The Remembrance

by Natalie Edwards

  “What the bleedin’ hell is this?” Ruby had snarled, stepping forward herself until she and Hannah were eye to eye, practically nose to nose. “And what do you think you’re doing, turning up here?”

  Hannah had pulled something from the front of her trench coat: an already open leather wallet embossed with a Metropolitan Police stamp, into which had been slotted a warrant card so convincing Ruby herself had wondered, just for a second, whether it might be real.

  “My job, Mrs Redfearn,” Hannah had replied, in a bored-sounding, jobsworth drone Ruby had reckoned she must have borrowed from one of the actors off The Bill. “Lucky for Miss Swift here, we’ve been keeping tabs on you for a while. And I’m sorry to have to tell you, but - you’re nicked.”

  (“If I’d had a bit more about me when it happened,” Ruby told El later, “I’d’ve pissed myself laughing at that. It weren’t The Bill she’d be watching - it was the bloody Sweeney”).

  “Nicked, am I?” Ruby had snapped back at her, baring her blackened teeth. “How’d you reckon that, then?”

  “Do you… still need me, Detective?” Swift had asked Hannah, unusually timorous.

  Neither Ruby nor Hannah had bothered to look at her as she’d spoken; had continued instead to bore holes into one another with the aggressive intensity of a pair of warring lionesses on the savannah.

  “No,” Hannah had said, when she’d eventually broken eye contact. “You’ve been very helpful, but I can take it from here. Someone from the station will be in touch to let you know when to come in and give your statement.”

  “Great. Thank you, that’s… great.”

  Swift had begun to sidle away, then stopped herself, apparently remembering something she hadn’t done, but was obliged to do.

  “The case,” she’d added, gesturing down at the black briefcase still in her hand. “Do you still…?”

  “Yes, please,” Hannah had told her, holding out a hand of her own. Swift passed her the briefcase - with, Ruby had considered, no small degree of reluctance, her fingers tightening to claws around the handle before she finally released her hold.

  “And I’ll…?” Swift had continued.

  “Get it back? Yes. Obviously. But I’ll need one of my team to take it back to the station to be processed before we can release it. As we talked about.”

  Swift, Ruby had thought, had seemed conflicted: instinctive deference to authorities more powerful than her ramming up against an equally instinctive reluctance to part with a case stuffed full - or so Ruby had guessed - of a king’s ransom’s worth of her own money.

  “And someone from the station will…?”

  “Call you with the details of how to reclaim it once we’ve finished with it, yes,” Hannah had answered, impatiently.

  She’d turned back to face Ruby; behaving, to all intents and purposes, as if Swift had removed herself from the equation already.

  “Great,” Swift had said, somewhat weakly. “Great. I’ll go, then.”

  And, no longer able to pretend she hadn’t been summarily dismissed, she’d scurried away from the house - leaving Ruby and Hannah still staring at one another in molten silence on the doorstep.

  “What she?” Karen spat, the words fired Hannah’s way like hollow-point bullets. “What are you even fucking talking about, she?”

  “You know,” Hannah told Ruby. “You must do. Surely.”

  “Only thing I know,” Ruby answered, the veins in her neck visible even through her layers of body makeup, “is I want back what you took off me. Off all of us.”

  Hannah groaned, a low exasperated exhalation; bent down to the briefcase she’d been keeping next to her, laid it down flat on the floor and kicked it over towards Ruby.

  “God,” she said, “it’s always money with you people, isn’t it? Well, fine. Have it your way.”

  “What’s in it?” El asked her, staring at the briefcase but making no move to pick it up or open it or look inside. None of them did, she noticed.

  “An early birthday present. Or a down-payment - whatever you want to call it. I can’t get you your money back, not immediately. I don’t have the capability, let alone… well. I suppose we’ll come to that. But since you’re all so obsessed with getting your just rewards… here. Have at it.”

  “There’s cash in there?” said Karen, suspiciously.

  “A hundred thousand. Everything that appalling self-help woman was gearing up to give you for that bottle of cold iced tea in the cellar. Or is it muddy water? I really have idea how you go about these things. Anyway, it’s all there.”

  Still, not one of them made a move towards the case.

  “You didn’t answer the question,” Sita said, cool but calm. “Who is this she you suppose is coming for us? And what possible interest could you have in seeing us forewarned?”

  “Believe it or not,” said Hannah, “I want to help you. Help myself too, of course. But it so happens that at the moment, helping you is the best way of achieving that last end. Who’d have thought it?”

  “I don’t believe it,” Ruby scowled. “Not one damn bit of it.”

  “You ought to. All that money you lost, your precious pots of gold? I’m the only chance you have of getting it back. And of staying alive, I might add.”

  “You’re saying someone intends to hurt us?” Rose asked. “Someone other than you, I mean.”

  “No, sister dear, I’m saying someone intends to kill you. All of you. And if you don’t start listening to me and do something about it, they almost certainly will kill you.”

  “And you’re swooping in to save us, are you?” This was from Kat, still transfixed by her own sore knuckle at the kitchen table. “You’ll have to excuse me if I find that a little bit tough to swallow.”

  Hannah issued a long, dismissive snort from her injured nostrils.

  “Good heavens, are you still hung up on that little knock to the skull you took? People change, you know. And they’re never just one-note performers. What’s that Whitman quote? I contain multitudes. I’m capable of doing more than just hitting people over the head with blunt instruments. Just as I’m sure there’s more to old Ruby here than stabbing perfect strangers in the throat with a carving knife.”

  By the sink, Ruby winced, the exaggerated wrinkles of her face shifting into something like regret at the memory.

  “Look,” Hannah continued, more placatingly. “You’ve lost everything. It’s been taken from you, and you’re sore from it - I understand that. But as bad as you think things have been, they’re only going to get worse if you don’t act. She’s gunning for you now. Really gunning for you.”

  “Who?” Karen was yelling now, her own hands curling into fists that El had no doubt she’d be using, if Hannah tried her patience any further. “Who the fuck are you talking about?”

  Hannah looked to Ruby; waited until Ruby was looking back at her before she spoke again.

  “Are you going to tell them,” she said, “or shall I?”

  “Tell ‘em what?” Ruby said, her own voice raised to a shout. “What is it you think I know that them lot don’t?”

  Hannah seemed for a moment genuinely bewildered.

  “You mean to say you don’t know?” she said, incredulous.

  “No, I don’t bleedin’ know. And I’m about this close to punchin’ your lights out myself if you don’t spit it out.”

  Hannah smiled; shook her head, ruefully.

  “You know, Ruby,” she said, “everyone always says how clever you are, how good you are at covering all the angles and factoring in the possibilities… I really thought you’d worked it out. But we’ve all been overestimating you, apparently. Your sister - she’s the one I’m talking about. Your sister is the one who’s coming after you.”

  Chapter 14

  Bethnal Green, London, April 1941

  She could never remember the exact moment she stopped speaking - whether it was straight after Uncle Jim had come and got her from the house in Camden, when he’d told her about her Mu
m and Dad and the bomb that hit The Happy Angler, or whether it was later, once the news had properly sunk in.

  No-one noticed, at first: Uncle Jim was out doing whatever it was he did for a living every hour of the day, and Dolly had kept her cards close to her chest for as long as Ruby could remember, so it wasn’t a surprise she didn’t want to talk to her baby sister about whatever it was she’d seen happen at the pub that night.

  (“She’s in shock,” Uncle Jim had said, when the ARP warden had brought Dolly home, caked in soot and wrapped in blankets and half deaf from the force of the blast, and they’d got her washed and settled down in bed with a hot cup of tea. “Let her be. She’ll tell us what she’s got to tell us, when she’s ready.”

  She never did tell them, though - not then, and not after).

  It wasn’t as if she or Dolly had lessons to go to, or teachers checking up on them. Half the kids they knew had been evacuated; what had been their school on Starcross Street had been bombed out not long after the war started and never rebuilt, and the one closest to Uncle Jim in Bethnal Green was shuttered up, so there were precious few people about for her to talk to anyway. Ruby spent most of her days reading, and making up stories for herself, and listening to the old men barter with the slick-haired spivs down Loot Alley for bags of sugar and bottles of gin. And Dolly hadn’t been what you’d call chatty herself, even before.

  When Uncle Jim did work out Ruby had been keeping schtum, he tried to bring her out of herself by getting her to come out with him, “on the job” - though she hadn’t known what he’d meant by that, not then. But she’d shook her head no, and gone back to reading the battered copy of Ozma of Oz she’d found on a park bench outside a church in Russell Square, and he’d let it go.

  The second time he tried, a couple of weeks on from his first attempt, it wasn’t her he wanted to talk about.

  “Any chance you know what’s up with that sister of yours?” he asked, settling himself down in the chair next to hers.

  She shrugged and looked down at the carpet. She knew why he was asking: she might not have had much to say, the last couple of months, but she had two good eyes and two good ears on her, and she knew something was up with Dolly. Knew she’d been sneaking ‘round even more than usual, stopping out all night then coming back to Uncle Jim’s with more colour than she had any right to in her cheeks and grinning like the cat that got the cream.

  She was out robbing, Ruby reckoned: doing over corner shops or houses while the streetlights were off and there was no-one about outside to catch her doing it. It explained how pleased with herself she’d seemed lately, in spite of everything - in spite of what the pair of them had lost. And all the odds and ends she’d been collecting in her jewellery box under the bed, the one she thought Ruby didn’t know about: the pearl earrings and gold necklaces and little silver brooches that looked like they might have been nicked from the dressing room of a Duchess.

  “Something ain’t right, I know that much,” Uncle Jim continued. “I don’t know what she’s got herself into, but I seen what she brought back in the house with her last night, what she trod on the kitchen floor ‘fore she cleaned it up. It was blood, girl. Blood, all over the soles of her boots. And not just a bit of blood, neither. Looked like she’d been pacing up and down a slaughterhouse.”

  “Blood?” Ruby said, before she even knew she was saying the word out loud.

  If Uncle Jim was surprised that she’d chosen there and then to break her silence, he didn’t show it.

  “That’s right. Blood. You tellin’ me you don’t know nothing about it?”

  “No,” she whispered - wondering if he knew about the jewellery box, if he’d put the pieces together and worked out what Dolly had been doing, the same way she had. If the whole conversation was his way of getting her to admit it.

  “Right, then,” he said, getting up from the chair as abruptly as he’d sat down. “Suppose I’ll have to have a word with her myself, then, won’t I?”

  Except he didn’t get the chance.

  Ruby sat up all that night in the living room, waiting for Dolly to come back - waiting for Uncle Jim to ask her the same questions he’d asked Ruby, for Dolly to confess where she’d been going and what she’d been doing and who she’d been stealing from. But Dolly - she never did come home. Not that night, nor the next, nor any of the long nights after.

  Chapter 15

  Chelsea, London, April 1998

  “What’s she want?” Ruby asked - her head down and expression entirely unreadable.

  “What was that?” Hannah said.

  “I said: what is it Dolly wants?”

  Hannah frowned.

  “Dolly? Is that what you called her?”

  “What I called her?” Ruby raised her head, looking directly at Hannah. Her eyes were bloodshot, El saw - in a way that suggested she’d been crying, or that she’d got herself so worked up she’d managed to burst a blood vessel. “It’s her bleedin’ name.”

  “Not now it isn’t. Her name’s Thea - or that’s the name she’s been using, anyway. Since at least the eighties, was my understanding. Thea Madera.”

  Ruby took a moment to absorb this - then whistled, softly, through her teeth.

  “Thea Madera,” she said, under her breath. “Thea Madera. Christ.”

  She hesitated again, rolling her eyes heavenwards - castigating herself, or her sister, or the universe itself, El wasn’t sure.

  “Her name,” she added, more loudly, “her full name, the one she was given… it’s Dorothea. Dorothea Wood. Thea for short, I s’pose, though none of us called her that and she never used it for herself, least the way I remember it. And Madera - that’s wood in Spanish, ain’t it? So Dolly Wood, Thea Madera… they’re the same name, just about. Dolly, she ain’t changed her name – she’s just messed about with it. Turned herself into a bleedin’ word game.”

  She let her eyes drop again, her body sagging against the sink top.

  “A sister?” Sita said quietly. “You never mentioned a sister.”

  She sounded sad, El thought; hurt, even. And maybe that was understandable. The two old women lied to the rest of the world constantly; had done for as long as El had known them. But she’d been under the impression that they very rarely lied to each other, or held back very many secrets from one another. Ruby, El knew, was one of the very few people Sita trusted with her life.

  “No,” Ruby replied, just as quietly. “No, don’t suppose I did. Left not long after my Mum and Dad died, didn’t she? I was nine. ‘Course, she’d only just turned thirteen herself then, not that she let that stop her. She just sort of… upped and went one night. Went out and never come home. Ain’t seen hide nor hair of her since. Truth be told, I’d more or less convinced myself that she were dead an’ all.”

  “She just… left?” Rose said, horrified. “At thirteen?”

  She’s thinking of Sophie, El realised. Sophie, walking out the door and never coming back. Or worse, being taken, and never seen again.

  “She weren’t exactly a kid,” Ruby told her. “The things she’d been up to, just before she legged it… Well, I’m pretty sure she could look after herself, put it that way.”

  Karen raised a hand, as if seeking permission to speak, then very deliberately cleared her throat.

  “Sorry if I’m coming off insensitive for asking,” she said, sounding not remotely apologetic, “but I’m not seeing what this - no offence, Ruby - antique bit of family gossip has got to do with why this Thea bird’s coming gunning for us now. Especially if she’s not seen you in fucking forever. Or what that bitch is doing tangled up in any of it.” She pointed a disparaging finger Hannah’s way. “Or, come to think of it, what’s she’s doing here now, sounding the alarm about it.”

  “Are you looking for enlightenment?” Hannah asked her, mock-sweetly. “Or did you just want to get that off your chest?”

  Karen really was going to punch her soon, El thought.

  “If you have something to tell us,” R
ose said, sounding to El somewhere between furious and exasperated, “then say it. Say it or go.”

  Hannah tutted.

  “Honestly,” she said, “you’re no fun at all, are you? But fine. I suppose I do owe you some sort of explanation. Are you all sitting comfortably? No? Well, no matter. I’ll just have to begin anyway.”

  She’d banked on Charlie Soames and his vendetta being the hammer-blow to bring them down - to get them all locked up, at the very least.

  It had been a bitter disappointment, seeing that plan fail; more disappointing still to see them revel in their little triumph at Karen’s wedding to that skinny ginger boy who could have been the third Proclaimer.

  Fortunately, because Hannah wasn’t a complete idiot, she’d had a back-up: a trump card she’d been holding back, should the very worst transpire.

  Her father, she’d gathered from all those years of watching and waiting in the wings, had relied on his fixer to do the majority of his dirty work - that Minotaur Lomax, who’d spilled his deathbed guts to Rose for a pitiful sack of blood money. It was Lomax her father had charged with cleaning up what messes there were to clean; with making disappear what problems there were to resolve.

  But occasionally, he’d needed more than Lomax alone could provide. And at times like those, he’d call on Madera.

  Reliable information on her - and on her brawny bullock of a henchman, and the scattering of other specialists in her inner circle - had been painfully hard to extract, but worth its weight in gold. And when Hannah had paid off the many, many informants and investigators and former police detectives who’d fed her the disparate snapshots she’d pieced together herself into a cohesive picture, she’d been left with three invaluable pieces of information: who Thea Madera was, what specifically she’d done for Hannah’s father, and where she might be found.

  Hannah’s efforts to make contact with Madera had taken, her - ironically, given Ruby and Co.’s recent pilgrimage to San Francisco - to California: not to the Bay Area but to LAX, and from there to a Mediterranean micro-compound in the Santa Monica Mountains, so shaded by the hill and rock and Big Leaf Maple trees around it that Hannah would undoubtedly have driven straight past it, had she not known exactly where it was.