no apologies from Marchant when he eventually arrived - braking his MG to a juddering stop on the driveway and stamping through the unlocked front door with the petulant, slightly sulky air of a spoilt child forced against his will to attend a gathering of distant relatives.
He was a decent-looking bloke, with his blue eyes and long Roman snout and thick dark hair parted off to the side, though no more her type than Lomax: too full of himself, too disdainful. She’d have known he was rich, even if she’d no more than passed him on the street: everything about him was tailored, manicured, precise in a way that only money could buy. Even the cologne he had on smelled expensive: Parisian, rather than something bought off a trader down the market.
“You called?” he said, the nasal twang to the not-really-a-question so smug it made her want to loosen his teeth with the point of her elbow.
“Wanted to see who we were dealing with, before we signed on the dotted line,” she told him, keeping her cool. “I expect you know a bit about that yourself, man like you?”
She looked him dead in the eye as she spoke, neither smiling nor scowling but fixing him with the sort of stare that Lucian had told her, in one of his rare jovial moments, made it clear she couldn’t’ve cared less if the person she was looking at lived or died - and that if she had to kill them herself, then so be it.
He met her gaze for all of half a second, then looked away - perhaps realising, she thought, that he’d bitten off more than he could chew in trying to intimidate her.
“Fine,” he said, sighing, his bravado folding like a deck of cards. “If you must. Here I am, then. Were there questions you wanted to ask me, or did you simply want to confirm my existence to your satisfaction?”
Now she smiled, just a little bit; let out the smallest flash of the grin Lucian had once said reminded him of the giant barracudas he used to fish for with his stepdad.
&
nbsp; “We got a few questions for you, yeah,” she answered. “Don’t we, Lucian?”
This was the boy’s cue. She liked to get him doing the talking these days, once she’d set out their stall. It made him feel useful, feel part of the proceedings; stopped him getting restive.
Getting resentful.
“Who is he, this guy you want us to do for you?” he asked, still sounding like a choirboy impersonating Brando despite his best efforts. “And why us? Seems a lot of trouble to go to, flying us all the way out here for something you could’ve got done cheaper, closer to home.”
“How much information do you need, to be able to do your job?” Marchant replied - speaking not to Lucian but to Dolly.
“A name,” she said, hoping the boy’s nose hadn’t been put too far out of joint by the obvious dismissal. She’d have to remedy it later, if it had been. “An address. Bit of a sense of his comings and goings, if you’ve got ‘em.”
“And an answer to that last question, if you don’t mind,” Lucian added, asserting himself.
Marchant sighed again.
“His name is Saul Bellman,” he said. “Ricky here can give you the address. I’m not entirely sure of his day-to-day movements, but I daresay we can find out for you, if it’s absolutely necessary that you know them.”
Bellman, she thought. Bellman. She’d heard that name before, somewhere - and recently, too.
Then it hit her.
“Bellman,” she said slowly, drawing out the syllables - remembering the very cursory bit of background she’d read on Marchant on the flight out of LAX, the handful of newspaper cuttings Lucian had managed to get hold of. “Ain’t that your wife’s name, Bellman? Her maiden name, I should say.”
She could actually hear Lomax’s surprise; the quick, sharp intake of breath from his wheezing lungs. Marchant, though, was that bit more composed - as if he’d expected them to know everything about him, about his wife and kids and background.
“It is, yes,” he told her. “And since I assume discretion is rather essential in your line of work, and since you may very well know already anyway - Saul Bellman is her father. My father-in-law.”
It wasn’t much of a revelation. A man wanting his father-in-law out of the way, it seemed to her, was an entirely valid justification for engaging her services; one she’d come across more than once before.
Lucian was greener, though; still apt to be taken aback by some of the things he heard and saw. He didn’t say anything - he knew better than to do that, in front of a client - but Marchant had shocked him, she could tell.
“Good,” Dolly said. “Should make things easier for us on the access front, if he’s someone close to you.”
“It can’t look like… what it is,” Marchant said, with just a touch more urgency. “You’ll need to frame it as an accident. Natural causes, ideally, if that’s an option. He’s a big man, not in the best of health. I can’t see anyone arguing with the coroner, if he were to come down with a heart attack.”
She looked to Lucian - more so he’d feel included than because she had any need of his take on the situation - and he shrugged.
“We can do that, I guess,” he said.
“There can’t be any suggestion at all of foul play,” Marchant added. “I hope we’re clear on that. No suggestion whatsoever. I can’t have anyone asking questions. And as to your question, earlier…” He hesitated. “There are certain things Ricky and I are able to deal with in-house, so to speak. And certain other things that require us to do not much more than bring in… outside contractors. Local ones.”
“Occasionally, though, we find ourselves in need of a more… specialist approach. And I can’t imagine it will surprise you to learn that we were hesitant to call on one of our London contacts. They’re good men, decently competent for the most part, but they’re not renowned for their circumspection. Unlike you, that is.”
He looked, again, directly at Dolly.
“Didn’t realise our good names had travelled quite so far over the ocean,” she said.
“I assume that’s false modesty, but just in case: it has. Your name certainly came up more than once, when Ricky here started making his initial enquiries across the pond for someone who might be willing to travel. And it helps, of course, that you’re a Londoner yourself, even if you have been somewhat displaced. Saul knows this city and half the people in it like the back of his hand. Your knowledge of the geography of the place is a definite advantage. I’m not sure I’d trust an American alone to get things done here with quite the same finesse. No offence intended,” he added, finally throwing a glance Lucian’s way.
“Whatever, man,” Lucian answered, more bored now than sullen and aggrieved - though Dolly thought it might have a been an act.
“This Bellman,” Dolly said - wanting, now she’d heard what she’d been after, to have this part of the conversation over with, so she and the boy could talk money with the organ grinder’s monkey and get on with the job they’d been brought over to do in the first place. “Your wife’s old man. What’s wrong with him, health-wise? Just his heart?”
“That we know of. Though it wouldn’t surprise me if there were other things, too - things he’s kept from Liz. He’s looking more and more like Henry VIII these days.”
“And what do you mean exactly when you say natural causes? D’you actually want us to give him a heart attack, or you alright with something like an accidental overdose, if it looks the part?”
Marchant took a moment to consider this, his handsome face striking the contemplative pose of a Hellenic statue.
“You know,” he said, when he’d thought enough to have reached a conclusion, “I’m not sure I care, one way or the other. As long as it’s clean and there are no repercussions… from my perspective, you can do with him whatever you like.”
Chapter 13
Chelsea, London, April 1998
“Did you have to hit me quite there?” Hannah complained, pressing a folded sheet of toilet roll against one bleeding nostril and pinching disconsolately at the bridge of her nose. “I’ll have a black eye for weeks. You couldn’t have gone for the ribs or the abdomen? Somewhere it wouldn’t show?”
“Cry me a fucking river, bitch,” Karen growled back at her - hovering protectively over Kat, who sat hypnotised at the kitchen table, her slightly misted gaze fixed on the swelling beginning to rise around her knuckles, as if she couldn’t quite bring herself to believe what she’d done.
El could very well believe it, though. She’d only been surprised that Karen hadn’t taken a swing at Hannah, too.
It wasn’t lost on her, the irony of all seven of them gathered together again in a West London kitchen - albeit one with more shades of fuchsia and a good deal more chintz than there’d ever been in Rose’s place in Notting Hill. Nor that the atmosphere between them now was only marginally less strained - and their tempers scarcely less seething - than they’d been two years earlier. Two years earlier, when Hannah stood beside her pistol-wielding father as he held them hostage, Karen tied up on the tiles with a broken jaw - and Kat had lain unconscious in a hospital bed in Islington with a traumatic brain injury and a piece of her skull missing.
There was something of the Western gunfight standoff about the arrangement of their bodies in the room now, El thought: Sita positioned next to Ruby by the sink, in an uncanny echo of the way the two of them had stood in the moments before Ruby had sunk one of Rose’s kitchen knives into the meat of Marchant’s neck; Karen standing sentry over Kat; Rose standing rigid in the doorway, El now beside her with a steadying hand on her hip. And Hannah - Hannah in the epicentre of the action, all six pairs of their eyes locked on her, watching her every move.
“We’re all here,” Ruby said, the pent-up venom rendering her speech so guttural El could hardly make out what she was saying, “just like you wanted. So what now? What are you after? ‘Cause whatever it is, we ain’t inclined to give it to you.”
Hannah withdrew the bloody tissue from under he
r nose, sniffed unnecessarily loudly, and turned her attention to Ruby.
She looked at once both exactly as El remembered her, and entirely different. Her physical characteristics were much the same: her body still tall and angular, almost gaunt, though now covered by a dark suit and black leather trench coat instead of head-to-toe Gucci, Prada and Chanel. Her hair was cut, still, into the same thick Anna Wintour bob, now dyed a solid copper red very nearly the same shade as Rose’s; her cheekbones still jutted like daggers from the pale skin of her face. But her demeanour, the set of her shoulders and the way she carried herself - these were less familiar.
For much of the brief time El had known her, Hannah D’Amboise had been a mouse: shy, timid, only ever really speaking when spoken to, swallowing down her never-ending grief at what she’d characterised as the loss of her husband and unborn child. Only at the end of their acquaintance, that afternoon in Rose’s kitchen, had what El had come to think of as the real Hannah shown herself: the murderous, sociopathic cuckoo in the nest whose obsession with the father who’d abandoned her even before she was born had inspired her to win their trust, so that she could better betray them later.
El thought she could see it on Hannah’s face, now she knew that it was there, that it had been there all along: the arrogance, the cruelty, the contempt. The abject disdain for anything and anyone she couldn’t use, in some way, to her own advantage.
Her utter loathing for the six of them.
“You may want to reserve judgement on what you will and won’t give,” she told Ruby. “At least until you’ve heard my proposition. The sad truth of it is, you need me. She’s coming for you, you see. And without me in your corner… you really don’t stand a chance.”
“It’s alright, Patricia,” Hannah had said earlier, at the front door, stepping in between Swift and Ruby. “We’ve got enough to go on. You needn’t keep pretending.”
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