Chapter 18
West Hampstead, London, April 1998
“There are four of them,” Hannah said, sinking back into Ruby’s armchair like it was her own - indifferent, if not oblivious, to the mix of disapproval and outright loathing emanating from the others in the room. “That’s including Madera herself, by the way. It’s a very small circle of associates she keeps - she doesn’t seem to trust very many people at all. Can’t imagine why.”
“Who?” Rose asked, making no effort to disguise her revulsion. El had been only semi-convinced, before they left Harriet’s for Ruby’s flat that morning, that she’d decide not to come; that the prospect of spending a sustained period of time occupying the same space as Hannah would prove too off-putting for her, even with so much at stake.
That Rose had come, El thought, was probably a greater testament to her wanting to protect Sophie from any move Madera might make against them than to her belief that Ruby had made the right call, bringing Hannah in on whatever plan she was concocting. A plan, El couldn’t fail to observe, that Ruby had yet to share with the rest of them.
Kat, unsurprisingly, had declined the invitation to attend.
(“Just tell me what she says if it’s worth knowing, yeah?” she’d said, when El had caught up with her the previous day. “I can’t be doing it - sitting there with that bitch like we’re mates, like it’s all water under the bridge. I don’t know what the hell she’s thinking, Ruby. I get that you love her, and she’s a bit of a surrogate mam for some of you lot, but come on - even you’ve got to see that this is mental, surely?”)
“Who?” Hannah smiled sweetly at Rose, her freshly bruised face reshaping itself into an impression of genuine confusion. It was pretty convincing, El thought; she might even have believed it, had she not known Hannah better.
“Madera’s associates,” Rose snarled, her anger so thinly veiled that El wondered whether she might need to intervene again, in the event of another fist-fight erupting. “Who are they?”
“Oh, them. I see.” Hannah settled even further back into the chair, curling her bare feet under her body - the way Ruby herself tended to, in that same position. “I’ve told you about Carruthers, haven’t I?”
“You’ve told us you met him, and that he was a big bastard,” Ruby said - sounding more even-tempered than Rose but still distant, distracted, as if only a part of her was there with them in the room. “But that’s about it.”
“Right. Now, the important caveat about Carruthers - about all of them, actually - is that the information I was given was very, very piecemeal. And a lot of is unverified. I’d go as far as to say unverifiable, in some cases. But I believe it’s true.”
“Oh, well, if you think it’s true…,” Karen started - swiftly curtailing the remainder of the sentence before Ruby could tell her to pipe down.
“Anyway,” Hannah continued, glaring at Karen through swollen eyes, “I’m fairly sure Lucian Carruthers isn’t his real name. Unlikely though it sounds, there are no records of anyone of that name having been born, in California or anywhere on the West Coast, between 1955 and 1965 - which, given his current age, would be just about his bracket. Now, it’s possible that he was born elsewhere and simply moved to California later - but I’ve heard the man speak, and he sounds like one of the Beach Boys. More to the point: it’s not just the birth records that are missing. From what my investigators tell me, there was no Lucian Carruthers anywhere in California until the mid-seventies - when he would have been eighteen or so. Not at school, not at the doctor or the dentist or anywhere else you might have expected a boy to put up. There’s nothing; not so much as a library card. Lucian Carruthers, to all intents and purposes, only sprang into existence in 1976, when he turned up at the DMV with a social security number to apply for a driving licence.”
“What’s interesting, though, is that while there wasn’t a Lucian Carruthers anywhere in California in the sixties or early seventies, there was a boy named Luke Carter. Born and raised in Santa Monica, just outside of L.A. - not far, incidentally, from where Thea Madera was living at the time. An entirely unremarkable child, by all accounts, as if that means anything - at least until he went missing in the spring of 1973, just after he’d turned fifteen. Ran away from home one day, never to be seen again. Just like someone else we know, eh, Ruby?”
“Lot of kids run away,” Ruby said flatly. “Lot of kids never come back. Ain’t sure you should read too much into it, if that’s all you got.”
“And perhaps I wouldn’t, if that was all. But I’ve seen photos of Luke Carter - the ones his family gave to the police. And others too - some more private ones my contact out there was able to get hold of. More to the point, I’ve met Carruthers - had a chance to look at him in close quarters. And I’m sure, absolutely sure that he and Luke Carter are the same person.”
“And that means what, for our purposes?” Rose interjected.
“For God’s sake, will any of you people let me finish? Listen: if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that, sometime in the early seventies, when he was a teenager, Luke Carter and Madera crossed paths - and something happened that made him want to follow her wherever she was going. As an apprentice, perhaps? A sort of fledgling murderer? We know Lucian Carruthers has been working with her since at least ’77 - my guy talked to at least half a dozen people who remember meeting them both, back then. Which means, sister mine, that he’s probably as loyal to Madera as all of you are to Ruby here. It means that he’s not just her right-hand man - he’s her acolyte. And if she’s giving him orders, then you won’t get past him - or get him to give up on the idea of killing you all - through any sort of traditional incentive. You can’t bribe him or con him into giving her up.”
Ruby crossed her arms; shook her head, apparently rejecting Hannah’s conclusion.
“Everyone’s got levers. Everyone. It’s just about finding ‘em, that’s all.”
“Is it?” Hannah raised her hands - the previously manicured nails now chipped and bitten, El saw - in an if you say so gesture. “Anyway - that’s him. Carruthers.”
“And the rest?” said Karen. “There are four of them, you said.”
“Yes. I believe I’ve mentioned the tech person already - Pasadena? As I said, we’re very light on details on who he is. We know he’s identified himself by several names before: James Huang, Leo Zhang and Jacob Li are the three we’re certain of, but there are probably more, and I wouldn’t count on any of them being his birth name. He worked in IT security, or so he’s claimed before - but we only have the word of the people he’s spoken to online to corroborate that. People in chatrooms, IRC channels - you know, your sort of thing.”
“My sort of thing?” Karen’s hands were balling into fists, her palms apparently itching to reach out and slap Hannah across the face, or worse, and El found herself wondering yet again just how it was that the woman always succeeded in getting so completely under their skin.
“Yes. You know - the internet and things. Geek stuff, isn’t that what they call it? In any case, the important thing about Pasadena now is that he seems to be completely off the grid. It’s probably safe to assume that he’s still hooked up to a computer somewhere, talking to strangers in cyberspace and doing whatever he does for Madera and Carruthers. But he’s effectively untraceable. From a distance, anyway. Tracking him down, I suspect, will be a question of literally finding him: working out where he is, where his body is, and actually going there.”
“And where do you think that might be?” Rose enquired - seemingly calmer than she’d been, though El could see the effort she was exerting just to stay on an even keel.
“Search me, darling. Though if you want my opinion, I’d say we’re apt to find him wherever Madera and Carruthers are. She strikes me as a woman inclined to keep her collaborators close, for the duration of a job.”
The word job, in that context - the call-back to the sort of job Madera took on - sent a chill through El; reminded her of the very real danger they were in
, the very imminent threat of attack every one of them faced. And not just them: their family, their friends, their network. Dexter and Michael. Karen’s Fergus.
Sophie.
In the whirlwind of strangeness that had engulfed her more or less since the moment she’d slid her card into the cashpoint and found the balance of her accounts at zero - losing the money, losing her home, fusing her life with Rose and Sophie’s not in a penthouse apartment overlooking Hyde Park but in Harriet Marchant’s overstuffed living room – she’d failed, El realised, to fully reflect on the implications of what Hannah had told them. On the possibility, the probability that a group of strangers not only wanted them dead, but were entirely capable of making them so, at the moment of their choosing.
Making Rose dead. Making Sophie dead.
El wasn’t the maternal type; she’d always known as much. But even if she wasn’t exactly a mother to Sophie, even if she’d never feel the same unbreakable attachment to the kid that Rose did… she felt protective of her. Responsible for her. And the thought of something happening to her, of someone like Madera taking a shot at her for no reason beyond her connection to El and Rose and Ruby… it was close to unbearable.
More that that: if what she felt was even a fraction of what Ruby felt, knowing that her own sister was the one coming for her family, blood and found… well, maybe it made sense after all that Ruby had been so quick to listen to Hannah, to make that particular deal with the devil.
“And then, of course,” Hannah went on, “there’s the girl. That bloody circus freak.”
“Circus freak?” El said, concerned she might have missed an important part of the conversation while she’d been lost in stomach-churning reverie.
“I’m sorry, is that not the politically correct term? Contortionist, then. Tumbler? Whatever else you’d call a person capable of pulling their feet behind their ears without so much as a warm-up stretch.”
“She got a name, this girl?” Ruby asked.
“She does. And happily, in this case, we actually know it. It’s Lawton - Kerry Lawton.”
“And she was in the circus, was she?”
“She was an acrobat, if you can believe it. Rather an accomplished one, apparently. She played the casinos in Las Vegas in her heyday - trapeze, aerial straps, tightrope… real Cirque Du Soleil stuff. Martial arts, too: Wushu, Capoeira… if there’s a high kick and a backflip in there anywhere, then chances are it’s a discipline she’s mastered.”
“But now she works with our Dolly.”
“Exclusively, by all accounts. She stopped performing at twenty-eight - which sounds young, I realise, but apparently isn’t all that uncommon for people who do that sort of thing. They’re like gymnasts - they start early, but it’s more or less over for them by the time they’re thirty, so it’s not all that surprising she was looking for a career change. Though quite how she got into breaking and entering, I don’t know…”
“She’s a thief?”
“A cat burglar, of all things. I can’t tell you how long she’s been with Madera, or how often Madera uses her - it might be every fortnight or three times a year - but she does use her, whenever there’s a… let’s say a complicated logistical element to one of her commissions. Lawton’s very, very good with break-ins, as you might imagine. And not just the getting in, either. If there’s a lock to be picked or an alarm to be disabled, she’s the one you want to handle it. She’s rather like you, too, come to think of it,” she quipped, raising her eyebrows at Karen. “Or would be, anyway, if you performed your own stunts.”
“Carruthers, Pasadena and this Lawton,” Rose said. “That’s three. The fourth is Madera?”
“It is.” Hannah yawned; covered her bruised mouth with her hand.
She’s knackered, El thought. Absolutely exhausted. Oh, she’ll try to pass it off as boredom or nonchalance… but she’s not been sleeping.
And I’ll bet it’s fear that’s been keeping her awake.
“What did you find out about her?” Ruby asked. “About our Dolly?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Ain’t that the whole point of you being here, to fill us in on who’s coming after us? Damn right I want to know. I want to know bleedin’ everything you’ve got to give.”
“Have it your way. But don’t say I didn’t warn you, if you don’t like what you hear. I’m only the messenger.”
“Just the messenger who rained all this shit down on us in the first place,” Karen reminded her. “None of us’d even be on Madera’s radar if you hadn’t gone shooting your gob off, trying to get her worked up.”
“Let her speak,” Ruby told Karen. “You need to be listening to this. We all do.”
“Thank you,” Hannah said, glowering at Karen. Then, to Ruby, she continued:
“As to Madera - I suppose I ought to start at the beginning. Or at what I thought was the beginning, before I knew who she was. Who she was to you, that is.”
“Now, the furthest back my people were able to go, when they were trying to trace her, was 1946 - which would have been, what? Five years after she left you?”
Ruby nodded, her face a carefully composed blank.
“It seems as if she was living in Paris then. She was certainly working there, doing much the same as she does now, though in a rather more rudimentary way. And not alone, I should stress. The Frenchmen my investigators spoke to on their travels were uniformly old, and I daresay their short-term memories leave something to be desired these days, but they were all very clear that Madera was shacking up with another… what would you call it? Contract killer? Another contract killer like her. An older man, and English - Benjamin or Benedict, something like that. Quite an unappealing chap, apparently. Very large teeth. Every one of the Frenchmen seemed to think Madera could have done better for herself, if she’d wanted to.”
“She wasn’t calling herself Thea Madera then, in case you were wondering. I don’t know how long she clung on to Dolly, but she was going by Lillian then - Lily. No one seemed to know a last name, if she even used one.”
“We assume she left Paris sometime in the early fifties, because the next time she turned up anywhere - turned up anywhere we could find any sort of record of - she’d already made the move to the States, to California. She spent much of that decade, according to my people, selling herself as a sort of triggerman for some of the bigger Hollywood players - studio heads and producers, the occasional actor with a grudge to settle. It seems as if that’s how she made most of her money, to begin with - before she really took an interest in investing. Her investments now, incidentally, are very significant; somewhere between thirty and forty million, was our best guess. And that’s pounds, not dollars.”
“She was in South America for at least some of the sixties - Chile, Argentina and Colombia, we think, although the details of her movements in that particular period are sketchy, even in comparison to the other bits we’ve pieced together. Personally, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she was working out there: there are at least a couple of anecdotal accounts that put her in a town or a city around the same time as a politician who got his throat cut or a young revolutionary who ran his motorbike off the edge of a cliff. It doesn’t sound like she was very political, herself,” Hannah added, as if to quell any concerns Ruby might have had on that score. “I mean, I don’t think she was, you know… a Communist, or anything like that. I think she very likely just went where the opportunities were - where she could find clients who could afford her.”
“Oh, good,” said Karen, sarcasm dripping from every pore. “As long as it was only the money she was in it for, not the politics.”
“Then,” Hannah went on pointedly, “we’re into the seventies, where she stumbles onto Carruthers, and the two of them begin to work together. That’s when Madera starts to really… grow the business, you might say. To take on American clients outside of the studios - bankers, and businessmen, and so on. And then, back in London, in the early eighties…”
> “She meets your old man,” Ruby concluded.
“Yes.”
“And starts doing jobs for him.”
“On and off… yes.”
A long, leaden silence fell over the room - all of them lost, or so El suspected, in their own very specific memories of James Marchant, and their own speculations around the character of the sort of person he might go to, when a job was in need of more cold-eyed, ruthless finesse than even he and Ricky Lomax could muster.
“We ain’t gonna kill ‘em,” Ruby said eventually.
“Then they’ll kill you,” Hannah replied. “All of you. And then me, for good measure.”
“There’s other ways of doing things. We’ll find ‘em.”
“Yes? Do tell, then. I’m quite literally dying to hear what they might be.”
“I ain’t figured it out yet. But I will. We will. Same way we always do. You think this is the first time we’ve ever had our feet held over the fire? This Carruthers, and the circus girl, and what’s his name, Pasadena… they’re just people. People with buttons you can push, if you know how. I’m telling you now, we’ll find a way.”
“And your sister? I notice you didn’t mention her, there.”
Ruby’s eyes narrowed to slits.
“You needn’t worry about her,” she said, in a leonine growl that seemed to rise up from somewhere deep in her chest. “You just help us deal with Carruthers and the rest of ‘em, alright? Our Dolly… you can leave her to me.”
Chapter 19
Pahrump, Nevada, September 1995
Kevin Lewis, manager and proprietor of the Sugar Love Mountain Ranch brothel, was - from all that Dolly had seen of him - a wholly unprepossessing gentleman.
Snaggle-toothed, beer-bellied and sporting an extravagantly coiffed blond mullet, he was, as she understood it, both a sex addict and a compulsive gambler. The former addiction presented few problems for him in his day-to-day life - his ownership of the Ranch granting him, in effect, free and unfettered access to the bodies of the girls in his employment.
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