To the twenty-two - seven women and fifteen men, every one of them working the front desk - she relayed the same request:
She wasn’t going to ask again, she told them, if they had a guest named Thea Madera staying with them. Their business relied on discretion, and assumed names were so commonplace they were virtually an industry standard; she appreciated that. But if they did happen to have an older woman staying with them who fit Madera’s description - late sixties, honey blonde hair, very bright blue eyes, unplaceable accent and probably travelling on a US passport - would they be kind enough to pass along a message to her?
Alright, all twenty-two of them answered, all equally non-committal - neither confirming nor denying the presence of any such woman in their establishment. What’s the message?
Tell her, Kat said, that Dolly Wood is looking for her.
Dollywood? several of them queried - one or two raising a sceptical eyebrow at the moniker.
Dolly Wood, she reiterated calmly. Two words. Nothing to do with Tennessee or country music, I promise.
A couple of them very nearly smiled at this, tiny cracks appearing in the smooth veneer of their professionalism.
Here’s where she’ll be, Kat added, passing across one of the twenty-odd sheets of paper she’d prepared earlier, each one filled with the handwritten details of the time and date and venue she’d decided on: 11am the following day, at a busy Belgian cafe on an equally busy section of The Strand.
And with that, she left.
The cafe was as busy as she’d hoped it would be, when she arrived the next morning: bursting to capacity with tourists, students, men in suits on coffee breaks. It was ten fifteen, a good forty-five minutes earlier than the time she’d given in her note; a necessary evil, she thought, if she was going to get the drop on Madera.
It still wasn’t early enough, though.
She’d been seated for barely the time it had taken her to order a cappuccino - at a very small table in the furthest corner of the cafe, her back against the wall to circumvent any ambush from behind - when Madera appeared in front of her, looming like a bloody vulture and eclipsing Kat’s view of the tourists, the baristas, the exit.
“You’re Katherine Morgan,” she said, taking a seat of her own opposite Kat.
The voice… wasn’t what Kat had expected. It was full-on Cockney, for a start; it could’ve been Ruby talking, not her sister.
How Madera looked, though - that was the real revelation.
Lying, murderous bitch though she was, Hannah hadn’t been wrong about the similarity: from a distance, Madera could have been Ruby, if you ignored the hair and the slightly straighter, stiffer posture.
She dressed better - Ruby’s shirts and sunglasses and denim jackets traded up for a navy A-line dress and a matching belt and earrings studded with what Kat was pretty sure were real sapphires. And her skin, unlike Ruby’s, was clear and free enough of wrinkles to have Kat suspecting she’d pulled on more than just expensive cold cream to achieve the effect.
But God, it was uncanny, the resemblance. You couldn’t look at her and not know, immediately and with absolute certainty, who she was. Kat would’ve guessed it from a mile away.
“And you’re Thea Madera,” she replied, with all the artificial confidence she could muster. “Or do you prefer Dolly?”
A smile like a needle run over the surface a block of ice spread across Madera’s unlined faced.
“Dealer’s choice,” she said evenly. “I’ve answered to a lot of things. Same as you, I’d imagine.”
You can do this, Kat told herself. Don’t let her scare you.
I mean, yes, alright - she’s absolutely fucking terrifying, sat there like the plagues of Egypt about to rain down on you. Yes, she could probably tear your throat out with nothing but her teeth and nails, if she fancied it.
But she hasn’t yet, has she? Because she’s curious. She wants to know why you got her here. What it is you’ve got to say for yourself.
Not for the first time in the last couple of years, nor even the hundredth, she found herself cursing the day she ever let Ruby Redfearn reel her into the Marchant job. The night she let Hannah fucking D’Amboise drive her out into the middle of nowhere and shatter her skull and the mind inside into so many pieces that she’d never be able to put herself together again, not really. Cursing herself for letting that bitch turn her into Humpty fucking Dumpty.
It’s her fault, she thought. If anyone’s to blame for this, it’s that waste of skin who calls herself a human being.
She’s the one who’s making you do this. You wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for her, would you?
It’s all her.
And the rest of them… well, that can’t be helped, can it? You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.
You of all people should fucking know that.
“You’ll be wanting to know what I want, I expect,” she said.
Madera sat very slightly back in her chair; pressed her hands together and considered Kat appraisingly over her steepled fingers.
“Want to tell me, do you?”
Kat swallowed.
Just do it. Fucking do it, and it’ll be done.
“I’ve got a proposal for you. A proposition, if you like.”
“A proposal.”
It wasn’t a question; wasn’t a request for more information. She already knew Kat wanted to talk; that she would talk.
All Madera had to do was sit and wait.
“Yeah.” Kat’s mouth was bone-dry now, her tongue so thick and desiccated it was a miracle the words came out at all. “I want to make a deal. With you.”
Madera didn’t react; remained as still and unblinking as a salamander on a rock.
“Interesting,” she said eventually. “Alright, then - I’m listening. You go on and tell me about this deal.”
Chapter 23
Charing Cross Road, London, May 1998
El had thought, at first, that Ruby and Sita would arrange to have Carruthers arrested, to remove him from the equation; that Sita would have a discreet word in Gerry Adler’s always-attentive ear about the threat Carruthers posed to them, and that Adler - driven as much by a desire to play Sita’s knight in shining armour as by his commitment to banging up a serial murderer - would swoop in on some fabricated pretext or other and make the arrest.
Ruby, though, had disabused her of that notion the moment El had mentioned it.
“Wouldn’t work,” she’d said. “I don’t doubt Adler’d do it if she asked him - he’s got stars in his eyes for her, always has done. But arresting Carruthers wouldn’t solve nothing on its own. You’d have to find a way to make sure he stayed locked up longer than just a day or two. And the sort of cash him and our Dolly’ve got knocking around, the bloke’d have some thousand-pound-an-hour brief in a fancy tie bailing him out in about the time it’d take one of us to nip down the shops for a pint of milk.”
“I’m afraid your Auntie Ruby may be right, darling,” Sita had added. “Gerry is certainly… obliging, but I doubt even he has the clout to keep Carruthers in a jail cell for very long without due cause. And if Carruthers has survived this long doing… what he does, then he’ll have sufficient wits about him not to allow himself to be baited into lashing out while the police are watching.”
What they ought to do to Carruthers instead, Ruby had insisted, was what they always did. What they were good at.
They needed to con him. To pull his levers.
In fact, she’d gone on, she and Sita had a sense already of how: how they might get to him, what his Achilles’ heel might be.
“He’s a vain bastard,” she’d said. “That Hannah said as much, didn’t she? All them muscles, and the sharp suits and that. And he’s got to be pretty arrogant, doing the jobs he does and getting away with ‘em clean. Don’t tell me a man like that goes ‘round taking money for putting people six feet under every fortnight without a hefty slab of self-belief.”
“You want us to play to
his vanity?” El had asked.
“I want us to play to his entitlement. Been with our Dolly since he was a kid, hasn’t he? Quarter of a century or more. And sounds like she’s always kept him close, don’t it? Right by her side, where she can keep her eyes on him and make sure he don’t try to pull a fast one. Can’t say I blame her, neither. It’s what I’d do, if I were her and I didn’t want a mutiny on my hands.”
That, El had realised then - perhaps for the first time - was something she’d always appreciated about Ruby: the way she’d never tried to rein El in or keep her close, just for the sake of being able to control her. Even when El had been a kid; been Ruby’s protege. Ruby had always let her go her own way, let her make her own mistakes and revel in her own triumphs. And, more to the point, had always been quick to welcome her back into the fold, whenever she’d come back - which she always, always did. Probably always would.
It was one of a thousand ways, she’d thought, that Ruby and her sister were nothing alike.
“You think he wants out? Out from under Madera, I mean,” she corrected herself. “That he’s looking to fly solo? Cut the apron strings and branch out on his own?”
“I don’t think it’s at all improbable,” Sita had agreed. “In which case, separating him from Madera - getting him out of the picture, as I believe you put it - may be as simple as offering him a better deal than the one he thinks he’s getting while he’s shackled to her.”
“A deal,” Ruby had said, “that’s just for him.”
The client would have to be American; they all agreed as much. Even with the work Madera and Carruthers had done for Marchant in London, the two of them were an American operation, and a mostly West Coast one at that. An approach from another Brit would be too suspicious; altogether too convenient.
“What about Kate Zhou?” Sita had suggested. “She’s from California, isn’t she? And lord knows, the girl’s a chameleon.”
El had bitten back her disagreement; her instinct to argue for bringing someone other than her in on the con. Literally anyone else.
It would have been baseless, the implicit criticism, and she’d known it. She’d met Kate Zhou only once, spending less than half an hour in her company more than a year earlier, but the woman’s reputation as a grifter and the respect Ruby and Sita had for her - not to mention the help she’d given them in pulling off the Soames job - should have been more than enough to persuade El to go along with the recommendation.
The fact was, she was jealous.
Kate had made it clear, during their brief sojourn in San Francisco, that she was interested in Rose. She’d gone as far as to take Rose out for dinner the evening before they’d left the city - a date that Rose had insisted later was entirely platonic, at least from her perspective.
(“Though it could have been more, had things been different,” Rose had said with a smile, one night in bed when El had raised the topic. “It wasn’t as if you’d made your move then. I was barely sure by that point that you were interested at all”).
Ruby had gone to stick the kettle on while she chewed over Sita’s idea.
“Could work, I reckon,” she’d announced on her return to the living room. “We’d have to get her over here pretty sharpish, mind.”
“I’m sure she’d be happy to chip in,” Sita had countered. “If we asked her nicely.”
“And you’d be alright with that, would you?” Ruby had turned her attention to El, who could feel the sourness of her own expression, even in the absence of a reflective surface to confirm it.
Grow the fuck up, she’d chastised herself. She’s an ally, not a threat.
Just relax. There’s nothing to worry about.
“Fine,” she’d answered, sounding entirely unconvincing. “Totally fine.”
Among the very few things Carruthers liked to actually spend his money on, they’d discovered, were books - the older and rarer, the better.
He’d spent several thousand pounds on Charing Cross Road alone since landing in London, the outgoings spread across a handful of shops specialising in first editions and collectibles. He’d visited them most days, they’d seen, and always in the morning – with every one of the transactions Karen had unearthed processed somewhere between 11am and midday.
There was a strong chance therefore, they reasoned, that Kate would find him perusing the shelves of one of those shops, if she lingered long enough in the area.
She arrived at Heathrow, without fanfare, on the Sunday of the week Ruby had called her to put in their request; took a few hours to sleep, shower and refuel in her hotel room, and then made her way from Belgravia to West Hampstead, where Ruby - after leading her on a whistle-stop tour of their predicament - briefed her on the plan.
The following day, at 11am on the dot, she was out on the Charing Cross Road, weaving in and out of the just-opened bookshops, eyes ostensibly trained on the glued, stitched stacks of paper and cloth and leather around her and peripheral vision fixed on the street outside, the bodies coming and going and passing through.
At 11.15, Carruthers entered the store she’d been browsing - cramming his outsized body through the narrow doorway and saluting the owner with an easy, familiar hello.
She waited five minutes; let him settle into place and slip his guard down. Then she moved; manoeuvred herself into position.
“Mr Carruthers,” she said, appearing at his shoulder, looking to the casual observer as if she were doing nothing more remarkable than scanning the titles on the set of shelves they were facing.
The greeting didn’t startle him - or didn’t appear to.
“Think you’ve got the wrong person,” he replied, not looking at her but picking a faded, dog-eared copy of The Brothers Karamazov off one of the shelves and thumbing it open.
“No,” she told him. “Pretty sure I don’t.”
He angled his head to look at her; to take in the stranger who’d accosted him in what should have been his private domain.
They’d decided, for the purposes of the job, on a harder-nosed character than was usual for Kate: a former hedge fund manager named Cindy Chen, newly settled in Santa Cruz after abandoning her big-city career in investment to launch a start-up that specialised in creating ethical beauty products from scratch and selling them on, for an obscenely high mark-up, over the internet.
Physically, Chen and Kate were different enough to avoid raising alarm bells for Carruthers, should he - unlikely though it was - have happened upon Kate’s name and face during the course of his background research into El and Ruby and the others.
As befitted her recent professional interests, Chen was beautifully groomed and prettily attired: the stylish androgyny of Kate’s slicked-back hair and tailored suits exchanged for the high-femme glamour of a tight red dress, tartan jacket and enough makeup to satisfy even the most demanding drag queen.
She was also, necessarily, ruthless.
They’d thrown around several possible motivations for Chen’s seeking out Carruthers: an abruptly broken engagement, a swindled inheritance, a love rival who refused to fade into the background. In the end, though, they’d gone for the most straightforward of the options: a business adversary, one Eliana Gregorians, whose product-distribution capabilities and ever-lowering prices were threatening to cut very starkly into Chen’s bottom line.
Which wouldn’t do at all.
“Like I said,” Carruthers told her, when he’d looked her up and down and returned his gaze to the Dostoevsky in his hand, “you’ve got the wrong person.”
“Mr Carruthers,” she said, undeterred, “I have a job for you. And if you knew me at all, you’d appreciate that I don’t normally travel quite this far out of state to do my hiring.”
With that, finally, she had his attention.
“I need her gone,” she continued, when they’d settled at her suggestion in a quiet and very empty Italian cafe on Litchfield Street and she’d relayed the story of her trouble with Gregorians. “Permanently off the scene. Can you do th
at?”
“With all due respect, Ms. Chen,” he answered, taking an incongruously dainty sip of the double espresso she’d bought him, “I don’t know you. I’ve never heard of you or your company. You could be anyone.”
“Search for us, then,” she answered, as if she’d been expecting just such a challenge. “Next time you’re at a computer, search for us. Or I can give you the web address and you can go straight to the site.”
It wasn’t a bluff. Thanks to a little work on Karen’s part that weekend, Chen’s company, Good & Whole, had not only its own website - from which all manner of sustainably-sourced soaps, shampoos, lipsticks and foundations could be purchased with the use of a credit card - but IRS records of the company’s tax declaration from the previous year and at least two dozen legitimate-seeming reviews of the Good & Whole product experience from a range of satisfied (and, for the sake of authenticity, several unsatisfied) customers. Further back-room digging, should Carruthers wish to undertake any, would uncover a decade of Chen’s personal tax records, an electronically-archived newsletter recounting her 1988 graduation (with Honors) from the MBA program at Harvard Business School, and - a detail of which Karen was particularly proud - a recently-created dating profile outlining Chen’s interest in meeting professional males, of any ethnicity, measuring at least 5’10, weighing no more than two hundred pounds and based, ideally, within driving distance of the San Francisco Metropolitan Area.
“I’ll do that,” he said. “But Ms. Chen - anyone can make a website, if they know how.”
She nodded.
“Yes, they can. And if we were back home and I was trying to convince you I’m serious and not a cop - which I’m guessing is what’s got you worried - then I’d probably do something like pull open my dress to show you I’m not wearing a wire or say something so incriminating that even a deadbeat lawyer could get a judge to call it entrapment. But we’re not back home, Mr Carruthers, and to tell you the truth, I sort of like this dress, so how about I just let you take a look inside my suitcase instead, and you can decide for yourself where you want the rest of the conversation to take us?”
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