Its gates were high and intimidating, its security ferocious, and Hannah had been in no doubt that Madera, or perhaps one of her minions, would have happily shot her dead on first sight, had she tried to make her way in surreptitiously. There was nothing for it, she’d told herself, but to be upfront in her intentions: to press the buzzer at the entrance, state her case, and hope Madera found it sufficiently compelling.
Madera had come down to the gates herself to investigate the unexpected visitor, which had taken Hannah aback; with the money the woman must have made over the course of a lifetime of doing what she did for the people she did it for, she could surely have afforded a retinue of staff. But that wasn’t the real shock.
Looking at Madera had been like looking right at Ruby Redfearn - though, perhaps, a Ruby Redfearn who’d known the benefit of a West Coast tan, a well-paid stylist and a very good moisturiser.
She was very slightly taller, Hannah had noticed as the woman came closer, and somewhat slimmer, her apple-shaped dimensions flattered by a well-cut summer dress and decent heels. Her hair was streaked honey blonde, expertly coloured - not grey and silver, as Redfearn’s was when the old harpy was off the clock - and the grooves age had carved so starkly around Redfearn’s mouth and forehead were, for the most part, absent, though Madera must have been somewhere close to seventy.
But the eyes were the same: a bright, clever azulejo blue, so sharp you could believe they might cut into you if you stared at them too long.
And the way she’d looked at Hannah from the other side of the gate; that curious, appraising, faintly threatening stare she’d issued through the gilded bars… it had been so terribly, terribly familiar.
“There something I can help you with?” she’d said - and the voice had sounded local, on the surface, but there was something below it, a pace to the delivery of the words that had seemed to belie the veracity of the accent.
And that - that had been enough for Hannah to be certain of who the woman was to Redfearn, who the woman must have been, even if she hadn’t been sure what to do with the knowledge.
“I’m James Marchant’s daughter,” she’d said, defaulting to the only line she’d thought stood a hope of persuading Madera to let her inside.
Madera had shifted her posture into something more aggressive.
“What about him?” she’d replied, and had Hannah been imagining it, or was the accent slipping just a little, letting just a sliver more of what had to be Cockney show through, like a glimpse of old paint brought to light by peeling wallpaper? “He’s on the run. Saw it on the news.”
“He’s dead. Murdered.”
The smallest note of surprise had registered on Madera’s face, then was gone as quickly as it had come.
“You sure about that?” she’d said. “Because the way I heard it, he stole a bunch of money from his own company and took off into the night.”
“You heard wrong. I was there when he died. I saw who killed him.” She’d paused - partly for effect, and partly to gauge whether the story she was telling was landing the way she’d needed it to. “That’s why I came. The people who did it - they’ve been talking. To the police. Not directly,” she’d added quickly, to preclude any irritating misunderstandings that might lead to her, for example, taking a bullet in the chest from a disgruntled hit-woman. “They haven’t been arrested, and frankly I doubt they ever will be. But they’ve been tipping off the Met. That’s what we call our police, in London.”
She’d been all but certain that the clarification was unnecessary, but hadn’t been able to resist needling her, this Redfearn doppelgänger - pressing her buttons for a reaction.
“I’m familiar with them, thank you,” Madera had all but growled back.
“Alright, then. Well, as I said: the people who killed my father, they’re talking to the Met. Drip-feeding them intel. And I’m afraid to say, your name came up.”
The look of surprise had returned to Madera’s face.
“My name?” she’d said, and had Hannah not already suspected what she’d suspected, then the emphasis - the stress not on my, but on name, as if there might have been a question mark over what name that could have been - would have been enough to tip her off.
“Yes,” Hannah had confirmed, moving in to close the deal. “So how about you let me inside, and I’ll tell you all about it?”
“You put her onto us?” Karen said, through gritted teeth. “This woman’s coming after us because you told her to? And now you’re here, not only admitting to it but telling us you want to team up so she doesn’t off us? You got some brass-neck, I’ll say that for you. ‘Cause if you think for one fucking second…”
“She’s a killer?” Ruby interrupted, her eyes turned to Hannah’s. “Our Dolly, that’s what she does now? Offs people for money, for men like Marchant?”
She sounded… not horrified, exactly, El thought, nor even disbelieving, but mournful. Like she’d expected the worst but was crestfallen nonetheless to discover that the worst really had come to pass.
“Yes,” Hannah said. Then: “Sorry.”
Madera had opened the gates, but wouldn’t let Hannah in the house - showing her, instead, to a grass and patio piazza around the back of the property, where a vast rectangular swimming pool jostled for space with cacti and white wicker recliners and a covered wooden barrel that Hannah had guessed to be a hot tub.
The old woman had taken a seat at the glass-topped table beside the pool but hadn’t invited Hannah to join her. Hadn’t said a word.
“I suppose I should start at the beginning,” Hannah began, pulling out another of the garden chairs and settling herself into it regardless.
“Who are they?” Madera had said, entirely disinterested in Hannah’s pleasantries, “and what have they been saying to the police about me?”
The accent had really wavered, then; had threatened to abandon the States altogether in favour of a return to the East End. It had to have been deliberate, Hannah reasoned; a woman like Madera wouldn’t make such an amateur slip-up.
She wants me to know where she’s from, Hannah had told herself. Does she think it’ll intimidate me, knowing she’s from my... what is it they call it, manor?
She really is just like her sister, if she does.
Because it had to be sisters, she’d thought. The resemblance between Madera and Redfearn had to be familial, and close-familial at that. They might even have been twins; twins ran in Redfearn’s family, after all. Those peas-in-a-pod sons of hers were proof of that.
The question was: would disclosing Redfearn as the ringleader of the offending party, the way she’d planned to - as the rat who was even at that moment singing like a canary down at Scotland Yard - help Hannah’s cause, or hinder it?
Would Madera be more or less inclined to act on Hannah’s information - and act in the swift and above all decisive way Hannah had hoped she would - if it was her own sister she’d have to act against?
“They’re con artists,” Hannah had answered, erring on the side of caution. “Grifters. They went after my father - that’s how I know them.”
“And they’ve been saying what about me to the old Bill?”
She’d been pure London then; no trace of LA about her at all.
Hannah had counted to ten - replaying the lie she’d been formulating since she’d made the decision to fly out to the States before committing to it by repeating it aloud.
“The con they were working on my father,” she’d said, keeping her tone steady and her eyes on Madera, “it took them to Ricky Lomax. I assume you came across him, at some stage?”
“Lomax? He’s dead too, ain’t he? Thought that cancer of his got him.”
“It did. But one of them got to him first - got him to talk. On camera, no less. And he, I’m afraid, was rather forthcoming about you. About the… work you did, for my father.”
Hannah, in truth, had had no sense at all of how many jobs Madera had taken on at her father’s behest: it might have been two, or it mi
ght have been twenty. None of her sources had been able to lay claim to that particular piece of information. The best she could do, she’d thought, was bluff it, if she were asked to expound on any of the finer points of that claim.
Madera hadn’t asked, though. Instead, her own gaze lingering not on Hannah but on the cool sapphire surface of the swimming pool, she’d said:
“What’s in it for you, telling me this? What is it you want out of it?”
For this question, at least, Hannah had prepared an answer - one that, unlike the others she’d given thus far, wasn’t entirely a lie.
“I want them dead,” she’d said, with perfect honesty. “All of them - every one of those bitches who took my father away. And I thought perhaps, if I told you what they’ve been up to, you might feel the same.”
Chapter 16
Chelsea, London, April 1998
“You sold us out,” Karen said wearily. “You sold us out to a fucking hitwoman. I don’t even know why I’m surprised.”
“It’s certainly in character,” Rose agreed. “But actually, my question isn’t at all dissimilar to the one this Madera woman asked of you. Why are you telling us this, and what do you expect to happen as a consequence? Inciting a professional killer to track us down and murder us isn’t at all the incentive to welcome you back into the fold with open arms you seem to think it is.”
“Would I be telling you at all if I didn’t want to help you?” Hannah told her, as if delivering the definitive rebuttal.
“What you’re telling us,” Rose replied, “if I’ve understood you correctly, is that you want to help extricate us from a situation you created in the first place. One that, had you not gone out to L.A. with the express purpose of having us done away with, wouldn’t, in fact, exist.”
“But I’m here now, aren’t I? Here and ready to help. That has to count for something, surely?”
“And why are you here?” Ruby said, her voice as cracked and strained as El imagined it had been when she’d been talking with Patricia Swift. “Cause I’d like to know, same as Rose. Same as our Dolly did.”
Hannah had at least the perspicacity to look embarrassed, though El had no faith whatsoever in her sincerity.
“I may have overestimated my own indispensability to the course of action I encouraged her to undertake,” she said, sounding faintly sheepish.
“What does that mean, then?” Ruby demanded.
“I pissed her off,” Hannah said, more flatly. “And now, I’m sorry to say, she wants me dead, too.”
They hadn’t told the police everything, Hannah had assured Madera, that day beside the pool. Some of what Ricky Lomax had disclosed to them - they were holding it back, as insurance. They hadn’t named Madera, not yet; nor had they passed along the details of the services she’d rendered for Marchant.
“But it’s only a matter of time,” she’d added. “Which is why it’s so imperative that we act now. Before it’s too late.”
“We?” Madera had said, her face still half-turned away from Hannah’s. A face, Hannah couldn’t help but think, so very like Ruby Redfearn’s, even in profile.
“You, then. If you, you know… decide you want to do something about it.”
Still Madera had kept her own counsel, leaving Hannah to fill the silence.
“You won’t find them like the other… problems you’re used to dealing with,” she’d gone on. “They’re resourceful. Well connected. And they’ve got money - more than enough to make themselves disappear, if they catch wind that they might be in the firing line.”
Madera had said nothing. Hannah might as well have been a piece of furniture herself - or an irritating bird, a parrot or a seagull, squawking into the breeze on the edges of Madera’s hearing but easy enough to tune out, with a small effort of will.
“They have video tapes of Lomax,” she’d said, a torrent of half-truths and almost-lies escaping from her mouth at a rate of knots. “Confessions. Their inside woman – she has them, at a cottage she keeps outside of London. You’ll need to destroy them, the tapes. The house too, perhaps, if that’s easier.”
“And you’ll need to find a way to cripple them financially, before you make a move. It’ll take time, planning – you mustn’t rush it. By all accounts, they’re drip-feeding the police the information… so you have time. A little of it, anyway. You’ll have to drain their accounts somehow, so they can’t just… I don’t know, hunker down in Bolivia on false passports for the rest of their days. They’ve all got them - false passports, I mean. They change their names as often as some people get a haircut, and they’ve got any number of contacts on tap to help them do it. For a price, I should say. That’s why it’s so important that you get to their money, you see - if you don’t, they’ll find a way to buy themselves out of trouble. Perhaps you know someone who might be able to do that? Take away their assets?”
She did have, and Hannah had known it. The details she’d been given were scant, but she’d remembered the basics: that among the small team of associates Madera and her muscle-man lieutenant recruited to pull off their larger-scale projects was a technical specialist, a young computer wizard who went by Pasadena in the digital realms he frequented. His real name might have been Huang, or it might have been Zhang - he’d used both in the past, according to Hannah’s sources, though either or both might have been pseudonyms. He’d purportedly worked in security for several of the larger Silicon Valley start-ups before leaving to go freelance, and thereafter even further off the map than he’d been previously.
Hannah had wondered idly, at the time, how he and Karen Baxter might have got along, had they known one another. Whether their paths might ever have crossed, on the internet if not out in the real world.
“Know a lot about what I ought to be doing, don’t you?” Madera had said - as if she were addressing the water, rather than Hannah.
“I just want to make sure you have all the information,” Hannah had told her, choosing her words carefully. “So you can decide for yourself what to do with it.”
“You’re not exactly helping your own cause here,” Rose said, adjusting her own stance into something very slightly more aggressive. El hadn’t seen her adopt it often - usually in defence of Sophie, and thankfully never directed at her - but she recognised it for what it was. If Hannah didn’t start offering them something useful, and soon, it might be Rose, and not Karen, who tried to punch her lights out.
“I’m getting there,” Hannah said. “And if you stop interrupting me every five seconds, perhaps I’ll get there sooner - have you considered that?”
“Who are they, then, these people?” Madera had asked - finally turning to look at Hannah as she spoke to her. “I notice you’ve not told me their names.”
Hannah had known the question would be coming; it was unavoidable. And she’d come out to the mountains fully prepared to throw them all to the lions: not just Redfearn and Sita and El bloody Gardener and Hannah’s own sanctimonious mess of a sister, but Redfearn’s sons, the ginger boy who’d put a ring on Karen Baxter, even the whining child Rose had managed to spawn with her dead gay husband… every one of them, and more.
Madera’s connection to Redfearn, though - it threw a spanner in the works, potentially. She’d have to navigate things cautiously; very cautiously.
“The main one is El Gardener,” she’d replied. “She’s the inside woman I mentioned - the one they sent in to swindle my father. There’s a technical person - a little thief named Karen Baxter. Rose Winchester - she’s the one who brought them all together in the first place. And Kat Morgan - she’s mostly a sort of prostitute, I believe.”
“That all of them, is it? A grifter, a thief, a call-girl and whatever this Rose is?”
Hannah had thought carefully before she spoke again.
“Not quite. There’s an older woman, Sita - I don’t have a clue about her surname, I’m not sure anyone does. And another one, too. The sort of… mastermind of the group, I suppose you’d call her.”
&
nbsp; “And she have a name, does she?”
Hannah had swallowed.
“It’s Redfearn,” she’d said. “Ruby Redfearn.”
There wasn’t time to hold her back. Rose was flying forward before El had even registered she’d gone, long before El’s own reflexes had kicked into gear.
The first punch Rose landed - a fist to the stomach with the full weight of her body behind it - had Hannah doubled over. The second struck her just below the jaw and sent her sprawling onto her shoulders on the kitchen floor, the fall generating an audible crack that had El suppressing a wince.
“You’d give her my daughter?” Rose screamed, standing over her - getting ready, El thought, to deliver a kick to her ribs. “My daughter? And El - you’d give her El?”
None of the others lifted a finger to stop her, El noticed. Ruby stayed propped up by the sink, as blank-faced as El had ever seen her, with Sita - her initial surprise and disappointment now apparently abated - resting a comforting hand on her upper arm. Karen was watching the fight unfold with what struck El as the detached interest of a spectator at a boxing match, and Kat… Kat was smiling, a feral glint in her eye that suggested more than a little vicarious pleasure taken in seeing Hannah beaten bloody.
It’s on me, El thought. If I don’t stop this, no-one else is going to.
She took five wary steps towards Rose, a defensive forearm already half-raised in preparation; fully expecting Rose to lash out before her rage dissipated and she remembered who El was, and that she wasn’t another enemy to fight. When she was close enough, she placed one, very tentative hand of her own on Rose’s lower back, below the fabric of her shirt; let it sit there, putting no pressure at all on the skin, until she felt Rose’s muscles begin to relax under her fingers.
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