“We are not leaving her,” Sita repeated. “I’m not...”
“It won’t be for long. I don’t want to leave her any more than you do. And we’ll need to do something about... all the rest, too. Kat and Hannah and... him.”
Karen swept a hand towards what remained of Carruthers.
“Do you have someone in mind?” Rose asked her. “Someone who can... take care of it?”
It had been Dexter and Michael, the last time, El remembered: Dexter and Michael they’d called to help get rid of Marchant’s body, Dexter whose connections had made sure that body stayed gone afterwards.
Dexter and Michael, who’d do anything for their mum, if she asked.
The thought of calling the boys now, though, was unconscionable. Bad enough the four of them had seen Ruby like that; that they could see her now, the life drained out of her. Dexter and Michael didn’t need to see it too. Didn’t need the afterimage of it on the back of their eyelids every night before they lost themselves to sleep, the way El had a feeling she would.
“Perce,” Karen said. “He won’t be able to sort it himself, but he’ll know someone who can.”
El saw why she’d think so. Karen’s Uncle Perce, her late father’s brother, had spent a solid portion of his life in prisons, and the remainder of it in the company of men more intimidating and more criminally inclined even than Perce himself. The odds were good he would know someone equipped to deal with the removal of a quartet of bodies from a given location, before the police turned up and began to ask inconvenient questions; that he could help them.
“I said no!”
Sita all but roared the final syllable - the sheer raw, commingled power of her grief and rage propelling her to her feet, animating her into lucidity.
“I’m sorry,” Karen told her calmly. “It’s gotta be done.”
“You’d have a stranger here, touching her? A cleaner, handling her like a slab of meat?”
She won’t leave, El thought, with terrible certainty. She won’t leave, not willingly, and we’ll have to make her, have to drag her out and tell ourselves it’s for her own good...
Rose dropped her fingers from El’s waist; walked across the floor to Sita and laid a hand on the old woman’s forearm.
“Is there someone else?” she asked, voice so soft El could barely hear the words. “Someone you’d rather have... come and take care of her?”
Sita was silent for a very long time.
“Gerry,” she answered, finally. “Gerry Adler. He won’t like it, but he’ll do it. He’ll help us. He knows her, you understand? He knows her. And he’ll... be kind.”
Rose nodded.
“We’ll call him,” she said, not letting go of Sita’s arm. “We’ll get out of here, and then we’ll call him.”
They took the staircase slowly, cautiously: Karen leading and El at the rear, with Sita between them, her body collapsed so completely against Rose’s that Rose might as well have been carrying her up the stairs.
El tried very hard not to look down, to look back at the other bodies they were leaving behind.
If she hadn’t been so numb, she reflected - if her capacity for emotional response hadn’t been so utterly deadened by what she’d seen, heard, smelled in the basement - then she’d be terrified; panicked at the possibility of Madera watching them unseen from some dark corner of the hallway or the kitchen as they climbed, gun in hand, waiting for the perfect opportunity to pick them off, one-by-one.
Maybe she’d done the sensible thing and made herself scarce; maybe she was long gone already. Maybe going up against four armed, unforgiving women in the furnace-heat of loss had seemed too big of a risk even for her, without a crew to back her up.
But maybe not.
She was old, yes. But she was clever. She couldn’t have survived as long as she had in the circles she moved in without knowing how to beat the odds.
Clever, and fast. What she’d done to Carruthers was proof enough of that.
At the top of the stairs, they paused, then crept forward, their backs half-turned to the wall to their right defensively, as if the plasterboard itself might offer them protection from attack - then sped up their pace at Karen’s unspoken instruction, almost but not quite running along the hallway, past the living room and study and on to the kitchen where Stuart Ma had first let them inside.
The back door was open: that was the first thing El saw, as she ground to a standing halt behind Karen and Rose and Sita in the doorway separating the kitchen from the hall. Someone had left it ajar - on their way out, or on their way in.
It took her a moment or two to understand the second thing she was seeing, because it seemed - after everything she’d learned about Madera - so very, very unlikely.
But nevertheless, there it was - or rather, there Madera was.
Flat on her back on the kitchen floor, as dead as the sister and the protege she’d left in her wake: a bullet wound in her head, another in the palm of her hand, and a pool of blood spreading out around her on the tiles like an aureole.
Chapter 31
Hampstead Heath, London, June 1998
Without a body, there could be no funeral. And there hadn’t been a body to find, after Gerry Adler had done whatever he’d done to clean up the carnage at the farmhouse. Not one.
But they held a service anyway: a small remembrance gathering on the Heath, in a wooded section of Golders Hill Park that Ruby and Winston, the husband she’d loved so much, had liked to walk along on Sundays, once upon a time.
There were less than twenty of them, altogether: El and Rose and Sophie and Harriet, who’d known just how much Ruby had meant to her sister; Fergus and Karen, and her brother Theo and their mother, who’d known Ruby since before any one of her children was born; Kate Zhou, her flight home to California postponed; Barbara Potter, the retired Ward Sister who’d patched up more than a few of their work-related injuries over the years, and who’d come along with Ruby’s friend Arlena, who still worked as a Staff Nurse at St. Luke’s in Islington; Gerry Adler himself, hovering silently and forlornly on the edges of the group.
Dexter and Michael, Ruby’s boys, in identical black suits - standing shoulder-to-shoulder beside El, the both of them crying.
And Sita in the centre, in a plain white salwar kameez and dupatta, giving her eulogy from memory.
“She’d have loathed all of this,” she concluded, smiling dimly through her own tears. “All this bleedin’ sentimentality, as I daresay she’d have called it. So I shan’t belabour things further, except to say that I loved her, as we all did, and that life as I’ve come to know it will be immeasurably poorer for her passing.”
“She never cared much for poetry either, of course. But I believe she’d understand our need to mark her passing, in our own way, and so, if you’ll allow me…”
She craned her neck towards the clear sky overhead, pulled back her shoulders and began to sing: a soft, low mantra in a language El thought might have been Hindi or Marathi, or even Sanskrit, and that struck her as astonishingly beautiful.
The boys, lifelong atheists, bowed their heads in what might have been prayer. And Rose, who’d had her left arm wrapped around Sophie as they'd cried, slipped her right around El and drew the three of them together.
“Would you mind terribly driving me home, darling?” Sita asked El afterwards, when the group had begun to disperse. “I don’t know that I entirely trust myself behind the wheel today.”
She’d rented a car, El remembered - another Rolls, this one minus a chauffeur - and had been using it to transport herself from A to B while she worked out where she’d go next, and how she’d get there.
Her money, like El’s and Karen’s and Rose’s, had been restored to her: Stuart Ma, so frightened that Karen might elect to delete him for good that he’d have done more or less anything she instructed, proving every bit as efficient in returning their assets as he’d been in misappropriating them to begin with.
But her Kensington apartment wa
s still gone, Rohan’s hospitality would eventually wear thin - and without Ruby there seemed, she’d told El earlier, less and less reason to build a new, permanent home in the city.
Bereft as she’d be without her, El had understood.
The Ludgate Hill flat was emptier than it had been, she saw when they got there; the lion’s share of Sita’s furniture and artwork now transplanted, or so El assumed, to a storage facility sufficiently white glove to meet Sita’s myriad and extremely detailed demands.
“Tea, darling?” Sita asked, settling El into one of the two red leather Chesterfields that remained in the lounge, then disappearing into the kitchen without giving El a chance to answer.
She’s lonely, El told herself. Her and Ruby: they were together so long - a unit for long, even when they were working different jobs in different countries - that she probably doesn’t know what to do with herself without her.
It’s like being widowed. It must be.
A sound came from the kitchen: something fragile breaking, the crack of china or ceramics on hardwood.
She’s dropped the cup, El thought - imagining Sita suddenly overcome by a fresh wave of grief by the kettle, her hands shaking so badly she couldn’t stop the tea-set from falling from her hands. She stood up, then - after a brief internal struggle - sat back down again, resolving not to intervene, after all, but stay right where she was on the sofa, and let Sita preserve her dignity, for however long it took her to compose herself.
But then, another sound: this time a clatter, the dull thud of a harder and heavier object falling to earth. An ornament, maybe. Something wooden.
I’ll just check, she thought, standing up again. I’ll quickly go and check on her, then I’ll come back in as if nothing ever happened and we’ll never mention it again.
She crept out of the lounge as discreetly as she could, not wanting to alert Sita to her presence.
And came to a dead stop in the hallway.
She couldn’t be seeing what she was seeing there, she knew. Couldn’t be.
Madera on the floor of the farmhouse kitchen with a bullet in her head: that had been unlikely. Improbable.
But Kat Morgan, alive and well and standing stock-still in Sita’s borrowed apartment, the walking stick she’d apparently dropped resting by her feet next to a broken teacup… that was impossible. Actually impossible.
She was dead. The bitch, the bitch she’d trusted, the bitch who’d murdered Ruby in cold fucking blood to buy herself a get out of jail free card… she was dead.
El had seen her die.
Hadn’t she?
Except… no, she remembered: she hadn’t. She’d seen Ruby die, and Hannah, and Lucian Carruthers… but she’d been out of it when Kat was shot, in such a fugue state she’d barely registered the gunshot, let alone seen the bullet land.
She’d seen Kat’s body, yes - seen it splayed and bleeding out on the basement carpet. But she hadn’t seen how it’d gotten there; hadn’t seen the shot that she and Rose and Karen had been so sure had caused that bleeding.
Was it possible that she’d…?
“El,” Kat said, breaking into the thought before it could reach any conclusion - looking, it seemed to El, apologetic somehow, as if she was gearing up to say sorry for breaking the crockery. “Listen…”
It had been a fog that had descended on her in the basement: a thick mist deadening her perceptions, cutting her off from the sensory data she’d normally rely on to bring her to understanding.
What El felt now, though, was closer to an inferno: a sudden, searing fury, burning away all calm and cognition and flooding her nerves with something dark and molten and incontrovertibly dangerous.
Kat began to speak again, her lips moving but the words lost below the pounding of blood in El’s ears.
She sprang: her shoulder tackling Kat in the stomach and forcing her to the ground and her arms grabbing at the dead woman’s ankles, snatching them from under her as Kat’s lower back hit the floor.
“Fucking stop!” Kat shouted, already breathless, but it was too late by far: El’s hands were already around her throat, squeezing and choking and…
“For Christ’s sake, girl, let go of her!” another voice roared, somewhere to El’s left. “She can’t bleedin’ breathe with you on her like that!”
El froze, her fingers falling away from Kat’s throat almost of their own volition.
She turned her head, her legs still straddling Kat’s body.
And there, just behind her, equally impossible, was Ruby.
Chapter 32
Blackheath, London, April 1998
She’d expected the postman, or a delivery driver with a parcel; perhaps even, after everything she’d been hearing about the last few days, some sort of Charles Bronson hitman with a sawn-off shotgun.
Who she hadn’t been expecting on her doorstep, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at seven o’clock in the morning, was Ruby bloody Redfearn.
“Can I have a word?” Ruby asked, though it wasn’t really a question, and what could Kat do except roll out the welcome mat and invite her in?
“I need your help,” she carried on, once she was sat down in the conservatory, cross-legged and barefooted on Kat’s brand-new, three grand hammock-chair.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. With our Dolly.”
Kat pulled her dressing gown tighter and shivered, wishing she’d put the heating on.
“Not being funny,” she said, “but could you not have waited ’til a bit later on in the day to come asking for a favour? I don’t know what time you get up, but this is still the middle of the night for me.”
“Early, as it happens. You don’t sleep much, when you get to my age. That ain’t the point, though. The point is, I didn’t want no-one seeing me come down here. What we’re talking about - I need it to stay between you and me. I can’t have none of the rest of ‘em knowing.”
“Knowing what? What are we supposed to be talking about?”
“Don’t you bleedin’ listen? Our Dolly, that’s what.”
“What about her? What is it you want me to help with that’s so fucking secret, all of a sudden?”
Ruby winced at the words, and Kat wondered, just for a second, whether the old bag was about to tell her to go and wash her mouth out.
“I been thinking about what to do,” Ruby said instead. “Going over and over it in my head, every bleedin’ minute since that Hannah come back and opened her gob. And whichever way I look at it, however I turn it ‘round, I keep coming back to the same damn thing.”
“Which is what?”
“Our Dolly - she ain’t gonna stop. She won’t hurt me - that’s what I been tellin’ myself, at least, though maybe that’s only so’s I can get to sleep at all. But the rest of you, you and Sita and Rose and Karen and our El, my boys even… she ain’t got no reason to hold back with you, has she? No reason at all. And if she really is what that Hannah says she is…”
She faltered; took a breath.
“If she is,” she continued, “then we’re gonna have to deal with her. I’m gonna have to deal with her. ‘Cause I can’t let her do that, do you see? I can’t have her coming after you, any of you. Rose and El… they’re like my own bleedin’ kids. You and Karen an’ all, much as you might hate me sometimes. And as for Sita…”
“Deal with her how?” Kat said, beginning to catch on.
“There’s something I been thinking about. Sort of… mullin’ over. But it’d only work with you on board - and I mean proper on board. You go in half-hearted or half-cocked, and the whole thing’s dead in the water.”
“When have I ever gone in half-cocked? I lost a chunk of my skull on one of your jobs, if you remember. That’s how bloody all-in I am, when I’m working.”
“I know. I ain’t forgotten. But this… it’s a lot to ask. A lot.”
Kat looked at the old woman in front of her; really looked. Saw the worry-lines on her forehead; the swollen bags under her eyes, from night after night up agonis
ing over what to do and how to do it.
“Ask, then,” Kat told her, already knowing what her answer would be. “Ask and get it over with. We haven’t got all day.”
“Are you mad?” Sita asked later, when Ruby had explained what she had in mind, and how she was planning to pull it off. “A makeup artist?”
“She ain’t a makeup artist,” Ruby replied. “She’s a special effects technician. Different kettle of fish altogether.”
“The woman turns actors into werewolves and aliens and revenants. Does it matter what she calls herself?”
“It does here. I’m talking about a girl who can make it seem like someone’s head exploded just from pushing a button, not some bird you’d wheel in to get your face done for a wedding.”
“Oh, well, in that case…”
“She’s bloody good at it, an’ all. Won every award going. Can see her picking up one of them Oscars, if she keeps at it.”
“And you’d really trust her to keep her mouth shut, would you? She’s Len Wolf’s daughter, for heaven’s sake. I can’t imagine the apple fell too far from that tree.”
Len Wolf, a semi-reformed bank robber who’d since adjourned to the countryside to spend more time with his classic car collection, was an old acquaintance of them both - albeit one for whom Sita, whose preference had long been for the non-violent confidence trick when it came to separating others from their cash above what she continued to refer to as stick-up artistry, had little affection.
His daughter Kathleen, both Sita and Ruby had been dimly aware, had worked in the film industry since leaving college: first on the sort of shoestring-budget productions that necessitated she spent more time than anyone could want in abandoned tunnels and repurposed shipping containers, and then, as her portfolio and reputation had grown, on larger-scale features that routinely took her to more exotic locations across the US, South America and Canada. She specialised in horror effects, creating an extraordinary range of demonic and extra-terrestrial visages from scratch, using only her box of tricks and the generically attractive facial canvases of those performers dispatched to her trailer.
The Remembrance Page 24